Vicious Triangle, Tues. April 17, 2008

I read the news today. Oh boy!

My brain is turning into some kind of information system that makes connections among otherwise unconnected things. My blog for today will show you what that means.

There are lots of stories in today’s Chicago Sun Times, all of them fairly unconnected to all the others except for the fact that they all appear in the same packet of processed tree-pulp that makes up today’s issue of the Chicago Sun Times, where a brain like mine can look at all the stories side-by-side while trying to figure out what—if anything—it all means.

One story that caught my attention tells about Brigitte Bardot being on trial in France because she said she doesn’t like Muslims and in France saying things that indicate that you might have prejudices toward people is against the law. Acting on prejudices probably needs to be against the law. We have laws in the U.S. against racism and those have always seemed to me to be good laws. We DO NOT—however—have laws against expressing racist opinions. U.S. laws do not try to keep us from talking about bad stuff. Our laws only try to keep us from acting in bad ways. I feel that this is the proper way for our laws to be set up. The explanation of this is not especially easy to understand because it calls for you to distinguish between feelings, words and actions.

Feelings are what they are. We might have some control over our feelings, but that control comes from first recognizing our feelings. Very often expressing feelings in words is a major part of recognizing feelings. Words help us process our feelings. When we suppress words, we prevent ourselves from processing our feelings. When we suppress one another’s words, we are attempting to prevent others from taking an important step toward processing their feelings.

So that’s THEIR problem, right?

Wrong.

Suppressed feelings are what cause men who have taken a vow of celibacy to become sexual predators. Deny it if you want, but it’s true. If people who have taken vows of celibacy felt comfortable about having normal human feelings and talking about those feelings, there would be fewer celibates who turn into sexual predators. I would welcome any attempt to prove my theory wrong. At least it would be an attempt and any attempt is more than we are currently doing to deal with the problem of sexual feelings-turned-ugly.

Suppressing the important processing tool of speech makes racism uglier and more virulent as well.

There are many people who feel strongly about freedom of expression for many better or worse reasons. My two best reasons to support free speech are 1) talking about it keeps feelings from automatically turning into unwilled actions and 2) a visible enemy is much less dangerous than a hidden enemy.

Let people talk.

In the interest of free speech, I would like to say that the nation of France is stupid, makes stupid laws that are bad for society and above all, France really needs a good bath, a shave and some deodorant.

I don’t hate my French ancestors. My commentary is directed toward the current government of France that puts people on trial for saying stuff. Merde total!

Besides, (item 2 of today’s triangle) I can write anything I want to write here because hardly anyone reads this blog. My honesty and candor are not hindered by any fear that someone will not like what I say. My obscurity allows me to tell it like I see it.

It would be nice to get a few people to read this thing. In my efforts to get readers, I’ve visited the main page at Blogger to see what the top blogs are talking about.

One of them is the third point in this triangle “Stuff White People Like”—a blog about which there was another news story in today’s Sun Times.

I would like for you to notice that I could have made a link to that article or to that blog in this blog, but I didn’t

It’s because they forgot to include one major item in their list of things liked by white people: the disdain that “white people” feel toward themselves and each other. The blog whose title I’m not going to type again is a popular blog because “white people” enjoy ridiculing themselves for being “white” almost as much as “non-white” people love making fun of “whites”.

And it’s all freedom of racist expression.

That blog would be illegal in France.

So would this one.

BTW, according to the U.S.-approved race-classification system, Arabs are white people.

It does not specify what color Persians (people from Iran) and Babylonians (Iraqis) are.

We—the writers of this blog—hold certain truths to be self-evident and some of these truths are that race, religion, national origin and gender have nothing to do with whether or not someone is a good person, but properly processing feelings does.

As a patriot, I would like to close this entry by saying Fuck Censorship.

Thank you.