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

Ian Sinclair's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/iansinclair
Bio: I am the author of the book 'The march that shook Blair: An oral history of 15 February 2003', published by Peace News Press: http://peacenews.info/node/7085/march-shook-blair-oral-h... (More)

All Sinclair Blogs

Myth vs Reality: British Troops “did not die in vain” in Sangin, Afghanistan

By Ian Sinclair at May 18, 2011


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As British forces handed over control of Sangin, Afghanistan to US forces in September 2010, the British Prime Minister David Cameron noted that:
 
“Our troops have performed magnificently in Sangin and I pay tribute to the thousands who have served, to the over 100 who've given their lives and to the many who have been wounded. They did not die in vain, they made Afghanistan a safer place and they have made Britain a safer place and they will never be forgotten.” (‘UK troops in Sangin did not die in vain, says Cameron’, 20 September 2010, BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11376603)
 
The problem for Cameron and all those British forces who served and died in Sangin, is that a recent poll conducted by the International Council on Security and Development of around 1400 military aged males in Afghanistan strongly suggests they did indeed die in vain.
 
Here are the results of those polled in Sangin:

- 99% of interviewees think NATO military operations are bad for the Afghan people.
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46% of interviewees oppose military operations in Sangin.
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99% of interviewees think working with the foreigners is wrong.
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51% of interviewees believe foreign forces do not protect the local population.
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72% of interviewees are more negative about the foreign forces than the year before.
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99% of interviewees think foreigners disrespect the religion and traditions.

(‘Afghanistan Transition: The Death of Bin Laden and Local Dynamics’, International Council on Security and Development, May 2011, http://www.icosgroup.net/static/reports/bin-laden-local-dynamics.pdf)
 

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