Welcome to The Lone Dissenter. I am a sixteen year old high school student in northern California. The climate is balmy, the study pace is frantic, and the politics are liberal. Excessively so, in fact. I hear so many remarkably stupid comments in one day that I thought, hey, why not keep these recorded somewhere? The result is this.
Posts will be sporadic, depending solely on when the idiotarians decide to make themselves known. The names are changed, but the events are true to the word. Perhaps not to the word, exactly, but as far as memory will serve. The cast will be predictably vague. You may see some people come back again and again, you may see some only once. It all depends on what they do.
What more can I say? Sit back. Relax. Remember what it was like to be in high school. You're sixteen. The government is the man, communism is a pretty good idea, and the only thing you aren't entitled to is foreign countries.
I cannot think of a more worthy purpose for blogging than the exposure of statist propaganda and masquerading as education, especially when it is a living breathing high school kid doing the exposing. One would think student-run newspaper would be the perfect place to discuss the shortcomings of the educational system. But, thanks to the Hazelwood decision, student newspapers do not enjoy the same 1st Amendment protestions as college and privately-owned newspapers. The Lone Dissenter skirts censorship via high school principal by taking his message directly to the people.
I'm shocked that we haven't been doing this already. The arrest and later release of journalist and blogger Sina Motallebi has demonstrated that the Iranian street pays attention to the Internet, specifically blogs, as a way to get information and opinion that their nation's ruling clerics can only attempt to control. The U.S. State Department has started its own Persian language website to reach young Iranians directly. This message from Collin Powell is available in Persian:
To the People of Iran:
I welcome you to the new Persian-language website of the United States Department of State. We are pleased to add Persian to the other websites we maintain in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and French. We hope you will find this site to be a useful source of information about the United States and about U.S. policy toward Iran.
Our differences are not with the Iranian people. Instead, it is the Iranian government's decisions to support terrorism, to pursue weapons of mass destruction, and to deny human rights to the people of Iran that are the obstacles to improved relations between our two countries.
At the core of U.S. policy is the conviction that people everywhere should enjoy freedom. The United States wants to see a democratic and prosperous Iran, integrated into the global economy. I look forward to the day that Iran takes its rightful place in the family of nations. Our two cultures have so much to offer each other.
Images of Iranians participating in spontaneous candlelight vigils in memory of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. touched us deeply. As President Bush has made clear, "There is a long history of friendship between the American people and the people of Iran. As Iran's people move toward a future defined by greater freedom, greater tolerance, they will have no better friend than the United States of America."
I hope you will look upon this website as a gesture of that friendship.
Again, why have we NOT been trying to communicate with young Iranians in this manner before this?
So what?
