Before I start, I'd like to announce that the "parallel blog" is now no longer on air. The same goes for Dutchism, the old blog which I kept up for emotional reasons, both are now no longer available. The philosophybyme blog is integrated into this one, Dutchism (as well as the other one) is saved on my computer. The reason for this is simple: the division between politics and play was made because parts of my life were better not associated with the open homosexuality and eroticism of this blog, yet I did wish for a broader public to view my ideas and opinions. This sentiment has changed, in that I now would rather be open about everything.
Coming out of the closet has been a gradual move for me, I have always maintained a subtle approach as to not receive too shocking responses. The fear of such responses has left me and now this blog will be all there is to me, for as far as "blogging" is concerned. I know of few bloggers who keep, or wish to keep I should say, different blogs apart. I have quite a history of this tendency, but as I may have been warned for by many, it is futile. The Internet is big and information is everywhere. This blog has been accompanied by a warning page concerning the 'objectionable content' which an unprepared mind might find unsuitable for his or her personal feelings, and who would want to hurt the personal feelings of complete strangers? A consequence to this is the removal of the older warning directly attached to this blog. The remarks on the commenting antics of people will remain enforced, so anonymous comments, disproportionally rude comments and stupid comments will still be removed. People will only not be warned for this - I believe it is time the people of the world learned some ethics, including ethics which apply to use of the Internet.
The Parallel Post Notifications will not be removed. Though it would be logical to delete the announcement of a philosophy-only related post since the provided link is out of business; Parallel Post Notifications were not always limited to the sterile set-up I had in mind for them. Fickle as my blogging behaviour is, plenty of these posts were accompanied with a short notice, an update, or whatever else I considered interesting at that time. It would be a shame to loose such content; and quite frankly, I am too lazy to adjust all posts that are concerned here. You might notice my English is rather lengthy today, that is because I am enjoying writing this quite a lot at the moment; and I have had several glasses of wine which are obviously kicking in at the moment. I apologize for any disturbance, and I warn you: the following post, right below this wall of text, was written in the same breath as this.
As was mentioned in the first post of this blog, the content of 'Dutchism' is still available by request. After all, what a fool I would be to destroy the memory, which is one so exact, of my unruly past as a teenager who found the Internet, Porn, Christ, the fallacy of Christ, and the merit of expressing your feelings to the world - but still remain anonymous in a sense.
The Pantheios will be updated as soon as possible, as I'm having some difficulties with the Blogger services. It may be me, my computer, or the service - but I'm expecting it to work eventually... ...or rather, I hope it will. Because that will make the sidebar even longer, I'll allow for more posts to be displayed on one page. After all, it looks silly to have a huge sidebar but no content where it is aside from, no?
---
In a world where information can be shared as swiftly, efficiently and accurately as in ours, people's valuing of information grows strongly. Before the internet, information was restricted to that what was available in libraries - documents - and in word. Modern education was perhaps the first step in this revolution on the value of theoretic information. And by that I mean words, texts; not the whole scala of kinds of information. By boldly claiming, as educators generally do, that they have the truth; people naturally became suspicious. Modern education invites that suspicion into the classroom, allowing young people to discover criticism, scrutinizing before themselves what is to be considered truth, and what is to be considered false. Creating small freethinkers, as they might have been called by the old garde, who fear all reality that seems uncomfortable; or rather sceptics. And what a great and encouraging view it is, to see scepticism rise from an insult to a word of stature, of significance. Because really, the individuals of our species that matter, are those who are not afraid to distinguish themselves, but also those who stand firm enough to doubt what information is fed to them. A sceptical approach to all information, might leave one without any reality to base anything on; but no one says sceptics are irrational people. We can never know everything, and as fate would have it, one of those ever shrouded things seems to be the very foundation of the world that we are a part of. Of course no one in their right mind would remain steadfast at the argumentum ad ignorantiam. There will always be things which cannot be proven because of lack of evidence, and/or be disproved by lack of evidence. This doesn't mean we should stay put in the middle, remaining neutral about everything. Someone who is senseless might find that appealing, but fortunately, most people do have a pretty good hunch when a proposition is absurd and truth can be reasonably established. Learning how to scrutinize truth from fallacy, has enabled us; and by 'us' I mean the larger public, not a handful of enlightened figures of science as in the time of Copernicus; to truly appreciate knowledge. We have all become philosophers, our natural eagerness to learn new things has led us to the point where nothing has to be a 'mystery' to anyone; the intellectually challenged aside. We have started to love information, and this bodes well for our race.
However, the established powers, namely governments and religions; powerhouses to control people; have long before concluded that the masses are no longer masses when each individual, becomes a true individual and becomes informed and skilled at processing information - valuing information as valid or invalid. It is as clear as crystal: if you want to control people by means of a placebo, you have to make sure they don't realize it's a placebo. Governments and religions are all placebo's, certain forms of government left aside... They both give the participating individual, or at least intend to give him, the feeling that he is correct in following it (and its orders). Yet this is by far not always the case. Of course religion is bullshit by definition, and popular governments (that are in function at this moment) are all far from optimal. But they do persist. Why?
My guess is, that they persist because the masses are still not trained enough in being objective, in being critical towards all that they are being told. But as I said earlier, I believe we are in a progressive motion, I believe people will more and more become sceptics and critics of all authorities. And this is very important, because if a system of power is afraid of change, if it is conservative, it must have something to hide. If we are discouraged to be critical of those that have power over us, that power prevents errors from coming to light, and thereby prevents becoming a more suitable system of power.
To prevent a system of power from becoming unsuitably oppressive, and avoiding of progress; it is important that the public, those the system is meant to serve, is not restricted in access to information. All information, no matter what it is, needs to be available to everyone. Of course artistic rights need to be protected - otherwise there would be very little artists left; but especially scientific information, political information and otherwise significant information needs to be shared with the public. There can be no such thing as a CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT. If something is classified, the system of power is screwing up. Of course, there is one exception.
If it concerns war, and the enemy is so dangerous or other circumstances lead to the wish of a surprise attack or anything else that requires some kind of hushing of information distribution; I can perfectly see why something needs to be held secret from the larger public. But only until the battle is done. And under no circumstances can anything else be a secret. It serves no purpose other than deceiving the public from the wrong a system is doing. Which is, obviously, wrong.
It is essential, for any form of a system of power, be it a business, a government, or an organization; to share all information with everyone. Keeping the people in the dark about things, is plainly criminal. And it is a way of controlling people's perception which is already failing because of the new generation of people who are fervently scrutinizing every entity that exerts any kind of power. Like cutting in the education budget of a country, keeping information from people is a very stupid thing to do as a government. It is criminal, because it basically deceives people who might have chosen differently if they had known alternatives and/or all information accompanying a prevailing system.
If a system of power is keeping information from you, this is a pretty clear hint that something is wrong and that it needs to be met with.
Coming out of the closet has been a gradual move for me, I have always maintained a subtle approach as to not receive too shocking responses. The fear of such responses has left me and now this blog will be all there is to me, for as far as "blogging" is concerned. I know of few bloggers who keep, or wish to keep I should say, different blogs apart. I have quite a history of this tendency, but as I may have been warned for by many, it is futile. The Internet is big and information is everywhere. This blog has been accompanied by a warning page concerning the 'objectionable content' which an unprepared mind might find unsuitable for his or her personal feelings, and who would want to hurt the personal feelings of complete strangers? A consequence to this is the removal of the older warning directly attached to this blog. The remarks on the commenting antics of people will remain enforced, so anonymous comments, disproportionally rude comments and stupid comments will still be removed. People will only not be warned for this - I believe it is time the people of the world learned some ethics, including ethics which apply to use of the Internet.
The Parallel Post Notifications will not be removed. Though it would be logical to delete the announcement of a philosophy-only related post since the provided link is out of business; Parallel Post Notifications were not always limited to the sterile set-up I had in mind for them. Fickle as my blogging behaviour is, plenty of these posts were accompanied with a short notice, an update, or whatever else I considered interesting at that time. It would be a shame to loose such content; and quite frankly, I am too lazy to adjust all posts that are concerned here. You might notice my English is rather lengthy today, that is because I am enjoying writing this quite a lot at the moment; and I have had several glasses of wine which are obviously kicking in at the moment. I apologize for any disturbance, and I warn you: the following post, right below this wall of text, was written in the same breath as this.
As was mentioned in the first post of this blog, the content of 'Dutchism' is still available by request. After all, what a fool I would be to destroy the memory, which is one so exact, of my unruly past as a teenager who found the Internet, Porn, Christ, the fallacy of Christ, and the merit of expressing your feelings to the world - but still remain anonymous in a sense.
The Pantheios will be updated as soon as possible, as I'm having some difficulties with the Blogger services. It may be me, my computer, or the service - but I'm expecting it to work eventually... ...or rather, I hope it will. Because that will make the sidebar even longer, I'll allow for more posts to be displayed on one page. After all, it looks silly to have a huge sidebar but no content where it is aside from, no?
---
In a world where information can be shared as swiftly, efficiently and accurately as in ours, people's valuing of information grows strongly. Before the internet, information was restricted to that what was available in libraries - documents - and in word. Modern education was perhaps the first step in this revolution on the value of theoretic information. And by that I mean words, texts; not the whole scala of kinds of information. By boldly claiming, as educators generally do, that they have the truth; people naturally became suspicious. Modern education invites that suspicion into the classroom, allowing young people to discover criticism, scrutinizing before themselves what is to be considered truth, and what is to be considered false. Creating small freethinkers, as they might have been called by the old garde, who fear all reality that seems uncomfortable; or rather sceptics. And what a great and encouraging view it is, to see scepticism rise from an insult to a word of stature, of significance. Because really, the individuals of our species that matter, are those who are not afraid to distinguish themselves, but also those who stand firm enough to doubt what information is fed to them. A sceptical approach to all information, might leave one without any reality to base anything on; but no one says sceptics are irrational people. We can never know everything, and as fate would have it, one of those ever shrouded things seems to be the very foundation of the world that we are a part of. Of course no one in their right mind would remain steadfast at the argumentum ad ignorantiam. There will always be things which cannot be proven because of lack of evidence, and/or be disproved by lack of evidence. This doesn't mean we should stay put in the middle, remaining neutral about everything. Someone who is senseless might find that appealing, but fortunately, most people do have a pretty good hunch when a proposition is absurd and truth can be reasonably established. Learning how to scrutinize truth from fallacy, has enabled us; and by 'us' I mean the larger public, not a handful of enlightened figures of science as in the time of Copernicus; to truly appreciate knowledge. We have all become philosophers, our natural eagerness to learn new things has led us to the point where nothing has to be a 'mystery' to anyone; the intellectually challenged aside. We have started to love information, and this bodes well for our race.
However, the established powers, namely governments and religions; powerhouses to control people; have long before concluded that the masses are no longer masses when each individual, becomes a true individual and becomes informed and skilled at processing information - valuing information as valid or invalid. It is as clear as crystal: if you want to control people by means of a placebo, you have to make sure they don't realize it's a placebo. Governments and religions are all placebo's, certain forms of government left aside... They both give the participating individual, or at least intend to give him, the feeling that he is correct in following it (and its orders). Yet this is by far not always the case. Of course religion is bullshit by definition, and popular governments (that are in function at this moment) are all far from optimal. But they do persist. Why?
My guess is, that they persist because the masses are still not trained enough in being objective, in being critical towards all that they are being told. But as I said earlier, I believe we are in a progressive motion, I believe people will more and more become sceptics and critics of all authorities. And this is very important, because if a system of power is afraid of change, if it is conservative, it must have something to hide. If we are discouraged to be critical of those that have power over us, that power prevents errors from coming to light, and thereby prevents becoming a more suitable system of power.
To prevent a system of power from becoming unsuitably oppressive, and avoiding of progress; it is important that the public, those the system is meant to serve, is not restricted in access to information. All information, no matter what it is, needs to be available to everyone. Of course artistic rights need to be protected - otherwise there would be very little artists left; but especially scientific information, political information and otherwise significant information needs to be shared with the public. There can be no such thing as a CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT. If something is classified, the system of power is screwing up. Of course, there is one exception.
If it concerns war, and the enemy is so dangerous or other circumstances lead to the wish of a surprise attack or anything else that requires some kind of hushing of information distribution; I can perfectly see why something needs to be held secret from the larger public. But only until the battle is done. And under no circumstances can anything else be a secret. It serves no purpose other than deceiving the public from the wrong a system is doing. Which is, obviously, wrong.
It is essential, for any form of a system of power, be it a business, a government, or an organization; to share all information with everyone. Keeping the people in the dark about things, is plainly criminal. And it is a way of controlling people's perception which is already failing because of the new generation of people who are fervently scrutinizing every entity that exerts any kind of power. Like cutting in the education budget of a country, keeping information from people is a very stupid thing to do as a government. It is criminal, because it basically deceives people who might have chosen differently if they had known alternatives and/or all information accompanying a prevailing system.
If a system of power is keeping information from you, this is a pretty clear hint that something is wrong and that it needs to be met with.
4 comments:
"controlling people's perception" is a trait of the psychology and politic of the authoritarian, and most politicians and bureaucrats are associated with authoritarian political parties.
Information wants to be fee. You are one of my favorite bloggers, thanks.
New post please! I want to hear some more!
Post a Comment