Routine Revelations

First, one needs to learn what history says it means to be an American. Next, one needs to decide what they believe it means to be an American. How consistent are your beliefs with history?

Next, one needs to determine what each political party claims it stands for and challenge the assumptions for how those claims are consistent with being an American and for progress.

Of course, the questions of whether progress is needed, desired, and how it looks needs to be decided, ultimately by each individual.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s recommendation for a full vote on Kavanaugh demonstrates the value of diversity. All the Republicans on the committee are men who identified with Kavanaugh’s anger. Lindsey Graham seemed to channel it the most. In that moment it no longer mattered whether Kavanaugh is qualified for the job (I don’t think he is) or guilty of sexual assault because by god they like the man just because he got pissed off! And that too is how we end up with Trump as President because enough voters liked him and didn’t care about his ability to actually do the job.

Senators have a constitutional responsibility to determine whether a person is competent to be a Supreme Court justice and not just like the candidates. The Senators who supported Kavanaugh have failed their duty.

Dave Winer has been writing about owning and archiving what one writes and publishes on the web for a very long time. I think the heart of the matter is that if one is to think of the web as a library there has to be a mechanism for it to be long-lived.

In other words, permanence. The interesting thing is that many people dislike the web’s permanence, and the European Union even has a law in place intended to enable people to disrupt that permanence.

If you do see the value, however, there needs to be permanent access to what is written and a way to get to it. Permanently storing files is a whole lot easier than permanent access.

Dave currently thinks Github may be as good as anything given that it is owned by Microsoft, a company one expects will be around for a while Still, given that it is a corporate asset, Github exists at the pleasure of Microsoft and not the public.

To Dave’s point, one thing I like about micro.blog is its support for Github. Micro.blog writes a copy of both the source markdown and the rendered HTML of what I write here to Github, and that provides one degree of backup. However, it gets even better because I use git to maintain a clone of that repository on my local computers, which provides me an easy backup copy of what I write on a computer I own.

The markdown is source for jekyll, which itself is an open source blog platform, and that source boils down to plain text files. BTW, jekyll itself works in this manner with Github pages which is good enough for many people, but I happen to like social layer and community that micro.blog provides.

I don’t get the mindset of conservatives. They say things like they want small government and want government out of people’s lives and yet they want to dictate their beliefs to people with whom they disagree.

If America is about liberty, then one expressing that liberty by protesting is in fact a high form of patriotism.

Second, people need to understand that public displays of patriotism, which is what standing during a national anthem is, is done by non-democratic countries too. Such displays are not uniquely American. See above for what is uniquely American.

Finally, in my upbringing kneeling is a sign of reverence. One can make the argument that kneeling is even a higher display of respect than standing. If Colin and the other NFL players did something like turn their back, or lie down, or start break dancing THAT would be disrespectful.

Worse, what is most disrespectful to veterans is not voting. Actively working to prevent citizens from voting. Not challenging the President when he sends our military in to conflict. And not demanding that Congress uphold its constitutional responsibility to declare war. Wouldn’t making sure every vet gets the physical and mental health care they need be a true sign of respect? What is more respectful, actually caring about active military and veterans or puttinng on appearances of respect?

P.S. Go to any sporting event and you will find people walking, talking, and otherwise not paying attention during the national anthem.

I think of micro.blog as a publishing platform, for two reasons. First, what I write is published to my blog. Second, what I write is published to other distribution channels, specifically for me Twitter and Facebook, but it could also include Medium and LinkedIn.

What would make micro.blog perfect for me is the ability to designate, at the time I am writing, to which distribution channels I want a particular item published to. All things that I write are appropriate for my blog, but some things I might only want to also be published to Twitter and yet other things I would prefer published to Facebook.

To me, the ability to control what gets published where, from the app in which I am writing, is particularly important if I were to publish to the LinkedIn and Medium channels that could be considered more “professional.”

Right now, cross-posting is all or nothing. Everything I write in micro.blog is cross posted to Twitter and Facebook and frankly some posts, like this one, don’t make sense for those audiences.

I recognize there are drawbacks to cross posting, specifically, it’s a write once experience meaning that edits don’t get re-published to Twitter and Facebook because there just isn’t a mechanism to do so.