Fame at last
Turns out I have had at least one or two readers in the past. Gosh.
A pity, though, that Gareth chose the post he did, or at least to quote that part of the post which he did. My style was apparently somewhere near its zenith of insufferable self-regard that day. Similarly, the folks at Backing Blair chose a post that ends with a comment that now looks shockingly naive. Still, these things are sent to try us. It's almost enough to make me start blogging regularly again.
What to make, then, of the last couple of months? I could here try to make an excuse stick about the silly season, but it's been anything but silly. I just haven't been bothered. Events generally overtook my ability to write about them, so that by the time I'd conceived and written a stinging post about something, it would already have been rendered obsolete by some further outrage. I speak, of course, of the conflict in the Lebanon and the astonishing worldwide reaction to it, which placed a rogue terrorist faction of an unpopular and unmandated political party funded and directed by a third party state on the same moral footing as - not to say a higher moral footing than - a nation state and its professional army.
Probably the real reason I've not updated in a while is that all my rhetorical energy has been absorbed in a long running email debate with a friend of mine, covering many topics (we have five threads running concurrently, I think, and the longest mail I've sent him was 70K of plain text), this one not the least of them. Therein, I argued that the obsession with "proportionality" that emerged during the conflict, aside from belying a confusion between "proportional" and "proportionate", reduces warfare to an accountancy of the dead and casts Israel as the villains for not letting their civilians get killed enough while overlooking the genuine war-crimes committed by Hezbollah by placing military assets in civilian areas. And so on.
The real story of that war, at least in the context of what I suppose I must call the blogosphere, was the steady stream of what Thaddeus Tremayne over at Samizdata, in a rather fabulous neologism, referred to as fauxtographs. (Perhaps it's nothing of the kind and I have just never come across it before, but heigh-ho.) Numerous stories leaked out of that region concerning the increasingly absurdly stage-managed nature of more-or-less all journalism going on there, from the hilariously amateurish doctoring of Reuters' photographs of bomb-damaged Beirut, to the chap with the green helmet creating tableaux of the dead; from the photogenic bomb victim who died cap in hand yet later that day was photographed clearing rubble, to the Lebanese woman who had two homes bombed inside three weeks yet hadn't even managed to change her clothes, all of which is not to mention the alarmingly brazen manner in which various national media outlets attempted to perpetrate their view of events. The difference, for example, between a BBC and an independent news report concerning bomb damage in the same town was staggering. One wonders how the BBC reconciles its mission for impartial reporting with its habit of advertising its vacant positions in the Guardian only, but there it is.
Some links, then.
Telegraph's Hannan borrows heavily from Mark Steyn.
Pictures worth a thousand lives.
Media Missiles.
No, this isn't a geopolitical ploy by Iran at all.... (login may be required: www.bugmenot.com)
Adnan Hajj.
Other photographic controversies.
A pity, though, that Gareth chose the post he did, or at least to quote that part of the post which he did. My style was apparently somewhere near its zenith of insufferable self-regard that day. Similarly, the folks at Backing Blair chose a post that ends with a comment that now looks shockingly naive. Still, these things are sent to try us. It's almost enough to make me start blogging regularly again.
What to make, then, of the last couple of months? I could here try to make an excuse stick about the silly season, but it's been anything but silly. I just haven't been bothered. Events generally overtook my ability to write about them, so that by the time I'd conceived and written a stinging post about something, it would already have been rendered obsolete by some further outrage. I speak, of course, of the conflict in the Lebanon and the astonishing worldwide reaction to it, which placed a rogue terrorist faction of an unpopular and unmandated political party funded and directed by a third party state on the same moral footing as - not to say a higher moral footing than - a nation state and its professional army.
Probably the real reason I've not updated in a while is that all my rhetorical energy has been absorbed in a long running email debate with a friend of mine, covering many topics (we have five threads running concurrently, I think, and the longest mail I've sent him was 70K of plain text), this one not the least of them. Therein, I argued that the obsession with "proportionality" that emerged during the conflict, aside from belying a confusion between "proportional" and "proportionate", reduces warfare to an accountancy of the dead and casts Israel as the villains for not letting their civilians get killed enough while overlooking the genuine war-crimes committed by Hezbollah by placing military assets in civilian areas. And so on.
The real story of that war, at least in the context of what I suppose I must call the blogosphere, was the steady stream of what Thaddeus Tremayne over at Samizdata, in a rather fabulous neologism, referred to as fauxtographs. (Perhaps it's nothing of the kind and I have just never come across it before, but heigh-ho.) Numerous stories leaked out of that region concerning the increasingly absurdly stage-managed nature of more-or-less all journalism going on there, from the hilariously amateurish doctoring of Reuters' photographs of bomb-damaged Beirut, to the chap with the green helmet creating tableaux of the dead; from the photogenic bomb victim who died cap in hand yet later that day was photographed clearing rubble, to the Lebanese woman who had two homes bombed inside three weeks yet hadn't even managed to change her clothes, all of which is not to mention the alarmingly brazen manner in which various national media outlets attempted to perpetrate their view of events. The difference, for example, between a BBC and an independent news report concerning bomb damage in the same town was staggering. One wonders how the BBC reconciles its mission for impartial reporting with its habit of advertising its vacant positions in the Guardian only, but there it is.
Some links, then.
Telegraph's Hannan borrows heavily from Mark Steyn.
Pictures worth a thousand lives.
Media Missiles.
No, this isn't a geopolitical ploy by Iran at all.... (login may be required: www.bugmenot.com)
Adnan Hajj.
Other photographic controversies.
posted by Novus at 09:08
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