Christianity is Anarchism

Okay, the title for this entry may be a little controversial, but it's not meant to be degrading. In fact, since I often consider myself an anarchist of some sort, I've quite often looked at how the Christian faith works with various political systems and ideologies.

Now, anarchism, as most people would have you believe, supposedly means disorder, lawlessness, collapse of all social boundaries, and maybe even total immorality and decadence. That's actually not entirely true, because the term anarchy has a different meaning in non-mainstream philosophy and politics. The above examples describe laisser-faire capitalism and unregulated economy far better.

Anarchy, in the most basic sense, simply means lack of hierarchy. Most anarchists, therefore, are opposed to social hierarchies imposed on them. This usually refers to government, the force of tradition, and various institutions that exert control over others. Many anarchists believe capitalism leads to social classes and is thus a classist institution, although this belief is not universal. Anarchism can usually mean pacifism, as use or threat of violence results in imposed hierarchies. Such is the case for Christian anarchism.

Biases

My biases, of course, need to be declared. Now, I don't fully believe Christianity is a continuation of Judaism, and so the Judaistic tradition may be disregarded. This therefore means that the Old Testament need not be emphasized and can be viewed simply as reference books intended to be canonical only for Judaism. I'm saying this because churches have already chosen to ignore most of the Old Testament, citing it only when it fits the occasion and teaching it either only as history or selectively as moral stories. So many books of the Old Testament are rarely even mentioned anymore. In addition, a lot of pocket Bibles don't even include the Old Testament. Why the double standard? Why not simply remove it from Christian canon? Now, that might encourage Christians to actually read and understand their Scriptures more clearly, with the rarely-commented-on books out of the way. Interested, intellectual-minded Christians may pursue the Old Testament as they see fit.

Secondly, I don't necessarily believe in anything I have written below or above in this entry. This is more of a philosophical musing than an argument intended to convince people.

Reasons

The only authority Christians need to answer to is of course, God. All humans are sinners; sinners are all imperfect and less than capable. Merit or ability measured by human standards mean nothing in God's eyes. Sinners, therefore, have no legitimacy to impose authority on anyone, whether the system is a monarchy, republic, dictatorship, or democracy. Code of law is simply an accumulation of human wisdom, which to Christians has neither authority nor legitimacy. To reason otherwise, one may argue, is basically idolatry.

Does this justify violent uprisings against illegitimate government? Not according to Jesus. Jesus said not to strike back at evil but to turn the other cheek, and he said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." He also said, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at [the sinner]." What does that mean? It means the entire judicial system everyone takes for granted is un-Christian; that's what it means. All these words together produce a coherent message: Christians, don't be self-righteous, and be careful of the three fingers pointing back at you. While you accuse others of the splinter in their eyes, take a moment to remove the wooden beam that is arrogance, condescension, self-righteousness, and legalism in your eyes.

It's tragically disheartening that Christianity, a strong basis for anarchism and true freedom, remains subverted to this date. My theory is that Christianity fell way before the collapse of Rome; Christianity was effectively destroyed when the Roman Empire turned it into the fad religion and consequently official religion. Even now, many self-proclaimed Christians act as legionnaires of evil in the employ of the shadow of the Roman Empire, seeking to rebuild its imperial authority. Beware the Christian 'evangelists' working as evil's agents.

Mmm, my cynicism says I like the last paragraph. Perhaps I can put the Investiture Controversy in there too.

So I had a dream

I had a dream some time ago. I'm not sure when it was, probably yesterday afternoon or the day before. It was kind of bizarre, and I can't recall all the details, but here goes.

Apparently, aliens, or some sort of malevolent beings, were after me, and I was oblivious because I was only half-aware in the dream. It actually felt kind of Silent Hill-ish. Anyway. I don't remember the first half of the dream, so I'll talk about the second half.

After somehow escaping from the aliens without realizing it, I started walking back home. Strangely enough, the gravity or whatever went haywire, and the street was tilted 90 degrees. Funny enough, I was still standing still. Since it felt so funny that I was practically walking up a verticle surface, I decided to turn around and look down. Normally I'm an acrophobe (scared of heights), and in the dream I seemed to have blocked out the image. And then, when I looked back up, the scenery around me changed. I was no longer walking along a wide street, but in an alley beside my high school building. The alley itself doesn't exist as far as I know, and I may have gotten the image from another alley a few blocks from the school.

It was a rather dark place, and high trees grew on one side, forming an impassable barrier and overarching the alley itself. The scene in the dream seemed to have happened in the late afternoon and around dusk. Now, as I walked, I saw an iron fence up ahead. The whole setting just stirred up some claustrophobic feelings. Of course, I didn't feel any emotion, and so I kept walking. There was a side door next to the fence. As I approached the door, it snapped open -- a teacher came out. He briefly looked at me with his usual stern face.

He ushered me in through the dark entrance, and the next second I saw that I was in a well-lit control room of some sort. Lots of weird gadgets and switches around, within a tiny space. Somehow, it felt safe. So I leaned against the wall and stayed there, and a voice suddenly started talking.

"The aliens. They gave out the evil books. Be careful."

I knew it referred to me, that I was given these 'evil books', but I was still unaware and the speaker obviously didn't mind me listening in. The teacher spoke with that voice, and I don't remember anything about their conversation.

Then I woke up, and the implications of what I didn't realize in the dream really sent a chill down my spine. It's especially freaky when you have a kitten poster on the wall. The eyes just seem so menacing when you're feeling afraid. Oh, and when I'm on the computer, usually when it's really late like now, I have my back facing the cat. It's a bit unnerving at times.

Soul defiled

Hell has come amidst us,
And we know it not;
Shall I fetch my knife and run
Or stay and fight or what?

Shadowy the cloud has zoomed
Over our pathetic lives;
Hell is fiery, hell is hot,
To which my soul defiled is doomed.

Save the heavens for yourself
And my dearest family,
But don't tell me no more of
The dreams of ecstacy.

Show me freedom, show me truth;
Show me how to beat the lies.
Show me how to find the way
And clear it for the cabaret.

Shadowy the clouds have zoomed
Over our pathetic lives;
Hell is glacial, hell is close;
And my soul defiled is doomed.

Fight the fiery fire with fire
And fight the fiery fight with ire;
Show me truth, and show me life;
Show me my own resting pyre.

Deafening the thunder's roared
Over our pathetic lives;
Hell is here, and hell is come,
And my soul defiled is numb.

Make way for my glorious pass!
Watch my soul from here depart
Into hell; my soul defiled,
My soul defiled my greatest art.

Traffic

So, this is my first public blog, and being the secretive web-crawler I am, I have no idea how to properly increase traffic online. As far as my educated guess goes, the proper way is to get other sites with established visitors to link you. That apparently is also how Google works. Boo, bad news to social phobics: they either have no friends to help out or are to embarrassed to ask for favours! So what else is available?

Advertising, or spamming, in chatrooms and on random message boards seems to be one viable option, if a bit too uncouth (and socially awkward) for me. Including a link in your signature on an active forum account is also one other possibility, which is not plausible to me because I don't post on forums. I mean, posting casually on forums is one of those painful activities social phobics would do well to avoid (unless they're comfortable expressing themselves online, which I often am not), and being an INFP, I don't like serious, logical posts that more often than not invite hostility on inflammatory topics. Either way, I hate trying to fit in.

Finally, we step into another controversial realm: traffic schemes. On one hand we have BlogCrowd, a site on which bloggers allegedly exchange page views at a 2:1 ratio. That sounds great in theory, since we're talking about bloggers, not average websurfers who might have a heart attack at the notion of reading for pleasure. I did run into a few amazing blogs, but the method does not work. I've visited over 200 blogs, and so in theory I should have over 100 page views. But in reality, I've only had 5 page views --in a whole week's time-- from BlogCrowd, according to their stats. Ugh.

Another gimmick I ran into was FreeViral, a pyramid-scheme-sort of site that makes the almost unrealistic claim of being able to generate one million visitors. I suppose it might give you 500 visitors (none of whom is likely to stay) if you work on building a downline network, but the whole thing just screams "FAKE!" so loudly into my face I don't know how it could work. Well, and social phobics don't build downline networks. (Still, I included referral links there in the vain hopes that some people might actually be interested and register.)

Google still hasn't crawled the blog, and is suggesting "stillwaterspa". *roll eyes* Not a bad idea actually...

Automated Message

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Update: Okay, so unfortunately that wiped old comments... Well, time to start anew I suppose.

New layout

Okay, so it's finished. Nothing amazing and all, but I'm hoping the page isn't too hard to see. I must have hit the 'preview' key a million times just to see what random changes to numbers would do -- I don't know css at all and know very little HTML. I would copy one line from one section and apply it to the other and hope it didn't break the page. After fiddling with the code like a blind cat for a looooong time, I finally got the page set up, with a third column too for more good stuff. Quite an achievement for a total newbie, I think. :D

So yarr, feedback time now.

Update, 1 AM: Whoa, Internet Explorer hates the new layout. That's what you get for getting too comfy with Mozilla Firefox. That's no good. Need to fix it soon...

Update, 4 AM: Finally fixed after hours of googling and manually sifting through all the code. Just as I expected, it was a stupid bug in Internet Explorer itself. Sheesh. Credits to Google, evolt.org, communitymx.com, and some other sites for giving me clues. The page should also look fine at 800x600 resolution now, except in IE where it seems to be utterly messed up. I'm not going after that bug!

Copyright

The complicated copyright issue is one of the main things I often think about. Since the things I want to do in life mostly involve the creation of some intellectual property, it's hard not to consider how copyright works and what merit it has. On the other hand, I'm also vehemently against corporate copyright schemes. And because I was born and raised in a lower-middle-class setting, I can't ignore the ugly reality of the "starving artist" either; so I have to partially buy the pro-copyright argument, leaving myself quite stuck in the middle. What I prefer, though, leans more toward a heavily revised licensing system that both credits and feeds the creator of the intellectual property (will call it IP hereafter) but also allows for free distribution.

The thing with copyright today is that it is an easily abused system. Corporations have the sort of massive power to force virtual monopoly on entire industries, and through their monopoly they are able to force ridiculous contracts on IP holders. And as legal persons, multi-national corporations are powerful and unaccountable to the public and can continually renew, retain, and abuse their copyright.

The movie and music industries, for example, are artistically and morally bankrupt. Hollywood thrives on formula dramatization, monopolized media hype, celebrity obsession, and computer-generated effects. The music industry is an RIAA-monopoly, likewise powered by media hype, celebrity obsession, and songs that all sound the same. And I call them morally bankrupt not as a 'family values' accusation, but because of the vast inequalities practised by these corporations. Executives and celebrity singers/actors are vastly overpaid; behind-the-scenes workers that make everything happen are on fixed salaries; and frivolous lawsuits and extortion are frequently used against individuals practising their freedom of expression on peer-to-peer networks. The list goes on and on.

So, therefore, I'm personally against releasing any content into the public domain, because that justifies potential commercial use by immoral companies and is against my conscience. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike is a lot better... but still, I have my own reservations. I have thought about the patron system that was commonplace before modern times, where wealthy people such as aristocrats would sponsor artists, and artists could produce works, some dedicated to the patron, without doing hack work or starving to death. Basically publisher, admirer, and buyer all in one. What I like even better is that they didn't have to worry about licensing and could pirate (or plagiarize) as much as they want. Much freer exchange of information, in some aspects...

Meh, I don't really want to dig too deep into those concepts. I only want to stay fed and not have to worry about money.

Blog layout

So I'm looking at my page now, and it looks somewhat dull to me. The dots are fine, and the colour scheme is okay, but being a default template shared by lots of bloggers, it looks kind of, eh, uninspired.

Unfortunately, I don't know css or HTML, so all I can do is nudge the existing setting around. As for image processing, that semi-transparent .gif with my e-mail address on it is the extent of my graphical expertise (Doh).

I've looked at blogskins.com, although most of the templates I ran into were too fancy for my tastes. Hmm... should tinker a bit with the format instead.

Saturday, 4:45 AM, and I'm still awake

I'm feeling very fatigued. I'm totally exhausted. But I can't sleep and don't want to head to bed. It's a despairing thought, because when I go to bed, which I eventually will in an hour or two, it feels like I'm passing out, sort of vanishing from this world and losing all awareness, and then at random times getting pulled back forcefully.

There was a time when I really looked forward to Saturdays. Now I barely notice. Only when I came to my own blog and saw the date of the last post did I realize that, whoa, another week's gone by, and my life is fading fast... way too fast.

Not so long ago, I was attending university and taking, if not particularly enjoying, classes. In those days, whilst it wasn't as tolerable an experience as high school before grade 12 was, I at least felt, well, partially alive. I was in a SAD support group on campus, which didn't help all that much but gave me a reason, weak though it was, to keep going to school. In those days, I was kept busy. A lot of pressure, very little learning, but enough purpose to go on nevertheless.

I didn't drop out, but it was close enough. I didn't register for the second year, so I have no idea what my status is at the administrative level. But when I made the decision, I didn't really care. I was ready to leave university for good because of what it was doing to me. It was.... ugh, forget it.

Meh, how confusing is it when the writer doesn't even know whether to criticize or defend herself and ends up deleting entire paragraphs. Only in SAD Land...

The "It's a bomb nation" Speech

I get amazed.. I can't look at it but about 10 seconds, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this, I'm trying to find a correct name for it, this utter, absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of politicians claiming to represent the people. I've never seen a politician in my life whom I wanted to represent me! ... And I'm going to be blunt and plain, if one ever looks at me like I were their base I'm going to kill them and tell God they died... In case anyone doesn't know, God calls us a bomb nation! It's a bomb nation! It's a bomb nation!

Link.

I know this is quite old, but it still makes me giggle every time I think of it.

The apolitical side

Sometimes, it seems like I'm a political activist, but I'm really no more than an idealist. It's just not me to be political, as much as my idealism demands of me.

I dislike politics. The endless quagmires of political debate do nothing to fix the world (or realistically, the local community), and neither does participating in pointless elections. Oh, I never voted. I didn't vote when I turned 18, and I don't plan on voting in the next general election. I have quite a few perfectly valid reasons for boycotting elections, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm just not paying any attention to politics.

For the last election, I was going to vote for the conservative candidate, because of totally arbitrary reasons, and he was the only candidate I knew of anyway -- thanks to flyers forced on me near the local church. Called George something, or maybe it was Gordon. I never did get to vote though, because I had no idea when election day was. Duh, how many points for apathy already?

Well, what in the world can be more impersonal than political diatribes? Even then, people frequently get so worked up over petty disagreements, they say the most personally insulting things and even get violent. Well, what can I do about it? Do I want to pay more tax or do I want welfare money? Do I want the health care system to be revamped? Do I want a better education where you don't get scholarships one year and drop out the next? Better get involved and get dirty... Yet everything seems so dead that nothing appears worth fighting for. Am I a disillusioned activist or am I just sick of whatever I'm sick of that I can't even describe?

Being caught in the middle of the system, I'm starting to contradict myself. On one hand, I want nothing to do with the realm of differing opinions; and on the other hand, my needs shout out louder than anything else and force me to get drawn into something I can't take. And at the end of the day, nothing ever changes for the good.

Why so much hate?

Link: Washington Post article. Alternate link in case the primary doesn't work. A third mirror here. (Same article)

The extent of the hatefulness this American administration has spewed is absolutely, incredibly stunning.

Whatever noble ideology may have been ultimately behind this conformist action (dissociation notwithstanding), there is no justification for denying people the chance to be saved from suicide. Whatever people have against homosexuality or gender deviance, they cannot seriously be so callous about real human lives that are actually hidden behind those labels.

And do people have any idea what transgender really means? It shouldn't really be lumped together with homosexuality, but for various reasons usually is. That, unfortunately, makes it seem particularly negative.

Transgender, unlike homosexuality, is something that has been going on for as long as humanity. Gender identity being an arbitrary social construct, transgendered people refuse to be simply labelled male or female and expected to act a certain way just because of superficial biological differences. One doesn't need to be a cross-dresser to be transgendered. If a person dislikes being stereotyped for imposed gender roles and wants to challenge those boundaries, then he or she may be rightly referred to as a transgendered individual.

On the other hand, I feel quite upset that so many people believe there's currently a grand homosexual agenda (or conspiracy) in the world to destroy morality and family values. Well, I can't speak for homosexual people, but I'd be happy to destroy the great evil that is prescriptive morality and family values. I'll talk about my objection to family values later.

A Patriotic Poem

I'm a patriotic pal that
Guards my fatherland by fist,
With my heart, and with my hat
Which says "All nail the nationalist"!

With my mouth and with my tongue,
I have put the wimps to shame.
Traitors should all taste my dung
And suffer by our leader's name.

Praise our country, right or wrong!
Raise your arms and kill our foes.
Fight for honour and be strong;
When war comes, none must oppose.

Hear the Latin platitude:
Dull-chay ate dee-chorram ayst
Pro pay-trial more-aye, dude;
"Traitors will all die in haste."

You have two cows

Heroic couplets

You have two cows that stand atop the pastures,
Their livid eyes affix'd upon the gestures
Of cowherds training armed and dang'rous bears
To fend off dragons raiding from their lairs.
The bears are most heroic, as they fight
With Mars's sword and Zeus's thund'rous might!
The cows continue to be bless'd by Sibyl,
As heroes once again prevail o'er evil.

Despair by Social Anxiety

*Bitter mode on*

I really didn't want a clichéd title for today's entry, but that is genuinely what's on my mind much of the time. I don't know where to start, so let me offer a brief explanation of what social anxiety (or phobia) is, to the best of my understanding.

Social anxiety disorder (which I like to call SAD because that's truly how I feel as a social phobic) is an anxiety disorder. Anxiety is the kind of dread and unease one feels when there is some sort of perceived threat or danger. For a human being, it's an essential and primal defence mechanism that helps survival. When threat is detected, adrenaline kicks in, and the Fight-or-Flight response fires up. It's the kind of feeling you get when a car is about to ram into you and it's also what makes you jump out of the way. It's a physical reaction that lingers for a while after the whole thing is over. If you've had an experience like that and vividly recall how you felt afterwards, you'd probably understand what social phobia is like.

In anxiety disorders, the response is triggered by certain situations that are not intrinsically threatening; nevertheless, often the anxiety would be so overwhelming that individuals with the disorder become severely incapacitated because of their inability to deal with those situations. We sometimes call such a reaction to anxiety-provoking circumstances a panic attack. It's the culprit behind phobias and other disorders, including social anxiety.

How does one develop a phobia? Sometimes, phobias are just amplified versions of basic instincts for survival, such as the fear of heights or fear of snakes. Sometimes, someone may undergo a traumatic experience and later associate the event with something else. For example, if a person eats a rotten apple and vomits badly or gets terribly ill, he or she may develop a phobia for apples, or some red fruit, or perhaps all fruit. Whatever the cause, it's a complicated process. Phobias are manifestations of subconscious fears, rather than diseases in themselves, which is partly why people have compiled absurdly large lists of phobias.

SAD is basically a fear of social interactions. Some social phobics panic only in certain cases, such as in parties or when speaking to acquaintancess or when giving a presentation to a large group (cf. agoraphobia). For me, almost everything social triggers substantial anxiety, including chatting online or sending e-mails.

Social phobics, fortunately, have their own comfort zones, which are situations in which or people with whom they feel more comfortable. Therefore, many social phobics may look like normal but somewhat shy people and may actually do quite well in life. Others, though, are doomed to lives of solitude and loneliness.

The main difference between shyness and SAD is that shy people are comfortable where they are, prefer to be quiet and alone, and may not feel lonely at all. Social phobics, on the other hand, are effectively put in solitary confinement by their own fears, and loneliness haunts them even when they are in the company of others. They often fear scrunity and judgement, and are extremely sensitive and easy to hurt by normal standards, insomuch that the condition resembles paranoia. ("Are these people sneering at me? Why are they looking at me like that? Why did they smirk at my direction just now? Does my shirt look funny? Oh, I always knew it stank. Maybe something funny on my face, too. Should've stayed at home...")

And again, you don't tell a social phobic to "pull yourself together" or "get a grip". It's not possible. People usually think by example, and since most people have experienced some sort of loneliness and dreaded some social interaction that they still managed to overcome, they think they know the extent of that anxiety.

Of course, there are various degrees of SAD, and after having attended several support groups and joined a few support networks, I have concluded that my case is so much worse that I feel marginalized and remain silent even in those settings. Get help, you say? There's another complaint right there. Why do psychotherapists need tiny offices (claustrophobics unite...) with secretaries and a lot of bureaucracy? Do they expect social phobics to go through that much unnecessary interaction just to get help?

("Go to Counter No. 6 and fill out this form. Call back tomorrow and ask for Tracy. Sorry, we're closed on Fridays and weekends so call back in three days. Then go to Counter No. 11 and fill out the form and have an interview with government employee Mr. Sunderland. Then go to Counter No. 8 in our office in downtown and wait for 5 hours to speak with Ms. Lee for an agonizing ten minutes. Then call us and wait for a week to get your appointment with Doctor Wong. Oh, Doctor Wong will be away on a business trip next week. Next month, then? That will be $1367.15, please. Debit? Sorry, you need a credit card. If you want to apply for a reduction in price for financial reasons, please hand over your PI number and we'll sell it to marketers and spam your mailbox.")

Is it a deliberate attempt to filter out as many as possible, so that you can have an entry on page forty-five on the newspaper, "Social phobics to seek help after hesitating for an average of 14 years"?

Besides, the federal government doesn't fund psychotherapy, certainly not for lower-middle-class citizens.

*Bitter mode off*

Hollowly

I had a dream the day before the last;
Evaded.
A hollow mark that's left inside the grey old vast.
Beyond the whispers and the voices
that dully resonate within.
I rolled my eyes and arched my brow;
A calmness.
Where quietude is not defined, the soul breaks its own vow.
Fantastic vision, it proclaims and
relives the emptiness of that.
But I've not found a trace, and have no clue
Whereas it--
refuses to give up; it hangs like glue,
anticipating non-existent
and something which, I've no idea--

Hour of Weakness

The Hour of Weakness for the day, or the week, has arrived again.

What is the Hour of Weakness? I suppose one might call it a bad depressive episode; I only chose to give it a different name for whatever reason. It doesn't necessarily last only an hour. Usually a whole afternoon, a whole night (accompanied by insomnia), or maybe a few days.

What does the Hour do to me? I don't quite know. One effect I'm vaguely aware of is that it makes my attempt at coherence, reason, and organization painfully difficult. I can barely write sentences that make sense or sound meaingful during such a period. It kills creativity and stifles enthusiasm in all things, and usually it utterly incapacitates me and sends me spiralling down a negative cycle. It's painful, boring, and frustrating. Sometimes, destructive behaviours arise as a result, wheter directed at myself or others.

So is that my excuse for being a lazy anarchist? I don't know. Wanna switch places? I'll be the hard-working capitalist while you get to sit around, leech on welfare, and be too lazy to get up and work. Yes, wannabe artists ought to starve, or study something useful, and by useful I mean everything but bachelor of arts.

The above paragraph very mildly demonstrates the snappy attitude that naturally accompanies each Hour of Weakness.

So why have I named it the Hour of Weakness? I think it's because I watched The Hour of Power on TV yesterday. In case you don't know, The Hour of Power is a Evangelist Christian broadcast on some channel, produced by a large church (The Crystal Cathedral) based in California. I was taping the program for my mother. How is it? Well, I dislike it, because half of the time they try to sell stuff to the viewer. "Become an Eagles Club member and contribute $60 a month to get this glorious, beautiful vase. You also get Dr. Schuller's latest book for free." Or "the latest collection of mugs with memorable quotes [which aren't even Bible verses] on them".

My mother's bought quite a lot of merchandise from that ministry, much of which has, um, nothing to do with Christianity or spirituality. So you see, I feel somewhat like mocking them by associating their name with something as bad as depression. Oh, it's bad.

Yes, they absolutely need a lot of money to continue the ministry, but I find them rather secular and more enamoured of good appearances than spirituality. Of course, that's just my uninformed opinion in my Hour of Weakness. Sighs.

Examining Free Speech

People know that the freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental aspect of modern democracies, but how it's interpreted varies from person to person. Most people can make the claim that they support the freedom of speech, but they also tend to gloss over the semantic details of what the phrase really means. For these people, this idea is only partially accepted, and I find that unfortunate.

Free speech is not just a noble idea; it is essential to humanity, because human beings form identities by expressing themselves. After all, there are no other known species that communicate the way humans do, and the impact human speech has on the world is substantial. No matter how ridiculous some of them may seem, expressed ideas are essential to a progressive world.

The opposite of free speech, let's call it censorship, is not necessarily something seen only in 1984-esque oppressive governments. It's a daily occurrence, even if people don't consider it censorship. People disagree with each other verbally all the time, and they shoot down genuine expressions of identities by taking the argument beyond "Here's my idea, and I disagree with yours; let's agree to disagree."

Free speech is not just for Shakespeares and Orwells. It's usually a universal right under sensible constitutions. Each person has a right to free speech, but the right is indefensible, because people are all too zealous to shoot down opposing ideas, even if they may be vehemently against state censorship. It is all too easy for people with hidden agendas to carry out 'vigilante' censorship missions, and it doesn't matter whether they're multi-billionnaires, politicians, respected celebrities, or just 'concerned citizens'. And alas, is it not their freedom of speech that guarantees them the right to censor others?

The existence of the middleman, such as news agencies or the traditional word of mouth, only exacerbates the problem. Free speech is not only censored right out of the oven, it is also processed with extra 'flavouring' before presented to the audience. Free speech, therefore, is inadequate in itself, because it is too easily manipulated. What needs to accompany the freedom of speech is the right to be listened to and treated just as seriously as any other person's self-expression, without being personally targeted and shot down or ridiculed and socially marginalized.

That leads to the possibility that in order to have true, untainted free speech that can reach the masses, several conditions must be fulfilled. First and foremost, anonymity is absolutely required. This may set off an alarm and remind some people of the deception, chaos, and anomie (i.e. trolling, flaming, spamming, death threats, malicious pranks, and so on) that arise out of anonymity on the Internet. Is that what I want? Not necessarily, because the kind of anonymity that is required for free speech does not really exist on the Internet.

Consider the fact that the IP address is broadcast publicly on the Internet. Geographical information associated with the IP address is publicly accessible, and even if one or more proxies are employed, determined individuals still can track down and trace back to the originating IP address. I probably don't have to mention the fact that most people are clueless when it comes to computer networking mechanisms, and crackers are perfectly capable of censoring people, should they choose to. The only anonymity the Internet offers is through obscurity; the cluttered Internet has so much information that people are usually reluctant to wade through it to censor everything they disagree with; but ideas cannot prosper when no one knows where to find them, and again, determined individuals will not be stopped even by encryption.

A second condition that needs to be fulfilled is universal access. An idea not only has to be relayed or published widely in its original form, without compromising the person's future ability to express more ideas, it also needs to be accessible at all times to an audience large enough to make an impact.

Now, I've rambled long enough about free speech, but I haven't really explained why it's so important. Why is free speech so significant, and why is censorship bad? Here's the view from my personal experience: an idea, no matter how ludicrous it may seem, is a genuine expression of self at the moment of its inception. Ridiculing the idea creates a precedent and discourages the individual from contributing more. Not only that, once censorship takes place, the precedent sends a message to others wishing to express similar ideas that may be remarkably valuable to society.

For example, let's assume the J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings after the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter is censored by Christian churches that fear its possible negative influence. The Lord of the Rings, whilst very different in tone and more treasured as literature, is fundamentally a fantasy novel and therefore belongs to the same genre as HP. Now, it's usually believed that Tolkien was a Christian and had much influence on the Christian writer, C. S. Lewis; thus, should the precedent be set, Tolkien could have very well shrugged off the idea and rationalized to himself, "Well, I don't want to be associated with novels about witchcraft and evil. I'll just keep writing about Middle English and forget the hobbits."

And let us use another example. Suppose a white supremacist attempts to communicate a racist idea, and is immediately shot down, censored, and personally ridiculed. If the right to free speech is granted, the individual may get the idea out and through the free exchange of ideas allow the theory to be developed into something that may eventually be intellectually valuable. Does that breed as much resentment toward society as a whole?

Who really knows how many budding Shakespeares and Charles Dickinsons have been silenced this way through the ages? How many socially-anxious and timid closet Virginia Woolfs have faded into obscurity for this very reason? And how many aspiring philosophers have been nipped in the bud by some snide remarks from strangers? How many Thomas Grays have been doomed to lives of suppressed creativity and ingenuity because they believed themselves to be inadequate thinkers unworthy of the freedom of expression? There's a lot more to be discussed, for sure.

I may be wrong of course, but this is my opinion.

What This Is All About

So you're here, and you might be wondering what this new blog is all about. I'm not entirely sure myself, so I'll just state whatever I think matters.

I'll introduce myself a bit. To put it in a neutral way, I'm an individual currently under the influence of various afflictions (primarily severe social anxiety/phobia and depression) that have rendered most aspects of normal life unbearable. Instead of further obsessing over the destructive consequences that necessarily follow the disabilities, I have decided to turn my attention elsewhere, and this blog is one outlet for the negativity that invariably piles up. At least, that's the rational conclusion for me.

I'd like to call myself a poet, or at least an aspiring one, although often my afflictions distort my outlook and self-image, to the extent that I cannot be relied on to offer an objectively sound picture of myself. Perhaps this blog is an attempt to gain some sort of acknowledgement. I don't want to pretend to be a closet Emily Dickinson or Margaret Atwood, but I like to dream; so allow me.

Not much else now, except that I may be talking about politics, ethics, and religion, so be forewarned that I'm an agnostic with a Protestant Christian background and generally an anti-establishment left-winger.

Feb 19, 2005

How fragile are my eardrums, doc;
Can they be shattered when I scream?
How fragile are my retinae, doc;
Can they withstand the heat and steam
That swollen, burning cheeks emit?
Feel the fears, and feel the wants
To flee and hide, or stand or sit
Before the swirling face's taunts.
Indeed, the face that smirks at me
Seems to be but one faceless mask,
Since I can neither hear nor see,
For all I wish, for all I ask.

stillwaters

The waters still in dreams of guilt
See turbulence time after time;
A dream unseen, beneath the quilt,
Where feles sings the broken rhyme.
A rustic voice in yet one more
Calls out to me, my shameful name;
The lum'nous words are thus to pour
A blessing o'er my fading frame.

But feles will not stop for me,
Or sing a song, or hum a hymn,
Or slow his soul and wait to see
The trail of tears that follows him.
I fall but reach to touch his shoe
But know I'm left behind by both;
And having torn myself in two,
I shrink and sink, ashamed and loath,

But neither drowning nor respiring.