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Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

One blogger’s rant to another: for AbuM

by Charles Cameron

Abu Muqawama seemed a reasonably nice and interesting guy, so I invited him in.  He came into my living room and was holding forth on Afghanistan and Iraq and matters military, and he seemed well informed.  I was glad I’d invited him in, and from time to time I found myself over in that corner of the room, and I listened. 

I think it’s important to learn from reasonably well-informed people, so I invite them into my home.  That’s the basic exchange that happens when you write a worthwhile blog: people invite you into their homes to listen to you.

When I invited Abu Muqawama into my room the other day — Andrew Exum, of the Center for a New American Security, that is — he happened to be talking about Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a top Hamas sheikh who converted to Christianity a while back, and was run as an inside agent by the Mossad for years.  Yousef has a new book coming out, and that’s why Exum and others have been taking an interest in him this week.

I turned to Exum and told him my own thoughts on the matter, but Exum didn’t respond, which is not ideal, but he’s a busy guy, okay — and anyway we were interrupted at that point.  Unfortunately, Exum seems to have had a drunken friend with him when he came into my living room this time, a ranting, homophobic drunk who spewed comments across my Bokhara rug (it’s not like it’s a museum piece you know, but I like it, I like it) such as…  well, let me quote his comment on Yousef himself, his conversion and his spying:

He’s probably celebrating Ask and Tell, say it proud, say it loud, it’s raining men in the Military. Hell, he’s probably volunteered to be the first gay in a submarine, along with all the pregnant sea persons. Gay. He probably saw Brokeback Mountain one too many times in that Israeli prison. Them Jews are smart, making gays out of Islamist, letting them sodomize each other.

Utterly charming. The only problem being, it’s not the sort of conversation I really want in my living room.

It is, Andrew Exum, should you ever read this, distinctly uninvited.

If I lived in a rowdy bar, perhaps, and slept in the sawdust during the day?  But I don’t. 

There are, by one count, around 15 such comments on that particular post on Exum’s blog that — what shall I say? will make me think twice about inviting Exum over to my place unless I can find a grownup to vouch for him first?

Look, there was another commenter on that particular blog post who told Andrew — if he was even listening — that that he was letting his blog “be ruined by not IP banning the moron”.  And I excerpted that phrase and put it in quotes because the commenter was plainly annoyed by this time and his own language was getting a little salty.

I think he had a point.  Exum wants into the living rooms and offices of people like myself: that’s why he has a blog.  Exum works for CNAS, which is an interesting group with friends in fairly high places, like Michele Flournoy.  Their logo is atop Exum’s blog these days, though I remember when it was just this young soldier’s blog, and no less interesting for lack of official sponsorship.

But look, today it is part of the web-presence of the much touted Center for a New American Security, so they’re in my living room, too.  And you might think they’d have a concern for their reputation.

I’m a reasonably civil chap — brought up in England, and a bit old school, you know — so I fished up their email address and asked them very politely if they would remove comments like the one from “Bubba loves them Sabra girls”.

Somehow, I don’t see them letting someone stand in their office suite handing our fortune cookies that read “Bubba loves them Sabra girls” — do you?  I don’t want them to think they can encourage that in my home, either.  I tried to tell them that politely via email, but that was almost a week ago, and I don’t think they read all their email.  And almost that long ago, the same comment poster who had complained earlier posted again, this time saying:

Rofl, this is amazing. 1 guy with 15/21 comments in a thread. Exum, you’re being an idiot. I’ve read this blog for well over 3 years now, and this is terrible. You’re letting your blog sink.

It’s truly sad. It would take 2 seconds to moderate this blog.

 He’s right, you know.  Exum isn’t an idiot, but his tolerating this sort of trolling on his blog is idiotic.  Exum would like to make conversation with anyone who’s listening, but he doesn’t appear to be listening himself. 

Look, this is all focused on Abu Muqawama, who doesn’t entirely deserve it.  And I understand: he’s a busy man.  But I love this internets thing, and I happen to think it’s an opportunity for all of us.

There are blogs out there for hatred, blogs for poetry, blogs for discussing issues in Byzantine history or Catholic liturgy, blogs for porn, blogs for someone and the cousins to share photos of their pets and kiddies, lots and lots of blogs.  But within the enormity of the ‘sphere, there’s an opportunity for civilized discourse on matters of significance.

Abu Muqawama aspires to speak in that place, as does Zenpundit, as do I.  We are trying to build a conversation of informed insight across the webs, blog calling to blog, in a project that might make the world a little wiser and less liable to suffer the consequences of ignorance and prejudice.

If, like Abu M, you are a web notable, and you blog — as I see it, you have an opportunity and an obligation.

I want to say this quite clearly, because I invite you and your peers and friends into my living room and into my life, every day:

You have an obligation to listen, as well as speak.  You have an obligation to read the comments in your blog — or if you’re too busy, okay, to have an intern read them for you, and select the best for you to read — and you or your intern have a responsibility to notice when some foul-mouth splashes your pages with regurgitated bile, and to clean up the mess. 

Today, a person in Hong Kong, using Google translator to read a post on cognition, was the 500,000th visitor to Zenpundit.

Thank you to all the readers, commenters and blogfriends whose repeated patronage of ZP made this milestone possible! Looking ahead to the 1 million mark now 🙂

The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama by Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman – just arrived in my mailbox yesterday. Flipped through it today and scanned the index; it looks like a book that would appeal to both “political” bloggers, including Nixon aficianados and the security-defense-foreign policy types who compose a large segment of the readership here.

This year I decided to keep track of all the books I read and see what conclusions I could draw from that experience. I learned a number of interesting things.

First, I did not read nearly as many books cover to cover that I thought I would, though in fairness some of them were a) large and b) ‘hard”. Those I had to read for a grad program were also tedious in the sense of often being composed in the worst kind of academic jargon being overused to convey relatively simple arguments. That said, I could probably have read more than I did. Partly, the problem was a tight schedule and partly it was a case of my reading time being taken consumed more by blogs, PDFs, email, listservs, e-zines and news. All useful but not the same thing as deep reading provided by books.

Secondly, the variety of reading material was not as diverse as I’d have liked, though that is unfortunately the nature of formal programs of study. By definition they are narrow and drill down. I need to add more science and more literature to my repetoire.

Without further ado, my list:

Classics and Ancient History:

The Anabasis of Cyrus by Xenophon ( Wayne Ambler, trans.).    
On War by Carl von Clausewitz (Michael Howard, Peter Paret, trans.)
Caesar’s Commentaries On The Gallic War by Julius Caesar
Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge
How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

War, National Security, Military History and Strategy (Modern):

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush by Thomas P.M. Barnett
Threats in the Age of Obama by Michael Tanji (ed.)
The Culture of War by Martin van Creveld
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P.W. Singer
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant T. Hammond
Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton
The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer
The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America by Douglas E. Schoen
This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang by Samuel Logan

Islamic World:

Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future by Vali Nasr

Society, Arts, Literature and Science:

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
Fatal Revenant: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Give a Little: How Your Small Donations Can Transform Our World by Wendy Smith

Educational Theory, Learning and Schools:

Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality by Charles Murray
Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 by Rafe Esquith
What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action by Robert J. Marzano
Teaching What Matters Most: Standards and Strategies for Raising Student Achievement by Richard Strong
Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work by Robert E. Eaker
Getting Results With Curriculum Mapping by Heidi Hayes Jacobs
SuperVision and Instructional Leadership: A Developmental Approach by Carl D. Glickman
Pretending to Be Normal: Living With Asperger’s Syndrome by Liane Holliday Willey
Dealing with Difficult Parents by Todd Whitaker
The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
School, Family, and Community Partnerships : Preparing Educators and Improving Schools by Joyce Levy Epstein
American Public School Finance by William A. Owings
Ethics Of School Administration by Kenneth Strike
Ethical Leadership in Schools: Creating Community in an Environment of Accountability by Kenneth Strike
Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues by James Noll
Teachers and the Law by Louis Fischer
Practicing the Art of Leadership: A Problem-Based Approach to Implementing the ISLLC Standards by Reginald Leon Green
On Common Ground: The Power of Professional Learning Communities by Roland S. Barth
Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan
Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching by Carol A. Tomlinson
Studying Educational and Social Policy: Theoretical Concepts and Research Methods by Ronald H. Heck
Data Analysis 2nd by Victoria L. Bernhardt

Currently Reading Now:

The Call of Nepal: My Life In the Himalayan Homeland of Britain’s Gurkha Soldiers by J.P. Cross
Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count by Richard E. Nisbett
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism by Howard Bloom

Related:

I also make use of a Kindle            

The unpleasant outside project that I have been working on for the past year and the last month and a half in particular is finished and put to bed forevermore! It’s a relief to have a large chunk of my time back which I can now use to blog more often, to relax and to catch up on my Antilibrary which has swollen to a vast pile of sixty five unread books, many of which are relatively “current”. I’ve already started digging in to them and I’m going to return to my formerly rigorous exercise regime that has slowly dwindled under the weight of more sedentary commitments. I have two ideas for some writing projects that I am going to pursue now even as my posting velocity here at ZP will increase in the coming weeks.

I’d also like to take a moment to thank Charles Cameron and J. Scott Shipman for stepping up and guest posting here in November – it was a great help to have them writing some excellent posts precisely when I had the least amount of time to create my own. Much appreciated gents!