Just by virtue of comparison, other Iowa lib/progressive blogs recent average daily hit counts look like this:

• Iowa Independent 900
• Bleeding Heartland 350
• Century of the Common Iowan 34

Color me shocked about Common Iowan. So, I guess I’m a middling playa in the Iowa blogosphere. Perhaps later in the month I’ll do a more substantial survey to satisfy my curiosity about Iowa political websites in general.

Please feel free to post comments on the blog. I have my spam shields up to maximum. So, commenting requires registration and approval of comments. But I am pretty, um… liberal and really only bin spam. Behave and show good manners and we’ll all be cool.

Lastly, I would like to welcome the small influx of readers from Iran. The prayers of me and my family are with you. Your struggle is having an effect world-wide and forcing people to reevaluate how they think about Iran and Islam here in the heartland. A short anecdote:

Last night I was invited to a local men’s club. This club is probably as good a cross-sample of the male population of Eastern Iowa that you will find outside a tightly controlled focus group. Last night I heard from a number of people who I knew either by reputation or personally to have what I normally would consider pretty simplistic ideas about Iran and Islam… much influenced by the fear-mongering of the Bush years. (Caveat: I don’t know all of these people all that well, but I’m just going by baseline male 20-40-something, Iowan attitude and knowledge level gleaned from living here most of my life.) But from these people I heard a number of statements along the lines of, “I hope they can get it done.” “They look like normal people.” “Who knew Iran had elections?” and so on. This is a pretty profound shift. For most of these people two weeks ago if they thought about Iran at all it was probably in the mental context of “rag-heads,” or “bomb the fuckers,” or something along those lines.

Admittedly these are small steps. But the first thing one needs to do in a war is to dehumanize the enemy. For a long time in this country certain segments of the media and political actors have worked hard to dehumanize the Iranian people specifically, and Arabs and Muslims generally. The events of the last week and-a-half (and also to a certain extent the sufferings of the Pakistani’s this spring also) have begun to tear down that wall of ignorance and fear. In that sense then the people of Iran have already achieved a great victory for themselves and for the faith as well.

Pax Vobiscum

Now to finish my 1200 words and then off to San Francisco for a few days.

Quote: by Connor W. Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

New category: The Singularity.

The old blog URL dies now.