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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

Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Paul Street's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/paulstreet
Bio:         Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois.&nbs... (More)

All Street Blogs

My June 2008 Reflections on How President Barack Obama Would be Absurdly Red- (and Black-) Baited

By Paul Street at Sep 07, 2009


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I thought I would paste in the following two paragraphs (below) from the June 2008 preface to my book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. They seem rather germane to current events and to the difficulty involved in trying to criticize the new adminsitration from the Left in a nation whose dominant political culture remains dangerously tilted to the right. Here they are:


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I added the finishing touches in the writing of this manuscript in early June of 2008, as Hillary Clinton stepped down from her quest for the Democratic nomination and it became clear that Obama would be running as the Democratic presidential candidate against John McCain in November. Most of the research for this book was conducted between the publication of Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope (which marked the de facto beginning of his presidential campaign) and late April of 2008. By the time this volume hits the bookshelves, I am aware, its portrayal of Obama as a relatively conservative, capitalism-/corporate-friendly, racially conciliatory, and Empire-friendly “centrist” will strike some readers as counter-intuitive. The nation’s still-potent right-wing Republican attack machine will already be regularly and unreasonably assailing Obama as a “far left” candidate, a “socialist,” a “black nationalist,” and a dangerous “anti-American” enemy of God, Country, the Family, and Apple Pie! Obama will also be subjected to no small measure of ugly racial bigotry. The racial fears and bias and toxic color prejudice – already evident across the Internet as I draft this preface in early June of 2008 – that his presidential candidacy will arouse will sometimes make it seem like the Obama phenomenon represents a real and substantive challenge to racial hierarchy in the U.S.

These unpleasant facts will make it more difficult than it would be otherwise to understand the Left critique of “the Obama phenomenon” that comes in the chapters that follow. It will also compel many of this book’s readers and in fact the book’s author to defend Obama against ridiculous, reactionary, and racist assaults. I nonetheless stand behind the often unsympathetic portrayal presented here, claming my right to walk (criticize Obama from a left-democratic perspective) and chew gum (defend him against racial bigotry and outrageous rightist misrepresentation and abuse) at one and the same time....
 
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