Liberal Post 3: Language Challenge

Where in the world are our blogs' readers? One advantage of Blogger/Blogspot over the free versions of Live Journal and Word Press is that Google always tells Google-hosted bloggers from which countries we're getting page views.

This web site is based in the United States and is mostly about the United States, so no points for guessing that the US is always on our top ten list.

This web site moved from Live Journal and still has a shadow at LJ, which is based in Russia, so it's not surprising that Russia has usually been on our top ten list too. We know very little about our Russian readers. One or two of them have posted a comment in English on Live Journal, and one posts lovely photos and graphics, with English texts, on Twitter. We like to think, or hope, they're reading English-language web sites in order to keep the parts of their brains that have studied English active, the way I like to read things in Spanish and French. I've said this before and will say it again: Welcome, all international readers. Welcome, US State Department and FBI readers. This blog is our virtual front porch and sitting room, so feel free to pull up chairs, sit down, introduce yourselves...

The other eight countries on the top ten list vary from week to week, and frequently surprise me. Google can be positively pushy about translating everything, so it's possible that people in non-English-speaking countries aren't even reading English-language web sites for language practice, but how is it possible that, some weeks, we have more readers in non-English-speaking countries than in English-speaking ones? Google reports only the top ten. Have we offended everybody in Canada this week, or are they all on vacation?

This web site has no foreign policy. Although it's been written and edited by an "I," it does still belong to a "we," some of whom don't even have screen names. Individually we're a mixed group; though Yona looks White, when Grandma Bonnie Peters died we may have lost our last "ethnically pure" White member. Most of us have traced our ancestors to lots of different places, and our personal friends are also mixed crowds. We include at least one Trump supporter (as distinct from supporters of the U.S. Constitution), and we would just dare anybody to say to his face that we are in any way racist, if it weren't for social distancing.

Generally we think foreign visitors who are here legally and legitimately are interesting, and the ones who have been here for a while and still want to stay here probably have a contribution to make to our society and should stay. Generally we know that, although human beings can be friends, nations can only form alliances that change from year to year. Individuals have to respect our national policy makers' decisions about those, trusting that governments can aggregate more information about what's going on in other countries than individuals would ever have.

"Oh blah, that's just general Internet boilerplate, like the reminder that Google-hosted sites use cookies and that nobody should type any living person's real name or individual contact information on a computer that connects to the Internet, that this web site repeats every few months. What else is new?"

Well. Bloggers of the world, today this web site challenges you to greet your readers in their national languages, even if the equivalent of "hello" or "good morning" is the only word you know of those languages.

So, this week, this web site says:

Hello, US readers.

Merhaba, Turkish readers, at least those of you who are actually reading and not trying to hack into anything. The position of this web site is that all hackers should be permanently confined to dank, damp cells where, if anybody were able to smuggle in any electronic device, it would corrode instantly, and meanwhile the hackers would be too busy coughing and wheezing in the damp air and scrubbing little patches of mold off their skins to care. Actual readers are welcome.

Buon giorno, Italian readers.

Konnichi wa, Japanese readers.

Guten Morgen, German readers.

Zdravstvuyte, Russian readers. Zdraste, regular Russian readers who've been with us since 2011.

Bonjour, French readers.

Buenos dias, readers in Argentina. Why Argentina, where I don't know anybody, more than Mexico, Colombia, or Guatemala, where I do? Ni idea.

As salaam alaikum, Saudi readers.

Bom dia, Portuguese readers.

This web site wishes you all a good week...and that's a definitively liberal thought. (When I accepted payment for "liberal posts" I had in mind some posts about the good work done by people who've held left-leaning political views. Those will appear. Meanwhile, this web site is liberal in the sense of being generous with good intentions. We can't afford to be very generous with much else, but we have lots of good will and good intentions.)

Meanwhile, what the State Department and FBI want to know seems to be whether our foreign readers are telling us how to vote, or trying to use our names to participate illegally in the US political process. We certainly don't want to make that easy. (That's one reason why we never, never, never use any of our real-world names in cyberspace.) Several years ago some hackers in Turkey apparently used my individual e-mail account to make a campaign contribution to Rand Paul; they did that without my knowledge or consent, they fouled up the e-mail, and if I had any idea who or where they were I'd spank them. If you like any of the people who are candidates for political office in the United States, international readers, please feel free to buy their books and donate money to their charities, but stay out of other people's e-mail.