Vivat Libertas

I post too much but... ...I believe that one should work for one's treasured goals. So far, so good. Very few people would disagree with me. I also believe that one should work for these treasured goals even if one believes that they are impossible to achieve. This is the part where people start to look at me weirdly and ask "Why would you do that? Dear God, why?" After all, why should one sink time and effort - perhaps a life's worth of time and effort - into an unreachable goal? Why should one try to do the impossible? Well, pardon me for saying this, but that's based on fallacious reasoning: that either one accomplishes the goal or one does not accomplish the goal, with nothing in between. If that were true, there would indeed be no point in working towards it and we should all give up now. But that's not the case. We don't live in an all-or-nothing world; we can still get partway to a goal, still do a good turn for a society desperately in need...

Well, everyone seems to have differing definitions of freedom . The Tea Party think it's found in gun ownership and low taxes; the liberals think it's found in freedom of speech and communication; the cynics think it's found nowhere on earth, and the power-mad think it's found in the domination of others. Freedom isn't gun ownership. Freedom isn't being able to buy and sell things. Freedom isn't the right to enter into a contract where you slave yourself half to death. Freedom isn't low taxes. Freedom isn't having the biggest collection of nukes in the known universe. No, freedom is when you can say what you want, when you want, where you want. Freedom is where people will listen to you and actually pay some damn attention for once . Freedom is where you don't have to be scared of the authorities tracking you down for a loose tongue here or a hashtag there. Freedom is where no-one regulates your life but you. It's not an ...

Again, this was written while I was off at the JACT Summer School , and I haven't edited it in the slightest, which is why it might read a bit weirdly. I freely admit it; I know nothing about like. I am young - too young, some people say, for my opinions to be worth anything - and inexperienced, and, being a teenager, people say that I'm prone to melodrama. I also freely admit that I know nothing about my purpose in life, and I have very little idea of how to make one for myself. I am too young to be free - which would help - but I'm too old not to believe that fundamentally, life is meaningless. We exist because however many years ago someone fertilised an egg and the resulting ball of cells was carried to term and lived; our only purpose is to make as many more balls of cells as we can, and if we reject that we have nothing. Bleak diatribe aside, I'm not treading any new ground here. I'm not treading any new ground either when I say that I find it wonderful ...