The Bush administration came up with this absurd concept of the war on terror as if terror was a tangible enemy that one could truly fight. And using this concoction the US conducted war style operations on civilian populations something that is not only immoral but it only fuels terrorism. Now the paradox is that US ally Israel, a country that truly is at war, denies being at war. And the results are awkward. When USA bombs Somalia as it did yesterday, looking for Islamic terrorists to kill and killing innocent civilians in the process ,the US government justifies its actions by arguing that they are at war with terrorists everywhere. But Israel instead who is at war with a Hamas led Gaza says instead that it is not at War. To me Gaza is a country regardless of whether it´s been recognized by most or not. It has borders, it is independent of the rest of Palestine in its policy making, it has its own government. And Gaza is at war with Israel. Rockets frequently fly from Gaza to Israel and Israel frequently attacks and invades Gaza. There is regular fighting going on. Now while I consider US policy fighting terrorism unreasonable and inhumane as terrorists should be fought by the rule of law, as we do here in Spain, captured, judged and imprisoned and not bombarded from the air I consider Israel´s policy equally confusing. Israel is not fighting terrorists, it is fighting a newly independent country whose government and population are hostile to Israel. Israel is really at war, not USA. And while I was a supporter of the Gaza withdrawal I do agree with many commentators who now say that the withdrawal was a failure and that a West Bank withdrawal would be suicidal. Gazans had a great opportunity to build a new nation and show the way for all Palestine. Instead they have continued to focus on Israel as the source of all evil joining the nations that prefer to play victims than to grow out of their problems. I have always wanted Palestine to be an independent country but unfortunately Gaza has made it very hard for tiny Israel to risk having rockets falling into its civilian population from all sides. In this blog and at my foundation´s I greatly criticized the Israeli invasion of Lebanon for example, an invasion that I considered unnecessary harsh, brutal and counterproductive. But with Gaza Israel has shown tremendous restraint and unfortunately it has not paid off.
2008 3
Blogs and languages
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Today, by mistake, I published the Somalia and Twitxr posts in my Spanish blog as well. As I did not want to erase them I left them there. And soon I had more comments on them than in my English posts. To me blog writing is a give an take and while I am not going to say that I am interested in all comments in my blog I am interested in enough of them to read them and truly appreciate them. Still there´s a mystery that I can´t solve. Why is it that my Spanish blog has 3 times the readership but 20 times the number of comments? Maybe I should publish my English posts both in English and Spanish since I get more comments and readers. Probably half of my Spanish readers speak English and I don´t like to translate my posts. Once a Spanish reader told me that he was surprised that such few people read me in English. What surprises me instead is that so many read it and such few comment on what they read.
2008 3
Air bombardment in Somalia
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
The BBC reports that the US Army is bombing civilian targets in Somalia right now because there´s a suspicion that there are terrorists around. Even if there were terrorists US has to stop its policy of air bombardments of civilian towns in which terrorists may be present. Think about it. There are probably Islamic terrorists in Madrid where I live right now. Should we get bombed then? Are we all fair game for USA to catch terrorists? And even if a terrorist is identified, should he/she be killed from the air or instead brough to justice as we do over here in Spain? Why is placing bombs terrorism and throwing bombs from airplanes not terrorism?
2008 3
The difference between Okorko and Twitxr
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Recently FonLabs launched two apps. One is a site that offers a simple way to measure the appeal of different web sites called Okorko (is it OK or knocked out?) and the other one is Twitxr (pronounced Twitcher) a tool that brings photography to Twitter, the messaging platform. Interestingly both were featured on Techcrunch as they were launched and both had the same initial traffic. But as I watch the usage in both platforms you can see that while Okorko is destined to be a niche site with limited appeal (it was launched as a geek answer to Hotornot), Twitxr is getting real usage from many people, including Michael Arrington who first trashed it but then actually got to like it, and it is growing nicely. The positive forces that converged on Twitxr is that it combines Twitter than everyone knows, photography that everyone loves with cross postings on Flickr and Facebook. A twitx (pronounced Twitch) is a moment that is capture by text, picture and geolocalization automatically available in many mobile phones. The easiest way to use Twitxr is to try iTwitxr with a hacked iPhone (the only type of iPhones that are really fun to use). As far as data is concerned we are getting around 5000 uniques per day 2 weeks afer the launch. The cost of developing Twitxr was around $10K and it will cost us around $1K per month to maintain.