(Thinking of thoughts) and What you can't say

I ran across this article today and debated on where to post it. No question about *IF*, just WHERE: here? Dogma? Politics? It would probably fit in any of them.

Obviously, here won out as consciousness is, after all, being mentally awake and aware.But, hey, I may still post it elsewhere. Lots of you know me and my fascination with language and labels as well as history. This article ties them all in very nicely. =)

Anyway, here's a brief introductory excerpt.

"What You Can't Say, by Paul Graham
January 2004

(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made us all publishers.)

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves. [1]

..."

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Bravo, Paul Graham!

Much, much more at the original link:

What You Can't Say