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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.

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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.

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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

583275

Joe Emersberger's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/joeemersberger
Bio: Joe Emersberger was born in 1966 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where he currently lives and works. He is an engineer and a  member of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union. (More)

All Emersberger Blogs

Note to Peter Beaumont Re Civility, Honest Engagement and telling readers to F*** Off

By Joe Emersberger at Aug 26, 2012


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RE:How do we escape the hysteria that threatens to erode public debate? by Peter Beaumont
 
Hi Mr. Beaumont
 
Do you remember what you said about me and other Media Lens message board participants in 2006?
 
“It is a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to suit its arguments, a curious willy-waving exercise... Think a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin.” (Peter Beaumont, ‘Microscope on Medialens,’ The Observer, June 18, 2006) 
You closed that essay by saying
 
"And so, Gabriele Zamparini, Joe Emersberger, Mr Bombastic, David Cromwell and David Edwards, David Sketchley, Rasputin, and Informationist, email if you must; my finger will be ready on the delete button."
 
Assuming you don't simply delete this email, do you not see a contradiction in the language you used then and now saying
 
"The blogosphere, increasingly fuelled by toxic language, is hindering honest engagement rather than encouraging it "
 
Joe Emersberger

****

I might have added that Beaumont also accused me (and many others all at once) of being "
controlling Politburo lefties who insist that the only acceptable version of the truth is theirs alone and that everybody else should march to the same step and sing the same (old party) song. "

Standards for accuracy and honesty obviously drop through the floor when journalists assail those outside their corporate club. 
 
My exchange in 2006 with Roger Alton, Beaumont's boss at the Observer at the time, is also revealing of the standards for "civility" that are maintained by media professionals when dealing with mere readers:

Mr. Alton: 
In response to a polite and thoughtful letter by Dave Watton to Peter 
Beaumont you responded 

"This is utter bollocks -- the piece wasn't compromised. It was fine. 
Please stop bothering people about such junk." 


What do hope to achieve with such rudeness? Do you expect people to use 
such a tone with you? Do you deny that an institution that deeply impacts 
the public should be accountable to the public? 

Joe Emersberger 

ALTON's REPLY: 

We are wholly accountable; but I am not going to compromise the abilities 
of the journalists who work here. As you perfectly know, you are not 
interested in a debate, you and your friends and media lens are trying to 
fuck up decent hard-working men and women who are trying to tell the truth. 

So do fuck off 

MY RESPONSE: 

Interesting that you maintain you are accountable while using language like that. I don't imagine many MP's respond to polite letters that way, nor do I suppose you speak to your superiors or important advertisers that way.

http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5798&sid=9faeec4a97eb1ee8644304e81e8be007

 
Similarly I wonder if Beaumont was trying to encourage honest engagement when, in reply to a very polite email from a reader, Beaumont said "piss off now like a good boy to your Chomsky". 

http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=11945#11945 

The reader responded to Beaumont's abuse by saying

"You don't seem prepared to engage seriously..."

Beaumont's reply:

"
No I'm not. So kindly fuck off."

It shows not only breathtaking hypocrisy that Beaumont would pontificate in his column about "toxic language" and "honest engagement", it shows how completely certain he is that his readers are irrelevant and incapable of exposing his hypocrisy. Unfortunately, readers are close to irrelvant to the corporate media. Readers are the audience being sold to advertisers - the product much more than they are the customers. That was dramaticaly highighted in 2010 when Roger Alton was runnig the UK Independent.

In response to an article by Bruce Anderson that advocated the torture of children. 


(Bruce Anderson: "We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty" Feb 15, 2010)
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/bruce-anderson/bruce-anderson-we-not-only-have-a-right-to-use-torture-we-have-a-duty-1899555.html


Alton replied to complaints from readers with his usual abusiveness. However, his tone changed markedly when those readers whom he had brushed off and insulted began contacting advertisers and copying Alton on their correspendence. It is quite clear to whom corporate journalists and editors are "wholly accountable".


 
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Breathtaking is right

By Podur, Justin at Sep 02, 2012 23:01 PM

Thanks Joe. That was quite breathtaking - what an embarrassment for Beaumont. I'm pretty sure that I have also written entreaties about trying to have some decency in dialogue and debate... but I am also pretty sure I've never said "kindly fuck off" to anyone in an email!

I linked your blog post at my blog: http://www.killingtrain.com/node/830

Thanks for this Joe... keep it up.

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583275

Re: Breathtaking is right

By Emersberger, Joe at Sep 02, 2012 23:46 PM

Thanks Justin. I agree with what you said in your blog that it is easy to get numb to the rotten things people with power do and say - police, corproate journalists, politians. To some extent the numbness might not be a entirely bad thing.  However, it is worth remebering that sometimes the "small outrages" provoke tremendous push back against the worst outrages.   

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