Thought Crimes

It was interesting how your description of thought crimes depended very much on geography and demographics, and i certainly believe that these factors affect the extent of how seriously the government responds to peoples' thoughts and actions.

From my personal viewpoint, thought crimes are frowned upon in Malaysia, and there has been severe clampdown by the authorities on anyone who tries to incite 'instability' within the country. The examples that you gave such as converting to certain religions and publishing pamphlets are viewed as direct threat to the ruling body and as such dealt with swift and punitive actions. People are thus 'muffled' and have to be very clandestine if they are ever to voice something out that is not agreeable to the government. But this does not solve the problem, in fact it only gets worse. When you look at different countries,especially ones with totalitarian and despot rulers, the people suffer in silence. North Korea's decision to strengthen its military actually makes its citizens one of the poorest in the world, but yet they cannot do anything about it. When people are refused the chance to speak, the whole country suffers.

As far as I know here in America,freedom of speech is protected vehemently. People are not allowed to say anything they want, but mostly they are not restricted by anyone, and if they are, there are legal and constitutional rights for them to seek recourse. I guess in a way it all relates to democracy and other forms of government. People should definitely be let to speak their mind as much as possible, even though the outcome may not please everyone. Like Winston Churchill once said "democracy is the worst form of govenrment, but is it the best one we've got"

Identity

I've talked about identity in a few of my classes, and it intrigues me how people just have to have a label on someone, either an inferior or superior description of them, just to appease themselves that everyone fits into a specific category. Why can't people just be what they want to be?

Take for example a disabled person. He does not necessarily think of himself as incapacitated; for all we know he could be as confident and as functional ad any able-bodied man. But we still identify himself as the stereotypical person in a wheelchair. It is time we let people define themselves in whatever way they want, and not simply stick a label on them that we find appropriate. By doing this, we can eliminate a lot of problems and tensions. Race has always been a perennial identity, and many people do not like to be identified or judged based on the color of their skin. Thus by letting them chose how they would be liked to be addressed, we would allowing them the fundamental right of freedom; how they want to be known

Overall, I think that identity is an amorphous being, something that shifts continuously throughout one's life. A person can be a student, a father, and a son at the same time. How would you possibly judge him then? You may call him one of them, but he may not agree with that. Thus it is important to treat identity with respect and flexibility. We should not fear to be identified as something that does not fit the society's common perception. It is perfectly okay to look into the mirror and see someone else staring back at you,; as long as you are comfortable with it. There is no such thing as a pre-ascribed identity

Profane? Not necessarily

Profanity goes well with racism, at least from where I come from. But I've found the use of traditionally unacceptable words quite helpful in defusing tense situations, and so I actually think profanities, if used appropriately and in context can bring much good.

It especially helps when you have a bunch of multi-racial friends whom you know well. When I was in high school, I had friends from at least three different races. Sometimes, there are situations that just get awkward, and race comes into issue. For instance, people from my country are very passionate about soccer (though our national team has a tendency to suck), and emotions usually run very high. There was once when an Indian player missed a sitter and my Chinese and Malay friends got angry. So they were like "Pela india tuh, sng2 pon xbley score, balik estet la!" Now you see what he's basically saying is 'That Indian guy can't play, he should go back to his estate" which is offensive since Indian immigrants came to Malaysia initially to work in rubber estates (conditions were terrible, no water etc). But instead of overreacting and getting into a fist-fight, profanities really can save the day. So I said "Eleh korg, td cina sepet tuh xnmpk bola sepak angin, pastuh korg Melayu bkn nk pass bola bikin belacan ke?". I was racially abusing the Chinese players by saying that they have such slant eyes that they cannot see the ball, and the Malays were not passing the ball, implying they were making belacan (a pungent smelling Malay dish). We laughed at each other. That was that

So you see, while generally profanities are bad, no one should be extreme as to say that its COMPLETELY bad. There are always two sides to each story, as there is to this one.

#1- Regimented requirements

This post is for my English class, Spring '10. I really have nothing much to say here. Never been much of a blogger before. Let's pray this blog doesn't die out after this semester.