Can Chávez be Understood?

When Hugo Chávez was elected for the first time a decade ago, he only had to contend with a popular former Miss Universe, Irene Sáez. He won big.

I understand why he won. I remember going to private primary school in Caracas and my school mates would flat out denigrate and insult the 'niches' (or 'poor and uncultivated'). I don't want to put myself above anyone, but I do remember how uncomfortable I'd feel listening and seeing the insults and mockery.

It was time, I believe, for this sub-culture to have a voice.

However, and this is really important, I never liked Chávez. History should teach us to learn from the past. He's a former soldier who attempted to overthrow a government, however legitimate these reasons might have been; he didn't come out as aggressively as he does today (he needed to appeal to the middle class he's now destroyed), but it was clear he was confrontational. Every time he was either re-elected or won a referendum of some sort (there have been quite a few elections and referendums since he took over), his speech became more and more aggressive.

It's indeed unfortunate, highly deplorable, that the voice that Venezuela's unprivileged strata so much needed had to be a man who, from the beginning, sought to destroy the country. But then I ask myself, why didn't anyone else appear before Chávez? Unfortunately (and this might be one of the very few political patterns that repeat themselves worth of serious study) those who are certain of their forceful means will take over before those who don't know how they'll manage to accomplish the same task through peaceful means.

And this is proof that military force is never for peaceful purposes. And nobody has the right to use force against their own people. The irony is that Chávez claims that one of the reasons he attempted to overthrow the government in 1992 in the first place after the 1989 Caracazo was because he couldn't follow his orders to go against his own people. Well, Mr. Chávez shouldn't be doing that today.

Or are power and Gucci suits to nice to give up?

Blogs are to the West what Participatory Politics was to Ancient Athens

I've been working on a research project on the use of online information and knowledge sharing tools by genealogists. You may have guessed it, there's really not a lot of research out there on the information seeking behavior of this group, much less on the online tools they use. But there's still some.

Yet as I tried looking for a study that would differentiate between information and knowledge sharing, of course, I found nothing. It makes sense though.

Say email, for example. It could be both. An email may contain information or knowledge; the same with an online forum. Wikis are more difficult to place. They contain a combination of individual "knowledges" that form a greater one.

But I found blogs the most interesting. I find good information for competitive intelligence projects in blogs. They are not necessarily primary sources, but blogs are great stepping stones to finding the right information. They usually comment about something that has happened--they regurgitate existing information to some extent, and add bloggers' insights and thoughts about that information.

I've often thought that our society has gone through similar stages as the ancient Greeks did. But I always wondered how it'd be possible for us to be as close to policy and opinion shaping as they were. And blogs do seem to fill that gap. We can't all meet in Washington or Ottawa to discuss politics. But like in Athens, we're now listening to the most popular opinion-makers through blogs, though these are not politicians or anyone of national importance. I like that.

My question is, who's going to be our Alexander the Great?