Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

The guns of August, 1914 and 2006

by

Back in Oct. 2002, I asked, in the context of a discussion of the looming Iraq war that still, at that point, seemed like an unimaginable future, “Has anyone in the Bush White House read ‘The Guns of August’?”

The answer then was, “Evidently not.” The same apparently could not be said of the Clinton administration, whose U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, now writes in the Washington Post about the unsettled chaos spreading from an Iraqi epicenter through the Middle East today. “This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,” he chillingly declares. Holbrooke explicitly draws the parallel between the one-thing-leads-to-another crisis of August 1914 and the no-one-seems-to-be-on-top-of-things crisis unfolding today.

Barbara Tuchman’s famous and still magnificently readable book is the prototypical description of an international crisis in which, as the saying goes, events “took on a life of their own.” The complex interlocking alliances and mobilization timetables that pushed Europe over the brink, ending a long age of peace and prosperity and ushering in previously unimaginable volumes of slaughter and woe, might not seem on the surface to have much to do with today’s unfolding tragedies. And Holbrooke doesn’t work the parallel through as fully as he might: He sees the prospect of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and Pakistan and India reigniting their conflict, while America’s colossal mistakes unite its enemies and its Israeli allies sink deeper into the Lebanon swamp. But he doesn’t connect the dots to back up his Cuban missile crisis comparison. It’s hard to see how we get from disastrous regional conflicts to World War-level conflagration.

That doesn’t make today’s situation much less scary, alas. We live in a faster era than our Great War forebears, with their telegrams and trenches, and yet, to me, today’s crisis feels more slow-motion. The disastrous choices compressed into the month of Tuchman’s title have instead in our day played out over the span of years since Bush’s ill-starred invasion of Iraq. How locked into the logic of chaotic confrontation are we? Will the slower pace of this train-wreck make its impact any less destructive? We can only hope and pray.
[tags]iraq, richard holbrooke, guns of august[/tags]

Bush, “fascist” and the other F word

by

The term “Islamic fascist” has risen to the front of President Bush’s neural queue, it seems. He used it on Monday in reference to Hezbollah, and then Thursday he again applied it to the British plane-bombing ring.

It’s a big, heavy word, freighted with history that seems weirdly inapplicable in these cases. Fascism was all about fusing the power of the state and party with modern mythology cobbled together from odd remnants dug up from the bottom of the nationalist dustbin (Mussolini tried to drag in the grandeur of Rome, and Hitler loved his Valkyries), and it tended to be in conflict with organized religion, whose hold over the popular imagination it sought to supplant. As such, fascism seems a strange label to apply to the enemies we face today, in their statelessness and devotional fervor.

Yes, they share some of the traits we associate with fascism — a yearning for a lost era of glory, an indifference to civilian carnage (a trait that, alas, they hold no monopoly over). But why reach for this ill-fitting word when another “F word” lies so readily at hand and fits the bill so much more snugly?

Is there some reason that President Bush might not want to refer to the enemy as “fundamentalist”?

[tags]president bush, islamic fascism, political rhetoric[/tags]

Music notes: Sprout, Goats, Glenns

by

Tobin Sprout is working on a new album — can’t wait.

John Darnielle talks about the Mountain Goats’ forthcoming album Get Lonely:

Well, it’s quieter and darker, I think: I consider a lot of my old stuff kind in-your-face, you know, a guy hollerin’ lyrics real fast. The new one has to me a much darker groove, for lack of a better word: all the songs are sort of in a cave down in the earth waiting for light to break through, but all that really comes is some rain. It’s kind of the album I’ve always wanted to make in that sense; my favorite records are always really sad, down records.

And here he mentions that the Extra Glenns (that’s the collaboration between Darnielle and Franklin Bruno) are working on a new album too .

[Thanks to Largehearted Boy for these fine links]

[tags]mountain goats, tobin sprout, extra glenns[/tags]

My ancient cellphone: All that is clunky eventually becomes cool again

by

I’m not a serious cellphone user; it’s basically a necessity for certain mundane family management tasks, and that’s all I use it for. Email, that’s my bag. (Yes, I know that tags me as the fortysomething I am.)

So I’m still using this fairly clunky old Motorola V-60 that Verizon gave me way back when. No camera, not even color, but hey, it works.

And now, it turns out, this very phone has made Kevin Kelly’s excellent Cool Tools site:

Motorola V60

If 1960s cars can be fashionable in Hollywood, surely late-1990s phones must stage a comeback at some point. When people look with surprise at my “piece of junk,” I tell them I’m just ahead of my time.

Questions after the British airline plot

by

Some questions based on the news from Britain of the foiled airline-hijacking ring:

  • How soon do you think it will be before Dick Cheney tells us that it’s all the fault of Ned Lamont and his “cut-and-run” Democrats?
  • How many Americans do you think will react to the news by embracing the Bush administration because of its strong-against-terror rhetoric?
  • How many Americans do you think will instead wonder how pouring blood and money into Iraq for the last three years helped us prevent such plots?
  • Will voters think, “By God, we’d better win in Iraq or they’ll come after us here at home?” Or, “Why did these guys waste the last three years on a losing battle in Iraq when they should have been fighting the real enemies who attacked us on 9/11?”
  • Is it “Thank goodness for tough-talking leaders?” — or “Why didn’t these idiots keep their eye on the ball?”

The Republicans want people to think that only they are strong enough to fight terrorists. The Democrats need to keep reminding people that the Republicans have actually run their “war on terror” as a vast exercise in waste, incompetence, corruption and failure. There’s no strength in their strong talk. Maybe this time the bluster will backfire.

Jacob Weisberg’s bizarre soft-on-terror slur

by

When I called the Lamont victory a “1968 moment” last night, I was thinking specifically of the events early in that year that led to Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race: Eugene McCarthy’s upset surge in New Hampshire, Bobby Kennedy’s entry into the primaries, and the gradual realization that the Democratic Party had decided it could no longer back its president’s war in Vietnam.

All this was an indication that 1968 was not going to be a business-as-usual year. So far, 2006 looks similar in that regard.

But now we’re hearing a different sort of 1968 analogy from some commentators: Look out, they’re saying, here come the New Left wackos and they’re going to drag the Democrats down to defeat again.

The analogy doesn’t hold at all, but it will be used with brutal effectiveness by camp Bush (Josh Marshall reports that it’s already begun), so it’s strange to hear it spun so effortfully by ostensibly liberal writers like Jacob Weisberg. But here he is in today’s Slate, complaining that “Lamont’s Victory Spells Democratic Disaster.” Why? Lamont and his crew are, Weisberg says in no uncertain terms, soft on terror.

To Weisberg, Lamont’s win means that “Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.” It’s not that Lamont and his supporters aren’t basically right that Iraq is a disaster and the sooner we leave, the better; it’s that, in Weisberg’s view, “many” of “the anti-Lieberman insurgents” ” “appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.”

Weisberg is unable to cite a single quotation or other fact that actually might demonstrate Lamont’s failure to take Islamic fanaticism seriously. Instead, he embarks on a lengthy historical analogy: “The party’s Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense — and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism — helped push a lot of Americans who didn’t much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.” And by opposing Lieberman, apparently, the Democrats are once more going to alienate middle America.

I think Weisberg is simply another example of a Beltway insider who is peeved at Connecticut’s voters for rejecting one of their own. (See Marshall in Time: “Lieberman got in trouble because he let himself live in the bubble of D.C. conventional wisdom and A-list punditry. He flattered them; and they loved him back.”) As the political insiders start to fall, it looks like the journalistic insiders are going to start losing their bearings.

Anyway, Weisberg’s analogy makes little sense: In 1968 the Democrats split because their own president had failed either to win or to disengage from a stalemated war. (If it were really 1968, it’s the Republicans who should be challenging their unpopular and incompetent president today.) And Nixon didn’t win in 1968 because Americans thought the Democrats were soft on communism; he won because the best Democratic candidate was murdered, and the eventual candidate was unable to distance himself from the disastrous war.

Unlike in 1968, Democrats — except for a few Lieberman die-hards — are remarkably united. I don’t hear a lot of Democrats denying the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat and related challenges; but a lot of us feel that the Bush administration’s failures — the very policies that Lieberman embraces — have set our side in that conflict back so far that the best we can do is clean house and reboot.

Weisberg seems less interested in fathoming the depth of voters’ anger at Lieberman than in dripping condescension upon the head of the winner of the election, who is “callow,” a “novice,” “less a fleshed-out alternative to Lieberman than a stand-in for an anti-war, anti-Bush movement.” It hardly matters that Lamont managed the extraordinary political feat of knocking off a three-term incumbent; he’s a pipsqueak upstart!

I don’t know what’s motivating Weisberg to spout such nonsense, but it’s actively harmful nonsense. In its own snotty way, it’s a bit of neo-McCarthyist baiting: no evidence, just vague charges that the other guy is a little, you know, “soft,” pink. “The 2006 Connecticut primary,” Weisberg writes, “points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad.”

Who are these fifth-column radicals? Where can we find them — in Connecticut, really? Does Weisberg have a list of names? And what do they have to do with the mainstream Democrats who decided they’d had enough of Joe Lieberman telling them not to criticize the president?

POSTSCRIPT Mark Schmitt also takes Weisberg down, notes WSJ editorial arguing that this isn’t like 1968 or even 1972 but rather 1974, when Democrats swept Congress clean.
[tags]Ned Lamont, Joe Lieberman, Democrats, 1968, Jacob Weisberg[/tags]

Size of the blogosphere: 50 million or bust

by

Kevin Burton questioned the logic behind Dave Sifry’s latest report on the size of the blogosphere based on Technorati’s feed index, and now there’s a fascinating discussion going on based on his post. Burton questions Sifry’s claim that there are 50 million blogs. But look over at Sifry’s report and you see that he’s careful enough to write, “On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog.”

So we’re back in 1997 or so when search sites would report on the exploding number of Web sites they had in their indexes and those of us in the industry actually building large sites would think, hmmm, things are growing like gangbusters, but are we really going to count every abandoned Geocities page as a bona fide Web site?

There’s no right or wrong here. What you count depends on why you’re counting it. As Kevin Marks points out to Burton, an “abandoned blog” — one that’s no longer being updated — isn’t necessarily a worthless blog. Sometimes, for instance, people post for a discrete period of time to record an event, then move on. On the other hand, that 50 million number probably includes the test blog I set up one day over on Blogger just to learn how the system works, and, you know, there’s nothing to see there. I assume that despite Technorati’s best efforts some significant portion of that 50 million number also includes spamblogs (“splogs”) and the like. Sifry discusses this at length (he says that over 70% of the pings his service receives are from “known spam sources” — sheesh!).

What I find interesting is the sense I get that people are crestfallen at the notion that, gee, there might be only, say, a couple million really active bloggers, and maybe twice that number of occasional active bloggers. In the history of media and human expression, a couple million people regularly and actively publishing their writing to a globally accessible network is extraordinary, unprecedented and likely to have vast consequences we can’t foresee.

In other words, if Burton is right and the growth in the actual, active, committed blogosphere is linear rather than exponential, it doesn’t really matter. There’s still a revolution going on.

Lamont over Lieberman: A 1968 moment

by

So Lamont beats Lieberman, but not with as wide a margin as the previous week’s polls suggested, and so… what? We’re supposed to think that the defeat of a three-term senator who carried the party’s banner on the national ticket in 2000 is not significant? Is tomorrow morning’s spin going to be, “Hey, Joe caught up to within 3 points! It wasn’t so bad!” Sorry, that won’t wash.

This is a 1968 moment. By which I mean it is a revolt of the people against a Democratic party leadership that hasn’t quite kept up with the depth of anger felt by voters about a terrible war. In 1968 the final outcome was fragmentation of the party followed by national defeat. The defeat that year was helped along by sundry assassinations and other schisms, like the Wallace candidacy. It doesn’t have to happen again this time around.

In order for it not to happen, the Democratic leadership needs to do something simple: accept the verdict of its own voters. In Connecticut, this means that Ned Lamont is now the Democratic candidate. If Joe Lieberman insists on the divine right to senatorship and runs as an independent spoiler, the party ought to shun him; given the closeness of the battle for the Senate, where every seat counts, a third-party run on his part says to the world, “I don’t care who controls the Senate as long as I get my revenge.”

On the wider national stage, the Connecticut results send a simple message to the Democratic leadership: Bush’s deceptively launched and incompetently prosecuted war is a disaster of such colossal proportions — such unconscionable cost in human lives, dollars, and lost opportunities — that it looms over everything this year. The Democrats must unite around a simple platform — throw out the liars, the war profiteers, the fanatics and the idiots who have led us into this mess. Bipartisanship is folly in today’s climate. The other guys don’t play that game. (See Paul Krugman, “Centrism is for Suckers.”)
[tags]Democratic Party, Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont[/tags]

Lanny Davis, bile, and the distinction between “blog” and “comments”

by

As I write this, I don’t know whether Ned Lamont has beaten Joe Lieberman. From where I sit, Lieberman let down his party on the most important issue of our time and behaved as though voters owed him his office. He deserves to lose. I’d like to see him replaced by a Democrat who won’t hedge his bets and who will send a message to the Bush administration that its days are numbered.

But if he does lose — and whether he then petulantly runs as an independent, courts a Bush administration appointment of some kind, or graciously retires — you can bet we’re going to hear all about the bloggers. You know, those nasty ultraliberal disrespectful divisive bloggers who failed to let Lieberman’s support for the president’s miserable war pass, and who churned up anger and fanned Lamont’s primary challenge in its earliest and most fragile stages. We’ll hear about them from entrenched powerbrokers of all stripes, Democratic and Republican — about how they are a dark and dangerous force that can only bring us to woe. The outcry will be far louder than today’s tempest-in-a-server-room about whether Lieberman’s Web site was actually hacked or he just had a lousy hosting plan.

This incumbents’ backlash has in fact already begun. On today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page comes Bill Clinton’s old lawyer, Lanny Davis, complaining about how those bloggers have treated Lieberman, for whom Davis campaigned in recent months. Conservatives aren’t the only hotheads out there, Davis discovered in his forays on Lieberman’s behalf; liberals, he is horrified to learn, can also be nasty. “The far right,” he says, “does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony.”

Davis has apparently been living offline for the last decade. So when he pokes his head out from hiding and scans the Internet’s tubes for political discourse, he discovers that many people on liberal sites are saying intemperate, even hateful things.

It may be regrettable that the leftward side of the spectrum has its own share of creeps, but, given the distribution of human traits across the political spectrum, it seems inevitable. Still, there’s a bigger problem with Davis’s argument: he cites a list of five examples of “the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman” — “emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers.”

However, every single one of his examples is actually a comment on someone’s blog (in fact, they’re all comments posted either on Huffington Post or Daily Kos). They’re not “things” the “liberal blog sites” have been “posting”; they’re things various random passersby have posted.

The simple distinction between the proprietor of a site — the “blogger” — and the poster of comments is being forgotten or deliberately ignored here to score a political point. It’s a low blow, similar to what happened in 2004 when conservative critics of MoveOn behaved as though the organization was responsible for the content of every single submission to a “make your own ad” contest.

In open online environments, it simply makes no sense to hold the publisher/blogger/site owner responsible for every opinion, attitude and flame that visitors post. If that’s where we’re headed, we might as well just shut down the Net and go home.

In tarring the bloggers with the sins of their commenters, Davis is doing what I worried would happen, way back during the Dean campaign days: political campaigns that embrace openness online might find themselves bludgeoned by opponents who’d turn dumb comments posted by random jerks into lethal soundbites. It’s sad to see that happen anywhere, sadder to see one Democrat doing it to another.
[tags]Joe Lieberman, politics, blogging[/tags]

Business Week followup: Valuing assets

by

Following up on Business Week’s bubble-logic cover story on Digg, Techdirt offers a good roundup, suggesting that the $60 million figure was the last-minute work of “higher-up” editors, and noting that it does not appear in the text of the print edition, only on the Web (suggesting a late edit).

That’s certainly possible. When I was Salon’s technology editor I had to do my share of reality-checking the direction that “higher-up” editors wanted to take when promoting my stories on the cover. If this is what happened at Business Week, though, it’s really no defense; it’s a sign of organizational dysfunction. Either the “not-so-higher-up” editor of the piece didn’t object to the misleading headline, in which case he is complicit, or he did object and was overruled by “higher-ups” who showed they don’t trust their own people. Neither scenario is to the publication’s credit.

Then there’s a half-hearted effort on the part of Business Week blogger Stephen Baker to defend the $60-million-out-of-a-hat headline itself. My mistaken idea, Baker writes, “shared by many, is that money is not ‘made’ until an asset is sold in one marketplace or another. But if you look at the rankings of everything from executive compensation to individual wealth, they’re based on valuations of diverse assets. Many are open to question and just as tenuous as the valuation of this New Jersey bubble-inflated split-level I’m typing in at this very moment.”

By that logic, then, Business Week is abandoning any attempt at mooring valuation to the reality of market exchange. Companies are worth whatever anyone says they’re worth so long as there is some fig-leaf of math involved. I can say that every visitor to my site is worth X, multiply X by my traffic, and — hooray! — I’ve “made” that amount of money. Why? Because I — excuse me, the phrase from the BW article is “people in the know” — said so. This is how the original Web bubble got blown up, and that’s why so many people who lived through it are appalled at Business Week’s gaffe.

Sober-minded businesspeople, analysts and journalists rely on more stringent standards of valuation. Baker and I might each own a “diverse” asset in our homes, but the bank will give us a loan based on that ownership, because there is a reasonable market for homes, even though it may greatly fluctuate. Stock options vary in actual value depending on the ups and downs of a stock price, and executives’ opportunity to exercise them is constrained in various ways, but they bear some relationship to an active equity market, so they’re not entirely vaporous. But an ownership stake in a small private company that’s had great success building Web traffic but little or no record of profitability doesn’t meet the “collateral” test; it’s certainly not something you can count on to buy a house or send kids to college (I don’t think Rose is worrying about that one yet).

Digg is a great site and a great service, and someday it may be worth a big pile of actual dollars, and many of those dollars may end up in Kevin Rose’s pocket. But until then he has simply not “made” millions of dollars. Until then, his share of the company is an asset, certainly, but not one anyone should hang a dollar figure on, and Business Week should never have tried, or taken a wild speculative guess and turned it into a sure-thing headline.

Now the magazine can either publish a correction, which I doubt it will ever do, or live with the diminished credibility it deserves. Ed Cone agrees: “BusinessWeek’s best bet is to say, ‘We goofed. We wrote an interesting article about an interesting subject, but we made a pretty bad mistake in the way we headlined the story.’ ” Let’s see if they really understand anything about “Web 2.0.”

UPDATE: At a different Business Week blog, Rob Hof takes a more nuanced stance: “Now, reasonable minds can disagree on the meaning of ‘made.’ …But unlike my colleague Steve Baker and some others on the magazine, I think the fact that a lot of intelligent people read ‘made’ to mean something different [from] what the magazine intended to convey is prima facie evidence that the cover language didn’t hit the mark… We hear the criticisms, even if not everyone here agrees with them. I also know that, contrary to the beliefs of some critics, the words on the cover are something that folks here take very seriously and debate vociferously.” Hof’s entry is a good example of how someone blogging from within an institution can tactfully criticize it without getting (figuratively) beheaded.
[tags]Digg, Web 2.0, bubble, businessweek[/tags]