hey.

I AM an average metrosexual unemployed barista,
who sits with his Macbook in the coffee shop even after he lost
the job because that's where all of his friends are

you insensitive clod

meanwhile you are

an anonymous coward.

p.s. barista only has one r, dumbass.

A friend of mine who's worked in China over the past few years told me the story of the Wu Mao Tang. This translates, roughly, to the "50¢ party"; it's the name of the army of internet users that the government pays to surf the net, looking for "subversives". This is where poverty, and a lack of culture that values freedom collide: 50¢ is enough to buy the selling out of your wrong-thinking peer. We should remember that Google isn't arguing just against the government, but millions of Chinese that support it. And that this isn't so much a technical matter (we're used to fearing automatic filtering) as much as a social and cultural one.

campbell, whose work unites the studies of mythology and psychology, wrote "Hero With a Thousand Faces", an excellent study of myths and archetypes. lucas used many of his ideas in the star wars films, http://www.moongadget.com/origins/myth.html and campbell has some interesting things to say about the movies.

my favorite quote is from an interview with bill moyers, when campbell calls vader a bureaucrat:

CAMPBELL: Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done. MOYERS: By doing what? CAMPBELL: By holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you. ...When Ben Kenobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions."