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

On Silence; or, What the Bleep is Wrong With Us?

By Michael McGehee at Jul 01, 2009


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"Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, and Hercules don't scare me. The FBI, the anti-American Committee, J. Edgar Hoover, President Nixon, President Johnson, Martha Mitchell and her husband, or her man, or her woman, Ethel Kennedy, all the Kennedy's, The Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Rockefeller, none of these people scare me. What scares me is that one day my son will ask me "What did you do, daddy, when all the shit was going down?" - Richard Pryor
 
"Silence / Something about silence makes me sick" - RATM
 
I first heard this on a CD of Pryor's a few years back. It was one of those things that just stick to you like glue. It's up there with the comment Noam Chomsky made when he said something to this effect: "if you're not offending those who ought to be offended then
 
Silence. Inaction. Apathy. Subservience. Genuflection. Passive-aggressiveness. In their own way they're all synonymous with each other and an indictment to too many of us.
 
All of these things define us. And we are all guilty of it - some more so than others. I am sure some of us sometimes see something wrong and ignore it, hoping somebody else does something about it.
 
Howard Zinn was right. The world is topsy turvy.
 
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.
 
And we face a shitload of problems. Locally. Nationally. Globally.
 
Unemployed. Uninsured. Under-funded. Under attack. Un-democratic. Unfair. Unjust. Unacceptable.
 
Shit, there is so much wrong it's hard to focus or to even determine our priorities.
 
The world is topsy turvy.
 
I have got a second child on the way, and like Richard Pryor, what scares me is when they call me out.
 
How will we answer our children? Will we deny the problems? Will we plea ignorance? How about helpless? Will we point the fingers of blame elsewhere? What are our responsibilities? Why is it so rare for people to see what's wrong, stand up, resist and make things right?
 
Last month we saw people rise up in Peru, Honduras and Iran. Yet, and only for the moment, it is mostly silent in the belly of the beast.

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By Pishdadi, Shireen at Jul 02, 2009 09:54 AM

thank you for sharing. this is one of my struggles. this is also a central theme of Islam- in fact it is the mission of Islam: enjoining right and forbidding wrong. this is in fact what jihad is - even though no one would ever guess that from all the propaganda: jihad is standing up for the poor and oppressed and establishing justice. and justice is total, it cannot exist when we put ourselves, families, or group above laws.

if people, the majority, always struggle for justice, then the wicked, the elite minority, can never take power. but we are cowards, or that is only part of it. the other part is that we covet the cookie crumbs thrown at us from the ones we think are so powerful. but where is the real power, that is the question we should ask. and what is the real success?

also can you tell me where the howard zinn quote is from?

thanks.

 

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