Go read P.J. right now. I insist. Maybe Welch and Lileks will hire P.J., too.
P.J. article via the Bellicose Woman.
John Cole started Balloon Juice early in 2002. Those who have followed along know that this has been quite the journey.
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Go read P.J. right now. I insist. Maybe Welch and Lileks will hire P.J., too.
P.J. article via the Bellicose Woman.
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Rand Simberg comes up with some working definitions of terrorism for our twit ‘friends’ (even the moderate ones) at the OIC.
Here guys, let me help you out here–it’s clear that you’re confused.
With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, if you strap TNT to yourself and detonate it in a crowded pizza parlor, you might be a terrorist.
If you walk into a wedding party and start spraying it with AK-47 rounds, you might be a terrorist.
If you drive a rental truck full of high explosives into the basement of a skyscraper and blow it up, you might be a terrorist.
If you purchase airplane tickets, then slit the throats of flight attendants and commandeer the aircraft, and fly it into the side of that same skyscraper, you might be a terrorist.
And if you obfuscate the definition of terrorism, use illogical and inconsistent statements to defend the above behaviors, change the subject whenever anyone calls you on it, pretend that there’s any justification whatsoever for them, ship weapons to those carrying them out, and provide large amounts of funding to the widows and family of the perps, you just might be a terrorist yourself.
In which case, you might want to at least consider recusing yourself from any committee dedicated to “defining terrorism.”
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As for our accuracy, I challenge any anti-bloggers out there to come up with the name of one blogger that has seen the slightest bit of success or traffic after repeatedly posting misinformation. Not legions, folks. Just one.
I can think of one. Jak’s Blog.
His every post is an endeavor into asininity, and he has proven himself infinitely impeccable in his idiocy. His traffic has probably jumped because it is so much fun for me and others to point out his foolishness. I don’t think he is a bad person per se, but a lot of his ideas are disgusting. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is just misguided (he will retort with some sort of ZOG related screed that I have been brainwashed by the Jew media, so I probably should not be that charitable). Today he essentially blamed slavery on capitalism. His daily Palestinian Log is a source of endless joy for me.
Yesterday, you might recall, a policeman stopped a suspicious looking driver in Jerusalem (sorry Jak- I am linking to an Israeli newspaper). The driver then detonated explosives in the car, killing himself and the policeman. Jak reports it as such:
During the past twenty-four hours, a Palestinian militant and an Israeli security officer were killed during at an attack on an Israeli roadblock.
Note the weasel words- militant, not terrorist. “Were killed during an attack on an Israeli roadblock.” Who attacked? The Germans? The Chinese? Oh, I am sorry- that was the terrorist who was attacking- the policeman. But was he really attacking the roadblock, or is that just where he was stopped, before he could successfully drive into a cafe full of civilians?
Also noticably absent from this ‘Palestinian Log’ is the fate of the 11 ‘collaborators’ who were gunned down in cold blood by armed gunmen. Indeed, all Palestinians are equal, some are just more equal than others.
It goes on and on, but why give him more hits for the sins Miss Hawk Girl discussed…
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Jeff Jarvis has a much more reasonable take on the unreasonable Alex Beam. Says Jarvis:
What old media does best is give us the facts. Credibility is their asset.
What new media does best is give us perspective — a new perspective, the too-long-unheard perspective of the people. The people are our asset.
And new media does that best in weblogs because these are products of passionate interest where quality rises to the top. Nobody’s getting rich or famous (yet) blogging; we do it because we love it (I do it because I learn); and the best ones succeed because they’re the better than the worst ones and the audience knows the difference. Weblogs as a whole do an amazing job of editing the world of news, finding the best, warning of the worst, asking questions, poking holes, adding perspective and opinion and the voice of the people.
Both are valuable. Only the blind cannot see that.
He is right in a sense, although the credibility of major news sources is on thin ice- and that is what buffoons like Beam are upset about. As is frequently stated in the blogosphere, ‘we can fact check your ass.’ I don;t think anyone in ‘blogistan’ really intends to replace ‘old media,’ if we did, who would we read and link to every day for news. We are not out there researching the stories- we are critiquing, analyzing, and trying to put some order to the disorder and add some depth to the breadth of coverage. It is tired old farts like Beam who feel threatened. Not us. I still intend to read the bothersome NY Times every day- and then I will ridicule it.
*** Update ***
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Well, well, well. Look who has a blog now.
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Peter Preston cheers suicide bombers in this essay for the Guardian, titled Palestinians have found a weapon Israel can’t counter. There are so many offensive statements in this piece (of crap) that I will try to focus on the most odious:
The Israelis use their heavy-duty kit to blast the remnants of PLO authority. The Palestinians wrap teenage girls in Semtex and send them, smiling sweetly, to devastate supermarkets and cafes.
Ahh. Moral Relevance and equivocation, the preferred side-arm of every nitwit.
Are they – the inexhaustible legions of Hamas and Hizbullah – to be condemned for that?
In a word, YES, you silly limey bastard.
It is easy to feel revulsion at so many young lives lost in a cause we can’t fully understand; and over so many Israeli civilian lives, innocent lives, brutally shattered.
Apparently not easy enough, as it appears to have utterly escaped you in this ode to suicide bombers.
Yet there is also another reality. The IDF has its jets and tanks, weapons of conventional war built and used to kill. The Palestinians possess no such weaponry; they are completely outgunned and outclassed. No one – apart from Arabs bearing wan words – comes to their aid. But they have, nevertheless, found a weapon at last that the Israelis cannot counter.
That is almost right. No one does come to their aid. Not even the ARAB nations, who have done nothing but exacerbate this problem.
Suicide is their chosen tool, their howitzer of ultimate resort, clinically chosen. We may think of suicide as an act of emotion – but, as Primo Levi once said, that overlooks its careful sentience. “Animals don’t commit suicide.”
Groan. Animals do strap explosives to themselves and blow up seders and 22 innocent victims.
And we need to be clear: it’s a winner. It has humiliated one of the world’s toughest conventional armies. They move in, flattening all before them and, far away, another burger bar or shopping centre is blasted to smithereens. There are some wars conventional soldiers can’t win.
Cue the triumphant music. The Palestinians are about to suicide bomb themselves into oblivion, because the rest of the world is about to break out a big stick- and we are not going to beat Israel with it.
Go read the rest of this disgusting babble. I am tired.
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I liked him better when he was rapping- Cornell West in the Philly Enquirer:
Many are calling for the Bush administration to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. And such intervention could help. Yet the Bush administration is making no effort to conceal that its heart lies elsewhere: in creating a coalition in the Islamic world that will support forthcoming U.S. attempts to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Though little evidence links Saddam to Osama bin Ladin or al-Qaeda, the White House has used the cover of outrage at terror to legitimate a new war in Iraq that will complete what the last Bush administration left unresolved.
I am sure these remarks went down well at the Philly VFWs.