make clean: spanning

2006/08/14

spanning

tonight, while spending a few hours hacking code, i happened to spot the lineup on cspan for the evening. put it on and just listened for four hours straight.

the first speaker was the president of iran (mahmoud ahmadinejad). this was his interview on 60 minutes, which lasted quite a few more than that. it seemed to basically be a farce - he made light of any serious questions thrown at him, and avoided answering anything directly, as much as humanly possible (despite being pursued about the subjects). i realize this is to be expected from a politician, but it really was disappointing that he seemed to have no interest in trying to be understanding about the world around him. many of his arguments were deeply flawed on a number of levels. i was unable to be at all convinced of him, and i don't think it had anything to do with the translator.

second was bush who, despite giving a decent speech for once (not perfect, but among the best i've heard from him), received not a single bit of applause (albeit from a crowd of press). he handled the questions quite a bit better than i'd seen him do in the past. almost gives me some hope.

third was the prime minister of israel (ehud olmert + benjamin netanyahu). i really didn't know what to expect here. i guess neither was particularly overwhelming. olmert seemed to have a very controversial reception (which tells me that i have no understanding of the issues being discussed, despite having an english translation). several people of...some...party had to be removed during his talk, which came as qutie a surprise to me. netanyahu was more moderate (in my perception, at least), and had what appeared to be a more calm reception

finally was the leader (secretary-general - who or how many he speaks for i don't know) of hezbollah (hassan nasrallah). immediately claiming victory as a result of the u.n. truce, it's never really explained as to why he believes it to be one (there is some consensus that they are victorious simply by virtue of the fact of still being alive - i'm not sure the extent of the meaning behind this). his forces are continually referred to as ``the resistance''. this seems odd to me, as the world news seems to have focused the initiating of all of the recent events upon the kidnapping of two israeli soldiers, and the firing of rockets into northern israel. he actually seemed the most calm and peaceful of all the speakers i saw tonight. unfortunately, a majority of his talk was about the short-term operational aspects of what needed to be done in lebanon, rather than much in the way of philosophical views about their current situation (though he did repeatedly call of open, public dialogue on how things should proceed, which i found quite encouraging).

the differences in perspective were really quite astounding. ahmadinejad (supposedly) couldn't understand why the u.s. wouldn't be sympathetic to hezbollah's cause. nasrallah seemed to think that israel simply hated the lebanese, and was bombing them for no particular reason. i really can't understand why a leader would bother saying things like that. it's not confidence-inspiring, in any way. in stark contrast to the israeli speakers, he didn't mention an interest in attacking a single time (with the possible exception of describing the israeli counterparts in negotiations as ``pieces of wood'') and only mentioned defending in congratulating those that survived. i realize (conjecture?) that the talks were not all specifically planned around each other, but just observing the demeanor of the speakers and response of the audiences was quite incredible.

i doubt i'll sleep much tonight.

p.s. substantial updates were made to link/etterextract. i'll set up space on aleph sometime in the near future and post them so that they're more readily available.