"you know, we want to harm America."
-George Bush, Meet the Press, Feb. 8, 2004

This Week in The Guardian:

"The Bush administration makes no secret that it sees the Iraq war as the prototype for future conflicts; indeed, it has enshrined the idea in its official national security strategy document. Pre-emption remains the Bush doctrine. Witness Donald Rumsfeld's revealing remarks in Munich last week. Asked whether America is bound by any international system, legal framework or code of conduct, the US defence secretary replied: "I honestly believe that every country ought to do what it wants to do ... It either is proud of itself afterwards, or it is less proud of itself." Translation: the US can do what it likes - including making war on countries that have made no attack on it."

One of the nice things about the net is that you can read things like this before they are old news, but I am curious that the press here is the US (the supposedly "liberal" press) didn't report these remarks.

Arguements with Oneself

When you are trying to be honest with yourself in an academic environment you are often obligated to take stands contrary to those you would like to hold to make sure that you are coming to the right conclusion overall. It's a conflict between beliefs and thoughts

I do believe that the Internet is a medium that can advance democracy and that unlike older media it's relatively low costs of access and production give it certain advantages over other media capable of having mass reach. The problem is that while that is my belief, I'm also aware that there are other factors acting on us. I find the paper that we are reading very "Americacentric", and that given that we are not the only democracy it helps to look further afield to other experiences. I'm particulalry taken by Popper's concept of the Open Society, which is less about particular media and more about how we approach the place of people and communication (especially unpopular communication) in the body politic. Or as Pericles said:
"Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it."

This is democracy, and it happened over a millenium ago.

On another level though, Sherry Turkle has noted in last week's Chronicle that computers shift the communication from content values to presentation values. Got to think about that one.