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March 27, 2003

al-Jazeera pay-per-view
: You can now watch al-Jazeera -- but you have to pay. Ish.com, the German service that had been streaming it, just put up a pay gate (via German company Firstgate.com): .10 Euros per minute. I just spent 30 cents watching the U.S. ambassador walk out on Iraq's ambassador at the U.N.
Worth it.

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Pixelated media... grainy reality... low-res news
: Not only is the world changing in this war, news is.
And technology is changing it.
Watch TV news now and you see grainy, pixelated, jumpy, low-res images that would have been cause for dismissal for a network producer only a year or two ago. But now these images from the front imply immediacy, even credibility: They look real, they look now, they look like news.
Now add to this the fact that reporters -- and now even members of the audience -- can carry the devices that create those images. If I had carried a phone with a camera attached and text-messaging capabilities on September 11th, I would have been reporting (or you can call it blogging) to the world.
Now add one more factor -- the always-connected, international, everywhere network in which we now live -- and you have the shape of news to come: from anywhere to anywhere anytime by anybody.
Oh, but there's one more dimension to add: opinion. People will pick their spin. In Britain, people pick the Mirror or the Sun (or the Times or the Guardian). That doesn't happen in a one-outlet local market. But it does happen in a diverse national market, like Britain, and it will happen in a diverse nanomedia market, with weblogs.
So we'll get more news from more sources and more perspectives, more up-to-the-minute with more reality from the scene and more perspective later.
I like that picture.
(So does Corey Bergman, a local TV guru who created the wonderful weblog Lost Remote and who wrote about all this for OJR).

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Ew, Canada
: Christie Blatchford, a well-known Canadian columnist, says Canada didn't have to send bombs, only words of support, to avoid seeing its relationship with its testy neighbor to the south deteriorate. [via Blogs of War]

Canada did not have to grab a chair and crack it over the head of the guy her American pal was pummelling in the bar, she had only to refrain from actively cheering the other fellow on -- oh, and maybe buy the Yank a drink when the mess was over.
It is this national failure of nerve that is, as the modern lingo has it, the root cause of the wildly deteriorating state of relations between the two countries; why the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, said what he said this week (and why Mr. Bush, his close personal friend, gave him the go-ahead to do so) and why it now appears Mr. Bush's first visit to Ottawa, slated for this spring, may be in jeopardy.

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Bush supporter
: It's a photo gag from Blogs of War. Ya have to be there.

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Sour
: Instapundit points us to a parody of a parody: The Lemon. A promo I liked: "Paul Krugman thinks your idea is stupid." I also liked the nice link here. Flattery will get you everywhere.

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Ew, Canada
: Glenn Reynolds is gratified that Canada's House of Commons just voted to try Saddam Hussein for war crimes.
I'd be more gratified if Canada put its moxie where its mouth is and sent troops over there to help us bring him to justice, eh?

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Netpolitik
: Instapundit and I both blogged this Times of London column about a new world order that begins now. All the old alliances are out-of-date -- the U.N. cut off its own arms and legs; NATO's job is done; America and Britain "reconcile," in Blair's word, their relationships with Europe; Russia plays with France and Germany and will live to regret it; Eastern Europe comes into its own; the Middle East is up for grabs; America sees a global role for itself...
Change is unsettling and this is big change.
It needs a name, this momentous new era of ours. It's not a cold war. It's not ostpolitik or realpolitik.
It's all about alliances of convenience and need and the moment.
It's a world that starts to look like an Internet router, which finds the best route for the moment and then forgets it and finds the best route the next time.
This is the era, then, of what:
Network diplomacy?
: Alex proposes Neopolitik in the comments. (But what I really like in his comment is my new nickname: Buzz.)
: A variant: Netpolitik. It's all about networks and networks change; they plug into and out of each other. I'm liking that one: The era of netpolitik. Nice ring, eh?

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Liberation theology
: An provocative exchange is beginning on Ibidem, a blog from Spain, regarding liberation theology, a liberal religious cause of the '60s and since. It usually comes in the context of opression and poverty in Latin America. But a commenter on this blog quotes Irish theologian Seamus Murphy SJ, who brings liberation theology into the context of Iraq and the Vatican's opposition to the war there:

In Latin America in the 1960s, there emerged a way of doing theology known as the 'theology of liberation'. Its focus was the poor and the oppressed, its starting-point was their experience, and its inspiration was the God revealed in the story of the people of Israel.
God, the merciful and the compassionate, is a God of justice on the side of the oppressed, and his plan of salvation unfolds in their struggle for liberation....
Liberation theology focuses on the story of the people of Iraq, rather than on abstract philosophical and legal categories....
Since 1968, Iraqis have lived under a brutal dictatorship where the oppression and fear is far worse than any reported from Latin America, as UN and Amnesty International reports show. Since 1979, some 200,000 Iraqis have been murdered in prison. Far more have been tortured....
While liberation theology does not encourage violence, it acknowledges the right of people to defend themselves against murderous repression. Uprisings by Kurds and Shi'ites in 1987-89 and in 1991 were put down in large-scale massacres, sometimes with chemical weapons. If they were to rise again, they would have the world's sympathy. Liberation theology would say that the Lord, who breaks the rod of the oppressor, was with them. But unaided rebellion would have no prospect of success, and our bystander sympathy, our distant indignation (if we even noticed) would not prevent it being crushed with great slaughter....
But, sadly, Christian solidarity with them is overwhelmed by pacifism, neutralism, and anti-Americanism....
Liberation theology would say: God is with the victims, and failure to stand in solidarity with them is a betrayal of the Gospel.

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Ho-Ho-Ho
: I'm listening to Today this morning and here Katie say, Oh, war protestors outside our window.
The "die-in" had begun.
WSNBC has a story and video. Tiny crowd or mere irritants.

Hundreds of chanting anti-war protesters lined Fifth Avenue on Thursday and dozens rushed into the street and lay down at the beginning of a series of civil disobedience actions planned for throughout the day....
Anti-war groups had called for a day of widespread civil disobedience, including blocking busy intersections and a "die-in" to protest media and corporate "profiteering from the war."
As helicopters hovered overhead, the protesters -- chanting "Hey-hey, ho-ho, Bush's war has to go" and "Peace Now!" -- jammed police pens along Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, near St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Sak's Fifth Avenue store.

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Confessions of a war blogger
: I wrote a story for the Star-Ledger about war blogging to try to explain the phenom and how it's done. The story is here; a list of links is here.

I am a warblogger.
If that sounds like the confession of an addiction, it is. For since war in Iraq began, I have been compulsively reading – and writing – warblogs, which is short for war weblogs, which simply means web pages that link to the latest and best coverage of the war from anywhere in the world, often with personal commentary.
Thanks to these warblogs, I read the news the night before I hear Katie and Matt read it to me on Today. I find unusual sources of information – news reports direct from Kuwait or Israel; opinion from Kurdish commentators or Saudi columnists; and video from the front. And I hear the buzz, what people are saying about the war – pro and anti – in America, Europe, and the Middle East.

: Lots of new posts this morning over at my warblog.

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The Iraqi Vegas
: Lt. Smash has a great anecdote from the front, talking to locals about the liberation of Umm Qasr:

“Sir, is it true,” they asked me, “is Umm Qasr secured?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Can we go there?” This puzzled me.
“Why would you want to go there?”
“Dancing girls! Beer!”
Then it hit me – Umm Qasr is a border town. For these men, it holds memories of a different time, a time before war, when they could travel freely to Iraq, and do all the things not allowed in their own country.
Umm Qasr is their Tijuana.

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