Thai Cancer Patient Gets Life as Text Insults Queen

In the summer of 1905, Mark Twain wrote an essay, titled "The Privilege of the Grave," in which he states that "out of fear, or out of calculated wisdom, or out of reluctance to wound friends," the living don't dare to say what they truly think. Such freedom of expression, he said, "ranks with the privilege of committing murder; we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences."

Not exactly the fence-painting, frog-jumping, raft-riding, Mark Twain that many of us grew up with knowing. The humor is dark here. After following bankruptcy and the deaths of his wife and beloved daughter, this is Twain at his darkest moment.

'The Privilege of the Grave'

"An unpopular opinion concerning politics or religion lies concealed in the breast of every man; in many cases not only one sample, but several. The more intelligent the man, the larger the freightage of this kind of opinions he carries, and keeps to himself. There is not one individual--including the reader and myself--who is not the possessor of dear and cherished unpopular convictions which common wisdom forbids him to utter. Sometimes we suppress an opinion for reasons that are a credit to us, not a discredit, but oftenest we suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford the bitter cost of putting it forth. None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned.

A natural result of these conditions is, that we consciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor's pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound. This custom naturally produces another result: public opinion being born and reared on this plan, it is not opinion at all, it is merely policy; there is no reflection back of it, no principle, and it is entitled to no respect."

We must welcome any addition of Mark Twain, however unpopular to his impressive body of work. 

"The Privilege of the Grave" supposes that in more cases than we should like to admit, we have two sets of opinions: one private, the other public; one secret and sincere, the other more or less tainted.

Certainly both are riffs on the age old problem of man’s reluctance to use the only gift that separates humans from other animals, reason being, why one chooses one over the other is difficult to see, not to mention why one would think this is would be such a dark definition on human nature. It's simply comic philosophical observation written out in two different ways. 

There is that which is more ridiculous to the one who has a fertile vocabulary, curiosity about the world, and active imagination that the feebleness of the average human being in the department of original thought becomes a mental room they had never visited. It is a comedy for the conformity which serves society. 

Personally I find it shocking that it penetrates even the fields of science, where a citizen is suppose to be immune to any type of bias but often proves to be just as much sheep as opposed to the species of mankind. To my mind this is really only immaturity. To take a word and truly make it to reform a character of a nation. It's just that most people grow up in the bulk of humanity which are not leaders but followers.
This follow my leader conformity is almost universal whether it is a monarch, dictator, president, prime minister they are all the same..

Anyway who is Mark Twain? Who is Socrates? Who is Galileo? 

Who was the Queen of Thailand?