And now, for a war

Just watched Powell’s news conference. Bush will speak tonight, followed by the bombs. As Fox is reporting “diplomacy is dead.” (Which implies that it was recently living, if not exactly thriving.)

What now?

1. I regret to say my immediate concern is research into how the web (and blogs) respond. Despite thinking it would happen sooner, I am caught a bit unprepared. I have a few hours to get things into gear. I’m hoping for a daily crawl, starting tomorrow. I’ll blog about this.

2. Protests are maximum effort with minimal response. I have always thought this, and think it now as well. It does have an effect: galvanizing the protestors, but it has a less significant impact than the time and effort would suggest.

3. What does have an impact? Economics. It is a simple thing: buy products manufactured overseas. Vote with your dollars. Will this have an impact on American workers? Of course! But the larger impact will be on the power elite of this country. An effective boycott of the US, not only around the world, but within our borders, lets those who do have influence — US corporations and their leaders — that they are vulnerable.

Within the week, I will set up a page that provides a listing of e-tailers based outside of the US. Order from them, and tell the national retailers that’s what you are doing. Buying a car? Make it Korean (or Japanese or German or… OK, you’re not going to buy a Panda or a Renault, but you get the idea). Bush has sold businesses on the idea that a war will improve the economy and decrease the uncertainty brought on by terrorism. Show them that war hurts the US economy. Make GM a peace activist!

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

3 Comments

  1. Posted 3/17/2003 at 3:13 pm | Permalink

    While I like the idea of hurting the US government where it hurts most by “voting with our dollars”, I doubt that method would have more of an effect than the widespread peace rallies and protest actions.

    I fear that it will once again only be the progressive liberals and enlightened that will do this while the lemmings remain asleep and not change their buying patterns at all.

  2. Posted 3/18/2003 at 12:12 am | Permalink

    I’m not sure what type of war blogs you’re looking for, but I’ve run across a few over the past few days:

    http://www.kevinsites.net/ [cnn]
    http://www.back-to-iraq.com/ [former ap/new york daily news]

    Rebecca Blood says (on her blog) this might be as a way to side-step government (ground rules? most likely) & pesky editors. Very interesting!

    What type of crawl do you use? Is this something that you’ve built yourself? I’d love to hear more about it.

    Happy blog capturing.

    Kaye

  3. halavais
    Posted 3/18/2003 at 3:34 pm | Permalink

    Kaye: Thanks for the helpful links! I am actually trying to check all of the blogs that post to weblogs.com and then isolating those that have war-related memes. Wish me luck: that’s a lot of coding to do, and I have some other time-eaters coming in soon.

    Alex

Post a Reply to Fabio

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>