No Replacement For Displacement

Being Wrong

A lot of times, I notice that columnists rarely if ever take themselves to task if they were correct or not. For example, during the Gulf War, every single columnist wildly overstated how capable the Iraqi army was. At the time, I was telling people that we should win, and fairly easily, with under 1000 American combat deaths, and maybe 5000 casualties overall. This would be in a campaign that would take no more than 6 months. At the time, most people though I was nuts, that my casualty figures were too low, and that it would be a bloodbath. I was wrong only in the fact that I wasn't optimistic enough.

After the war, though I was more than a bit miffed that so many pundits got it so wrong, and noone called them to account for it, and none of them bothered to write a single mea culpa on that point. This is one of the biggest benefits of the blogosphere. If you publish a column, and you take a patently asinine position, about a dozen bloggers will rip apart what you say and provide stinging counterexamples.

There is, however, a danger that we might replicate what columnists do, and fail to do even the most minor examination about how our writings hold up to the light of day. Therefore we bloggers shouldn't become like our dead tree brethren and not bother to engage in a bit of self criticism from time to time. So, in that vein, here comes a few self criticisms of myself:

In this post, I was a bit breathless. The emotion of the atrocity got the better of me and I posted a bit rashly. I still think some grassroots pressure is necessary, but looking back, I sound like the right wing equivalent of a Sierra Club weenie screaming about Kyoto. Ergo, I hereby say I should have taken a prozak and mellowed out.

In this post, I said I was going to make a detailed post about September 11 one year on, my feelings then and now. I didn't. By the time the day was over, I was just too drained emotionally to do it.

Occasionally on long posts, I don't do a good enough job editing myself, especially in my longer posts. On smaller posts, it isn't as big a deal, because I can sneak back and edit for grammar, etc. On long posts, once I put the post in place, that is it. Blogger won't let you edit long posts, and barfs a lung when you try. Because of that, when I make bonehead mistakes, like saying Oman when I meant Qatar, and saying Iraq when I meant Baghdad, it comes off wrong, and I can't edit it afterwards. I am now paying more attention to what I am writing, and taking a more than cursory look now. However, I'm not a professional writer, so I'm not sure how that will turn out. When I write, I tend to go with my gut instincts first. I don't revise much, because only rarely do I feel like the flow is wrong to what I've written.

Also, I believe from time to time that I've ended a post sort of hanging, without a proper conclusion. I'll try and do better.

There are more things I know I need to fix about my writing(I have to say--hee hee), but these are the biggies that I've noticed. Next post will be about something I believe I got almost exactly right. I was wrong in parts, but overall I think I nailed it pretty well. Coming soon....