Midday open thread

• I think Andrew "The Internets are bad for you" Keen is hilarious.

  The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.

  Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then.

  Yeah, what would happen if there were no fact-checkers????? We'd be like Nazis!!!!!

  Which means, I guess, that Keen is a Nazi. This is me from October 2007:

  Andrew Keen recently wrote a book called "The Cult of the Amateur" in which he lambasts citizen media for degrading our culture. To him, Craigslist, YouTube, blogs, and the like are dangerous because "the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred."

  Despite the patent absurdity of the premise, I picked up the book anyway, thinking it may have some value.

  What did Keen, an "expert" technologist and entrepreneur, have to add to the debate?

  I started reading until I got to page 52, and unexpectedly came across this passage:

  Unfortunately, the internet is bloated with the hot air of these amateur journalists. Despite the size of their readership, even the A-List bloggers have no formal journalistic training. And, in fact, much of the real news their blogs contain has been lifted from (or aggregated from) the very news organizations they aim to replace.

  It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.

  Even back then, the About page on this site said:

  Moulitsas earned two bachelor degrees at Northern Illinois University (1992-96), with majors in Philosophy, Journalism, and Political Science and a minor in German.

  And as I noted in that post, any cursory research into my past would've dug up examples of my journalism background, including running my college newspaper (and being inducted into its hall of fame), freelancing for the Chicago Tribune, and writing for the Guardian (UK). So it's striking that even today, Keen is still blabbering about "fact checkers" when he himself can't be bothered to properly research his own bleatings.

• Speaking of Hitler, did you know that Cheney was better than Hitler? Phew! I'm relieved he cleared that bar.
• MN-Sen: Another interesting data point from the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll last week:

  QUESTION: Which statement best reflects your point of view? (ROTATED):

  The recount process has been fair to both Norm Coleman and Al Franken OR
  The recount process has been mostly unfair to Norm Coleman OR
  The recount process has been mostly unfair to Al Franken

               BOTH  COLEMAN  FRANKEN  NOT SURE

  ALL           63%     17%     12%       8%

  DEMOCRATS     69%      7%     18%       6%
  REPUBLICANS   54%     32%      5%       9%
  INDEPENDENTS  66%     14%     11%       9%

  Note that overall, despite the whines of right-wing pundits and the Coleman campaign, only 17 percent of Minnesotans think the recount was unfair to Coleman. and even among Republicans, less than a third (32%) thought the process was stacked against their guy.

• Joe the Plumber is yet another reason I'm so, so glad I'm not a conservative.
• Discover Magazine has a list of the top 100 science stories of 2008.
• My neighborhood.
• I suspect Atrios would like this.
• Yeah, Slumdog Millionaire is awesome. And yes, Freida Pinto is insanely gorgeous. But neither she, nor her co-star Dev Patel, are dancers (but I don't hold it against them).