Liberdade de expressão

O que mais se vê hoje em dia, especialmente na internet, são opiniões extremas, pessoas ridicularizando outras por causa de pensamentos contrários, críticas de todos os lados e discussão atrás de discussão. Nem sempre é muito bom conviver com tudo isso. Mesmo assim, eu defendo o direito de todo mundo fazer qualquer uma dessas coisas.

Como individualista que sou, prezo pelo poder do indivíduo, e isso inclui manter seu direito de liberdade de expressão intacto. Pouco me interessa se fulano simpatiza com nazistas, se odeia crianças, tem nojo de heterossexuais ou admira ditaduras. Enquanto isso não passa de opiniões e palavras, todo mundo pode criticar a vontade, mas ninguém deve ser calado, não importa o lado.

Aqui sempre entra a velha história do “discurso de ódio”. De acordo com os coletivistas, certas opiniões são muito prejudiciais e devem ser proibidas. Eles acham que proibir alguém de falar que odeia homossexuais fará com que, como num passe de mágica, ele fosse repensar sua postura. Haja utopia.

Não existe nada mais difícil de se mudar do que o pensamento de uma pessoa. Um depressivo não volta ao normal apenas por saber que está se prejudicando, nem um aracnofóbico ignora seu medo de aranhas porque humanos matam muito mais do que elas. É pura inocência acreditar que coibir opiniões altera atitudes. Ainda que um maníaco homicida seja proibido de falar de sua sede de sangue, ele não vai deixar de matar.

A partir do momento em que crimininalizamos OPINIÕES, mas procuramos desculpas para os ATOS, tudo está perdido. A pessoa que tem nojo de negros pode ser uma preconceituosa e uma pessoa repulsiva, mas não é uma criminosa. A pessoa que mata um negro, a menos que em legítima defesa, é uma criminosa. É essa última que deve importar. A primeira está apenas exercendo seu direito de falar asneiras.

Existem opiniões que ofendem. Existem. Mas se formos partir do princípio de que o ofensivo não deve ser tolerado, não será mais possível falar de nada. Afinal, o simples fato de eu estar feliz e saudável pode ofender os tristes e doentes; meus dentes inteiros podem ofender os banguelas; minha magreza pode ofender os gordos; até mesmo o fato de que eu respiro pode incomodar muita gente. Então como vamos ficar se qualquer coisa pode ofender qualquer um?

Se você acredita que uma mulher não pode ser zombada por ser gorda, mas o adolescente que assalta e mata outra pessoa deve ser perdoado, você está dizendo que inocentes devem ser poupados (o ofensor e o assassinado), e defendendo o culpado (o assassino). E até onde eu sei, a culpa nunca deve ser da vítima.

Por que sou individualista

Eu já me intitulei várias coisas: reaça, “opressora”, minarquista… Hoje em dia, me considero apenas uma individualista.

E por que isso?

Pra comecar, porque cansei de rótulos. Se encaixar nesta ou naquela linha de pensamento sempre traz algum tipo da chamada “cagação de regra”. Quem nunca ouviu que conservador não pode se divorciar/mandar nude, que libertário tem que ser ancap (????), que liberal tem que ser a favor das drogas?

Eu acho isso um porre. Concordo com várias ideias que não se encaixam, todas, em lugar nenhum. Tenho ainda uma boa parte da minha mentalidade conservadora, que respeita e valoriza a família, igreja e propriedade privada. Apenas não imponho essas opiniões ao resto do mundo. Odeio drogas, mal bebo álcool, e sou a favor da liberação das drogas porque não acredito que o Estado deva ter controle sobre o que cada um faz com o próprio corpo, sem prejudicar a outrem. Desprezo coletivismos como feminismo, movimento gay e movimento negro. Peguei um nojo profundo por Estado de uma forma geral, o que fez minha concepção de minarquismo ficar ainda mais radical. Considero impostos como uma extorsão, assim como qualquer tipo de tributação obrigatória.

Tenho minhas rusgas com quase todos os grupos. Na direita, me cansa a mania de reclamar do Estado ao mesmo tempo que venera policiais e é contra liberação de drogas. Ou seja, não gostam do Estado, mas quando ele limita o que lhes agrada, não tem problema. Na esquerda, odeio a síndrome de vítima e o proselitismo que fazem com absolutamente tudo que veem na frente. No libertário, desprezo a mania de superioridade e a mania de basear TUDO pela PNA, além de não se decidirem nunca se aborto é liberdade da mulher sobre seu corpo ou uma violação do direito a vida. Sou radicalmente contra abortos, e ainda falarei disso mais tarde. Não acredito que o anarcocapitalismo seja um modelo ideal.

Conheço pessoas que gosto e com as quais concordo em muitos aspectos de todas essas categorias, e mesmo assim não consigo mais me definir como nada disso. Vejo radicais e babacas por todos os lados. Sabe o famoso meme das coordenadas políticas? Eu o vejo assim:

Authoritarian left: todo mundo que discorda de mim é fascista.

Authoritarian right: todo mundo que discorda de mim é petista.

Libertarian left: todo mundo que discorda de mim é bolsominion.

Libertarian right: todo mundo que discorda de mim é socialista.

Por isso acredito no individualismo: porque defendo o direito do indivíduo proteger sua própria vida quando estiver em risco, de falar o que quiser sem censuras, de viver a vida como bem desejar, desde que ninguém se fira no processo. Porque acredito no indivíduo, antes de mais nada.

Tem coisa que eu acho legal de todos esses quadrantes, menos o authoritarian left, claro. Isso não quer dizer que eu pertenço a nenhum deles.

Eu sou só chata. E vocês, que vêem o inimigo mortal em todo mundo que não concorde piamente com todas as suas opiniões, são uns retardados e eu quero distância.

 

Tolerância

Ser tolerante é um oásis e um inferno.

Eu gosto de ser tolerante. Prefiro engolir uma irritação momentânea a começar uma briga, considero abrir mão de algo que gostaria de fazer para agradar alguém, ignoro provocações e apaziguo desentendimentos.

Viver assim é um oásis, porque exercita a paciência. Viver estressado é insuportável para mim, e quando gosto de verdade da pessoa, faço todo o possível para viver em paz com ela. E isso não necessariamente custa a minha. Fico verdadeiramente feliz por ser compreensiva com as idiossincrasias e problemas das pessoas que me importam ao meu redor. Gosto de fazê-las sentirem-se protegidas, queridas, amadas. Sou do tipo que não sabe ser romântica e escrever poesias, mas mando um “estou com saudade” no meio da tarde. Deixo a última bolacha do pacote, se for a sua favorita. Deixo sozinho se quiser privacidade, talvez um pouco ressentida, mas não reclamo. Mimo e tomo conta se me deixar.

Mas também é um inferno. Por saber que não me importo em ceder, as pessoas acabam se acostumando a exigir sempre. Como não gosto de discutir, engulo dores e incômodos até que eles explodam ou se dissipem. Atraio pessoas que são exigentes e ao mesmo tempo pouco ativas; tudo querem, mas pouco oferecem. Então eu me desgasto tentando ser presente, amiga, carinhosa, solícita, e não consigo muito mais do que reclamações, cobranças, picuinhas e desconfianças.

A linha entre ser tolerante e ser trouxa é bem tênue. E quando você se torna trouxa, não está sendo legal nem bonzinho com as pessoas; está sendo mal e impiedoso consigo mesmo, ou seja, agindo errado justamente com a pessoa que deve vir em primeiro lugar: você mesmo;

Statism and its problems

As I decided to be colaborative in this blog again, I’d better do it by starting right now, don’t you agree? 😀

Let’s talk about statism, then.

Statism is a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs.. (Wikipedia)

That’s the formal definition of the thing. Practically speaking, statism means only one thing: complete lack of freedom.

What does state do? Or, at least, being simpler, what SHOULD it do?

Think about the things you’d like to have from it. Safety, education, health. And how is it going?

Terrible. Slaughterings and blood baths barely horrorize people nowadays, as it became part of the news routine; Brazil is behind Sub-Saharan countries in basic education researches; public hospitals are a complete mess.

And why is that? Why doesn’t state guarantee us such basic rights as these?

Well, the answer is quite simple. State is unable to give anything to the population; actually, the only thing it does extremely well is taking things from its people.

Consider the high taxes we pay. We work near 5 months a year just to fulfill the required tax amount. Corruption scandals are everywhere. So, we spend a lot of money to have some “rights”, and still we don’t have them.

State sees all of us as contributors. But when people contribute for some thing, they do it because they want to. Us, citizens, are forced to pay taxes, as it is the law. Tax evasion is a crime and can be punished with – more – taxes or even jail.

State is a parasite. It needs outside resources to work, and it is completely unable to produce anything. It just takes away, never gives back. Because what state wants is to fortify itself and gain even more, not to take care of the people.

In places where state is too much intrusive, it controls even your personal life. For example, here is a crime to beat children. Evidently, it’s terrible to spank anyone, even worse if it is a defenseless person like a child. But as a parent, you don’t even have the right to slap your mannerless child if he misbehaves. This is pure dictatorship.

And well, what’s the solution? As you can see, state creates much more problems than it solves. So, the best scenario is a controlled state, as reduced as possible, with no possibility of interfering on personal choices (your children) or private properties (your money). What belongs to you, should remain with you, unless you choose otherwise. This is the basis of everything. If we cannot choose, we are slaves. There is no dignity where there is no freedom. And state is always against freedom, because it means less gains for it and more people against it.

Do not support states, wherever or whatever they are. They want nothing good for you or your life. On the contrary, they wanna extort you to death.

Coming back

After a long while, I have decided to write here again. Yay!

In the years that passed by between the last post and now, I changed a lot. A lot of things were improved, and so many others are still left to work on…

But I feel I became wiser, less impatient (even though I’m the best impatient person ever when I want to), more focused, more educated in some fields. As I can judge, the days made me more better than worse.

I’ll try to keep an average of two or three posts per week. I might wish to discuss about politics, economy, feelings, and any kind of freak idea that crosses my mind.

The death of a child, and the morals of a gun

In a recent tragedy, a 8 year-old girl was shot by a 11 year-old boy, in the middle of a discussion about her dogs. Not disregarding the relevance of a dead child murdered by another child, the situation makes bigger questions arise.

United States is a contractditory country when it comes to gun tolerance, probably because of the autonomy given to each state to create their own laws. Oregon, which recently witnessed a deadly shootout at a college, is a gun-free zone – defined as a law that forbids individuals of possessing firearms in a specific region. Tennessee, where the child was killed, is less restrict.

Leaving the civil matter, and coming back to the human side, there must be a lot of people wondering about the reasons of such a stupid occurence. There are different levels of involvment: parentes/relatives and friends, and the rest of the world. But probably both groups are struggling to understand why a tragedy like this had to happen.

And that’s the point where theories emerge. Evidently, a gun should never be accessible to anyone uncapable to fully comprehend and respond to the consequences of its use or misuse – like children. So it’s fair to say that the gun itself had some importance in the acts that were perpetrated while in the hands of someone. The danger here is to put the whole guilt in the shoulders of an inanimated object and forget about the human matter.

Certainly, some will not put the responsibility only on the firearm. The parentes, or his legal responsibles, were (to say the least) careless for permitting the accessibility of a child to a gun. That’s pretty fair, too. The boy wasn’t the holder of the weapon. Instead, it was under the custody of people who are supposed to look after him. Therefore, the owner of the gun should be also responsible about the use or misuse of a firearm he has, even if by the hands of someone else.

However, the true danger is to forget about the third knot in the tie: the child.

Well, well. I understand two things: childrendon’t have a fully developed sense of moral and reality, and that’s why they’re not called adults. In addition, for knowing about the restrictions in the real world comprehension of a kid, I’m not defending he should be punished like an adult. But those two statements can’t really ommit the portion of responsibility of someone who has a target, aims it with a gun and shoots.

Considerering the possibility of his misunderstanding about the situation he caused (which might be true or not), I believe that the most human and rational way of reacting is teaching him about the terrible consequences of what he’ve done, so he won’t repeat it again. Or if he do, he at least won’t have the ignorance as justificative or excuse.

Here’s where reason turns into fog. Which would be the best way to do so? That’s a question that will have a lot of answers, or no one. Options do exist. Juveline jails, social labour, psychological care. Anyway, it’s important to keep eyes open to the real causes of a problem, instead of throwing responsibility in the shoulders of components that might not be innocent, but certainly aren’t the only ones to blame.

A documentary of a rapist

Crimes happen anywhere, under a lot of circumstances, and so frequently that, unfortunately, many of us can’t see the real horror behind it anymore. Nonetheless, some of those cruelties can beat us harder. And when a specific one grabs internation attention, we know that things were a lot less further than usual.

It was the case of this terrible crime, when a girl was violently raped and murdered by a gang. Exactly like it uses to happen when some brutality goes viral, every single detail was commented (and judged, of course) to the exhaustion. And while there were that ones who were human enough to just feel very sorry about, a lot of people defending the murderers or affirming that nothing would have happened if she’d had more faith came up. Trying to find excuses or explanations for such a hideous crime is just horrible as the crime itself.

And, more than two years later, when the media’s interest was lost long time ago, and the psychological scars of the victim’s beloved ones still couldn’t be healed, someone comes up with an act that succeeds on being even more despicable as those misguided opinions about the crime.

A documentary interviewing one of the criminals is released.

When I first heard of this, my first astonished thought was simply: ‘Why’? Is there any rational reason to do so? At the same time it can’t be considered respectful in any sense, its justification exists. Just like a famous author can release new editions and sequels of a best seller book, media just found a way to create a revival for an until then forgotten crime, to get them more audience.

That’s how an atrocity gets ressurected. To supposedly remember the memory of the victims, or some other equally poor pretext, its whereabouts are digged out of the cave, and again shown to an audience thirsting for a different subject to discuss and judge.

Right away with the crime, the well known ‘moral judgers’ come back. For them, I’ll always have the golden argument: what if it was your daughter? And if it isn’t good enough, then don’t complain if someone smashes your skull with a hammer while you’re roaming around. You weren’t wearing a helmet, so you asked for it. Just like you think that unfortunate girl was, for staying late out of her house.

My idea of human rights is strict to the respect given to other people’s rights. Once he didn’t even respect her biggest right, which is life, this same right could be instantly taken away from him. And if Dante got anything right about his Inferno, the second circle just got another habitant – and the fifth will get overwhelmed.

Our inseparable gadgets – and what they did to us

Amidst the knowledges obtained and improved by human race, few could create such a boom like the advent of technological mobile devices – our beloved gadgets.

Not so many years ago, computers and phones were still luxury items. I remember having fun with a Carmen Sandiego game stored on a 3 1/2 floppy disk, which I played on my 20GB old PC. My first mobile phone was a nostalgic Nokia 1220, acquired in 2005 by my aunt for my 11th birthday. I had lots of fun with Space Impact (my childhood proud, this was the only game I could finish – no kidding) and the eternal Snake.

Years passed, and my old buddies grew up with me – even in a much larger scale. A simple device that was meant to do phone calls and send text messages evolved to an all-in-one small machine that could shoot photos, play music, surf the web and so, so on. In a while, it had turned into something so big that even its name changed: it wasn’t just a phone anymore, it was a smartphone.

Computers followed this same path. Processors got faster and smoother, just like its remaining components. Suddenly, it became a part of our daily routine. Shopping, dating, working, playing – almost everything could be done online. And it was modified, too. Laptops came into existence, and right after them, the tablets, an even more portable version.

With such improvements, it isn’t hard to figure out why those gadgets became a part of people’s life. You can see people and their portable devices everywhere: shows, movies, streets, public transport. Nonetheless, along with all the benefits, some disadvantages appeared. This virtual life style leads many to forget they actually had a physical one before. And it’s evident when ‘selfies’ are taken in burials, dates are interrupted by phones ringing, traffic doesn’t move because a driver is texting on his/her gadget.

I’m not against technologic advances. They’re useful and necessary in many senses. Many people use them wrongly or not properly, but that’s not a progress matter. It’s a human matter. A person can use a knife to cut a bread, or to kill someone. That’s why I don’t blame the misuse of an smartphone by its stupid owner.

Racism and racial prides in a connected world

In the mixed world we live in, with different beliefs, cultures and traditions, the intolerance and racism of so many never stops to astonish me. Underestimating others for such particularities is a proof of one of the deepest ignorances ever seen.

To try to cut off those intolerances, some countries have created laws against racism. But that’s a bit less effective than it seems at a first sight. Consider a group of friends mocking themselves with racist acts. While it keeps between them, everything is okay. But add a listener to the conversation – or post it into a social network – , and you’ll see all hell breaking loose.

So many is spoken about equality and so few is done. The truth is racism is inside of us. A cockroach, for example, is much cleaner than an ant. Nonetheless, whch’s the uglier? Which looks the nastier?

Umatches amidst ‘different’ people always existed. Christians hunted and killed non-adepts, jewishes were massacred by Aryans, Muslims and Hindus divided a country in two. But with the advent of technologic networks, a misplaced argument turns into a racist view, and where there were nothing disrespectful, someone finds a way to claim discrepancy. Innocent ‘emoticons’ are claimed separatists, and the wave of political correct behavior drowns everyone. And for me, those finding racism in absurd places are even more guilty than the ones who sees other races as inferior.

It’s common that people have opinions about different matters. What you think it’s right, some will not agree. And there’s nothing wrong about it. Not everybody will match your point of views, but respecting each other’s stands is a must.

Charlie Hebdo and the speech freedom

News about the recent attack to a satiric French newspaper can be found in anywhere’s media. The violent act motivated thousands of people to join protests in France and all over the world, as well as discussions about religious intolerances and the famous ‘speech freedom’.

Just to enlighten: doesn’t matter how offended the aggressors were, it does not justify slaughtering people or mistreating them in any way. In my point of view.

Fierce acts are often a matter of public sensibility. Murders interefere in human’s most valuable right: living. Death(s) impact families and friends, but its  relevance on higher scales, from a city to some continents, are based not on human losses itself, but in its intensitity on ‘powerful people’s eyes.

For example: not many time ago, about 150 people died during an attack to a school in Peshawar, Pakistan – mainly kids. Commotion was intense: the country reinstalled death penalty right after, president set a national grieving. What about the rest of the world? Some created funds to help families and to rebuild the school. Some debated about violence and extremism amidst Muslim world.

From the moment a human being turns another person into a corpse, there must be pain. One or three thousands can fall deceased, it is a loss to cry for. But the importance given to some episodes to the detriment of others unveil the pride over the grieve.

Press affirms this outrage were not harmful only to the victims and their families, but to the freedom of media. For me, that’s a partial true. Jornalism is actually able to discuss about whatever they wish – and the mere existence of Charlie Hebdo proves so. Cartunists working in its name created charges that can be rough and disrespectful for many. Once again, that’s not reason enough to turn anyone’s address into a tombstone. Nonetheless, it shows that speech freedom is safe and sound – people working for this cause are not.

While hundreds of thousands die due to deadly diseases in Africa, in civil wars placed on poorer countries, urban violence and so many other causes, the world stops to stare at a single country’s pain. I admit their loss, and I agree such acts should be stopped. But to take care of an injured child doesn’t save the rest of the hospital.