Too much time on his hands
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Why not try to understand him? Everyone (and I truly mean this) would be much happier if we threw out our ridiculous preconceptions and actually tried to understand people.
There have been a few times where I've been in the perfect frame of mind where I'm 100% focused on a person and on my interaction with that person, with absolutely no distractions. It's almost crazy how easy it is to understand someone's way of thinking. Even complete strangers can't help but be intrigued by someone who seems completely consumed by them, even if only for a moment.
So don't file it away to try to figure out on your own later; that makes no sense. Talk to him right now, really listen, and share a part of the human experience that you previously had no knowledge of.
My dad was always fond of saying "Knowing is a barrier which prevents learning". I'm sure he stole it from somewhere...
In a situation like that, I often feel two simultaneous reactions, one being "How would you know?" and the other "I appreciate the sentiment." Guess which one I choose to act upon?
Just as "great job" from someone who doesn't know anything about it is not such a big deal because it was simply a nice gesture, so can "too much time on his hands" be (sometimes) considered to be no big deal because there was no specific malice behind it.
In other words, while I agree with the sentiment, people sometimes need to grow a skin bit thicker than they have.
Here the Author claims that the Speaker failed to appreciate some element in what the Enthusiast produced. It could just as easily be interpreted as the Enthusiast's failure to produce something the Speaker could appreciate.
In condemnation of the phrase he hates, the Author ascribes malicious intentions to the Speaker who uses it. That's a misrepresentation. "Too much time on his hands" usually implies that the Enthusiast produced something for which the Speaker sees no use, which prompts the Speaker to imply that it would be better to apply the Enthusiast's energies and passions on something the Speaker finds useful. Along with passing judgment on Enthusiast's work (something that upsets the Author), the Speaker also recognized the Enthusiast's passion.
Of course, some of this stuff will surely be relegated to the scrapheap of history.
Let's face it, most of the "fringey" stuff is relegated to the scrapheap of history. For every misunderstood genius, you have many more harmless nuts who invent and patent "Method and apparatus for automatically exercising a curious animal"[1]. What changed is our ability to perceive them globally, or, to be more precise, their ability to broadcast to a wider public.
Having more freedom to direct your thoughts and opinions to a wider audience than before, does not mean you're somehow entitled to have those thoughts and opinions respected.
Was the Enthusiast even attempting to produce something the Speaker could appreciate, or was it merely for their own amusement/edification? If it's the latter, then the Speaker's a Dick for going out of their way to insult the Enthusiast. The Speaker is not entitled to be enamored with the Enthusiast's tinkerings.
Saying "you've got too much time on your hands" is telling the person that they'd be better off spending their time on something else. But who are you to judge? What entitles you to make a pronouncement like that?
> the Speaker also recognized the Enthusiast's passion.
They're proclaiming that the Enthusiast's passion would be better spent elsewhere, which I suppose is a recognition of the mere existence of said passion, but it's hardly a gesture of respect, as you're implying.
> Having more freedom to direct your thoughts and opinions to a wider audience than before, does not mean you're somehow entitled to have those thoughts and opinions respected.
No, of course not, but neither is anyone entitled to actively disrespect every flight of fancy they come across.
Interesting questions, especially because they don't have only one answer. Let's say I make a video of a "fringey" hobby I have; pick anything you would profoundly useless. Let's say I send that video to a group of my friends, saying "look what I did". If it somehow finds its way to a broader audience on the Internet, for which it was not intended, and some Joe Schmoe says "this guy has too much time on his hands", then you could say that he's being a Dick. You could also say my friends were Dicks for exposing me to Joe Schmoe's ridicule.
However, if I take that same video, post in on a public site, with no access controls (such as YouTube ), saying "look what I did", then I'm inviting people to give their opinions on it. I'm entitling a hypothetical Speaker to judge my work.
They're proclaiming that the Enthusiast's passion would be better spent elsewhere, which I suppose is a recognition of the mere existence of said passion, but it's hardly a gesture of respect, as you're implying.
I'm not implying it's a gesture of respect. I'm simply claiming that it's a recognition of that passion, because the Author's sentiment is that this passion is not recognized by people who use the phrase "too much time on his hands". Of course, we could quibble about the word "recognize". To forestall that, I'll explain that I'm using it in the sense of acknowledging something, not acclaiming something.
No, of course not, but neither is anyone entitled to actively _dis_ respect every flight of fancy they come across.
In other words: "Either offer a constructive criticism or shut up." That's okay, I agree with that completely. What I disagree with is reacting out of proportion to the disrespect. That kind of reaction usually comes from the false sense of entitlement, a feeling that not only people shouldn't disrespect your passions, but that they should keep quiet if they disagree.
There's no way for an outside observer to know how much free time someone has based only on a viewing of the fruits of their hobby. That guy who built an ornate castle out of clothes pins may well have a packed schedule, and it was all he could do to cram the building in a few hours a week.
Actually, remember the guy who built a fully-functioning Daft Punk helmet that was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago? That took him 18 months. It was a labor of love for no external gain, but he quite likely had very little free time for it to take him that long.
If you don't want to hear my opinion, don't make your ears available to me.
And just because you spend 18 months making a hat, doesn't mean that I have to like it, appreciate it, defer judgment on it, or anything else.
Is this statement preferred, "That person clearly has different priorities or available time on their hand that would allow them to, what I would consider, waste it, on such a frutless effort." I guess I just prefer the shorthand.
Actually it was a commission, although he made one for himself as well.
If you ask me, I think it's a much further-reaching pejorative.
Who can say? We can say. We have to decide what's worth our time and what's not. We pass judgment on other people's work. We'll be wrong much of the time, but turning off our critical faculty altogether is worse than being wrong. At least "too much time on his hands" is a statement that can become the basis for a conversation, if you give the speaker some credit instead of assuming his statement is a "substitute for thought." The speaker might be prepared to expand on his opinion if someone wants to hear it. Anyway, a person who sees no value in something is irrelevant to its future. Its future depends on people who do see value in it, not on the open-mindedness or delicate consideration of people who don't.
Furthermore, it's hypocritical for an editor of an extremely popular, carefully polished and curated blog to pretend he doesn't discriminate. People visit Boing Boing because Boing Boing consistently delivers quick nuggets of feel-good eccentricity whose substance is optional to the experience. Like any successful blog, it has a consistent and narrow culture. You won't find an impassioned screed advocating Communist government on Boing Boing, or a gallery of tattoos commemorating murders committed by the tattooees, or Buffy incest fanfic, or a patent for a WiMax antenna, or a discussion of why it's a bad deal for individual investors to buy corn futures.
"The genuinely disruptive, novel artefacts are by definition unpredictable," he says. But he chooses items for Boing Boing that have a predictable flavor. That's okay. The world needs to be organized, and sometimes it has to be organized by collective or individual taste.
Maybe the whole thing is just a plea to protect the fragile ego of creators. Express your taste, guys, but do so in the politest terms possible. Bullshit. If you can't handle a simple "too much time on his hands" comment, then you shouldn't present your work for public consumption. Hide it away from the sight of anybody who might accidentally have an opinion about it. Especially if you're bothered by opinions that (per Doctorow's assumption) are vacuous, because as H.L. Mencken said, injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. If you can't handle thoughtless, vacuous criticism, then god forbid anybody takes your work seriously; you'll have an aneurysm.
Cory is primarily talking about intrinsic value.
I realize natural languages don't have binary contains() functions for words, it's just something that I tend to stumble over as a non-native speaker.
[1]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pastime [2]: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/pasttime.html
Humans are natural pattern matches and subscribe to a set of ideals; anyone that does not fit their pattern and forces them to think differently is going to cause defensiveness in some people; the least of which is simple dismissal.
On the other hand, it's great that society has progressed the stage where people are being rude about your hobby instead of violent because of your skin colour.
Be it with remarks such as the one the author rants about. However it takes many forms.
Just remember: when you do something creative, something you love, something outside of the mundane you do not have to justify your self to anyone. Chances are, if what you are creating appears utterly pointless to others, it makes you happy. Who cares what others think or say?
True art should be made for your self, not for any other critic be it real or pretend.
Granted, it could be meant as a slur. So could "good job", or "that's f'kin amazing", or anything. It's all context; take it in context.
As a college student in DC, I once went out and joined a march on The White House. As usual, it turned into an opportunity to observe people (since I really didn't care much about the actual issue driving the protest). The variety of the intent of the other marchers ranged from people who had traveled some distance at their own expense, putting their lives on hold because the issue at hand was quite important to them to what can be described best as, "Hey! A big group of people making a lot of noise! Wheee! LOOK AT ME!"
The problem with this rant is that it lacks context or scope. Although, we should respect each other a la Golden Rule. You might be prompted to dismiss a person because they disagree with them. You have that right. You even have the right to insult someone. Of course, when you do this, the corollary is that you trade away your own passions being taken seriously. I'm pretty comfortable doing that with people who, from context, appear to be jumping up and down, waving their arms and making noise to draw attention to themselves. But I can't not respect that other person who is obviously invested… even if I disagree with them.
Also, I'm totally happy to watch some jerk fritter away her credibility. If she can't tell the difference between, "I disagree" and "You have too much free time," her opinion isn't worth squat.