Filed under: discworld, interweb, kingdom of the world, saving the world
“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol–well, okay.”
“Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I’ll grant you that, but–”
“Saving civilization from a horde of–”
“It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
“Yeah, but in the long run, what does Sarge?”
I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to figure out exactly what Twitter is good for. I think I might be getting an inkling.
Saving civilization from a horde of black-robed Mullahs?
We’ll see.
Twitter seems to be what newsgathering will look like in a post-Journalism world. CNN was 24 hours behind twitter in picking up on the brewing crisis after the election. And Twitter re-scheduled maintenance on their server farm to not interfere with Iranians using it. As wired put it recently, when commenting on the MySpace loosing ground to Facebook:
When your server farm’s service schedule has an impact on Middle East Peace you are onto something big — much bigger than which garden-variety walled garden has more members.
Unfortunately, at the same time, I’m disappointed to realize that Administration of Hope and Change is morally retarded. A President who’s afraid of speaking out plainly and strongly against the type of tactics used by a regime that is willing to send the Basij to shoot their own people seems like a disappointing successor to the people who marched in the 1960s. President Obama is right to worry that he’s on the wrong side of history when France and Canada can make stronger statements against the current regime.
This isn’t about invading and occupying a country. It’s about not giving a repressive regime a moral pass for crushing dissent.