had a spectacularly interesting conversation with branen today about...oooh, we're going meta...blogging. among other things, he noted that he'd like for sccs to develop a blogger-like form for its users. that *would* be cool, even though i'm fairly happy with my current web-home.

we chatted for a while about the influence of swat alum justin hall, who was called a "visionary" or some such claptrap when he started blogging here in the late-mid-'90's. hall's page, which i'm not linking to because i'm just too lazy, is this amazing absurdist compilation of scenes from his life that is, secondarily, blisteringly accurate and, primarily, immensely self-absorbed. other people are less than plotlines--more often, they're just names for him to drop as people who helped screw up *his* childhood or people with whom *he* had sex and/or did drugs while at college. (to be fair, this is no longer my dominant impression of the site, which has grown up and gotten sponsored and such....but all those pages are definitely still there.) the point of all of this, i suppose, is that it's very interesting how having a personal web presence changes -- and doesn't change--one's actual life. there are bloggers out there who share all the details and bloggers who stick to politics and/or poetics and bloggers (like me?) who share the innocuous stuff and leave the real news for people with whom they can have eye contact [or at least a phone conversation]. to be sure, blogging as a subculture is something well worth a bit of time and study...for someone else. i'll stick to political rants, at least for the immediate future.

speaking of which, please read jimmy carter's op-ed in the new york times today. i respect carter very much, and appreciate the fact that he's willing to stick his neck out as a liberal christian in response to dubya's habit of brandishing his religious identity like a weapon or a suit of armor. the bush administration's policy in iraq seems uncomfortably like some sort of latter-day neoliberal Crusade, and it's important to remember that, rather like those first Crusades, it doesn't exactly adhere to the christian ideals of justice and humility (just to name a couple of the virtues it so effectively stomps on).