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Regrettably, I find myself disappointing those seeking some kind of intellectual stimulation with "smoke," or "puff," or whatever the appropriate terminology may be, although BS works for me. I'm not sure that the content of the article is nearly as stimulating as the comments from the peanut gallery of observers, readers, and responders. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!" seems hopelessly lost when the focus is on the article and not an individual or collective response. I could high brow this thing and take the moral high ground on the slippery-slope of rationality or I could plunge henceforth into the emotional abyss this kind of corporate terrorism provokes from me. Personally, rather than taking these two numb-skulls out for a good thrashing, I think the appropriate response would be to sentence them to non-profit-watch-doggery for five years, not to rehabilitate them but to introduce them to those who spend a life time of service to others. Cheap grace, for sure, but a more appropriate disciplinary action.
And isn't it interesting that Mr. Zorro would like to go to the garden, Mr. Gardner? Hmmm. I wonder whether it could be the Inagodadavida music playing in the background I'm hearing or my own careless provocation with the messiness of the human condition that sees this forum as an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation, if only from a distance, as we compare notes on what matters to us. Sorry to see you leave, Mr. Gardner. This could be so much more fun at so many levels. And Mr. Zorro, you are welcome in my garden at any time. J

Ray "Puff" is what smokers, hip-hop and fat people do. The discussions today are triggered by things like other people's Reverends, and there is no shortage of places for those discussions. I can't remember the last time I had a life changing experience deeply engaged in any intellectual or media related discussion. Writers that either smoke (positive) or even write puff pieces (negative) do so usually from a distance, so it is then the people who turn up here who swallow all the club second hand smoke (didn't do Andy Kaufman any good either), and it is therefore the collective "we" who always do the inhaling and exhaling. This, however, is also the 21st Century, so today we can learn fundamental truths just by sitting in a garden and watching a snail move. I hope the snails won't mind, for who knows what world they live in when they stuck in their individual shells, but if Einstein discovered major stuff thinking in unusual ways, I guess I will keep on giving it one more try, but this time only in my garden......M.

Okay, let's see.
We have two pompous, arrogant, and dishonest young men who sought to perpetuate their own lust for power - presumably by policing other people's good intentions - which only magnifies their own hypocrisy.

And Fast Company does a puff-piece on them.

This says what about this site and their magazine?

I've only been coming here a short time, but since I find myself repeatedly exasperated with the quality and content of this site and the magazine, I suppose I'm on the way out.
I keep coming back hoping to see a discussion to really get into, but instead. . .

Wow! What Mark Zorro said. That's my kind of comment. I appreciate the dedication our public servants accept as their burden to bear and I grieve those whose ambition is compromised by their expedience. Things are never what they seem and I suspect that there is a great deal more to this story than a couple of good-guys gone bad. It's that Response of the Organism to the Toxic Environment thing I get hung up on. The Mark of Zorro on this article speaks to me so pungently that I just need to paraphrase his words about disease - If one is looking for it, one will find it.
I still wonder whether the article would get the same response if the writer was looking for the health of these young men's quest at GiveWell.

Alex I don't want to shoot the messenger. I only paid attention to these couple of cyberherpies featured in this article because I followed your links to the metafilter wiki, otherwise I wouldn't give these turgidstans a blink in a moments worth of daily eyelid movement. I support what your comments say because I believe that the real juice of interaction exists below the line in interactive dance with what appears above the line. In this comment itself I've sprayed out enough of my own negative labels to win a "latrine of the year" contest, and so while I also value a toothgrit watchdog or well-intended fierce activism, and the creation of community labels such as "astroturfing and sock puppeting", I also want to value standing behind the journalist, the teacher and the public servant. Yet I don't think the path to higher quality media is going to come from how we label negative people or how we segment diseased social behaviour. If we focus too much on life as a disease, even more of life begins to look like a disease. We cease to focus on anything remotely healthy, we don't even bother tabulating all the healthy things we do, the ones that are really worth labelling, because IMHO we can learn far more from a labels like that. We end up like the medical practice today, watching a "Patch Adams" movie and wondering where the medical world lost the plot while they were prescribing their social medication. No one on our planet has ever achieved anything by focusing on the removal of hypocrisy and that is because hypocrisy is invariably impossible to remove. In that regard the intelligence of daily house-cleaning is always way more powerful than any social agenda or improvement program this world can invent or conjure; and that's what made me realize that I cannot make my life about cleaning other people's houses. People generally focus on how much they have bled rather than how much they have read including the writer of this piece. We all do that in lockstep stereotypical fashion and label generation is proof IMHO that we are being hormonally active in our honourable impulse to protect the world from other hormones. It is honourable to stand up and fight for something we strongly value, that is why IMHO mankind has invented its extreme child prodigy, culminating often in a social collective called "war". Ultimately when all of this compounded result ends in this big bang because thats what the collective habit of trying to clean other people's houses becomes in its final expression. Our well intended focuses therefore often leads us to the biggest hypocrisy of all where we all become friends again, (call it norming, storming, norming if you want) where at a national level we become a league or a united nations and as a human family we engage in reparations, the ultimate hypocrisy of global atomic institutionalism and activism - to repair that which we united together to inadvertently "improve", defend or destroy. Yet we don't just do that on the national scale, we do it on the playground as well, and my best friends were often the ones where our value arguments became full blooded fist fights, or at least at my school where I had plenty of spectators to urge me and my opponent on. We are therefore tribal as our environment allows us to be, but we also live in an increasingly digital age of mechanical computers, where technology doesn't fight, it simply processes and so I realized from this that process trumps tribalism. So why do I write this, because I don't want to rag, even remotely, on the shortcomings of this writer, I want this writer to be on our side, I want to move out of our vertical identity siloes and acknowledge smart people on the horizontal, and then we can start looking at the kind of scum that media think that we need to be aware of (and allow pondscum to live in harmony with the intelligence floating in the rest of the horizontal). An undue attraction and attention towards scumbags, does not really uplift the quality of my own life in any significant way, as does watching the profile of the next nutcase on the next voyeuristic media special. So today I realize that I cannot prevent a world that is continuously daily conditioned to view life as a disease or as a product to buy, but I sure can start exploring what a healthy world looks like by looking at my own self, and for me to do that Alex, I need to read metafilter wiki that describes to me what healthy human behaviour also looks like, and that is because my friend, I am tired of labels that just add to my internalized memory that there is something extremely problematic with the world. I want to find a way to stop the label machine manufacturing away in my own head, so that I can ultimately be free to look at my developing world from a far healthier perspective; where I acknowledge Alex as Alex and Anya as Anya without pretending that I have anything remotely in common with both or that we are friends or blood-brothers or oxygen-sisters of a common cause. I simply want to remove the unnecessary boundary above the line and below the line that I have continuously created in my own head, where I improve the quality of my own listening by noticing the quality in other people's voice, as well learning to silence my own voice in the accompanied learning. I know that when I can walk through this world in a silent manner, I will have witnessed the first sign of my own intelligence, and to do that I have to learn to think differently and I guess here came the real positive coming from all of this spiel today. I talk too much, and from now on I will leave it to all you guys to do the talking and maybe, just maybe your collective voices might figure it out, for maybe at last, today I have discovered the only label that should have mattered all along, what it means to "be" than to "have" freedom......M.