Outfoxed

I watched Outfoxed today. It's a documentary made in 2004 about Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Network and its utter lack of neutrality. It is an unconscionable travesty that they advertise themselves with the slogan 'fair and balanced' - nothing could be further from the truth! They are nothing short of lackeys of right-wing political interests who unabashedly toe the party line and trample the truth into the ground. Have they no respect for democracy, fairness and the public interest? Is basic decency too much to demand of them?

For more info on Outfoxed, visit http://www.outfoxed.org/

This is a problem that is not peculiar to this one news network. Across the board, we are watching journalism subverted by sensationalism and propaganda. The fourth estate is one of the vital pillars on which democracy stands. Do not stand by and watch it ruined by shallow people. Please watch this documentary. It is a clarion call to all those who stand on the side of fairness and democracy.

Today, the internet is the biggest ray of hope for those who fight to preserve journalism. It costs nothing to disseminate ideas through this medium and it is possible for anybody and everybody to reach a wide audience. The power of money and political clout don't count for much in the cyber world. But all is not well here - there is another battle that looms just beyond the horizon, the one to preserve net neutrality.

For more info on net neutrality, visit the following websites:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html

Rage

Note: This post is NOT going to make for pleasurable reading, not by any stretch of the imagination. These are words that have refused to flow from my pen for a long time now. This dull wintry evening, for a reason I know nothing of, they have found their release, and I mine. And I am glad of it, for I carry my pen lighter now. Is this fact or fiction? Does it matter?

To those of you who do venture beyond this point, I ask this much of you. Do not judge me a negative person, upon reading the initial paragraphs. Read on to the end.

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Have you ever felt rage? I do not refer to the sort of anger that makes you want to hurl curses or even blows at someone. No sir! I speak of the primal rage that you feel coursing through your very veins - a feeling that makes you want to END whomsoever is the object of it... right then... right there... with your bare hands. When I speak of ending someone, I don't mean just killing him... you want to rub him out of existence... even from the memories of people... make it like he never existed... wipe the slate clean! That is the sort of rage that in no time drags you across that invisible line which separates the sane from the insane. Mistake it not for the silly madness that makes you crave ice cream on a snowy December evening. This is the sort of madness that takes prisoner your senses and sensibilities before you even know it. It is a rage that derives from deep-rooted hate - hate that slowly burns you up as it burns within you... the sort that leaves you nothing but a hollow husk, numb to all joy.

Forgiveness is divine... but alas, I'm no God! When someone wrongs you so badly as to make you comprehend the true nature of hate, they have killed your innocence - they have killed a part of you. Forgiveness is not an option. However, vengeance doesn't accomplish much either. True, it does grant you an immediate satisfaction but, all too soon you are left with a void that is impossible to fill. What's worse is that the hate and rage make you oblivious to pain - both your own and that of the ones you love - but just long enough to let you commit acts that leave you with the ever-lasting bitterness of regret.

I have felt that hate, that rage and yet I have managed to pull myself out of that downward spiral. So what you may ask was my solution? Amnesia... dumb bleeding amnesia... not the clinical kind, but the self-induced variety that is brought on by sheer force of will. It takes a lot to hold on to your senses while your body shakes from the force of your anger. But in the end, it's worth it to rediscover your lost smile. His life is not worth living, he who can not recall the sound of his own laughter. I can and I do - and every time I do, I smile to myself, relieved - knowing that none of this may have ever come to pass.

I do not have it in me to forgive nor do I even wish to be able to do so. But I can be blissfully absent-minded when I choose to be. There are doors in my mind that have been locked, never to be opened again. The cobwebs of time have already begun to obscure them and soon they will be lost to oblivion. And I live my life now with a passion and vigor known only to one who has wished death. For, no possession is cherished so sweetly, as one lost and regained.

And I leave you now with words from Friedrich Nietzsche: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

PS. I couldn't help myself this incongruously silly digression but all this perhaps explains why my favorite superhero is Batman - his life a hollow existence, defined by the very vengeance that drives him.

Thus spake Nietzsche

Here are a few quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche that I recently came across:

• Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
• A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
• Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
• Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?
• It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.