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

Moral Truisms

There is no doubt that people have moral intuitions, and research -- serious research is in very early stages -- reveals that they are quite uniform without experience in complex situations, and in many ways surprising. There is little reason to doubt ... (More) Comments (10)

Controlling the Middle East

Controlling the region means being in a position to have a significant effect of decisions that are taken there, particularly with regard to production levels, price range (not to high, not too low), distribution (e.g., where pipelines go), etc. Nothing s... (More) Comments (0)

An Independent Iraq

For what it's worth, polls in Iraq reveal very considerable and apparently growing support for withdrawal of the US occupying army, apart from the Kurdish regions. That doesn't mean withdrawal tomorrow. No one is talking about that, and it isn't even te... (More) Comments (3)

Peak Oil Theory

The basic theory is incontrovertible. The only questions have to do with timing and cost. ... The date can be pushed back much farther if more costly (or maybe some to-be-discovered improved) technology is used. As for the estimates of cost, by reasonabl... (More) Comments (8)

Iran's Threat

The sharp increase in focus on Iran's alleged threat (nuclear weapons, connections to terror, etc.) is very clear. ... The same has been true with regard to Syria (including last December's "Syria Accountability Act" passed almost unanimously in Congress... (More) Comments (5)

Invading Cuba

Cuba was officially regarded as a security threat to the US until 1998, and when the Pentagon decided that maybe the US could survive a Cuban assault, the Clinton administration insisted that the threat must be defined as "negligible," but still real. Ba... (More) Comments (2)

The Wall and Israel's Aims

If the goal were security, Israel would have built the fence a few km inside its borders. It could then be a mile high, patrolled on both sides by the IDF, mined with nuclear weapons, utterly impenetrable. Perfect security. The problem would be that it ... (More) Comments (2)

Classified Documents

The scheduled release of declassified documents in the official State Department history is 30 years. In practice it is a bit longer, about 35 years or so usually. Of course, not everything is declassified. Sometimes it turns out on independent investig... (More) Comments (0)

India Today

It's important to bear in mind that there are two quite different Indias. There is the high tech India in Hyderabad, which Thomas Friedman raves about in his odes to "globalization" -- meaning, the neoliberal version of investor-rights-based internation... (More) Comments (4)

Turkey in the World

Turkey's human rights record has been awful, though it has been improving, as commentators routinely point out. But that overlooks a rather important fact: Turkey's crimes against its own population, particularly Kurds, rely crucially on (1) massive US mi... (More) Comments (0)

The SU and the Arms Race

Questioner: Given that the arms race was a disaster for the Soviet Union economically and of little advantage militarily, why did the USSR engage in it? What it did to them economically is exactly what Khrushchev predicted, and presumably what JFK and hi... (More) Comments (0)

Iraq and Vietnam

Personally, I don't see much useful analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. Vietnam was in a remote corner of the world that no one cared about very much, so the US could pound away at it, devastating four countries, with little international protest, and that... (More) Comments (2)

Saudi Puppet

It's often pointed out in the international relations literature that the notion "puppet" is not a simple one. Puppets can often influence the dominant power significantly. The Soviet satellites were certainly "puppets," if the term has any meaning. But u... (More) Comments (2)

The Reagan Phenomena

I believe this is the first such extravaganza in the US. ... There was something similar after the JFK assassination, but of course the assassination of a living president is quite different. I don't recall anything else remotely similar, perhaps since... (More) Comments (2)

Defeating Nazi...

Questioner: The U.S. opposed and defeated the Nazis and the Communists. Doesn't this evidence U.S. humanitarianism for the rest of the world? The "history" assumed in this argument is so radically and uncontroversially false that it is hard even to comme... (More) Comments (2)

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