Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Rezwan]

Hi Duke, I hear you. See how difficult this free speech thing is, even in the land of the free? How in order to have a free society, you end up suffering a lot of opinions that seem counterproductive and downright annoying? That seem to take up a lot of time and go nowhere? I’m reading this cool book right now: The Future of the Internet (And how to stop it) Talks about this phenomenon in terms of the tradeoff between generativity and mischief (virusus, spam, spyware, etc.)

These issues are everywhere. I think it comes down to what Rose Wilder Lane said – that the driving force for people is to control the energy of other people, by controlling their beliefs. We all have that urge. Hence the tendency to get shrill and act like our view is the only right one, or what not. Takes a lot of discipline to keep a conversation constructive. But also, every now and then you have to realize you may be wrong. Perhaps Reagan IS a prophet. “Well…”

Duke Leto wrote: If you are, as you say, under scrutiny for having been educated in the US, for god’s sake stop posting in this thread! I feel bad enough for having exposed you to closer scrutiny by sounding you out while you are in Iran.

Oh, too late for that. Cats out of the bag. I have that other website, and I twitter. The issue here is that the government has been equating opposing views with foreign regime change plots. I’m just trying to clarify that that’s not what I’m about. Public forums are just the place to do that.

No. I’m not about regime change and superimposing western style government here, establishing a new puppet. Rather, I’m all about organic, home grown transformation, free speech and generativity, unique to this locale. But that’s quite a hard sell here. And so many of the habits of free speech have not been developed here. We don’t have a lot of experience with it. And as you see from your own post, quite often people get fed up with other people’s blather and the impulse to just shut up/dismiss/ridicule disagreeing voices is always there.

So, what’s needed here is more acts of speech, rather than less. I’m trying to actively shift perspectives here. Trying to get Americans to see their role in the stifling of free speech in the middle east. Trying to show hardliners here that free speech is…well, even though it’s very annoying (let’s be honest) – its worth it in terms of creating a generative society that can, paradoxically handle major threats.

Yes, that’s a cowardly utilitarian argument. But it needs to be made, and seems to be the thing to do right now.

Anyway, my thoughts on this are still cooking.