BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

June 25, 2003

Baghdad Bob captured
: Or so says the Mirror.

Real business
: Marketing Fix is bought by Andy Bourland. Good news for all.

Those were the days, my friend
: Via Der Schockwellenreiter, here are some DDR (East German) nostalgia sites (this one auf Englisch); I have a soft spot for commie kitsch.

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Hot!
: We're blogging the beach!
That's right. Forget about politics, war, the law, religion, life, and death.
We're blogging bodies!
And I couldn't be prouder.
Here's the NJ.com Beach Blog.
On top of that, you can control the cam on the beach at the Jersey Shore with ZoomCam.
Enjoy, you poor office rat.

: And, shame on me, I neglected to send you to our MLive.com Michigan Beach Cam. Yes, Michigan beach.

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Iranian Christmas
: David Warren has visions of sugarplums dancing in his head at the thought of the mullahs' collapse:

...when the world's first, most successful, and longest-lived, "Islamist" totalitarian regime finally dies, the prestige of Islamic political fanaticism everywhere will be catastrophically undermined....
If the ayatollahs fall, the international Hezbollah terrorist network will be orphaned; the Syrian Baathist dictatorship will lose its main foreign ally and prop; the North Koreans will lose their principal weapons market; the nuisance of Iranian subversion will be removed from Iraq and Afghanistan; the last serious Russian influence in the region will evaporate; France will lose its chief remaining means to sow mischief against U.S. interests; and the U.S. will lose its only credible rival as a military presence in the Gulf.
It is moreover just possible that the world oil market will go into long-term glut, from the collapse of political obstacles to free trade. This would have various economic implications, debatable environmental ones, but two indisputable strategic effects: the permanent elimination of Saudi Arabia's oil weapon, and the gradual removal of the oil crutch upon which the region's economies lean. The very need for productive enterprise, to feed swelling young populations, will force free-market reforms that will change the nature of Arab society.
And this is before calculating the power of example, if Iran -- flanked, Allah willing, by other successes in Iraq and Afghanistan -- can establish a secular democratic constitution. The desire for it is overwhelming, and after the fall of first the Shah, and then the mad mullahs, Iran may have exhausted the alternatives. The prospects for a democratic constitutional order are better in Iran than in any Arab country, from the Iranians' willingness to do it themselves. They do not require a foreign liberator.

Mouth-watering, eh?

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Iran today
: Pejman Yousefzadeh has a very good backgrounder on Iran today at Tech Central Station.

: More from the Iranian/American couple blogging their trip to Iran. This from the American wife, on clothes:

Before coming here, I promised myself that I would not obsess over the headscarf and the manteau that I am forced to wear. When other writers did that, I was bored. I thought that there were other issues of women’s life that were more important. After all, I do have to wear a modicum of clothing anywhere I go. It’s just that I don’t really want to walk around the city topless or bottomless, but I definitely do want to walk around without a scarf on my head and without a manteau. I mean, it’s summer for god sakes!
I am losing my tolerance. Anyone who knows me, knows how frigging accepting I can be (I can hear my sisters and brother laughing now). But I am losing my tolerance.
My sisters-in-law can’t run out in the street to say goodbye when friends and relatives leave; they are afraid to be seen from the doorway even; they barely leave the house during the day because of the heat. It’s not even that hot! But it is that hot when you are wearing a scarf and a manteau.
I used to believe women who said that the hijab does not restrict them in any way. Oh yeah? Try telling that to any woman that I have spoken to hear in Iran. Even religious women that I have spoken to are fed up with the restrictions. Every single woman I have spoken with from those who pray 3 times a day to those who don’t pray at all feel restricted by the dress code and restricted by this regime.
This is the first time I have been in a truly restrictive society. Church and state? Prayer in school? A religious society? Come here if that is what you want. You’ll quickly find yourselves longing for liberals and liberal society.

And this on her husband's history in Iran:

K took me on a walk of places he had been beaten up in this city. “Here is where I was thrown out of a second-story window. Here is where I was beaten and dragged and left for dead. Here is where I used to give out pamphlets and got beaten up for it. Here is where I was when I was told that the beating I got was deserved.”
This treatment he got from less than one percent of the population of his city. Less than one percent believed so fervently and extremely in their religion and its rightness that they were willing to kill and die for it. Less than one percent of this city terrorized the other 99% of the city and forced them to live with the restrictions of an Islamic regime.
It does not take much. It just takes unquestioning faith and twisted beliefs.

: Note that Tony Blair is sticking by us again, supporting Iran's demonstrators. The mullahs are pissed.

: Whoman on oil and Iran:

Many Iranians believe that the discovery of oil in their country has been probably one the worst things that could have happened to them. Many call oil the bread that brings about hunger, cursed blessing, or things like that...
It is simply because oil has attracted many powerful countries and has derailed all democratic movements in Iran since 1907 when the first Iranian revolution in recent history took place. What kind of an authentically democratic government would rip off its own people by filling up the foreign tankers with cheap prices?

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