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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Riverlution 
| | Prodded by Dave and Frank, I just tried looking at NYTimesriver and BBCriver on my Treo 700p, and for the first time I actually like the damn device (which has otherwise been a PITA since the day I got it). |
| | Here's a bonus: The river metaphor makes me look at the supply side of blogging from a whole new perspective. |
| | Big difference between a 'site' and a 'source', no? |
Why blog?
| | So people have been wondering why shooting pictures from airplanes would be more enjoyable than, as I said yesterday, " 97% of of the rest of the stuff I still blog about". |
| | Well, because that's how I felt at the time. Two reasons for that. |
| | First, photography is a satisfying art for me. I've always enjoyed taking pictures of interesting people and interesting stuff, and giving them away. In the case of shots out airplane windows, it's also a way to learn about the world that allows others to do the same along with me — and to teach me more, through their comments to my picture posts on Flickr. |
| | Second, nobody will ever call me an "A-list" photographer or a "gatekeeper" around anything photographic. |
| | I'm a pretty thick-skinned guy. But I gotta say that the "Great Unread" thread that Nick Carr started depressed me more than it has the other times the same topic has come up. That, combined with news yesterday that airlines might stop me (and others like me) from doing something harmless, useful and enjoyable (worse, for "security reasons"), kinda demotivated me a bit. And it made me visit the subject of how much I enjoy doing what I do here. The answer at that moment was highly skewed toward the activity that was thorougly — as opposed to mostly — enjoyable. |
| | But the fact is that I enjoy it all. Degrees of enjoyment change, and are hardly worth visiting, most of the time. They're binary, basically. Either I enjoy it or I don't. Nearly all of the time, I do. |
| | I also don't just blog for the fun of it. I blog to make a positive difference in a world we're all making, right now, regarless of where any of us stand in anybody's ranking system. I may not do that with every post. (It would get boring if I did.) But that's what keeps me going. |
The Kurds' way
| | In a region where rule by reactionary clerics, gangster elites, and calcified military dictatorships is the norm, Iraqi Kurdistan is, by local standards, an open, liberal, and peaceful society. Its government is elected by a popular vote, competing political parties run their own newspapers, and the press is (mostly) free. Religion and the state are separate, and women can and do vote. The citizens here are tired of war, and they¹re doing everything in their power to make their corner of the Middle East a normal, stable place where it¹s safe to live, and to invest and build. |
| | But to carve out their breathing space, the Kurds have adopted discriminatory policies that would make any liberal-minded Westerner squirm. It remains to be seen how the contradictions will sort themselves out in the long run. But the outcome is important, especially if Kurdistan reaches the day — and it seems increasingly likely that it will — that it breaks entirely free of Baghdad and declares independence. |
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