Category: Old Dish

John Scalzi reflects on how the blogosphere has changed and not changed in a few years:

The composition of the blog population is tremendously more diverse than any other previous iteration of online community, and many if not most of the truly prominent bloggers are professional people who write about what they know, not just what they think about what they think they know. So you have lawyers discussing law, economists discussing the economy, writers discussing writing, so on and so forth. They all also write about whatever else they want – i.e., they’re as happy to spout off beyond their area of expertise as any the rest of us poor schmoes – but the point to make here is that these personalized sites are no longer simply “amateur”; there are enough people in enough fields writing in blogs that you can look to the blog world as a resource to understanding the real world, not merely a place that is reacting to it. And that’s mostly new and mostly useful.

Yes, what thousands of people are now building is an extraordinary new resource for understanding the world. It won’t replace traditional media. But it will be an exhilarating fresh and open supplement.

That was Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s total compensation last year. What was Raines’ severance package? Edward Boyd searches in vain.

Michael Ledeen thinks a revolution in Iran could be brewing:

The regime is in a real jam. The mullahs know the people hate them – even the timorous correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor in Tehran says that 90 percent of Iranians want democratic change, and 70 percent want drastic change – and they also know that their own instruments of repression are insufficient to deal with a massive insurrection. Many leaders of the armed forces have openly said they will side with the people if there is open civil conflict. Members of some of the most powerful institutions in the country have said that they believe more than half of the Revolutionary Guards will support the people in a frontal showdown. Ergo, the mullahs have had to import foreign thugs – described as “Afghan Arabs” in the popular press – to put down demonstrations.

Not an encouraging sign for the theocrats, is it?

With each front-page story in the New York Times and every report from the BBC predicting the q-word for American troops in Iraq, my optimism ticks up. This isn’t to say that we don’t have a hell of a task in Iraq and that some of it won’t be tough on soldiers. But in the broader view, there are a handful of encouraging signs in the Middle East, all of which suggest that the Bush gamble on remaking the region is again defying skeptics. Egypt is now seriously engaged in pressuring Islamist terrorists to deal with the Palestinian Authority. The intervention of Arab countries in this dispute is central to any hope of even minimal success. My bet is that many of these Arab leaders have grown to respect Bush and even fear him. Iraq was a critical testing ground for this trust; and the president proved his mettle. Meanwhile, the news from Iran is inspiring. Student and dissident protests have led to serious violence; and have now entered a sixth consecutive night. As the Washington Post explains:

The complaints of ordinary Iranians … center on an authoritarian religious government that has failed to respond to demands for greater personal freedoms and at least the hope for a better economic future. More than 70 percent of Iran’s 67 million people are under the age of 30 and too young to recall the 1979 Islamic revolution that deposed the U.S.-installed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought the clerics to power. Tehran residents saw evidence over the weekend that protests could bring at least marginal results in an economy closely controlled by the central government: The price of a pound of chicken, for example, dropped from the equivalent of $1 to 60 cents. Newspapers that largely ignored the protests did carry news that a hike in railway ticket prices would be rolled back.

This is how tyrannies fall. Once the regime is exposed as defensive, insecure and reliant on paramilitary thugs to maintain order, its legitimacy, already crumbling, can begin to slide into nothing. Again, could the success in Iraq have had something to do with this? Of course it has.

THE YOUNG IRANIANS: This story from the New York Times also warmed my heart. The battle against theocracy – largely won in the West for the last couple of centuries – is still in its infancy in Iran, but the themes are the same:

“It takes a lot of courage just to walk with a woman down the main street of Isfahan,” said Payam, a 21-year-old with the shoulder-length hair that many male students grow as a form of protest. “We don’t want a government that prescribes to us all the time what is good and what is bad,” he added. Activist students are struck by the fact that the revolution puts great emphasis on education, then seeks to veil their minds. “We should be able to criticize the government, the religion,” said Hamed, a 21-year-old engineering major. “If we want to be able to understand it, we should be able to criticize it.”

Exactly. I wonder if there’s a way the blogosphere can help. Maybe some kind of “Freedom in Iran Day,” where we all pledge to write about the struggle, link to Persian and Iranian websites and blogs, and generally send out a webby gesture of solidarity. This revolution may not be televised. But it sure will be blogged.

THE EURO MENACE: My latest piece on Giscard D’Estaing’s shenanigans is now posted.

Why doesn’t Alan Simpson include in his critique of the religious right their obsessive hostility to any recognition of gay citizens? He’s right about the politics of abortion; and he is on the record saying the same things about gay equality. And yet he still balks. But in some ways, the gay issue is the primary one that the far right will insist on using to gin up their base and make life difficult for president Bush. They will treat the long-overdue reversal of blatantly discriminatory sodomy laws as some kind of assault on the family. And they will surely try to respond to any civil recognition of gay relationships with a truly poisonous bid to amend the federal constitution to keep marriage from including all citizens, gay and straight. Their threat to a sane conservatism is as profound as their indifference to fomenting deep social division. At some point, the president must realize this. Let’s hope it’s not before it’s too late.

COMMIE SPIES IN BRITAIN: Yes, the Stasi infiltrated the British trade union movement. Big surprise.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Fascinating statistic gleaned from Steven Den Beste’s blog: French imports to the U.S. seem to have plummeted. At Front Page, meanwhile, they just ran a fascinating symposium on whether France is moribund. It was also, apparently, a somewhat depressing Paris Air Show. Heh.

I think we’ve now located the first blogger to express skepticism about the Iraq National Museum looting. Here’s the archived entry. Prescient, no? And far smarter than the mainstream media. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

HILLARY SUCK-UP WATCH: “Which brings us to the question of Hillary Clinton’s status and stature as a woman, certainly the most prominent and influential American woman of our time, perhaps of any time; only Eleanor Roosevelt, to whom Clinton insistently compares herself, reached similar heights.” – Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post. (Full disclosure: this unfortunate sentence is the exception to the rule in Yardley’s writing, which is almost always, in my opinion, superb.)

IS BUSH A LIAR? Byron York takes on an emerging meme.

PLEDGE WEEK UPDATE: Because Amex takes some time to report, and many checks may still be in the mail, the results are still preliminary. But it looks as if we now have close to 1700 new supporting members for the site, which brings our full total to somewhere over 6000 members. We hoped for 7000, but Robert and I are delighted to have all of you on board, however many you are. Thanks to all of you and to Robert for coordinating it all (he has manually assembled a master-list of contributors and keeps track of everything for free). What we now have is a real, workable budget for the year; and the site is financially secure for the foreseeable future. I’m finally going to break down and give myself a salary. You made it possible. I’m immeasurably grateful. Thanks again.

Voices from the Iranian uprising.

The constitution for the anti-American super-state has been unveiled. An excellent philosophical treatment – of the Habermasian or Hayekian dimensions of the EU – can be read here. Tim Garton Ash’s optimistic defense of a free multi-national Europe can be found here. Ash even has something of a scoop. He recalls an incident in Germany recently:

In the Cafe Orange on the Oranienburgerstrasse, in the now trendy heart of what used to be East Berlin, I talk to a guy dressed in T-shirt, sandals and designer sunglasses. An old ’68er, he is sharply critical of the current policies of the Bush administration. At one point he leans forward and says, teasingly: “Don’t you think we need a new Boston tea party?” Surely, he jokes, the Boston tea party was good for relations between Britain and America – in the long term. When he gets up to leave, I notice that he puts on a black baseball cap advertising “American Eagle”. “Ja,” he says, “das habe ich in Boston gekauft.” (“I bought it in Boston.”)

WHo was the German? German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. Isn’t it a little, er, undiplomatic for a foreign minister of a putative ally to be speaking of the need to overthrow the current American constitution? Or is it a clue to what he really believes?

ROMENESKO WATCH: In the past few weeks, blogger Jim Romenesko, a supporter of the gay left, has won some well-deserved plaudits for his coverage of the New York Times meltdown. Lost in this torrent of praise is the fact that Romenesko is far from an objective or neutral observer. He’s a hard-line liberal who routinely refuses to link to any conservative media criticism. Blogger Ombudsgod notices how selective Romenesko can be in covering certain stories: no mention of a widely quoted piece about p.c. editing at the NYT, nor of the fact that the head of al Jazeera turned out to have been in the pay of Saddam, and on and on. Romenesko, ever since I complained about his role in violating my private life a couple of years ago, also refuses to link to any articles of mine anywhere. That’s his prerogative. But the notion that he’s somehow above the ideological fray is preposterous.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “For a meal so thick with fat, salt and starch, it is oddly bland. It slides down my throat like a wino’s tongue, leaving several tablespoons of brown grease in a puddle at the end of the plate (at which point, maybe, the spoon is supposed to come into play). It is not so much disgusting as depressing.” – a food review from the Guardian. The Brits even beat Johnny Apple at this kind of thing.

It’s a celebrity death-match. Did Dick knock Joe to the ground? Did Joe cock his arm at Dick? It’s all at Salon.

Herewith a spectacularly stupid piece in Salon, arguing that president Bush has no right to appoint any Supreme Court Justices because he didn’t win the popular vote. Money quote:

To be absolutely clear, my point is not that President Bush can’t make a Supreme Court nomination in this term. It’s that he shouldn’t have to, or failing that, that he just shouldn’t. President Bush holds his office in spite of the democratically expressed will of the national electorate, not because of it. It is not a repudiation of his legitimacy as president to observe that simple point of fact. Whether or not you consider the Electoral College to be a pointless anachronism, in the 2000 presidential election it indisputably led to an undemocratic result: The holder of the nation’s highest office is not the person who got the most votes.

To say that a president is illegitimate is not to repudiate his legitimacy?

CANADIANS SUPPORT MARRIAGE: By significant margins, Canadians support bringing the institution of marriage to all citizens (and non-citizens, for that matter). The Court decision actually reflects popular sentiment. Stanley Kurtz’s notion that the Canadian public is evenly split isn’t true. In only two provinces is there a majority opposed. In most, the margins of support range from 62 percent in Nova Scotia, 58 percent in Quebec, to 52 percent in Ontario (where opposition runs at 44 percent). The trend in the U.S. is exactly in the same direction, as the polls in Massachusetts also show.