Posts, October 2003:

What is Truth?: Blogger Mark Butterworth asked a lot of pundits and bloggers what Truth is. He's now posted the replies and his comments. My answer was that "truth is a statement that accurately describes reality, allowing for the inaccuracy of human language [...]

Iraq a new Afghanistan?: Aftenposten quotes Rami Khouri, chief editor of the Lebanese newspaper Daily Star, who sees another Afghanistan emerging in the Sunni triangle: - It appears that Iraq has become a magnet, says Khouri. He has a background as an analysist for [...]

Krekar and Ansar: A few days ago I linked to this Christian Science Monitor article about the Rise and Fall of Ansar al-Islam. It explains how Ansar was modelled after al-Qaeda, was connected to al-Qaeda, but fell apart in its original form after [...]

CIA's stovepipe: This article by Seymor Hersh puts light on why the Bush administration got Iraq's wmd threat wrong, (which until we're shown otherwise I'll continue to believe). Mechanisms in the CIA that were intended to verify and filter intelligence data were [...]

Objectivity and neutrality: There's a misunderstanding that objectivity and neutrality is the same thing. The only meaningful definition of objectivity is to strive towards the truth. (This assumes you believe there exists an objective truth independent of subjective experience to strive for). Reaching [...]

Blog spam: Some "#!#/"¤/&¤"! has been spamming my blog with, well, spam comments for about two weeks now. Real spam, V1agra etc. A lot of it, most of it for old entries, so I didn't notice. I assume they're using a bot [...]

Petersen visits Arafat: Norway's Foreign Minister Jan Petersen visited Yassir Arafat in Ramallah this week, the first minister to do so in three months. It's a curious statement to make, and a curious time to make it. It offends the Israeli government, (which [...]

Dude, where's my bad-pun headline?: I'll say one thing for Dagbladet's review of Michael Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?: It's not what I expected. All the noise Moore's critics make must have breached the barrier to Dagbladet's alternate universe somehow. The American satirist, [...]

NTB discovers terrorism: NTB/Aftenposten headline of the day: - Terrorists behind bomb attack. - Terrorists were behind the car bomb which killed seven people in Baghdad yesterday, Iraq's Foreign Minister believes. At least six Iraqis were killed in the explosion. Terrorists? Surely not! [...]

The Peace Prize: If the Nobel Committee had really wanted to make a neo-pacifist statement this year, a repeat of last year's "kick in the leg" of George W. Bush, they would have withheld the prize, citing lack of candidates in a year [...]

Budgets and beer: I'm not qualified to discuss the national budget the government presented on Wednesday. But I note that it's a centrist budget. I note that cuts in taxes and expenses are mostly cosmetic. I note that one in five working-age Norwegians [...]

A common language on the Internet: Tobias Schwarz, who now also writes for the Fistful of Euros group blog, picks up on a discussion we had in January about language. It's mostly a recycle of an old post from his other blog, but it's a good [...]

They make more than I do: Ah, the joys of equality - full income tax records of every citizen available on the Internet. We're all equal before the Peeping Tom's here in Norway. Look, here's me. And here's the PM! Notice anything odd? That's right - [...]

NTB in anti-Bush frenzy: Is it me or has NTB, Norway's primary wire service, hardened the tone of its Iraq/Bush coverage? Perhaps the Kay interim report has triggered an escalation into all-out attack mode among NTB's journalists, or perhaps they were always this bad [...]

Woohoo's and gotcha's: When you have two opposing camps, it's always more pleasing to have somebody from the enemy switch and join your side, than for somebody who used to be neutral to join you. When a former neutral joins camp A, all [...]

Discovering neo-conservatism: One frustrating failure of the Norwegian media leading up to the Iraq war was lack of curiosity about the American motivation for planning a war. Why now, what had changed, what were they hoping to achieve? Answers, or rather assumptions, [...]

BBC, Blair and the feedback loop: Aftenposten's UK correspondent Carsten Bleness has written countless articles about David Kelly's suicide and the Hutton inquiry, barely mentioning with a word any of the criticism that has been directed at the BBC and Andrew Gilligan for "sexing up" his [...]

Anti-Nobel Prize nominations: Norway's Nobel committee has picked the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, and will announce it next week. As usual, the winner is likely to symbolize Norway's peculiar foreign policy attitudes (peace is a process, violence never solves anything, [...]

Out with a bang: Weekend, a recently started weekly paper which, having unsuccessfully tried to position itself at the lower end of the tabloid market, is already on the brink of bankruptcy, intends to publish an article that describes in detail how terrorists could [...]