Michelle Cottle has written a piece for The New Republic on Sarah Palin’s public relations strategy that ends up making a far more interesting point about Facebook in the process:

Of course, unlike other categories of the rich and famous, political celebs (especially populist firebrands) cannot risk being seen as remote or out of touch. But here’s where Palin’s embrace of new media saves the day. Her perky, quirky tweets and chatty Facebook items make her fans feel as though they have a direct line to her—despite the oft-voiced assumption that Palin (like so many pols) does not write most (if any) of her own Facebook posts. Such is the beauty of social networking: It allows a public figure to avoid direct interaction with the public while promoting the illusion of personal connection and involvement.

Cottle’s writing drips with enthusiasm for the “genius” of this strategy. But I think this paragraph reveals a great deal more about social media than it does about Sarah Palin. The whole underpinning of this new kind of campaign is based on faking human interaction through things like Facebook, where its connections are inherently ephemeral and illusory.

I guess my question is—how true is this assertion about the connections we make on Facebook? Because if it’s true when it’s used in this way by politicians, isn’t it also necessarily true about the other connections we make on Facebook? This gets at one of primary reasons why I myself am on hiatus from Facebook at the moment. Very little of what I did while I was on it was actual communication with people. Mostly, it was about having the feeling of being connected to people by virtue of being privy to random tidbits about their lives that they chose to share. Once I came to realize how disconnected I actually was I grew disenchanted with the whole thing.

If Cottle is right about this, that what’s so innovative about this approach is the ability to manage a political campaign built entirely on false connectivity and the willingness of people to buy into a kind of self-delusion about how much they really matter, then “beauty” is just about the last word I can think of to describe it.

And if this is what’s at the core of social media interactions—that it’s not about interacting at all but more about giving ourselves the illusion of being connected to one another—then we need to rethink the kind of value we place on things like Facebook and Twitter.

Lately I’ve taken an interest in anything written by Conor Friedersdorf. He has an excellent knack for constructing thorough, intelligent arguments to back up his points (if this sounds like it should be a given for political writers, trust me—it’s not). And beyond that, he’s fun to read whenever he systematically deconstructs the nonsense of political party hacks, like what he did this week to Bill Kristol:

In other words, Mr. Kristol has offered exactly zero solutions. “At a moment like this, talking points are not enough,” he writes, having published a piece that is all vague talking points, and bereft of any specific suggestions. The moment requires “radical choice,” he says, but offers none. Defending “bold and seemingly impolitic or impractical ideas,” he neither names nor endorses any of them. “Belt-tightening and program-trimming, more transparency and greater efficiency, are not enough,” he writes, without offering anything more.

Mr. Kristol is calling on the Republic [sic] Party to do something radical without saying what, or even seeming to care.

The Daily Show has been to Arizona more and more over the last year. Their website even boasts a “Best Moments from the Great State of Arizona” page with clips of correspondents raking Arizona laws and politicians over the coals. Last night’s show featured yet another instance of brutally honest mockery, this time aimed at Arizonan State Representative Carl Seel. Olivia Munn reports:

(Watch on TheDailyShow.com)

At this point in the game, I have long since lost the ability to be surprised at what politicians in Arizona are capable of.

TIME asks the question: “Will Afghanistan’s Military Ever Be Fit to Fight?”

Short answer: no.

Longer answer, courtesy of Tim McGirk’s reporting:

It is a nearly impossible mission. Nine out of 10 Afghan enlisted recruits can’t read a rifle-instruction manual or drive a car, according to NATO trainers. The officers’ corps is fractured by rivalries: Soviet-era veterans vs. the former mujahedin rebels who fought them in the 1980s, Tajiks vs. Uzbeks, Hazaras and Pashtuns. Commanders routinely steal their enlisted men’s salaries. Soldiers shake down civilians at road checkpoints and sell off their own American-supplied boots, blankets and guns at the bazaar — sometimes to the Taliban. Afghans, not surprisingly, run when they see the army coming.

Recruits tend to go AWOL after their first leave, while one-quarter of those who stay in service are blitzed on hashish or heroin, according to an internal survey carried out by the Afghan National Army (ANA). One NATO major from Latvia, stationed in the north, complained to a TIME video team that when a battalion’s combat tour was extended, three Afghan officers shot themselves in the foot to get medevacked out.

Even if they are brought up to fit and fighting shape at the target numbers (which is currently 171,600 by October 2011), they’ll still cost six times what the Afghan government makes annually in tax revenue to keep them in the field.

I think this snippet of conversation nicely sums up the difficulty of the Afghan mission:

A commander steps into the conversation to talk about the [Afghan] soldiers’ bravery. “An army post was surrounded by the Taliban, and the soldiers held them off for four hours until they ran out of ammo,” he says. I asked what happened next. He shrugs and replies, “The Taliban beheaded them.”

The piece is worth reading in full. Beyond the issues with raising, training, and funding a functional Afghan military, it takes a look at the divisions within Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry that threaten to undo the efforts to build it altogether.

I passed through the UofA campus today on my way to grab lunch and a haircut. On my way I passed by a green tent by the main student union covered in pictures. Before I even got close to it I knew what it was for. The color gave it away.

The pictures were scenes from Iran during the protests last year. There were faces of those lost, tear gas billowing across streets turned into war zones, Bassij militia in storm trooper helmets. (No pictures of the tent itself because I didn’t have my camera with me.) It was a somber memorial, standing off by itself in the brutal Tucson summer sun.

It was the one year anniversary of when the protests began this past week. Following the fraudulent presidential election results on June 12, 2009, hundreds of thousands went into the streets to speak out against the injustice of it. Thousands still came out when the government began to crack down hard on dissenters. It was an event both exhilarating and horrendously frightening to watch unfold.

There will be no large scale demonstrations to mark the occasion this year. Mousavi and Karroubi have called them off. They don’t have the heart for more of the inevitable bloodshed that it would entail. They struggle to continue the fight in important, if less glamorous and heart-pounding, ways. This week Mousavi put out a statement calling (once again) for an independent inquiry into the election fraud committed last year. Since the government’s official line is still that no election fraud was committed, the chances that he’ll actually get it are about zero. But he’s still pushing back against the narrative the coup regime is trying to spin, and there are a lot of people behind him even if for now they can’t show it or speak it publicly without risking their lives.

There were few that expected the regime to topple in the months immediately following the protests, although it was often secretly wished for. I was predicting that it would be an issue for years to come when last year I wrote:

There are too many variables in play right now to predict an outcome, but even if Khamenei and Ahmadinejad win out in the end they won’t really be winning out. This movement has left an indelible mark on the country’s history and the collective memory of an entire generation of young Iranians (remember, more than half of the country’s population is under the age of 30). They’ll never forget. They’ll never miss a chance to make their voices heard. The people’s dissatisfaction with the government will always be simmering just below the surface, always at risk of boiling over at the opportune moment.

There’s a phrase in Iran for this simmering: “the fire beneath the ash.”

For now things look like they’ll get worse before they get better. There’s no question that Iran is under the auspices of a military dictatorship that will take a harder line against dissent that hasn’t been seen since the days when the Shah was in power. It will be a long road ahead for the likes of Mousavi.

But the efforts of the Green Movement haven’t been in vain. The eyes of the world have been drawn to their cause, and their plight hasn’t gone unnoticed or forgotten. In America, in particular, the events of last summer have shaped the way we view Iran and its people in a way that few would have dreamed possible in years before.

Who would have ever thought that you’d see a tent honoring Iranian victims of totalitarian oppression in a place like Tucson, Arizona?

On another one of the Colbert Report’‘s “Formidable Opponent” segments, Stephen Colbert cuts to the heart of the issues surrounding the flotilla raid:

(Watch on ColbertNation.com)

Notice how the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, states that Israel is “not particularly obliged” to allow snack food or soda into Gaza (which Colbert rightly shows is downright ridiculous). He quickly pivots to point out that Hamas refused to accept the sugar-laden aid, but my concern is not over the Israeli/snack-hating Hamas. My concern is why are snack foods and soda not normally permitted in the first place?

What kind of embargo is this, exactly? What’s the point of denying snack food and soda from getting through? If there is no point, how is it justifiable?

And from the perspective of someone interested in the state of journalism in America today, how many other television hosts raised this issue with Oren during an interview session with him?

Updated to Add:
The BBC reports on the reactions to the flotilla raid inside Israel:
“‘Israel’s eases three-year blockade. Gazans get jam and coriander’ ran the debatably sarcastic headline in this morning’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.”

Continuing on from thoughts I shared about Twitter awhile back, Golnaz Esfandiari (via The Daily Dish) dumps a small lake’s worth of cold water on the notion of Twitter being a key component during the Iranian protests last year. In an article for Foreign Policy, he starts with an anecdote that sums up the public misconception of the phenomenon:

Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts that were commenting on the events in Tehran and asked me if I know the identities of the contributors. I told her I did, but she seemed disappointed when I told her that one of them was in the United States, one was in Turkey, and the third — who specialized in urging people to “take to the streets” — was based in Switzerland.

The journalist’s reaction is all the more curious considering that, “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

In other words, Twitter’s role in disseminating information within Iran during the protests was widely overstated.

This isn’t to say that Twitter didn’t have a huge impact on the Iranian protests. The Iranian Revolution and the Twitter Revolution may not be the same, but the latter has largely shaped our views in the West on the former. The level of online activity on the subject of the Iranian elections made it a familiar topic to many of us looking on from outside Iran in a way that it might not have otherwise.

But as far as the actual usefulness of Twitter itself goes, I remain a firm skeptic.