OK. What I will do is dedicate a brief negative notice to each of your subjects.
swearing Well, I regret to say that I have been known to let fly myself... let fly with a vengeance. Of someone with my ghastly temper and living in the difficult conditions I do, you would expect it, I suppose. But that does not make it right, and, more to the point, does not make it any less ugly. Swearing is not big and is not clever: our parents always told us that, and they were right. Even supposing invective to be necessary (and it rarely is), a multiplication of f-words and s-words does nothing for it. If you really want to insult someone, how much better is the way of an inventive MP of old: "When self-indulgence in food has reduced Lord X to his current shape, continence in sex involves nothing more than a sense of the ridiculous." Tell me, what annihilates your enemy more effectually - calling him/her a "fucking bastard/bitch" - or saying something like that? marijuana Ah, yes, I certainly have something to say about it. Let me preface this by saying that I am against the outlawing of drugs, on grounds mainly of double standards - we do, after all, accept one of the most ruinous and addictive drugs, namely alcohol. But at the same time, I have no more time for marijuana than I have for drunkenness, and that is based on personal experience. The stereotype of the joint-smoker is the mellow, stoned hippy; well, I must be unlucky in my pot-heads, because every of them I ever met has been both surly and paranoid, unpleasant to live with, and often manipulative with it. Whether it is that weed attracts a particular kind of person, or whether it stimulates that kind of bad attitude, I don't know; but I do know that I have no reason to think any good of it. Intoxication and addiction are never good news. ranting itself Can you think of an easier and cheaper way to make yourself look good before yourself and others? Take something; denounce it. Straightaway you are a campaigner, a crusader, a man in a cape. You don't have to do anything to change your own attitudes, to improve your life, to seriously do anything about the evil, yourselves; just denounce it to others. And the larger, vaguer, and more distant, from yourself, the better. To denounce a war crime that is taking place at the other end of the world - or that took place two hundred years ago - is so much easier than to try and break your addiction to junk food, or your problems with relationships, or your porn habit.
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Date: 2005-01-28 08:18 am (UTC)swearing
Well, I regret to say that I have been known to let fly myself... let fly with a vengeance. Of someone with my ghastly temper and living in the difficult conditions I do, you would expect it, I suppose. But that does not make it right, and, more to the point, does not make it any less ugly. Swearing is not big and is not clever: our parents always told us that, and they were right. Even supposing invective to be necessary (and it rarely is), a multiplication of f-words and s-words does nothing for it. If you really want to insult someone, how much better is the way of an inventive MP of old: "When self-indulgence in food has reduced Lord X to his current shape, continence in sex involves nothing more than a sense of the ridiculous." Tell me, what annihilates your enemy more effectually - calling him/her a "fucking bastard/bitch" - or saying something like that?
marijuana
Ah, yes, I certainly have something to say about it. Let me preface this by saying that I am against the outlawing of drugs, on grounds mainly of double standards - we do, after all, accept one of the most ruinous and addictive drugs, namely alcohol. But at the same time, I have no more time for marijuana than I have for drunkenness, and that is based on personal experience. The stereotype of the joint-smoker is the mellow, stoned hippy; well, I must be unlucky in my pot-heads, because every of them I ever met has been both surly and paranoid, unpleasant to live with, and often manipulative with it. Whether it is that weed attracts a particular kind of person, or whether it stimulates that kind of bad attitude, I don't know; but I do know that I have no reason to think any good of it. Intoxication and addiction are never good news.
ranting itself
Can you think of an easier and cheaper way to make yourself look good before yourself and others? Take something; denounce it. Straightaway you are a campaigner, a crusader, a man in a cape. You don't have to do anything to change your own attitudes, to improve your life, to seriously do anything about the evil, yourselves; just denounce it to others. And the larger, vaguer, and more distant, from yourself, the better. To denounce a war crime that is taking place at the other end of the world - or that took place two hundred years ago - is so much easier than to try and break your addiction to junk food, or your problems with relationships, or your porn habit.