Eye on Winer

I was not surprised when Dave came out in defense of a book about Israel and Palestine that he hasn’t read, but I was disappointed. He bases his support for the book not on reading and research, but on his opinion that “I don’t know what it is about Jews, but when it comes to Israel they lose all sense of perspective.” He might be the first anti-semitic Jew that I’ve ever come into contact with.

I guess the thing that’s hard for Dave to grasp is that his idol wrote a book and people who have been studying this thing, academically, for years are coming out of the woodwork to say that Carter has basically done a smear-piece on Israel by playing fast-and-loose with the facts. This is something that a lot of lefties, who support generally Palestine — though I have no idea why that correllation exists, really hate to see.

Have a look at this interview by NPR with Emory History Professor Ken Stein. He seems to have boat-loads of perspective. His thesis seems to be (paraphrasing) “Yes, Israel has done some horrible things, but they are combating a group that resorts to terrorism, and most of Israel’s worst behaviors are in response to that.”

Essentially, the argument that most critics of Carter’s book are making is that there’s enough blame to go around in that area of the world, and slanting the facts to make Israel look bad doesn’t really help anyone.

Posts like this make me think dave is from a different planet than the rest of us.

Washington Post: “The Pentagon yesterday disavowed a senior official’s remarks suggesting companies boycott law firms that represent detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

To be clear, what the official did is a breach of everything that we hold sacred in our legal system. It reeks of totalitarianism.

The official utilized his First Amendment right to suggest that consumers refrain from supporting businesses that engage in business practices that they find objectionable. What a fascist asshole.

If this official suggested that we boycott firms which support the government’s position on Guantanamo Bay, it would’ve been garnered bold letters and praise.

People like Dave confound me.

Assuming you agree, would you be willing to stand up with other Americans, and march together to stop the war in Iraq?

Would you march in your hometown, or go to Washington to help save the lives of young Americans in Iraq?

Does he actually believe that protests can stop a war? After all, the Dems now control the purse strings… weren’t we all supposed to be seeing “change” and “democracy” or something?

Aren’t the congresscritters supposed to be stopping the war in Iraq? If nothing else, we should at least give the new congress a chance before we waste time, energy, and productivity walking around.

“The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.”
~Dave Barry

…more frequently, though, the purpose of a protest is as much to make the protesters feel good as it is to actually effect some sort of change.

I’ve always regarded march-in-the-street protests as intellectually similar, in terms of method, as riots, flag burnings, and cross-burnings. You can quibble as to the morality or intellectualism of the actual message, but the method of delivery is the same, tired nonsense.

Street protests are the tools of expression of the intellectually under-developed.

Dave asks a disingenuous question. “What is victory?” From what I’ve seen, for people like Dave, there is no victory. Defeat is found in every success and failure harvested from all progress. And why? More than a small portion of it seems to be rooted in the (largely irrational) hate for one man, the President. Maybe Dave should be telling us what he thinks “victory” would be — I would be very surprised if he had any sort of answer aside from “Victory would be never having gone there in the first place.” Answers such as those all but eliminate one’s opinion from reasonable consideration. Regardless of whether we should or shouldn’t have gone into Iraq (a position on which reasonable people differ), we’re there now and we need to do whatever is necessary to “win.” Of course, as we’ve seen, what constitutes “winning” is another proposition on which reasonable people differ.

What still confuses me… the Democrats took control of congress, mostly claiming that they could wage the war better than the president was. Yet, to date, we’ve seen nothing in the way of progress or plans coming out of the left. Change can be a good thing (”Politicians in government should be changed regularly, like diapers, for the same reason.” ~ Richard Davies) but I have yet to see any hint of difference between what we got rid of and what we acquired. Same shit, different party.

Of course, if you ask Dave, this pile of manure is much preferable to the Evil Republican manure.

PS: Dave’s attempt to speak for the “people of the world” is indicative of his own special brand of hubris. He believes that not only is he “right,” but that everyone agrees with him. Shocking.

When a man has a stroke, as South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson did today, most normal individuals have a sympathetic reaction of concern. If you’re Dave Winer, however, your first response is to try and figure out how this is going to affect you personally.

Tim Johnson, the 59-year-old US Senator from South Dakota, may have suffered a stroke. If he can’t serve, a replacement will be appointed by South Dakota’s governor, a Republican. Johnson is a Democrat, whose 51-49 majority in the new Senate would turn into a 50-50 tie.

You can bet that Mr. Johnson’s family is not terribly concerned right now with how this is going to impact a democratic majority in the senate. I wonder why that is.

In other news… SURPRISE! Dave isn’t going to stop blogging.

Technorati is suddenly showing me new links that are over a month old. Not sure why, but there are two people who wrote and specifically addressed a post of mine from back in late September and both deserve responses. I apologize to Dave and Stray Packets (who both addressed the same post) for not responding sooner.

There are several ways to destroy discourse. One of them, obviously, is to suppress it. Some claim that this is what Bush is doing. Of course, the fact that they’re making those claims from the safety and security of their homes and offices in America essentially negates that claim.

Another way is by lowering the level of discourse to the point where it amounts to little more than mud-slinging and insult hurling. Dave isn’t quite there yet, but the number of insults and ad hominems Dave uses about Republicans is at a level where no intelligent discourse really issues from Scripting News.

Also, it’s a semantic thing, but my point is and has always been that it’s “people like Dave” and not Dave alone and personally that are causing the problem. By “people like Dave” I mean people on both sides of the aisle who seek to vilify first and debate later.

Yet another way to destroy discourse, and it goes hand-in-hand with last idea, is to lower the signal-to-noise ratio to such a level that nothing is really being said. Dave (and people like him on both sides of the aisle) do this superbly.

It’s not intentional, but why can we not talk about the merits of the war in Iraq without talking about Bush being an idiot or lying to us? Why not just talk about whether it was a good decision or a bad decision? Why does it have to become personal? Consider the issue of Clinton and his impeachment: why was anyone discussing Clinton’s moral fiber? Shouldn’t it have been enough to discuss his actual criminal activity?

And the answer in both cases is: Yes. So why bother with the loathing, mouth-foaming rage? Why not just talk about the issues?

Tripe like this is appalling.

Doc’s here, we’re watching CNN before going out to breakfast. We’re playing a neat game called Spot the Republican. When we see a Republican on CNN, I decide what form of punishment we’re going to give them. Usually it’s the death penalty of some form. Hanging, firing squad, dismemberment.

I’m now convinced that I know no one more foul and depraved than Winer. The fact that he would even think this is funny is disgusting.

While my pocketbook worries what a Democratic congress might do to it (then again, Bush has been spending like a Democrat, so…), I have to wonder if Dave wouldn’t be more tolerable if the Democrats won.

The part of me that reads Dave’s blog has found that it vastly prefers the hubris, ego, and occasional stupidity that Dave displays on tech issues to the constant, pervasive stupidity (AKA Partisanship) that he displays on political ones.

The left is already starting to stoke the “The Dirty, Evil Republicans Cheated!” fires, before the election has even started… in preparation for a loss. If the Dems don’t take both the house and the senate, I think we can probably expect months of links to hair-brained conspiracy theories about how Shrubby McBushitler stole the election again.

Am I the only person who thinks the country would be a heck of a lot better if political parties were disbanded and people had to run on the ISSUES instead of the letters after their names?

…Maybe it would just be better if someone ran Dave’s Scripting News feed through FeedRinse and stripped out posts that use the words “Republican” or “Bush”.

Dave doesn’t know. Observe.

I learned a new word from this movie: blowback. “The effect caused by recirculation into the source country of disinformation previously planted abroad by that country’s intelligence service in an effort to mislead the government of another country.” That might be a bit confusing. An example. Suppose the CIA does something nasty to another country, but it’s a secret, so we don’t know about it. Then the other country retalliates [sic]. We wonder why they hate us. The President explains, saying they’re evil. Sound familiar?

Two issues, we’ll deal first with the horrible example, then the horrible example itself.

While one might call the hypothetical Dave posed an example of “blowback”, it certainly does not fit within the definition that Dave posted. I can’t decide if Dave is being: 1) purposefully disingenuous, 2) simply ignorant, or 3) sees everything as a way to criticize republicans.

A correct example of the term as Dave defined it, would be a circumstance where the CIA planted false information in some foreign country — say that the US was about to run out of lumber — and that info made it back into the US. People starting to horde lumber and buy it in large quantities would be “blowback”.

Now… Dave’s “example”…

Why is it that nobody thinks it’s appropriate to blame the victim of a vicious assault or a rape, but when it comes to folks on the far left and terrorism, the victim — the US — is the blameworthy party. Not the (usually) Muslim perpetrators of the terrorism. Not the sectors of Arab and Muslim society that condone and cheer the terrorism. No, we should blame America (and, if possible, Dirty, Evil Republicans) because it is clear that were it not for something we did, we would not have become victimized.

Just like poor Susie Rape-victim… had she not been wearing those tight jeans and that low-cut top, Johnny Rapist wouldn’t have found her such an attractive target.

The whole exercise in “blaming the victim” — for assaults or terrorism is despicable.

Dave jumps on the Liberal Bandwagon.

What Kerry Actually Said:

If you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t you get stuck in Iraq.

What Kerry allegedly meant to say:

Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.

I say “allegedly” not because I’m convinced that his purpose was to insult the troops, but because even if he had, this is what he’d have said to save face when it blew up on him. But yes, Dave, he has something to apologize for. Whatever it was that he actually meant, a great many reasonable people were insulted by his remarks. And, after his spotty record of “supporting” our troops, I can’t say that I blame those people.

Granted, I think the right-wing blogosphere has gone a little crazy, but if, the day after, he had come out and said “I apologize, what I meant to say is that Bush is an idiot” it would take the teeth out of the current fracas. It would’ve also helped if he had had the presence to realize what kind of a line his intended joke was treading close to and had actually said what he allegedly intended to say.

As it stands right now, reasonable people think that he insulted our soldiers and he doesn’t think those concerns are worth addressing.

It doesn’t help that the party’s foot soldiers like Dave are rushing to his defense.