On Information Control - RAH

 Lately, in watching the news and marveling at the nitwits who seem to be rising like shit floats, I find myself thinking of one of my favorite Robert A Heinlein quotes:

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

I know. Heinlein was the product of his times and his own experience, but I still agree with that sentiment.  Any time anyone tells you there's something that must be banned, it must not be read, it must be withheld from impressionable minds, I go get it.  That's the way I am.  If you tell me something is not fit for me, I'll be damned if I'm going to let someone else restrict my access to information. 

One of the things that absolutely thrilled me about the internet was the broad nature of the available information.  Hell, some of this stuff wasn't available to me as a child in a household with THREE encyclopedia sets, a Random House unabridged dictionary and a full Oxford English Dictionary.  For those of you who have not had the pleasure of hefting one of those monsters, think a book that's about eighteen inches tall, about a foot wide, and at least eight inches thick.  That's right, bloody thick.  We had two of them.

When one grows up in the house of wordaholics, one finds the recommendation that you "look it up" can be utterly fascinating and a giant time sink.  But then, at the same time, there's very little you can't learn reading a dictionary.  Even naughty things.  So I had that going for me.

But when it came to simple things like wanting to learn, on my own, higher math, the internet is wonderful.  And I can learn a lot more.  Such as the levels of fuckwitism some fuckwits will rise towards to become just wonderful people.

Today's vomit in my mouth a little is yet another example of why Ronald Reagan ought to be hung in effigy in many American towns.  I don't know about you, but I remember very well the dark days in the late 1970s when the Iranian state devolved.  Yes, I'm abundantly aware that America spent a lot of time and money propping up the dictator Shah of Iran, and I do understand their anger at America.  What stuns and sickens me is word that some elected fuckwit went around behind the Carter Administration and asked the Iranians to continue holding the American diplomatic staff captured in the raid on the American Embassy until Reagan can come to office and make a better deal.

What sort of filthy bastard would encourage a foreign nation to continue to hold his fellow countrymen?  For political gain?  I thought the rot of the Republican party was recent, turns out it's a festering wound that goes back a long time.  Their knowledge of math and taxation policy is, as we can all see, a big part of what is ruining America.  We used to be a country with a middle class.  Now we just go ahead and elect the lowest class as our "leaders" so they can pillage, root, hog, and generally shit their way to the top.  I used to think America had a future.  Seems pretty apparent if the Republicans get their way, the schools will be turned into indoctrination centers where only the approved knowledge will be passed on to the children, their ability to think will be tightly controlled, and rather than improve the planet, they'll make damned sure it's a festering sphincter when they're done with it.

I know, it's a sin to despair, but when the ruling class decides to parse out that which we can know, well, then, there's the problem.  If we let ourselves be controlled, limited, restricted, and accept only that which is approved for us to know, well, welcome to hell.  You won't need to die to go there.  Just elect the people who want to prevent information from being available to anyone.  

I miss the good old days when people were expected to be intelligent, not controlled.