Comments on: UN Dispatch

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:13:58 +0000

Henry, if you want to continue the debate about the CSCE’s role in the East Bloc’s collapse, feel free to leave a comment here—I promise I won’t pummel you with ad hominem insults. But to return to the topic at hand: what is your view of UN Watch? “Factual information”, or mere “cheap gotchas about corruption and sex scandals”? Enquiring minds want to know.

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:08:50 +0000

Simon’s second rule of partisan hackery: If you accuse someone of ignorance, and prescribe a cure consisting of regular study from a fully-funded organ of one of your own side’s more strident advocacy groups, then you’re really, really, open-and-shut guilty of it. While, for example, self-evidently bogus claims that Vaclav Havel didn’t mean it when he said that the CSCE played a key role in the demise of Communism in C-E Europe, and was just trying to be polite to his hosts, are neutral statements of fact? Have you read Havel on this? Dan, your problem isn’t that you’re ignorant – it’s that you’re invincibly ignorant. That is, judging from your previous track record in debate, when you encounter awkward facts, you try to deny them through ad-hoccery rather than reconsidering whether you might actually be wrong. Which means that the practical worth of debating with you is zero. Whether you’re a hack or not, I can’t tell – I don’t know whether you actually believe what you say, or whether you’re deliberately engaging in sophistry. Whichever which way, it doesn’t much matter to me – there’s not much point in arguing with you either way.

By: Colin from Bklyn

Colin from Bklyn — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 14:06:30 +0000

A lot of it has to do with the Anglocentrism of the surrounding culture, which I think is a breathtakingly disastrous competitive shortfall, among other things. That's why I think we need blogalization:

Blogalization is an open, distributed karass of bloggers and other independent Web writers and publishers who post in one or more languages about material discovered in one or more other languages: if I have languages A and B and you have languages B and C, we can share memes across barriers of mutual incomprehension.

By: IJ

IJ — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:26:55 +0000

I wonder if the new UN blog will say anything about the harmful nationalism that is spreading all around the world. After 60 years, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are still unwilling to give up their right to ignore the Charter (veto). And don’t more nations want the veto?

By: nick

nick — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:32:18 +0000

But we all know that such a UN blog, especially one enabling comments, would be cut down at the knees within seconds thanks to the hordes dispatched from the usual suspects, don’t we?

By: Mill

Mill — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:53:20 +0000

I don’t agree with Dan Simon very often, but I’m with him on this one. To judge from what’s on the front page, the “UN Dispatcher” is just puffery. You say “a take on the UN that isn’t limited to cheap gotchas about corruption and sex scandals”, but in fact, it doesn’t include ANY information about corruption or sex scandals, both of which are critically important data when considering a supranational organisation that claims a role as the conscience of all humanity. So what’s the point of reading it? I don’t read one-sided warblogs—not on either side—because I know they are intentionally trying to deceive me by omission. This UN Dispatcher thing is apparently trying exactly the same trick. File it in the worthless PR file where it belongs, and wait for someone to start a genuinely balanced UN blog that celebrates the good AND exposes the bad. Hey, maybe we could call this practice “responsible journalism”!

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 07:32:07 +0000

Dan – I didn’t want to say this before, but you’re slap-bang in the center of my list of bloggers who rabbit on about international organizations without seeming to actually know much about them Simon’s second rule of partisan hackery: If you accuse someone of ignorance, and prescribe a cure consisting of regular study from a fully-funded organ of one of your own side’s more strident advocacy groups, then you’re really, really, open-and-shut guilty of it.

By: BadTux

BadTux — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 06:25:28 +0000

Uhm, if I want to read about, say, Australian politics, I go to an Australian blog. If I want to read about, say, Iraqi politics, I go to an Iraqi blog. What is this thing you call “The Blogosphere”? Are you saying that “The Blogosphere” only includes blogs written in the United States of America?! – Badtux the Internationalist Penguin

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 04:18:57 +0000

Barry, yes – Jonathan Edelstein’s blog is a gem – and is one of the ones that I was thinking of when I wrote the post. Dan – I didn’t want to say this before, but you’re slap-bang in the center of my list of bloggers who rabbit on about international organizations without seeming to actually know much about them (viz. your comments on the CSCE/OSCE in a previous thread, and your claim that Vaclav Havel was only trying to be polite to his hosts when he said that the CSCE was a key part of the collapse of Communist regimes in C-E Europe – a claim which anyone who actually knew much about Havel, his history, and the particulars of that collapse wouldn’t credit for a moment).

By: drapeto

drapeto — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 03:14:55 +0000

the blogosphere is surprisingly bad at providing information on politics outside the US. there are a number of blogs in english and french which cover politics in the non-US world, as a matter of fact. i think it’s a question of who reads/links what, rather than what exists to be read. i mean, i notice the same thing in ct’s book and movie suggestion threads. i also think that the most popular blogs are the ones that are the most news-of-the-day driven, i.e. that following the major media newscycle more closesly will make a blog more popular, more linked-to etc., which distorts one’s sense of what blogs exist/do.

By: praktike

praktike — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:03:15 +0000

I think the Head Heeb is superhuman. As for the UNDispatch, it needs some work. If you’re reading, Peter— a) give it a human face (“Dispatcher?”) b) have a longer blogroll c) don’t put so much below the fold d) at least allow trackbacks, eh?

By: Barry Ross

Barry Ross — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 23:30:28 +0000

Certainly an exception (that proves the rule?) of the parochial nature of the blogosphere is Jonathan Edelstein’s The Head Heeb, wherein he does a fantastic job of monitoring events in sub-Saharan Africa, the South Pacific as well as offering erudite commentary on political events in Israel and Palestine. There are others who report regularly on individual countries or areas of the world consistently if one looks for them but the Head Heeb remains a singular and remarkable resource of quite underreported areas (and this does include Israel).

By: floopmeister

floopmeister — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:38:48 +0000

…the blogosphere is surprisingly bad at providing information on politics outside the US… Gee, you think?

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:35:45 +0000

Henry, not only did I read your post, but I even scooted over to the new UN blog for a sample. I stand by my assessment—it’s simply a mirror-image version of any number of pro-US warblogs, replete with fawning stories about “all the good work they’re doing”. In case you haven’t noticed, the warbloggers, too, like to present themselves as simply addressing the problem that “the blogosphere is extraordinarily weak on facts” about the US occupation of Iraq. My point is that official organs of large organizations like the Pentagon and the UN provide all the happy talk anyone could ever need about them, and blogs that tout such pablum as “information” are providing nothing of value to the blogosphere.

By: stephen

stephen — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:33:28 +0000

What do you mean, “politics outside the US “? The domestic politics of many nations are well served by their own bloggers (although perhaps not so accessible outside their native languages). Your first sentence set me up to rant at length about the US-centricity of assuming that “blogosphere” = US blogs, and then gradually I realised that maybe you’re talking about coverage of the UN. Which is a much narrower field than politics outside the US.