Greg Sadler’s Bio
E-mail me: ourcognitivesurplus at gmail dot com
I am Greg Sadler, a student who has just finished an Arts(philosophy)/Law(Hons) degree at the Australian National University in Australia’s capital, Canberra. I’m currently waiting to graduate in December. You can read my honours paper here to get a feeling for the sort of things I’m interested in.
I’m currently working part time as a paralegal doing copyright law. I’ll be starting full-time legal work in February 2009 and hopefully getting admitted to the bar so I can start calling myself a lawyer. I’ve done a variety of part time work including: being a research assistant for a philosophy professor; writing for arguably Australia’s leading computing magazine PCPP as a reviewer, feature writer and columnist about all things computer hardware; and some less glamorous work stacking shelves and working with children. We all have to start somewhere 
The goal of this project, called Our Cognitive Surplus, is to use my free time actively rather than passively. Instead of watching T.V I want to create something that contributes to the human endeavour. Lives are judged by their works not by their length. And it’s pretty hard in this day and age not to generate a good amount of works. Everyone can be a publisher. My first blog post has a link to my inspiration and a discussion of my original direction – although it’s likely to become dated.
The subjects of this blog largely reflect my bio. I’m going to talk about law, religion, copyright, philosophy and technology.
A note on anonymity:
A general draw card of the Internet is that you get to be anonymous – part of the internet collective rather than an individual. As much as I love the idea of “Anonymous”, for the purpose of this blog I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve. I’m a real and identifiable person and I’m more than happy for this blog to be read by my friends, family and work colleagues.
A note on offensive content:
I’m critical of a lot of ideas. I think some ideas are demonstrably harmful and that there is huge merit in criticising them. On this blog you’ll find criticism of many religions and philosophies. If you think what I’m saying is misguided or wrong PLEASE post a reply. If there is something I’m not aware of please post and let me know. That’s the merit of open debate. Also, please try not to take personal offense in lieu of ideas you happen to hold. For instance, I think Islam is pretty daft. But, if you’re a Muslim, I hold nothing against you as a person. There is a huge distinction between a person and their ideas.
I think ideas are open for strong criticism, but I think non-memetic attributes - like race, ethnicity, sexuality etc – should be protected from attack. If something is someone’s choice, free speech is needed to ensure people are making the best choice. If something is not a choice, there is less merit in saying hateful things about it. Therefore, if I’m being derogatory of something that is not a person’s choice but something that they are, please lambaste me for it. In comments, please be as aggressive as you like about ideas, but I will not tolerate people being aggressive about things that are not the choice of the holder – like skin colour.
I think that policy is an acceptable balance between free-speech and hate-speech.
Greg, thanks for your very insightful comments on Greetings Earthlings. I haven’t had a change to properly answer you yet – I’m just finishing the first draft of a tourism studies magazine, of all things – but I’m very impressed with your efforts here, so I’ll write a small post on them tonight. I’m very much with you on not being anonymous and contributing to the human endeavour. In future I hope to bounce ideas off you and see what you think!
In the meantime, I look forward to more of your posts.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Poole said this on Sunday 20 July 2008 at 10:09 am |
Please use any color that is light and bright than black for your website backcground, I can’t even see clearly what I am writing here.
I am curous why you date your piece on travel to the pyramids as 15 August 2008, are you one week at least in advance of where I am?
But, please oh please use any color that is light and bright for your website background, at any rate tell me why you are using black, it is so trouble to see in the dark.
gerry
getes@hotmail.com
gerry said this on Thursday 7 August 2008 at 12:46 pm |
Hey Gerry, thanks for the response.
That’s interesting about the dating of the articles, I hadn’t noticed they were wrong. It looks like they’re all wrong. I was using the automatic dating and was assuming it would be correct. I’ll see if I can mend it.
Regarding the dark background, I haven’t had trouble using it on any of my computers, perhaps there is an issue with your monitor? If other people are having the problem I’m more than happy to change. I chose this theme mainly because I like the column arrangement not the color scheme.
Greg Sadler said this on Friday 8 August 2008 at 10:59 pm |
I don’t quite get the “use my free time actively” part because, from what I can glean from here about your life, you don’t have pretty much of those idle minutes and seconds. Unless you don’t sleep. !!!
Keep on writing. Cheers!
Joanna said this on Friday 15 August 2008 at 3:51 am |
I guess life sounds more busy than it really is when you shove it all into two paragraphs. I have a lot of time free to stop and smell the roses. Where the roses are the internet and smelling is reading…
Anyway, thanks for the comment! Do you have a blog? You ought to give me a link. It’s probably one I commented on but it’s sometimes hard to put names to blogs!
Greg Sadler said this on Saturday 16 August 2008 at 5:29 am |
janathema.wordpress.com. You’re quite a voyeur no?
Joanna said this on Tuesday 19 August 2008 at 4:30 am |
Quite a voyeur? That sounds like an insult
Greg Sadler said this on Tuesday 19 August 2008 at 7:46 am |
Dude I meant to post this on your “Real China” page but kept getting rejected. Since it took like 40 minutes to find all the material, I would still like to send to you somehow. Since I don’t see an email anywhere, hope it’s okay to post here. You can deal with it later I hope. Best.
********
Hey, last thing, just want to leave two more notes. The first is a bunch of links to high-quality sources which have said the persecution is real and given evidence for it (apart from those above), and the second is a note from another practitioner which I think it will be helpful and enjoyable for you to read. By the way, I’m also from Canberra, though not there at the moment. People do the exercises at Commonwealth Park every Saturday and Sunday from 1pm or 2pm (forgot which). You can go there yourself and see with your own eyes what Falun Gong is all about. I’ll be back in January, so you might even see me there. I realise I copy a lot of links below, it’s just so you get the idea that this is legitimate and that the torture, beatings, psychiatric abuse, etc., is all real. There are practitioners in Canberra who have been put in labor camps—one guy, a retired school teacher from Hainan Island was arrested and beaten with electric batons before they came to Aust. He’s like 70 something, a short guy. Actually, if you just watch that documentary in the post above you’ll get the idea pretty quickly. I think that since disinformation is still being spread, some people don’t fully realise what is happening. There sources are all available though, so you can just peruse at your leisure and make up your own mind. I think I’ve done my bit now.
Persecution:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/china02/china0802-11.htm#P1320_428651 — an excerpt which is related to Munro’s piece originally published in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law: full biblio: Munro, Robin. “Judicial Psychiatry in China and its Political Abuses.” Columbia Journal of Asian Law 14.1 (2000): 1-125.
http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/docs/62chr/ecn4-2006-6-Add6.doc — Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment: MISSION TO CHINA, Manfred Nowak, United Nations, Table 1: Victims of alleged torture, p. 13, 2006, accessed October 12 2007 (this has the “Falun Gong practitioners are two thirds of reported torture cases in China” comment)
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90133.htm — International Religious Freedom Report 2007, US Department of State, Sept 14, 2007, accessed 28th Sept 2007 (this has the “Falun Gong practitioners are over half the labor camp population” comment)
http://www.jaapl.org/cgi/reprint/30/1/126.pdf — Sunny Y. Lu, MD, PhD, and Viviana B. Galli, MD, “Psychiatric Abuse of Falun Gong Practitioners in China”, J Am Acad Psychiatry Law, 30:126–30, 2002
http://flghrwg.net/reports/UN2004/UN2004.pdf — The United Nations Reports on China’s Persecution of Falun Gong (2004)
http://organharvestinvestigation.net/events/Fact_sheet_Amnesty.pdf — Amnesty International Fact Sheet on Persecution of Falun Gong, Falun Gong Persecution Fact Sheet, Amnesty International
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,773633,00.html — John Gittings, China ’sending dissidents to mental hospitals, The Guardian, August 13, 200
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/02/09/falun-gong-china_cz_rm_0209falungong.html — Morais, Richard C.”China’s Fight With Falun Gong”, Forbes, February 9, 2006, retrieved July 7, 2006
http://web.archive.org/web/20030711022606/http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engASA170112000 , The crackdown on Falun Gong and other so-called heretical organizations, Amnesty International, 23 March 2000
http://hrw.org/english/docs/1999/11/09/china1959.htm — “China uses Rule of Law to Crackdown on Falun Gong”, Human Rights Watch, New York, November 9, 1999
Julia Ching, “The Falun Gong: Religious and Political Implications,” American Asian Review, Vol. XIX, no. 4, Winter 2001, p. 12
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol2No3/Falun%20Gong.htm — Michael Lestz, Why Smash the Falun Gong?, Religion in the News, Fall 1999, Vol. 2, No. 3, Trinity College, Massachusetts
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/02/05/china.willycolumn/index.html — Willy Wo-Lap Lam, China’s sect suppression carries a high price, CNN.com, February 9, 2001
Here is a page on personal testimonies from practitioners: http://faluninfo.net/topic/60/all/
That page actually has a lot of stuff worth browsing.
Here is the comment from another practitioner which I think is useful:
“In my view, the way some of you are applying the ‘cult’ label is yet another obfuscation of the word’s meaning. Talking about subjects beyond the purview of science has no relation to whether Falun Gong is a ‘cult’ or not. You could shout “Heresy! Heterodoxy! Feudal superstition!” all over the place, just because you disagree with Li Hongzhi’s teachings. But that does not make Falun Gong a ‘cult’ or Li Hongzhi a ‘cult leader’. However, I’m aware of how such words are powerful tools in positioning Falun Gong practitioners–or anyone, for that matter–outside the borders of rationality and normalcy. Thus “cult members” is just another way of saying “inferior subjects”, whose autonomous will is not on the level of an ordinary citizen. More severe control measures then seem acceptable and justified, and the outsider’s “rational” view becomes the standard by which to judge what “they” really are all about. “Now, stay put while the doctor administers his cure!”
“But whether something deserves to be called a ‘cult’ is a matter of its operational structure. Falun Gong is not operating like a cult, which has been verified by all those who have done serious research on the practice. Practitioners know that perfectly well: they know such labels have absolutely nothing to do with their experiences. Those who choose to use this word in labelling Falun Gong are merely drawing a line of demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘purity’ and ‘danger’, ‘centre’ and ‘margin’, while paying no attention to the accuracy of such concepts. Because they think Falun Gong is stupid and its practitioners are alienated from what is real, they couldn’t care less if people assume, for example, that Falun Gong is an “organization”, with a tight grip on the sheepish “cult members”, whose money is going up a pyramid structure to the hands of a callous, calculating and charismatic “cult leader”.
“Falun Gong is completely open for people to come in or leave. You don’t have to pay for anything. You either take responsibility for your own cultivation or you don’t, or you start working against the persecution or not, but nobody’s ever going to order you to do something. You never join any organization; the practice itself is about as informal as when you go play pétanque with your friends in a park. True, Falun Gong can be called dissidence, at least in relation to the dominant scientific paradigm. But we must keep in mind that China’s so-called qigong boom was widely perceived as a paradigm shift–a new form of science–and therefore it’s totally understandable why so many qigong enthusiasts, including many Falun Gong practitioners, are highly educated, as proven by fieldwork. True qigong’s effects are perfectly tangible and real; the discrepancy that exists between the views of materialist science and the phenomenology of qigong is a blatant farce. And judging by its pre-1999 popularity and the number of awards it received in China, Falun Gong is the most renowned qigong practice in history. That is why it was banned; it was too genuine, intertextual and deeply-rooted for the Communist leaders, as it created a meaningful existence outside of the Party framework. Taking into account what took place in China in the 1980s and 90s, the pop culture definition of qigong as just another “breathing exercise” is a form of revisionist history, an ideologically loaded concept that aims at neutralizing and diluting its essence. China’s qigong boom came to an abrupt end because of political repression; qigong was never conclusively proven false or irreal, but the leading ideologies of the scientific establishment have swept it under the carpet, along with a myriad of other anomalous phenomena that call into question the legacy of the Western Enlightenment. This is nothing new, but its implications are sometimes forgotten.
“In this way, deliberate obfuscation of the ‘cult’ label is, in itself, a tool of ideological struggle, not infrequently linked to militant secularism, scientism, or, ironically, even religious fundamentalism. It postulates a “closed” reality, a fixed set of metaphysical axioms, and seeks to crush its perceived adversaries by the way of social exclusion, even if it has to prostitute language itself: it doesn’t matter if apples become oranges or war becomes peace. Of course, many people slap labels without any profound idea of what they’re doing, but in this matter, they are, unwittingly or not, serving as lackeys of those who would rather see “heresy” weeded out to pave the way for a Brave New World. Talk about yet another Hegelian nightmare! It is heartbreaking to see how the 20th Century couldn’t teach us very much.”
Anyway, some food for thought. You have my best wishes. If you want to contact me directly email 12jjyz [@] gmail.com
Cool blog, by the way, only saw you were from ANU yesterday. Will check back from time to time.
jjyz said this on Tuesday 30 September 2008 at 11:00 am |
while I’ve known you for about 2 years now, I was always under the impression that you did have far to much time on your hands because of some of the things you could come up with lol. Now, after stumbling on this, and briefly reading your thesis, I have a whole new respect for you. I hope all goes well.
Arty // Josh said this on Sunday 2 November 2008 at 11:21 pm |
Thanks arty
I hope you keep up the reading
Greg Sadler said this on Monday 3 November 2008 at 1:35 am |
i have read your bio…interesting
esti said this on Wednesday 26 November 2008 at 8:27 pm |
Thanks esti, although ‘interesting’ makes you sounds creepy :p
Greg Sadler said this on Thursday 27 November 2008 at 5:58 am |