Submitted by Tom Last on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 9:17am.
A lot of sites are banned, especially those sites which speak of freedom. This website brings in readers from most countries so when I notice no one from a certain country visits the site I know they don't have access, especially internet active countries like Iran and China. About 3 or more years ago visitors from these countries stopped appearing after they put in screening equipment. It was reported during the China olympics that China has 10,000 moniters looking for sites to ban.
There is a Chinese search engine somewhere online where websites that have been screened out don't appear.
Groups are always suppressive to ideas because their existence depends on some common belief. Leaders that try to suppress a free flow of ideas whether it be a church, society publication, or government are really showing their true colors as a repressive organization. The best way to control (unthinking) people is to control ideas. Even thinking people need a conceptual content to think about.
Steiner presented the principles for a free community but it still may be ahead of its time.
While we of the present are somewhat infatuated with the Internet and its possibilities, use of this particular tool for the social transmission of ideas is actually secondary to the deeper and more true form of social transmission - oral culture.
Stories are powerful, all the more so when spoken from mouth to ear. The written word is a dying of the spoken word - a kind of entombment of meaning since thought itself (meaning) is supersensible in nature (its living nature dies on the page). In fact, the actions of the State in trying to control mass media, especially the Internet, generally has an opposite social effect for that act itself "speaks" volumns. To withold is to not only point directly at something of importance, but to make it more dear.
Meaning dies into near-rigid form when written. In oral transmission speaker and listener have the subtleties of gesture, posture and tone of voice with which to embue words with qualities that strict definition otherwise can hide. Ideas and concepts hover over the written word, however, and a good writer can carry the thinking of the reader to realms not otherwise accessable. It is really only a kind of infatuation with technology which makes us so interested in the Internet. Especially today we love our gagets, which as we all know can in fact cause us to mistake the medium for the message (remember: the medium is the message! McLuhan's work is worth revisiting - especially notice his ideas about cold and hot media.)
Not all meaning has to arrive in the consciousness of the I via social transmission. A lone individual could discover on their own all the riches of PoF even if they never hear the name, for its truths are part and central to our being (one of the founders of the discipline of Projective Geometry created all his thought merely in his own mind while a prisoner from many years). This vertical transmission via Grace from Above cannot be interferred with by the State. The State could delay these meanings from arriving in the perception of the I during various kinds of tight control of language and meaning in the social, as demonstrated by Orwell's 1984. However, this merely delays the timely arrival of cosmic truth to the incarnate human spirit.
There is an idea called: the precautionary principle. It advises us to notice potential problems, and to sometimes make advance adjustments to our actions so as to lesson the possible effects of these problems. We could loose the Internet in the next years - to commerce, to State action, to terrorism. Are we already too dependent upon this tool? Would its loss so dishearten us that we would loose hope?
For millennia oral culture has been a main means of transmitting spiritual knowledge. Perhaps it is time to not only write on the Internet about PoF, or to make videos about PoF, but even better to find a way to cast its leading ideas and concepts into stories - into the living and enlivening Arts of oral culture.
How can I find out ....
what other sites are banned? Thank you.
Homunc
A lot of sites are banned.
A lot of sites are banned, especially those sites which speak of freedom. This website brings in readers from most countries so when I notice no one from a certain country visits the site I know they don't have access, especially internet active countries like Iran and China. About 3 or more years ago visitors from these countries stopped appearing after they put in screening equipment. It was reported during the China olympics that China has 10,000 moniters looking for sites to ban.
There is a Chinese search engine somewhere online where websites that have been screened out don't appear.
Groups are always suppressive to ideas because their existence depends on some common belief. Leaders that try to suppress a free flow of ideas whether it be a church, society publication, or government are really showing their true colors as a repressive organization. The best way to control (unthinking) people is to control ideas. Even thinking people need a conceptual content to think about.
Steiner presented the principles for a free community but it still may be ahead of its time.
Freedom of speech in action here.
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=dennett
This video is a great exaqmple of two people with opposing perspectives making sincere and clear effort to co-exist.
If you've got the time it makes a great watch. A materialist and a nom-materialist both with informed and accurate insights to present.
Hurray for us the humans.
Homunculus.
banning of websites ultimately ineffective
While we of the present are somewhat infatuated with the Internet and its possibilities, use of this particular tool for the social transmission of ideas is actually secondary to the deeper and more true form of social transmission - oral culture.
Stories are powerful, all the more so when spoken from mouth to ear. The written word is a dying of the spoken word - a kind of entombment of meaning since thought itself (meaning) is supersensible in nature (its living nature dies on the page). In fact, the actions of the State in trying to control mass media, especially the Internet, generally has an opposite social effect for that act itself "speaks" volumns. To withold is to not only point directly at something of importance, but to make it more dear.
Meaning dies into near-rigid form when written. In oral transmission speaker and listener have the subtleties of gesture, posture and tone of voice with which to embue words with qualities that strict definition otherwise can hide. Ideas and concepts hover over the written word, however, and a good writer can carry the thinking of the reader to realms not otherwise accessable. It is really only a kind of infatuation with technology which makes us so interested in the Internet. Especially today we love our gagets, which as we all know can in fact cause us to mistake the medium for the message (remember: the medium is the message! McLuhan's work is worth revisiting - especially notice his ideas about cold and hot media.)
Not all meaning has to arrive in the consciousness of the I via social transmission. A lone individual could discover on their own all the riches of PoF even if they never hear the name, for its truths are part and central to our being (one of the founders of the discipline of Projective Geometry created all his thought merely in his own mind while a prisoner from many years). This vertical transmission via Grace from Above cannot be interferred with by the State. The State could delay these meanings from arriving in the perception of the I during various kinds of tight control of language and meaning in the social, as demonstrated by Orwell's 1984. However, this merely delays the timely arrival of cosmic truth to the incarnate human spirit.
There is an idea called: the precautionary principle. It advises us to notice potential problems, and to sometimes make advance adjustments to our actions so as to lesson the possible effects of these problems. We could loose the Internet in the next years - to commerce, to State action, to terrorism. Are we already too dependent upon this tool? Would its loss so dishearten us that we would loose hope?
For millennia oral culture has been a main means of transmitting spiritual knowledge. Perhaps it is time to not only write on the Internet about PoF, or to make videos about PoF, but even better to find a way to cast its leading ideas and concepts into stories - into the living and enlivening Arts of oral culture.