How To Change The World (In 1 Easy Step!)

Somewhere between this essay,

http://www.visi.com/~phantos/essays.html

and this podcast video,

http://freakrevolution.com/2009/04/07/the-monkeysphere/
(yes, she explodes onscreen and is a bit annoying to listen to, but trust me, it's worth it.)

is an idea that could change the world...

In my own words:

Being a minority, or outcast, and not getting in people's faces about it never did a minority group or outcast any good. Especially if you have say, a sexual orientation, or a religion, or a lifestyle, or even the odd hobby outside the mainstream. This doesn't necessarily mean being confrontational, or shouting about your private life from the rooftops, but it means not hiding. Not hiding who you are, just because you're afraid of what someone might say to you because they might get offended if they knew exactly who you really were. (And that's a lot of "mights" and "ifs".)

If you have a secret like this, and let slip to all your friends and even half of them remain friends with you... then you just might have gained a few allies who will support your rights when the time comes... but would have chosen otherwise out of ignorance! What's the alternative? Staying in the closet, shivering with fear over what others might think, until the day comes everything you hold dear is made illegal... because you never took the time to try and educate those around you... to help them understand you. The real you. All for what? The preservation of some average lifestyle that's about as accurate a reflection of real life as the .4th of a child in the average family of 2.4 children?

In my experience, finally overcoming the fear of what the illusive "mainstream" people might think, and being openly yourself, will only attract like-minded people. Yes, you will have a bit less friends, but the friends you make will be friends not with a fake person you project in order to "fit in", but friends with you. The real you. Those who are actually offended by you personally will generally be out of your life before you can hear much of anything from them anyway.

Live like you're a hated freak, and you will be hated. Live like your beliefs and lifestyle are no big deal... and they'll be accepted.

In other words, come out the closet and be yourself and you'll eventually change the world...

Big Brother is now a reality in the UK

Looks the the UK is wasting no time slipping into a totalitarian state.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5439604.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084

Now, at this point, I know many readers out there are thinking "They're only spying on criminals, doing illegal things." Unfortunately that "I'm honest, so I have nothing to hide" mentality is a trap.

Now, what specifically could carry sentences of 3 or more years that could be on someone's computer? Perhaps this has something to do with the UK's recent ban on "extreme pornography".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7364475.stm

Yes, there are arguments on both sides of the issue, but it seems to be only a short step between that and banning other types of pornography, if not other types of expression, from the internet. And this is assuming everyone in the British government has the best of intentions and only bans things that are legitimately illegal... and doesn't use these new self-granted powers to attack free speech or criticism of the government.

Oops! There goes an entire internet archive!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/14/demon_muzzles_wayback_machine/

So now that they've proven their heavy-handed draconian intentions, who's next? How many private citizens will be jailed for private possession of pornography even if they just keep it to themselves? Prior to recent years, only fundamentalist theocracies such as Iran had "morality police." Now modern democracies such as Britain can boast that wonderful distinction as well.

I have another reason for disliking this policy. I consider this an invasion of not just personal privacy, but home and property. My internet-age sensibilities are that a PC, and its contents are someone's personal property. I have no protest if the authorities were to procure a warrant to sieze and search my PC. But this is searching without a warrant by using spyware! Something that is, by definition illegal.

So, the message here is: hacking is ok if the government does it? Malware is by definition illegal, unless it's government malware? The hypocricy of this double-standard sickens me.

This is one time I'm very glad to be living "across the pond" from the Brits. No matter how bad the threats to personal liberty have been in the US, things seem to be slipping into Orwell's police state over there ten times faster. I can only hope other countries don't take a page from Britain's draconian internet bans, and that it remains an isolated example.

Remember: In the Information Wars, don't worry about what you can see... worry about what you can no longer see.

Surveilance

Today I overheard a discussion about politics. Now, mostly it was about how the US economy is tanking, and how bad a president Bush has been (thank gods he'll be gone soon!) and other relatively rational opinions. Except then I heard "I don't get what all the fuss about the Patriot Act is all about. I don't have any problem with them listening in on my telephone conversations or reading my emails. If I say something I shouldn't, then I should be locked up."

Well, now I'm going to put my two cents in on what all the fuss about the government spying on US citizens is all about.

It's easy to think "Well, I'm a decent, law-abiding person, so if the government or police or FBI were to start listening in on me, I've got nothing to hide." This is the founding philosophy behind sites like myspace and livejournal, and also reality TV. But it's a terrible trap to fall into. There seems to be this growing sense in recent years that "privacy" is some archaic, out-modeled social idea left over from the Victorian Age, right alongside segregation and eugenics. People who, like me, still consider personal privacy an important right are becoming fewer and fewer in number.

We are treading on thin ice here. Sure, you may think your lifestyle and opinions are perfectly normal, but there is a huge variety of things that while seemingly normal, someone is going to be offended over. For starters, spending any amount of time in close quarters with some friend you thought you knew well (such as a sleepover or camping trip) will reveal that there is a huge range of preferences in personal hygene, including practices that will most likely offend you. It's not too far a stretch of the imagination that some of your routine personal cleaning will offend somebody. Then, of course, there are the parts of one's lifestyle generally best left unsaid: politics, religion, sexual orientation.

I highly doubt you could find 10 members of some minority lifestyle or opinion, 10 gays, 10 neopagans, 10 transexuals, 10 Ralph Nader supporters, ect, who would agree it's a great idea to have "nothing to hide" to the point they would think it a good idea to let their boss and coworkers know such details about their private lives. Now imagine that we had this wonderful "transparent society" where due to surveilance the government knew such details about everyone, including you.

Just stop for a minute, poke around google or youtube or something, and think it over. If you don't get chills up your spine, you are both naieve, and already standing in line to become one of big brother's sheep.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there will always be a person who would be offended by your lifestyle, and your beliefs. Maybe some prudish public servant on the other side of the cameras would find one of your kinks an offensive "perversion" worthy of stamping out. Nothing like sexual preferences to raise somebody's ire. Maybe some zealot of [insert religion here] would see your faith (or lack thereof) as an "abomination" that should never be practiced. After all, religion is just such a great starter of flame wars, (and real ones!)

More to the point, do you really want the government to know everything that you say all the time? Who among us can honesty say they didn't, at one time or another, blurt out in an angry moment how this or that person should die?

I will put myself on the spot here and say that, while I'm not the perfect model of citizenship, I do vote, and have not commited any crimes beyond a few traffic tickets. And yet, I have, in private, throughout my life, advocated horrible fates to some people. In high school, me and my friends used to draw cartoons of kids and teachers we didn't like meeting horrible ends. Even now, some of my professors end up in the margins of my homework and notebooks, always about to suffer a terrible fate. I have, in anger, advocated the destruction of certain countries, and death to certain groups of people. (Most notably nuking Islamic countries, drowning large numbers of lawyers, hanging terrorists and pirates, and the like.) And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

None of this I ever meant seriously. But if there was a government surveilance program listening in at all times, would they know that? If the people running it had the (lack of) sense of humor of, say, airport security workers, I daresay I would (gods forbid) be in jail already for some "terrorist plot".

Just stop for a minute and think about your own private conversations and tell me you have never, ever, wished death or suffering on somebody. Even if it was just for a moment in a fit of anger. Then tell me with a straight face you would like Homeland Security agents listening in on that, all the time.

Think it over.