The Media

Dean Esmay is talking about Cindy Sheehan and how she has been changing her story.

I thought it might be of interest for some to see her columns over at the libertarian site LewRockwell.com. They're full of bitterness, as only a mother who has lost her son can be.

If you're going to talk about a person, at least read what they have to say. Not that you agree, but in the interest of fairness. This even applies to screeds written by the Kossites. It shows their true nature. It's easy to dismiss it, but once you've experienced it first-hand, it becomes tangible.

The editors of the Dalles Morning News made a brave and historic decision: No longer will they refer to the terrorists in Iraq as "insurgents". Let's hope this becomes a trend.

Here an exerpt from the Friday, July 15 editorial entitled Call Them What They Are: Those who murder Iraqi civilians are terrorists:

Today, this editorial board resolves to sacrifice another word – "insurgent" – on the altar of precise language. No longer will we refer to suicide bombers or anyone else in Iraq who targets and kills children and other innocent civilians as "insurgents."

The notion that these murderers in any way are nobly rising up against a sitting government in a principled fight for freedom has become, on its face, absurd. If they ever held a moral high ground, they sacrificed it weeks ago, when they turned their focus from U.S. troops to Iraqi men, women and now children going about their daily lives.

Read it all.

In reply, I sent the following letter to the editor:

As an American abroad, I applaud your decision to relegate the word "insurgent" to the dustbin. We live in a time when we can truly be proud to be Americans – when the brave men and women of our Armed Forces are the ones spreading freedom throughout the world. Those who kill the innocent to prevent the march of freedom cannot be called insurgents or militants. Whether in Iraq, Israel, the UK or elsewhere, they must be recognized for who they are.

Hat tip: LGF.

UPDATE July 19:
The letter was chosen for publication with the headline "Our military spreads freedom". It is available on the Dalles Morning News site (probably only available for one week, registration unfortunately required).

Yesterday I received a call for papers that was distributed on the Corpus Linguistics email list.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will hold a symposium on blogs at Stanford University next spring (March 27-29). The title is "Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs" and will cover everything from symantic processing to political science:

[01] AI methods for ethnographic analysis through blogs.
[02] Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
[03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
[04] Crawling/spidering and indexing.
[05] Human Computer Interaction; blogging tools; navigation.
[06] Multimedia; audio/visual blogs processing; aggregating information from different modalities.
[07] Semantic analysis; cross-blog name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
[08] Semantic Web; semantic blogging; unstructured knowledge management.
[09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
[10] Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
[11] Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
[12] Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on blogs.
[13] Trend identification/tracking.

If NZ Bear would like to submit a paper on relationships between blogs and all that, I'm sure he would do very well

I might see about submitting a paper on one of the above topics, though I've not decided if I find time.

Wow! Our friends at Llamabutchers seem to have made it into a comic strip, too. Except this one is widely available. And it's negative.

Rudy Park (April 2, 2005):


Background: Rudy has become a Republican (which is evidenced by his new short hair) and has decided to become a capitalist, to the dismay of his Uncle Mort. In this installment, we see that life as a conservative isn't easy. Why the Llamas have to be colicky, I'm not sure. But it seems to stand to reason, that there is at least a reference to the colicky Llamabutchers. Hope they recover soon.

QandO has almost got it right - Google knows the first hate sentence Ted Rall attributed to bloggers ("Ted Rall should be beat to within an inch of life with a baseball bat."), but believe me, it wasn't easy to find it. It takes real googling skills. Or maybe Ted Rall frequents that forum.

This google search will find the comment. Currently it's fourth place, but after the column, I doubt that will remain there long. The original source comment can be found here. The source is a comment posted on Dec. 15, 2003 by user "Domh" on the "Global Affair" forum in response to this cartoon (ucomics subscription required - for a nonsubscription link, try this). Domh went on to say the following (exerpt only):

Those people desperately need to spend a year living in the mideast building schools, roads, digging wells, and getting a smack upside the head... but NOOOO - cant bring them out of their little fantasy world can we?

This is the mentality of the HOWARD DEAN set... in a nutshell. I know. I grew up with it, went to school with it learned everything I need to know about it to reject it intelligently. This is the mindset that my own stepfather is still firmly entrenched in as he approaches 60 years old.

Looking at this, it is clear that it is not a personal threat (and not even hateful), but an expression of disgust at the way certain liberals insult the US armed forces.

However, in spite of the quote existing, it exists on a forum, not a blog. My registration for that forum has not yet been activated (since this was the first time I visited it), so I cannot say whether Domh has a link to his blog in his personal profile (personal profiles are only visible to registered users). Maybe Mr. Rall could do some accurate research for once. However, seeing that he's got a track record for being free with facts, maybe he specializes in "fictionalized journalism", just like Hunter S. Thompson.

(Note: I've attempted to contact Domh and will update this post if I get a response.)

(Hat tip: Captain Ed)

Update: Domh responds:

Fascinating!

No I am not a blogger, never have been. The quote was made in the forum thread you noted and nowhere else.

Rall? Shoddy Journalism? Imagine my shock and surprise, and please note my severe sarcasm. [...] Rall is a hack [...] with no morals or ethics whatsoever. He is a shock-jockey with pen and ink. He is a junior-Michael-Moore, biting at the teat that feeds him to force out more milk-money.

Thanks for pointing this out. I wonder when the death threats from the the 'peaceniks' will start flooding my inbox!

Cheers,

Domh

Look, children, at the excellent example of McCarthyism that Ted Rall displays. It's not the blogsphere, but the MSM journalists who are the biggots today and make free with the facts. (Update updated to clarify meaning - and remove expletives.)

Update 2:
Domh started a thread on the topic on the Global Affairs forum. That said, does anyone have a copy of the original cartoon? I don't subscribe to ucomics, else I would have posted it here.

Update 3: The harmless cartoon that sparked it all.
You can find the editorial cartoon that sparked Domh's wrath here. I've modified my original text to add this link, too. Be careful - you might spew your lunch.

Update 4:
My hunch about the Rall-Thompson connection turns out to have been right. Upon looking through Rall's blog, I came across a post in which Rall states that "I wouldn't be able to do what I do if it hadn't been for Dr. Thompson." That says it all.