Psychotic Penguins

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

- George Carlin

Oh…we know alright. We talk among ourselves incessantly passing the fear along and we know the plague is here.

I just watched a video about employers now asking their employees and candidates for employment to provide their passwords to social media networking sites like Facebook. This is an unbelievable level of arrogance and invasion of privacy that is not much different than asking for the keys to your house so they can have a look around. Employers do not and should not have the right to demand access to personal social media pages and email and that needs to be nipped in the bud.

But here is the thing I find the most troubling.

The very first comment posted about the video did not attack these same employers who were violating people’s privacy by engaging in these practices, it attacked government. It actually accused government of creating a false crisis by getting employers to engage in this activity so that it could justify its anti-Internet crime legislation.

Just how stupid a society are we actually becoming?

The mere thought that there are people out there who believe that their own government is capable of organizing something like this with private-sector employers is mind boggling. I read that comment and had to remind myself to breathe.

There is such an absurd fear of our own governments now that I am beginning to wonder if perhaps there is some chemical in the water or in the Big Macs served at MacDonalds that has destroyed brain cells. Our collective ability to think and to reason is plummeting and soon, penguins will be smarter than we are, if they aren’t already. Penguins are so stupid, they chose to live in the coldest place in the world and wear black so that killer whales will see them more easily in contrast to the ice.

In the past month alone, Google, Facebook and Twitter have all been exposed for invasion of the privacy of their users. We don't have laws to protect us from this abuse of personal data because we’re so stupidly afraid of our own governments, we’d rather be raped by online by companies and predators than actually see some regulation and rules put in place to protect us. We’re even prepared to let children continue to be bullied online, threatened and to be abused by pedophiles and porn sites rather than allowing law enforcement the tools they need to combat this perversion.

Just today, I read an article about the latest online fraud wherein those we protect, because of our fear of own governments, are using the Mega Download situation to scam people out of more money.

The Internet is awash in scammers, spammers, terrorist cells, racists, hate-mongers, pedophiles and bullies but it’s our governments of which people are suspicious. There are actually people out there who trust Anonymous more than their government and that’s a leap in logic I can’t even begin to fathom. It’s like trusting a street gang to protect your home rather than the police.

I guess it’s true. You can talk yourself into anything with minimal effort these days and government is the only enemy that matters. It makes me wonder why so many bother to align themselves in the political debate and are so passionate about who does or doesn’t represent them.

We have not only lost our common sense and anything even resembling a sense of community, we have thrown away our basic ability to think beyond the last tweet we saw or web site we visited. In fact, many can’t even think for themselves anymore. I read enough social media messages to see the same stuff being parroted over and over and over again with not an original thought in the mix.

We've become so devoid of common sense and the ability to reason for ourselves that we are becoming as stupid as some of the questions asked of political candidates by CNN. It tnever occurs to us that the people leading the charge against Internet regulation are the very people who benefit most from there being no regulation. We have become so paranoid of government that we just follow along like sheep waiting to be sheared

Freedom of expression is a valuable and cherished freedom and should be protected but it does come with a modicum of responsibility. In a democracy, it is expected that there will always be those who abuse and misuse that right but it is usually expected that they will be the minority. There is a significant difference between exercising your right to freedom of speech and simply acting like a trained Myna bird and parroting garbage. If the best we can do as a society is pass more garbage and paranoia along to each other, what’s the bloody point?

When Gutenberg invented the printing press it revolutionzed communication. For the first time, the great works could be distributed to the masses. No longer was knowledge under the control of the state and the church. Ideas could be shared and they were. Literacy for the common man changed the world and knowledge was no longer available to the privileged few.

Mass media took it to a new level in the 20^th Century and information traveled at the speed of sound. We were better informed, had better access to more information and were able to share ideas on broader basis. It was thought that the Internet would take it up another notch.

What a pipe dream that’s turning out to be.

This powerful medium, this repository of all of the world’s knowledge is so cluttered with garbage and fear that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the truth anymore. It isn’t making us smarter or drawing us closer together. Instead, it is dumbing down society and polarizing us in a way no politician could have ever hoped to achieve.

The Internet has become the playground for too many who are shallow, a threat, dishonest, the lazy and the just outright paranoid.

We no longer learn, we simply grab whatever bit of nonsense fuels our uninformed opinions and run with that. We shout down any who disagree with us rather than listen to them in the off chance they might actually have a point and we perpetuate this bizarre fear of government.

The Greek word for fear is psychosis which is from where the term psychotic is derived and that, my friends, is a perfect term to define what is happening these days. We are becoming like psychotic penguins squabbling incessantly over little pieces of the beach, babbling about anything and everything except the real threats out there in the big blue sea. Those we ignore.

It's government we fear, not those huge killer whales with their gnarly teeth and never-ending hunger for penguin. We use extreme words like treason and fascist to define the most mundane things about governments with which we disagree as if those words somehow elevate the importance of our argument. 

It is one thing to criticize government, the good Lord knows there is lots for which to criticize any democratic government or leader. But it is something completely different to be so afraid of our government that we talk ourselves into a paranoid delusion.

And it is government we fear….the same government many stand in front of with their hands out because apparently, that fear of government doesn’t extend to lining up to cash in on a few entitlements here and there.

Maybe all those folks, like Occupy, who are constantly demanding things like free tuition and free housing should be asking Anonymous for them instead of demanding the government they don’t trust cough them up. 

There is no doubt that Anonymous has access to lots of credit cards they can use to pay for everything….not their credit cards of course….the credit cards they steal from psychotic penguins too caught up in fear of their own governments to notice the real threat just off shore.

Perhaps it's time we starting culling the flock.


LINKS
Criminals target Megaupload users with fake settlement demands
http://torrentfreak.com/criminals-target-megaupload-users-with-fake-settlement-demands-120321/ 

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