cshen.net

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

How does a government eradicate civil liberties? By creating an evil and then pretending to solve it, if only people could give up a little of their freedom. Little by little, one imaginary evil after another, we suddenly find ourselves devoid of the freedoms we once enjoyed, and we have – each and every one of us – become the evil that the government targets.

The strawmen of today are internet criminals: scammers, identity thieves, child pornographers. With the permeance of the internet, they have become the dark, mysterious, scary monsters of our time: a readily available excuse for the government to curtail its population’s freedoms.

I have received emails from the BC Liberals for a while now, every time I get one, I mark it as spam. Why? Because every single email the BC Liberals has ever sent me, is spam. Most of the emails I mark as spam without reading, but from the ones with titles ambiguous enough that I’d click on it, it’s evident that my email was added to some mailing list for BC Liberals propaganda. All form letters, many of which designed to get their supporters do to something.

I have never signed up to any BC Liberals spam list, in fact I have never given them my email address by any means. Their frequent emails are wholly unsolicited and unwanted. How did my address end up on their spam list? My best guess is that a Liberal supporter/organizer who shall remain unnamed took some unrequested liberty with use of my email address. I gave him my email to continue a conversation about some BCYL event I was marginally interested in, nothing was mentioned about being added to a spam list. I decided that the event wouldn’t have worked out with my schedule, and that should have been it, but soon I started receiving BC Liberal spam. Correlated much?

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and took the chance to make a new theme. This time going for a clean, minimal look and emphasizing text as the center of focus. No more sidebar: tag, category, and monthly lists are on their own pages now. This theme, like the last one, is served as XHTML or XML. Internet Explorer still gets an XML error, but it molests this design so much that even the XML error page is a better visual experience.

The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc are finally working together to form a functional coalition government which represents Canadians far more accurately than the Tory minority we currently have, yet people all over are accusing it of being undemocratic. It’s no surprise that the conservatives are whining, they don’t want to loose totalitarian grip over the other 60% of the country. But even some non-conservatives are buying into the fabrication that a coalition is somehow undemocratic, unjust, or otherwise illegitimate.

The only argument that’s being used against this coalition is that Canadians elected a “Tory government”, and that it is disrespectful or dishonest for the other parties to “steal” the government from them. This is such a flawed argument I’d be amused at its ubiquitous adoption if it weren’t so said that so many Canadians are either idiots or too lazy to look up the facts.

Self acclaimed liberals often claim that freedom and equality are the two most important values society can have. Indeed, this is evident in their moral systems, and as a liberal democracy (which is distinguished from the ideology) our society generally reflects those values, or at least the profession of them.

These values are supposed to protect the weak and vulnerable, or the unpopular from the majority, yet in modern western society it is exactly when the most unpopular ideas are expressed that the otherwise champions of freedom suspend these values to silence dissent. This, of course, happens with almost every controversial issue, and both conservatives and liberals (and everyone in between) are guilty of it. However, while they all nit-pick the circumstances under which to champion freedom, conservatives are not being hypocrites while doing so. Conservative ideology often places other values above that of freedom and equality, and it makes sense to sacrifice them in order to maintain higher values. Liberal ideology, however, places freedom and equality above all else, so to suppress them in favour of some other benefit, that is being hypocritical.