Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's blog

[skdadl]

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has a blog. He just started up last Friday.

Here is the BBC  report that led me to him.

I write for a blog too, of course, so for my thoughts on the president's first entry, you can read here.

[kuri]

I love that poll question. If only the latest attack were fought as a scrabble tournament rather than an actual war.

[skdadl]

Damn you, kuri! You are too fast!

I just went into the site and corrected that typo for Mahmoud.  :lol:

When I do that after I've already published, I have to watch it "rebuild," which always scares the hell out of me.  

[kuri]

I wish I had the same talent for spotting my own typos!  :oops:

This is pretty interesting. Thanks for linking to it, skdadl. Now, if only the text was larger. I can barely read it. I read very little of it, and will be back later when my aging eyes are feeling stronger.

[Toedancer]

How do we know this isn't a fake?

[skdadl]

But kuri, that was not my typo! If you look at the site, the English translation does say "word" rather than "world"!   :D

The BBC has corrected it, I see, and I'm guessing that it was just a typo too -- I copied and pasted, which was how it got into pogge -- but it's terribly funny that it would persist on the original site. Ah, well: I guess I have another comment to send him.

Toedancer, I don't see any reason to doubt the site. It sounds like him, like the arguments he would want to make to the world, and he has apparently given a TV interview to an American network coincident with the start of the blog (see the BBC story). Why would it be a fake?

[Toedancer]

Oh you've updated me, I didn't know about the interview. But ya know I am a suspicious sort. Also, as far as I can tell so far isn't the entire purpose of this first entry and Poll, which will undoubtedly get a huge majority for YES, just to say in the second post, See, the U.S. and Israel want to start WW 3.

Sure is interesting though.

[kuri]

But kuri, that was not my typo! If you look at the site, the English translation does say "word" rather than "world"!   :D

Yeah, I know. I was guessing it's a translation problem.

[Luke]

I guess I'm confused this morn ....

So I corrected my post since I was a little late

?? :?

['lance]

Toedancer, I don't see any reason to doubt the site. It sounds like him, like the arguments he would want to make to the world, and he has apparently given a TV interview to an American network coincident with the start of the blog (see the BBC story). Why would it be a fake?

I saw part of that interview. Cringe-worthy. Mike Wallace came across a clueless yokel. He seemed to want to represent his country, and represented an aspect of it all too well.

[Luke]

?? :?

If this was meant for me, I had written about the spelling error, posted it and *then* realised that Kuri and Skadl had been talking about it.

I'm not feeling too great today could be my excuse or simply old age catching up

[Herr Magoo]

To be fair, he's not exactly the first holocaust denier to discover the interweb.  Do you really want to be linking to him when his next poll question reads:

How many Jews really died in the so-called "holocaust"?  

a) six
b) less than six

[skdadl]

I didn't see any Holocaust denial on that site.

Sigh. Do we have to look up the old Juan Cole posts again? Should I tell Herr Magoo to go to Juan Cole and find his old posts on the topic of Ahmadinejad's speeches?

When I follow Ahmadinejad (and more than him in Iran), I'm not thinking about whether I like him or not or agree with him or not. I am thinking that this is a man any sane Western regimes would educate themselves about, would make contact with, and would learn to negotiate with. That would be any Western regimes that are interested in more than dropping nukes on Iran, plainly a stupid way to go, but then some have already demonstrated that they are always gonna pick the stupid way.

If you read Christopher de Bellaigue's reports in the New York Review of Books, you know that some Western governments are already talking quite successfully with Ayatollah Khamenei, who sounds to be quite the practised diplomat, as Ahmadinejad clearly was not at first.

Your daily paper or TV network in North America won't tell you that, since the game here is demonization, but Europeans know it.