Random Friday links

A few quick links. Here's a fun link from local blogger Christian Garbis about style in Armenia. It's funny because it's true. Here's a thread over at Crooked Timber which sucked up way, way too much of my time in the last couple of days. Short version: the Exile is mildly amusing and occasionally interesting, but, well, not all that. I just got annoyed at... well, read it only if you're a completist. I don't know why I'm even linking to it. Come to think of it, just skip it. Moving along. Achewood is one of the strangest things on the Internet. It's uneven, but when it's good, it's very good. Carlos enjoyed the severed head of Keith Moon, but I'm a fan of the Great Outdoor Fight. Totally randomness: this morning I heard Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" coming out of the radio. Damn, I thought, I haven't heard that on the radio in years... but radio here is pleasantly idiosyncratic, and all sorts of odd stuff gets played. This evening I find that Andrew Sullivan has posted the video. Go figure. (My God, Gabriel looks so young.) We're not finished with those chipmunks! More animated rodent madness next week. And that's all.

Comments

[Bernard Guerrero]

Bwhaha! "People obviously want to think that their cars can nail each other. That is a given." Hadn't seen that one before, thank you.

[Carlos]

Doug, you let abb1 get to you? Dude. She's like Al on Matthew Yglesias; there may be a set of core beliefs there, but it's 99+% reactionary blither, variety left, that takes about thirty seconds to wind into a knot of contradictions.

[Doug (not Muir)]

Actually, the CT thread is pretty entertaining. Sorta sorry I missed it. Ames was actually nice in the one-to-one interaction I had with him like a decade ago. I posted something semi-informed and semi-snarky to, I think, Johnson's Russia List and the eXile wanted to publish it. So I said sure, but I've never ventured to their offices to pick up my t-shirt when I've been in Moscow. Probably can't even find the writing anymore.

Anyway, the Applebaum book is better the further away it is from the present. She lays out a lot of facts about the '80s that contradict her beliefs, but can't quite change them to match reality. So she's honest but unsatisfying in the book. Her columns, though. Mmph. Wouldn't even get her into the top ranks of bloggerdom these days.

The observation (yours? v lazy today & won't re-scroll thread) that ed-in-chief of eXile is wacky and exciting in 20s/early 30s but sorta sad later on in life is dead on.

[Francis "I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me" Burdett]

Only tangentially connected with any of the above: slagging in emails and blog posts.

[I am venting somewhat and y'all are a completely disinterested crowd so my apologies]

Yesterday I received an email response from one of the premier political journalists in Ottawa. I was honestly shocked that I got a reply as one assumes that emails to journalists/bloggers are never read. I was actually somewhat elated to see his name in my inbox. Then I read the email. I was told that I was a "tedious" "pathetic" "loser" and that I should "Bugger off".

Every single reader of this blog has a thicker skin than I do and would not still be smarting from being called "pathetic" 24 hours after the fact. I am just weak that way.

A question to anyone: How to handle something like this?

[Francis "I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me" Burdett]

Only tangentially connected with any of the above: slagging in emails and blog posts.

[I am venting somewhat and y'all are a completely disinterested crowd so my apologies]

Yesterday I received an email response from one of the premier political journalists in Ottawa. I was honestly shocked that I got a reply as one assumes that emails to journalists/bloggers are never read. I was actually somewhat elated to see his name in my inbox. Then I read the email. I was told that I was a "tedious" "pathetic" "loser" and that I should "Bugger off".

Every single reader of this blog has a thicker skin than I do and would not still be smarting from being called "pathetic" 24 hours after the fact. I am just weak that way.

A question to anyone: How to handle something like this?

[Noel Maurer]

Sir Francis,

I'd need to know more context to be able to give you intelligible advice. After all, it could be anything from, "Way to go, you got him where it hurts!" to "Gee, man, sounds like you should apologize," depending on the situation.

Somehow, though, I suspect it's much more the former.

[Doug M.]

Bernard, click on the rest of that sequence. It gets better...

Carlos, not abb1. The whole Exile thing. Ames screeching about how America has no Politovskaya while the cops round up the Georgians off the street.

Other-Doug, Applebaum reminds me a bit of Paul Johnson. No, not the spanking... the "further from today, the better" bit. Johnson's _Birth of the Modern_ is a perfectly okay vanilla survey of the post-Napoleonic period. By the time he reaches the 20th century he's unreadable. On the other side of the aisle, Eric Hobsbawm.

Applebaum lives in Poland now and hs definitely been drinking the tap water there. Someday someone will write a good book about how Eastern European Russophobia, as moderated by the Polish and Hungarian diasporas, influenced discourse in both the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. The Russians made a lot of people hate them, with fascinating knock-on effects. Note that this may have more relevance to modern American policy than we might like to think.

Francis, I join with Noel in wanting to know more. But one possibility: post the response someplace public and high-traffic, ideally someplace that the journalist in question will hear about. Just a thought.

cheers,

Doug M.

[Doug (not Muir)]

Invading the neighbors is also an interesting dynamic to observe from Munich...

As near as I can tell, the current govt in Poland really is a bunch of nutters. Not that fractiousness on the right side of the Polski spectrum is anything new, but it has produced some very peculiar results this time around. Judging on the post-89 record, though, the next spin of the wheel can't be too far away.

You're also in a v good place to observe diaspora policy on US foreign policy, in re Karabakh and Azerbaijan. The ECE diasporas were pushing in a direction that the US ship of state was already heading, at least post-WWII. Cold War antagonist, meet exiles with grudges. The younger Brzezinskis, though, seem to have their heads on straight. And Russia is the closest thing that ECE has to a rival for the US, so a jaundiced eye is not completely out of place.

[Doug (not Muir)]

First sentence above should begin, "Having invaded..."

Someday, I will learn to preview, but not yet.

[Randy McDonald]

But one possibility: post the response someplace public and high-traffic, ideally someplace that the journalist in question will hear about. Just a thought.

Speaking from personal experience, that's what you do only when you feel a need to carry on the dialogue. Some people just aren't worth the grief they give you.