I was digging around in my email folders looking for something and came across this rant.  I didn’t write it.  I originally encountered it on Slashdot a while back and sent it to some people in an email.  It was originally written by someone named Andy Walton in a Usenet flamewar concerning how Usenet was administered.  Someone made the comment that “Freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.”  Which is a familiar refrain that we often hear from those who would trap us in the straitjacket of regulation to the point that all we have is responsibility and no freedom.  To which Mr. Walton had this reply:

And responsibility without freedom is not responsibility at all.  Totalitarian control of human beings means the death of responsibility, as everyone is “just following orders.”

<engage rant mode>

I would rather be a brain-dead junkie in a gutter with a sticky copy of Hustler as a result of my OWN stupidity than a clean and well-fed automaton in a tiki-taki house with my actions dictated by you or another self-anointed earthly representative of God’s Will ((C), All Rights Reserved). I want to run through parking lots like a lunatic, fall and scrape my knees. I want to color outside the lines. I want to cover myself with lime Jello and run down the street shouting random lines from Finnegan’s Wake (are there any non-random lines in Finnegan’s Wake?). If I want to smack my skull against the wall, damn it, it’s my skull and my wall. If I want to sing the Leave it to Beaver theme in Esperanto while whacking off with topless pictures of Sandra Bernhart and standing ankle-deep in a galvanized steel tub full of Kraft Honey Dijon salad dressing, that’s none of your business.

And if this means that I’ll be shot as an anarchist when the revolution comes, so be it; I’d rather have the worm-eaten stench of a private tomb than the prim, sterile, chrome-lined common tomb which people like you want to make of the Earth. And when they decide that you’re not quite orthodox enough, I’ll save you the next spot over up against the wall.

<rant mode off>

Clear enough?

That’s got to be one of best rants of all time.  It takes a truly sick and twisted individual to come up with that whole Leave it to Beaver/Esperanto/Sandra Bernhart thing.

I have to admit that my brain works in strange ways.  I often set out to do one thing and end up with something completely different.  The tiniest thing will often send me off on a tangent.  Once I read that rant I forgot what I was originally looking for.  It’s sort of the electronic equivalent of going into a room and forgetting why you’re there.  Oh well, I guess it’ll come to me one of these days.