Last time we wrote about the American Family Association, and noted what a special kind of stupid they were. There's all kinds of stupid, though, and it isn't all horrid and mean. Some of it is stupid like a big, happy dog that wants to lick you all over till your critical faculties dissolve into uncritical enthusiasm.

Take Kevin Kelly, for instance. Writing in Wired magazine, he's all breathlessly enthusiastic about the future. Never mind Web 3.0, he gushes. The next stage in technological evolution is a single worldwide computer. This projected entity is to be collated from all the existing devices that connect to the Internet - PCs, laptops, palmtops, mobiles, etc. As an increasing number and variety of devices are lashed to one another via the Internet and other communication systems, they form the components of what we might call the One Machine.

Well, yes, Kevin, we could call it that. We could call a field of daisies The Great Superdaisy of Cosmic Oneness. The question though is whether there's any point in calling it that.

As if calling the Interweb the One Machine isn't bombastic enough, he then goes on to compare synapses with hyperlinks, apparently for no other reason than that both connect to other things, and goes on to state that as waves of links surge around the world, they resemble the thought patterns of a very large brain. This is too much for Chris Edwards at the excellently named Hacking Cough, who is piqued enough to refute the argument point by point.

He expertly demolishes the analogy between synapses and hyperlinks, but the crucial point to my mind is that the Internet would only be like a brain, or like a machine come to that, if the different parts of it shared a common goal. If it doesn't, and it doesn't, then comparing it to minds or machines is just rhetoric.

It's not that I'm uninterested in the future, you understand. Apart from anything else, it's got the whole of next football season in it. I just think that when you argue through analogy, it's incumbent upon you to define the extent of the analogy as precisely as possible, or your argument just dissolves into an amorphous hippy gloop. And frankly I had enough amorphous hippy gloop in the Eighties. You just can't flush that stuff away.

You do get the odd dimwit on the Internet. Not in here, obviously, you're all unlauded Wittgensteins. No, it's those other places I'm talking about. The American Family Association, for instance. They're dim enough when they do it on purpose, for instance by calling an article Newt Gingrich offers common sense solution to energy crisis. Say what?

But here's Ed Brayton explaining how their grasp of the medium can sometimes actually exceed the vacuity of their message. AFA's Search/Replace function works perfectly, he calls his post, and I think he's right.

They have some very strict policies on language at the AFA, and one of them is that instead of gay they should always say homosexual. Presumably they think gay sounds too sympathetic. If you're the kind of website that would rather cut off its own dick that sound sympathetic to gay people, you might well think it a logical step to add a replace command which corrects this liberal faux pas automatically, but top American athlete Tyson Gay may well beg to differ.

I'm sure my lovely readers can fill in the blanks. To be fair, it's not the AFA's fault there was an athlete called Dix in the next lane.

Thanks also to The Bad Idea Blog, long-term chronicler of the online dimwit phenomenon for the benefit of future generations, for bringing this to our attention, along with the proposed Republican amendment to the United States Constitution. If passed this would make gay marriage unconstitutional by defining marriage as a legal bond between a man and a woman, so you have to wonder why they chose Larry Craig and David Vitter to propose it.

The Larry Craig who was arrested for trying to have sex with an undercover policeman, you wonder? The self-same. It's obvious, when you think about it.

Well, at least David Vitter's straight. Just ask Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who used to organise prostitutes for him. The DC Madam, they used to call her. That's short for Washington DC, and not AC/DC, in case you were wondering.

Fortunately there's apparently virtually no chance of this amendment even making it to a vote, never mind passing. Which means we can afford to laugh.