Friday, 23 May, 2003Off for the weekendOkay, folks, I'm off to attend a wedding in upstate New York, and I expect I won't be posting. I'll be back on Tuesday; you all have a good weekend. posted 1812 Z-8 [link] Further consideration re Salam Jeff Jarvis has some further ruminations on those seeking to dissect Salam, and (as usual) he makes good sense. Certainly, Salam is far from being a neutral and dispassionate observer. Clearly, he does come from a—by Iraqi standards—privileged background, and he's likely to be somewhat miffed that his relatively cushy life has been thoroughly disrupted. But it's equally important to bear in mind that people in wartime try to cling to whatever shred of normality they can; I recall a story about a television license inspector in Sarajevo who was still going about his job two years into the siege. So, while Salam's complaint about no longer having access to an indoor swimming pool may seem awfully petty, it does have to be seen in the proper context. Perhaps Salam is a thoroughly unpleasant chap when you get to know him; perhaps he's a dilettante who benefited from his family connections to live the good life; for all I know, he may have a couple of skeletons in his closet. From what I'm reading, Saddam's Iraq was not a place where you could be a saint. The point is that Salam provides a rare perspective from the ground in Iraq, unfiltered by sub-editors or PR men, and that is what makes his blog compelling reading. It's probably superfluous to say it would be mistake to take "Where is Raed?" as gospel; Salam may be a little too close to see the bigger picture, as were citizens of, say, Berlin in the spring and summer of 1945. But to build a good picture of events, we must incorporate multiple perspectives, and Salam provides us with one. As Jeff Jarvis puts it: This witness brings with him a viewpoint and baggage aplenty. [...] Nonetheless, we need to get used to the idea of getting information from contemporary witnesses who have a viewpoint. [...] All we have to do is know how to judge what they are saying in the context of their times and circumstances.Wise words indeed. posted 1655 Z-8 [link] David Warren on Salam You'll recall that I was rather happy when Salam Pax resurfaced. Consequently, I was less than enthusiatic when I became aware (via, among others, Jeff Jarvis) of the attempted character assassination, hamfistedly conducted by David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen. posted 0615 Z-8 [more..] Thursday, 22 May, 2003Well, poo.I just found out that one of my utterly favourite sites, the Brunching shuttlecocks, will not be publishing any more material. Well, okay, I guess Dave and Lore have their own lives to run, the Book of Ratings and the Self-Made Critic are continuing on spinoff sites, and—most importantly—the archives will remain available, but this still kind of sucks. posted 1700 Z-8 [link] Once more unto the breach... Hello again. One of the reasons I put a link to Evan Kirchoff's 101-280 in the sidebar was this observation, in his entry of 14-Apr-2003: I've also concluded that while lists and discussion boards are a good medium for working out narrow technical issues and minor political debates, they're a really crappy medium for major political differences. For times like these, when Big Issues are in the air, the arms-length, long-post, take-it-or-leave-it nature of blogs works better than the "shared space" metaphor of lists.During the blogging lull of the past week, much of my activity has been over on the 3WA boards, and this spell has served to impress upon me once again exactly how correct Evan Kirchoff's observation is. To my mind, there is currently one Big Issue in particular which appears to defy reasoned discussion, and that is the matter of Iraq's NBC weapons stockpiles and programmes. This is a topic I've touched on before, but in the intervening two weeks, the tone of the discussion has hardly improved. posted 0346 Z-8 [more..] |
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