Why I blog

Pouring time into this blog has been deeply satisfying to me.  But what is this accomplishing, I sometimes wonder? 

After all, there are already numerous writers out there.  Technorati.com indicates that it is now tracking 48.5 million sites and 2.7 billion links.  Plus, there are numerous traditional sources of information (books, magazines, movies, television) available to anyone who is interested.

I don’t have any illusions about my alleged importance.  As Charles De Gaulle famously said, “The cemetery is full of indispensable people.”  Nonetheless, I joined the Blogosphere to have a voice and to hopefully present a meaningfully unique voice.  This blog is an experiment that will always be provisional and evolving.

This blog grew out of an email relationship between a fellow who lives in Madison (he goes by the name of Grumpypilgrim on this blog) and me.  I met “Grumpy” when I provided legal services for a company for whom Grumpy worked.  We had emailed our rants and observations back and forth for more than a year.  Eventually, I suggested that we exchange our ideas in a public way, in case anyone else might be interested. 

Two months later, dangerousintersection.org was designed by Nick Smith of nicksmithdesign.com.  I chose the name after looking at a big yellow “Dangerous Intersection” sign I had in my office (I had it around as a novelty) and after considering how that name might generally fit an iconoclastic blog.  I took the photo of the intersection used in the site’s logo. Nick made it …

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Is global television coverage the real cause of terrorism?

I've been thinking about why terrorism is such a hot topic these days.  I mean, bombs aren't new; they've been around for centuries.  Religious fanatics obviously aren't new; they've been around for millenia.  Fear isn't new; it's been around since the Dawn of Mankind.  People who are desperate or angry…

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What’s happening on the ground in Iraq?

In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. . . .  A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or liberation. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.

The above was reported by Nir Rosen.   On his website, Rosen describes himself as follows:

Born in New York City in 1977, Nir Rosen is a freelance writer, photographer and film-maker who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and other popular tourist destinations. 

Rosen, who speaks Arabic and who passes as Middle Eastern, recently wrote “The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds,” a piece that was published on Truthdig.com.  In this disturbing piece, he sized up the American occupation of Iraq:

In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to

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Coordinated violence and the frame of “war”

Imagine that it is broad daylight and you are attending a large public festival.  Now imagine that you suddenly realize that you are walking around in your underwear.  Perhaps you are one of the many people who would find it disconcerting to suddenly find that so much of your skin, and most every crevice, curve and imperfection of your body was exposed to public view.

This thought occurred to me while I was at a municipal swimming pool with my children.  I was surrounded by hundreds of people who were wearing swimming suits that covered no mobeach-at-nantucketre skin (and often less) than the underwear that many of these people likely wore.  Yet these people strutted about and proudly spread out on their towels and lawn chairs without any apparent concern that they were flagrantly exposing so much of their “private” areas to total strangers.

What is it, then, that convinces people to expose so much of their bodies to strangers in one case but not in the other?  It would seem that the context of being at a public swimming area constitutes a “frame.”

George Lakoff wrote of the great power of frames in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!  Know Your Values and Framed the Debate (2004).  Here is how Lakoff describes frames:

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world.  As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a

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