Monday, August 08, 2005

Bloggers Rule!

You don't realize what you have until its gone.

That's how the old saying goes I guess. Lebanese bloggers have all of a sudden drastically reduced their output. I have to admit... I haven't been writing much either. Either yesterday or today morning, I wanted to catch up with news from Lebanon, and found no new blog entries, so I did the easiest thing and checked out the English press.

My reaction: blakh... (and the after-taste lasted a long, long time)

So, Hassan, Doha, Tony and LP, thanks for writing today. I might not totally agree with your opinions, but you all totally kick ass for expressing them anyway!

3 comments:

Mustapha said...

hmm, i don't agree TM, i think the reason is simple:

summer time, and the blogging is laazyy..

Charles Malik said...

I'm finding it really hard to blog. I'm thinking work, and most of the topics are either minute or general. In thinking about topics to blog, I've been finding a lot of possibilities for theses. There is a lot to talk about in Lebanon, and there are a lot of books to read, but few have decent statistics.
The problem is, you can't get decent stats without a decent census and a government willing to divulge numbers. The Lebanese government is scared of giving away any numbers, even those as minute as the yearly crop yield of olives. They think the Israelis will use that against us. What they don't understand is that their keeping the data inside the ministry hurts Lebanese academics, economists, and farmers, but the Israelis get the information anyway through their mukhabarati networks.
I truly believe that the Israelis know more about what is going on in Lebanon than the Lebanese government. And the reason why Johnny Abdo is always right. Hmmm....

Raja said...

I agree with the three of you.

- TM, you're right, the political volatility in Lebanon seems to have just ended. We had a raging sea, and now we have a placid lake.

- Mustapha, you're also right. I feel guilty a lot of times because I almost get scared of exerting the effort it would take to post a blog entry

- And finaly, LP, I agree that numbers and Lebanese politics are almost alergic from each other. However, I think that the Lebanese government just won't collect them or publish them because the different sides in Lebanese politics don't want to deal with numbers. A lot of people in Lebanon just start yawning when you bring numbers up. People like talking about BIG things like the real "identity" of Lebanese people, the "Arab-Israeli" conflict, etc....