The New Paranoia

[mishalak]

So here I am blogging as I always said I was. For myself. I've been posting lots of private entries to myself. They don't go into specifics about work, because how dumb would that be? But I do talk about work and with the way things are lately I don't feel comfortable even putting those out even as 'trusted readers only'. Despite how I go on about blogging just for myself it does feel different when I write things that no one but me (and the snoopy techs at 6A should I attract their attention somehow) will ever see. If I die I think I should like my journal to be opened up. All the private stuff put out there after a decent interval has been observed. Say, five years. I wonder if that will ever be a thing. Researchers using computers to cull through old journal entries for ground level views of history. I know that researchers on any period before about 1850 would kill for masses of such information. How incredibly useful would it be if there had been a dozen lower class individuals keeping track of their lives around the French Revolution? But do such things hold any value today?

I know my journal has a lot of value for me. It can show me things like how I really thought about something at the time rather than how I remember it in retrospect. That is how I know that I expected Saddam Hussein to have at least some pathetic/decrepit chemical or bio warfare works around, though I did not expect the US troops to face any actually effective weapons. Though I held my breath fearing that I would be proved wrong in a dramatic way. That it would be a huge vindication of the Bush Administration and I'd have to eat at least some personal crow. I wonder how many people also felt those sorts of fears and have not forgotten saying, "Oh I knew all along and so did everyone really in the know."

It is even more useful for the small things. The bits that I would otherwise forget to write down. Like my random experiments with food and/or alcohol. Right. I should probably do more beer reviews again. I have, until this week, had about one a night with dinner. This week I skipped for a number of days because I felt blue and did not want to have alcohol. I tend to get bluer under the influence.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I think the social historians would like the ones where people recite the trivia of their lives in huge detail, whereas I like to hear of people doing the unusual, especially if they write well. I try to entertain as well as document, and am always conscious of the ennui as I describe another trip into the mountains.

BTW, might be a little late at the picnic, as I'm meeting a friend at Boulder Airport's open day, and would like to see the skydivers arrive before I come on to the Ponds.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

You did know all along. You would have to have been superhuman not to have been a little uncertain in the face of Bush/Blair's iron public certainty.

I'm the other way around. My writing of the time shows me openly scornful of the pathetic public justifications, like the aluminium tubes fiasco or the canvas-sided "mobile bio-warfare labs". But I remember having a little nagging doubt, especially with Blair's broad hints of sekrit intelligence data: surely, surely they couldn't be bluffing with as poor a hand as that?

So yeah, having a little nagging doubt still counts as knowing all along. 100% certainty is not required, nor attainable, and would probably be hubristic anyway.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

It was not Bush or Blair. I just expected that Saddam Hussein would have a hole card. I mean seriously, if I was an evil bad dictator I would have one. Something to give my enemies pause or if it came to it to stab at them from hell's heart at the end. I was honestly surprised that he had given it all up and it was all public bluster on his part. Standing up the the US just to stand up to the US, not because he actually had any WMD works in the works.