metonymy4u

…One topic which seems relevant to the subject of conflict, is the question of author-ity and speaking. I have participated in several online communities in which speech appears to be regulated (shaped) by a small subset of the community. Certainly the powers of censorship have been put to dubious use in the past, as in the execution of Socrates for questioning the piety of the state and influencing the morals of the youth. And plenty of other times when entire classes of citizens at home and abroad were designated, because of their distinctive physiognomy, a clear and present danger. The dialectic between private irony and public hope has been a difficult one for millennia. The romans, during their republican years, solved the dilemma by providing for the appointment of a dict-ator in times that required seditionis sedandae et rei gerundae causa. And yet I wonder, in the time of online conversation over thousands of miles of planetary distance, what would constitute such a time of sedition or extreme need? And what advantages are won, by the amplification of homogeneity, that are offset by the dangers of cruelty and the loss of creativity often found in variation?