"Kids these days are so narcissistic"

I hear that every so often: that the way youth plaster their lives all over the Internet these days is a sign of their incredible narcissism. I suppose it's an easy way of fitting the way new media is currently used by youth into an understandable framework. It seems premature to dismiss it as just that though.

"Narcissism" implies self-indulgence: that the sharing of sometimes very intimate aspects of their lives with the entire world is an exercise in completely unnecessary ego-gratification. Ego gratification maybe, but unnecessary? Wanting a child so that your name might live on could be called ego gratification, but it wouldn't be called "narcissism" unless that's all that it was.

What else could be involved in youth expression on Myspace et al that would go beyond mere personal aggrandisement? I see three possibilities:

(1) Power. It's hard not to notice that in today's mediated world, media exposure and power in society are directly related. A person might readily conclude that amassing an audience could today lead to as much influence in society as amassing wealth has in previous years - assuming the audience likes what you have to say.
(2) Existentialism. Again a product of today's mediated environment, summarised by a quote I read somewhere describing the situation in high schools in the US today: "if you don't have Myspace, then you don't exist". Asserting a person's own personal life online might be seen as asserting their existence in a world which by and large doesn't care about them, or even know who they are, in an environment where they're surrounded by people who are asserting their existence, and validating the existence of others, through online media such as Myspace. Previous generations only needed to assert their existence to those relatively few people around them whose lack of validation might have led to existential uncertainty. Today's youth are connected to the entire world. Is it any wonder that they want the entire world to validate their existence?
(3) Identity formation. Tricky, this one. Premise: the process of growing up involves an adolescent defining their identity not just to others, but to themself. Premise: successful self-definition requires self-differentation: I am this, I am not that. Premise: successful self-differentation can only be done through reference to an external source which can describe to a person what certain aspects of their identity are or are not.

The peer group can be helpful here in determining whether someone, for example, is emo or is not hardcore, but the Internet offers new opportunities to ask more people the question "Who am I"?. In this approach the online exposure isn't asserting an identity so much as asking what that identity is: "here are my likes and dislikes in music, books and TV. Who does that mean that I am?", "In this blog entry I say I did this today, this is who I think that makes me, do my friends agree?". That's not the questions asked, but that's the subconscious subtext.

So there's more than one way to examine the embrace of "exhibitionism" online by modern youth without leaping to the conclusion that it's something negative like "narcissism", or for that matter, "exhibitionism".

Bad media coverage

My media environment seems to be awash in hysteria about (a) the Internet (b) emo subculture, and (c) the Internet and emo subculture of late. I had the misfortune of having my intelligence insulted when someone presented me with this woefully bad Today Tonight segment on the emo subculture in the wake of the double suicide of two teen girls in Melbourne. Last night my lecturer suggested watching Difference of Opinion on ABC as it was covering issues concerning new media, and both my boyfriend and I found it so cringe-worthy that we had to stop.

I'm no longer youth, but I was part of an "alternative" subculture, as well as currently being a heavy user of the Internet, and really, the reporting conventions for "evil youth subculture" don't change much. Henry Jenkins wrote a post on a similarly overblown US report on the emo subculture in "Dissecting a Media Scare", which basically describes Today Tonight's coverage as well - the only real difference being that Repentant Recanter didn't get a play in the Australian coverage, while Overwrought And Overtaxed Parent did. I guess the goth kids are feeling kind of thankful that they're not in the media cross-hairs this time, although they probably shouldn't relax just yet with headlines like "Drug use and gothic culture led to WA murder" starting to crop up.

The emo kids themselves are for their part distinctly unimpressed. Here's one Myspace user who seems to think that the trouble he's facing in life stems far more from the "concern" adults show at his subcultural identity than it does from the subcultural identity itself. I can just hear the cries of thousands of misunderstood teenagers facing off against their newly concerned Today Tonight-watching parents with that old teen trope "why can't you just let me be who I am?!!".

As for Difference of Opinion's "The Digital Revolution: Communications Breakthrough or Breakdown?", I really think it's the adult "experts" that have got things wrong there. The main argument against youth adoption of new media was the claim that they didn't understand the full implications of what those media were capable of doing. I respectfully disagree: I think they understand the implications better than those of us who haven't grown up immersed in them by virtue of having more experience with them, and perhaps also by having no preconceptions about how they "ought" to work.

Gay in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe: Gay activist goes into hiding.

How many people use the global nature of the Internet to actually examine the rest of the globe I wonder? Here's an article from Zimbabwe, where scarcity of resources has apparently led to a comma shortage. But I shouldn't sneer - not until I'm capable of understanding what the non-English parts of the comments say I guess. I find it a stark reminder of conditions for people in other parts of the world, particularly gay people in this case.

American interest in the refugee swap

Wildframe is an Australian blogger, but they present an interesting perspective on how the refugee deal might go down in the US. The post Republican's export Cuban refugees to Australia makes me think more seriously that this bizarre "refugee swap" is intended to benefit the US government more than the Australian government.

Australia, USA organise "refugee swap"

Okay, this agreement between Australia and the US makes absolutely no sense. Does John Howard seriously expect us to believe that offering boat people the possibility of ending up in America rather than Australia will have a negative impact on people-smuggling?

The conspiracy theorist side of me wants to say "no, it'll encourage it, and that's the whole point". The Coalition's had a lamentable lack of potential terrorists asylum seekers trying to enter Australia of late which they can struggle against with great fanfare. Nothing like trying to encourage a few to try it in an election year in order to recreate Tampa 2001.

Less conspiracy theoryish, but still in that kind of paranoid territory, is the thought that this is more about what the US government wants than what the Australian government wants, which would explain why Howard is doing something that doesn't look like it'd be very popular in Australia even among the "go back where you came from!" mob. Some kind of quid pro quo for David Hicks perhaps? This hasn't been reported in American media at the time of writing - no idea how US citizens will view it.

More prosaic - and therefore probably accurate - is the possibility floated by Asylum Seeker Resource Centre spokeswoman Pamela Curr in the article linked above:

Ms Curr said political pressure from Nauru had prompted the island nation to set boundaries on the processing of boat people bound for Australia.

"I think (Australia) is worried that Nauru's going to cut up rough and put pressure on the government to get these young men and boys off Nauru," she said.

Doubts in the US over the future of Guantanamo Bay may also have come into calculation, she said.

Besides the problems with their respective offshore refugee processing regimes, it strikes me as an awfully convenient way of basically ensuring that a potential refugee from Australia (or the US) can get further delayed from receiving refugee status by requiring them to restart the entire process of seeking asylum anew in the US (or Australia).

I can only guess at any of this, but even these kinds of possibilities seem less absurd than the reason the Australian government is trying to get Australian citizens to swallow.

A psychiatrist on the true motivations for torturing

Always nice when someone succintly summarises your own viewpoint.

Social networking site aggregators

I was expecting something like this:
Loopster Makes Friends of Social Networks. Techcrunch profiles efforts in creating "meta-social-networking" sites which try to transcend the limitations of having multiple disparate and incompatible social networking sites in existence. Various strategies of aggregation are discussed, with the featured site being a thing called Loopster

From the Techcrunch article:

Once you’ve registered with Loopster, you hand over your credentials for MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Live Journal, or your Blogger user name and click “Add”. This gets Loopster’s crawlers working.

Just hand over your credentials? Just like that? I would've thought there were privacy and security concerns to worry about. Not dealing with those issues is one way of dealing with those issues I guess. Then again, efforts that actually try to deal with these issues, like OpenID, don't seem in any hurry to get off the ground. Then there's the issue that the OpenID approach relies on co-operation of the social networking site to work, while Loopster's approach just needs a user's username/password combo to access any site that they can support, no site co-operation required. The Techcrunch article actually mentions Myspace's active resistance to this sort of arrangement:"MySpace doesn’t have an API for its site, and has been known to send some nasty C&D letters to people who crawl their network."

These meta-social-networking sites highlight an incompatibility between the desires of social networkers and the desires of the companies that maintain social networking sites. Your typical social networking site user wants as wide a selection of people to meet and services to use as possible. Your typical social networking site company wants people to meet other people on, and use the services of, its own site and no others to as great an extent as possible. The tendency for new social networking sites is for segmentation and specialisation, like the specialised services for dog-lovers, families etc mentioned in the Techcrunch article. I don't think that's what users want at all.

What users seem to want is compatibility between sites, but the sites themselves rarely if ever offer tools that facilitate this. Even where cross-site tools exist within a social networking site, the tendency is to use them in a way that promotes one site at the expense of others. Vox, for example, allows automatic crossposting to other blogs but defaults to a setting which posts only part of the entry with a "read the rest of this entry on Vox" link appended (an option to cross-post the whole post has since been made available at the request of Vox users, although it's not the default behaviour).

The whole compatibility issue may become moot if Myspace continues its role as the Windows 95 of the social networking world and becomes the only social networking site that anybody uses, but I'm sort of hoping that doesn't happen. It'd be nice to see consumers able to make their own choices about how they want to segment their social spaces instead of having it foisted on them by incompatible social networking regimes. It'd be nice too for people to be able to start using new and possibly superior services without having to address the "but everyone I know is on Myspace, not [different service]" issue. Vox, as noted above, sort of does this by easing migration to the new service through convenient cross-posting, but even Vox tends to sandbox its services by, for example, only allowing comments on the Vox blogs from registered Vox users.

One of the commenters in the Techcrunch article wondered if the meta-social-networking site would meet the same unsuccessful fate as the meta-search engine. I don't think it will. A meta-search engine doesn't really add any function to that already provided by a search engine, but a meta-social-networking sites actually provide a necessary functionality that social networking sites don't (won't?) provide in their current form: that of convenient cross-site communication.

Howard on Iraq

John Howard gives a speech on Iraq the night before I'm drawing up some notes for a discussion on Ausralia's involvement in Iraq for uni. Timing, huh? Plenty I could vent about, but suffice it to say that I'm amused by the headlines describing Howard's speech as a commitment to stay the course in Iraq. Didn't take long for that particular buzzphrase to return, did it?

Also, from Howard's speech:

In Kevin Rudd's case, it's unclear whether he is auditioning for the editorial board of The Weekly Standard or to be Australia's answer to Michael Moore.

Strange that Howard would compare Rudd to American political institutions rather than Australian ones. Was his speech perhaps more for the benefit of an American audience than an Australian one?

Viacom sues Gootube

YouTube/Google sued by Viacom for a billion bucks

I'm not remotely suprised that Viacom was the content provider who did this, given their strident, shortsighted, longstanding, not to mention abusive attitude to copyrights and copyright law.

Howard's powergame as seen by a first-year uni student

One useful aspect of starting to study humanities at university is that it exposes me to far more thorough and far more rigorous investigations of concepts that I've been previously been mulling here. Take a little concept by a person named Steven Lukes about "the three faces of power", for instance. He described power as having three faces:
1. Decision-making. The most obvious face, where an entity makes a decision and enforces it.
2. Non-decision-making, or agenda-setting. A more subtle exercise of power where the actual decisions that can be made get constrained somehow.
3. Shaping desires. An even subtler face, in which power is exercised not to coercively over-ride someone else's decision, but to actually change what they want, so that they come to the "correct" decision.

I'm pretty sure that the Howard government has actively focused on exercising the second and third face of power: convincing people that the most important issues on the agenda (agenda-setting) is the economy and anti-terror, and that economic rationalism and a militant attitude to tackling jihadism will give people what they want out of life (shaping desires?). I note that Labor under Rudd has apparently made some inroads on Howard by some agenda-setting of their own, specifically Rudd's repeated references to "compassion" as being something which should shape government policy.

GooTube

Users are going to make copies of your copyright content, so you may as well get used to it and embrace it. Video content companies ought to make it even easier for “fans” to use unauthorized copyright content uploads, instead of trying to deprive them of the content they are “fanatics” about.

What will the video content owners really get out of their “fans” exploiting unauthorized uploads of their copyright content? That is still Googley “unclear.”

So sayeth Google CEO Erich Schmidt, as reported by one of ZDNet's blogging types in this article: Why Google will never pay for content.

Content owners are far from thrilled at the idea that Google can basically make a profit through advertising via people watching the video content on Youtube which Google didn't purchase and which is very frequently in blunt violation of copyright law (and I was enjoying those illegal uploads of entire episodes of NBC's series "Heroes" until the uploader's account was suspended, too. Damn the Man!).

I'm not sure how Us copyright law works in this situation. The DMCA provides a safe harbour for Google from prosecution for contributory copyright infringement if they're not notified that a copyright violation is occurring on their system I think. But if they're provided formal notification, then the allegedly infringing content must be removed (a so-called "DMCA takedown").

It seems both Google and content owners feel that this system as it currently stands is unworkable. The'yre probably right. The sheer volume of content involved makes formal notification difficult, and formal policing costly. A lot of the dispute seems to revolve around the policing. Content owners want Google to do the policing, but Google wants content owners to pay for the policing. Google call this a "service" I guess, but content owners apparently prefer to call it a "shakedown".

I suspect that there'll be a lot of lobbying for changes in US copyright law from both parties. Interesting to see who wins out. Content providers seem better established to demand a stricter enforcement regime than the DMCA allows through its pro-business position, but, bluntly, Google's CEO basically articulated what the vast majority of Youtube users actually want, ethics and law be damned. To quote from one of the many people who left comments praising the "Heroes" uploader's efforts in providing full episodes to those not in the US and who are blocked from watching at the official NBC website: "dude, you're the Robin Hood of Youtube". Google would have popular opinion on its side.

Iraq the Model, and its fans

Iraq the Model, one of the few Iraqi blogs still supportive of a US presence in Iraq wants the "surge" to work, and rails against what they perceive as the "unrealistic expectations" of the "Surge" plan's many critics. Mildly interesting as a study in Strawman Argument 101, but what's especially fascinating is some of the commentary.

Some samples:

of course you will read or hear nothing about this glaring reality in the enemy-i mean mainstream-press.

The mainstream press isn't just "biased", it is an actual ENEMY.

The use of the term "last chance" is meant to convey how very discouraged all of America is in Iraqis' individual failure to step up to the plate and assume responsiblity for your own country.

It is uttered in the tone of the adult parents chastising the recalicitrant delinquent teenager standing defiantly before them, having just totalled the family car ... again.

Iraqis are all immature children who need a stern dressing down from those who command parental authority over them: the US.

You're correct. The phrase "last chance" is defeatist and is being used to undermine our mission in Iraq.

This of course blatantly contradicts the previous comment's explanation for the "last chance" rhetoric. But there was no attempt to resolve the contradiction. Unsurprising, really.

The surge will not be a test of the
Anerican military, it will be a test
of the loyalty, integrity, and bravery
of the Iraqi Army.

"Blame the Iraqis" is in full swing.

If you want to know whether a surge of U.S. troops in Baghdad will make a difference, listen to Iraqis like taxi driver Ali Mansoor, 38.

Did someone seriously suggest that we should be taking advice on military strategy from a taxi driver? Yes, they did.

the test is not for the US military and political effort, it is for the Iraqi govt and military and PEOPLE.

Just in case anyone was thinking that the "blame the Iraqis" game was limited only to blaming the Iraqi government.

People,
Do we have to install another dictator to get u guys to get along?

Speaks for itself.

The Left is getting desperate. They used the Diebold Machine and propaganda to gain control of Congress and IT DIDN'T DO THEM ANY GOOD.

!

But I think I'll let the one and only person claiming to be an actual soldier in the US army have the last word:

Marhaba....I'm a soldier stationed in Iraq. I've been here over 10 months, and will be here for six more, extended as part of the troop surge. I work on a Tactical Human Intelligence Team south of Baghdad.
Yes, this is the last chance. Quit whining about the choice of words. Fact: American soldiers are being killed by IED's on the roads, in my area. The Iraqi Police know who are planting the IED's, and do nothing. Fact: Iraqi police alert Jaysh Al Mahdi terrorists by cell phone when Humvees pass their checkpoints on raids. Iraqi culture is a zero sum game between tribes. Jaysh Al Mahdi is the biggest "tribe." Fact: Our civil affairs projects fund terrorists - bribes, shoddy work, protection money, corruption. At the end of this deployment, I will have been away from my family for 24 months. I have seen comrades blown apart by IED's. All for a people who are incapable of fixing themselves. I challenge anyone here to argue. I will inundate you with facts. I am non-political. I don't care about democrat/republican. -Masaalama.

German has such interesting lingual constructs

Learned a new word today: dolchstosslegende. It very roughly translates to "mythology of the stab in the back". Born in Germany to rationalise why the "invincible" German army was unable to win World War I, the myth has since migrated to another mighty nation which needed to explain why its "invincible" military failed to achieve victory in Korea, Vietnam, and soon, Iraq. Here's an old link describing the myth's origins and applications, as well as a reason for why the dolchstosslegende may not be successful at rationalising failure in Iraq.

Stabbed in the back!

A thought on neonconservativism

Ex-neocon Francis Fukuyama writes that neoconservatives have

a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends

.
It occurs to me that this statement isn't an entirely accurate description of neoconservative ideology. There's one form of "ambitious social engineering" which neoconservatives do back completely: government-sponsored violence against foreign nations. War, in other words.

It's interesting to note that the neocons' "ambitious social engineering" in Iraq (aka invading it and overthrowing the government) has led to the (in the neoconservative view) unexpected consequences of an Iraqi civil war and a newly powerful Iran, which are undermining the ends of democracy promotion in the Middle East that the invasion was supposedly aimed at achieving.

The Surge strategy as explained by World of Warcraft players

Kung Fu Monkey has found a perfect way to summarise Bush's Iraq Surge strategy: George Bush is Leroy Jenkins.

Observe:

Australia supports Bush's "surge" strategy?

From the Age:

Australia won't send more troops to Iraq but has has given its backing to an expected US plan to bolster its forces in the war-ravaged nation by up to 20,000

Hmph.

The token person with an actual military background that the Age spoke to was less than enthusiastic for the plan:

Former senior defence official Allan Behm is doubtful a change in US strategy will solve the violence tearing Iraq apart.

"The US decision will probably to put some additional forces but personally I don't think it's the right decision," Mr Behm said.

"I don't it will make any difference at all.

"I think that 20,000 is a number but the sort of forces that they need to pacify Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands not in the tens of thousands."

Couldn't the Age find a current defence official willing to express an opinion?

Is Bush a neoconservative hawk on Iran?

I would like to believe that the Bush Administration isn't actually trying to start a war with Iran. Threaten it, sure, but actually start a war? Surely even Bush can see that America, for all its strength, can't actually invade Iran and succeed at anything except creating more chaos, especially when it's not even able to control the chaos in Iraq at this point.

Maybe there's enough acceptance of reality in the US government to understand that invasion of Iran is not an option. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case for Bush's neoconservative backers, the ones who convinced so many people, including me I'm sorry to say, that a democratic Iraq was possible through military invasion.

Urgings for a military confrontation with Iran have been popping up in neoconservative online dens such as Real Clear Politics and National Review Online. All of the writers seem to take it as given that such a fight will be won by the US, so long as the US has the will to win. This bizarre belief that the US can do anything it wants to just so long as it wants to do it strongly enough has been dubbed Green Lantern theory of geopolitics by Matthew Yglesias. It's disturbing to think that there are people who want a confrontation with Iran on the basis of that theory.

But is Bush one of those people? He's still hanging out with the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute, the people who convinced Bush to basically wipe his ass with the Iraq Study Group report in favour of a "surge" strategy which is predicated on the assumption that "victory" is still an achievable goal in iraq, so it does seem like he'd be willing to buy an invasion of Iran if it's wrapped up in enough sweet-smelling bullshit.

And the bullshit coming out of the Corner and others smells especially sweet. Take this offering from Real Clear Politics: To Win in Baghdad, Strike at Iran.

Now there's a brilliant way to sidestep the festering issue of Iraq when talking about invading Iran: you don't have to worry about fixing Iraq before invading Iran because invading Iran is what will fix Iraq! Tally ho! Too bad it's such a tunnel-view of the situation. But that does seem to be a hallmark of neoconservative thought: complex reality gets ignored in favour of simple-sounding summations, in this case boiling down all the troubles in Iraq to Iranian interference.

Reading through, Mr Tracinski also has a clever way of saying why a declaration of war against Iran should not be viewed as a declaration of war against Iran: because we're already at war with Iran because of actions taken against US interests in the Middle East. Somehow I think that excuse will fly even less well at the UN than the excuse for the Iraq invasion did. Not that neoconservatives care about even token respect for international institutions of course.

Trackinski's article does seem to have an appeal if you believe that the world is engaged in a struggle between Good (the West and democracy) vs Evil ("islofascism" in all its forms). It also works if you believe that the US will decisively win an armed conflict with Iran. Bush believes the first. I don't know about the second. But given that he's still talking about "victory" in Iraq when the overwhelming majority of American citizens have given up on that being an achievable goal....well, it doesn't look good.

Saddam Hussein's death takes on a life of its own.

At the time I wrote my last post I was thinking the media dust would settle over Saddam Hussein's execution within a few days. I was expecting the execution to be a straightforward, if somewhat distasteful, procedure.

I was not expecting the execution itself to be so badly handled as to become a media issue in its own right.

An unofficial filming of the execution has reportedly surfaced, recorded on a mobile phone, in which I'm told the whole affair looks more like a lynching than a dispensation of justice (I have not seen this film and have no desire to see it unless absolutely necessary - snuff films are so not my thing). Even the local Murdoch press, hardly given to worrying about standing up for justice over vengeance when reporting punishment of people who are "pure evil", has registered a story which shows some concern in its own way when the truth about the execution came out: Jeers nearly stopped Saddam hanging".

I've spent an entertaining few days watching the fall-out, and especially watching the fledgling democratic government of Iraq falteringly try to emulate the example of the proud US democracy in dealing with events that reflect badly on the government in power: shovel as much bullshit at the public as you can.

From Yahoo News on Wednesday we have:"BAGHDAD, Iraq - The person believed to have recorded
Saddam Hussein's raucous execution on a cell phone camera was arrested Wednesday, an adviser to
Iraq's prime minister said."


From the Irish Examiner on Thursday we have:"Earlier, it was reported a man had been detained over making the video, but an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, Sami al-Askari, denied this."

Do these advisors even know the truth themselves?

Never fear, the Iraqi government is definitely investigating (at least until someone else in the government denies it I guess). Although, to hear that "the Shi'ite-led government, embarrassed by images that show a composed-looking Saddam subjected to sectarian taunts as a noose is put around his neck, has set up a committee to investigate who filmed and leaked the video" doesn't really bode well for me. The main problem from the government's perspective was.....that people got to see what really happened?

The official spin at the moment for the actual taunting and shouting that went on is that (a) Shi'ite militias infiltrated the execution and it was they, not government officials, who are to blame for what went on in the execution chamber:

"There was an infiltration at the execution chamber."

Echoing those accusations, a senior Interior Ministry official said the hanging was supposed to be carried out by hangmen employed by the Interior Ministry but that "militias" had managed to infiltrate the executioners' team.

"The execution was carried out by militias and outsiders. They put aside the team from the Interior Ministry that was supposed to carry it out," the official said.

An official execution video, which had no sound and ended before Saddam falls through the trapdoor, boosted Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's authority among his fractious Shi'ite allies.

and (b) the shouts and insults didn't occur in the execution chamber at all:

Prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon, who also attended the execution and told Reuters he saw two senior government officials film the hanging with their mobiles, said on Wednesday the taunts came from guards who were outside the chamber.

"These shouts were spontaneous. The guards who called out were outside the chamber," he told Al Jazeera.

Hmmmm. The blog Talking Points Memo is doing a far better job of tracking the confused and conflicting statements coming from Iraqi government officials than I can.

Obligatory "Death of Saddam Hussein" post

Coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution has reached a media glut. Today's Daily Telegraph front-page hawking the executioner's statement "HE WAS AFRAID, I SAW HIS FEAR" suggests that the media is going to wring every last drop of interest over the event of his death and anything remotedly connected to it that they can.

Really, things in Iraq have moved so far beyond the situation where Saddam is still relevant to current events on the ground that it's not funny. People are talking about the execution all over the place, but was Saddam anything more than a symbol of...something or other, depending on the viewer's perspective....by the time it came to execute him?

Commentary on the left-wing side of the blogosphere, apart from the expected principled opposition to the death penalty, has also included a hefty dose of speculation about the timing. To serve Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki's interests? To serve the Bush Administration's interests in Iraq? In Iran?

I doubt it's anything so Machiavellian. Most likely it was simply a desire tfor vengeance upon Saddam Hussein on the Iraqis' part, and a desire to salvage any kind of dignity over the disgraceful handling of the Iraq invasion on the Bush Administration's part.

But one small point for speculation: Bush unexpectedly delayed his announcement for his new plan of attack for Iraq until an unspecified later date, sometime in January. Is it possible that Bush was betting on a death penalty for Saddam Hussein being handed out in the December-January period? By delaying his announcement of a new strategy until, well, now or anytime after now, the last thing that the public will remember hearing in media reports for Iraq will not be the damning indictment of the Iraq Study Group, but the "Mission Accomplished"-esque event of Saddam's successful execution for his crimes. He is likely to have more support for increasing troop presence in Iraq now.

I wonder how many times Bush will mention Saddam Hussein's trial and execution in his announcement of the new Iraq strategy? I'm going to take a guess at...ooh, let's say eight. Fifteen if he takes questions from reporters.

The ideological differences between Fatah, Hamas and Al-Qaeda

I dislike the "islamo-fascism" label used by the Right for a number of reasons. One is that it mistakenly implies that Islamic extremism has parallels with early 20th-century nationalism, probably more in an effort to paint people with the Hitler/Mussolini brush than to help illuminate details of the ideologies involved. Another is that it misleadingly gives the impression that all strands of Islamic extremism are identical. They aren't. Comments by Al-qaeda criticising Hamas, and the armed conflict that has been starting to occur between Hamas and Fatah in Palestine, may be useful in scoping out the differences.

I've previously used the catch-all term "jihadist" to get past the false comparison with Italy and Germany pre-World War II. I think I need to expand my definitions to highlight the different strands of extremism within the Islamic world. Fatah, Hamas and Al-Qaeda are representatives of three different strands.

1. Fatah. I would call their ideology "traditionalist Islam", or perhaps "conservative Islam". It isn't a group that defines itself by its upholding of Islamic tenets, but its members all adhere to Islam. It's not really extremist I think, although it is illiberal to a great degree. Their political agitation is not caught up in the rhetoric of "Holy War" to my knowledge, focusing more on dealing with immediate non-religious problems in a way that is pragmatic rather than visionary.

2.Hamas. The word here I think is "Islamism". Islamism is a political ideology which expressly states that all politics and political process must occur in the way dictated by the religion of Islam. Or by the Islamist's particular interpretation of Islam, anyway. It is more idealistic and visionary than Islamic traditionalism: Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel, while Fatah sees this as an unobtainable goal.

3, Al-qaeda. Jihadist. The goal is similar to Islamism - a way of life that is Islamic - but the method of bringing it about is through violence. It's not clear to me if their specific goals actually extend beyond that call to engage in violence against the enemies of Islam.

In terms of how each group functions, there's going to be some overlap - Hamas is willing to engage in terrorist strikes, which is jihadist rather than Islamist - but I think those are the core ideologies of each of those three groups.