Tag Archives: montreal

On Freedom and Fallacies

This is take two on this topic. I’m starting fresh a couple hours later, after a glass of wine and homemade chicken pot pie.
It’s the second take because this topic is really important to me and I don’t want to fuck it up.
Thank god I have quality guidance like that of Fame. Yes, you heard me, the ‘80s arts school drama. It’s on, and I’m chilling. Defragging my mind, as I like to say. Watching fluff is exactly the right fit, and has given me some interesting perspective as I crack this nut for a second time.
Funnily, a girl in this episode of Fame scoffs at the notion of writing her private thoughts and dreams in a diary at the teacher’s urging.
“If I wrote down my dreams,” she says, “I’d get arrested.”
Yeah. Huh. Ironic.
To that end, take note of the week that was in the world of the wide web. Proper fucked, indeed. It’s like a crash course in What Not to Do in the Intertubez.
A Montreal guy writes some shit in a forum then figures rifle + college = a good afternoon’s plan.
Like the motherfucking coward he was, he went out and tried to kill a bunch of people. Realizing he couldn’t even do a massacre right, he deprived us of the fun of letting cops kill him. The coward took his life. Fucking better off dead, anyhow.
But he wrote in forums.
We shoulda seen it coming.
A dickhead in Seattle decides he’s going to act like a fucking 13-year-old and reposts another city’s craigslist ad by some dirty-minded femme, and gets a couple hundred responses or something, then figgers he’s got rights to publish that private correspondence in an attempt to expose those apparent sickos to the world.
But they answered a public ad.
They shoulda seen it coming.
A young mother in Florida writes her secret other self dark thoughts on a public blog, and then her child goes mysteriously missing, improbably snatched from their window. Young mother kills herself 16 days into the toddler’s absence.
But she wrote dark shit on blogs, then her kid vanishes.
We shoulda seen it coming.
A video diarist on the world wide web is exposed as a professional actress working off a script. The show is produced, directed, and written, yet has duped the majority of its viewers, primarily through YouTube.com, into believing the so-called lonelygirl15 was a teenaged girl locked in her bedroom and homeschooled by orthodox religious parents. Doh.
She’s a fake.
Like ohmigod. But she, like, really talked to us, man!”
You shoulda seen it coming.
It’s happening. It’s really fucking happening.
You know what I’m talking about.
For some godforsaken reason, it’s starting to occur to people that this, like, internet thing might just be a way of seeing what’s really going on in the noggins of little people everywhere.
And, um, uh-oh, but what’s going on in those little people’s noggins everywhere is something that’s not very pretty.
Some people, it would seem, are angry.
Some of them even feel disenfranchised. And, look. They’re acting on this shit.
Yeah, well. When the odds are stacked, you ought not be surprised at the outcome. Probability and logic being what they are and all, yes?
I’m part of the generation that got schooled in Orwell’s classic 1984. We were raised to believe that someday, one day, the government would hear every word we would utter, and freedom would be a thing of the past.
I’ll be honest, the Digital Age scares me.
The ease with which people can access information about me is frightening. It should frighten you, too. Unfortunately, the time is coming nigh where voices on the web are not just an anonymous blur with little impact on the real world. Now, we’re not so anonymous, and now this world is more real than it is virtual.
There’s coming a time where what you say here is going to come home to haunt you. This is the age of insinuation, and anything you say can be manipulated and used against you. Decide now if you plan to live in fear of that, or if you have the balls to play the game my way, and own your ability to say what you think and how you feel.
In forums such as this, someone such as me might decide to write a little bloggie in which the entire contents of our deepest darkest other selves are posted up on virtual walls for the world at large to indulge in.
In essence, it’s a voice. I have a voice, you have a voice, we all have voices.
It’s idyllic. A virtual Utopia in which we’re all given voices and identities, something that ironically clashes with our seemingly democratic lives – lives spent living in societies that claim to be governed by the people, of the people, for the people.
Only they’re not like any people I’ve ever known.
And I don’t feel like I belong.
And I’m tired of feeling this small because I’m just an ordinary gal.
I thought I’d take my voice and use it. I’m not alone. You’re doing it too. And him, and her, and hey.
We all took our existences online, where we thought we’d have the right to say what we think whenever the fuck it pops into mind.
Unfortunately, when such vocal freedom is enjoyed by a world at large, some of those voices will be beyond dissent. They will be voices of rage and fury and vengeance. Or maybe they’ll be coolly quiet.
And that’s a risk we take by allowing open dialogue.
Every now and then, though, those voices will be warning signals. Intervention might occur, and it might segue to prevention.
Just because assholes and the disenfranchised like these can use the web to serve their fucted means doesn’t necessitate that the rest of us should have to watch our words.
Sadly, the voice of reason doesn’t seem to resonate these days. I fear that the talking heads of today might soon decide that there is such thing as too much free speech and they will indeed succeed in legislating the internet.
In which case now might be the time to, like the good hunter Elmer Fudd suggests, be vewwy, vewwy qwiet.
Only we’re not hunting rabbits.

New Obscenity Laws in Canada

Once again, Canada leads the pack. Back in 1969, Canada’s new prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, said that the Canadian government had no business being in the bedrooms of Canadians. Consenting adults — male, female, straight, gay — could do as they wished, because where there was consent between the parties, no harm.
That is the prevailing thought behind the some new rulings that will be redefining the parameters of what can and can’t transpire due to “obscenity” here in Canada.
The gist of this? Swingers / sex clubs, the Supreme Court of Canada now says, are legal. Why? Basically because by way of entering the swinging establishment, where sex usually transpires quite openly, all those within the premises have essentially consented to the acts being committed therein. Go on ahead and visit Montreal, visit a swingers club, and have a little sex while you’re at it. It’s legal.
(About Montreal — the Paris of North America: There’s a show filmed here in Canada called Kink, and each season it’s set in another Canadian city where it follows the lives of a few participants as they go about their kinky existences in their little kinkdoms– from boring homosexual sex through to leathers, whips, and all the pain you can eat. Slings, anyone? Easily the kinkiest place in Canada is Montreal, where fetish is a rite of passage. God, I love my French-Canadian heritage. 😉
There are reasons I’m profoundly proud to be Canadian, and the level of personal freedoms is far and away at the top of my list, of which this is simply the latest example — most recently preceded by the legalization of gay marriages. Whether it’s smoking pot anywhere I want in this town (although still illegal, it’s largely ignored — we are this continent’s Amsterdam, kids, and owners of the best dope in the world, sez High Times) or knowing that I could perform any sex act I want (except possibly bestiality, which obviously is not exactly my bag, since I can’t even handle hairy backs, let alone fur), there is no doubt that the border between Canada and the United States is where my world changes, drastically.
So, here’s a thought: Your life is only as good as the freedom with which you live it. Whether you have extreme views on sex, drug use, or just everyday rights for everyday people, voting is crucial to the well-being of your life. It’s no secret, I don’t like George Bush. At all. I dislike the politics I see coming across the wires from our Southern neighbours, and it saddens me to see what seems to be an erosion of freedoms in a time when “freedom” is what the fight’s all about. Ironic, methinks.
But the point is this, your supreme court shapes the land in which you live. Hell, look what it’s done for my country.
Bush was elected on a fiscal platform, and because he pulled patriotic strings. I’m not sure many people sat back and thought, “Hmm, will he be the right guy to pick Supreme Court judges that will shape my freedoms for the next four decades?” Well, fortunately/unfortunately, that’s the case. Not one judge, but two, and with three years to go, who’s to say what’s next? You think you have an opinion on his choices yet? How could you, when they’ve got a lifetime in their offices? Some twenty, thirty, forty years of deciding policy that will impact the lives of every citizen. Food for thought, indeed.
Perhaps this is another fork in the road of our two countries. Now, me, I’m no swinger, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever be. I’m an old-fashioned romantic with a fondness for orgasms, that’s all — and a fondness for freedom.
So, swing away, kids. Montreal’s where it’s at. Coming soon to a Canadian city near you, perhaps.