mon 04 jan 2010 00:41:28 — witte de withstraat
some things i should write about
i should write about how people know, and how they think they know things they don't know. how the democratization of mass communication necessarily includes people who are crazy. and the atomization that brings.
important to include: how "climate change" has become a religion, or maybe a nation. how at a certain point i have to say "i don't know what's happening". need to train myself not to speculate too much.
also it's time to broaden my "trouble with nations" thing. thinking tonight about how people complain about globalization, as if nationalism is better. globalization is not the problem: greed and carelessness are the problems. and nationalism is not a good solution.
and i thought about how strange it is that nations can declare humans to be traitors, when in fact it's usually the nations who are betraying the humans.
and i thought about how we seem to forgive states for having 'state secrets'. back in the 80s, vanunu got in trouble for revealing state secrets. but why should that be a crime? why is it not instead a crime for a state to have secrets? have state secrets ever served humanity? secrecy may help nations defend themselves against each other, and against their people. secrecy also helps nations get away with doing bad things.
today i was reading the UN's universal declaration of human rights, from 1948 or so. offhand i can't think of any nation that abides by these rules. supposedly israel agreed to them in the act of its formation, which happened around the same time as the UN was chartered. but in its treatment of (among others) vanunu it has completely flouted many of its articles. and that's just one of many nations who are doing bad stuff.