The Importance of Being Earnest

When you are offered a free massage, and you're actually being sold a credit card with hidden costs. When your insurance agent forgets to mention commissions that will eat up your retirement savings. When his industry invents a whole new language to intricate a simple issue that can be perfectly described with simple, proper words. When your cable company offers free channels for three month, and then, without warning they charge you big money for shows you don't watch anyway. Then you are being lied. You are being robbed.
There is some kind of violence, of abuse, in the way most companies conduct business with us. They feed you wrong or incomplete information, they prompt you to take immediate decision on fields that are new to us, and a prudent time afterwards they claim you agreed to terms you couldn't have even understood, much less agreed.
They largely stream their sweet talk, but they are not ready to sign a bit. Signing is the victim's role. Signing a twenty pages legal contract for a mobile phone, that doesn't include the price you were verbally offered.
Since the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism has empowered simple citizens with the ability to decide, to work for money and buy with that money whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted. Trick and lie was not part of the game, but a misconduct subject to punishment. How we let it become the norm, I don't know.
But never before we have been so much able to fight them. The terms they are not ready to put on writing is being recorded with a device that every other teen keeps hanging from his ears. The hidden camera is watching them. And we are not depending on yellow TV shows to uncover them anymore. The Internet is here to spread their shame, to tell everybody that we do care, that we will buy from anybody but them, and if they are everyone, then not buying is an option.

The Fury of God

Early in February 2006, a Danish cartoonist had the impertinence of drawing the prophet Muhammad with a turban that resembled a bomb. He didn't mean that the prophet wore such a turban. Everybody knows that in the 7th century, explosives were not yet used as weapons. It was his way of depicting Muslims as violent people, which is a racist and foolish prejudgment.
In response to such injuries, upset Muslims around the world put embassies on fire, killed people and started the Dane hunting season.
Religious authorities in Iran sentenced the cartoonist to death.
It reminds me to a card that juggled my mind when I was a kid. On one side it read "The script on the other side is false". On the second side, it read exactly the same. If one side was right, then the second was wrong and then the first was wrong, but then the second is right and so on.
Leave logic apart, it is not fashionable these days. But where were the Pacifist, such a crowded party in the last half decade? Most were extremely silent. But some could not stay put before such display of intolerance, before this growing hate between Muslims and Europeans. And they screamed out against... guess who. Yea, right again: The USA. How in heaven did the USA got involved in a Danish Cartoon about Muslims? I'm scared to ask. Who knows what feelings such an intolerant question can arouse, specially among the faithful of the Religion of Tolerance.