I have been doing some posting in the TEDEX forums. It seems no one is paying attention these days but there is no way I can tell for sure. Internet security issues require a totally private membership so it is hard for sincere new blood to contribute. TEDEX seems to be a closed society. That was and is not my intent.
Thankfully, real people still email me directly. The private correspondence would make good fodder for the forums or one of my blogs but I respect their privacy.
It is just too bad that my clean open TEDEX forums are pretty much a thing of the past. The USA was built on the principle of freedom of expression (and the press.) Forty five years ago I joined the US Navy to support and defend those principles of the USA to the world. Not all the world respects freedoms and privacy or knows the difference.
I have concern about the US and other Press as they often try to destroy personal privacy (e.g. paparazzi and their publishers), a different issue. But celebrities are not public property. Saying they are, is pure misinformation to justify abuse of privacy.
I now realize a public open communication system is extremely easy to abuse. The abusers become the very vocal minority until they seem to be the majority. We have all heard those terms and it is true.
The Internet has become the epitome of the concept. The public freedom of expression is wonderful. I vote not to change it. But there is also the concept of private freedom that must be respected, but many times becomes the target of public abuse.
If I build a church for the purpose of quite (private) meditation and leave the door open for easy (public) access, is it OK to invade that space with an Acid/Hard Rock Band and play that music all day long? No, it is not OK with me and to me that is not the meaning of public freedom of expression. Look up all the meanings of the word private.
If the church must lock the door to keep the Rock Band out, what happened to real freedom? Now the church has changed the meaning of private more towards secret, and only members with the password (key) can gain entrance. What has freedom done to itself? What was intentionally just private is now suspected of being sinister because the door was closed and locked.
For example, there are many current inane attempts by the “media” to discredit the Masonic Order for having secrets. In my youth I was in DeMolay International, aka the Order of DeMolay. Did we have secrets? Yes. Sinister secrets? No. My father and grandfather never gave me Freemason secrets just because I was DeMolay. Am I somehow less of a person? Of course not. It was my choice not to follow in their steps in the lodge for purely private and personal reasons. I am still proud to be associated because I believe I know the truth.
It’s when conflicting private freedoms collide that Utopian Ideals fail.
Public freedom is never an excuse for invasion of privacy. Private freedom is an equal right to public freedom, at least in the USA. I believe private freedom is more inherently free than public. The fact that privacy creates suspicion to public outsiders is a human trait. Misguided freedom fighters sometimes want to destroy privacy because of their suspicion. That doesn’t mean privacy is inherently evil. Many lies and falsehoods are created in the name of public freedom of expression.
Yes, privacy can be used to conceal the doing of evil and that can be a criminal activity. But that is no more a worry than what occurs in public.
Public freedom of expression has no guarantee of truth. It supports falsehood as an equal. Nazi Germany is an example. It suppressed private dissent to spread its brand of public disinformation.
I hope the world learned the lesson.
All I want is to offer a friendly open forum that will stay on topic. It must be too much to expect…
