Category: Meta

I’d like to think I am a tolerant man.  I like Docudharma partly because of this toleration.  There are few rules, and what rules there are are largely sensible.  It’s not a single mission blog, like some others, and so there’s a great deal of freedom to explore what some people might consider the “wacky and crazy”.

One of the reasons I spend more time here as of now as opposed to anywhere else in terms of participating on the internet is that I find most or many ideas that aren’t palatable, at least tolerable, and that this benign toleration is preferable to constraining conversation and trying to create a community where topics that are “off-mission” are grounds for being banned from a site.

And, being a hermit, online community is important to me.  One of the things that strikes me is if you think about it, most of us have people in our own lives who are dear friends and family members who hold views that we might consider crazed.

I once had an eminently accomplished and deeply analytical friend who thought that the Earth was 6,000 years old and that dinosaur fossils were placed in the earth to lure people to Satan.

I have a family member who is a conservative Christian, committed adultery, married the woman he committed adultery with and divorced his wife, and once told me that my being gay was an abomination because it was “selfish” and that I was denying all my manifest charms to a woman.  Apparently there have never been any limits on a person with such a history judging others while refusing to look at the “plank in his own eye” to employ a Biblical phrase.

I had a friend who came over unannounced at all hours, and called me up all the time for help, and finally what precipitated the end of our friendship was his trying to introduce me to the joys of crystal meth.

And, as I have said more than once, I have one sibling, a dear brother, who remains dear to me, who thinks among other things that the problem with Democrats is that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are too darn liberal and thinks that gay people shouldn’t have certain civil rights because it would “cost the taxpayers money”.

So, yeah, I’d like to think I am a tolerant man.  The reason for me pointing out the above examples is to posit that sometimes we will tolerate a lot more in terms of bug-eyed battiness from family and the people we care about and adore in person than some people do on blogs.  And that is the reason, I believe, that Docudharma cultivates viewpoint toleration as a social good.  I know, there are some who believe that Docudharma is a “nutty fringe” website.  This, I believe is worth the price, because when you start shutting down discussion you start losing good conversation and good ideas and anything that might result from that.

What I feel most of us realize on Docudharma is that people are more than the sum of their words on a blog.  It is the totality of their existence that matters, and further too many other blogs forget that, to the detriment of forming the communities that are going to be the backbone of the liberal movement.

There are on this site people who appear to believe that the Illuminati are real and that the biggest problem we have today is a shadow government that is about to take over the world.  There are others who seem to believe that global warming is a hoax and that vaccines cause autism and that 9/11 was a conspiracy.

Honestly, I don’t care.

grid·lock

noun

1. A traffic jam in which no vehicular movement is possible, especially one caused by the blockage of key intersections within a grid of streets.

2. A complete lack of movement or progress resulting in a backup or stagnation:

“the political gridlock that prevented … the President and Congress from moving expeditiously to cut the budget”

gridlock – Chiefly US

noun

1. (Engineering / Automotive Engineering) obstruction of urban traffic caused by queues of vehicles forming across junctions and causing further queues to form in the intersecting streets

2. a point in a dispute at which no agreement can be reached; deadlock political gridlock

verb

1. to block or obstruct (an area)

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gridlock

For our scientifically challenged fellow-citizens, it may hard to understand, but simply experiencing a few record-setting Snow Storms, does NOT automatically disprove the theory of Global Warming (aka Climate Change).  Science doesn’t work that way.  Science takes evidence.  Science takes data.  Science takes experiments – and lots and lots of Measuring. … It takes measuring of those boring things, called Facts.

The theory of Climate Change, views weather events from a long-term perspective.   Climate varies from year to year. Decade to decade.

Climate is a generational phenomenon. (could be why the younger generation “gets it” — more so than the older.)

Weather, on the other hand, changes with the wind.  Weather is a daily event.  Weather is the background noise, upon which we plan our daily lives.

In other words, weather can change – a lot;  over the course of a week, or over a Season. … Weather can even swing wildly over the course of a day sometimes – just ask anyone caught without rain gear, when unexpected downburst rolls in.

Weather is volatile.  Weather is constantly changing.  Climate not so much.

You see, my goal for DocuDharma is to make it a cool place to hang out.  A no pressure zone where you can let it slip on occasion that you’re part of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party without having people get all in your face like you’re a Yankee fan.  A virtual Cheers where everyone knows your name Norm! and you can ignore blowhards like Cliff.

Liveblogging is hard, but no harder than on many other platforms.  You just have to remember to hit the ‘Refresh’ button on your browser instead of admiring your last bon mot for an hour or two.

On the other hand (appointment blogging) it sucks when you get no feedback from your audience.

Now I don’t seem to have a problem with that so much in part because I don’t care what people think, and also I’m perfectly comfortable expressing my interior dialog (and they called me mad at the institute).  I talk to myself all day every day and twice as much on Sundays.

And I watch TV.  All the time.  I can’t remember the last time I turned it off.

Coming up in GroundHog Month are some major sports events that I think we can enjoy together-

Puppy Bowl, Curling, America’s Cup.

While I’m content to try and provide content myself, I think the Olympics is a little more than I can handle even on steroids and I’d like some volunteers.

Oh you betcha.

Actually quite a bit more traumatic and time consuming than I expected.

Of course most of that is my fault, since I’m very obsessive about backups and notes.

And I shifted my installation paradigm for this one, sticking with the Microsoft defaults for as long as I could stand them, which is now.

XP Pro, Service Pack 3, all the updates including IE 8 and MP 11.  The only thing proprietary is the network drivers and firewall included with my Asus A8N-E motherboard.

The good news is that it’s looking more and more like a virus or malware since IE was behaving just as badly as my 1.5.0.12 Firefox.  Hopefully by this evening I’ll have a system I recognize and can be productive for you with.

General tirades about computers accepted below.

I recently came across, through a YouTube video, a rather unique French public service announcement.  It encouraged heterosexual men to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS by using a condom before engaging in sexual contact.  Predictable enough subject for a PSA, one might think, but the video’s concept was both amusing and novel.  While the American mind would likely appreciate the humor, it would also deem it too graphic to be aired on network television and probably cable as well.  American liberalism has, I realize, a long standing Francophone tradition, just as American conservative thought has an equally lengthy history of criticizing it, so my point is not to cater directly to either camp.  Somewhere between the two is something close to the truth and as such I seek to find it.

To get to my point, in France, sex is everywhere, and yet attitudes towards sexuality in one’s personal life are often more traditional than in the United States.  While on the continent, one often encounters nudity on billboards, street signs, and shop windows while out and about, but the attitude of most residents is that the body is a natural entity, as are public depictions of it without the benefit of clothes to disguise the objectionable parts.  To us, of course, the only truly socially acceptable manner of presentation regarding the unveiled human body is in the art gallery and even then some people have been known to register their visible discomfort.  Furthermore, we deem nudity or frank depictions of nudity in any form to often only be granted as a privilege based on reaching a certain age and with it some perceived degree of maturity, believing that children and minors ought not to be exposed to its supposedly corrupting influences until the age where they can make an informed decision whether or not to partake.  Put that way, it sounds almost as though nudity is some health hazard, like smoking or consuming too much alcohol.  Still, for all the energy we expend spinning out cautionary tales and guilt-laden commandments, one would think we ought to expect more for our efforts.        

Larry McMurty wrote this great read, Lonesome Dove. I read it in 1986 and fell in love with the characters, the writing, the story, the ideas. I loved that even kids could hunt a rabbit and fix it for a meal. Or that guys could trek hundreds of hard miles on horseback, sleep under the stars and survive storms and winters that way. They crossed rivers, fought with skill, drove cattle and horses… these lucky few were really free. Not in lack of hardship, but they had options. They had options.

As we have created our lives, seeking freedom from the mundane tasks of living, we have become prisoners. Of those who feed us and clothe us and house us. We are domesticated like farm animals. We have the mentality of our pets… forgetting how to fend for themselves, staying as kittens and puppies, forever young and helpless.

We have robbed ourselves of options. The poor in cities can’t grow anything on the concrete. Those in the suburbs wouldn’t know how to plant, much less maintain, a vegetable garden. How many of us could start a fire without a match? Or catch even a mouse (if we could force ourselves to eat it).

Do we have the option to survive outside of the very society that is strangling us? Can we even imagine it?

This is just a short list of what I think the responsibilities of a good political blogger are.  I know we fill up the physical world with garbage:

Here I just wish to suggest ways of producing not-garbage in the political blogosphere.  Opinions below are merely the product of the author.

(Crossposted at Orange)