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It's Friday: let's metablog.
Recently I've come across two instances of diplomats blogging anonymously:
A third secretary at the Croatian Embassy in Washington DC was recently recalled after he was outed as writing a blog (vibbi.blog.hr- no longer up, and I can't even find a Google cache. let's not even start about how good my Serbo-Croatian is...) complaining about how bored he was (in DC! how is this possible?!), how all he did was dream about his girlfriend, and (what no doubt got him canned) how there was no difference between Bush and Kerry. Dubrovnik is lovely, though, (much nicer than Zagreb) and he seems to be the son of a TV journalist in Croatia, so I'm sure he'll land on his feet somewhere with his lovely lass in tow.
Via Dan Drezner (my kind of republican), our next diplomatic-blog-disaster-waiting-to-happen is the Diplomad, Sterling's kind of diplomat. While he tends to stoop to MemeFirst levels of childishness when talking about politics, he does have some relevant points about bureaucracy at State (although I wonder how useful his "fire is the solution to everything" approach is).
However, I think he's playing with fire in having a blog. Organizations like the State Dept. (and governement in general) place great stake in being "on message" at all levels, and, given the quasi-public nature of a blog, as soon as they figure out who he is (and he leaves a lot of clues), I imagine the DSS goons will decend on him like the proverbial million-pound shithammer (to borrow from Hunter S. Thompson). I give it three weeks.
My dad's a diplomat. He blogs.
Oh, and here's a mirror of the Croat's blog.
Sterling's kind of diplomat is six feet under ground. I hold the "profession" as a whole in contempt roughly equal to that of McKinsey consultants and attorneys who advertise on television.
Posted by: Sterling on November 19, 2004 11:39 PMWell, it was an example of immature blogging. I wrote about the scandal on my blog from the first day, since I am part of blogging service where diplomat wrote this blog.
Posted by: Zec on November 21, 2004 01:04 PMStefan - If he's smart he's doing this on a personal laptop at multiple free (or unprotected) Wi-Fi access points, and at minimum clearing the browser cache and defragging the hard drive a couple times a week.
(I'm sure you can wardrive around DC and find lots of wireless routers named "Linksys" or "Netgear" which the owner hasn't bothered to protect.)
What can DSS do if they suspect him but can't prove it? Do State Department employees have to sign away certain Constitutional protections as part of their employment agreement?
Posted by: Sterling on November 21, 2004 05:38 PMI'm not sure I follow, Sterling. Are you talking about my Dad? You do know we're Belgian, right?
Posted by: Stefan Geens on November 22, 2004 11:42 AMI know you're Belgian. Got no problem with the Belgians.
Pretty little country - actually has a town called "Hoboken". How bad can a little state with a Hoboken be?
Posted by: Sterling on November 22, 2004 03:28 PMMy mother is from Hoboken. It's a suburb of Antwerp, where the shipbuilding yards are/were. The name is derived from "hoge beuken," or "tall beeches" (the tree) that once lined the banks of the river Scheldt.
As you may know, the first permanent settlers of Manhattan were Belgians -- Walloons, in fact -- but many others followed, naming towns after their places of origin (as the Dutch did with Haarlem). I suspect Hoboken got its name thus.
Posted by: Stefan Geens on November 22, 2004 03:35 PMHoboken in NJ is a shortening of a Hackensack Indian name for the place - Hopoghan Hackingh. It means "place where we smoke weed", apparently. Hoboken was at the north end of the original patroonship of "Pavonia", with Staten Island at the south. Michael Pauw, the proprietor of Pavonia, was from Amsterdam.
I'm aware of the Walloon presence - there was a strong Hueguenot influx very early on, and places like Staten Island and New Paltz became enclaves. I don't think it's been proved whether the first European-descent child born in New Netherland was the Hugeunot Jean Vigne or the Dutch Calvinist Sara Rapalje.
Point is, Hoboken was called "Hopoghan" before any Europeans ever saw it - it is phonetically almost identical. How far back does the history of the Belgian Hoboken go? I've never researched it, but from when I first drove by it on the way from Brussels to Amsterdam, it amused me to think it might the only town in Europe to result from eastward traffic in place names.
Posted by: Sterling on November 22, 2004 04:30 PM