April 04, 2004

• Oh god it gets me angry sometimes when they talk about using maple leafs and the like to pretend they are Canadians. . Maybe those Iraqi people don't hate us for a reason? We weren't involved in that war and now these reporters are using our good name to their own advantage. Please go ahead and tarnish our reputation around the world. Disgusting.
• What the fuck??? When are the American people going to get off of their asses and realize what a rotten thing this is. I'm guessing never as it might mean turning Rush Limbaugh off and turninig Fox News off and using their wasted, closed minds. Sometimes I'm just ashamed to be an American. Christ.
• We can't realize what a rotten thing this is, because we have faith in the president. Note how different faith is from trust. That's why we don't want to see it, don't want to hear about it, and wouldn't consider truth part of the equation even if it is forced down our throats. That's why our press barely talks about it, because we can vote with our dollars and they're barely hanging on as it is. If we're wrong about Iraq, then we're wrong about the president, and if our faith in the president was wrong, then what faiths will fall next? 50% of america is too ego-invested in faith to use their heads and think instead of believing. The scariest thing to me is how perfectly the current regime exploits these weaknesses in our culture. Can the pendulum swing back before it's too late? Our planet is at a cusp; it's a very dangerous time to have profit and power as the only players at the cabinet table.
• 50% of america is too ego-invested in faith to use their heads and think instead of believing. Is this the 50% that votes, or the 50% that doesn't?
• Iraq protests end in 20 deaths.
• The American project in Iraq will work fine -- Britain used the same tactics in India, and held on there for a couple of hundred years. After all, might makes right. Right, Socrates?
• I was just reading this article somewhere else, and then flipped over to MoFi. Funny coincidence. I read it at a Canadian site, and I must say, hearing that U.S. journalists were sewing the Canadian flag onto their backpacks makes me very upset. I don't really want to get into the rest of it, but that alone, to me, is really telling of a bigger problem here.
• So a poll commissioned by British, American, Japanese and Australian media found a majority of Iraqis already consider themselves better off just a year after the war than when they lived under Saddam's rule, but a Guardian reporter has found a Pepsi bottler who doesn't like the U.S. In Baghdad, no less, a city where millions of civilians can provide a pretty much unlimited pool of "human voice" (journalism lingo for regular people) for stories about this very subject. Yet the Pepsi bottler is the only non-official voice in the story. Yes, there are some folks who hate the occupation just as there are some who have welcomed it, but this is just lazy, sloppy journalism. When I saw the tagline explaining the story had originally appeared in The Nation, it made more sense to me -- this article has about the same credibility as a story in the National Review trumpeting Bush's accomplishments.
• but a Guardian reporter Never heard of Naomi Klein?
• I wonder if pretending to be Canadian will yield more or less honest responses during interviews. Would it even change the investigative process or just protect an American journalist's ass? My American history background is weak, but I wonder how all this compares to the US occupation of Germany post-WW2.
• I'm guessing it's the attire. if you google pretending to be Canadian, you'll see what I mean.
• Germany was a disaster until the Marshall Plan was installed. Before then there was no plan and thousands of Americans ended up getting killed. Germany was (and still is) a major industrial nation. They could rebuild the economy and put their people back to work. Iraq is an oil nation and the profits from that will go to a few.
• "Beyond the Euphrates began for us the land of mirage and danger, the sands where one helplessly sank, and the roads which ended in nothing. The slightest reversal would have resulted in a jolt to our prestige giving rise to all kinds of catastrophe; the problem was not only to conquer but to conquer again and again, perpetually; our forces would be drained off in the attempt." Emperor Hadrian AD 117-138
• Germany was a disaster until the Marshall Plan was installed. Before then there was no plan and thousands of Americans ended up getting killed. I thought that no American or British troops were killed in Germany after the war finished? Or am I completely wrong about that? Its mighty hard to google anything out at the moment though.
• Pre-Marshall Plan Germany.
• Never heard of Naomi Klein? Nope, but after poking around on that link you provided, she seems to be much like the Vassar and Bard students I know. Which is cool, but not my particular cup of tea. To me, that's like sending Jonah Goldberg to Iraq as a war correspondent and combing the graphs of his stories for insight into what's going on -- no thanks, I'd rather read the straight news articles and decide for myself. I don't like the blending of opinion and news, and since this was labeled as a "Special Report" with the byline "Naomi Klein in Baghdad," I assumed I expected a straight news story. And it's still a lazy piece of journalism, regardless of who it was written by.
• I was sort of saying the same thing, as in if you read "by Naomi Klein" you can guess pretty much dead-on as to what you'll get. She's actually fairly well-known in certain quarters.