Wednesday, May 29, 2002

It's all about trust The whole objective of the terrorists is to reduce our trust in all the normal instruments and technologies we use in daily life. You wake up in the morning and trust that you can get to work across the Brooklyn Bridge — don't. This is particularly dangerous because societies which have a low degree of trust are backward societies." 10:09:51 PM     Thomas Friedman on "Fresh Air Who's the Enemy? "People here always thought the enemy was Microsoft, not Mohamed Atta." From Webbed, Wired and Worried 9:44:40 PM     "Will this déjà vu never end?" Salman Rushie on the India/Pakistan situation. Absolutely required reading. And he quotes the Spice Girls! The point is not to restrain Indian "aggression," but to make the world safer for us all. The situation can only be stabilized if India and Pakistan are both forced to back away, preferably to outside of Kashmir's historic, unpartitioned borders. This "hands off Kashmir" solution will have to be externally imposed on the reluctant principals and will require that a large peacekeeping force be sent to the region to support Kashmir as an autonomous area. But who in the West wants that — it's just the old colonialist-imperialist power trip, isn't it? And who's supposed to pay for all this peacekeeping, anyway? The answers to those questions are also questions: What's the alternative? Do you have a better idea? Or shall we just stand back and keep our postcolonial, nonimperialist fingers crossed? Will it take mushroom clouds over Delhi and Islamabad to make us give up our ingrained prejudices and try something that might actually work? In the immortal words of the Spice Girls, "Will this déjà vu never end?" 9:36:42 PM     Does anyone care about this? News about the changing of the guard behind the anchor desk at NBC nightly news. Who actually depends on this for their information anymore? I understand the longing for the days of a communal experience -- when we all got our news from the same two or three sources, and we could respond more cohesively as a nation. But that's just nostalgia for something famailiar from the past, not something better that has degraded. The news is simply better now -- more sources, more talent, more time (22 minutes is just not enough to spend on the news of the day). 8:21:12 PM

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