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Tuesday, August 12, 2003
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 Tuesday, August 12, 2003
started 8/12/2003; 12:51:37 AM - last post 8/17/2003; 3:24:03 PM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 
8/12/2003; 4:51:37 AM (reads: 5296, responses: 3)
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What links reveal 
| | Nothing's changing, just lots more hits. And the referers don't reveal anything. Not sure what's happening there. |
| | If you're interested in weblog APIs, please review the new MetaWeblog API spec . Today it moved from my test site to the XML-RPC site, replacing the spec from 2002 (which has been archived). It's very important to review this for accuracy and completeness now, I'd like to finish this rev in a week or two. There haven't been any comments for quite some time, so perhaps we're almost done. Now is the time to review; after it's frozen, as you know, it will be too late. |
| | I don't know much about this stuff, but it is interesting to look at how we use blogs to increase What We Know: to move as much as possible from the tacit to the explicit. There's a chart I'm looking for here, but can't find it. No time. |
Centerweight
| | Caught a little of the Democratic debate on CSPAN last night while I was getting ready for bed. Kerry looked more commanding than anybody else on stage. He certainly comes across very well on TV. Sharpton had a lot of funny one-liners. Gephardt came across as substantive. Dean was solid, making the most of his small-state background. |
| | But the whole crowd scraped me the wrong way. None of them gave Bush and his administration much credit (or so it seemed — I didn't catch the whole show) for any success in the war on terror, and that bothered me. I believe the Bush administration blew a thousand chances to make the world a better place between 9/11 and the Iraq War, but I also think they made America a safer place (at least so far). Their fuck-ups are well-known; but what about their successes — those tragedies that never happened? I'm sure there have been some. So: Credit where due. |
| | I also don't share the Dem candidates distaste for NAFTA (Dean excepted, since he said Vermont benefited enormously from it), nor their general discomfort with free trade. I didn't get the sense that any of them (with the possible exceptions of Lieberman and Dean) deeply understands how a free market works, or how a government can help by getting out of the way. |
| | Democrats, in general, like more laws, more regulation, and therefore more bureaucracy and more drag on commerce. |
| | Unfortunately, so do Republicans. They say they don't, but they do. |
| | Democrats, however, like helping people and protecting resources the marketplace could give a shit about, such as old growth timber, poor people and clean drinking water. Republicans, at least since Reagan, side with the marketplace, which they tend to see as playing fields tilted to favor the Big Winners. They like those those Big Winners, especially when they make big contributions. |
| | Shallow oversimplifications aside, I think there's a middle wing that doesn't see much play in the press, though it's all over the blogosphere. It doesn't think of itself as libertarian, although that's basically what it is. It values personal liberty and minimal government interference, either in private lives or in private enterprise. It dislikes market-limiting power moves by big business as much as those by big government, especially when it uses the former to operate the latter, as we've been seeing with the RIAA. |
| | I think the candidate that captures the sympathy of that third wing will win in 2004. |
Rightwurst
| | John asked me to participate, but I've been on the road. In any case I guess would have listed the great assassins (Booth, Sirhan, Ray, Oswald) thrown in Joe McCarthy and then a corrupt pol or two (Tweed, Agnew). |
| | But I wasn't compfortable with the question, frankly. Not sure it moves anybody's thinking anywhere, other than to observe that both political wings tend to disapprove of assassins. |
discuss
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Joshua Koenig - Re: Tuesday, August 12, 2003
8/12/2003; 10:21:05 PM (reads: 605, responses: 1)
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I believe the Bush administration blew a thousand chances to make the world a better place between 9/11 and the Iraq War, but I also think they made America a safer place (at least so far). Their fuck-ups are well-known; but what about their successes — those tragedies that never happened? I'm sure there have been some. So: Credit where due.
Doc, here's the problem. While it's possible that there have been a few cloak and dagger, spy film worthy "tragedies that never happened," we havn't heard about any of them. Team Bush has had a few media-ready events, a well-timed announcement here, a terror alert there, but none have had any actual content.
The sad and frightening truth is there's been little to no evidence of any substantive or lasting progress in the "war on terror." A few purported terror cells have been broken, e.g. the Buffalo five, but many of those charges are fishy (e.g. the so-called "dirty bomber") and since everything goes under military purview, information about this "progress" is not available to the public, or even to members of congress.
Afghanistan is sliding back into warlordism and the Taliban is increasing its territorial holdings there. At the same time, we're frittering away our civil rights at home, occupying a nation which did not threaten us at great human and financial cost, running a gulag for suspected terrorists in Cuba, and continuing to make a complete nash of the situation. The Bush approach to the War on Terror has, like the rest of his term in office, been drivin by ideology, not facts. As such, he's failed to give us any results to give him credit for.
We all want to believe that the President is doing something right, but here's no sign of it that I can see. There's no there there man. Faith-based foreign policy doesn't get results.
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, August 12, 2003
8/13/2003; 11:36:42 PM (reads: 762, responses: 0)
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Two I-told-you-so links: 1) Running off at the Tube, from November 2001; and 2) Terrorist Sting Nets 'Significant" Arms Dealer, from today.
Here's the problem with political partisanship, especially in presidential campaigns: Swing voters weigh virtues, plus successes and failures. To paint one's opponent as a complete sham and failure is therefore to risk sacrificing credibiilty with the voters you need most.
I'm no fan of the Bush administration, nor of its approach to to terror. It continues to ignore terrorism's causes in conditions the U.S. has caused or exacerbated, and has done too little to relieve. And it has rationalized or failed to take full account of the systematic inter-bureaucratic intelligence failings that allowed 9/11 to happen.
That said, I also believe that the country's air travel security system is far better than it was before 9/11, and that international cooperation around operations like this recent sting are also better. Would they also have been better in a Gore administration, post-9/11? Certainly.
Still, I think the Bush administration needs to receive some credit where due. Because the voters will give it, even if Bush's opponents don't.
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adamsj - Rightwurst/Leftwurst...
8/17/2003; 7:24:03 PM (reads: 620, responses: 0)
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Two people I was amazed didn't make the list:
When did the right-wingers stop hating Martin Luther King?
When did lefties stop planning for they day they could piss in William Calley's open casket?
But yeah, lists like that are depressing:
"Okay, what about the guy in Roosevelt's cabinet who blocked rescuing the Jews?"
"No, no--we need celebrity status. Charles Lindbergh! Henry Ford!"
"What about Ezra Pound?"
"Oh, come on--this is post-literate America. How about Pee Wee Herman?"
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