Composting Bad Ideas

Stream of consciousness blogging allows for ideas to spring to life in a setting where they can be shot down virtually immediately if they are not very good ideas. After a while, bloggers develop a readership that is comfortable with the things that we have to say, and finds common thought able to refine ideas and make them better. The core bloggers that i like to visit are listed in the Cross Lynx.

Ali's Voice ran a post on Jim Bell's murder for hire scheme, and the first commentary requested that it be taken off the bloggosphere and certainly not supported with ink and attention. But in the world of ideas, the bad ones have to be heard with the good ones. Being familiar with satire ever since reading Swift's A Modest Proposal in high school after i blew through Gulliver's Travels, i realized that pulling somebody's leg involved yarning a tall tale - the taller the better. I took the whole Assassination Politics thing as tongue in cheek and was rolling. If Jim Bell was arrested for this, we have some rather serious free speech problems that need immediate attention. This isn't serious, is it?

Part of reading things on the net is being able to discern truth from fiction. Everything is fiction unless you believe it. If you believe it and I do not - it is simply truth to you and fiction to me. We should be able to agree to disagree, but today, we cannot do that, we must just be standing in line cheering full-heartedly or setting down and shutting up. To the winner go the spoils and the losers get some crumbs. But the one party system has very few crumbs, as neither sticks nor the occasional carrot are anything like true rewards of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven. Point is - believe what you believe at your own risk.

The battle of ideas is won and lost in the history books - while we are here, we will do what we will do and the attempt to psychoanalyze on the fly can only lead us into bigger piles of manure. But if it's cold and wet and scary, fresh manure is a warm dry place to hide - ask a million billion rodents and insects. And today's manure is tomorrows fertilizer, if composted properly. Or next millenia's oil if collected and not composted. Somebody's lunch in the animal kingdom. Why do monkey's play with their feces? Ah - such a shitty subject, but not one which should be banned because it's distasteful.

Ali - i vote for you to keep the Bell post up - if i have a vote in your system.

BTW - the depth of truth can only be measured by consensus of informed peers - do your homework, believe what you believe consistently and work to make things you know are true fit into your system of reality, you can change your system of thought, but you cannot change the truth in reality, after the event has occurred.