"Think of it as open source nation building," he says. Something like that - I personally prefer Dr. Martin Luther King's "Everyone is great because everyone can serve," but you get the idea.
Jeff's entire post is a very worthwhile read, and explains how his efforts, and those of many other bloggers, have made Spirit of America.NET what it is today. Still, this is just the first step. We all have much more we can do. More on that tomorrow.
And lest we forget the British, have a look over at leftist blogger Harry's Place and his "Do Something" category.
Joe: I am as obsessed with Al-hurayrah (Al-Hurrah) as Andrew is with Chalabi (and, lo! Andrew and the Economist were right!)-- but couldn't some Al-Hurrah funding be redirected to support the local SofA stations, that would eventually carry and popularize Al-Hurrah?
Hey, did he just out Armed Liberal?
The problem with Al-Hurrah, btw, is that nobody wants to watch it, because it is an attempt to make the US popular via cultural values that are anathema to religious conservatives. I know that "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" (or rock n' roll and blue jeans) played a large role in Eastern Europe's rejection of communism, but the Arab world is much more culturally conservative, and if democracy is associated too strongly with sex, I think it will turn people off. The challenge is to convey democratic values in a way that is entertaining yet not culturally offensive.
Any way, here's a great report on some soldiers in the field in Iraq.
asdf, A.L. outed himself on Monday.
asdf: there are two main problems with Al-Hurrah:
1. Bad design.
2. Bad implementation.
The design attempted to set up Al-Hurrah as a monolithic replacement for Al-Jazeerha. The implementation relied on Lebanese programmers and commentators (their accent and dialect screams, "we are not Iraqis!!!") and the extremely unfortunate choice of name-- Al-Hurrah is similiar to Al-Hurayrah (the 'kitten') in iraqi.
An infinitely better approach IMHO would have been to set up myriad small local stations (like SofA) that carried Al-Hurrah programming, and gradually fixed the meme (it is good to watch Al-Hurrah) in the population.
In the interest of adaptive change for Islam, sex is the most powerful memetic vector for change that we have at our disposal, and while it is true that it needs to be employed with finesse, that is not to make it more 'PC', but to spoof the memetic receptors.
asdf: BTW, I am sooooo not an XY being! Sheesh!