Blogging the democratic revolution
Instapundit links a superb items on how technology is fuelling revolution in the Middle East and Central Asia. It’s a must-read. Read it here.
Alek Boyd has a disturbing e-mail message from someone inside Venezuela’s phone system, reporting the growing signs of a potential Internet blackout in beleaguered Venezuela. If so, this would be the first steps toward making the Internet as accessible to Venezuelans as it is to Cubans. And that’s not a step upward. Read it here.
Dedicated readers of Publius Pundit will have noticed that when I contribute to this blog, I attach a link at the bottom of the post to my blog, Window on the Arab World, and More! Up until today my blog was hosted by Blogger, a free blogging service which is wonderful for what you pay for it, but which otherwise has a variety of problems and limitations. I have today completed my design at my new Movable Type formatted blog, and will therefore be posting more regularly after two weeks of light blogging. That also means more posting here at…
None other than blogger Alek Boyd – who’s been featured in a Sunday front page feature in El Universal, the top newspaper in Caracas, Venezuela for his awesome blogging exposing the corrupt political networks of the Hugo Chavez political machine in the U.S., something for which the U.S. owes him a debt of gratitude. Who says blogging doesn’t lead to revolution? Check it out here, here and here. UPDATE: Free Republic has an excellent English translation of the interview. Be sure to read it to see the depth of Alek’s grasp of the current issues surrounding the Venezuelan government’s propaganda…
Just when you thought the Venezuelan Revolution was on its last legs, I discover this promising new blog in English called Notiven by Javier Caceres. It’s an occasionally updated blog that’s full of thoughtful analysis and commentary on the news. Javier’s got a new item up about Hugo Chavez’s likely plans to align and control the FARC narcoterrorist jungle guerrilla movement of Colombia. Well worth reading here.
This week’s carnival of revolutions is up! Find out what’s gone down.
Venezuela is the only country I know of whose Embassy employees in Washington are regularly commissioned to harass bloggers. Honestly, I don’t understand how this can be legal. We all get emails from them. They are worse than that, though – their crazed leftist “press” minions on the Internet, who have some sort of relationship with them, post bloggers’ home addresses, work places, phone numbers and e-mails on their sites. They also have called bloggers’ employers and attempted to get them fired. And of course they try desperately to find out who some of us are. This is all perfectly…
I just wanted to throw out an announcement that Nathan and the crew over at Registan.net are up for the Reports Without Borders Freedom Blog Award. If you are grateful at all for his coverage of Central Asia (and you know you’ve been there) then pop on by and vote for him!
Michael Totten and Jim Hake are on the ground in Lebanon, raising money for the Cedar Revolutionaries. I got this email from Jim just a while ago: I’m in Beirut, Lebanon to kick off a project to support the pro-democracy demonstrators at the "tent city" in Martyrs’ Square. Their goals are independence (i.e., Syria out of Lebanon) and free and fair elections. The tent city demonstrators are the center of gravity for Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement. They are leading the charge. They put together the massive demonstrations 3 weeks ago. As they go, so goes Lebanon’s independence. And so goes a…
The first edition of the Carnival of Revolutions is up. It’s basically a run down of everything going on revolution wise over the past week. Hopefully it can get a lot bigger, so save any links you go to and make sure to send them his way so that he can put together a huge, comprehensive carnival.
Miguel Buitrago at MABB blog in Bolivia has gotten word of four new blogs about Bolivia. See his roundup here. Apparently, blogging has taken off in Bolivia, a superb development, given the hammerlock assorted leftists have always had on news coming out of Bolivia. Now, we don’t need them, we get our news from Bolivians direct. Good work, Bolivian bloggers!
An amazing trend is beginning to show up, on all places, at Ivy League campuses. There, young people who were barely old enough to remember the collapse of The Wall in East Germany in 1989, have sensed a new something in the air and are making it their own statement. Attractive young Ivy League students, some of them sons and daughters of Cuban exiles, and others just interested in Cuba, are coming out and challenging the prevailing Che tee shirt logic of ignorance and stupidity. At Princeton, there was a big spontaneous demonstration against communism in Cuba. Other kids are…
I just got done reading David McDuff’s eleventh installment of Dragons and Democracy. Always a good read!
Wow! It was a quarter ago that I followed John Hawkins’ lead and published a list of my favorite bloggers. Have I been blogging that long already? Certainly my eyesight has gotten worse. Because of changing events in the world, my destinations are certainly different on a day to day basis and the list will probably reflect that. There’ll probably be quite a few changes from last time! But without further ado… 20. Neeka’s Backlog 19. Radio Free Nepal 18. A Step at a Time 17. The Word Unheard 16. Belmont Club 15. Blogrel 14. Barcepundit 13. Bloggledygook 12. Chrenkoff…
How’d I miss this? Here is a terrific Bolivian blog from a Santa Cruz perspective called Blog de Bolivia by Alvaro Piaggio, written with a fierce eye on Bolivia’s democracy struggle, in the context of other democracy struggles around the world today. Santa Cruz, Bolivia is the market-oriented, free-trading, libertarian half of the country, brimming with industrious immigrants, with a cold view of the communism preached by coca-grower Evo Morales. Alvaro’s blog is in Spanish but if you can read it, the perspective is crisp and fresh, not what we are used to getting from the jaded mainstream media.
Big thanks to Ian from The Political Teen for letting me know. This website was featured on Connected Coast to Coast at the end of the segment. What’s better? Ian has the video uploaded so that you can see. I’ll probably be including this link inside family Christmas cards for years to come.
The object of the caption contest was to fill in the rest of the sentence for this anti-war protestor Below is Sortapundit’s entry: “…the models used in this picture, but all the attractive Americans are Republicans.” Congratulations! You’ve won a one week blogad. I’ll be getting into contact with you to put it up. And thanks to everyone who participated. All of the entries can be found here.
It’s Sunday, and you know what that means! Actually, not much. Except that I’m catching up on my blog reading. Which means you need to check out that latest of David McDuff’s series of posts Dragons and Democracy, part 10!
Tomorrow will mark the second anniversary of Operation: Iraqi Freedom. Glenn over at Instapundit said it, I think, better than anyone. WAR CRITICS want to mark the anniversary of the war — there will be an “antiwar protest” at my local mall tomorrow and there are all sorts of events planned worldwide — but a proper way of marking the date would be with a mass apology to the Iraqi people, and to George W. Bush, for taking the wrong side at a crucial moment in history. Sackcloth, ashes, and signs reading: WE WERE WRONG, SORRY WE TRIED TO BLOCK…
You may remember earlier in the week a couple Bahraini bloggers were arrested and people protested. Well, they’ve been released and with an added boon to all of us: They’ve passed some pro-democracy legislation. The Cabinet yesterday appr????oved the Chamber of Deputies???????? decision to introduce human rights and democracy as subjects at the intermediate and secondary levels and asked the Ministry of Education to consider both subjects in its curricula development plans. Check it all out. MORE: Babbling Bahrania is certainly covering this well.
If any of you read the story of a Bahraini blogger being arrested for “hate speech,” then this is a very encouraging story for everyone. Chan’ad recounts how a row of 200 peaceful protestors along Hall of Exhibition Avenue were stared down by a phalanx of riot police. Tensions evidently heated up, with protestors staging a sit-down in front of the officers, but all remained peaceful and organizers eventually ended the rally early at 8:30 to avoid an escalation. Chan’ad notes that four people were inexplicably arrested before the protest even began, and that police had blocked off part of…
With all that’s been going on in the Middle East lately, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening elsewhere. At Bloggledygook I have an update on the situation in Ukraine, including the latest on the supposed suicide of Yuri Kravchenko and the implications of his demise.
Arthur Chrenkoff lands a sweet interview with Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. If you were a member of that “war cabinet” what three things you would suggest the United States should do that is not currently doing? We should be funding more (mostly private) radio and television broadcasting to Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The people in those countries know that they are being lied to by their governments, but they don’t know the truth, especially about their own country. If you read some of the blogs from Iran, for example (and there…
David McDuff — I got it right this time — posts part 3 of his series Dragons and Democracy. The new Utopianism, if such it can be called, consists mainly of a rejection of reason: while the socialists at least had arguments and a program, the new anticapitalists ???????seem to have sunk to a lower mental level.??????? There are roots and precedents and roots for this malaise. Conquest points to the emotionalism of postwar French intellectual life, when ???????much of the emotional drive had not come so much from a devotion to the proclaimed social transformation as from a hatred…