Wed Sep 12, 2007 at 05:00:00 PDT
Time to start making our marks.
We look sharp, time to be sharp.
Category: Meta
Sep 12 2008
So Today’s The Big Day!
Sep 05 2008
American Idol
One week has passed now since Barack Obama gave his eloquent acceptance speech before an audience of 84,000 in Denver. It has been one week since John McCain announced his running mate would be Sarah Palin. In that time, the Democratic presidential campaign has been derailed and in the year of the celebrity candidate, Palin is the hot new thing.
Conservatives have their “rock star” and liberals cannot help themselves from talking and writing about her. McCain has accomplished what he set out to do by choosing her: shake things up. His campaign was withering. Obama was not only reaching out to the middle and independents of the American electorate, but also over to disaffected Republicans. Obama was on his way to becoming the Democratic Party’s response to Ronald Reagan.
No longer.
Aug 17 2008
Web 2.0: Share This w/poll
Brought to you by Add This: A fabulous widget now available on DocuDharma.
This widget allows you to easily share and bookmark your favorite essays. You may have noticed this button: 
at the top and bottom of the Essay pages. Scroll over one of the buttons and you’ll see the option to submit this essay to some of the most popular social bookmarking services: Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us Stumble, etc. Click the “More” button and you’ll see even more options.
Aug 04 2008
Meta…One piece of the puzzle.
I’m heading off for new pastures tomorrow and might be offline for a day or so after that til I get all the kinks ironed out, so I thought I would leave you with this, lol.
Perhaps the biggest problem with interaction on blogs is the elusive in definition, yet ever present, “personal attack” or perception of personal attack. Though this video is specifically about race, the method/meta described applies to almost all personal attack situations. It centers on the difference between, the “what they did” conversation as opposed to the “what they are” conversation. And why using personal attack….”what you are”….ends up in flames.
The problem is only exacerbated on smaller blogs where we all get to know…..and form opinions about….and judgments on…another persons character.
When really all we are seeing is PARTS of that other persons character. And then we, in a moment of weakness or to just try to “win, “attack those parts…attack who we THINK they are. It is all too easy to fall into judgment, and then to pigeon hole the ‘opposing’ poster into the very narrow parameters of that judgment. Then the ‘opposition’ is forced to react to our judgment and perception….usually with their own judgment and perception about us.
Voila….flame war.
However, it has been my experience that humans are VERY bad at not judging each other no matter how small the evidence is. I know I do! Even though I try not to. And then I end up not talking to another person….but to the judgments I have formed about that person in the ‘heat of battle.’ It is tough not to do, but if it was easy, ANYONE could do it! This approach is not a cure all, but If we can absorb this and try to put it into practice it will help.
Jul 28 2008
Here’s the thing about Docudharma!
This has to do with the bloodletting that’s going on right now. I think that it’s important that we remember that Docudharma is not a “more and better Democrats” community. Some of us used to post at a place like that. Some of us have chosen not to post there any longer. I’m sure each of us who’ve chosen that route have different reasons, and I’m sure that some of the reasons are the same. For the moment, those reasons don’t matter (at least in the context of this posting).
Jul 25 2008
Emily Dickinson, Dame of DocuDharma
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring blog!
I know that Emily would forgive me for editing the last word. After all, Emily Dickinson died before the first bloguero, Marcel Proust, was born, and Marcel passed on before he was able to finish À la recherche du temps perdu, although it was 3,200 pages and had more characters in it than there are UID’s here. But that’s another essay, comparing people here to Proust’s characters. This essay is about the joy and peace of being nobody in Left Blogistan.
Some people want Nobody for President. But that’s another essay entirely, one about politics and disillusionment, disenfranchisement and the two party system. That’s not this essay. This one is about the joy of being nobody here at docuDharma.
Nobody is also the name of a police officer who disguises himself in a black outfit to fight crime in New York in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But that’s another essay also. When asked who it was who did something particularly daring or courageous, witnesses in TMNT responded, “Nobody.” That nobody I’m not. I’m nobody here, and I’m happy being nobody.
When you’re nobody, you’re anonymous. And no one pays any particular attention to you. Maybe people read what you write, maybe they don’t. You’re clearly not a somebody. You don’t have any elevated status or special belonging or a posse or a gang of followers and disciples. You might have a few fans, maybe not. You don’t have a title. You don’t have responsibility. You come and go as you wish. If you feel like writing something, you do. If you don’t feel like it, you don’t bother. If you express your opinions, others might respond, or not. You’re nobody, so it doesn’t really matter what they say about what you wrote. An example: the other day at Orange a commenter opined that I was “astonishingly ignorant” about the law. If I were somebody, that dismissive slap would have hurt my feelings. Because I’m nobody, I suspected that the hyperbolic snap was a projection of the writer’s discomfort and misunderstanding. It doesn’t matter what’s said about nobody.
It’s far easier to thrive when you’re not being somebody. You’re just nobody. And you have nobody’s opinions, and tastes, and style, and preferences, and judgments, whatever they might be. And you express whatever you feel like however you like. And it’s hard for people to get mad at nobody, though occasionally some people try to. And people hardly ever insult nobody. It’s hard for nobody to be perceived as a threat or a rival or an enemy or someone to disagree with.
Nobodies can live happily by the Four Toltec Agreements:
“Be impeccable with your words”
“Don’t take anything personally”
“Don’t make assumptions”
“Always do your best”.
What most disrupts living beautifully by the Four Agreements imo is ego, which means being somebody or acting like you’re somebody or believing that you’re actually somebody. That uniqueness, that importance, that personality, that essential dualism tends to make people careless with their words when they speak or write. It tends to make people take things personally, in ways that hurt their feelings about who they are or what their life means or what they represent or where they’ve been or what they’ve done. It causes them pain. It creates suffering, between what one is and what one would like to be, between what one believes one is and others’ perceptions of what one actually is. The number of possible kinds of suffering is gigantic Being someone leads to making assumptions, usually about others. And sadly, being somebody convinces one that s/he can get by without trying really hard, because s/he is somebody already, without trying. But I digress.
Being nobody is really joyful and wonderful. And liberating. To participate in Flame Wars you have to be somebody. To threaten to leave a blog you have to be somebody. You have to be right, you have to see that others are wrong or mean or different from you in essential ways that hurt you. Only somebody can do or be that. If you’re nobody, what’s written doesn’t matter in a personal way, because you’re not somebody whose feeling will be hurt. You’re nobody. If you leave, you just go somewhere else. Months later, maybe, someone will ask whatever happened to you. Or not.
I’m concerned that the point of this brief essay might be too cryptic, too opaque, to blurred. I’m also concerned that it might seem strangely inarticulate. If there were a metaphorical knock on my door, I’d go and see who was there. There might be nobody there. Anyway, if there were somebody there, I’d have to say that I was sorry, but there was nobody home.
Maybe a parable will help. Although I suspect, it might make things even more confusing.
Once on Erev Yom Kippur, the rabbi and the cantor were on the Bimah. They prayed hard and knelt and bowed and beat their breasts and intoned, “I’m nobody. I’m nobody.” This public contrition and atonement was appropriate in that congregation. The shamus, a Jewish word for the Shul’s janitor, was moved by their intense prayers, and he too stepped onto the Bimah to kneel and beat his chest. The Cantor saw this, frowned, turned to the Rabbi and said, “So, look who thinks he’s nobody.”
Jul 23 2008
Call and Response in Kafka Kountry
I recently expressed a limited criticism of points made in an essay. When I began receiving responses which twisted my words or mischaracterized me, I made a decision and set up an algorithm for myself: I would keep responding so long as my words were twisted or I was left with an insult or a mischaracterization of any kind. I tried not to escalate, just defend. And I would end with anyone who stopped with a neutral remark, such as let’s just drop this or this is going nowhere. From that simple position, it became clear that unless I allowed an inaccurate statement to stand, the discussion would continue to escalate indefinitely. The longer I stuck around, the higher the stakes became and the more I was demonized, until two other essays were born, apparently for little other reason than to demonize the person who would not back down. It was disorienting in the extreme to wander into two essays based on the false premise that 1) I didn’t want a certain person on the site and 2) I simply refuse stubbornly to learn. Starting from that extreme misrepresentation, hundreds of words were written, many high-minded notions expressed, all kinds of brilliant theories expounded. It was truly Kafkaesque. Seeing so many people buy in and participate in what was, more than anything, a trashing of me, has been disappointing but informative.
I offer the following as a mere record. I don’t expect movement, I don’t expect anything to change. Please don’t express sympathy for my feelings or ask me to stay. I’m not looking for that. I take responsibility for my choices, and I chose to behave in a way that has brought me to this point. I am not complaining, I am not putting anyone down, I am recording how the experience looked and felt to me. In the end, this was a lot closer to Alice’s Wonderland than anything I have ever experienced. By a long shot.
Jul 22 2008
On being a Contributing Editor
We have over 30 Contributing Editors here at DocuDharma and the reason I won’t list them is that I don’t want to encourage judgement on the basis of activity. Many of them are busier behind the scenes than in front of the curtain. Others have had commitments that have called them away temporarily. Some left to be free to express some rather unpopular positions that they thought would be damaging to the blog (at least that was the excuse).
There are few positions too unpopular to express here.
Most of them I think simply forgot, or lost their muse, or are busy with their own real life thing (fancy that).
It’s something to commit to one piece of original content a month, a week, or EVERY SINGLE DAY WHAT WAS I THINKING!
Sorry. I hear voices sometimes.
And I think that scares people off, thinking that we’re some kind of insane Jann Wenner taskmasters cracking the whip with deadlines and threatening to cut off your expense account. It’ll be ready when it’s ready. Nor does it have to be a masterpiece, but it does have your name on top and maybe I’m just more comfortable churning out crap than most.
Coming soon we’re going to change the table of organization and have more Guest Bloggers and announce some new Contributing Editors.
Jul 10 2008
Integrity
What is integrity? It is a word that has been bandied about a lot recently during our National process of choosing leaders to be elected to the highest Political Offices of our Country. Who has integrity? Who does not have integrity? Is integrity in our Politicians a good trait? A bad trait? An impossible trait? Who is to say whether any certain Candidate or any person, for that matter, has integrity or not? Can a person have integrity on one issue and not have integrity on another issue and still have Integrity?
So many questions. Not such easy answers.
Let’s have a look at the word Integrity.
In discussions on behavior and morality, one view of the property of integrity sees it as the virtue of basing actions on an internally-consistent framework of principles.
This scenario may emphasize depth of principles and adherence of each level to the next. One can describe a person as having integrity to the extent that everything that that person does derives from the same core set of values. While those values may change, their consistency with each other and with the person’s actions determine the person’s degree of integrity.
Considering this description of Integrity, an Internally-consistant framework of principles would have to be viewed as a trait belonging to an individual. Therefore, MY degree of integrity to MYSELF may be close too 100% if I stick to my internal principles at all times. However, someone other than myself might see me as not having integrity because they do not understand my internal set of principles and therefore only have the ability to judge me by my words and actions.