Just a quickie to start off the days of my fellow Zoners. Found this via Slashdot of all the places: An essay by Paul Graham entitled What You Can't Say. In this essay, which you will read, Graham explores the idea of the heresy - not just in the religious sense, but in the more general sense of things which are socially unacceptable to say. Not simply wrong ("The sky is plaid") but largely unacceptable ("George W. Bush is guilty of treason;" "Canada's defense budget needs a twofold increase").
Graham's main idea is that these taboos are generally mistaken unless they're something obviously Bad ("Don't kill and eat children"), and he suggests a bit of introspection to figure out what to do about it. A lot of taboos are based more on conformity and social standing than relevance and usefulness, he argues, and Graham not only suggests we each take a long look at ourselves to see how "ours" our ideas are, but also discusses how to go about chipping away at taboos that you think should be away-at-chipped.
Anyway, yeah. What are you still doing here? Go read that.
Posted by zibblsnrt at January 5, 2004 02:37 AM