👌
Okay. Almost there.
The post-Oslo explainer is very long, but it has to be, and I think I've done as right by the balance of material as I can.
Time for a walk in the dreary grey, then some squinting at links and numbers (good grief, do they ever keep rising), and then...
30 years of regional politics and the implications we need to consider, whenever we in the West feel an urge to go around shooting off about what "should" be done to secure Middle Eastern peace.
(a.k.a., always 🙃) #Soon!
As a quick research aside:
Never trust the numbers you see cited from another source on their own. Look for the original article referenced in the one you're using!
Today I spent a tedious amount of time hunting the origin of a figure that had a bibliographic entry, but no trace of that entry in direct searches for the author or title elsewhere.
I finally found the darned thing on Wayback Machine, but boy, am I annoyed that many scholars just copy-pasted a dead link from each other for years!
@MLClark Archive.org (AKA Wayback Machine) is a lifesaver. I've been able to find a lot for my book that exists no more except on Archive.
Thanks to Archive, I was able to prove that a local politician was lying when he claimed he got a document off Obama's campaign web site on a certain date.
It's funny - I use the terms Wayback Machine and Internet Archive for different parts of the same project. Archive.org is where I would find many difficult-to-acquire 17th through early 20th century texts key to my 19th century lit studies - and also some key documents for my novel writing.
But WM just feels more natural when talking about capturing slices of the old internet otherwise lost to time.
Either way, it is a GEM of a repository. :) Well done on the sleuthing yourself!
@MLClark I think most people refer to it as WM. My endnotes refer to Archive.org.
I think there's a technical difference. WM is used to search a URL or keywords. Internet Archive is a more generic search.
I use it mostly to search for defunct URLs ... Not everything gets archived. Videos, for example. Some PDFs are archived but not all.
The politician waved in his hand a document he claimed he'd just downloaded from Obama's web site. The document on that date didn't say what he claimed.
I would use Internet Archive / Archive.org for the reference section in my scholarly work drawn from old scanned texts. WM for news articles.
But the fragility of those websites and videos is something, isn't it?
I include a video in this piece that isn't hosted by many places, because it's not filled with flattering info - which of course means that most uploads come through sources from one "side". Not ideal.
It is super delicate work, keeping materials cleanly for posterity!
@MLClark Yeppers ... For my book, I tracked down local sources at the local newspaper and community college. Some videos were kept. Others were not. The lying politician was thanks to a MP4 the college gave me.
I just found on YouTube a Tea Party protest at KSC the day Obama spoke here. They didn't know anything about the space issues. They were just here to be contrary. MAGA before MAGA.
It's amazing how ready folks are to forget the Tea Party, no?
A little like how everyone wants to forget about all the crypto scams now that SBF's been caught, and lean into the New Shiny of AI investment today. 🙃 Because *this* is going to be the bubble that doesn't burst, right?
Whether it's a tech-bro scheme or an alt-right cult, we seem incapable of learning from our mistakes so long as we still live with the same baseline of socioeconomic precarity.
Which... alack, we do.
@WordsmithFL
(More later! Walk now. I look forward to diving into your DMs after this piece is posted. Thank you for them - I don't doubt they'll make for good reading! 🤗)