HUH. Over 53,000 pageviews today. That’s a lot for a Sunday. Must be the protests.
Does this make me a tacit supporter of A.N.S.W.E.R.?
No.
Archive for 2003
January 19, 2003
ANTIWAR PROTESTS: A pale shadow of what we saw 12 years ago?
DESTINATION: BRITAIN! Adil Farooq, who lives there, is horrified by Britain’s asylum policies.
WATCH THOSE HARD DRIVES: They’re harder to clean than you think. The last sentence in this story makes me think that there’s an interesting story behind the story.
(Via Ray Garraud).
PROTEST NUMBERS from around the world. There’s more, including the attendance at the Detroit Auto Show (where people showed up Saturday to look at SUVs in numbers dwarfing the entire American protest turnout) here. And some questions for protesters, and answers, linked here. Also, photos and firsthand reports from the protests here.
UPDATE: Environment-friendly marchers? Well. . . . In a weird kind of way, these pictures make sense.
GENIUS MUST BE RECOGNIZED.
A PACK, NOT A HERD: I got an email saying that the story about two high school students downing a would-be school shooter (or at least a would-be “Jeremy”) that I posted on Friday night will be reported on CNN tomorrow.
WE’RE ALL JUST PUPPETS, and Cathy Seipp is pulling the strings. Well, yeah. But we don’t mind.
JUST SAW THE MEDIA MATTERS BLOGGING EPISODE, which was quite different from the rough cut that I had seen earlier. I liked the old music better (techno vs. the Bobby McFerrin — I think — in the new cut), but overall I thought it was pretty good. And I still think that Oliver Willis should have a TV show.
UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh has a review up (two key points: Megan McArdle is “hot” — and why not a sequel focusing on Iranian-Jewish webloggers?) And Anil Dash has comments focusing on the, um, “opportunities” he hopes the appearance will produce. . . .
A WHILE BACK, I linked to a story from the Los Angeles Times pronouncing Milwaukee the “most segregated” city in America. Angry Milwaukee reader Rob Burg sends this story and this story reporting a study that pronounces the Census Bureau data leading to that conclusion wrong.
TACITUS is issuing a challenge to anti-war bloggers: Disavow A.N.S.W.E.R. and what it stands for. And he’s got some pretty graphic stuff on what it stands for.
UPDATE: Radley Balko responds. Oliver Willis has a response, too.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan McArdle comments:
I’ve seen a number of people say that it doesn’t matter that A.N.S.W.E.R. organized the anti-war marches — they may be quasi-marxist apologists for Stalin using the anti-war rallies to advance a hard-left statist agenda, but why should we let that stop us from marching in a good cause?
Come again? Would you go to a fundraiser for abandoned puppies organized by the Klan? Please do not bother trying to convince me; of course you wouldn’t. You’d donate money to a shelter, or adopt a puppy, but no matter how good the cause was, you wouldn’t stand up to be counted alongside the guys in sheets.
She’s also designed some nifty t-shirts. Where do I order one? (LATER: Why here, of course!)
ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots of comments on Tacitus’s original post. My favorite, however, is not precisely on point, but it is funny:
hmmm connecting dots.
Stalin: big mustache, vicious dictator
Saddam : big mustache, vicious dictator
A.N.S.W.E.R.: Stalinist organisation opposes move to unseat Saddam.
question, if Bush had a big mustache would they be ambivalent over their support of Saddam?
Hmm. Big mustache. Cowboy hat. . . . All I can say is, Tom Selleck for President! Let’s bring America back together. . . .
Heh.
Meanwhile, Steven Jens asks, “What is it with evil men and mustaches?”
JUSTIN KATZ WRITES on conservatism and change in the Islamic world.
ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPONS? DefenseTech has some links and information. And scroll down for more on the unfolding Los Alamos scandals, which are getting less attention than they deserve.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste, who knows about this kind of thing, has comments here, and here.
RON BAILEY WRITES ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE AND ITS CRITICS, particularly Francis Fukuyama.
I’ve written about neuroscience, too, but while I was worried about how other people might use it to control us, Fukuyama is more worried about how we might use it to control ourselves. Which sums up the difference between my position and Fukuyama’s on a number of subjects.
STUFF I MEANT TO LINK THIS WEEK, but never got around to:
This article by Buzz Aldrin and Ron Jones on space tourism;
This magisterial post by Lynxx Pherrett on human trafficking worldwide (it’s not just the UN peacekeepers!);
This column by Rand Simberg on space commercialization;
Reality Carnival — the whole blog, which as you’ll see lives up to its name;
This post on why I was wrong, and this post on why I wasn’t, in my discussion of Eldred (LATER: Larry Lessig says I was “sensible”); and
This post from the Bitch Girls, commenting on the C-SPAN coverage of the protests yesterday.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a bunch — when I find this stuff I leave the screen open meaning to go back to it, and sometimes I just don’t get there.
DOES THIS ELECTION mean I’m not supposed to call Castro a “dictator” any more? I’m with Josh Chafetz on this one:
This just goes to show that, in addition to being brutal and oppressive, the Cuban regime is also incompetent. All 609 ran unopposed? Which genius in Fidel’s inner circle was in charge of this? Couldn’t they at least scare up two Communists to run against each other, so they could at least plausibly claim to be holding free elections? As it is, why even bother with the election? — it’s not fooling much of anyone …
But there are those who will point to it, just as there are those who think that Saddam just won a democratic election.
DAMIAN PENNY is running a contest for the dumbest protest sign seen yesterday. Get your entries in!
ATRIOS IS RUNNING THIS QUOTE from an article in the Knoxville alt-weekly Metro Pulse:
In late 1969, a group of about 25 demonstrators marched from campus down Alcoa Highway to the airport. The intent was to symbolically greet the soldiers who weren’t coming home. “The only thing that really hurt,” recalls organizer Charlie Reynolds, “is that one of the students insisted on carrying a North Vietnamese flag.”
Reynolds was UT’s ranking expert on demonstrating. An ordained Methodist minister and still a professor of religious studies at UT, he was new to campus. Born in Alabama, Reynolds had been involved in civil rights demonstrations there as early as ’61. Since then, he’d been pelted with eggs in Boston and faced firehoses in Heidelberg. When Nixon came to town in 1970, Reynolds, finishing his first year at UT, would lead the opposition.
Yeah, that’s my dad. I’ve linked to this piece a couple of times myself (here’s one mention, from last June), as a matter of fact. There’s also an article from 1971, I think, that Garry Wills wrote for Esquire, though it’s not online as far as I can tell.
To Atrios, it’s funny that my father protested a different war. To me, of course, the most important line is this one:
“The only thing that really hurt,” recalls organizer Charlie Reynolds, “is that one of the students insisted on carrying a North Vietnamese flag.”
My father and I disagree on the current (projected) war, but we don’t disagree about how unfortunate it is that that peace movement — and this one — have been ruined by jackholes who are really just posturing, or actively rooting for the other side.
And I actually marched with my Dad in Boston, but that was protesting Louise Day Hicks.
WELL, THEY’RE CALLED ANARCHISTS FOR A REASON: An amusing story from yesterday’s protests.
PUNDITWATCH is up!
GARY HART HAS LAUNCHED HIS 2004 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN WEBSITE. I think he’s the strongest Democrat in the field.
Here is the Hart website, which can also be reached at http://hart2004.com.
POWER LINE POINTS OUT that an anti-Hugo Chavez rally in Miami drew 50,000 people — about as many as the largest credible estimates for the D.C. antiwar rally yesterday. In the words of Power Line:
[T]he anti-Chavez, pro-freedom rally by Cuban-Americans and others in Miami was likely larger than any of yesterday’s antiwar rallies. How much coverage did it get in your local newspaper?
That says something about the limited appeal of the antiwar movement. And about what the mainstream press considers news, and what it doesn’t.
UPDATE: ToneCluster points out that 100,000 people protested against Chavez in Caracas yesterday.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus notes that more people will be showing up for the NFC and AFC championship games than showed up at any of the protests. (Heck, based on official figures more people showed up to see the lame Tennessee Vols lose to Florida last fall than showed up at all the American antiwar protests combined.)
He also notes that the ESPN coverage — unlike coverage of the antiwar protesters — includes detailed analysis of the records and backgrounds of the participants, and concludes: “I wonder why ‘pure news’ reporters look down on sports reporters?”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Charles Austin emails:
More people didn’t just show up to see the Vols lose to Florida, they paid for the privilege! I would have said that unlike the pro-Saddam demonstrators, they did not regard their opponent’s supporters as feckless, hygenically challenged, evil morons, but we are talking about Gator fans after all.
Meanwhile, Oliver Willis emails this link to a page with video that purports to show 350,000 people at the San Francisco rally. I couldn’t get the video to play, but I regard that claim as absurdly inflated.
And reader Ronnie Schreiber sends this observation:
A couple of the reports on the various anti-war protests said that a number of the protesters’ signs mentioned SUVs. Today is the last day of the 2003 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan. Last year there were 759,907 people who paid to get into the nine day show and crowds so far have exceeded last year’s attendance. The last Saturday of the show is typically the day with the highest attendance which means that yesterday there may have been more people attending the Detroit auto show to look at the latest SUVs than there were anti-war protesters in both SF and DC.
Sure enough, thanks to the wonder of Google News, I found this story, reporting that:
Event organizers predicted the final turnout by Monday evening could approach the 2000 record of 802,300. Saturday’s attendance alone was projected to top 120,000 people.
So, using official numbers, it seems that there were certainly more people looking at SUVs in Detroit yesterday than were protesting the war across America. You may, of course, doubt the truth of the official numbers — and crowd estimation, especially with large crowds where people don’t have to pass through turnstiles to get there is hard — but it seems rather unlikely to me that the Washington, D.C. and San Francisco municipal governments are such hotbeds of warhawkery that they would be deliberately under-reporting the numbers by a factor of ten, as the organizers are claiming. (LATER: Schreiber emails to point out that the Auto Show charges admission, and so probably has a very reliable count compared to what you get with open-air events. True enough.) (STILL LATER: A reader emails that yesterday’s attendance was 142,865. I can’t find that anywhere on the Web, but if so, well, the outcome’s pretty clear.)
Meanwhile, Charles Johnson reports that press accounts are whitewashing the presence of radical Islamists at the protests.
UPDATE: And James Hudnall has a pop quiz for protesters. Read it.
KEITH RICHARDS isn’t scared of terrorists:
“I say to Osama and the boys bring it on, evaporate me,” Richards said on the eve of the band’s Australian tour. “If it gets to the stage where these guys are dictating if we rock or not, then forget about it.”
Paul McCartney, on the other hand, is less defiant.