Sunday, December 14, 2003

the current event

Excellent news from Iraq. here's hoping it deflates the bubble of violence and the rebuilding can get on track.

interesting though - I got the news by way of a right-wing weblog, in which the writer's second (after "hooray, we got Saddam") was along the lines of "all those lefties are going to be very disappointed when they find this out". HUH?

and elsewhere, on a more left-leaning blog, the author was saying "now I hope all the lefties will remember that this is a good thing for our country". HUH?

Another good thing for this country would be if we could get a little better at distinguishing myth from reality - and from what I've seen, the Saddamite lefties lie in the first category.

It's easy to fall into seeing - and demonizing - others from the "you're either with us or against us" perspective, but people do come in more flavors than "ally" and "enemy".

update: unfortunately, the disappointeds are not as mythical as I had thought. Not common, though.

update II: the Philosoraptor nails it again.

update III: in The 'Republic of Fear' Is Dead:
In his wrenching book on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the dissident writer Kanan Makiya explained that the most powerful force keeping the cruel regime in power--more important than brute strength--was "an all-embracing atmosphere of fear"...
i.e., civil civic discourse was not high on his list of priorities.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...

Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.

* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.

If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.

New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)

Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.