Dancing in a ring (a response to a query posed by Norm Geras)

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent post, Norman Geras wrote:

And yet it is almost de rigeur amongst people of liberal and left outlook, today, to use as representative of what we should fear in the way of a possible return of the horrors of Nazism, not the many actual ruthless and life-devouring regimes we have known in recent decades, but… George Bush, or America, or some other Western instance or combination. Why? One answer I would give to this is that I don’t know. I’ve been trying to understand it since September 11 2001 and on some level failing. Yes, you can say knee-jerk this, that and the other, and in its own way it is right to say so. But, more deeply, the failure involved in these de rigeur responses, the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters, is hard to comprehend.

In that one-word sentence, “Why?” and its answer, “I don’t know,” lie an enormity of wonder, a perplexity many of us share.

Why do so many “of liberal and left outlook” focus on Bush’s supposed crimes, making the Nazi comparison at the drop of a metaphor, and ignoring the far more terrible tyrants around the world for whom the Hitlerian analogy would be more apt? Why indeed have many on the left functioned as apologists for Saddam Hussein, a man whose downfall they should be applauding? When they said they were against tyranny, didn’t they mean what they said?

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer. But I do have a response.

First, I offer this quote from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.

Now, you might say that leftists didn’t have to compromise their beliefs to have applauded the downfall of Saddam Hussein and to have realized that he and his regime were worse (and far more Nazi-like) than George Bush. Indeed, there are many leftists who have consistently said these very things. But there are others—and their numbers are not small–who have not, or who have done it with so much “throat-clearing,” as Chris Hitchens calls it, that their statements become virtually meaningless.

What is the difference between these two types of people? I think it has to do with the extent of their devotion to the circle dance, and the hierarchy of their belief system. The former group–what Norm Geras calls “principled leftists”–truly do believe what they say about hating tyrants and tyranny, and this is one of their highest values. They apply it irrespective of where the tyranny originates. But the second group, the terrorist and Saddam apologists, the relentless Bush=Hitler accusers, are quite different. It seems that they feel that their membership in the circle of the left requires them to elevate one particular guiding principle above all else, and that is this: in any power struggle between members of a third-world country and a developed Western country (especially the most powerful of all, the United States), the third-world country is always right.

Once learned, this very simple and reductionist principle makes the world easy to understand, and dictates all further responses. If one believes this principle, then oppression and tyranny can go in one direction only, and all evidence to the contrary must be ignored, suppressed, or twisted by sophistry into something almost unrecognizable. But once that price is paid, one can go on dancing in the old circle.

In the quote with which I began this essay, Norm Geras refers to “the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters.” I think the key phrase is “which matter more than just about anything else matters.” To those intent on dancing the circle dance above all else, the priorities are different. Apparently, other things matter more.

I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to the left. I’ve watched some on the right do the same sort of thing (although the details and issues are quite different): ignore evidence or twist logic to make sure they come to a preordained conclusion that fits into previous theories. And on the right there are also those brave ones who leave the circle and dance outside the ring.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 3–Beginnings

The New Neo Posted on by

(Part I)
(Part II)

How does a political identity begin?

Political identities, like religious identities, start when we’re very young, and they start with the family. Later on, in our teens and early twenties, we may rebel, or we may continue along the path laid down in childhood. But as little children we can’t possibly understand politics rationally. For children, politics is mostly a matter of affilliation, plus some vague information swirling around in the public domain and filtering down to the child in childish terms: What does my family think and believe? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

My first political memory is of the Korean War, which began when I was almost an infant (please do me a favor and don’t do the math). I must have been only two or three years old when I told my mother, after careful and solemn consideration of the pros and cons, that red was no longer my favorite color. When she asked me why, I answered that it was because it was the Communist color (or perhaps “Commie color”?).

Thus is a political consciousness born. I didn’t–and couldn’t, being so young–have any understanding of the conflict itself, nor of the issues involved. But I’d overheard things, enough to conclude that there was an enemy, and that since the enemy liked the color red (heretofore my favorite color), now I needed to hate red.

On my first day of kindergarten I was issued a set of metal dog tags with my name and address and instructed to wear them around my neck at all times. I don’t know whether this was a national policy, or one limited to New York, but everyone in our school was given them, although few of us ended up wearing them (we were also supposed to bring a handkerchief to school every day, and I forgot that too, and regularly got marked down for it). I knew exactly what the dog tags were for, though, thanks to my best friend. If we were bombed and blown to bits, she explained, and there were no bodies left, the dog tags would help them identify the pieces (ah, those innocent pre-DNA days!).

So I grew up with the idea of war and danger hovering very near, although the danger never did materialize on our shores. Later there were the famous “duck-and-cover” drills, which seemed useless even then, in a war that was likely to be catastrophically nuclear. There was once an even more elaborate citywide drill in which all the schools and businesses closed prematurely at a certain pre-planned time in the early afternoon, and we were all supposed to get home immediately, or to go to another pre-arranged place where a trusted adult would be waiting. We had about 15-minutes’ time to get there.

This latter drill was supposed to mimic the way it would be if we actually got a warning that a fleet of ICBMs had been launched and was zinging our way from Russia. I viewed my lonely walk home that day as an exercise in going there to die, not to be safe–for how could home ever protect me from that? The eerie, silent, nearly car-free streets I walked along half convinced me, a child with an overactive imagination, that this was the real thing. As I looked up at the sky I could almost see the warheads coming, so real did it all seem.

I saw the movie “On the Beach” when it first came out in 1959, and read the book, too, for extra measure. Afterwards, I became so fearful that the world would end in 1964, the year in which the book was set, that for self-protection I started to avoid reading things that seemed likely to upset me so much, although my avoidance was far from complete (I did a project for the Science Fair on fallout shelters, for example).

During these early years I was quite aware that everyone in my family was a Democrat. So, I was a Democrat too, whatever that meant. It meant I was for Adlai Stevenson and that I didn’t like Eisenhower, although since Eisenhower was the President I had to root for him, too, which was a bit complicated. But I was a mini Pauline Kael in the making, unaware of knowing any Republicans at all, and I had been suitably shocked when Eisenhower was re-elected (as Kael had been about Nixon’s re-election). I hadn’t the foggiest notion what Democrats actually did, just that they were supposed to be kinder and nicer, especially to poor people, and that Stevenson was smarter, too.

But there was another strain in my family that was impossible to ignore. I had one relative who was relentlessly pro-Soviet. At all family gatherings, he would hold forth on why the USSR was better than the US in every way–why, in fact, the Soviet Union was the greatest and most progressive nation on earth. And this wasn’t in the early days of Communism, before the awful picture had become crystal-clear; this was after Stalin, after the purges and famines, after the point of no return for most who had previously supported that regime.

This relative, whom I’ll call Joe, was my first introduction to fanaticism, although I didn’t know the word. There was no argument that could possibly dissuade him, even when presented by my father, who was awfully good at debate. Joe could rationalize anything, and never ever ever admitted that he’d been wrong. He seemed to touch a particular nerve in my grandmother, a stalwart and patriotic sort. At each family gathering she’d listen for a while to the mounting argument and the raised voices, and then she would finally raise her own in exasperation and say: “America has been very good to you, Joe. If you like Russia so much, why don’t you just move there?”

Not a bad question, actually; right on the money. But Joe never missed a beat, in the same way that he never had trouble weasling out of any other question he didn’t like. “Oh, I could move there,” he’d answer. “I’d like to. But it’s more important for me to stay and work for change here.”

I would observe from the sidelines. There was no point in entering this repetitive exchange, which always seemed to proceed in choreographed fashion to its inevitable denouement. I had no idea why the adults persisted in an argument that never changed, and clearly never was going to.

So, what did I learn in my childhood about politics? I learned to affiliate with my family’s beliefs on an emotional level, but I learned very little except generalities about the reasoning and factual basis behind those positions. I learned that politics could be a very contentious subject, but that people still liked to discuss it. I learned that some people were fanatics and didn’t listen to reason or argument, and I knew I never wanted to be like them. And I knew the world was a dangerous place, and that (at least in my mind) there was an excellent chance I wouldn’t live to grow up, because a nuclear conflagration would stop me. There was fear involved in politics, but it seemed important–perhaps a matter of life or death. I learned to protect myself from the intensity of this fear by tuning out information about certain subjects, by not reading about them in depth.

How much of this is universal? I imagine this sense of danger is typical for a child growing up in times in which there is a threat of war, which (unfortunately) includes most times. I think the sense of right/wrong and us/them (polarization and identification with a particular group) would also be quite strong for virtually all children growing up with family and friends who are more or less on a single political page. I also think it likely that even children in more politically heterogeneous families form some sort of political identification based on the politics of one parent or another, and that, although this identification is probably more tentative, sometimes it can be quite strong. I think that most, if not all, children lack the cognitive powers to understand the deeper issues behind political affiliation, and so the decisions children make aren’t really cognitive decisions at all, but simply emotional reactions.

Extrapolating from my own situation and the situation of my friends who grew up as liberal Democrats, I think the sensitivity that caused me to turn away from seeking out deeper knowledge of upsetting or frightening topics of the day may have been somewhat typical. Paradoxically, though, my interest came in through a sort of back door–I would read about other wars and other times. In this, perhaps, I was not typical; I really don’t know. The Holocaust, WWI, the Trojan War, the Civil War–I could (and did) read about these events, but not about threats that were too close to home, too up-close and personal.

I think that there were special circumstances in my own family–Joe, to be exact–that sensitized me to be extremely wary of fanatics. As a result, I dedicated myself on some very deep level to the idea of being openminded, and to seriously considering arguments that ran counter to my habitual opinions. I think it was this deeply-rooted antagonism to fanaticism that set the stage for the possibility (not the actuality, and certainly not the inevitability, but just the possibility) that I might change my political position much later in life.

(To be continued….in Part 4)

[ADDENDUM: For next part, “Interlude,” go here.]

The Shiavo case–a family affair

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t weighed in on the Shiavo case yet, and I haven’t followed it in anything approaching exhaustive detail. But I have my take on it, which I think is a bit different from most of what I’ve been reading.

I look at it as an excellent example of a case that is primarily and essentially a family dispute. I don’t know whether these parties have ever tried mediation or family therapy–not that either would have led to a resolution, of course, but I wish they’d been tried.

If Terri herself had left written instructions in a living will, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all; her wishes would have been carried out. In the absence of such written instructions, if both parties (the parents, the husband) had been on the same page about what Terri wanted, we also wouldn’t be having this discussion. Even without that agreement between the parties on what her wishes might have been, if both parties themselves agreed on what they wanted, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The only reason we are having this discussion is that Terri’s husband and parents disagree, and disagree strongly enough to have a court battle.

To me, it would have been best if her husband and family could have reached some agreement out of court. Since that didn’t happen, and has no chance of happening any more, it becomes a court case. As far as I can see (and, once again, I have to say I have not read a vast amount of documentation about this case), the issue becomes twofold: is Terri’s husband correct in his statement of what her wishes were; and, if we can’t know for sure, whose wishes should be paramount, the husbands’s (to “let her die”) or the parents’ (to “protect her right to life”)?

In human terms, this case is nothing but a tragedy, from start to finish. A beautiful young woman in the prime of life reduced to this sort of twilight lingering dependency. Heartbroken parents, a husband who was probably heartbroken too, albeit in a different way (I will assume here that Michael Shiavo’s motives are good; I know others would disagree). All possible outcomes are almost unutterably sad. To look at photos of Terri’s grieving parents is to see a pain that is nearly unbearable.

But in legal terms, here is my suggestion: I think that Florida law, which to my understanding favors the rights of a spouse over the rights of parents, should be amended to read that the paramount right to decide (in the absence of written expressed wishes of the ill person) should rest in the spouse unless another first degree relative has been the primary caretaker for a certain time, in which case that caretaker/relative would have rights equal to or greater than the spouse. I’m not sure what the details of such a law would be in terms of what that length of time should be, or how to define “primary caretaker,” but I’m sure the legislature could duke it out on that and come up with something more fair than the present law.

I would also suggest that it be mandatory that the parties to such a dispute be required to try a course of mediation, and/or of consultation with a family therapist specializing in medical family therapy, as a prelude to any court hearing. This sort of thing is done in some states for child custody battles, for example, and I see no reason why it couldn’t be tried in cases like this. Of course, such an amended law won’t help us in the Shiavo case, but it might help for future cases.

If Terri dies soon (and it is looking more and more as though she will), her parents are going to have to go through a terrible time of pain and anger. I can only hope, if she is to die shortly, that it happens as painlessly and easily as possible, and that her parents get a lot of help, support, and love–whether through therapy or their church or friends or family or all of the above. They will need it.

ADDENDUM: I just came across this Charles Krauthammer piece in which he says essentially the same thing I’ve said here. I find this interesting because Krauthammer is a psychiatrist as well as a very fine writer. He approaches questions with that perspective, and it gives him a different take on many subjects. Not only that, but he has a special sensitivity, I think, as a person with a disability himself–he is a quadriplegic from an accident he sustained as a young man.

The language of public life

The New Neo Posted on by

I was reading Dr. Sanity’s recent post, in which she quotes Fred Siegel from the NY Observer. He describes an encounter with some undergraduate Dean supporters prior to the 2004 primaries thusly:

I was taken aback by my conversation with the Deaniacs; their sheer coarseness stunned me. Even at the height of the “Ronald Reagan is going to blow up the world” mania of the 1980’s, I had never seen a “Fuck Reagan” button. But the coarseness was consistent with the dominant mood in academia outside of the sciences.

Well, I hate to break it to you, Fred, but it ain’t just academia. At the risk of sliding even further into old-fuddydud-ism (and perhaps even my use of the word “fuddydud” is emblematic of the fact that I’m already hopelessly mired there), I have to say that I myself have noticed recently a remarkable rise of what Siegel delicately refers to as “coarseness” in public life, not just academia.

Clinton donned shades and played the sax on TV. That wasn’t any problem; it was fun. But now we have candidates using the F-word in interviews with the media. Kerry in Rolling Stone, describing Bush’s Iraq policy–well, at least that was Rolling Stone, which appeals to a certain demography, so there was a bit of logic behind it, although I think it did absolutely nothing to enhance his candidacy or his person. And, just to show that I’m a nonpartisan equal-opportunity critic, there was Dick Cheney dissing Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate–although that was a personal spat, apparently, rather than a public interview.

What’s up? We’re all baby boomers here, and we tiresome boomers used to crow about how we liberated the language (and a lot else) from the confines of earlier ideas of propriety, etiquette, and politeness. Some of this liberation was good, no doubt.

But there’s something to be said for propriety, especially in public life. Now Joe Biden, in an article in the 3/21/05 New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “The Unbranding,” is quoted as saying, “What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn’t give President Clinton the authority to use force” have now become, he said, moral interventionists. “Give me a fucking break.”

Does this make you want to vote for the man in 2008? Does it make him seem more “muscular?” Does it make him seem young and hip, or merely juvenile? To me, it’s the latter.

I’m a child of the 60s myself, and not averse to an F-word here and there in my private life. But I can’t imagine Roosevelt or Truman giving an interview and purposely using language that they no doubt were familiar with, but thought should be confined to private life, if uttered at all. They were aware that there’s public and then there’s private words, and as leaders of the Western world they had some funny notion of retaining a little dignity in public discourse.

ADDENDUM: By the way, spellcheck agrees. It wanted me to replace “assholes” with “assails,” and “fucking” with “bucking.”

How about those anti-Clinton bumper stickers?

The New Neo Posted on by

A commenter named Nick writes, in response to this post of mine:

I remember seeing a lot of anti-Clinton bumper stickers when he was elected. These two come to mind immediately…

“Inhale to the Chief”
“Don’t Blame Me. I Voted for Bush”

I’m not sure whether the Clinton ones ever became quite as popular… or whether they were as ferocious as some of the current Bush ones, but lets not forget about them. Both sides have played this game.

So, have both sides played this game? To a certain extent.

But as Nick himself suggests, the enmity towards Bush seems both more widespread and more vicious than that towards Clinton. For this reason I think there is a qualitative difference; I don’t think that Bush-hatred is merely a mirror image of Clinton-hatred, although Clinton-hatred certainly existed.

Look at the two bumper stickers Nick mentions. They are critical of Clinton, it’s true, and the first one is hostile (the second one reminds me of the “Don’t Blame Me, I’m from Massachusetts” post-Watergate sticker that I mentioned in my earlier bumper-sticker post, and was no doubt modeled after it).

But neither of these stickers even begins to approach the depth and scope of the hostility displayed (and even gloried in) by the Bush ones: calling Bush an idiot, calling his Presidency a “regime,” comparing him to Hitler. What’s more–and I don’t believe it’s just because I live in a blue state now–the number of cars sporting these extremely negative anti-Bush stickers was far greater than the number displaying the anti-Clinton ones, which as I recall were few and far between (and I lived in a purple state back then, so I would have expected to have seen a fair number of them, if so many had actually existed).

There is no doubt that there was a fringe element almost psychotic in its hatred of Clinton, accusing him, for example, of murdering Vincent Foster. These people I condemn in the harshest of terms. But, at least to my knowledge, this element represented a far smaller percentage of the Republican party compared to those who suffer from intense hatred of Bush, which is practically a mainstream position among liberal Democrats.

During the 2004 election, the ratio of Bush-hating to Kerry-loving bumper stickers seemed to be about 3 to 1. I believe that the degree of negativity in that 2004 campaign was an unprecedented event in modern politics. Let’s hope it’s not a trend.

Welcome: first day of spring (hope springs eternal)

The New Neo Posted on by

We here at neo-neocon (that’s me!) wish to officially welcome the first day of spring. It’s today, in case you didn’t know–I didn’t, myself, till I heard it on the radio this morning.

I’ve lived in New England for over thirty years, doing some time in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, and I have to say that here, the first day of spring is usually met with a derisive snort: you call this spring? Today is actually rather nice and sunny, but there’s still quite a bit of snow on the ground, and I would wager there’s more to come. But we know that the snows to come will melt far more quickly than before, and that gives us hope. A corner has been turned (I didn’t want to make this post at all political, but it occurs to me that maybe this is a good metaphor for what’s been happening lately in the Arab world).

At any rate, I plan to start thinking about gardening. That’s what people do in New England on the first day of spring–think of the next task (is that a metaphor, too?)

And here’s an excerpt from a Robert Frost poem describing the time of year that’s about to come any moment now, known as “mud time” in New England, for obvious reasons (the poem takes place in April rather than March, but I hope you’ll grant me some poetic license):

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You´re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you´re two months back in the middle of March.

So, go out and enjoy that sun, and enjoy the hope that goes with it!

Fun with sitemeters

The New Neo Posted on by

According to my trusty sitemeter, already today I’ve gotten three–count em, three!–people coming to my blog as a result of Google searches for “Lebanese women cleavage flag.”

Welcome! Isn’t the blogosphere wonderful?

(For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, see here.)

How much credit? The AP gets into the business of editorial writing and answers, “not much”

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, the AP. Read how they report Bush’s radio speech today, in which he claims that the war in Iraq has inspired democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran.

Yesterday I asked the question: how much credit does Bush get for the anti-Syria protests in Lebanon? Today, the AP answers: “not much.”

To begin their article, the AP quotes a few lines from Bush’s speech. Then, without further ado, the writer of the piece, Jennifer Loven, skips to this:

With his primary rationale for the war ”” Saddam’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction ”” discredited, Bush has turned to the argument that the war in Iraq was justified because it freed the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and now gives the Middle East a model for democracy.

Those who read blogs know that freeing the Iraqi people was always a rationale for the war, not one “turned to” because the “real” rationale was discredited. I would have hoped that newspaper readers–not to mention AP writers–would know that, too.

The article goes on with another quote from Bush about recent progress in Iraq. Then we hear some more from Ms. Loven about how bad it all is nevertheless:

Against that progress, insurgents have carried on a relentless campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings while rampant crime, power outages, unemployment over 50 percent and a fuel crisis in one of the world’s prime oil-exporting countries continues. Even as the Iraqi legislators convened, they did not set a new date to meet reconvene, elect a speaker or nominate a president and vice president. Some have questioned Bush’s repeated claims that recent democratic developments in several global hotspots are due to both the Iraq war and his second-term drive to push for reforms in friend and foe.

Hmmm, “some have questioned.” Is it possible that Jennifer reads Benjamin in Michael Totten’s comments section? Will wonders never cease?

She goes on:

Still, the President has pointed to democratic gains…

So still, still, in the face of all of this, Bush has the gall and the stupidity to point to those gains. Would that, instead, he had Jennifer’s ability to see the true picture.

EVENING UPDATE: Hindrocket at Powerline concurs. It seems that Ms. Loven wrote some AP articles in the lead-up to last fall’s Presidential election that were more or less indistinguishable from DNC press releases. I guess she’s nothing if not consistent.

How much credit does Bush get for the anti-Syria protests in Lebanon?

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise that we’ve seen the usual disagreements about how much credit Bush gets for the recent dramatic “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon. For example, in the comments section of this post of Michael Totten’s, someone named Benjamin objects to Totten’s calling it a “revolution,” or tying it directly to Bush’s actions:

Although you [Totten] are anxious in your article to trumpet the apparent success of US foreign policy as regards Lebanon, you don’t acknowledge the internal dynamic of Lebanon’s politics which has been building since way before Dubya was President, and which is influenced by many other factors… Indeed, you are anxious to ‘claim’ the Arab street, just as the other lot did earlier. I am not sure how useful that is, or indeed accurate.”

Well, Benjamin, I hereby submit that it’s both useful and accurate. “Useful,” because it’s good to relate causes to effects, even if the causes might only be partial or contributing causes. “Accurate,” because simple logic indicates that there is some sort of causal relationship. True, we don’t have a classic experiment here in which we have an alternate universe as a control, a world in which the US never liberated (and yes, we can now say “liberated”) Iraq and Bush never criticized dictatorships in the Arab world, so we’ll never know for sure. But how useful or accurate is it to fail to connect some fairly obvious and close-together dots?

My take on it? Whatever gradual, step-by-step approaches Lebanon has taken since 1991 towards a more representative government free of the Syrian occupation, Bush’s contribution can’t be denied, unless one is desperately looking to deny it. It as though goods were being laboriously transported by mule pack through some steep canyon pass, and then suddenly a helicopter swoops down and hoists the mule, pack and all, aboard. The goods are going to get to their destination a lot sooner, and it doesn’t make sense to say, “Oh, well, the mule was carrying those packs there anyway, so what help was the helicopter?”

Just ask yourself: if not for Bush and the war in Iraq and most particularly the Iraqi elections of 1/30, do you think these anti-Syrian demonstrations would ever have happened? And, if so, how many people do you think they would they have drawn? The Iraqi war has energized and emboldened this new Arab Street, which may in fact represent a heretofore “silent majority” in the Arab world.

Comments are now more user-friendly–I hope

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had a couple of complaints about the fact that this blog requires people to register fully with blogger before commenting. In the interests of becoming more comment-friendly (and because I finally figured out how to fix it), I’ve changed the settings and have now made it easier to comment here. Power to the people!

UPDATE: It’s come to my attention that, even though this represents improvement, there are still some folks who are having trouble posting. So, I offer this comments tutorial for those who are even more computer-challenged than I.

The following sounds complex, but it’s really very very easy. Trust me. Take a few deep slow breaths and I’ll walk you through it.

1) Click on “0 comments” (or whatever the number of comments happens to be) beneath the post, on the right. On the left of your screen, you will then be able to view whatever comments have already been made.

2) Click on “post a comment” on the lower left.

3) Write your comment in the blank box on the right of your screen under “leave your comment.”

4) Under that box, you are given three choices for signing in under “choose an identity.” You need to choose one of the three by clicking in the circle before your choice: “blogger,” “other,” or “anonymous.”
–If you choose “blogger”: this means you have to create an account with blogger. Those who already have an account, no problem. Otherwise click on “sign up here” and follow the instructions.
–If you choose “other”: this means you just sign in with a name of your choice. There is also a space to fill in your web page URL, if you want, but you don’t have to do this.
–If you choose “anonymous,” you’re all set to post a comment.

5) After typing your comment in the box and choosing your identity, you now can post your comment, or you might want to preview it first. If posting, just click “login and publish” (if you’ve chosen “blogger” as your identity), or click “publish your comment” (if you’ve chosen “other” or “anonymous” as your identity). That’s all you need to do.

If you prefer to preview your comment before posting it, click “preview” intead. Afterwards, if you look on the lower left, you will see your comment in a yellow box. Look it over, and if satisfied, click on “publish this comment.” Otherwise, click on “edit comment,” and then fix the comment. Then click on “publish your comment” (or “login and publish,” if you’ve chosen blogger), and you’re all set.

Simplicity itself, isn’t it?