New Civilization News - Category: Communities    
 A forum in NCN??72 comments
picture 8 Apr 2006 @ 09:58, by silviamar. Communities
Since I set up the Landing group for newcomers last year, I've realized how difficult is to communicate with the members in NCN because there's not a proper place for it. Many newcomers come to me saying that they don't know where to post a message. Many don't want to set up their own newslog or join any particular workgroup, but would like to have a place where they can post a message and have a conversation with the rest of NCN members.

The conversation rooms are not very user friendly because there are not organized threads that can be followed, as they are in most of the forums. If you post something there, your message becomes hidden very quickly by the next messages, so it's difficult to follow up the conversation.  More >

 'Sea's Mind': Fear of Self-Expresion!15 comments
picture2 Mar 2006 @ 23:52, by sea. Communities
It truly amazes me how often we, as humans, are afraid to speak our minds! I can understand it being hard to stand before a group of people you don't know & express yourself. What amazes me is that even on the web I see this happen all the time.

It happens in the news groups, 1000's of lurkers afraid to post because they may find others with opposing views, or may offend another. I see it all over in sections like this one, where comments can be made, even to what I am saying now. Are they utilized? Rarely!!!

I see it in forums, in our A&AC Forum alone. I have posted over 100 articles & have recieved under 5 comments. We have an open 'general' area to discuss most anything & yet no one says a word. Another section to post views, ideas, comments, suggestions, anything about the website - nothing posted!

People do have views, I know you do!!! I get the emails filling my box all the time. Questions, ideas, issues about the website, discussion on some of the topics... Everything that could be posted in at least 10 places on this website alone, end up in my email instead of in a place they might benefit others or encourage thought & debate.

I have to wonder... Why? Have we as a world society so beat up the individual that they are afraid of even saying 'boo'?  More >

 I is another *23 comments
picture22 Feb 2006 @ 21:57, by uncleremus. Communities

"Are you a captive somewhere? Are you in economic chains? Caught against your will in a spiritual straightjacket? Are you a wage slave or a boss? Do you live off your wits? Have you undergone shock treatment? Do you dispense shock treatment? Were you denied, at some point in your life, your rightful inheritance? Are you an outcast? Do you smoke pot? Do you crack the heads of dissenters? Are you a dissenter, and proud of it? Were you last seen somewhere? Do you want to be seen? Are you even visible? Do you enjoy a sinecure? Do you view life as hopeless? Are you happy? Miserable? Overflowing with existential angst? Do you admire power? Raw power: refined power: power within a velvet glove or in a steel mit? Do you believe there will be a tomorrow? Or are all our days yesterdays? Do you vote? Do you cry? Do you make love? Do you ever go to a movie? Are your papers in order? Are you an expatriate? Has Interpol come after you? Do you still live in your native land? Have you learned yet that the Soviet Union collapsed? Do you care? Are you a student in an exclussive Islamic university? Do you hope to visit Disneyland some day? Have you? Are you a chess enthusiast? Do you play softball? Do you like girls? Have you a girl? Does she truly love you? Are you faithful? Do you prefer the night to the day, or vice versa? Have you ever felt the breeze standing on the end of a pier at dawn? Are you under investigation? Do you believe in God?"

-----21 Feb 2006 @ 00:22 by Quinty

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 New Civilization: its Culture7 comments
2 Dec 2005 @ 04:18, by shreepal. Communities
New Civilization seeks to accomplish four objectives and one of them is Enlightenment. (Please refer to the draft Charter of New Civilization).

We want to know more. We want to learn what we do not know. The history of all civilizations is the history of the urge of their people to learn more.

We want to learn more about something, say, a motor car. A motor car is an abstract idea that is too general and we cannot study a general and abstract idea. We shall have to take a ‘real’ motor car to study it in a scientific manner. One has to remember in this context what Albert Einstein had said about the necessity of performing ‘real’ experiment while setting his famous model of a running train with one observer on the train and the other on the railway track. Therefore, if we want to study a motor car, then we shall have to study a ‘real’ motor car, say, the motor car of certain John Smith.

Again, we cannot study the motor car of John Smith in general. One has to choose a concrete ‘realty’, an event. So, we choose to study the motor car of John Smith on a particular day at a given moment.

And, thus we choose a particular moment and concentrate on a ‘part’ of car, say, its ‘front wheels’ to study their ‘truth’. Now the wheels are connected to an integrated whole of the system of this car. The movement of the wheels are dependent on and controlled by ‘many’ factors. Apart from the aspects of motor engineering, which every body knows, the movements of these wheels are dependent on the ‘whims’ of John Smith that he may happen to enjoy at a particular moment. Things are getting too complicated. But it is realty. We cannot escape it. This Smith may fancy an idea and the fate of these wheels will depend on it. He may choose to turn, jump or destroy them and so would be the fate of these wheels. And this Smith is not an entity that is un-connected with and immune from very many factors in making his decision. He may happen to enjoy his elevated mood or be undergoing severe stress, who knows. It is realty. We are studying things as they are and not in a simple manner as we routinely think they are. The universe is an integrated whole, which is complex in its detail but simple in its fundamentals. We human beings are not an isolated and separate entity as a ‘Closed Box’ destined to be permanently cut off from the universal whole and without any connecting bridge. On the contrary, we are part and parcel of the whole that may envelop any conceived ‘Closed Box’.

We do not know many things. We are ignorant in many respects. And, on top of it we are arrogant by habits. It is fundamentalism. And, there are many kinds of fundamentalism that are thriving on our planet. We belong to Old Civilization. Fundamentalism has no place in the culture of New Civilization.

To learn more, one must be humble. It is a virtue. It is the corner stone of the culture of New Civilization. New Civilization seeks to accomplish enlightenment. It can be accomplished by encouraging people to imbibe the knowledge of science and to always remain opened to change one’s long held and cherished positions.














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 What is the difference between Old Civilization and New Civilization?14 comments
8 Nov 2005 @ 17:48, by shreepal. Communities

We are lacking the very thing that is ESSENTIAL in our whole enterprize aimed at New Civilization. And that essential thing is to ascertain the DEFINING attributes of New Civilization. And, then we may compare these atrributes with the ones of Old Civilization to understand the difference between the two. Let us look at this issue.

The New Civilization cannot be founded on the ‘CLASSICAL MODEL’ (the term has been borrowed from the terminology of modern physics – and which very aptly applies to the subject we are discussing here) of today’s human thinking. We are accustomed to view and evaluate things in our world from our ‘RIGID’ POSITIONS. We have no inkling at all of the ‘RELATIVE’ character of our rigid positions that we human beings take on all the things we encounter in this world. There are almost always aberrations and unexpected outcomes in our interactions and of which we are unable to account for when we reckon them from our rigid positions of our ‘CLASSICAL’ way of thinking. We are very much ‘EARTH-CENTRIC’ in dealing with the universal scheme of things. We are very much ‘SELF-CENTRIC’ when reckoning things that are connected with faith and religion. We are very much ‘HUMAN-CENTRIC’ when we judge our place and position in the span of Universal Time. We are very much ‘PRESENT-CENTRIC’ when we judge of ourselves. We have no inkling even of the very obvious that we are judging of ourselves by ourselves. Our seemingly illogical aberrations in reckoning our relations are accounted for by giving a margin for the errors of others in adjusting and correcting the aberrations. We are totally incapable to visualize the ‘RELATIVE NATURE’ of our place, position and knowledge. We are conditioned to think in the ‘OLD CLASSICAL WAY’. We do not visualize that what we know today was not known to us yesterday and advance this historical experience logically to future to arrive at the conclusion that all our position, place and knowledge are ‘RELATIVE’ in worth.

The New Civilization cannot be made to rest on the old classical model of human thinking. All our aberrations and irreconcilable positions, which are the corner-stone of our Old Civilization, are resolved and put in their logical place once we apply the ‘RELATIVISTIC MODEL’ of human thinking. Our rigid positions become our respective ‘FRAMES OF REFERENCE’ and all our stands become true only relative to our frame of reference. With the help of this model we human beings are put in their relative place of Universal Time and Space.
Then, we get rid of human-centric frame of reference in evaluating the worth of our knowledge and logically accept that it is not 'ABSOLUTELY TRUE'. And, paradoxically, but which is day-like clear under the Relativistic concepts, it is true that all conceivable frames of reference are equally good and all judgments (of course,if the individual making the judgment is not committing a mistake or is not of insane mind) qua a particular frame of reference are 'ABSOLUTELY TRUE'. With the help of this relativistic Model, we are rid of earth-centric view of Universal scheme of things. Then, we are rid of man-centric view of life and its evolutionary destiny.

Let us apply these two models to the problems of our world. Our present civilization – Old Civilization – is plagued with the problems of faiths, cultures and political states.

Let us take the example of faith-anarchy gripping our earth. We shall not take other examples – of cultures and political states etc, here for dealing with them according to the two respective models. The example in hand may equally apply to other human problems of antagonistic nature that have defied mankind’s MIND - until Einstein uncovered the deep secret of nature – that is, the universal principle of Relativity. The Classical Model is founded on the premises that what you observe, if observed correctly, would be ABSOLUTELY TRUE. But Relativity has demolished the very basis of the foundation of this model. The universal principle of Relativity holds that all observations conducted while stationed on different FRAMES OF REFERENCE that are in motion relative to one another (in the case of human beings, individuals living life at different planes of consciousness) would not agree in their judgments and all would be TRUE. But they would be true with respect to that particular FRAME OF REFERENCE only and not universally. There is no way to find a universal stationary FRAME OF REFERENCE with respect to which all observations would be correct, except universal constant, that is the speed of light. With regard to consciousness we do not know what is that constant. After all MIND is merely a FRAME OF REFERENCE and it is not the ONLY frame of reference in the domain of Consciousness that is constantly evolving.


With the end of this article, I intend to cease for now serious and philosophical articles (unless the occasion warrants otherwise at appropriate intervals). All these articles are merely my opinion - but judgments drived from the observation made from my FRAME OF REFERENCE of Consciousness. I would be TRUE in my judgment and you would be TRUE in your judgment, though we both may CONTRADICT each other on the point in issue because we both are making oservations from different FRAMES OF REFERENCE of Consciousness. Such are the dictates of Relativity. Perhaps my opinion may be read fruitfully as background material for New Civilization Global Movement.


Now we must get down to the job of preparing Earth Summit.




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 The Ignorant Musings of an English Girl3 comments
5 Oct 2005 @ 13:54, by poopac2222. Communities
Poor AmericaÂ… Let us not right it off as left behind a dead and backward placeÂ… It doesnÂ’t have to be a dustbin or should I say trash can a dumping ground for the spiritually impoverished the blind the sick of mind the apathetic; the patheticÂ…

I once envisaged a future where there were vast networks of communities: The Pockets Progression prevalent throughout rampant EuropeÂ… Like a beautiful cancerÂ… There were no laws only unspoken rules; few would break because to break was to cheat and to cheat the universe is to murder yourself to not play the game extracts you from the pact the intrinsic pact without which nothing is reversible without which we devoid ourselves of seduction; seduction of the universeÂ… This was happening in the future and the whole world was lapping it up they were all brimming and trusting and merging and free from fervent judgement of petty differenceÂ… all except America.

Poor America! I envisaged America to be the place where the dwellers consisted not souly but solely of those (anti-freaks) who refused to play the game: the ones still insisting on the value money the lost siblings the unshameless ones who cling whingeing to ornate stagnancy who bear the futile burden of judgement fervent disastrously disastrously disastrously free; free from the illusion of loveÂ…

I once envisaged a future where there were vast pockets of progression: Reality is a consequence of imaginationÂ…
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 Optimizing7 comments
picture 24 May 2005 @ 17:44, by ming. Communities
Robert Cringely had a couple of articles recently, DayJet May Be the First Peer-to-Peer Airline and Jet Me to Work
DayJet Software Could Revolutionize More Than Just Air Travel
. Essentially about a private jet company called DayJet, which has made a piece of software that makes it economical to provide relatively cheap business flights from just about anywhere to just about anywhere in the U.S. on cheap jets that have seats for just 3 passengers. They plan on having between 40 and 300 planes like that. The big deal is their optimization software. All airlines have to do a big optimization calculation, to figure out how best to utilize their aircraft, and transport the most people to places they want to go, for the lowest cost. But even for a major airline, the number of planes and routes and destinations is relatively small, and they don't change their routes very often. What DayJet has in mind is a much huger set of optimization calculations, done not every month, but every time somebody wants to go somewhere. The use of the planes will change all the time, and any little airport might be used, as long as the jets can land there. So, the whole calculation needs to be done basically for each customer, in relation to whoever else wants to fly around that time. You know, it isn't economical to fly just one person, so the optimization will figure out how best to serve everybody and fill up the seats as much as possible.

I don't think I'll ever fly in one of those seats, so that's not why it is interesting. What's interesting is the general possibilities of optimizing a whole bunch of things, if you have the software and the computing power for it.

Our society is a rather inefficient machine in many ways exactly because we don't have very efficient means of coordinating what is available with what is needed.

If I have a book I've read and I don't need it any longer, why don't I give it to somebody else who'd like it, particularly if they live just around the corner, and they can come and pick it up this afternoon? Because we don't know of each other, that's why. And there's no good means for us to do so. I'm not going to go around and put up notices on the lamp posts for my book, that's too expensive in effort expended. And if everybody did that, there'd be too much information to wade through. But software could do it. It is a matter of representing what is available and what is needed in some kind of useful manner, and then it is an optimization problem.

Why don't everybody on a street share a small number of lawn mowers, instead of having to maintain their own? It could be much cheaper to share. The reason is that it is too much trouble to coordinate the sharing, and figuring how the right number of lawn mowers and the scheduling. In the absence of some kind of optimization program, it is just much easier to each have our own.

Why do I need to have my own bicycle or car? If I could always find an available vehicle standing close by, and it was reasonably cheap and somebody took care of the maintenance, it would probably be more economical for everybody that we shared. And, indeed, there are now companies that deliver that service in various major cities. Cars or bicycles with GPS systems, coordinated by optimization software.

Really, our whole society is not much more than one big optimization problem. We've got these resources, we've got these needs - how do we bring them together in the most optimum manner? On a micro level.

In a way the solution to that could be a synthesis of free market capitalism and centralized communism. Better than either of them. Both of them bog down because it is just too centralized and there's no good capability to give most people what they need, or to use their resources well. So the solution has been to just make up some product that a lot of people ought to want, and make a one-size-fits-all version of it, and market the hell out of it, and not worry about if it isn't perfect for everybody. Or, in the communist version, to decide what kind of appartment everybody ought to have, or what kind of bicycle, and then just manufacture the same for everybody, in a big dull centralized factory.

If we had the infrastructure for it, it could both open up a great many more business opportunities, and at the same time it can cheaply solve many social issues. As to the book I no longer need, I might either be happy giving it away for free, or I might participate in a business that gives me an appropriate amount of money for it. If I have a restaurant that throws away all the left-over food every day, it would be no extra trouble for me to let somebody come and pick it up and feed it to poor people. All based on that the communication infrastructure is very cheap and easy to use. And that it optimizes both the use of resources and the result or profit gained from their use. I might either want to get the most possible dollars for my book, or I might want to give it to whoever will have the biggest benefit for it. It is merely an optimization problem either way.

The way it will happen is probably that comparnies carve out a niche, delivering more personalized service more efficiently, and we start getting used to expecting custom solutions, rather than general solutions that don't quite fit. We'll start expecting that there will be public transportation in front of our door, rather than half a mile away.

It would be better if it were a transparent open-source system that did it, but competing business solutions would be a good start.

The more transparent, the better. It can potentially be a huge shift in how things are done. See, most traditional businesses are based on hiding from you what the optimum solution would be. In part because they might not know, but also because their economics are based on giving you roughly what they give everybody else, and making you believe that it is the best that is available. Imagine that instead you had your own optimizer, which was plugged into a vast and finegrained infrastructure, which pretty instantly could point out to you the shortest route between what you have and what you want.  More >

 Virtual Futurists2 comments
picture 7 May 2005 @ 15:39, by ming. Communities
Last week was the first meeting of the Second Life Future Salon. I used to go to the monthly futurist salons in L.A. spearheaded by John Smart, which was always enjoyable. A group of very bright techie, transhumanist futurists, and always great speakers. Since then affiliated salons have popped up in other places, San Francisco, San Diego and Las Vegas. And now this is the first one in virtual space, in the Second Life virtual world. Which means I can be there, even if it is at 4AM where I am in France.

I was a bit late, and it took me a while to find it. I haven't used Second Life more than a couple of times. It was in a China Town simulation, which was pretty cool, but how to find it? I basically scanned over the world map, which is huge, until I found a suitably large group of people that I could teleport to. People, well, what is there is avatars, virtual bodies. And, well, it is weird compared with a "meat space" meeting. People can have all sorts of wild costumes, and wings and robotic arms or whatever suits them. And you can fly or walk or ride a motorcycle or teleport, or whatever. But you still go to a meeting hall with chairs and sit down, and there is a speaker up front, and you sit and fiddle or look around at who else is there. They had hooked up some new audio conferencing capability so you could hear the speaker. Otherwise you type to each other in speech bubbles or chat windows.

Well, what's interesting is how serious this is. It isn't just some kids trying to pass their spare time with a game. Rather, we have academics and professionals who dedicate quite some effort to making virtual worlds more viable for various kinds of activities, and who study the dynamics of what happen there. How you best do business there, whether you can telecommute from there, what kinds of infrastructure is needed, etc.

Lots of interesting stuff on the Second Life Future Salon Blog, like the article The Flat Earth's Shaky Virtual Ground on the interesting phenomenon of low-wage Chinese workers being employed to play online games in virtual worlds and gather stuff of value that can be sold, and how they get into a puzzling situation in a place like Second Life, where it isn't really a game, but where you can very well make good money in real estate speculation or by starting businesses, but it requires understanding how a capitalist economy works. And if you do, you wouldn't really have to work for peanuts for somebody else in a sweatshop for virtual workers.  More >

 A Survivable Path for the Planet Earth18 comments
picture29 Apr 2005 @ 16:34, by rcarratu. Communities
People either think the Universe is just existing in their whimsical little egos or they are in a Universe that far exceeds their little minds and bodies.

Either way, this is a challange to all of you...  More >

 Morals and Freedom14 comments
picture 29 Mar 2005 @ 17:57, by ming. Communities
One of my standards for evaluating how free a society would be would be the inverse of the degree to which it suppresses various kinds of "vices" and "indecent" or "immoral" behavior.

Sex and drugs and free communication, primarily. You know, is nudity illegal? Or saying "bad" words. Or smoking or hallucinogenics. Or prostitution. Or odd sexual fetishes.

Personal choices and life styles and modes of expression. The degree to which a society feels it needs to use force to control those is closely related to the degree it is being oppressive.

When a lot of people share a society, it can be quite practical to have laws that regulate the interaction between them and protect their health and liberty. Driving in the same side of the street really makes things much easier. Having somebody to call when your house gets burglarized makes you safer. But for a public authority to try to control your personal habits, for no other reason than that somebody doesn't like them, is a totally different matter.

Victimless crimes, essentially. Which generally aren't really crimes, but manifestations of the existence of slavery and mind control, enforced by physical or economic violence.

A society where you aren't allowed to say "fuck" or show your breasts on TV is kind of sick. It indicates there are some perverts in charge who have a big hangup on sex, thinking they have to control everybody else, because they're afraid of their own thoughts, probably.

The view that sex or nudity is somehow bad or evil or indecent or offensive is at best a little strange. Certainly has nothing to do with what we find in nature. We're all born naked, and remain so under our clothes. We all got here by some people having sex and enjoying it greatly. There can hardly be anything more natural. That it is an evil thing comes out of a twisted religious mindset, which itself is the cause of much evil in the world.

"But we need to protect the children!" many people would say. From what? From the knowledge of how they came about? The idea that sex and children have to be kept far apart, or some kind of disaster happens, is in itself rather weird. From nature's hand, things tend to progress by themselves in a healthy way, if you don't mess with it. Little kids just don't have much interest in sexual subjects. But at some point they reach adolescence, and they certainly do. But then they run into oppressive laws that tell them they have to be children in that regard until they're 18, and that they have no right to choose to be sexual. Depends on the society. The age of consent is higher in the more oppressive societies.

So, what in some places is a healthy expression of sexuality, at a natural stage of one's life, will in other places be considered child pornography and molestation, and something one will lock people up for life for. You know, the topless girls in a Danish tabloid newspaper might just be 15 or 16. Which would be unthinkable in the United States, where there certainly wouldn't be any nudity in a newspaper, and it certainly wouldn't be teenagers.

Now, I've lived in the U.S. for so long that even a couple of years later I still instinctively get the american moral reactions some of the time. Even if I never believed in them. It is more a matter of looking over your shoulders for the police coming to arrest you because you did something unthinkably horribly bad, like serve alcohol to somebody under 21, or take a photo of some naked kids running through the sprinkler in the summer.

Now I'm in France, where even the gas company uses nude people in their commercials on TV. Which is absolutely non-controversial. People here would have a hard time understanding how there possibly could be any kind of issue with that.

And "bad" words? Most French try hard to be very polite, and expect others to be polite, so there are certain things one would tend not to say when one is in that mode. But that has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is illegal to say certain words in a public medium. You can say fuck all you want, or the equivalent, if that's somehow fits the mode of communication you're using. And a lot of the time it doesn't fit. See, it is your choice.

Here they serve wine in the cafeteria in high school. Zero issue with that. If you want water, you take a water carafe; if you want wine, you take a wine carafe. So, are the kids drunk all the time? Stupid question. On the contrary. Everybody has a very relaxed relationship to alcohol, so it isn't a problem. Oppressive and unnecessary regulation only makes things worse.

Smoking. Well, the cigarette packs in all of Europe by law have forceful hypnotic commands on them. Essentially: You're going to die!! Horribly, painfully, slowly! I could say a lot about the pitiful lack of understanding of the human mind that goes into producing such a campaign, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's another story. Anyways, it is quite likely most of Europe would end up with similar control of smoking as in the U.S.

Am I saying that's bad? I'm saying that lack of choice is bad. And lack of good, balanced information is bad. "Smoking Kills!!" is propaganda. It is probably illegal in many places to provide any more balanced information. Smoking is a drug addiction. There are many drugs with various pros and cons and things to say about them. Coffee, sugar, heroin, nicotine. They're not all the same. But generally nobody is taking them for their harmful effects.

So, drug use. I'd say a society that leaves it up to the individual to choose, but which provides good information and support, is way more healthy than one that just makes it all illegal. The statistics show quite clearly that Holland has way fewer problems with drugs and drug related criminality than places that try to outlaw it. Lower rate of drug use, fewer fatalities, fewer health issues, less crime. Making the use of certain drugs illegal merely fuels a huge multi-billion dollar criminal drug industry, and puts a lot of people under serious health risks, because they don't know what they're getting, and there's no help available for them. And, as always, making a whole bunch of different things all the same in the eye of the law or in education brings all sorts of nasty problems. Heroin is not the same as marihuana. Neither is the same as most hallucinogenics, which typically aren't addictive. Making those illegal is probably mostly a matter of trying to stop people from stumbling into thinking out of the box. And, again, the negative effects are much greater when it is illegal, and you buy some unknown substance from some guy on a street corner, rather than from a pharmacy. Quite likely it is because somebody in power actually desire the population to have the negative effects, rather than any more balanced and healthy experience. Or because they benefit from the big money is the criminal drug industry.

Prostitution. I think women (or men) should be free to choose who they'll have sex with, as long as all parties agree. And if one of them earns money from it, so what. Making money from providing a service is an empowering thing. Prostitution is a valuable service, which relieves all sorts of pressures that otherwise could be let out in harmful ways. Making it illegal will only create a criminal industry around it, with pimps and violence. Making it illegal will ensure all sorts of health issues, and make it hazardous for both prostitutes and their customers. Again, countries that have legalized prostitution, like Holland or Germany, can clearly show the beneficial effects in their statistics. People who're trying to outlaw prostitution will usually do it out of some religious or moral belief, for some reason believing that women should not be free to choose where and when to apply their sexuality.

The question is who comes up with the "shoulds" and why, and the degree to which they succeed in getting government power to enforce their particular view. Somebody's personal choice gets elevated to law, so that everybody will be forced to make the same choice. A society that lets that happen has problems.

Real life is full of nuances. Everything has degrees and pros and cons. Some things are fun, but dangerous. Some things are risky and enjoyable at the same time. A free society needs to allow people to make choices that fit their nature, particularly when it is personal choices that don't harm others. That others might take offense is not a good enough reason to outlaw something. It just isn't good enough that there are groups that think that certain behaviors are bad. They're free to make their own choice, but not to enforce it on everybody else. If they don't feel like being gay or engaging in S&M or taking ecstasy or smoking or drinking or appearing nude in a magazine, no problem. But some people do, and feel like a whole lot of things that might be horrifying to others. That's what choice is about. It is up to you what you choose. It is not up to you to rule that all traces of those things you don't choose get weeded out of society. There needs to be room for all of us here.

So, again, a good test of the freedom of a society is how it deals with all those personal behaviors that might be considered by some to be immoral, bizarre, dangerous, perverted, unhealthy, indecent. And the funny thing is that if such choices are freely allowed, they right away become a lot less unhealthy and dangerous and strange. Because oppression and repression and suppression are the real dangers.  More >



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