Dear friends,
Thank you for your patience, sense of humor, understanding, tolerance, maturity and fairness. You heard me. I believe you deserve all those attributes, in different quantities.
Compared to when we first started, the tone of the comments has improved a lot. I think we’re beginning to understand that telling our critics to shut up and hurling abuse at them will not make them shut up and they’ll curse right back at you. So I see big improvement in discussions even though we still have a few years to go 🙂
In the past six months I did block two dozen people or more. Probably more if you include commercial spammers. Most others were blocked for a few days, few weeks and unblocked. It’s the least pleasant part of my work. I hate interfering and playing the role of school master. Every time I block someone or delete an offensive comment I do think about the site’s motto "nothing is sacred" and I wonder. Was I right? Was I wrong? I never feel completely justified in whatever action I decide take, and it wears you down.
If I judged your comments to harshly and deleted too many of them, I hope you don’t take it to heart. If you got booted out of the site for too long, bebakhsheed. You’re always welcome here.
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My outlook on Iran is positive. The road ahead is long and treacherous, but democracy as an idea has taken root and growing fast. It’s an idea whose time has come. Political Islam on the other hand has lost its intellectual vigor and ideological dynamism. It’s become the protector of a dictatorship of a few in the name of god. The Green Movement is the future.
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It’s the Year of the Tiger, my Chinese sign. Soon I’m going to London for a few months with the option to travel all over Europe. So many places I want to see… Italy (especially Verona), Greece (never visited, dying to go), Prague (old wish), Amsterdam (makes me smile)…
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Here’s Hesam Deihimi’s cover of “Koodakaneh” originally performed by Farhad.
