No, it’s not as scary as Slashdot, but sometimes Metafilter posters come close. For example, check out this recent thread started by someone who had apparently never heard the saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” before hearing it on a “Babylon 5” episode — and was subsequently astonished to hear a recent speech George W. Bush in which the president apparently repeated dialogue from a B5 episode.
I think that’s clueless with a capital C.
But Slashdot really took the cake with the hilarious responses to the thread, Writers Who Will Stand the Test of Time?. I like lousy genre fiction as much as the next geek, but come on — 50 years from now, nobody’s going to give a rats ass about Roger Zelazny or Robert Jordan (well, maybe Jordan will have an audience as he continues to promise to bring his Wheel of Time storyline to a close).
I guess this wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t know half a dozen very intelligent people who restrict their reading lists to a combination of comic books and genre novels. Sure I’m looking forward to the Lord of the Rings film, but you know Dante Alighieri wrote a fantastic trilogy that runs rings around Tolkein.