now, I’m giving up on Kinja and I’m going to exclude Kinja from my site in the future. It’s not that I’m outraged or anything, it’s just that to me, the site never lived up to anything close to what it promised. None of the shortcomings are even killers – it’s more a “death by a thousand cuts” kind of thing. The honking big CNet ad didn’t help, but it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the whole load. Other problems with Kinja? It seems very fickle about what it picks up and when, it often suffers from post-dumps from particular sites, it doesn’t deal with accents very well, posts are frequently out of sequence, and, even more, it doesn’t give me anything new, anything I can’t get better in a dozen other places. It’s too bad – judging by the look of the thing and the reputation of the folks who worked on it, I expected a lot more.
Archives for 2004
Listening to
Caterina right now on the CBC’s Sounds like Canada.
On a lighter note,
the New Yorker has published a wonderful piece about the knuckleball, by Ben McGrath. It seems there’s something of a renaissance of the fine art of the floater pitch. There’s also a fun Q & A with McGrath on the site.
The NY Times Op-Ed by David Brooks
today was remarkable. It was entitled, For Iraqis to Win, the U.S. Must Lose and included the following stunning sentence, “we went into Iraq with what, in retrospect, seems like a childish fantasy. We were going to topple Saddam, establish democracy and hand the country back to grateful Iraqis. We expected to be universally admired when it was all over.”
The trouble is that he says it as if this is just now occurring to him, and that this is a great insight that he is imparting to us. In fact, the points he makes are precisely what the anti-war crowd has, in the main, been saying all along.
He writes, “There was a failure to understand the effect our power would have on other people around the world. We were so sure we were using our might for noble purposes, we assumed that sooner or later, everybody else would see that as well.” And, later, “we didn’t understand the tragic irony that our power is also our weakness.”
Brooks may not have understood it, but WE – those of us against this brash adventure from the start – we did understand it perfectly well. This IS the internationalist, pro-UN argument. Internationalists know that the UN, as highly imperfect as it is, was founded for the very reason that no nation could rely on narrow perceptions of nobility as the basis for action – particularly action that would have any kind of legitimacy. That to act required a framework in which that action might take place.
Harry Truman, after he gave the order to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – he certainly understood the irony of power. Great Britain, at the end of its rule of India, certainly knew the irony of power. Gandhi liberated hundreds of millions of people from Colonial rule using NOTHING but the irony of British power against it. These are the people that founded the UN. Sadly, though the US has to learn the lesson all over again. Unfortunately, that will only happen when the current crowd is turfed out of office. For they will refuse to read the signs, though they are lit up in neon for all the world to see.
Don’t be evil?
One thing that people have noticed about the new Blogger is that there are lots of redirected links in Blogger sites. According to Blogger, one of the reasons for this is to ensure that Blogger’s relationship and proximity to Google doesn’t influence things like Pagerank. More info from Blogger Help : Why do links on blogger.com (and in comments) redirect through google.com and blogger.com?
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