I found this site by accident. It was an old site I intended to turn in to something. I've been blogging on blogspot under multiple names, and other websites for awhile now. I really don't know why I started, but now I sometimes have the urge to write something. Before I really didn't have that urge, it was mostly just an attempt to interact. I wanted to write comments on things that I have read, so I created usernames. This inevitably led me to writing some blogs myself. The whole process is somewhat individualistic. Or maybe thats not the right word. Although we are writing and sharing with so many people, real interaction is somewhat hard to find. In fact blogging and writing these things can isolate rather than connect. It is far more satisfying on an interactive level to play online video games. Working in a team to achieve a goal. To do this effectively the team must communicate in order to form a strategy to get to the goal. Blogging is silly and self-absorbed, it accomplishes very little. "New media" was a failure and now the internet is dominated by the same "old media". I think I may have viewed the internet as a panacea for curing the decline of Pax Americana, both domestic and foreign. This was naive and idealistic. The sad part is that I wrote all of these blogs thinking that I would "grow out" of these ideas. Now I realize I will never grow out of them. I formulated my opinions when I was very young. I can remember things that I have changed my mind on for years. The first being the fact that I supported the death penalty, because of my belief that it deterred murder from being committed. When I studied the practice what I found was this was not true, the regions which have the highest effeciency executions are actually plagued with more murders. While finding this out I was confronted with a few other facts: innocents have been killed, the poor are disproportinately executed, and minorities are disproportionately executed. I realized that these all compiled to mean it had a higher cost than it was worth. Both literaly and figuratively, it costs a state far more money to execute someone than to incarcerate them for life. This opinion changed when I was 12 or 13, at this point I already had a great interest in politics and had formulated most of my opinions on the matters. The next time this happened is when I was 21, I realized that the drinking age is right and moral, no no only joking. I went with a class to the NRA national headquarters and was told that the assault rifle ban was bad and there should be no controls on arms. I asked if that included nuclear weapons or bombs. He said that he "don't answer hypotheticals" and thats not a firearm. I told him the word firearm is not in the bill of rights. I was not called on by him again.
Although the NRA was wholly unconvincing my own research in to gun control gave me a different perspective, which eventually would turn me around. Up until this point I had come from a town which experienced what is called the first school shooting, Laurie Dan. I have no memory of the event I was way to young and I went to a different elementary school. But it seemed to me that guns were tools for killing people, and thusly there should be certain places you cannot have a gun, certain guns that not anyone can have, and certain people that shouldn't have guns. I basically believed that handguns should be banned. I was a boy scout and was(still am) a great shot with a rifle or shotgun, but I to this day have never fired a handgun and abhored them until I was 21. At this point I had to re-examine my schema. First of all its in the constitution I had to tell myself. You don't fuck with the constitution, anyone can tell you that, especially not the bill of rights. So what does it mean if it can't be fucked with, how is it to be interpreted. When I realized that the intention of our constitutinal protection of the right to bear arms, is to check tyranny it was the big turn around. The 9/11 attacks had just happened, the patriot act was in effect, the government was rounding up muslims, while the white house was stonewalling an investigation. I saw the neccisity of the people's ability to check tyranny in black and white. In my opinion there should be a background check on the person purchasing the gun, if they have a history of mental instability or a violent criminal record, they should not be sold the gun. Other than that I think any person should be able to posess/bear any firearm they choose to. The ability to check tyranny overwhelms the cost of murder with firearms, easily. The final instance of an opinion changing I have ever had is when I started researching the events of 9/11. After seeing Michael Moore's movie I was compelled to look up some of the citations from the movie, what I happened upon was a wealth of other information pertaining to the events of that day. Up until this point I had thought the executive was trying to stop an investigation or get Kissinger at the head of it, just to make sure they couldn't get any of the blame for what happened. It never occured to me, it was because they were actively complicit in the events. This one took a long time to change. I was very, very resistant to changing my mind about this. To believe that factions of our federal government allowed certain people to stay free, quashed certain investigations, and paralyzed our air defense with war games, in order to up the probability that these suicide bombers would be successful is a disturbing and scary thought. It means that the world is so much darker than I had previously believed, but it fit with everything I knew about war and greed. Again I had conquered a more naive part of myself to come to grips with the truth just as I had twice before. It is strange, because there are many who do not understand this. They think that there is either one or the other, either a government orchestarted attack or lone terrorists on their own mission. There is a vast amount of gray area and some facts will never be known. They've been successfully obfuscated or just plain destroyed before they could be released. Or they are subject to the massive increase in secrecy in the executive branch, denying more FOIA requests than ever before. This especially pisses me off, because the FOIA can easily mean the salvation of democracy. The press is owned by corporate interests, all the news just parrots the opinion of said corporate interest. If the US citizen could see the unadulterated truth through the FOIA, they wouldn't need these bullshit spewing middle men. Without truth getting to the people there is no chance of holding our leaders accountable, if our leaders aren't held accountable then they are above the law. This means that we will have devolved in to a monarchy or dictatorship. But anyway, certain things will never be known and certain stories will never be printed whether or not they are true.
What happened to reading between the lines?
