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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

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Roger Bybee's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/rogerdbybee
Bio: I've recently been invited  to write a twice-weekly blog in In These Times, appearing Tuesdays and Thursdays (go to www.inthesetimes.com and flick the In These Times Working link at the top of... (More)

All Bybee Blogs

Post-reality politics: Obama the Muslim, FDR the Jew

By Roger Bybee at Nov 23, 2010


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Post-reality politics
Lies aimed at total de-legitimation:
FDR the "Jew" and Obama the "Muslim
"
 
Chip Berlet, a progressive scholar with Political Research Associates who analyzes the Right with great insight and is an invaluable source for the Left, recently referred to "post-reality politics."
 
"Post-reality" is certainly a perfect description for the media's role in the current period, where the mainstream corporate media so often act as unfaltering amplifiers for the allegations of the crazed Right. That's why all the Right's concerted efforts to portray President Obama as an alien, illegitimate force--supposedly born in Kenya, sponsoring "death panels," and actually a Muslim--gained such traction through uncritical repetition.
 
The incessant news features about each new charge against the president were clearly part of a concerted campaign to utterly de-legitimate him. Ironically, trying to fundamentally discredit Obama by labeling him a Muslim bears a strong parallel to the way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was often said by 1930's rightists to be a Jew. Perhaps, then, "post-reality politics" is not entirely new.
 
How else could a good American explain the utterly un-American doctrines that "Rosenberg" or Rosenfeld" and "The Jew York Times" were imposing on the nation?
 
In the 1930's, when anti-Semitism was rife and fanned by American heroes like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh (by the way, don't miss reading Philip Roth's book The Plot Against America imaging Lindbergh defeating FDR in 1938), Jews were little more popular than Muslims now.
 
The latest round of strategic religious branding, fed by FOX News and other outlets against Obama  and against Roosevelt in the 30's were intended to color all their policies as dangerously extreme and downright alien to America.

In the case of Roosevelt, a group of CEOs organized in the Liberty League actually approached US Marines Major General Smedley D. Butler and asked him to wage a coup against Roosevelt. As Berlet and co-author Matthew N. Lyons point out in Right-Wing Populism in America, Butler's account was verified by a congressional investigation but the prominent executives were not prosecuted..
 
With Obama, an attempt at a military coup seems unlikely, in part because  his policies on Iraq and Afghanistan have differed so little from the top brass. But the systematic erosion of his legitimacy has encouraged a spike in threats against his life and an upsurge in militia activity.--and these should not be taken lightly.

Moreover, the far Right seems to have successfully blunted most of his initiatives with the kind of scurrilous post-reality attacks that FDR was able to successfully
. FDR knew how to effectively and continuously fight back against the "economic royalists," and Obama apparently does not.
 
 
You may also e interested in Berlet speaking on the right-wing populist threat:

Chip Berlet - Right Wing Populism in America



Rated 4.0 out of 5.0    
- 12 min - Oct 22, 2010 - Uploaded by permaculturecoop
ccsrwm.berkeley.edu Fractures, Alliances And Mobilizations In The Age Of Obama: Emerging Analyses Of The 'Tea Party Movement ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee0If9uMjz8
 
 
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