Revolt of the Masses

[PHDNM]

[JamesBond007]

...most people don't give a tinker's damn about intellectual freedom, which is hardly surprising since most people don't have much of an intellect to be free with -- after all, half the population -- and 85% of blacks -- have an IQ below 100. But even for most of the more cerebral types, intellectual freedom doesn't usually mean much because their minds are so fossilized with conventional ideas that the chance of a new one finding an entree is about as likely as the chance of finding a negro competent in brain surgery. For the small remainder of us, however, intellectual freedom is almost as vital as breathing. For us, truth is the goal, no matter whose ox gets gored, whose ass gets kicked, or whose sacred cow gets turned into shishkebob. Truth-seeking, it is to be admitted, can be a risky business -- the history of mankind is littered with the corpses of dissenters and heretics, and there is only the thin blue line of civilization which stands between the truth-seeker and the barbarity of most other men.---John Bryant

The only virtue is knowledge; the only evil is ignorance. --Diogenes Laertius

Information has always been regarded as subversive, whether to political or to ideological regimes. This is why Galileo was silenced, why the Nazis burned books, why communist countries control the media, and why wowsers ban pornography.

Most of us would agree with the statement that knowledge is good; and yet in practice, most of us deny it with a vengance. Indeed, the behaviors which have made men most wroth have always been what might reasonably be called information crimes, i.e., the "crimes" of either knowing too much, or else of permitting others to find out too much.