obviously - Quaker Ranter

Letting your life speak in digital spaces

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 May 2018 15:50:05 +0000

Kathleen Wooten has some tips on ministering in social spaces without “losing your sanity”):

Develop personal rules: These are specific to you. A few of mine…. Never respond to an angry message from my phone. Always open a computer, sit down intentionally, and if possible wait 24 hours. ON social media – this might be a shorter time frame, but still, not until I can sit and center and not speak out of anger.

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quakerkathleen.org

I’m not sure if I’ve ever written down my personal guidelines. Some of these are generic to being a good online citizen (don’t feed trolls, don’t punch down, don’t respond in anger, disengage when a conversation is obviously running in circles).

Other guidelines of mine arguably come from Quaker values. For example, in general I won’t mention someone else on a forum in which they don’t appear. I’m especially wary on private Facebook groups, as they can easily become forum for detraction and us/them peer pressure. The Tract Association pamphlet on detraction is really a must-read. It’s actually probably something worth re-reading every six months. Readers: what kind of practices have you developed to be a responsible Quaker online?

Lots of Blame-Shifting on the Niger/Iraq Forgery

Martin Kelley — Fri, 11 Jul 2003 10:07:42 +0000

The CIA asked Britain to drop it’s Iraq claim while President Bush said that the CIA “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.”
Remember that Bush’s State of the Union address didn’t claim that the US believed that Iraq was buying nuclear material from Niger or other African countries. It said that British intelligence thought Iraq was. Shifting responsibility for the claim gave the Bush team the wiggle room to include an allegation they knew was probably not true. It’s the triumph of politics over truth.
As I’ve written before, there is a political brillance to the Bush Presidency. The Administration knows that it can sway large portions of the American public just by making claims. It doesn’t matter if the claims are wrong –even obviously wrong– as long as they feed into some deep psychic narrative. It’s been awhile since we saw a President that could bully through reality as long as the story sounded good. Ronald Reagan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I’m suspecting our current President is even better. The question is whether enough people will start insisting on the truth and demand investigations into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and President Bush knew it. The American people would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq wasn’t a threat and this too President Bush knew.