UN Dispatch

I think part of the problem with the blog culture is the echo-chamber aspect- the reinforcing of the group mentality and focusing on a specific set of issues based on what is available in the news.

It’s something I think about when people laud the superiority of blogs to journalism. Of course, Fafblog says it better with Giblets’s posts on the all-conquering Blogosphere.

I am happy to see a blog about the UN. It is hard to maintain a blog limited to one topic, at least it was for me. They should have plenty of material, though.

Dan – the point, if you’d care to read the post, isn’t that this blog is providing a direct counterblast to Glenn Reynolds style cheap shots – it’s that the blogosphere is extraordinarily weak on facts about the UN and international politics more generally. I’d be delighted if there were UN-criticizing blogs out there written by people who actually knew something about what the UN does, and what its strengths and weaknesses were. Then we could have a real debate, instead of dimwitted snark and regurgitated talking points.

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.

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).

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.

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

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”!

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?

bq. 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.