Bread and games: now see me DIE

What an eventful time this last month or two is proving to be...

Remember this unsightly episode that some of us feared to be a harbinger of a new era: one where the standards of public morality - which to me means humanity as an attitude of consideration towards other people's boundaries and dignity - would be in direct correlation with the increasing lack of adequate physical sustenance?

Bread and games... and he ****** your granddaughter, too!

What worried me - and many others, no doubt - is that just yelling obscenities on air would hardly be the upper limit of the new "freedom of expression" that is upon us.

And it wasn't.

Less than a month later, the world was confronted by this ghastly image:

Horror as teenager commits suicide live

The ghastly image of itself feasting its void eyes on the intolerable pain of somebody else's void.

Never one to lag behind, British TV has summoned up the "courage" to do the same... sort of:

Assisted suicide on TV

This is not an individual's internet blog, mind you: this is TV - "reality TV" driven to its extreme.

And lest there is a misunderstanding: we are not talking about euthanasia here.
They are: the channel that aired it, and many of the other media outlets.

And that's precisely what makes me so angry.
This is not about euthanasia.

If my opinion even matters here, I can tell you that, while I don't necessarily share the views of those who support euthanasia (I happen to believe there is always a possibility to get better, even without medical help), I am not opposed to suicide itself.
And while I think the categoric view "my life is MINE" is somewhat simplistic in view of the meta-physical reality of life, at least I can understand it.

What bothers me - very much so! - in this case is that it's being presented as a "case for euthanasia".

It has very little to do with the moral, ethical and other implications of the ACT itself: it's about purposefully recording and airing the last moments of a living being, thereby removing one of the last "taboos".

And there is a good reason why such things have been a taboo until now: if you open the floodgates, soon ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, including the basest human behaviour, will find its way into the media - and from there, it'll rule the world.

People have always loved gladiator games: the bloodier, the better.

It's just that now they are called "Reality TV".

Are you saying: "But he wanted to do it! It was his decision! He consented to it!"

Indeed, he may even wanted to "help" somebody...

There are many things that people would like to do but they don't - or didn't, until very recently - because they fear the social (or even legal) consequences of their act.

Does that make them "repressed"?

Not really. The stifling of an urge or two for the benefit of respecting other people's rights doesn't really curtail your personal freedom and integrity.

More importantly, if we have to choose - and living in an ever imperfect human society, yes, we HAVE to choose - it's far more acceptable, far better (for all, in the long run) to put up with certain "taboos", even a certain level of "censorship" than to let all hell loose.

Which is exactly what would happen once the barriers of social conventions fell.

Which is exactly where we are headed now - and fast.

Never did the old adage "the public has the right to know" sound so shallow.

I would say: "the public" deserves to be confronted with the horror of its own image in the mirror.

But if we accept this apparent "freedom", we must give up - if we have a shred of moral integrity and honesty left, we must give up - the idea that we, each and every individual, are free to live our lives as we choose, according to the standards we choose, for us and for our children.

This apparent "freedom" is anything but.

The "anything goes" attitude is a simulacrum of freedom: a dangerous, lethal beast that man has never been able to fight, precisely because it has the appearance of freedom.

It is the tyranny of ugliness, of horror, of the basest human instincts presented as if they were the ONLY valid and honest human instincts and aspirations.

It is the advent of the age of terror against anyone who still aspires to live in harmony, in beauty, in a gentle and kind world, where ugliness and violence is a rare and unwelcome intrusion.

(No, my dear naysayers: choosing to live a life free of ugliness and misery does not equal ignorance.

Believing that life has to equal ugliness and violence and misery does.)

Mark my words, my friend: unless a miracle happens, you might soon be harrassed and derided for aspiring to a life of beauty, health and freedom.

You shall not be free to live your life according to your vision of life - unless it's a vision of unbridled baseness.

(I can even predict the word that'll be used against you: you'll be called a "reactionary".)

Think about it.

Think about what freedom really is.

Because if you don't, others will think it for you.

The race of the browsers: the good, the bad, the ugly... and the egregious

I never thought I would say this, but... Firefox is no longer my default browser.
And from a fiery long-time supporter, that is saying something.

One of the things I dislike most about it is that, for some reason (which still hasn't been satisfactorily explained, in my opinion), it gets very cumbersome - it slows down - in a relatively short amount of time.
This has become especially noticeable in the last two years or so.
And since the last worldwide "coordinated" mass download, in June (what a fiasco of a non-event that was, world-record or not...!), it seems worse than ever. It hogs much too much memory, the password manager has become unreliable (yes, I do use the "remember password" function - and no, my PC hasn't been cracked yet) - and, most of all, it simply cannot handle scripting the way it should to offer a smooth sail. (In order to surf through script-intensive pages you have to disable scripts, which makes loading noticeably faster, of course - but it also deprives you of the functions that scripts offer.)

Within Blogger, I have also noticed - more than once! - a bug specific to Firefox: at times, during editing the blog, the text that is being edited simply disappears. If you want to edit the blog entry, you will have to either restart the browser (or even the PC), or edit it in some other browser. (I know this is a Blogger - not Firefox - bug; but the fact remains that I only have to contend with it in Firefox.)

People have tried to find all kinds of solutions to "lighten" the burden and make it run faster, but all these solutions really do is reveal the in-built flaws.
And until it is substantially improved, Firefox will remain the second in line of succession to the throne of Default Browser in my household.

"Second?" I hear you say. "Not first?"

That's right: second, not first.

As of November, the official (potential) heir to the throne is: Chromium.
After dear old Firefox's grinding through script-intensive pages like a rheumatic snail, the speed of this - very, very LIGHT - browser was, literally, like a sigh of relief.

It has a few glitches: copying and pasting HTML tags and such (for example, on IMDB) is beyond annoying; and sometimes it simply disappears - you click a link and instead of finding yourself on the new page, you find yourself in the open sea of your PC screen background. (Bear with my paltry metaphors today; I haven't had enough sleep.)

But it is very fast, and the layout is very convenient: the "home page" presents you with tiny screenshots of your most often visited websites.

But which browser rules, you ask?
Surely not... not Internet Explorer?!

Rest assured: surely not.
Definitely not.
In fact, I haven't used it in years, except for research reasons (to compare its efficacy with other browsers) - and for adding an extra click on various click-to-donate pages that register visitors by their browsers, not by IP addresses. (What can I say: I am a kind soul! ;)

And it is not Safari (for Windows), even though I am very pleased with its graphics, including the typography (which I hear some people hate). I wouldn't describe its performance as "blazing", as its makers claim; it often hogs all the CPU (something Firefox does, too), and it is definitely very annoying to see the "crash" error messages EVERY SINGLE TIME I close it.
(It was suggested to me that I should download the newest version. Well, I did, but it didn't help one bit. I'll keep you posted if I find a solution.)

And God knows it's not pitiful Opera!
I never could understand why it was touted to be the "fastest browser" on Earth (or was it "the galaxy"?)
It was never anything but unfriendly, fidgety and very, VERY slow on my PC.
(And remember, I always had other browsers - never less than three at any given time, five or six for the past two years - to compare it with, so its performance clearly wasn't due to something that my PC did or did not do.)

In my experience, even Netscape - yes, yes, I still do use Netscape! - is much faster and friendlier than Opera. (And lately considerably faster than Firefox, I regret to report.)


So... which is it?


After having ridden all my browsers - and I rode them hard! (and yes, I am aware I am mixing metaphors; you don't ride successors to a throne - well, not unless... eh, forget it) - I am glad to announce my new default browser:

FLOCK

You may or may not believe this, but Flock has consistently outperformed all the other browsers installed in my OS.

I only installed it after being pushed to it by Netscape, and only to give it a test ride. I certainly never intended to use it as the "social" browser that it is marketed as (I am not really a fan of internet "networking"). And I didn't.

But after seeing its consistent lightness and speed, even after many months of intensive daily use - and that's with all the scripting enabled - I decided to instaurate it as my default browser.
So far, it has never crashed or frozen (and I use all my browsers very intensively).
Also - and this is very important- it provides an elegant, hassle-free solution to the infuriating problem created by Firefox's cowering (how would you call it?) before Microsoft's nagging "Security Zone Policy" issue, which automatically prevents you from downloading (let alone saving) ANY executable files - including updates of Mozilla/Firefox itself!
(There are a lot of things that you can do - correction: there are a lot of things that you'll HAVE to do - if you want to resolve this issue.
One is downloading IE 7, if you haven't got it yet - yes, even though you are using Firefox - so you can adjust the security settings.
Right...
The other one, of course, is ditching both Firefox and IE for another browser, non-compliant with MS's enforced "security" obsession, to download and save files.)

I am not sure Flock's marketing - "the Social Web Browser" - is really doing it justice.
But maybe it's better that way.
Maybe if more people would use it, the success would go to its makers' heads, and we'd be stuck with another... Meh.

So, now you know. Flock rules!
In my opinion, it is anything but egregious - unless you use (as I did - once, never again) the word in its original sense... :)


To find out more about browsers, here you have a useful timeline (with links).

And when it comes to keeping your browsers' caches uncluttered, I don't think you can do much better than the free utility known as CCleaner.
(I am not paid to say so; in fact, I was glad to pay them a little donation, a long while ago.)


And BTW...

Has your browser passed the ACID TEST?

EDIT (January 16, 2009):

I finally downloaded the last version of Opera (my pet peeve), and I have to report that it has improved - susbstantially!

Meanwhile, Firefox has gone from my default browser to not-so-good-anymore, then to almost-bad, and now to... worse.