People's Right to be Assholes

Ninety percent of the time, a smoke detector is there to piss you off. Like a car alarm, it forces you to accommodate, and makes noise for stupid reasons. Unlike a car alarm, that tenth time, a smoke detector will save your life, your home and most of what you love. In the end, what you have to put up with is welcome. But you don't think that every time you burn popcorn.

Some people are smoke detectors. Last month, a few went off up north.

Now what Ezra and Mark did is something I support. There's a little Danish flag right above my mirror. It was waved exactly once. But I must be clear: Ezra is an asshole. You can tell from the video he's an asshole. He's the kind of guy who likes to fart in church. Who holds the fart until he gets there. Who eats pickles the night before. A whole jar of horseradish pickles. But he's right. Fortunately, he also understands why he is right, and seems to have been ready.

That's a lot of pickles.

The reason I put "Libertarian" in my facebook profile is not that I shit my pants in joy at the thought of owning a half-mile of a federal highway.* It's for stuff like this. It's because Blasphemy tempts a free society. Because we expose ourselves to the coarseness and stupidity of other people's thoughts. And everyone can be blasphemed because everyone holds something sacred.

But it can send us to hell. This Albertan mess proves that. Once you give power to coerce public expression, that power grows. What starts off as a fair housing committee will try to shut down newspapers. Also, robot party. A Baptist minister, a concerned parent and a movement feminist have different, strongly held ideas of what is indecent. If you give one of them the power to regulate "indecency," eventually everyone becomes a target. You've formed the body, You've passed the mandate, all any faction has to do is take office.

What happens to debate in such a circumstance is predictable. You don't have to threaten me today if I hear that someone else has been brought up on charges for the crime of speech and writing. Once that happens, I know anything I write down runs the risk. If not today, then after the next board election, or the next one. However long it takes for someone who doesn't like me to get their turn.

That and you can't force people to be pure. I think PC censorship is even more dangerous than other forms because it has no limit. Most right-wing thought police want you to obey. To be pious in public. To not offend their traditions and institutions. As far as I'm concerned they can blow themselves like an oboe. But they STOP. The nice police want to make you better. They care about intent. They want you to feel correctly every waking moment. They keep looking, keep re-defining the crime, until they find your guilt.

It's like the ban on smoking here in NYC. That sounded defensible because smoke fills a room. But that's not how they justified it. Now they're publishing lists of what oils restaurants are allowed to buy. You must be clean. If your lungs, why not your colon? If your newspaper, why not your workplace conversations?  Comparing this urge to witch-hunting is redundant, because it's clearly the same urge. There's no way to actually make another person's soul clean. There's no way to actually make them happy. So you do what people have done forever: constantly uncover more and more deviance, and punish whoever you can reach.

Dutch, this is my answer to the Ron Paul issue too. No, I won't elect him president. But distasteful, disliked, beer-fart-in-church types are a national asset. They're the first ones touched by creeping power. They'll likely be the first ones to say "what the fuck" in situations where really, we all should.

I love this stupid movie.

Oh and Canada, can we talk? You're better than this.

Love,
Bizzo