Fundamentalism, Absolutism and the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is not absolute, it has limits.  As important as those limits are, it is even more important that the First Amendment, and its limits, apply to everyone equally.

Whether based on the spirit, legal or societal commitment to the First Amendment, it is easy to start carving out exceptions to protect segments of society in unusual situations. Easy is rarely right or good. We choose easy because new definitions and demarcations can be very difficult. Even understanding that free speech is not absolute is hard. Even harder when we start talking about exactly where those limits are.

The fundamental absolute about the First Amendment is that it was intended to be as dynamic and changeable as the Constitution itself. That's why the founding fathers built-in a the capability to make amendments. The First Amendment and the Constitution were created by mortal men, but men smart enough to know that change is the only constant in the universe. Change is inevitable, necessary and rarely easy.  A static and rigid U.S. Constitution would be no better than the Russian Constitution.  When have you heard anyone discuss the Russian Constitution?

What if Heaven is Empty

Some aspire to go to heaven, others just wish to avoid hell, there are those who believe in neither and then there are those who don't care.

If heaven does exist, so does hell. There is always balance. Perhaps there are a spectrum of places between them. It seems unlikely that if you aren't an absolute paragon of virtue, and nobody is, you are doomed to the place reserved for the worst of humanity. I doubt that I will end up as Hitler's roommate for eternity because I lied to my mother about how her favorite vase got broken. However, possible sins, and the opportunities for exclusion from heaven are plentiful.

Even people who strive to live vitreous lives, with the expectation of going to heaven are committing a sin (hubis) and are therefore excluded. Being ignorant of heaven, religion or the striving for eternal reward seems the only relatively good path to the Kingdom of God. A catch-22, if there ever was one.

It seems unbalanced, getting into heaven so hard and getting into hell so easy. You can go to hell for doing nothing (sloth), but you can't get to heaven for trying. And, of courses,  one persons heaven is another's hell. So even striving for the ultimate goal may not be such a great deal.

There may be a number of heavens. Will my friends and family go to the same heaven I am? Is anyone in my heaven? If I get to heaven and it's empty,  it's going to really quiet. I could live with that.

Apologies to Pepe the Frog

There is something in the Pepe the Frog issue to piss-off just about everyone; a beloved meme hijacked to promote a hateful political agenda, media attention that now permanently casts a shadow on the beloved image and so much attention being paid to such a comparatively small thing at a time of rampant hate and discord.

Humans have a habit of co-opting items from popular culture for their own purposes. There is a long tradition of such things. Mostly, usually, it's benign and sometimes productive. The use of evergreen trees to celebrate the winter solstice goes back to the vikings. It is also no coincidence that every major religion  has festivals, holidays or rituals for  autumn, midwinter and spring. We use the familiar to make the new or different more acceptable. Sort of a social Trojan horse.

However, there is a darker side to this characteristic behavior. Famously, destructively and relevantly, there is Hitler's appropriation of the swastika. The same holds true for many revered symbols and images like the Celtic Cross, four leaf clover and the Gadsden Don't Tread On Me flag. The KKK even tried to corrupt Casper the Friendly Ghost until the ADL brought the Klan's efforts to King World Entertainment Corp's attention. Copyright is a powerful thing.

Unfortunately Pepe, you have no copyright protection, and you fell in with a bad crowd. The good news is,  you are not the first image to be abused in this way. You probably won't be the last. Perhaps if the morons of this world leave you alone, redemption will soon be yours.

Until then, sorry you're having a rough time.

The Tolerance Weapon

Don't we feel foolish.  Tolerance, the once promising key to a better tomorrow, has been turned to crap.

The haters,  in this case the self-anointed victims of the Civil Rights Movement, have finally figured out how to screw up our best intentions. They now claim that they too are entitled to be tolerated.

As truly social deviants, and unlikely to qualify to be tolerated, the haters have recast themselves in more socially neutral terms. They no longer call themselves right-wing, white rights or European traditionalists.

They are now Alt-Right. A term so ambiguous as to obscure their true principals and confuse the less informed. As a result, the fringes of the Alt Right contain some relatively normal people. The true right-wing core of the Alt Right movement uses the appearance of normality at its fringes to claims a right to be tolerated in the social and political arena.

Make no mistake, these are white supremacists and fascists trying to paint their picture with a brush broad enough to attract those people who are even slightly disgruntled.  And who of us isn't slightly disgruntled?

So, the sore losers of the Civil Rights Movement, the malcontents of the "Second Reconstruction" have decided that if they can't beat tolerance, they would cripple it, usurp it and undo it.

This all started with David Duke who encouraged the Klan to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.” In essence, to seek the appearance of legitimacy and so be able to believably claim to be legitimate. Many other right-wing groups have followed his example. All clamoring for tolerance they neither believe in or deserve.

Hate deserves no respect, no tolerance. Not from anyone - regardless of race, religion, country, sex or political belief.

What now? Maybe it's time to abandon political correctness in favor of common sense. Not beliefs, just reality and truth.

We fought a war for this. Anyone remember? ,

DEAR INTERNET: IT’S TIME TO FIX THIS MESS YOU MADE

http://www.wired.com/2016/08/open-letter-to-the-internet/

• AUTHOR: WIRED STAFF.WIRED STAFF CULTURE

• DATE OF PUBLICATION: 08.24.16.08.24.16

• TIME OF PUBLICATION: 9:30 PM.9:30 PM

DEAR INTERNET, IT’S been a while, right? We here at WIRED talk about you a lot (mostly good things!), and we’ll admit it feels a little weird to address you directly. But we need to have a talk. And yeah, no, this is not going to be a fun one. Because things aren’t great, Internet. Actually, scratch that: they’re awful.

You were supposed to be the blossoming of a million voices. We were all going to democratize access to information together. But some of your users have taken that freedom as a license to victimize others. This is not fine.

Are we talking about Leslie Jones? Sure. Today. But we should’ve mentioned something to you Monday when some of you went after the woman running Ireland’s Twitter account. Or earlier this summer when anti-Semitic trolls started crowing about their nested-parentheses bat-signal. Last year, it was the assumption that of course we should have a pro-Gamergate panel at SXSW. Or two years ago, when some of you hacked Jennifer Lawrence and a slew of other folks in that ugly display known as—this is as gross to type as it is to read—the Fappening.

Did you know 40 percent of Internet-using adults have experienced online harassment? Do you know how many Internet-using people commit harassment? Us neither. It’s not many. But that minority is literally the worst. And they’re screwing it up for the rest of us.

When you were born 25 years ago, people were so overjoyed that they just wanted to talk with each other. Then they wanted to spend money. Great! Except the companies that rushed to fill that void figured something out: For anyone trying to spend money, odds are there’s someone else trying to take it. They added fraud protections to protect people and themselves.

But that didn’t protect anyone against what people said to each other. As you got bigger and stronger, more people wanted to talk—but some of them were jerks, or worse. Remember flame wars? You had no immune system, and you started to rot. Now that rot has turned to blight. And here we are.

The networks we use to talk to each other have managers, and they don’t seem to know what to do about it. We don’t either. We don’t know how to make you a place where information is still free but people are safe, too. We only know that silence is unacceptable.

You had no immune system, and you started to rot. Now that rot has turned to blight. And here we are.

Here’s what a Twitter spokesperson said when we asked about the problem of abuse on its platform: “We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.” After a hate mob drove Leslie Jones off Twitter last month, Jack Dorsey appealed to bureaucracy: “Our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.” There are rules? Well. As long as there are rules.

Except, you know what’s not making a difference, Internet? Rules. Do you know what happens when people talk to usabout how to stop harassment? They get harassed! Threatened. Other people email them their home addresses and name their family members!

And do you know what happens when we highlight how people respond to hate with love? Just read the replies.

Internet, it has to stop. And since you are this enormous, limitless beast with many heads and hearts and faces, the best way we know to get your attention is to talk to the companies and people who form your backbone and your bloodstream.

So. Companies that created the tools that let us communicate: no more passes. You have the ability to help people feel safe in their daily online lives. You havesophisticated tools to fight spam, and you take down content that infringes on copyright in the blink of an eye. This is a call to action. And a plea. You can’t say “we suck at dealing with abuse,” promise to do something, and then drag your feet. Because it’s starting to look like you care more about your next earnings call than the people who actually use your sites.

Maybe you’re not a company! Maybe you’re a hacker who can come up with some solutions to this problem. Go get ‘em, White Hats. And companies who pay hackers andresearchers to poke holes in the Internet, how about putting a bounty on fixing this enormous hole at the heart of the Internet? Help some people out.
 

If you’re someone who organizes, executes, or fuels abuse and hate crimes online, then let us be blunt: You are not our people. We trust you can find the door.

And if you’re someone who organizes, executes, or fuels abuse and hate crimes online, then let us be blunt: You are not our people. We see you dominating the comments on our Facebook posts. We see you shouting louder than anyone else in the comments of our stories, and in our Twitter timeline. Stop. Just don’t. You’re an embarrassment to the sites you frequent. We trust you can find the door.

Back to you, Internet. After all, we’re stuck with each other. You’re how we live our lives, and you’re how we’re going to continue to live them. We wouldn’t trade that for the world. We just want to make sure we work together—with you, and the people who built you and maintain you and depend on you—to become the place you were supposed to be, and be better than you are.
 
Love,
WIRED

The Fiction of Non-Fiction

Historically, libraries have divided books into two broad categories; fiction and non-fiction. Examples of fiction are stories, fables and fantasies. The rest is non-fiction, widely considered as fact.

Merriam-Webster defines it as:

"writing that is about facts or real events: all writing that is not fiction."

The digital world has inherited that default definition for non-fiction and is suffering for it. 

The first of many problems is that the fiction or non-fiction classification is bestowed by the author. A written piece about traveling to the moon in a basket carried by geese could be speculative non-fiction on alternative methods of spaceflight or a fictional fairy-tale. There is no objective measure which way it is classified. As a result, there are non-fiction writings about  how the Holocaust did not happen, genetic superiority or how the government is controlling people through microwave towers, among various other nonsense. 

If people just laughed, and some do, that would be fine. However, the ignorant and manipulative people point out that these writings are non-fiction, therefore true and irrefutable. By the assumption of truth and delegation to the category of non-fiction, these falsehoods become defictionalized. They are now free to permeate reality and distort politics, history, science and society.

We need to abandon the old classifications for written material. The writer's desire to portray their work as fiction or non-fiction is irrelevant. What is important is understanding what is true or speculation; what stands up to examination and what is intentional distortion. 

Literature and journalistic classification that categorizes writing, imply no degree of validity would be a start. A letter classification (1) Subject (2) Postulation (3) Position. Historic (H) Opinion (O) Critical (C) for example. It would then be up to the writer to support and defend what they espouse  rather than simply assigning an implication of truth.

Free speech is not about saying anything without being criticized or not having to defend a position.   Free speech is about debate, discourse; embracing good ideas and rejection of flawed, malicious or bad ideas.

David Duke, David Irving, Willis Carto, William Piece, Ben Klassen, Ernst Zundel and George Rockwell for example have all written works of malicious fiction which are classified and tragically accepted as non-fiction.

If we want to avoid drowning in the noise of presumed and unsupported alleged facts, then something must be done. 

We Are All Journalists

So many of us are journalists, storytellers, relaters of experience. Blogging, vlogging and micro-blogging. Some hoping to be the next Drudge or Huffington, others just needing to speak. Not since the Instamatic camera has our existence been chronicled so richly.

There are all kinds of journalists. Career journalists, science journalists, entertainment journalists and foremost, citizen  journalists. All are important and valuable, but a mixed bag. Some career journalists are amateurs and some citizen journalists are professionals. The difference between professionals and amateurs is not a matter of experience. It is a matter of dedication to journalistic standards, ethics and practices. Not everyone has that dedication.

The problem is dedication and commitment are great attributes, but not a great shield from abuse. More and more, as we citizen journalists, we need a shield or two.  In this election year we have seen just how badly  professional journalists can be abused for seemingly innocuous reasons. The reality is, citizen journalists have been subject to this level of abuse and worse for years.

Professional journalists have some level of support in place, from their colleagues to their publishers. Citizen journalists have no such support network. In many cases intelligent, well-meaning people have been harassed and driven off the internet because their opinions displease some people. We are not talking about radicals, racists or extremists. Can anyone honestly say that reasonable people, even if unpopular, should be abused into silence?

Blogging, vlogging, Tweeting and whatever comes next, should not put users at inordinate risk. It is counter to the concept of a free press. When writers meet basic journalistic standards they should be afforded the same respect and protection as any professional reporter.

As a species we are storytellers. If we don't protect the ways we have to tell our stories, we start becoming less.