I have thought a lot about one of the problems of blogging and
journalling (I will refer to it as blogging from now on).
I read a few blogs/journals (I will refer to these as blogs for now on)
and some of them offer great advice, when you use google and other
search engines for some obscure combination of terms, often the results
are blogs.
I usually avoid the political/religious discussions, which sometimes
arise in relation to blog entries about such subjects. It is not that I
do not have opinions on these things, but I do not find the blog forum
the right forum to discuss these matters.
Even when meta-moderating here on use.perl I avoid these discussions,
since they are mostly based on matters of opinion can there for go on
forever.
Saturday the 7th. I made a journal entry (http://use.perl.org/~jonasbn/journal/12678) about my forthcoming trip to Cuba, simply to inform the readers of my journal (I
think there is at least one) that I would not be updating my journal
for the next week due to vacation.
A (http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=13444&cid=20906)
was writing to this entry indicating reservation about Cuba and I
guess the social/political state in Cuba. I tried twice to write a
response to this, both times I discarded the response.
But I have really thought much about it though and I wanted to explain
to the commenter why I was going to Cuba, but it did not seem possible
for me to do this without getting into a political discussion even
though the trip had no political agenda at all.
So now I have to decided to try to explain why I did not respond to the
comment, I do not consider this entry a response merely an explanation.
During my Cuba trip (on which a lot of my friends participated) we had
a lot of political discussions and apart from being one of the best
vacations I have ever had – it was certainly also the most political.
Since politics and religion are based on ideology and/or belief. I do
not think that one is able to get anywhere with a discussion via a
forum like a blog on issues like those. At the same time english is
only my second language and I would not be able to argument in the same
manner as I would in danish. I would probably just piss people of.
So my rule of thumb is to walk a way from such discussions, no matter
how much I want to engage in these and to raise my opinion.
So these are the topics I am currently avoiding:
* War in Iraq/Afghanistan
* US foreign politics in general
* Religion
* Politics
These subjects are difficult to discuss even via fora better suited for
discussion, so apart from avoiding the subjects in blogs and commenting
in blogs. I also avoid these subjects in the following fora:
* IRC
* Email (unless I am writing with somebody very familiar to me)
* NNTP
* Diverse web-based fora
Maybe it is just me, but it has kept me from a lot of flames and I
think I have pretty straightforward relations to people whom I interact
with via the Internet.
I get my share of discussion off the Internet. I sometimes read these
discussions, since they can be a great source for seeing things from a
different point of view, but that is as far as I go.
One thing that bothers me though is the Biedermeier like state of things,
which I am supporting by not involving myself.
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