Somewhere between the book-burning Evangelical Christians and the tofu-eating Vegan Faggots, the bulk of the West is caught in the crossfire of a so-called culture war. If you’re a user of any chan (aside from perhaps 4chon’s /news/ board), chances are you’ve already warily picked your side. Hope you like tofu… and sucking dick.

Making that decision is rather easy. Imagine what the world would be like if the other side won: no porn, no violent video games, no mention of evolution or sex in public schools, no abortion, and no birth control. Basically, these are a people working so hard to get (us all, apparently) to heaven that they’ll make a hell out of earth.

Then again, imagine if our side won: no smoking, terrible vegetarian cafes on every street corner, serving tofu at Thanksgiving wouldn’t even get you ostracized from your family forever (as it should, you monster), men failing to keep their eyes to the ground and their hands in their pockets will be immediately imprisoned for sexual harassment, pretentious films built around a single gimmick will win best picture, and oh, speaking of movies, they’ll be full of sex but little violence. I’m down with sexy movies, but I’m just not sure about the rest…

Neither side is particularly tolerant. The right hates obscene speech, the left hates hate speech. One side hates equality, the other takes it way too far. The right hates porn for one reason, the left hates it for another…

The problem is if you’re anywhere in the middle, you’re just a refugee from the culture wars, one of so many peasants fleeing the turmoil behind you. There’s no middle ground with any of those doing the fighting. If any one of them gains an inch and declares a ceasefire, they’ll immediately violate its terms and push ahead towards their ultimate victory. The war is never-ending.

In the no-man’s land of the culture war, and for those of us safely behind lines of the Vegan Peta open-relationship all-organic warriors at the front lines, we are experiencing a game-changing event in the form of imageboard culture (however pretentious and faggy that may sound). The thing is, everywhere else kids go these days they’re walking on eggshells if they hold unpopular opinions. Authority figures everywhere are happy to stamp out independent thought in the name of either side of this war: religion, tolerance, whatever…

4chan and all its spin-offs provide the exact opposite. Here you can say anything at all and this is an extremely important thing for the world to have at the moment.

Everyone decries the newfags, the cancer killing whatever, and dreads summer, but why? How many completely mind-blowing things are these kids going to be exposed to after one quick read-through? One of the things on my mind lately is the whole green-text stories and particularly the ones about retards in the public school system. The vegan faggot side of the culture wars has literally inflicted the “differently-abled” on normal children in the United States. These stories are all told with humor in mind but for someone somewhere, they’re going to read through this and hopefully it’s going to click with them: these retards are super-disruptive to the learning environment. Read through just one of these threads and tally up the number of hours wasted for entire classrooms worth of kids. This is a case of tolerance and equality run amok… like a retard that lost his pants. Even if they fail to see the point I’m trying to make, at least here they’re allowed to make fun of retards here! They can’t do that in public anymore…

Everything Western Culture pays lip-service to as being sacred was in its infancy an unpopular opinion held by radicals. From the notion that you can’t be owned outright as a slave on up to the massive public health and education systems that kept you from dying of smallpox and taught you to read were all once seen as a threat to the powers that be. I say lip-service of course because those that rode this wave into power are just as willing as our previous dictators and autocrats defend their position at the top. Every complaint we might utter is instantly labeled racist, sexist, intolerant, or extremist.

These are just words meant to inflame passion in the unthinking masses. The best part is they’re running out of words to use. Kings could once claim they ruled by the Will of God, but where is the Will of God in France? Russia? Italy? Ireland? Scotland¹⁾? Tell the modern Westerner now that your rule is the Will of God and you will be laughed out of office.

In times past, our government could control what we learn through a state-sanctioned curriculum. The end result was both commendable and damnable: near-universal literacy but in an unholy marriage with blind nationalism and of course a selective ignorance regarding uncomfortable issues. This leaked over into the first instances of mass media: newspapers, radio, and television. What was said was controlled by those that owned the presses, networks, and broadcasters. The Internet is a different matter all together. Any person with an opinion can, with an absolutely minimal investment, broadcast their point of view to an audience in the millions (or in the case of this site, a few hundred before the server is slagged).

The SOPA/PIPA thing was one of the first threats to this and the answer to it was remarkable. For the first time, I'm hoping that people see just how important of a shift in control the Internet has become. It's no longer about the state, media companies, movie studios, or anyone else controlling what is said; it's about some nutcase who believes in bigfoot and wants to tell everyone about it…

You can look at your opinion being awash in a sea of so many others as a problem but as far as I'm concerned, it's a good thing. It's getting a lot easier to spot opinions held by influential (or merely rich) people as a result. Here on the Internet we're allowed to actively question their opinions rather than to merely mumble our disgust at the television set (or leave nasty comments on sasquatch believers' blogs). It wasn't people who were interested in pirating movies that killed SOPA, it was people that realized it would give powerful media companies the right to stifle freedom of expression. Only big names would be allowed in the game of shaping opinions online if this thing had passed.

The law could have been abused to shut down a site that so much as dared to give a negative movie review. Most small-time sites would not have been able to afford the legal bills necessary to remain online in the face of corporate pressure and would have simply folded as a result. So who would review movies? The same companies that make them. That's only a small facet of the overall issue, but I hope I'm getting the point across: the Internet is here for you to voice and hold opinions all your own. Not only that, you have the ability to back them up. You have more resources at your disposal than any generation in history to find nearly every fact regarding nearly everything on this planet. For the first time, the facts are at hand, not just what comes out of the mouth of a man on television, over the radio, in a newspaper column, or some guy wearing a crown.

So am I an extremist? By popular definition, yes. I don't see why you can't say “fuck” or show tits on television. In my opinion, the world would be improved by increasing the frequency of both. Is anyone listening? I doubt it and I'm OK with that…

So anyway, have your unpopular opinions, enjoy them, and most importantly fight for your right to have them.

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED MY ESSAY AND I THINK IT DESERVES A B+ - THE END