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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.

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

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

To Nation re Amy Wilentz article on Haiti

By Joe Emersberger at Mar 02, 2012


Change Text Size a- | A+
RE: http://www.thenation.com/article/166519/duvalier-and-haitis-triple-threat
 
I sent this brief letter in to the Nation but do not know if it will be published.
***
 
Judging by this article, Amy Wilentz cannot even consider that a series of US presidents should be in the dock for what they have done in Haiti alone, yet she pontificates to Haitians that "Impunity is no good for democracy." A US led coup in 2004 led to 2 years of dictatorship under Gerard Latortue - whom Wilentz neglected to mention at all - that led to at least 4000 political murders according to a scientific study published in the Lancet Medical Journal. It was also a US backed coup that led to thousands of murders between 1991-1994 - the first time Aristide was overthrown. Both Clinton and Bush Sr. did all they could to ensure that the perpetrators escaped justice and also infiltrated Haiti's security forces after the US finally ordered their allies to step aside in 1994. Thanks to Wikileaks we know the Bush II administration did the same thing after 2004 and ensured that paramilitary thugs were absorbed into the Haitian police.

Martelly owes his presidency to US bullying as Wilentz well knows. The overwhelming majority of Haitian voters shunned the US imposed electoral farce. However, even if Haitians succeed in once again electing a president like Aristide who tries to prioritize their interests, the US has ensured that paramilitary killers are well positioned to strike yet again. None of this raises any concern about US "impunity" for Wilentz.

It is astounding how completely liberals like Wilentz internalize imperial assumptions. No matter how high the corpses pile up around the world as a result of US policy, "impunity" is always someone else's problem.


Joe Emersberger


Brian Concannon comments

The analysis [by Wilentz] of Duvalier's situation is accurate, the analysis of Aristide's is outrageous. The most obvious example: "It’s assumed that during the seven years of his South African exile, one thing that kept Aristide from returning to Haiti was fear of prosecution on such charges". Aristide spent all seven years of exile publicly and privately trying to return. It has been well documented that US government persistently worked to keep Aristide away from Haiti, including two telephone calls from President Obama to South Africa's President Zuma in 2011.

The idea that there is an equivalence between the case against Duvalier- a mountain of well-documented, internationally recognized evidence of centrally-directed state sponsored terror, and the never proven claims by political opponents for Aristide is absurd. The article's equivalence does not reflect the proven facts. It does reflect the talking points of Haiti’s neo-Duvalierist elites and the State Department. The Nation should be able to tell the difference

Brian Concannon Jr., Esq.

Director, Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti 

 



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