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| Tuesday, August 6, 2002 |
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Intellectual blog pong 
| | Stephen den Beste and Eric S. Raymond are having a long-form exchange on the subject of open source, the idea ESR has done more than anyone else on Earth to promulgate. |
Blog of the Day
Hope he still got to skate somewhere in there
| | The Beast had a bad driving experience on my birthday. Background: TB is a major skateboard shredder, a veteran of the dot-com trenches and one of the best thinkers I know. |
Peacemongering
Well done
Runs in the family
Sounds like trouble
| | I don't have a clue. Might be fun to have get together and harass Quest or something. |
Nice to see it's still being reborn.
Warblustery
| | ...the US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime mainly because the West needs to humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millenial fantasy. |
| | He's right of course, and I suspect (and hope) the Bush Administration has thought of all this. It's just politically incorrect to say it. |
| | But why? The people who would object are always saying that it's a good learning experience when the United States is humiliated. |
| | [Aside: Hey, I object, and I've never said "humiliation is a good learning experience" for anybody, least of all for the U.S.] |
| | A telling comment from Glenn Reynolds last night, and now I have a clue what a warblogger is. I may try to write a new definition. It'll probably involve the words blow and hard, and examples from playgrounds. Dangerous stuff. Watch out for the humiliation, that's where holocausts come from. |
| | Dave is being obscure, but I presume he's referring to the humiliation of Germany at Versailles, which preceded the holocaust. The argument being that an Arab world, humiliated, is all the more dangerous. |
| | Not an unreasonable point. But I'd draw a different lesson. The Arab world has long felt humiliated, it's already dangerous. If you are going to defeat your enemy, do so conclusively, as the US and UK defeated Germany in the Second World War. One could equally well say, to paraphrase Winer: watch out for appeasement, that's where holocausts come from. |
| | Nick has recognized some unpleasant truths. And if the term "warblogger" means anything at all (and I'm not sure it does) recognizing unpleasant truths about war and self-defense is at the core of it. |
| | Dave isn't there yet. Nick wrote that the only thing that will change current hardline Arab culture is the humiliation of an unmistakable abject defeat. Dave replies: "Dangerous stuff. Watch out for the humiliation, that's where holocausts come from." No. At most, that's where the desire to perpetrate holocausts comes from. |
| | But the hardline Arabs (who are the ones calling the shots pretty much everywhere) already have the desire to perpetrate a holocaust, as has been made abundantly clear. They merely lack the means. The mentality we're dealing with isn't Germany in 1914. It's more like Germany in 1939. And that Germany was in dire need of abject defeat and humiliation, the sooner the better. |
| | I'm still with Dave, whose clue link goes to the term warmonger. I cringed when I read it, but not as much as I did when I read what Nick said and Glenn nodded along with. I thought: ...the West needs to humiliate the Arab world??? |
| | Here's Nick again, back on Aug 4: |
| | Let the US send 40,000 soldiers against an Iraqi army ten times the size; let the defeat be total; and let Arab people realize that liberal democracy isn't just a soft western indulgence, but the most effective form of social organization on this planet, and it is their future, if they want a future. |
| | Yet earlier in that same post he says, |
| | But the establishment of a government in Baghdad that is both democratic and pro-Western: that's just wishful thinking. |
| | In other words, The most effective form of social organization on the planet is going to flatten a country to teach something the winner has no faith that the loser can learn. |
| | Which means we're really not talking about education here. We're just talking about humiliation. And what makes this okay is that we're humiliating the right people. |
| | At its best, war is a lesser evil. That's it. If you have to crush a regime and its armies to end the far worse things they've been doing — as we did to Japan and Germany in World War II, and to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan — your actions are entirely justifiable in the death-for-death and misery-for-misery moral economics of war. Inflict a lesser misery to end a greater one. End of story. |
| | And that, exactly, is the story George W. Bush is trying to tell, apparently with insufficient success. But bless him for trying to do the right thing for the all the people involved, including the citizens of Iraq. |
| | At its worst, war is a disease that rationalizes killing by spreading the virus of euphemism. We "service a target" or "humiliate" rather than "kill a bunch of people." What exactly are we rationalizing here? What groups is it most okay to kill? And how does that okayness vary with our distance and difference from them? |
| | I also wonder about the effect of all this bluster. Yes, there is a battle of ideas going on here, but it's not confined to the blogosphere. There's a larger context. Do we think Arabs don't use Google? Do we think blogging like this is going to help the pro-Western moderates arguing face to face with medieval millenialists on Al-Jazeera? |
| | Well, Hassan, there are a bunch of journalists called "warbloggers" in the U.S. who seem to agree that... it says right here... the West needs to humiliate the Arab world. And you're telling me they don't hate us over there? |
| | In his Aug 5 post, Glenn made it clear that he and Nick were both talking about "hard line" Arabs. But in his response to Dave, Nick was still laying the "enemy" label on "the Arab world." Maybe Glenn's right and Nick's meaning is narrower than that. But the quotable stuff isn't. |
| | After 9/11 we declared war against terrorism, not against a whole people. Let's try to remember that. |
| | [Later...] Nick has graciously compiled a list of responses — mostly critical — to his posts that started it all. |
The fans in the machine
| | The Santa Barbara Bowl holds about 4000 people. At the Alicia Keys concert last night, every seat was filled. Except for my wife and me, I'm sure there was nobody over 50. Take away our two 40-something friends, and there was nobody over 40. I'd say the average age was about 25, and the average sex was female. In fact, I'd say that 95% of the males were boyfriends on dates with girlfriends who where fans. But most of the girls came with other girls. And, this being Southern California, the girl-watching was primo. That included Alicia, who is gorgeous. |
| | My interest in hearing her was based on a single exposure: her performance of "Fallin'" on Saturday Night Live last fall. I'd also read a little about her, and gathered she had a lot of talent. Having heard me talk about her, my wife bought the tickets for my birthday. |
| | Alicia put on a nice, big, well-produced show. We enjoyed it. But I was hoping it would be great, and it wasn't. She seems to have one song. It's not "Fallin'" (which, predictably, was her encore). It's the same song you hear lots of talented young female vocalists sing when you hit SCAN on the car radio. It's the song all of these girls turn "The Star Spangled Banner" into when they sing it at ball games, working 50 notes into the word "wave." It's a gospel thing, but it seems to be more about showing off than about showing soul. |
| | Alicia has soul, no doubt about it. But not as much as she'll have when she hits 25, 35 or 45. |
| | At one point she did a solo turn with a grand piano, starting out with Beethoven's "Für Elise." I was hoping she'd stay with it right into the hard part, but she wandered off into a series of digressions that seemed intended more to show off her stylistic versatility than to treat the audience to a wider repertoire. At one point she started going into a kind of barrelhouse bluesy thing, and I thought Whoa, this will be good, but it was over in about ten seconds and she was on to the next item on the stylistic smorgasbord. I looked around. Most of the girls in the audience were into the performance, but a few were talking to each other or on cell phones. At least one was asleep. |
| | But it was interesting to see the star-making machinery at work. Whatever (and whoever) else Alicia Keys is, she is a product: a hot young star, somehow manufactured in spite of her prodigious and charming self-made qualities. |
| | Next month I'll see Bonnie Raitt with Lyle Lovett at the same venue. Bonnie's a star too, but due more to persistence than to any promotional effort. Her first hit record came long after her first label had dumped her. I've seen her more times than I can count, but not once after that first hit record, "Nick of Time," almost ten years ago. Itll be interesting to see her now. By all reports, she's no less terrific than ever. |
| | Interesting to see the difference when you look up Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt on Google. It's not fair, of course. Bonnie is a veteran artist who's more than twice Alicia's age and with maybe thirty times the mileage as an entertainer. She's also been involved in much more than music from the beginning. But the main difference, to me at least, is that all the top Alicia sites are what the record industry loves to see: official publicity and the adoration of fans: the union of production and consumption. |
| | Nothing wrong with that, by itself. And not a knock on Alicia. She's extraordinarily blessed, and quite humble and gracious about it. |
| | There's just something wrong with what the industry wants, which is nothing but that. As Chuqui said yesterday (both here and here), the record companies aren't in business for the "midlist" artists. Even if they make money on them, they only care about blockbusters. |
| | I wish Alicia well. But I also know she'll be a much better artist and performer after she's done with her turn as a blockbuster. |
| | She'll also have a lot more to sing about. |
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