Interview with Dean Esmay from Dean’s World
Dean Esmay is a democracy and human rights advocate who lives near Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a freelance writer and editor, and one of the internet’s most popular webloggers. He is a senior contributor to Pajamas Media. He is a board member and co-founder of Operation Give, a charity that does major works helping distribute medical supplies and toys to children in Iraq. He is a graduate of Colorado Technical University, a husband and a father.
He is also a blogger for Dean’s World.
Simon Owens: One of the hotbed issues dealing with Middle Eastern terrorism has to do with access to weapons, and as you indicate in your post “Reports: Yemen Arming Somalia Again,” we are having a hard time with this particular problem. How do you think our US military should go about solving it?
Dean Esmay: The international arms trade is much like the international drug trade, and there is very little the U.S. military can do about either one. The State Department can apply pressure to government regimes that are irresponsible in the arms trade, such as Yemen. The U.S. military can find and destroy weapons caches in areas it controls, such as Iraq, but otherwise this is a matter of diplomacy and international finance, not military action.
Simon Owens: As a follow up question, do you think that the best way to fight terrorism is to cut off their weapons resources?
Dean Esmay: No. This is like saying that the best way to fight drug abuse is to cut off access to drugs to the drug dealers. No, the best way to fight terrorism is to help promote democracy, promote human freedom, and to put pressure on those government regimes which coopoerate with terrorist networks (all of which are non-democratic states, I might add).
Simon Owens: Do you tend to blog about whatever issue is the most talked-about at the time of posting, or do you like to search for the overlooked stories that nobody has noticed yet?
Dean Esmay: More the latter than the former. Obviously some stories are so big you can’t help but remark upon them, but we usually try to avoid the mad rush of the 24 hour news cycle.
Simon Owens: How do you go about finding the articles you link to in your blog? Do you find them from other blogs, or are there particular news services you monitor?
Dean Esmay: I get a ton of links mailed to me every day. I’d say about a quarter of my links come from that. I also enjoy randomly browsing the blogs from my blogroll, looking for something interesting. And yes, I scan a few different internet news services periodically.
Simon Owens: Do you think that as each election cycle comes around, political blogs gain more and more influence over the political process?
Dean Esmay: Yes. And they’re alread more important than most people think. But not in the way some bloggers would like to think. It’s not that so many people read political blogs, or that a majority of voters will ever read them. That’s not what makes blogs important. Ditto the impact of blogs as a fundraising tool, which can be significant but will never replace traditional fundraising channels.
What’s most important and powerful in politics is ideas. In the past, most political ideas were nurtured in the pages of political journals like The Nation, The New Republic, The National Review, and other such publications. Those journals at their height never had more than 100,000 readers, usually less. But they were read by decision makers, political figures, academics, an so on, and were enormously influential on the nation in ways that many people even today are unaware of. And I see political blogs as the modern equivalent of that. To the extent that they discuss ideas, they have a cumulaitive long-term impact that’s difficult to measure, but it’s large and it’s growing.
There are people in the White House whose job it is to monitor political blogs. What does that tell you, even if you don’t read blogs yourself?
Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own blog?
Dean Esmay: My wife Rosemary’s blog, The Queen of All Evil. She’s far more conservative than I am, and daily rides into battle with the lefties of The Daily Kos, Eschaton, and other far-left blogs. She’s always fun, too.
Trudy Schuett’s Desert Light Journal, covering issues of domestic violence and gender issues from a perspective that’s too rarely seen in the mainstream media.
Michael Demmons’ Gay Orbit. A GLBT community blog with an attitude and a perspective you don’t see much in traditional sources. Plus very funny.
Austin Bay. International relations and military analysis from a fine mind and a terrific writer.
Mohammed and Omar’s Iraq The Model. Whenever I really want to know what’s going on in Baghda, they tell me.
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I would quibble with the title for your otherwise fine interview. Through Dean’s very conscious efforts, I no longer think of Dean’s World as just Dean. There’s a real diversity of voices there, in part because of the commenters, and in part because he went out of his way to invite co-bloggers who come from different perspectives. So I think “Interview with Dean Esmay” or “Interview with Dean of Dean’s World” would be more accurate.
Although i was a bit rushed when i did the interview, I should note that the article you referenced on Yemen was written by my contributor Jane Novak, not me.
We now have over half a dozen contributors who write for Dean’s World and not just me.