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

The Hypocrisy in Najaf

By Michael McGehee at Jan 25, 2010


Change Text Size a- | A+
It seems like it wasn't too long ago that Najaf was under siege by American Forces and the Shiite-dominated city was welcoming with open arms a Sunni contingency of aid and assistance. That was maybe five years ago. Something like that.
 
Flash forward to now. The Shiite-led government has banned hundreds of Sunni candidates from the upcoming election on the basis that they are Ba'athists or Ba'athist sympathizers.
 
The city council basically said "you have 24 hours to leave or we will kill you."
 
It's worth exploring grievances against the Ba'ath Party. But to be brief: They ruled violently. They were tyrants. It was sectarian.
 
Back when Bush was puffing his chest about "the surge" many had noted that one of the main reasons for the "success" was not the increase of American targets - human sandbags for resistance fighters and terrorists to hone their skills on - but that in many places Sunni's were effectively cleansed from neighborhoods and concrete walls put up to keep them out. The surge, of course, followed the report by morticians in Baghdad's morgues that the vast majority of bodies coming in were young Sunni men.
 
If there was any thought that the Shiites would behave differently once in power that evaporated long ago and what's going on now in Najaf is just another painful example to illustrate that.
 
Maybe these candidates are Ba'athists or Ba'athist sympathizers, maybe not. The point is they are trying to work within the system. Allowing them to participate would more likely prove successful at bridging differences than threats of violence and intolerance - traits all too similar to the tyranny that should be history.
Loading_border