OMG, Twitter is Useful

Although I still haven't "got a Twitter", and have no plans for "tweeting" in the very near future, I have come to the conclusion that the entire enterprise is not an utter waste of time. I remain sensitive to the prospect that serial texting isn't necessarily the best thing that has ever happened to literacy, or socialization, or motor safety, but the evidence to date pulls in both directions, and often defies intuition.



What's obvious is that there's no amount of language policing or Luddism that can hold back the tide of communicators going about communicating their various communications however they damned well please to communicate them. One of the reasons for the "micro-blogging" portal's seeming overnight success is the very immediacy of it. Giants like Google that were able to organize the pandemonium of such widely dispersed web content that fills the intertubes into easily referenced chunks did so by extracting relevance from search patterns that take at least some appreciable time to develop. Twitter, with its constant flow of real-time updates on all matters large and small, has managed to become as much of "the pulse of the internet" as we've yet seen.

Forget Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. (Seriously, try.) Never mind the ceaseless waves of narcissism that crash upon the weathered beach of basic human dignity daily. The purest expression of Twitter's potential as a medium in its own right with any redeeming value must be when the State Department prevailed on the San Francisco-based social networking site to delay a scheduled update that would have thrown a wet blanket on thousands of brave Iranian protestors just as their arsenal of cell phone cameras and texting pads were landing some blows on the hirsute chins of the Islamic Republic's ruling elite.

It's a perfect demonstration of the futility any fascist regime must face when matching 20th Century tecniques for suppression against more nimble 21st century technology. Worse still, for an outfit dedicated to the prospect of arresting or even reversing cultural evolution in a landscape so fecund for just that. Clearly, this generation of young Persians won't be flinging themselves into Iraqi landmines.

Death, Blood, and Glory

Bibi Netanyahu, just hours before taking the helm of Israel's new coaltion government, told The Atlantic magazine that Israel might put a military stop to nuke production in Iran if the United States isn't going to do anything about it. Echoing my chief concern, the new prime minister said:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs.”

No, Bibi, I sure as hell do not want that. That is the last thing I want. It is an actual danger. A mushroom cloud over Jerusalem courtesy of The Islamic Republic of Iran? Not so much. For once the religious miasma that hangs over the region sheds a bit of grace: although sacred to Jews and Christians, Jerusalem is far too holy a city in Islam also for any Muslim front to make it a glass parking lot, as one of Andrew Sullivan's readers points out. But Netanyahu, as if his remarks were not chilling enough already, goes on to say:

"When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran...

"Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they’ll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?”

The prime minister sends a message to the president that he's going to be a hardass, whatever accomodationist kabuki the White House is committed to carrying out. I say let the Israelis take care of business. It was hardly the end for US/Israeli relations when Ronald Reagan condemned our ally's action against nuclear facilities in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It would hardly be the death knell if this president parted company on virtually the same issue.