Bruce Umbaugh reminds us that today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Salon Blogs. (Here’s a link to my first day’s posts from a year ago.) Thanks to everyone who has chosen to pitch their blog-tents on our virtual turf!
Links from near and far
John Dean: “It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein’s weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony…
So egregious and serious are Bush’s misrepresentations that they appear to be a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the public. So arrogant and secretive is the Bush White House that only a special prosecutor can effectively answer and address these troubling matters.”
Dave Weinberger: Why we know that’s really Howard Dean writing over on Lessig’s blog.
Dave Cullen takes apart the new “Million for Marriage” campaign and taps into his own anger: “If I can’t marry a woman I don’t see why I can’t be allowed to marry at all.”
Tim Bray sees a new browser war on the horizon.
The Preacher gets spooked by a catalog of mass-produced church paraphernalia, has a dialogue with the devil, and sets off to sort out his soul with Hugh Elliott.
Mark Hoback is holding a “Google Cutups” contest.
Perfidious Canada!
So now when a reporter does something the White House doesn’t like — such as accurately report the dissatisfaction of American troops in Iraq who feel they have been misled by secretary of defense Rumsfeld — we can expect the Bush team to start leaking ostensible dirt about the reporter to the likes of Matt Drudge. Only the best the clowns now running the White House press office could come up with about ABC reporter Jeffrey Kofman is that he is (a) gay and (b) Canadian.
Shock! Horror! Surely we cannot trust the news as reported by these limpwristed Canucks! Surely if those servicemen had only known that they were dealing with a perfidious Molson-swiller of suspect sexual leanings, they would never have talked to him!
It’s getting positively Nixonian out there.
Pay no attention to that president behind the curtain, says Weinberger
Meanwhile, speaking of Nixonian, Caspar Weinberger showed up on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today, arguing that the Niger yellowcake scandal is no big deal. After recycling the “British have learned” literalist defense one more time, he goes on to say, “The real unanswered questions are these: Did anyone seriously believe we went to war because we had a British report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger?”
Well, no, Cap. A lot of us didn’t believe that at the time: We believed that the President and Dick Cheney had already made up their minds to launch a war for a bunch of other reasons. But it was the president who got up in front of the nation and told us all that the Niger connection was one of the key pieces of evidence driving us to invade Iraq.
So I guess what you’re saying, Mr. former Secretary of Defense and former chief of Bechtel, is that we were right to distrust the president, we should never have taken the president seriously, and those who did so are fools worthy only of contempt. Thanks for clearing that up.
Slate goes bicolumnar
I am a proud reader of Slate. So what if Salon and Slate have had their spats through the years? Any publication that offers both David Edelstein’s movie reviews and Steven Johnson’s technology commentaries — along with lots of other fine reading — is going to be a permanent bookmark of mine.
But may I humbly suggest to the good people at Slate that they have taken a big step backward in their recent home page redesign? (And yes, I’m well aware that there are plenty of things about Salon’s own site organization that could be improved.)
For many years now Slate has had a highly sensible home page design, one that paralleled the essential good sense of blog organization: Newly posted articles appeared at the top of a long scrolling list, and older articles sank to the bottom. Subheaders divided this list by day. Like a blog, Slate’s design let you load up the page and scroll down steadily, picking what to read, until you started recognizing stuff that you’d already seen on your last visit. And a big “display block” at the top of the page allowed Slate’s editors to call out the articles they thought were hottest or best or most deserving of our attention.
For reasons that I cannot fathom, Slate has now changed over to a two-column format. The list is substantially similar (though harder to read thanks to some font tweaks), but it wraps down one column and then starts over at the top again. This is an incredible pain; you scroll down and scan headlines, then you have to scroll back up and then scroll back down… There’s no scarcity of vertical space in a browser, the way there is on a paper page. A two-column format only makes sense if you are making editorial choices about what to put at the top of each column, so that you crowd more of the stuff you think is important onto the “top screen.” What point is a two-column format when the list is still ordered chronologically?
In other changes, Slate now lets you click on linked days of the week to see what the previous days’ “display blocks” looked like. That’s a nice touch.
Nice, clean, surgical lies
Today’s news about the ballooning federal deficit should come as no surprise to anyone. If you cut taxes and increase spending, what else could possibly happen? The brazenness of the Bush administration’s number-fudging has been obvious ever since it took power: today the pattern of outrageously lowballing the deficit figures continues, as the Bush budget office refuses to consider future costs of operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in its forecasts, ostensibly because “it’s impossible to know.” (C’mon, guys, you can take a guess! Any guess is likely to be closer to the truth than “zero.”)
Between the deficit forecast, the continuing doubletalk on WMD and the worsening situation on the ground in Iraq, shouldn’t Bush and his team begin to be held accountable for their deceptions? You’d think so. Those of us who were appalled at the partisan exploitation of Bill Clinton’s stupid but fundamentally insignificant lies about his sex life keep wondering why lies about war and peace and the future of the economy don’t seem to generate much outrage.
I’m beginning to think that it is the very significance of Bush’s lies — the fact that he is lying about things that are genuinely important, that are matters of state, that involve our livelihoods and our servicepeople’s lives — that protects him. There is no taint of tawdriness to Bush’s lies, the way there were to Clinton’s, with their prurient scent, or to Nixon’s, with their late-night skulduggery. Bush’s lies — like those of his predecessor Ronald Reagan — live in the rarefied realm of macroeconomics and global strategy rather than in the gutter of personal misbehavior, and that seems to place them in a kind of realpolitik “get out of jail free” zone. Whatever forbearance Bush fails to earn on these grounds, he wins — again, as Reagan did — on the basis of our assumption of his incompetence, his out-of-the-loopiness. (Is there any other way to explain the way Bush has gotten away with claiming, absurdly, contrary to all fact, that Saddam Hussein didn’t allow the arms inspectors back in?)
If things keep getting worse, though — if the economy continues to refuse to budge on the basis of Bush’s half-baked economic plan, if the soldiers continue to be picked off one by one in Iraq, if it finally dawns on the American public that this administration is driving the nation into a ditch — maybe the public will come to its senses. We can certainly hope.
Stephenson speaks
Found on Lambda the Ultimate: Some fascinating notes on a Neal Stephenson lecture about his approach to writing, with parallels to programming:
“A good writer (and a good programmer) does not work by distilling good ideas from a large pool of bad and good ones, but by producing few if any bad ideas in the first place. It is important to give ideas time to mature [in the subconsciousness] so only good ideas percolate to the conscious level.”
Mozilla Foundation launches
The open source browser gets a new institutional framework, with initial funding from AOL. Press release is here. Mitch Kapor of OSAF will be the chairman. This can only be a positive thing for the long-term growth of a healthier software ecology not dependent on closed methodologies and closed markets.
Connect those stories, number two
It’s time to play “connect the story” — the game where we show the relationship between seemingly disconnected news stories — again, as we recently did regarding the California energy and budget crises.
There isn’t much more to say about the flap over President Bush’s State of the Union use of fraudulent evidence regarding Iraq’s nuclear program. We know that an administration desperate to make a case for war seized upon material that it had been repeatedly warned was suspect or (as is actually the case) outright forged and presented it to the American public. That impeachment hearings aren’t already being held is just another sign of the deep dysfunctionality of our political system — in which partisan operatives in Congress can drum up an impeachment vote when a president lies about his sex life, but when a president lies about the gravest matters of war and peace, it’s not even considered worth an investigation.
What is interesting here is that this story is playing out at precisely the same time the nation may be slowly coming to the belated realization that things really aren’t going so well in the president’s open-ended, no-clearly-defined-goals “war on terrorism.” Our principal foe, Osama bin Laden, remains on the loose, and his organization continues to operate in a region sandwiched between one nation that we conquered and one that is nominally our ally. His principal ally, Mullah Omar, is also on the loose. The leader of the other nation we’ve recently invaded, Saddam Hussein, is also on the loose. Is there a pattern here? Why can’t we find these guys?
This is, of course, an intelligence failure — and that’s where these two stories intersect. At the very same time that the Bush administration was corrupting our intelligence agencies by demanding that they produce the evidence for an already decided-upon war, it needed to rely upon them to locate its foes. I’m not an intelligence insider and I don’t know whether U.S. intelligence’s failure to locate Osama et al. is a function of incompetence, demoralization, structural weakness (reliance on technical means rather than people who speak the language, for example) or other factors.
But it’s obvious that the bogus Iraq/Niger nuclear connection story is a sign of just how derailed, corrupted and ineffectual the U.S.intelligence effort has become. If you’re busy squabbling over whether to offer fabricated evidence for a trumped-up war, you have that much less time to do your real job.
Matters of public record
There’s a fascinating dispute in the blogosphere right now that is worth talking about beyond the emotions of the personalities involved, because it touches on a substantive issue: What is the public record of the Web and of blogs?
Dave Winer writes Scripting News, has developed some key blogging software tools (including Radio Userland, which I use for this blog and which Salon Blogs uses), and is now a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. Scripting News is a widely read and influential blog — partly because Dave’s been at it a really long time, partly because he updates it a lot, but mostly, I think, because he is adept at letting the full span of his professional and personal worlds spill out into his blogging. Dave’s life really is an open book, and in demonstrating how to do that he has contributed enormously to all of our understanding of what we do here on the Web.
Dave and a number of other high-profile software developers have recently been engaged in a very public and (to outsiders) arcane dispute over the future of RSS, the protocol most blogs use to syndicate their content. I’m not going to weigh in on that issue, partly because I have neither the expertise nor the time to figure out exactly what I think but mostly because I don’t wish to add to the noise.
Meanwhile, however — whether as a result of that dispute or for other reasons, I don’t know — Mark Pilgrim, who has a highly regarded site that focuses on Web design issues, has begun a site called “Winer Watcher,” subtitled, “What did Dave edit today?” He’s written a script that grabs Scripting News every five minutes, and he’s posting the revisions that Dave makes to his blogs, so that you can see successive versions of Dave’s posts. Dave has asked Mark to stop, and as far as I can see, as I write this, Mark has refused.
The whole thing is now turning to the question of whether Mark is using too much of Dave’s bandwidth, and whether Mark’s republishing of Dave’s writing is fair use or not, but neither of these questions is what interests me here.
To me, this disagreement highlights one of the continuing, unresolved questions about Web publishing. We know that a Web page is simply a file on a server, and that files are totally mutable. The only thing that keeps something “published” on the Web once it is first published is the publisher’s continued choice to leave the file, unchanged, on his server. Some people view their sites as the bits-and-pixels equivalent to paper publishing, and try to keep as fixed a record as they can of how pages looked and read at the moment they were first published (at Salon we maintain an archive server that allows you to find the original, often creative designs of our earlier issues). Other people view their sites as the Webly equivalent of live improv — the site is an everchanging thing; you can’t step in the same river twice (yes Google has a cache, but it expires; and yes, there’s the Internet Archive, but it doesn’t scrape any site every five minutes!).
As a journalistic enterprise, at Salon we’ve always understood that there is a temptation to futz with what you’ve published, particularly to cover your tracks if you’ve goofed. We’ve tried to resist this temptation; if we make a tiny error that does not bear on the substance of an article (misspell a word or a name) we will simply correct it; but if we fix a substantive error after a story has been published, we will post a correction notice, note that the story has been corrected on the story itself, and link the story to the correction notice.
But Salon is a newsroom: we edit everything we publish and we behave like a journalistic organization. A personal blog is another kind of beast. There is no editor. There is — at least as blogging is most widely practiced today — mostly opinion, not fact. Corrections are less of an issue.
As I understand the way Dave Winer blogs, he posts constantly through the day and revises quite a bit; by the end of the day he’s finished the product, it gets sent out to those who receive it by e-mail, and that’s that. So he’s exposing his editing process to his readers, by choice. I don’t begrudge him this method of working.
In traditional journalism, we produce a piece of writing, get it edited, assure ourselves that it’s ready to be published, and then we release it to the world. Part of what makes blogging different is that it’s more impulsive, less polished, less filtered. This is fundamentally a good thing. But as a result it’s only natural that some bloggers may feel a desire to keep re-editing their stuff even after it’s live.
In my blog, I prefer to post and then, if I need to fix something, fix it by posting a new item making reference to the old one, rather than by outright revisions. But my style of working has been shaped by 20 years in newsrooms. Dave has a different modus operandi; he’s open about it, and it seems to work for him.
I’m not sure why we’re supposed to be upset by the revisions that the “Winer Watcher” exposes. So what if Winer sometimes makes a statement that he later chooses to retract? This isn’t presidential diplomacy. Yes, blogs are creating a public record, but they are also highly personal records. And we’re each going to approach the recording process in our own way.
If a blogger made a practice of going back deep into his archives and messing around with old posts, I’d consider that a shame — not because he’d somehow betrayed his public but because he was in a sense betraying himself. But if Dave Winer wants to view each day’s Weblog posts as works-in-progress for the day, it seems like a reasonable practice, and one that doesn’t deserve to be pursued with an obsessive eye.
Unbrand me, you cad!
As a consumer who hates the commercialization of public space, the creeping of logos onto our clothing, the placement of products in our entertainment and the corporatization of our imaginations, I assume I am just the sort of person whom “Unbrand America” is aimed at. This campaign — which emanates from Adbusters — seems to involve the placing of a big black blotch on ads and logos everywhere (there’s a gallery of examples here).
The Web site offers this explanatory text:
| In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations. This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries “liberated” without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats. |
But there’s a problem here. The idea is to oppose mindless Pavlovian responses to ultrasimplified graphical logo representations of objects of consumerist desire, right? So why is the campaign based around … an ultrasimplified graphical logo representation of opposition to consumerism? Does Adbusters really think the answer to the logo-fication of the world is to introduce a logo for the anti-logo-ites? Why would one want to protest the omnipresence of advertising campaigns by, in essence, creating a new advertising campaign? Why should we “unbrand America” by creating a new anti-brand brand?
If you oppose mindless Pavlovian responses, you manifest that opposition by thinking, and perhaps acting on that thinking — not by trying to counter mindlessness of a corporate species with mindlessness of a leftist species.