I recently watch this documentary about two americans that are fighting over the ownership of a real human foot. The documentary is entertaining, yet in the end it is a sad story about a superficial culture and what people will do to get famous. These are the kind of cultural issues we need to fight in order to create a more healthy society, a kind of culture which cultivates reasonable wants in individuals and that creates reasonable role models for children and adults. It is worth your time, even if the premise sounds rediculous. You will find the link to a stream below.
http://www.solarmovie.ac/watch-finders-keepers-2015-online.html
With all the worthless content on the internet today, I thought I would seperate some of the gems from the shit and post them on this blog. Together with articles and comments on culture, politics and philosophy.
Visar inlägg med etikett america. Visa alla inlägg
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söndag 3 januari 2016
söndag 20 april 2014
Freedom of Speech is overrated
There are no eternal laws out there that we can find to construe society and legislation around. When I was younger I was convinced that unrestrained free speech, shounting fire in theatres and the like, was a god given principle that the race of men ought to uphold at any cost. Although freedom of speech is essential, the legeslative aspects of it are overrated. What people are afraid of, those who want to express radical thought, is not primarily some prison time or slap on the wrist, it is the subsequent ostracization that often follows the expression of radical thought. It is the cultural and sociaital pressure to think alike, to form a cohesive whole in which divergence is seen as treason. If people know I am a racist, then free men and women can deny me work, or avoid me and so on. We are, in fact, very limited in practice when it comes to the free expression of thought, but these constraints are invisible to us, because to us they are the boundaries at which people become insane, unfit for society, and so on. We are grown into a way of being and thinking that respects a set of constraints that we do not directly percieve.
Although free speech in legislation is a good thing, and one that we should hold dear, it is only a very limitied aspect of the broader notion of free thought and speech. We get worked into communities and are expected to behave, think and act in certain ways. When people say "free speech" they think of something concrete, the act of expressing a thought, but the processes through which any thought is expressed is deeply ingrained with the culture and society that rules on what strings of words are fit to exit ones mouth and when. The very limited cases when this process fails, as with rabid racists, we prohibit their unwanted behaviour through legislation such as "hate crime" laws.
Anonymity in the internet age has perserved a forum for opinions that are not attatched to a certain known person, people can say what they like without their name being associated with their words. This is precisley the sort of freedom that escapes the cultural and societal pressures that often governs speech and writing, and it is valuable for that sake. Even controversial biologists, physicists, philosophers, benefit greatly from the possibility of expressing radical views while being anonymous. They will not express radical views as long as it hurts their careers, damages social relations, and upsets authorities in their own field.
The contemporary rage from goverments over internet trolls that "hide behind anonymity" is a fear that is equivalent to that of the Church when they prosecuted people for un-religious thought. They want to drag people out into the light of the moral majority, they want us to play their game and be judged by their rules, but it is the rules that radical thought is questioning, and hence we cannot be asked to play a game that is already rigged against us. Radical thought is suppose to undermine large parts of our web of beliefs, and those parts under question can not be assumed to be true at the outset, then new ideas will be dismissed simply because of dogma.
We enter into the oligarchs paradise as soon as every internet user is identifable with a physical person. Now adds will be more efficient, the goverment will together with buisness have large oversight over any thought that occurs anywhere in the world, and who is thinking what. Westerners today are too full of themselves to think that there wont come a time when their own thought needs protection, we have let govements run rampant over the internet and annonymity. This suggests that people think that it is suffiecent to protect free speech by simply having an amendment to a constitution, yet this is not sufficient to protect and care for free and radical thought.
fredag 11 april 2014
Elisabeth Warren and the fate of America
There is only one hope for America as I currently see the situation, and that is the very intelligent senator for Massachusetts, Elistabeth Warren. Former Professor with a focus on consumer protection, this honst and strong women is precisly what America needs. There are no other people in my mind that would represent the American people, Hilary Clintons unsatisfied desire for power probably cause her to be even more promiscuous toward the demand of the private interests, one million dollars in adds here or there, two votes for a bill there, an even trade.
As a non-American I am absolutley flabergasted that someone like Chris Christie can be so obviously guilty of abusing poltitical power and still be a condender for the position of president. This would never have happend where I come from, it is a sign that people just dont care anymore. The problem is that the influence of American politics extend far beyond its geographical and demographical boarders, to its allys primarily, and to its enemies as well. That there are serious politicians with such disregard for the democratic process is disgusting, we need a new witch hunt on these people. We need to show them that even if the media still accepts them, the people dont. We need to hunt down their contributers and their puppets, one of them being Christie, and tell them that if they try to put their greasy capitalist fingers into the demoractic political process once more we will cut off their hands. The people have the ultimate power, money can buy guns, but it cant buy people to carry those guns if those people care more about their country than their own short term finanical well being.
I wish you all luck in solving your problems America, and if Senator Warren runs for president I will start raising funds in Europe for her campagin as this is in the interest not only of America, not only Europe, but the whole world.
Etiketter:
america,
chris christie,
clinton,
corruption,
elisabeth warren,
obama,
politics,
polititicians,
power
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