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 SU and the Arms Race

By Noam Chomsky at Jun 10, 2004


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Questioner: Given that the arms race was a disaster for the Soviet Union economically and of little advantage militarily, why did the USSR engage in it? What it did to them economically is exactly what Khrushchev predicted, and presumably what JFK and his advisers had in mind when they turned down Khrushchev's call for sharp mutual reduction of offensive military forces, and his significant unilateral steps in that direction: stagnation, and an end to significant socioeconomic progress, in fact decline relative to the vastly richer West. I think one can make an argument, like yours, that the USSR should have simply let itself fall far behind the US in offensive military capacity, and hope for the best. With their experience, and what they saw happening right then -- with the enormous "missile gap" (in US favor), the purposeful humiliation at the missile crisis, JFK's military buildup and sharp increase in intervention and support for military dictatorships -- it's not too surprising that they chose the suicidal course of trying to match the US in military terms. The far more interesting question, both as seen from Mars and (crucially) as seen from here, is why the US leadership, with the applause of elites, continued massive arms build-up, and is now hysterically worshipping the class A mass murderer and torturer who drove it farther forward in the 80s.
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