There once was a time in the not-too-distant past when I really blogged. I think.
No real writing tonight — instead, I’m offering up some tasties from the fine sites on my blogroll and their internet cousins.
Chad Evans at In the Bullpen takes a look at how the radical Islamist movement is increasingly utilizing the internet.
Nearly five years after 9/11, there can be considerable debate whether or not radical Islam as an ideology has grown. I believe it has, but the measure of whether or not the ideology has spawned future terrorists is not known. What is known is that jihadis using the Internet to disseminate their ideology has grown and grown at a rather alarming rate.
In the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s report, a twenty percent increase of jihadi sites is cited over the previous year.
[…]
The question on everyone’s mind is what are we doing to stop this? Sadly, I don’t think we are doing much to prevent these sites from operating and growing.
Military Matters‘ Uncle Jimbo, a frequent contributor over at Blackfive, questions the media’s assualt on what is essentially a military psy-ops effort. Preach it, Uncle.
I have difficulty with the press pushing back every time it finds out the military doesn’t trust it to inform the American public, or the world, about our operations. Every time they sniff out any foray into information warfare, they begin with the propaganda meme, and attempt to discredit it. Yet the same folks will bemoan the inability of the administration to stir public sentiment in our favor at home or anywhere else. It would be nice for the media to admit they have waged an aggressive propaganda campaign of disinformation and disinterest in anything positive that has actually harmed our war effort and made our work in Iraq more difficult.
I am not blaming the press for the current situation in Iraq, except as an agent spreading doom and gloom.
Protein Wisdom‘s Jeff Goldstein looks at the same effort with similar conclusions. As an aside, I ain’t shy about thinking that Jeff’s mix of off-the-wall zanyand dead-on-target analysis makes him one of the best in the blogging arena.
Whenever I mention that the tenor of mainstream media coverage of this war is troublesome—and that it may indeed have a material impact on how successful the campaign ultimately is—I am met with scoffs from anti-war types who insist that their dissent has no effect on the situation on the ground in Iraq, and that in fact, their willingness to speak Truth to Power is part of the great tradition of this country, and one of the few things left that the Bushies haven’t beaten into the dirt with their fascist boot heels.
Of course, this is a strawman argument: my gripe is not against dissent, but rather against intentional and purposeful misrepresentations growing out of ideology.
And it is ironic, I think, that the anti-war crowd spends so much time noting how their “dissent†has no measurable impact on the waging of the war—even though it should be obvious that public opinion is driven largely by the media representation of the war and its prosecution—and then turns around and finds troubling a “propaganda†campaign they claim is being waged by the military.
Evidently, some words do have an impact, though I guess to many in the anti-war crowd, some propagandists are more equal than others.
Finally, Unqualified Offerings brings us a blog post. It has comments. Generic hat-tip-type acknowledgement to JohnL at TexasBestGrok, who calls it the world’s greatest blog posting ever.