Yeah, I know, I’ve said that before. Unfortunately, I’m afraid upcoming world events will compel me to say it again fairly frequently from time to time. Actually, now that I’ve said that, I think the rest of this entry is going to be more thoughts on blogging than thoughts on war. When I originally started this blog, I wasn’t real sure what I was doing, but I wrote this item on what I thought a blog was, or should be. And more recently, I wrote this entry about what I’m doing, or trying to do,here.
Now I’m looking at a bunch of articles I’ve collected over the past week concerning the impending slaughter in Iraq, intending to weave them together into another political rant here. But somehow it seems redundant. It’s not that I’m bashful about voicing my political views (or even cramming them down people’s throats). And, as I mentioned in that previous entry, this blog is about stuff that interests me; others can take it or leave it. But I do want it to be as original and unique as possible. I want to avoid the tactic, mocked in a Doonesbury strip, of regurgitating items from mainstream media. If I’m going to cite news articles here. I either want to find offbeat stuff that people might not have seen, or provide some original personal slant on the news. I don’t see much point in simply providing links to widely-published articles and saying “This is good” with no further comment; that doesn’t meet my originality goal. Most of the people reading this are fairly literate and capable of finding their own news (and some have even sent me references to good articles). And most of what I’ve read this week has been from the NY Times, so it’s likely that most people reading this have already seen the same articles, or similar ones. And they’ve been so well written that it’s tough for me to add any relevant comments . So, as I said, although I felt the need to reiterate my opinion that war sucks, I don’t see much point in repeating a bunch of information easily available elsewhere reinforcing that opinion.
I did receive one item through a mailing list that’s a little more obscure, so I think it’s worth mentioning here. It was the text of an article by a public health physician who just returned from a mission to Iraq. A quick search on the author’s name found the same article on the Counterpunch website. I’d never heard of Counterpunch before, so maybe you haven’t either. So maybe it’s acceptable to show you this article and say “This is good”.