About me (Laird Shaw)
Autobiographical đŤâď¸đ´ó §ó ˘ó łó Łó ´ó żđŽđŞđ´ó §ó ˘ó Ľó Žó §ó żđżđŚđŚ
As a straight cis male of Scottish, Irish, and English descent, I was dealt all the normative and privilege cards. Born in South Africa in 1977 to loving parents who two years later bore my sister (my only blood sibling), I emigrated with my family to Australia in 1987, where I remain resident, having gained citizenship shortly after we arrived.
Immediately after completing high school in 1994, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Systems) at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). This went well until existential, psychospiritual difficulties overcame me. I abandoned my degree about two thirds of the way through. My life since then has in a sense been an attempt to grapple with, avoid, and otherwise manage those difficulties - which have never fully resolved - and to evade the interventionism they have provoked.
Early on, part of that involved travelling around Australia, which I did a couple of times, taking about a year for each trip, and funding my travels by working odd jobs on the way: pizza delivery driver, fruit picker, outback roadhouse attendant, and grocery warehouse data entry operator. Other early adventures include serendipitously ending up at and getting involved in a forest logging protest camp in the Styx Valley.
Since then, I have lived a fairly insular, mostly online life, occasionally working professionally as a computer programmer, mostly in back-end web development.
Views đŞ˝đ§ŹđđŹď¸
Politically, I'm generally left wing aka progressive. Although this perspective makes innate and rational sense to me, it has been bolstered by my early experience in a family opposed to and resisting Apartheid.
Ethically, I affirm the imperative of respect for all life (sentience), human and beyond, and I correlate life (in the sense of living beings) with sentience because the evidence strongly suggests that all life is sentient.
Metaphysically, I recognise our condition as physically-embodied non-physical beings in a created reality in which both good and evil exist.
Spiritually, I acknowledge divinity and the imperative to act in service of the divine (good).
Causes đłď¸ââŽ
In a world full of ongoing harms, one which bad actors seek to dominate and control, the high-level earthly solution seems to me to be decentralisation: diffusing power among the people rather than concentrating it where it is at risk of usurpation by those bad actors. My high-level cause then is the development of systems of direct, aka participatory, and especially digital (online), democracy.
I also value a world in which we are of service to one another out of love rather than need - or, worse, greed - for financial compensation, and so, part of my high-level cause is for the decentralised, participatory, democratic systems that we develop to reduce the role of money, ideally to zero.
Several ongoing harms are of particular concern to me, and consist in my particular causes (this is not a comprehensive list, just some of those uppermost in my mind):
đ Animal (and non-human living beings in general) rights and liberation. The objectification, slaughter, and mistreatment of other living beings by humans is currently the greatest moral evil in this world.
âď¸ Restorative justice for the dispossessed, colonised, and occupied, from the indigenous peoples of this occupied country in which I unfortunately find myself among the occupiers, to occupied Palestine, and beyond.
đ Ending coercive psychiatry. I know its harms from personal experience across almost two decades.
đď¸ Peace. It is unfathomable that in the twenty-first century, brutal wars of aggression and conquest are still being waged.
Interests đľď¸
đŞ Percussion (playing and listening to).
đś Music in general (listening to).
âď¸ Philosophy (contemplating and debating more so than reading).
𼟠Parapsychology and related matters.
đ¨đťâđť Software development.
âď¸ Poetry (writing more than reading).
Personal website 
This (creativeandcritical.net) is it. I didn't have any particular aim in setting it up other than to share whatever I happened to have to share as it became available to share. I set up this "about me" page very late, and many years after setting up the site itself.
Other sites of mine đ
On withrespect.net.au, I have made a start at outlining a philosophy and world vision.
Other sites I help maintain đ
I am one of the ten co-founders of Psience Quest, a discussion board focussed on parapsychology and related matters, and I help with its hosting and administration.
Many years ago, I helped to set up the comp.lang.c wiki, and developed its treeview skin. I currently host and administer that wiki. It is very incomplete and a bit of an abandoned ghost site at the moment. I welcome contact from anyone (potentially) interested in reviving it.
Connect and contact đ¨
