Tuesday, 06 January 2004
Public beta:
Alert reader Joshua Scholar is the first, including myself, to realize that I accidentally enabled comments earlier this afternoon. I've been fiddling around behind the scenes for about a week now, trying to get the Blosxom "writeback" plugin ready for prime time, and I inadvertently left it turned on when I posted my most recent article.
The plugin still has a few configuration issues, though (as Joshua was also first to notice, alas): I've managed to quickly fix the problem where paragraph breaks were being ignored, but the counters that show the number of comments per entry are still not updating in real time. (I also suspect that comments will look terrible on any style sheet other than the default one, but I haven't had time to check this yet.) I suppose having the comments "go live" will give me an incentive to fix these bugs right away, rather than procrastinating for another week… so, depending on your perspective, my blunder might be considered a good thing.
Anyhoo, I am delighted to discover that people are leaving comments, even if the technology isn't all there yet—I think I secretly suspected that my readership consists of my immediate family, four other bloggers, and LiveJournal's jackslack, so I'm glad to know that other people are reading, and to provide a forum for debate. (I should probably develop a comments policy or something; for now just pretend that my mother is reading the comments, since she probably is.) I'll see what I can do about smoothing out the rough edges, but in the meantime feel free to kick the tires.
Update: I think it's ready for prime time now (or, at least, no less ready than the rest of the blog). Jeff from Canned Platypus has also confessed that, although his blog is named after an item found in every tourist-trap souvenir shop from Sydney to Perth and back, he isn't actually an Aussie or an expat… so I've updated my blogroll to respect truth-in-advertising laws, and while I'm at it to include some new and interesting expat voices. (Besides, how can I not link to a blog named A Geek in Korea?)
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:13 am. comments.
Tuesday, 06 January 2004
An Officer and a Scoundrel:
On occasion I've read some thought-provoking articles by one Ralph Peters, a retired Army Intelligence officer. Peters has shown himself capable of intelligent, coherent debate on the subject of Mideast policy, for example; I don't always agree with everything he says (heck, I don't always agree with everything I say), but until now I respected him as a rational person whose insights were worth reading.
Until I read this lapse of judgement in today's New York Post, that is. In a paroxysm of rage and loathing, Peters has unloaded his bile ducts into a vile op-ed piece about the Howard Dean campaign: He compares Dean to Hitler, Dean's supporters to the Brownshirts, and Dean's Internet campaign to the Gestapo. Listen to this:
Dean was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl.
Listen to Dean's rhetoric, especially on security and international issues. He never offers specifics; it's all hocus-pocus. He knows how best to deal with terrorists. We voters from the humble Volk need to take it on trust.
This is not the stuff of which a rational argument is made. Nor, for that matter, does it contribute to a discussion of the various Presidential candidates and their merits. It is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that Ralph Peters would condemn (while a chorus of Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Reynoldses tsked in outrage) if it showed up at, say, MoveOn.org in a homemade campaign commercial by some random nobody.
But apparently if the same odious comparisons are directed at a Democrat, and with the same lack of evidence to justify them, that's just fine and dandy. No problem there. Heck, we don't even need to assume that the author is some no-name minority of one: A paid columnist of the Post can compare Howard Dean to the Führer, and apparently no one will blink an eye.
If I took these same paragraphs, and changed one word in each…
Bush was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl.
Listen to Bush's rhetoric, especially on security and international issues. He never offers specifics; it's all hocus-pocus. He knows how best to deal with terrorists. We voters from the humble Volk need to take it on trust.
…the Right would be screaming to high Heaven. If Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky or one of the Right's other whipping-boys had written the above, you'd have read about it by now in every blog from here to Tacitus and back.
You're a hypocrite and a scoundrel, Ralph Peters. You're a symptom of a larger problem, where the extreme Left and Right of our political spectrum have given up trying to work with—or even speak to—each other. Instead they trade charges of treason and fascism across the no-man's-land of the political center, turning our elections into winner-take-all contests that deny our democracy the free exchange of ideas. I had once thought Ralph Peters held to a higher standard than that, but in the future I'll regard his words with the same low esteem I give to Ann Coulter or Michael Moore: Just another clown in the demagogue circus; not to be taken seriously.
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:33 am. comments.
