Welcome to New Readers! Our Philosophy, Values and Ground Rules

Welcome to many new The Smokey Wire readers!  The goal of The Smokey Wire is to share observations and learn from each other.  Important values that we share here are hospitality and (some degree of humility).  This is not like other parts of the internet,  all comments are approved by me, and nothing is monetized in any way shape or form, in fact, quite the opposite.

Here are some helpful hints for commenters:

State that you disagree or agree and WHY- what is it in your experience, or what you have read or.  If we wanted to hear “ranchers are bad” or “environmentalists are bad” or “people from Red or Blue states are bad” or even “Mormons are bad” we could go plenty of places on the internet.  Even AI, bless its nonexistent little heart, sometimes tells us where it gets its information and provides a link.   As a human, you can do better.

Use “I” and “some”, it’s really helpful.  For example, just the word “some” changes the dynamic and opens a door for the curious.  I’ll take two examples “Republicans want to sell off federal lands.”  If we ask, instead “which Republicans?” we say Mike Lee would be a yes, and say Ryan Zinke, a strong no.  So it might be more correct to say current R elected officials in the Congress of the US disagree about selling off federal lands.

Another example,  “environmentalists want to cover the land with wind turbines”, if we said “some” we could distinguish the folks who are against most “extractive” uses of federal lands (and motorized) from say, Audubon or the other more “if we don’t solve the climate crisis everything will die, and the only way is wind and solar.”  And folks and groups can change their minds, NRDC for example,

Driving the news: The NRDC filed comments earlier this month in support of an early step toward restarting a nuclear power plant in Iowa that Google is planning to use for one of its data centers in the region.

“This is unprecedented for us because it marks the first time in our history that we have taken action in support of an individual nuclear power plant,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of NRDC, told Axios in an exclusive interview.

WordPress comments are not limited by characters, so you can use these words “I think” “I disagree with X” .

But if you don’t have any content other than “this is the way it is” or  “intentions are bad” I will probably not approve your comment, because your comment is not adding to the purpose of this site, which is learning from each other and engaging with human beings with different views.

That’s the intention that I care about and the intention I enforce in approving comments.

“Yes,” you might say, “but you approved Person X’s comment and she said a mean thing!”  It’s true, I do have a sliding scale.  For some people,  at first I approve the comment and push back, hoping they reform.

Other people have social capital built up from a history of previous comments such that I overlook and approve some of their more rant-y comments. I do not edit out the mean parts myself, that’s on you.  In some cases I have to balance the need to hear from certain people, particularly those who disagree with me, with their default writing style (polemic).

The way I see it, we are like the  story of the blind men and the elephant. We all have different experiences and readings; at different spatial and temporal scales, in different organizations, trying to do different things.. what unites us is our love and concern for our shared federal lands (and private forest lands). From Wikipedia:

The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.^[1][2] The parable originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has been widely diffused.

What’s funny, from my perspective, is that often we can’t even characterize the elephant, but some are extremely certain what will happen in the future.  As a long-lived person, I grow more and more humble about thinking I know about the future.  Think of the shale revolution, or the rise of AI- not predicted, or even the return of nuclear.   I have seen concerns rise and fall.  Not enough people going to the woods.. crisis! Too many people going to the woods, crisis! Too many people in the world, crisis!  Not enough people in the world, crisis!

And so on.  I feel that we will do better at dealing with real crises of all sorts if we work together, and we will work together better if we understand each other, and we will understand each other better if we don’t assume the others’ bad intentions and are in an environment where people feel free to share their knowledge and experience.

It’s possible, in my view, to “listen with the ear of the heart” as the Benedictines say, even on the internet.  If you are interested in this kind of work, you might read Daniel Taub’s “Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement.” The author is a practicing expert in peace negotiations (the diplomatic kind), and plus he’s a great storyteller.  You don’t have to be Jewish to learn, but it does make you wonder how Christianity lost this tradition of Holy Disagreement, and began Killing Off People Who Disagree With You Theologically.  There’s probably a book out there somewhere..

From this review:

This approach sees argument not as a combat zone but as a joint enterprise, and its disputants not as jealous custodians of competing truths, but collaborative explorers. It seeks to create safe spaces not by outlawing controversial opinions but by welcoming them, and it offers a set of practical tools to rethink our own preconceptions. In fractious times it charts a way to build communities and societies that are resilient enough to face new and challenging ideas without fear.

Anyway, that’s what we are embarked upon here at TSW.  I’m hoping it will explain what our purpose is (at least mine) and help you edit your comments.  Again, welcome!  Also guest posts are welcome .. if you have views and experiences you would like to share with the TSW community, please email me. Especially experiences in the past, which may be lost as history is rewritten by AI.