Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Sam Hitt's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/waterman
Bio:  I'm a part time fanatic in the Ed Abbey tradition, working a bit haphazardly to protect public lands in the Southwest. Like good poetry, gardening and local political engagement. Interested i... (More)

All Hitt Blogs

Authentic Hope

By Sam Hitt at Dec 25, 2009


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Authentic hope is a light burning at the core of our being that sees beyond the simple dichotomy of optimism and pessimism, through the bored emptiness of a cynicism, without clinging to the guarded apprehension of fear. We are large-souled beings, according to Aristotle, adept at facing the facts of our predicament while feeling despair and up to the task of taking effective action knowing full well the consequences of failure. Authentic hope isn’t disengaged wishful thinking, as the battered wife who stays with her abusive spouse hoping his behavior will change. It’s also not the exuberant pretensions of those who promise a cure to our addiction to fossil fuels without the pain of withdrawal. Neither is hope the secular equivalent of a distant heaven used by elites of old to keep us in line. Authentic hope didn’t lift Obama to the presidency. That was a manipulated and short-lived evanescence, a fallacious hope that Derrick Jensen argues keeps us enslaved and should be abandoned. Instead he advocates positive action, inspired by love, on behalf of all beings.
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