Memorial Day meandering...

Jeff Jarvis was the subject of a Howard Kurtz column. At least the first part...

.

A one-time staffer for the Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Examiner, Jarvis says that he became a populist as a TV critic in the 1980s when he defended the shows that people wanted to watch, regardless of what elite opinion said. Initially, he admits, he "didn't get" the appeal of blogging. That changed on September 11, 2001, when Jarvis was at the World Trade Center and, "like a stupid, idiotic journalist, I stayed there to report." He launched the blog that became Buzz Machine and "it soon took over all available life," to the point that "it became a social addiction. To abandon it is to abandon your friends." (Jarvis had 135,000 friends, or unique readers, in March, according to his figures, which include those who sign up for automatic feeds from his site.)

.

Jake, Jeff Jarvis' thirteen-year-old son, also started a blog. Take a look.

* * * *

* * *

* *

The reason I try to keep up with Doc Searls' blog is illustrated by one of his posts from last year about podcasting. At that time a Google search for the term turned up 25 hits. I haven't done a search today, but according to a comment left May 25 a search for "podcast" now shows over four million hits.

It is fair to say that Doc Searls coined the term.

.

What matters is that all the standards we're working with here are open. They're the new and growing infrastructure for a new class of 'casting. It won't replace old-fashioned broadcasting, just as FM didn't replace AM, and TV didn't replace radio. And it's not narrowcasting, which is conceived as broadcasting for fewer people. It's podcasting. I'll create an acronym for it: Personal Option Digital 'casting.

(Should we call it PODcasting, then, to make it clear that we're talking about a category and not one company's product? Let's try.)
.

PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.

.

Well, Doc, it seems to have worked.

* * * *
* * *
* *

Josh Marshall uses the word Flypaper referring to the usual justification for the US military presence in Iraq.

.

The thinking goes something like this. These guerilla engagements we're seeing in Iraq may not be such a bad thing. What we're doing is attracting all the terrorists to Iraq (i.e., like "flypaper") so that

a) they won't be attacking us in America and

b) we can fight them there on our own terms. As Andrew Sullivan put it early this month, "Continued conflict in Iraq, in other words, needn't always be bad news. It may be a sign that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork and tackling them in the open."

.

Elegant idea that it was, the flypaper theme was a simple idea that anyone could grasp to focus American political will to support a War in the Middle East. How many times have I heard somebody say "It's better to fight them over there than here at home"?

In that way we are "defending our freedom." Never mind that our freedom is being eroded more by our own leadership than any foreign threat.

.

Here we are a couple of years later, and it seems that Iraq has proved to be more a training theatre for terorists than a place they go to die. Check this out.

.

The Bush administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader "strategy against violent extremism."...The review marks the first ambitious effort since the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks to take stock of what the administration has called the "global war on terrorism" -- or GWOT -- but is now considering changing to recognize the evolution of its fight. "What we really want now is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism," said a senior administration official who described the review on the condition of anonymity because it is not finished. "GWOT is catchy, but there may be a better way to describe it, and those are things that ought to be incumbent on us to look at." ....Much of the discussion has focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe.

.

You get the idea.

Looks like the "flypaper" turns out to be more like a "buglite." Had the policy worked as well as flypaper, foreign terrorists would be stuck in place in Iraq until we got around to dispatching them. Instead, we have a bug light that attracts the worst of them, but the smartest of terorists are able to return from whence they came.

.

I blogged about the phenomenon before last year's election.

... when a handful of civilians, no doubt under the tutelage of a trained, card-carrying "terrorist", get together to build, plant and watch over a roadside bomb in hopes of detonating it as an American convoy goes past, the impact of terrorism is spreading, not shrinking. When a community feels threatened eveyone becomes a soldier. For every roadside bomb that detonates, there are many more that do not. When I hear stories of roadside bombs killing people, I think of the tragedy and loss of life, but I also think of many others that are set and ready, like so many mousetraps or fishing lures, that didn't go off. Each of these enterprises represents a spreading disease in Iraq. Trying to wipe them out is like drinking prune juice as a remedy for diarrhea.

"If we didn't fight them there, then we would have to fight them over here."

Sorry. I don't get it. What would that little coven of locals do? Take up a collection from their friends and neighbors in Fallujah or Basra and catch a plane to America? I think not. Their coach, on the other hand, the real terrorist who put them up to what they are doing, he might do just that. But when the American artillery opened up, it would not be him in the sights, any more than it is now. It would be the hapless pawns he convinced to do his work.

* * * *
* * *
* *

Glenn Reynolds links to an excellent piece about torture and says eveyone should read it. I agree. Unfortunately here is so damn much to read, including this, none of us can get past the surface.

Sigh.

Anyway, here is a kernel from the midle of a long, long, long article...

.

Torture and abuse is not just a moral or legal failure. It is a strategic failure in the War on Terror. Certainly, we will never be nice enough to convince Zarqawi—and the ~20,000 like him—to stop killing Americans. But there are another 55 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan who may still be convinced of our moral superiority to the Islamic fundamentalists, the terrorists and their ilk; another 55 million people whose hearts and minds may still be won.

.

Only, they may not be won if we keep killing, torturing and abusing them. We can never make them all love us, but we can certainly stop giving them good reasons to hate us.

.

John Henke is a libertarian, writing in The New Libertarian journal.

Comment thread has rejoinders from the author.

I sure wish libertairans didn't tend to be athiest or agnostic and laissez-faire capitalists. Most of what I hear and read of libertarian origin is clear, reasonable and pragmatic.

Unfortunately my own best points seem to be muddy, poorly-developed, unreasonable and idealistic. Neal Boortz has convinced me that being a libertarian is tantamount to being an ass about nearly everything.