Okay, Who Rained On Your Parade?
Feb. 7th, 2006 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynMy random thoughts for the day, just for nobody's amusement.
So, it looks like, in some parts of the world, WWIII is kicking off earlier than expected.
We all knew it was coming sooner or later. The gap between Western culture and some of the other world cultures is currently too large to be easily spanned by overtures of friendship. At least, not without a lot of legwork. And sooner or later, as world cultures started to integrate, we knew that values were going to clash. Well, it's happened, and it's running way the hell ahead of schedule. The disaster currently unfolding in the Middle East will probably be over in a month or two. The perpetrators have already been identified by the usual means, the agitators marked. As usual, nothing will happen because of it.
What this has done is outline the differences between the West and the Middle East, especially in our attitudes. Neither side is willing to compromise on this issue, although I expect the Muslim world will return to the status quo in the end. But the West should certainly not compromise on their principles. Free Speech is not Free Speech if it has a clause at the end saying "Everything you like, unless it offends people" We all know that a lot of people are easily offended, and pretty soon you won't be able to say anything. Nor can we reasonably give one group special privileges when it comes to not being offended.
Sooner or later there's going to be a fight. Hopefully it will be done with words instead of bombs, but it's a fight that the West must not lose. After all, in the end, Islamic culture has lived for years with people in foreign countries blaspheming against them. But Western culture may not survive a loss of freedom of speech.
So we must choose the battleground wisely and well. We would perhaps be served by forcing an encounter to take place, instead of in a crowded city, in the most morally corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, foul, filthy, and derogatory bastion of free speech on the entire planet. What might seem to be a battle of high moral principals can perhaps be forced into an uneasy stalemate by forcing people to march through the muck of moral decay in a place where the stench of wretchedness overpowers the senses.
I am speaking, of course, of the internet.
Let us be honest here. We all know that the internet is a very strange place, where “netizens” (if that remains the buzzword of the day) from more countries than you can count, even if you take your shoes off, engage in commonplace debates whose intellectual level would often make first graders ashamed to be part of humanity. As a singular entity, the internet has seen people fighting over George W. Bush, the election of the Pope, Manchester United, the proper way to make a cup of tea, and whether or not Orlando Bloom was totally touching that guy's ass in that shot. The general descent into juvenile bickering, name-calling, and all around lack of any sort of redeeming qualities tends to tarnish the reputation of the internet, and its denizens, with the sort of brush normally used to paint battleships. Only on the internet can you wake up suddenly despising, personally, a person you have never met, who lives on a continent you will never visit. Simply by association, every one of the flame warriors of the internet can be assumed to living in squalor, filth, and misery, squinting at their computer in dim light with one hand down their pants and a gig of horse porn on their hard drive.
But this day, netizens may stand tall and proud. “I may be a loser,” they can say, “but at least I'm not burning down the Danish embassy.”
Now, it is sort of strange to be discussing freedom of speech on the web. Freedom of speech is not just an article of faith on the internet, it is the internet. The internet has been created to service two things, the male libido, and the urge of people to make total idiots of themselves where nobody knows their name. It is a comforting zone, where any palooza smart enough to figure out which socket to plug their computer into, can stand on top of their digital soapbox and proclaim their own genius at finding a solution to the world's problems, and can exercise their inalienable right to be ignored by the rest of the world. You can say anything on the internet, even if you are wrong, even if you are lying, even if you are totally stoned off your ass, no matter how controversial it is. You can even get a server from a postage-stamped sized island in the south Pacific, whose only income is from collecting seashells and renting out its internet domain, and call for the assassination of everyone from Elvis (not dead yet) to Jack Abramoff (still alive, but his career is dead). It is difficult, after a few months on the 'net, to envisage it without free speech: moronic diatribes, spastic accounts of personal problems, and Jesus/Judas slashfic notwithstanding.
The internet is so free that it puts the mainstream media to shame in any country. Any letter about how the government is controlled by Zionist Masons who sent their black helicopters after the author, only to be foiled by UFOs beaming him up to space, will safely end up in the New York Times Editorial Board's trash can with an OMGWTFStupid! stamp on it. This does not work on the internet, which would explain why the NY Times has to throw out a dozen computer monitors each day with red stamp marks on them. As readers of the print media (or watchers of its tricked-out slut cousin, visual media), we are primarily shielded from TeH Stoopid. On the internet, you are essentially shielded from anything that requires an IQ greater than five. You have to go looking for it.
So it comes as no surprise that the reaction to Islamic protests around the world, either the moderate or the extreme kind, has been fairly uniform over the Western internet. Nobody really cares. After all, we have heard so many portrayals of Jews as money-grubbing, world dominating bastards, listened to so many jokes about priests molesting altar boys, seen so many ads for nun porn, and watched people make uninspired, religion based rants, for so long that we have become generally immune to blasphemy. You would have to get up to the level of people trying to film Last Supper gay porno movies before people around here do more than bat an eyelid. So far, the mood on most of the blogs, the boards, and the rest of the world seems to be that, while it might have been stupid and juvenile and come under a number of categories of moronic, they had the right to make an ass out of themselves in public.
The concept of making blasphemy a crime seems, in some respects, a little like blasphemy itself. Especially in the West. After all, it's blasphemy to not admit that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, and the literal Son of God. According to the WCC (who hopefully has gone down in the meantime), it would be blasphemy not to acknowledge that Anglo-Saxons are God's chosen people. It would be blasphemous to not acknowledge Joseph Smith as a prophet. There are so many blasphemies that we can no longer keep track of them, which is probably a blasphemy in itself. This is because the West is ultimately full of so many different religions that nobody bothers keeping a list. There are three major varieties of Judaism, with all their offshoots. There are more varieties of Christianity now than Jesus had disciples. A lot more. And, as someone pointed out, there are about as many varieties of Neo-Pagan religions as there are Neo-Pagans.
It is perhaps fitting that the internet, the sterling repository of tolerance and acceptance (based on the fact that, no matter how much you hate someone, the most you can do is pretend they don't exist), got the point so fast. After all, there is nothing that you can say on the internet, from political preferences to religion to the dietary preferences of your Aunt Molly, that won't offend someone, somewhere. A good rule of thumb is that someone, somewhere on the internet, is laughing at you, and somebody else hates you. You live with it. If we set a building on fire every time we got personally offended, the entire world would vanish in a ball of fire. So we have learned to live with deep-seated insults to our personal values. We wax eloquent about it, complain about it, whine about it in the privacy of our LJs and wank all over the paperwork, but we do not go out and incite riots over it.
And I think the world is stronger for it. After the first few times that you get fooled, reamed, or otherwise tricked by someone's ploy, even the slowest of us starts to learn. The fact that anyone can say anything, anywhere, makes people a lot more resilient when it comes down to attempts to trick them, to get them to believe in falsehoods, or to doubt their own values. Sure, some people stay endlessly gullible, but no more than in real life. And more people become aware of the transient nature of “true” information, and the rapid flux of rumors and hyper-inflated pretensions. So, while the rest of the world dissolves into arguments about the limits and boundaries of free speech, I think they might all benefit from a bit of a dip in the internet pool. Here, in an environment where everything is fair game, from your race, to your religion, to whether or not you had sex with your mother, you might learn that those insults that you had thought intolerable do not actually hurt as much as you thought. Then, maybe, members of both sides can reach out to each other and learn that, while they may not like the beliefs of the other side, there is nothing precipitous that we can do about it, and that only gentle, slow persuasion remains.
Once we can learn to live with each other, and talk to each other around our irreconcilable difficulties, we can get back to the serious business of buckling down, and flaming that damn Draco/Harry shipper who simply won't Shut The Fuck Up.
Now wasn't reading that a waste of your time?
I thought so.
So, it looks like, in some parts of the world, WWIII is kicking off earlier than expected.
We all knew it was coming sooner or later. The gap between Western culture and some of the other world cultures is currently too large to be easily spanned by overtures of friendship. At least, not without a lot of legwork. And sooner or later, as world cultures started to integrate, we knew that values were going to clash. Well, it's happened, and it's running way the hell ahead of schedule. The disaster currently unfolding in the Middle East will probably be over in a month or two. The perpetrators have already been identified by the usual means, the agitators marked. As usual, nothing will happen because of it.
What this has done is outline the differences between the West and the Middle East, especially in our attitudes. Neither side is willing to compromise on this issue, although I expect the Muslim world will return to the status quo in the end. But the West should certainly not compromise on their principles. Free Speech is not Free Speech if it has a clause at the end saying "Everything you like, unless it offends people" We all know that a lot of people are easily offended, and pretty soon you won't be able to say anything. Nor can we reasonably give one group special privileges when it comes to not being offended.
Sooner or later there's going to be a fight. Hopefully it will be done with words instead of bombs, but it's a fight that the West must not lose. After all, in the end, Islamic culture has lived for years with people in foreign countries blaspheming against them. But Western culture may not survive a loss of freedom of speech.
So we must choose the battleground wisely and well. We would perhaps be served by forcing an encounter to take place, instead of in a crowded city, in the most morally corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, foul, filthy, and derogatory bastion of free speech on the entire planet. What might seem to be a battle of high moral principals can perhaps be forced into an uneasy stalemate by forcing people to march through the muck of moral decay in a place where the stench of wretchedness overpowers the senses.
I am speaking, of course, of the internet.
Let us be honest here. We all know that the internet is a very strange place, where “netizens” (if that remains the buzzword of the day) from more countries than you can count, even if you take your shoes off, engage in commonplace debates whose intellectual level would often make first graders ashamed to be part of humanity. As a singular entity, the internet has seen people fighting over George W. Bush, the election of the Pope, Manchester United, the proper way to make a cup of tea, and whether or not Orlando Bloom was totally touching that guy's ass in that shot. The general descent into juvenile bickering, name-calling, and all around lack of any sort of redeeming qualities tends to tarnish the reputation of the internet, and its denizens, with the sort of brush normally used to paint battleships. Only on the internet can you wake up suddenly despising, personally, a person you have never met, who lives on a continent you will never visit. Simply by association, every one of the flame warriors of the internet can be assumed to living in squalor, filth, and misery, squinting at their computer in dim light with one hand down their pants and a gig of horse porn on their hard drive.
But this day, netizens may stand tall and proud. “I may be a loser,” they can say, “but at least I'm not burning down the Danish embassy.”
Now, it is sort of strange to be discussing freedom of speech on the web. Freedom of speech is not just an article of faith on the internet, it is the internet. The internet has been created to service two things, the male libido, and the urge of people to make total idiots of themselves where nobody knows their name. It is a comforting zone, where any palooza smart enough to figure out which socket to plug their computer into, can stand on top of their digital soapbox and proclaim their own genius at finding a solution to the world's problems, and can exercise their inalienable right to be ignored by the rest of the world. You can say anything on the internet, even if you are wrong, even if you are lying, even if you are totally stoned off your ass, no matter how controversial it is. You can even get a server from a postage-stamped sized island in the south Pacific, whose only income is from collecting seashells and renting out its internet domain, and call for the assassination of everyone from Elvis (not dead yet) to Jack Abramoff (still alive, but his career is dead). It is difficult, after a few months on the 'net, to envisage it without free speech: moronic diatribes, spastic accounts of personal problems, and Jesus/Judas slashfic notwithstanding.
The internet is so free that it puts the mainstream media to shame in any country. Any letter about how the government is controlled by Zionist Masons who sent their black helicopters after the author, only to be foiled by UFOs beaming him up to space, will safely end up in the New York Times Editorial Board's trash can with an OMGWTFStupid! stamp on it. This does not work on the internet, which would explain why the NY Times has to throw out a dozen computer monitors each day with red stamp marks on them. As readers of the print media (or watchers of its tricked-out slut cousin, visual media), we are primarily shielded from TeH Stoopid. On the internet, you are essentially shielded from anything that requires an IQ greater than five. You have to go looking for it.
So it comes as no surprise that the reaction to Islamic protests around the world, either the moderate or the extreme kind, has been fairly uniform over the Western internet. Nobody really cares. After all, we have heard so many portrayals of Jews as money-grubbing, world dominating bastards, listened to so many jokes about priests molesting altar boys, seen so many ads for nun porn, and watched people make uninspired, religion based rants, for so long that we have become generally immune to blasphemy. You would have to get up to the level of people trying to film Last Supper gay porno movies before people around here do more than bat an eyelid. So far, the mood on most of the blogs, the boards, and the rest of the world seems to be that, while it might have been stupid and juvenile and come under a number of categories of moronic, they had the right to make an ass out of themselves in public.
The concept of making blasphemy a crime seems, in some respects, a little like blasphemy itself. Especially in the West. After all, it's blasphemy to not admit that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, and the literal Son of God. According to the WCC (who hopefully has gone down in the meantime), it would be blasphemy not to acknowledge that Anglo-Saxons are God's chosen people. It would be blasphemous to not acknowledge Joseph Smith as a prophet. There are so many blasphemies that we can no longer keep track of them, which is probably a blasphemy in itself. This is because the West is ultimately full of so many different religions that nobody bothers keeping a list. There are three major varieties of Judaism, with all their offshoots. There are more varieties of Christianity now than Jesus had disciples. A lot more. And, as someone pointed out, there are about as many varieties of Neo-Pagan religions as there are Neo-Pagans.
It is perhaps fitting that the internet, the sterling repository of tolerance and acceptance (based on the fact that, no matter how much you hate someone, the most you can do is pretend they don't exist), got the point so fast. After all, there is nothing that you can say on the internet, from political preferences to religion to the dietary preferences of your Aunt Molly, that won't offend someone, somewhere. A good rule of thumb is that someone, somewhere on the internet, is laughing at you, and somebody else hates you. You live with it. If we set a building on fire every time we got personally offended, the entire world would vanish in a ball of fire. So we have learned to live with deep-seated insults to our personal values. We wax eloquent about it, complain about it, whine about it in the privacy of our LJs and wank all over the paperwork, but we do not go out and incite riots over it.
And I think the world is stronger for it. After the first few times that you get fooled, reamed, or otherwise tricked by someone's ploy, even the slowest of us starts to learn. The fact that anyone can say anything, anywhere, makes people a lot more resilient when it comes down to attempts to trick them, to get them to believe in falsehoods, or to doubt their own values. Sure, some people stay endlessly gullible, but no more than in real life. And more people become aware of the transient nature of “true” information, and the rapid flux of rumors and hyper-inflated pretensions. So, while the rest of the world dissolves into arguments about the limits and boundaries of free speech, I think they might all benefit from a bit of a dip in the internet pool. Here, in an environment where everything is fair game, from your race, to your religion, to whether or not you had sex with your mother, you might learn that those insults that you had thought intolerable do not actually hurt as much as you thought. Then, maybe, members of both sides can reach out to each other and learn that, while they may not like the beliefs of the other side, there is nothing precipitous that we can do about it, and that only gentle, slow persuasion remains.
Once we can learn to live with each other, and talk to each other around our irreconcilable difficulties, we can get back to the serious business of buckling down, and flaming that damn Draco/Harry shipper who simply won't Shut The Fuck Up.
Now wasn't reading that a waste of your time?
I thought so.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 07:28 am (UTC)In this part of the world, for example? Over here in the Nordic it's actually quite scary. We're right above Denmark, and they're pretty damn proud of their culture. This must be culture clashes to the highest degree.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 12:11 pm (UTC)The internet has been created to service two things, the male libido, and the urge of people to make total idiots of themselves where nobody knows their name.
And boy, do I indulge in the second! :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 01:58 pm (UTC)I said nothing.
*shifty eyes*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 12:24 pm (UTC)So maybe, to promote peace on Earth, we should provide all people with an Internet access...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 01:49 pm (UTC)Course, my own pet theory is that the Internet gets away with being so unregulated because few people take it seriously as a news resource.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 01:52 pm (UTC)Of course, the volume of gratuitous insults goes up, but I just think everyone needs a chill pill.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 03:06 pm (UTC)That sums it up so perfectly. No one is ever right in the eyes of everyone else, and to attempt to see things in such a black and white manner is only going to lead to ruin.
To be honest, I don't understand how we're supposed to transcribe societal custom and morals over to the internet. Everyone with the ability to Google can find other people with the same interests, and we all know what pack or clique mentality - to any degree - can be like.
Obviously, I don't mean the cases of child porn, for example, which are criminal acts and can be prosecuted. But what about stuff like trolling or flaming? The anonymity of the internet often reduces the only constraint holding back obnoxious people in real life; consequences.
...And apparently, I think too much about stuff.
We wax eloquent about it, complain about it, whine about it in the privacy of our LJs and wank all over the paperwork, but we do not go out and incite riots over it.
Well, no, because that would involve effort. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 03:36 pm (UTC)I think that outpouring of incivility on the internet doesn't make it a dangerous place. In fact it exposes just how meaningless that behavior is in the first place.
Just my two cents though.
And the internet is indeed safer because I'm a lazy bastard.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 03:48 pm (UTC)Y'know, considering the stance I usually take, I really ought to have thought about that before I posted. This is what happens when I try and look at the bigger picture.
I suppose that's the big issue; the internet just isn't the same as real life social interaction. However, this is the first time I've heard someone put that in a positive light, so kudos.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 11:38 pm (UTC)The big difference is it's huge. Even individual fandoms, for example, have several different branches, sites, forums, mailing lists, etc. If someone keeps annoying you, or you get fed up of how one board is going, chances are you can find somewhere else to hang out with people who have the same interests as you.
If you don't get on with a work colleague, classmate, or neighbour, you can't just up and move that way.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 04:28 am (UTC)I can hope that people can be a little calmer about that, and not fly off the handle at quite the same rate.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 03:25 pm (UTC)"You would have to get up to the level of people trying to film Last Supper gay porno movies before people around here do more than bat an eyelid."
Hmm... that has possibilities.
"I have enjoyed carnal relations with all of you at this table... but one of you has twice now betrayed me. One of you here has posted on the internet that the Son of God has a small willie -- twice. And one of you will post it on the internet once more by the time we're finished cleaning outselves up."
"But Jesus, why would we do that? Meager as your endowment is, there is no question that you use it very well. We all know this from experience."
"You flatter me Judas. Coming from a man of your... 'stature,' that means a lot."
"Lord, surely you jest. I'm not that big."
"Judas, you're the size of two Red Bull cans. Now come over here and screw the Son of God."
"There's nothing I'd love more. (But first lemme turn on this live webcam...)"
COMING TO THE WEB IN 2007: HUNG LIKE JESUS!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 06:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 01:30 am (UTC)