*Sigh* White screen of death

Well, it looks like I will need to buy a new inverter or monitor for the T23. I really hope it's the inverter; the behavior is consistent. If it's not that, it's something on the MB, and that's just doom.

How to wreck your point

Writing essays for a blog or other Internet site is a relatively straightforward matter, but there are the universal gotchas that destroy whatever point it was you were trying to get across to your readers. The classic is the Godwin Violation ("In any on-line discussion, the probability of someone mentioning Hitler or Nazis approaches one, and that person is usually assumed to have lost the argument."), but I am reminded of another, even more powerful dissuader of any writer's true capability to communicate.

Sam Vaknin, a contributor to The American Chronicle, a low-rent news aggregator with equally dim pundits whom you've never read before, reminded me of this in his article The Six Sins of Wikipedia. Many of his points are valid: Wikipedia is anarchic and I have no doubt that many of the articles are cut-and-paste from scanned materials (although how one copyrights a chart of electron shell diagrams or common hydrogen compounds is beyond me).

And yet Mr. Vaknin completely ruins his credibility with this phrase: "Evidently, Wikipedians are vehemently opposed to free speech when it is directed against them." He goes on to list a series of petty and childish attacks made against him on Wikipedia itself, including a parodic biography of Mr. Vaknin that has since been taken down at his request.

Don't shout "X is trying to silence me!" in front of a billion people. It looks stupid.

To be opposed to free speech in principle is the material of the religious fanatics who want to desecrate our Constitution in order to save an idol. The administration is opposed to free speech when it carves the public square into "free speech" and squelched speech zones. The Wikipedia kids are practicing graffiti on their own turf; complaining that what they're doing is tantamount to the real threats to our freedom is just plain dorky. Mr. Vankin, for all his complaints, has not yet figured out how to elevate his discourse above that of recess playground taunting.