On The Third Hand

Friday, 04 Jan 2002

... with bated breath, my fellow bloggers' dissection of the latest gem from Edward Said. I don't normally dissect, but I do enjoy watching the process. Said does have a few interesting points hidden in the rhetoric. I challenge you in the dissection business to find them. Liberal is not always wrong.

What it was like to be there.

A number of my fellow bloggers (you know who you are) seem to be having a problem with this post by Natalie Solent. They are wondering what she has eaten or drunk (with some pokes mentioning John Walker...). I'm not sure if this is a male/female thing or a myth-fans/not-myth-fans thing, but I had no problem understanding her. I promise you I don't drink J Walker, black or red. I am somewhat partial to single-malt scotch, but I don't think that is a negative personality trait (and I wish they had scotch on Amazon's wish list).

Then again... it might be an age thing... I disconnected with modern culture in the mid-eighties too.

White Russia? A terrorist armory? That insignificant little pipsqueak of an ex-Soviet (so-called) 'socialist republic'? According to this article in the Washington Post, yes. I think I better review my slavic languages. Who knows... I might get a high-paying job as a translator when we start dropping daisy-cutters.

We have lost our first soldier to enemy fire in this war. May he rest in peace. In a way, that is good news -- not that we lost one -- that it took so long before we did. The military is doing things right, except for the 'friendly fire' incident.

I've decided I can't stand Greymatter anymore, so I'm doing things by hand from now on. You probably won't notice much difference, except that the permanent links will no longer go to a separate page for each post. The links will go to an "anchor", so that if you copy a link, you will go directly to the post, not just to the top of the archive page.

The main page and all the archives will be by the day from now on. This should keep the size of the main index page reasonable for those on slow lines. None of the previous Greymatter links will change at all, so don't worry if you linked an older story of mine. I'm also changing my blog-time to be the same as my server's time.

Since Andrew Sullivan finally has a site that doesn't crash my browser, I've added him to my blog list. I'll be adding others as well.

Bjoern Staerk takes issue with a part of Jonah Goldberg's latest article (page down to "It's the Little Things"). Jonah (extreme simplification -- read the article) says that understanding does not bring peace. Bjoern replies that familiarity and understanding are not the same thing (read his piece too). I agree with Bjoern (mostly), when he says: "When you understand your potential enemy, you know how to deal with him. When you don't understand, you do either too much or too little."

I'd also add; when you understand a potential friend, you know how to deal with him. When you don't understand, you may end up as enemies. On a purely personal level, I have had some serious anger and hurt feelings simply because of misunderstandings (and my being misunderstood) between cultures that are only mildly different (US and UK -- US and Australia). We all need to listen first, and create bloody noses only when we know we really have been attacked. If we truly understand the attackers, as Bjoern implies, we can bloody the noses much more effectively. (Yep, I'm still feeling bellicose... and I studied the Russian language and Soviet culture during the Cold War... I'll leave it to you to figure out why.)