Glyndwr Open Day - Best Line Of Show

That blonde I was telling you about, working for TechniQuest, turning up at the Glyndwr Uni Open Day to show off what TechniQuest was all about?

She had this bench with a display of a bunch of scientific toys to play with. And there was also a biro, a Glyndwr pen someone had picked up off the floor.

I said to her "If anybody asks if that pen does anything, you can tell them that it can do this 5,000 year old magic trick called "writing.""

I think that was the best line of the whole show. :)

A "What If" Scenario ...

As I bought my 2000AD yesterday, I found myself thinking of a "what if" scenario.

Back in March 1977, the debut of this comic saw the appearance, in Issue 2, of a character who would come to define the comic like no other regular: Judge Dredd.

The backstory is, Dredd is a kind of future Supercop. Empowered by the Law to pass sentence and carry it out, he really is judge, jury and executioner in a dark, cynical hardscrabble world of future crime and future punishment.

Throughout this immensely long-running series, Dredd's sole guide, along with the rest of the force of Justice Department, had been The Book of Law.

But what if they'd come up with a Judge Dredd back in 1977, where their guide was The Book of The Law ... by Aleister Crowley?

Stuff I Have Said On FB Today

1:-
Two monks walking along a Nevada road one night encountered lights in the sky.

"Look! Unidentified flying objects!" said one monk.

The other monk picked up a rock and threw it as hard as he could.
...
"That object doesn't know what it is either," he said.

2:-
Fear and panic are a useful tool,
When wielded by anyone not a fool.
A man who wails that all shall soon die
Shall find truth in his own words, by and by.
Ignorance kills as much as a gun,
But in the end, all will be One.

3:-
I looked up the particularly useless definitions of free speech and censorship on dictionary.com, but a little further digging produced some more refined definitions:-



* Free speech is the right to express any expression in public, and the c...orresponding right to experience anybody's expressions in public, without being pressured, denied access, arrested, or otherwise punished by anyone, subject to somewhat fuzzy, but fairly well-understood exceptions.



* Censorship is the act of changing a message, including the act of deletion, between the sender and the receiver, without the sender's and receiver's consent and knowledge.

http://www.jerf.org/writings/communicationEthics/node5.html

I've heard so many rabble-rousing demagogues argue that they were just "exercising free speech" when they incited the crowd to go out and plant a burning cross on some black guy's lawn, set fire to a black church or go out and look for gay people to harass and murder. "I was just talking out loud. Guy's got a right. Ain't my fault if someone overheard me and was stupid enough to want to go out and actually do what I said, is it?"

It doesn't wash, because the man has the equal right to stand up and say "I want all of you to come up on stage and anally rape me before smashing my head in with house bricks and planks of wood!" Yet somehow, despite the fact that it's the same thing, only directed at himself rather than at someone else, they never quite have the courage of their convictions to actually try and see what would happen if they did say that.

Where does free speech end? If I say something like "You know what I think? I think we should blow up the Hollywood sign!" it's an opinion. People can take it or leave it, laugh at it and jokingly cheer if I suggest tying up LiLo and Paris Hilton to the sign, but even if I was a complete psycho my speech was not an order, or a command, or a request. Just an opinion.

If I say "You ought to go and kill some random guy coming out of that bar over there," again it's a suggestion, not a request or a demand.

If I say "I want you all to go and find some synagogue and paint nazi slogans on it," that's a request. If I tell someone "Go and blow up the Chrysler Building," or "Put anthrax into Lake Michigan," that's a demand. Hell, even an imperative command.

Requests, demands, even suggestions have nothing to do with speech, dialogue, conversation and exchange of ideas. Even the clever expression of a mere opinion, if accompanied by pressure from the side like minions going around handing sticks of dynamite and Molotov cocktails to undecided followers in the crowd, is still a veiling of the fact that the expressor of the "opinion" is actually telling people what to do.

And that is not free speech. That is incitement. That is words spoken with an intent to cause things to happen. That is speech where the listener is placed in the position, not of saying "I disagree with you," but "I refuse to do this thing that you want me to do."

That is where free speech has its limit - when it ceases to be speech at all, and becomes desire, impulsion and coercion.