Posts

Chris Suellentrop writes today about the fact that Al Jazeera is just as fair as CNN. Of course Al Jazeera has an Arab slant on the news, what’s less obvious to Americans is the strong slant toward America of the US news networks. To be frank, I’m willing to simply dismiss people who look at Al Jazeera as a propaganda outlet as simpleminded or ignorant. Today they suspended their broadcasts from Iraq because two of their reporters were expelled. Obviously they’re doing more to tweak Iraq’s government than folks like Peter Arnett. My problem with the common dismissal of Al Jazeera as a propaganda network is that it betrays a lack of perspective that offends me utterly. I can deal with conservatives and liberals equally well, what I can’t deal with is people who can’t get beyond their own biases. For example, I’m amazed by people who think it’s perfectly fine for us to detain people captured in Afghanistan as “unlawful combatants” rather than as prisoners of war, but who howl with outrage when Iraqis don’t treat our captured soldiers properly under the Geneva Convention. Our soldiers should be accorded the rights of prisoners of war but so too should we honor the convention even when it doesn’t suit us. The inability to step outside one’s own political outlook, or nationality, or race, or gender and look at the big picture from other perspectives is an intellectual flaw that I find to be fatal. Everyone comes at every issue with biases, I’m a liberal white male who grew up in a small town in Texas, and that background certainly colors my thoughts on pretty much everything. However, I pride myself on my ability to compensate for those factors and look at a situation from the perspective of other people, although I’m obviously far from perfect. In any case, the one piece of advice that I’d give anyone who wants to achieve a greater understanding of the world is to examine yourself for your biases and then attempt to set them aside when reading or watching the news. Things that seem utterly irrational through the lens of your own experiences may seem perfectly reasonable through someone else’s. Those people may still be completely wrong, but at least you might get a clue as to where they’re coming from. ...

Can I just say that when you make your résumé fully public on the various job boards, the total sleaze comes straight out of the woodwork? There are a lot of people out there who are trying to separate job applicants from their money.

There’s a new Mozilla Development Roadmap, and it’s a departure from what we’ve seen since the original Mozilla release. They’re going to move away from the big monolithic suite and toward multiple independent applications, a browser based on Phoenix and a mail client based on Minotaur. Makes sense to me. Oh, and the Mozilla 1.4 alpha is out, for people who like to live on the edge.

An LA Times photographer has been fired for submitting a Photoshopped photo that ran on the front page of the paper. The altered photo is better than either of the originals, too bad it doesn’t capture a real moment in time.

I have recommended The Agonist many times for his timely and obsessive reporting of war news as it breaks, and was very distressed to learn that many of the items he has posted are copied directly from Stratfor’s situation reports. I was also distressed to see the comments on this microscandal on both The Agonist and the site that exposed the plagiarism, which basically eschew the ethical (and legal) matter because of the utility they find in The Agonist. Here’s the problem. People like The Agonist because of the concise and meaningful summary of what’s going on in Iraq, that’s the reason I like it. That’s also the value that Stratfor brings to the table, and indeed they charge people money to view their reports. So when someone comes along and copies their reports to a free site (especially without attribution), then it hurts their business. It’s pretty simple – if I can get Strafor’s best stuff for free at The Agonist, why would I pay Stratfor? The fact that those items are often posted without attribution means that I can’t even judge for myself whether Stratfor is worth paying for based on the things taken from their site. Then there’s the added marketing problem for Stratfor. Sean-Paul from The Agonist has appeared on NBC Nightly News and has gotten a lot of other media exposure as well, I’m certain that the guys at Stratfor would prefer to get that exposure themselves, so that they can promote their service. Sean-Paul’s site is clearly well done in spite of the plagiarism, but I honestly have no idea how good it is because I don’t know how much of his stuff is taken from other sites and posted without attribution. Unfortunately, I can no longer recommend his site to my readers. Update: It seems Sean-Paul of The Agonist has buried the hatchet with Stratfor. I admit to still feeling a bit betrayed by his previous improper behavior, but it looks like things are going to be straightened out. ...

None other than Walter Cronkite has a New York Times op-ed to day on Peter Arnett, Speaking With the Enemy.

Stories like this one illustrate the price of war, not only on innocent bystanders but on the humanity of the combatants as well.

I’m probably like most people in that the large majority of my media consuming attention right now is being paid to the war. However, there’s lots of other stuff going on that bears monitoring as well, one of which being the so-called Super-DMCA, which would do lots of preposterous stuff. Anyway, right now the definitive resource seems to be Ed Felten’s blog. The link above is to an archive of his Super-DMCA postings. ...

Things I want to write something about but can’t, for lack of anything meaningful or enlightening to say: SARS Peter Arnett The suicide bombing in Iraq.

Colin Powell has joined Donald Rumsfeld in making belligerent statements against Syria and Iran. Odd to think that Syria joined with coalition forces in the Gulf War in 1991, and now they’re saying flat out that they want to see us lose this war. Does anyone think that a transformation in the Middle East toward democracy, individual liberty, and opposition to Islamism is closer now than it was before we went to Iraq? I really believe at this point that if the Bush administration tried to launch wars against Syria or Iran in the same way they did against Iraq, they’d lose the American people entirely. At least we could attack Iraq under the pretense that we wanted to enforce UN sanctions, no such excuse is available for Syria or Iran. ...