Sian

For Randis

Let's see... what's the difference between "speech" and terrorism?  Hmmm... how about the fact that one involves incendiary devices, and the other does not.  And while there's a good possibility that my eighth grade English teacher would die of shock, if she heard some of the things I say, there really isn't much lethality to speech. 

There may be a moral grey area.  For example, I would never write a post, or a book entitled 101 things the September 11th hijackers did wrong, because I have no desire to share this information with the stupid.  I do have a few thoughts on the subject, of course, but then, who doesn't?

If you're in High School, right now, you've spent most, if not all, of the sentient end of your youth in a post-9/11 world.  A world which panicked, once, and passed a wide spectrum of laws that it will be trying to un-do for a very long time.  I grew up in a different world.  One of the guys from my school designed--and built, sans core--a bomb for his physics class, and at the end discovered that he wasn't entirely sure how the guidance should work.  So naturally, he wrote a letter to the DOD.  "I am a high school student in..."  And they helped him.

I had a teacher who explained how to cook Marijuanna into brownies, and a rifle in your gun rack in the school parking lot wasn't always a hanging offense.

People are more careful, now about the things they write, and the things they say, but they shouldn't have to be.

Why should "Toss a peice of cellophane in the gas tank" be "conspiracy" while "And then Amy put a peice of cellophane in the gas tank, and ran away," is fiction?  Both sentences hold the same peice of information.

There are laws.  There always have been.  Libel, and terroristic threats and conspiracy, oh my!

And yes, freedom of speech does include explaining exactly how and why you'd like the local metropolis leveled.  Leveling it should be a crime.  Talking about it should not.  There are any number of thrillers that plan these things in detail.  There's at least one best selling author, who in a more innocent time, wrote spy novels which were so complete that you could use them as a blue print, and another, who described the destruction of a major American building by terrorist piloted aircraft...  in 1974.  Not to mention a number of authors whose research is so complete that you can catch a bus on the scheduals used in their books.  Speech is not the problem.  Speech is the warning system.

Let's face facts, the bad ass isn't the guy screaming about how he'd like to kick someone's face in; the bad ass is the guy standing there, smiling back at him.

posted by: SianNorah at 16:14 | link | comments

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