Pwn3d

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Yes, I was April Fooled. This morning, while all the hubbub was going on about GMail, I saw a post on a popular discussion list from someone who had swallowed the press release hook, line and sinker. So I posted back that it was B.S. And, of course, in true Murphy's Law fashion, it appears as if the new service is genuine. So Google fooled me into thinking that GMail was B.S. and I bought it. Oops.

The Subconscious Is A Funny Thing

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Tuesday morning at about 5:15 AM, my clock radio went off per usual. This time, though, the usual traffic, news and weather reports on 880 AM were replaced by something else - a Yankee game broadcast. Obviously, my subconscious had a bit of difficulty in reconciling the notion of a Yankee game at 5:15 in the morning.

We've been spending quite a few evenings working past midnight at Underscore recently, so the first thought to go through my head was, "That's it. I've finally flipped out. My body has simply shut down and I've slept through the day and it's probably about 7 in the evening. What the hell am I going to tell my clients and my partners? They're probably going to want to know why I didn't show up for work."

So I rolled over in bed, opened one eye, and looked at the clock. Turns out I hadnt slept in and I wasn't crazy. I had just been listening to the Yankee season opener at the Tokyo Dome, which was broadcast at this ungodly hour due to the time difference. Cue major sigh of relief.

Not Enough Information (Again)

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Over the weekend, the mainstream press reported on the shuttering of an Iraqi newspaper operation by the US-led coalition. The stories (1, 2, 3, for example) mention that the newspaper was shut down for inciting violence against coalition troops. A knee-jerk reactionist would lob a comment like, "It's a shame we can't practice what we preach to the Iraqi people" or something like that, but that's not what I'm going to do here.

We're trying to bring democracy to Iraq, and in many ways we're guaranteeing the basic rights that citizens need in order to make a democracy work the way it ought to. While our First Amendement doesn't apply in Iraq, a free press is certainly needed and something like the First Amendment should exist there.

This isn't to say that Iraqi newspapers should be allowed to say whatever they want. US citizens can't use free speech as a shield to incite people to violently overthrow the government, for instance. The Iraqis shouldn't expect to use their new found freedom to incite violence against the government either.

What's missing from the news stories? The one piece of critical information that allows US citizens to make an intelligent choice as to whether or not the coalition is justified in shutting down this newspaper. We don't have any concrete examples of stories this paper printed that call for violence. It's just another "the coalition's word against the Iraqi people's word" story. We can't make intelligent judgments in cases like this. A responsible journalist would have found out what the offending articles were and printed excerpts so that folks in the US could make this judgment.

Instead of having intelligent discourse over whether or not the paper did incite violence, we're going to have people in the U.S. who don't understand the First Amendment arguing that the Iraqis should be able to print whatever they want in their newspapers, and a bunch of people arguing the counterpoint saying that inciting violence is wrong. What we should be arguing about is whether or not the paper committed the offense of which it's been accused.

That's one of the major things that's angering me over the whole situation in Iraq. US citizens are getting bits and pieces of information, with nothing substantial by which they can make intelligent choices. It always boils down to a "this person's word against this person's word" situation, with little relevant facts included. I'm starting to get tired of this, because as US citizens, we're being asked to make intelligent choices without all the information we need to do so. I say suspend your judgments until someone prints some excerpts from the offending articles and demonstrates that the Iraqi newspaper was wrong.