Category: Uncategorized

There’s this great amorphous entity, the blogging community, its members in constant communication via their blogs and, less visibly, by email. Easy to fall into the illusion that we all occupy one space. Then, in a recent email to me, this sentence:

I just looked up from the screen to the window for a second to collect thoughts, and there was a mature bald eagle flying over the water. Always a beautiful sight.

When I turn round from my screen to look out of the window, what I see is the house across the road against a greyish background.

HipperCritical is, like normblog (mark 2), a blog of pale blue appearance. Another thing it has in common with normblog is that Glenn Halpern – for he it is who blogs there – posts the occasional item about Zimbabwe. Pay Glenn a visit. In particular, check out the sharp cartoon on this subject by “Gado” Godfrey Mwampembwa which Glenn posted shortly before Christmas.

Jeff Jarvis started in the newspaper business at age 17 and hasn’t stopped since. He was the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, the TV critic for TV Guide and People magazines; the Sunday editor, VP development, and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; an assistant city editor on the Chicago Tribune. Now he is president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications (Newshouse Newspapers, Condé Nast). He attended Claremont McKenna College and graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He now lives in the suburbs of New York with his wife, Tammy, and two children. He blogs at BuzzMachine.

Why do you blog? > I started blogging after surviving and reporting on the attacks on the World Trade Centre, where I arrived on the last PATH train as the first attack hit. I wrote my story for our online services and papers but I still had more to say. And so, I blogged. It has filled all my available life since.

What has been your best blogging experience? > After discovering the wonder of the Iranian weblog revolution, I hoped for a flowering of blogs in Iraq, and one day a dentist from Baghdad named Zeyad emailed me and said I had convinced him: he would blog. Now from Healing Iraq, he gives us a new perspective and he has convinced a dozen friends to do likewise. Having even a small part in helping a new nation discover free speech is more exciting than anything I have ever done in journalism.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Nothing compares with suffering a hack editor.

What are you reading at the moment? > Well, it’s sad, I suppose (though I’m not sure why) but I truly read little more than weblogs these days. Reading books changed for me on September 11, 2001, when I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel. I had to throw out my copy; it was infiltrated with the dust of destruction. I bought another copy. I couldn’t bear its self-absorption. Fiction has changed for me since. Nonfiction looks stale next to weblogs. News looks sterile next to weblogs. So I read weblogs.

What is your favourite movie? > Truffaut’s Day For Night is (oddly, I admit) my favourite movie simply because it is about creation and I love to create.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > Easy: War. I called myself a pacifist early in the age of Vietnam and did not change my mind until September 11. There’s an old joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. A hawk is a pacifist in the foxhole. I saw on that day the moral imperative to protect our children from the threat of terrorism; I faced my generation’s Hitler that day. My transformation occurred publicly, on my weblog.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > My brand of populism. As a critic, I defended the taste of the American people. As a blogger, I defend the wisdom of the people. For this is citizens’ media. And I now firmly believe that if you do not essentially trust the taste, intelligence, and goodness of your fellow man, then you cannot be a democrat or an effective marketer or an artist or a reformed theologian or a decent teacher.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Today, anti-Semitism. It is a terrible chameleon that calls itself many things, but anti-Semitism is the evil of our age.

Who are your political heroes? > Bill Clinton and Tony Blair: pragmatic liberals, decent men (in spite of all punchlines), who uphold liberal virtues without liberal self-righteousness.

What would you do with the UN? > That’s a changing answer. I used to support and believe in the UN. But I do feel betrayed by the UN following the Iraq war; they did not support the Iraqi people and fought against the US and Britain. So now I see the UN through different, darker lenses, and I ask whether it is time to start a competitor to the UN: an alliance of the world’s democracies to build a doctrine of democracy for our future.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > No doubt: Terrorism and fanaticism. Whether at the World Trade Centre or in Jerusalem or Moscow or Belfast or Baghdad, those who would destroy innocent life in the sick and evil pursuit of what passes for a cause are the most deluded, evil, destructive people of our time. Terrorism must be condemned as an evil tantamount to Nazism. There is no excuse for terrorism, not cause, not reason.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > I once dated an arch-conservative. She was smart and beautiful and talented and charming but I wondered what it would be like either arguing all our lives or avoiding half the interesting topics of conversation instead. Fortunately, it didn’t matter; we didn’t click profoundly. Instead, I married someone smarter, more beautiful, more talented, and more charming with whom I happen – ah, providence – to agree on most any political topic. It’s certainly more convenient.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Open-mouthed chewing. Drives me nuts. Drilled into me by my mother. An obsession. Can’t bear to hear somebody else smacking. Trivial? Absolutely. But profoundly irksome.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Sports. Especially watching sports. I know this is just a reaction to all the jocks who made fun of my catching and dribbling. But still, I don’t get spending hours playing a golf game or watching one. I’d rather be blogging.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > Oh, so many things: Work; not working; heart disease; cancer… you name it. I’m a hypochondriac. But the biggest worries come when you have children; you want to hermetically seal them until they are grown. So I worry about and for them constantly.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you’d do differently? > When I was at Time Inc., I wouldn’t sign the editors’ contract because it had a gag clause. And I quit Entertainment Weekly. If I had signed and had engineered my firing (not difficult), I would have received three years’ salary, bonus, and benefits. I now know the price of integrity and I think I was an idiot to pass up the money.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > I am a very rare beast: a Canadophile. Canada always seemed simpler and more civilized to me and I like its self-deprecating sense of humour. I love Sweden for similar reasons: less humour, prettier people.

What would your ideal holiday be? > A year off to write a book.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Easy answer these days: Blog. My blog fills my available life; I find myself plotting couch time so I can browse and blog. In fact, I resent filling this out now; I’d rather be blogging.

What is your most treasured possession? > Odd mementos of destruction: The dust-encrusted briefcase I carried on September 11th; a piece of the Berlin Wall.

What talent would you most like to have? > The ability to both start and finish a book.

Who are your sporting heroes? > I have none. I was tall and clumsy as a kid and came to resent the tyranny of jocks. As a result, I didn’t exercise until well into my 40s. So I look up to no jocks.

[Previous profiles: Ophelia Benson (Nov 7); Chris Bertram (Sep 26); Alan Brain (Oct 10); Francois Brutsch (Dec 5); Jackie D (Oct 17); Harry Hatchet (Oct 24); Saddam Hussein (Nov 14); Oliver Kamm (Nov 21); Sheila O’Malley (Dec 19); Natalie Solent (Nov 28); Roger L. Simon (Oct 31); Michael J. Totten (Oct 3); Brian Weatherson (Dec 12). The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature.]

Au Currant

Harry’s Place
Atlantic Blog
Politx
Power Line
Young Curmudgeon

Black Triangle
Legal Theory Blog
Oliver Kamm
George Junior

Crooked Timber
HispaLibertas
Roger L. Simon (nu? why not?)
InstaPundit
Stephen Pollard
Tom Watson MP
Michael J. Totten
A.E. Brain
Sitting on a Fence

Terra Taco
Outside the Beltway

Early Days of a Better Nation (reciprocating)
Virtual Stoa
Socialism in an Age of Waiting

And no exclusions, OK. There are Butterflies on the Crumb Trail; there’s a Swiss roll, and some British Politics, across the Solent… and more of the same. Them were the letters, is all it is. Seasonal greetings to all and sundry: bloggers, readers, sane people, other people, and our furry, and non-furry, friends – and, of course, the blogs themselves.

Barry Breadline, over at Four-Day Party, has posted greetings for the festive season as follows:

A merry Christmas and very happy New Year to all my loyal readers. I hope you have a good one!

On the face of it, this is regulation stuff for the time of the year, but there’s an element of it which I find faintly troubling. I don’t mean to be unfair to Barry, but had he been a little more sensitive to the various verbal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, he might have done better to omit the word ‘loyal’. Like other blogs, Four-Day Party surely has a mixture of different kinds of reader. Not all of them will be, or feel, especially loyal. Some may visit only very occasionally; others may not like Barry’s repeated arguments in favour of the more humane treatment of farm animals. Does Barry really mean to leave such people out of his good wishes? Posted by John Z.

Comments: 1. Couldn’t agree more, John. In fact, I’d go further than you have. BB is also excluding all those who aren’t readers of his blog, whether loyal or disloyal ones. Why? Does he assume they’re all worthless? Steve Garibaldi. 2. Typical BB – farm animals he can care about, but people who happen not to visit, or like, his bdog, they’re just rubbish as far as he’s concerned. Maureen. 3. Sorry, I meant blog not bdog. I wonder if BB has a bdog. Tee hee, feeling a little silly. Too much to drink. Maureen. 4. He’s a complete tosser. I’ve read better Christmas greetings from non-Christians. Barry bleedin’ Breadline should go and stick his head down a hole somewhere and not come out till the end of March. Jug the Invader. 5. I have to warn people posting comments here that I reserve the right to take down anything offensive. Jug, I think that is OTT, quite frankly. I raised a question about modes of verbal exclusion – which are not always conscious or intentional after all. John Z. 6. Yes, John, I think people are being a bit unfair to BB. For example, if I meet a friend in the street and wish her (or him!) a good Christmas, this doesn’t necessarily mean I wish all others ill. Does it? What worries me more about BB’s post is the transition it makes from ‘merry’ and then ‘happy’ to merely ‘good’. I feel that, coming where it does, ‘good’ is a tailing off. It suggests that BB may not have been all that enthusiastic in his greetings. As one of his loyal readers, I did feel slightly miffed. Jane Smith. 7. He’s a bumhole. I’ve always said so. I’m not bothering with him. But Jug the Invader is also out of line. What’s he implying? That non-Christians shouldn’t be expected to rise to the level of a decent greeting? Crass stupidity. Noske. 8. Total piss and crap, Noske, Jug didn’t say any such thing. Angelina. 9. Noske and Angelina: this is my last warning; I don’t tolerate abusive comments on my bdog. John Z. 10. I know for an asboltue fact that BB hasn’t got a dog. Not only that; he’s never had one. He affects this concern about farm animals, but he can’t even bring himself to care for a dog. As the owner of three dogs, I can proudly say they’ve never given me a day of unhappiness. I love them, my dear dogs. Once when I was taking Spot-the-Blot for a walk, he did something so cute. I’ve never forgotten it to this day. Maurice Beltstrap. 11. What was it that Spot-the-Blot did, Maurice? Trish. 12. Who gives a xxxx? Why does BB say ‘a good one’ at the end of his greeting? What does ‘one’ mean in this context? It could be anything. How are we supposed to know that he’s not wishing us – or his oh-so-‘loyal readers’ – a good calamity? DontheCon. 13. Stop it. Mary M. 14. Mary, if you can’t stand the blood, stay out of the slaughterhouse. Never heard of free speech. Sheesh. Nazi! Max Shapiro. 15. Give her a break, Max. I, too, have begun to feel that things might be getting a bit out of hand on this thread. Not very out of hand. Just a bit out of hand. Lord Scrum. 16. Get lost, Scrum. Scum. Ha ha ha ha. DerekD. 17. Stop it. Please. Mary M. 18. I’ve often wondered whether people shouldn’t also bestow their festive greetings upon dogs. What has BB got against dogs? Jeremy Jeremy. 18. It was bdog, meaning blog, not dog – you cretins. Attila. 19. Attila! Stop it. John Z. 20. John, it was me that – no, it was I who – said ‘Stop it’. Please don’t steal my stuff. Mary M………. 347. Shouldn’t Christmas greetings be extended beyond the narrow circle of humans, dogs and farm animals, to blogs? I don’t mean to bloggers, since they are, after all, human, most of them. I mean to the blogs themselves. Colin. 348. There’s an interesting connection between blogs, dogs and country music, which BB and all the rest of you have missed. TracyBelle Trenton……….

In this post I take up the discussion with Ken MacLeod on whether or not the Iraq war should have been supported. Ken argued against the position of the pro-war left here; I took issue with him here (on the old normblog site: December 8); and he then responded to me here.

In my criticism of Ken, I expressed the nub of my disagreement with his view by saying that:

it loses the specific in the general. Because of the general character of US power as projected by opponents of the Iraq war, we must oppose a course of action which leads to the demise of the Saddam regime.

For left supporters of the war, I went on to say, ‘the present and proximate future of the Iraqi people’ weighed more heavily in the balance than speculative projections about the future use of American power and generalist characterizations of what the latter supposedly is by its very essence. In his response Ken formally moves as if to meet the point. But I don’t think he does meet it. What he says amounts simply to a restatement of the position I was criticizing. Here is his reply:

I don’t think my objection turns on opposing the specific to the general, or the real present to the speculated-upon future… [T]his particular war is avowedly part of a long-term project to establish unchallengeable US hegemony, a project that in the view of many people… threatens much wider wars, including (and yes, this is speculative) against other advanced capitalist states. That a war that is overall reactionary (or otherwise disastrous) can have progressive (or otherwise good) effects is not new, and abstracting these effects from their context isn’t a new mistake, particularly and regrettably for socialists.

The argument starts as though it might be about to meet the criticism I made – with its reference to, and claims about, ‘this particular war’. But the characterization of the war which immediately follows (a) only obtains its content by adverting back from the particular to the general, with ‘long-term project’, ‘threatens’, and ‘overall reactionary’; and (b) is question-begging on the issues that divided left supporters and left opponents of the war.

I won’t elaborate on (a). It speaks for itself. What Ken writes here seems to me self-evidently subject to the same criticism it is meant to be defending against. This point is reinforced by a consideration of (b). For those of us who supported the war – well, for me at any rate – the ending of the Baathist regime is not just an incidental side-effect of what happened. It is the main story. I therefore don’t accept that the war was ‘overall reactionary’. I think that the freeing of the Iraqi people from a decades-long political darkness was – as Ken himself appears to allow – ‘progressive’. It was a boon, a great release for the Iraqi people, a national liberation, no less; and then, more than this, an opportunity for the region and the world. Therefore, I don’t regard support for the war as ‘abstracting these effects from their context’ – as if the context was already pre-defined by something else more general, with the progressive ‘bit’ being merely by the way. It’s a skewed version of what the war was about, WMD and all the rest of it notwithstanding. I would hold this view even if I thought (as in fact I do not) that George Bush and Tony Blair fought the war for wholly cynical reasons. To give a crude analogy here: if someone burgles a house and her only motive in doing so is greed, I will approve of her action if, in order to bring off the burglary, she finds she has to release a terrified family from the grip of a bullying, violent and child-abusing patriarch. I will not think that what happened was overall bad because it was – ‘in essence’ – a burglary; or worry, in my approval, about the burglar going on to burgle others. If she does, we can disapprove of – and oppose – that.

Ken also makes the point that ‘the occupation itself could be the catalyst for a slide into a worse situation than that before the war’. I’m not going to engage over it, because he doesn’t know that this will happen, and I don’t know that it won’t. It’s relevant to say that supporters of the war will have reckoned that the baseline for comparison about better and worse was such that it was improbable that the war would make things worse.

Finally, I criticized Ken for what struck me as a rather cavalier approach (‘So bloody what?’) to the mistakes that have been made by many on the left in opposing the war. What he says in reply I recognize as a partial clarification. He meant that in the circumstances such ‘stupidity is something to be expected and endured and fought against within the antiwar movement, not something that has to be accepted’; that these are ‘correctable, though shameful’ errors. All the same, as before here, for him the deep or inner character of everything is already fixed in advance by the generalities from which he begins. Those errors, he says, weren’t ‘a betrayal of the victims of Saddam’s regime’. No? Why not? Just so. On the other hand:

Errors on the side of support to imperialism are hardly ever correctable. That slope is too slippery, and the social gravitation too powerful, to be easily climbed back.

I don’t propose to comment on this other than to say that, though it’s more gently put than sometimes, it’s the discourse of renegacy. There could not be two views on the left about the war; or not two safe views anyway. And so we who supported the war look to be on the way out. Thanks, but no thanks. I won’t be excommunicated.

A postscript of a purely personal nature. Ken finishes on the ‘monstrous misconception of the pro-war left that some justification for supporting the invasion of Iraq can be found in the words or deeds of Lenin or Trotsky’ – next to which, he says, any mistakes on the anti-war side ‘are as dust in the balance’. I don’t know which people he has in mind in the matter of Lenin and Trotsky, but I’m bound, for contextual reasons, to suspect I might be amongst them. I’d like, therefore, to say this. In the daily flow of blogging, amidst the press of everything else, it is possible to have a hazy memory sometimes about what you may have written on this or that point. Still, I feel reasonably confident about two things: (1) I haven’t recently invoked Lenin’s name or authority on behalf of anything at all; and (2) the only appeal I’ve made to Trotsky’s thinking in connection with the Iraq war was to point out what he thought about treating fascism as a lesser enemy than social democracy and a lesser threat than (as it used to be called) bourgeois democracy. It is uselessly anachronistic to try to guess what viewpoint figures from the past might have adopted in present circumstances, but I know enough about Trotsky’s politics to know that, were he suddenly to be transported from his time into ours, he would almost certainly not be supporting the Coalition in Iraq. For a number of reasons which I won’t go into, that speculation carries no weight whatsoever in my own thinking about things. Or to put it more briefly, I don’t care. It’s not how I make up my mind on any issue, and it’s not how I ever have.

Anyone who felt overcome by sympathy at the sight of the humbled tyrant undergoing his medical examination might like to test their sympathy against a reading of this report by Matthew Campbell. Be warned that it isn’t pleasant reading. At the end of Campbell’s piece we are given the view of Hamid Faraj Hafof, of the Iraqi Political Prisoners’ League:

[He] was wary of echoing Bush’s call for Saddam to receive the “ultimate penalty”, or execution. “He should be made to suffer,” said Hafof. “He should be put in prison for the rest of his life. That is much more painful than death.”

(See also the views collected here.) I am reminded by Hafof’s statement of these lines from Primo Levi’s poem For Adolf Eichmann:

Oh son of death, we do not wish your death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived.
May you live sleepless five million nights,
And may you be visited each night by the suffering of everyone who saw,
Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back,
Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death.

It should not be inferred from this that Levi was opposed in principle to the death penalty for crimes on the scale of Eichmann’s or Saddam Hussein’s. He wasn’t.

Bret Stephens has some reflections on the humbling of Saddam:

[O]ne has to wonder whether humiliation is really such a terrible thing if the sight of a bedraggled and meek Saddam being manhandled by a US Army doctor brought Iraqis into the streets to honk their horns and fire their guns in the air. It caused women to faint for joy. It caused one Iraqi to exclaim: “I don’t know what to say… I am confused… no… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy… I am very happy….” And so on.
…..
[I]t’s about time we all stop treating Iraqis, and Arabs generally, as anything but what they are: Human beings, capable of making rational choices, who, like the rest of us, are accountable for their own successes, their own failures, and their own fates.

(Registration required. Hat tip: MG.)

Haaretz reports:

The European Union countries have foiled a PLO initiative to challenge Israel’s credentials at the UN, specifically Israel’s right to represent the territories.

Early this week the PLO delegation to the UN distributed a draft resolution that said: “The PLO representative in the UN is the representative of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including East Jerusalem.”

The resolution was meant to be voted on in the General Assembly on Wednesday, in a routine affirmation of the credentials of countries represented in the UN. But the EU was vehemently opposed to the resolution, regarding it as an attempt to undermine Israel’s legitimacy.

Hat tip: SdeW.

Here’s an item about research on terrorism, economic deprivation and civil liberties:

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society’s elites, not the dispossessed.

Via Oliver Kamm.