In the last two weeks, I have had conflicting ideas about how to continue these blog posts, which are taking the place of the actual, planned introductory posts that I had written. There is an ugly war of ideas taking place, and it’s not easy to ignore.
I have been dealing with basic WordPress administration, which is not as simple as you might think. The installation that I’m using is an out-of-the-box product built on top of a LAMP stack in Ubuntu. But I’m more comfortable with RHEL system administration. And those two major distributions of the core linux operating system and philosophy are in hot conflict with each other.
The advantage that this Ubuntu installation seems to have is that I can do package updates as needed, whereas whenever I built a WP site from scratch in the past, from my own hand-built LAMP stack, on RHEL (because that’s the platform I’m comfortable with), the WordPress installation crashes every time I run OS package updates.
Wil Wheaton mentions, in his autobiographical book Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir, the challenges of building a personal website. To put this in context, Wil Wheaton had an enormously successful personal website with articles about his life and his career, before the ugly term “blog” was invented (as an abbreviation for web log: a log of useful websites and other observations). Let’s put this in perspective: before there were listicles about 10 facts that will totally surprise you, followed by 10,000 inappropriate Taboola adverts, Wil did basically what I am trying to here, without my being a star of screen and stage.
And before he got there, he was a teenage actor on a science-fiction television series that portrayed him as a child genius, earning him much hate from people who imagined that a child genius is annoying, and who took the writing and direction of the program as real indications of his personal character. (Later in this blog, we will revisit the sad lot of people who confuse fiction with reality. I’m referring to the current war, since it’s virtually impossible to think about anything else right now.)
Question from a fan:
Q: Seriously, how much time do you spend reading techie sites like Slashdot and keeping up with the issues? … Is setting up your own server really fun for you…?
A: ….Setting up my own server is still beyond my abilities, but it is something I will be able to do, someday. Often, when I’m in a “down cycle,” or whatever the buzzword is for not working for months at a time, I think about getting a “fall back” job, so I could have a regular day job if I ever needed it. Recently, I’ve been thinking very seriously about pursuing a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate).[Endnote, written several years later for the updated edition, titled Still Just a Geek:]
http://wilwheatonbooks.com/still-just-a-geek/
I ultimately did learn how to configure an Apache webserver, configure php and Perl, understood mod_ re-write, and then realized that no matter how good I got at this stuff, I was never going to be as good as someone who wanted to attack it, so I never deployed a server in the wild.
I am approximately two steps ahead of our dear pioneering hero of both weblogging and space exploration. But I am still highly concerned about running a WordPress deployment, on top of a LAMP stack, on top of Ubuntu, since the Debian stream of linux distros may as well be in a different religion than the Red Hat stream.
But that’s not the war of conflicting ideas to which I was referring! (That, dear readers, was a narrative trick called misdirection.) The Debian crowd and the Red Hat crowd may as well be attending a thoroughly loving and mellow Rainbow Gathering-style GNU/linux convention, compared to what I am actually experiencing right at this moment.
There is a literal, physical war in progress right now. The facts about it are being documented, day by day. Those facts are being vetted, peer-reviewed, contested according to rules of objective journalism, and established. Even if you’re not reading about it in the news, future generations will read about it in history books.
And then, there is a war of ideas and opinions, largely ignoring any of those pesky notions such as “facts”. Just as in the wrongheaded, fundamentalist religious milieux that I grew up in, these ideas and opinions are all based on religious and culturally learned biases. Evidence is discarded, because emotional stances such as “righteous indignation” are more important.
I’m mostly referring to the pro-Palestinian movement, the supporters (who conveniently don’t live in Palestine, or any geographical area that would be influenced by the outcome of the Palestinian people’s lot) consistently assuming that all Israeli citizens, the State of Israel, and basically all Jews are completely guilty.
(Because those pro-Palestinians don’t live in Israel either, and don’t have any vested interest in the lives of residents on this side of the border – unless of course it means sweeping those lives out the way so that they can invent an imaginary nation that extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.) And you see that, just in attempting to define the terms of that debate, I’m already resorting to barbaric editorial techniques.
The other issue I’m facing now is now to proceed right now with this memoir, i.e. weblog, i.e. blog.
I had planned to build this website on certain idealistic goals. I wanted to explore the pros and cons of religions, languages, and cultures in some fun ways. I wanted to talk a lot about how much the two concepts of descriptivism and prescriptivism influence our daily lives. Trust me: if you can hang on, and if I can survive this war, and if I can stay sane, we have a lot of rich ground to explore together. (And by “together”, I’m also presuming a working comments section that won’t lead the site to be exploited and brought to its knees by website attackers.)
My consigliere has advised me: “I just think everyone should delete their Twitter account…. I would just rather read articles from reputable sources about people that monitor those things. I don’t want to stick my head in the toilet just to see if there is a turd in there.”
To that end, as an effort to preserve my sanity, I’ve decided that what I must do at this point is avoid discussing the news, ignore Twitter as a tool of day-to-day discussion, and proceed with my original plan of making this whole website something that I can be proud of. (You will, in due time, learn about my consigliere, as I describe our incredible life journeys between the Christian school in Georgia where we met, and lives we have pursued since then.)
Someday, I will return to the troubling subject of pro-Jihadist anti-Semitism, and my fascination about how it has become basically acceptable in the world outside of the land of Israel for people in foreign countries to wish us (no matter what our religious or political opinions are) to just take the next train to Bergen-Belsen. (I’m especially fascinated since – here in Israel – my Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Druze friends and I are getting along just fine. That would be a long and confusing train ride for all of us.)
But that debate is going to have to wait. Today’s holy war will have to be limited to linux package updates.
Leave a Reply