I mainly write these daily blog postings to help me "think through" various issues that strike me as important. Mostly, I write about issues relating to the "political world" in which we most immediately live. The Blogger website, which hosts my daily commentaries, gives readers an opportunity to make comments on what I write about, and I am always happy when someone does decide to post a comment.
Actually, let me correct that. I am MOSTLY delighted when someone decides to post a comment on what I have written, and that includes comments that disagree with my own point of view.
The comment process set up by the Blogger website allows me to review comments, before they are posted. I can decide either to post them, or not. I had to turn on that feature when I started getting a lot of comments that were, in essence, lengthy advertisements for various business propositions, about which I knew nothing, and which generally had little or nothing to do with what I might have said myself. Comments like those are screened out. Other comments, even when they disagree with my own point of view, are authorized. Commenters can either identify themselves, when they make comments, or they can post their comments anonymously. Naturally, I'd prefer all commenters to identify themselves, but I will approve any comment, even an anonymous comment, if it relates to what my blog posting was talking about.
I don't get all that many comments (leading me to question, sometimes, whether anyone actually reads what I write), and if you are ever inclined to comment, please don't hesitate. I welcome comments!
Actually, though, I do have a caveat. Death threats will not be authorized.
Not too long ago, I was notified of a proposed comment on my blog posting #242, from August 30, 2021. That long ago blog posting was titled, "We Didn't Start The Fire?" Click the link if you'd like to read it. My discussion of Billy Joel's 1989 hit raised some important philosophical points, or at least I thought so:
We didn't start the fire?
Maybe not - but maybe we did, right? We can choose to consider ourselves as relatively blameless individuals, unfairly caught up in a reality that is the product of past actions for which we have no individual responsibility. Or, alternatively, we can decide that we are willing to accept our individual responsibility for the collective reality that has been our human creation - the reality in which we now find ourselves.
However we wish to think about it, here we are! Right in the middle of the flames!
That blog posting may have been written in 2021, but it does seem pretty relevant right now; at least, I think so!
Anyway, four years after I wrote that blog posting (in other words, quite recently) I was notified of a proposed comment. It was an anonymous comment, and it was very brief. Here is the comment that was proposed:
kys
That's it; that was the total comment, and I had no idea what that meant. So, I looked it up. Turns out that "kys" means:
If you click that link, you will find a discussion of this expression in The New Statesman, dated August 26, 2017, which is where I got that image at the top of this blog posting. That "kys" expression has been around for quite awhile, I guess, but I had really never known anything about it, until I got that proposed comment on my earlier blog post.
When someone sends me a "kill your self" message, I could take it as a kind of "joke among friends," as The New Statesman put it. I don't choose to think of it that way.
When we start talking about killing people, it's no joking matter!
I don't think it's funny, either. These young people! Just wait until mortality dawns as a reality!
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