On the road again...

gonna be a busy couple of weeks so posting will be light.  Again.  just a couple of quick things.

First, the latest iteration of old-school vs. blogosphere happened in, of all places, a chemistry journal. Just the same old arguments - bloggers can't be trusted etc - from another obsolescent form of publishing. I was going to write the obligatory I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I post but the science bloggers did it better, so you should read this from David Kroll and this from Deborah Blum if you care to get the smart reaction.

I also noticed Maureen Dowd recently lamented the rebirth of anti-intellectualism on the right wing. I'm not going to do the "it happens as much on the left" thing because honestly, it doesn't.  

My take on it is simple - we've allowed our politics to descend to new depths of stupid.  We're poised to elect people who essentially believe dinosaurs and people lived together on this earth and belching a gazillion tons of smoke into the air really doesn't do anything bad, and it's totally OK to ignore challenging questions from reporters or even citizens, and it's even ok to hide where you get your money to broadcast your made-up crap.

We've allowed it to happen because no one with real power on the left (or even in the middle) has actually done anything to make it stop.

It's especially harmful to people in my line of work because most people see politics and PR as largely the same thing these days.  PR is actually about getting to the truth.  It's about telling people what's important.  Sadly our politicians (and too many PR folks) think PR is about changing the subject or hiding what matters most.

If you do this right - or if you really want to do this right - you think Campaign 2010 is inherently bad for business.