For your information, I believe that violence and destruction are counter-productive.

As with most people, I rely on a global system of trade and cooperation for my livelihood. I do not wish to disrupt that. Fundamentally, most people wish to simply get on with their lives; to spend their time, attention and energies on their own job, on feeding themselves and their family, on keeping a roof over their heads, on maintaining their relationships with their friends, and on pursuing whatever it is that makes each of them individually happy.

This political pissing-match is not something that they know or care about. Indeed, the pool is now so polluted, who would want to swim here? We did not ask for terrorists to come here and try to kill us ... just as we did not ask for the authorities to poke their noses into our private lives and threaten us with what they find.

However, as much as I would like both of these groups to go away and scw themselves, I have to acknowledge that we have no real choice in the matter. If some random psycho decides he does not like my religion or the colour of my skin, and decides to murder me and my family for it ... well, in all likelihood there is not much I can do about it. Ditto for the machinations of the uncaring zombie bureaucracies that we call the "Nation State".

In truth, we are utterly powerless, and these things are done to us with neither pity nor mercy nor any real thought for us as individuals whatsoever. I do not seek change, for in a massively connected world of billions, it cannot be but like this.

My bitterness and rage are futile; less than nothingness; feeble against the unstoppable forces of inevitability.

The thought that I might get up and do something is laughable -- at best it might tar me with the same disease that infects those responsible for all of this -- optimism, and a horribly, destructively misplaced belief that we have any power whatsoever to alter things.