The blogging has been slow for 2-3 days now. Over the weekend I dealt with monster network problems at home (Bad hub! Weird network troubles! Still working on it!). Things have been busier than usual on the editing front. Just beginning to catch up…
Archives for September 2002
Bin Laden, serving U.S. interests?
Courtesy Tom Fox’s Paris blog, a fascinating interview in a Lebanese paper with French scholar Gilles Kepel, who says that bin Laden’s effort to rally the Muslim masses against America has not only failed but backfired: “Kepel sharply criticized bin Laden, saying everything he did ultimately served US interests, whether during the Afghan war when he was America’s ‘puppet’ or after Sept. 11 when he was on Washington’s hit list. But Kepel said bin Laden may have won some popular Arab sentiment.
.. ‘I toured here and Syria, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates between October and December 2001,’ he said, adding he could measure the enthusiasm among youth, particularly young women, for bin Laden, who has become a type of Robin Hood or Che Guevara. Bin Laden’s videos, broadcast on television and featuring his vows to destroy America, have fascinated many Arabs. Kepel, however, described them as ‘only rhetoric, a symbol of (Arab) political impotence.’ “
Some turtles are more equal than others
A stray reference to the U.S. as “the turtle on top of the pile,” in response to my post below regarding the new Bush doctrine of U.S. uber alles, has incited a stirring exchange involving the (highly relevant) saga of Yertle the Turtle. (Here’s the condensed version.) Being “top turtle” may not be all it’s cracked up to be; you may recall that Yertle, the ruler of all that he sees, is eventually laid low when a peon at the bottom sneezes.
(This is not to be confused with the celebrated tale of the scientist confronted by the old lady who insists that the world is a flat plate supported on a tortoise’s back, and when the scientist challenges her as to what the tortoise is on, she replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”)
And while I am gamely analyzing the Bush doctrine in light of Dr. Seuss, Frank Lynch is finding his way in via Dr. Johnson.
Biggest kid on the block
It’s certainly a fine thing that the U.S. government is finally rewriting its global political and military strategy to take into account the fact that the Cold War is over. (The document’s full text is here.)
There are some things to applaud in this document. But David Sanger’s Times story highlights this statement: “The president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.”
Flash forward to 100 or 500 years from now, when some future Edward Gibbon is composing his massive “Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” and marks this moment as the zenith of American power, and the start of its downfall. Our leaders seem to be committing themselves at once to a military policy that brooks no challenge and commits us to outspend any challenger — and to an economic policy that inequitably but massively cuts government revenue. This is how empires are unmade.
Know thine enemy
In Slate, Michael Kinsley makes a cogent, and characteristically pragmatic, argument against Bush’s war-on-terrorism rhetoric. If you just keep repeating that your enemy is “evil,” and don’t explore his motivations, you’re going to do a lousy job of preventing other enemies from proliferating.
Meanwhile, in Salon Premium, Josh Marshall explores the quandary Bush administration hawks find themselves in now that the president has chosen to work through the U.N. and its resolutions. Latest twist: Rewrite Bush’s speech. “Maybe the president said that the issue was making Saddam live up to the resolutions, but in fact whether he does or not is really beside the point, because the real point is that Saddam can’t be trusted and must be ousted.”
Oh dear, what can the anti-matter be?
Enough about Bob Greene already! What’s really important? Researchers at CERN — the Swiss physics lab that birthed the World Wide Web a dozen years ago — have “made 50,000 atoms of anti-hydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of normal hydrogen.” Read more here. (Link courtesy David Harris.) This “blob” is apparently enough anti-matter for scientists to test the entire basis of modern physics: “If antihydrogen does not behave as they expect, the model will need to be replaced, and our notions of the structure of the Universe overhauled.”
What do we root for? Do we keep our fingers crossed that the standard model holds? Or do we root for the world to be turned upside down?
NYTimes coverage is here.
Salon Blog watch
This is how we wanted it to be! Leslie Blanton describes ending up blogging “by accident”: “I had been up examining Salon’s weblogs, and started one kinda by accident. Thought I’d see how hard it would be to download the free software. Now here I am minutes later, crafting my first posting.” |
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Kriselda of Different Strings critiques that company that’s renting Bowdlerized Hollywood movies: “I have to wonder how they would feel if someone took a good, wholesome, family-oriented movie, and, in order to fit in with their desire to see more sex and violence, added scenes of shoot-outs and orgies to it, and then rented it to whomever. I doubt many people would be willing to agree that they have a right to make such changes, and there’d certainly be an outcry over the ‘degredation’ of these clean-cut films.” |
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Michel Vuijlsteke is climbing up the rankings, thanks it seems to some flurry of interest in one Veronique de Cock’s chest. Which isn’t to say that this bilingual blog doesn’t deserve as much traffic as it gets. |
Weblog panel links
For the sake of attendees at tonight’s panel at the Berkeley Journalism School, and anyone else interested, I’m posting some links to previous Salon articles on the subject — because I’ve sort of said my piece on the subject of “blogging and journalists” already:
Much Ado About Blogging (May 10, 2002): Is it the end of journalism as we know it? Or just 6 zillion writers in search of an editor? Key points: Typically, the debate about blogs today is framed as a duel to the death between old and new journalism. Many bloggers see themselves as a Web-borne vanguard, striking blows for truth- telling authenticity against the media-monopoly empire. Many newsroom journalists see bloggers as wannabe amateurs badly in need of some skills and some editors. This debate is stupidly reductive… The professional journalist can still accomplish things that, so far at least, no blogger has managed…. But blogs can do some things the pros can’t…. The editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links. This carries pluses and minuses: At worst, it creates a lot of excess verbiage that only the most fanatically interested reader would want to wade through. At best, it creates a dramatic and dynamic exchange of information and ideas.Is there any doubt that, on balance, we come out ahead? |
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Fear of Links (May 28, 1999): While professional journalists turn up their noses, weblog pioneers invent a new, personal way to organize the Web’s chaos. Key points: On the Web, with its unspannable abundance of chaotic and ill-organized information, pointing people to good links is a fundamental service — a combination of giving directions to strangers and sharing one’s discoveries with friends. All of which explains why a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today… Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom. |
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Baring Your Soul to the Web (July 3, 1998): This was a Salon cover story by Simon Firth about the pre-blog phenomenon of Web diaries — an art that, interestingly, some leading practitioners felt in 1998 was already “over,” done, tired. Provides a little perspective on the cyclical nature of enthusiasm for Web innovation, and on the way we keep reinventing the wheel every couple of years — but with better tools, dammit! |
Axis of [Your Country’s Characteristic Here]
Pick any three countries and this cool applet tells you what they are an “Axis” of. (Link courtesy David Weinberger.)
Say it ain’t so, Saddam
Borowitz Report: “IRAQ AGREES TO WEAPONS INSPECTIONS; CHENEY BEGS THEM TO RECONSIDER.” Choice quote: “‘The Vice President is an optimistic man,’ the aide said. ‘This is a bump in the road, but he is still hopeful that Saddam will change his mind and refuse to allow weapons inspectors to return to Iraq.'”