Our new Prez

[buster]

Obama's speech captured, to me, the shift in tone and attitude that characterizes our new generation as different from the last one.  And, I think, that that is the primary shift that Obama represents to me.  A shift from fearing the future to embracing and wanting to create the future.  A very familiar mindset to a lot of us, I think, but I've

Comments

[disblfsuspender]

I think that what I most appreciate is that many of these are geek values. Fair play, curiosity, working together, and a screw-ideology-and-psychodrama-and-just-make-it-work approach. He's wedding geek values to traditional American values in a subtle and interesting way here.

[more_bjorn]

But plenty of geeks are techno-libertarians, who would take that speech and rip it apart. I'd actually say that this is more modern community activist than geek!

[disblfsuspender]

I'm thinking more of the open source evangelist / craigslist / wikipedia / creative commons sort of geekdom. But, you're right, there are definitely varieties of geek who are not down with any of this progressive citizenship stuff. I'm more interested in the transfer in the other direction though... the taking of the sorts of approaches that led to the abovementioned achievements into the public arena and the mainstream.

[buster]

Yeah, I agree that there are certain qualities of this generational leap that were really championed in the open source and creative commons movements of the geeks.

[goawayplease]

I enjoyed "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers" since often those code words like "Nation of God" means "a handful of Protestant churches and maybe some Catholics if we feel like it" and I really feel left out... This one finally sounded inclusive, not like some reminder from my grandma that I'm a bad person who should get my butt back in church someday.

[buster]

I really liked that too!

[joshc]

I would have preferred "enlightened nonbelievers", but I'll take what we can get.

[capricornia]

i was shocked and LOVED that he said "and nonbelievers"