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fpb1. Comment with any subject that you would like me to rant on. (Note that I may not have an opinion on your subject, and if I do, it might be different from yours.)
2. Watch my journal for your rant.
3. Post this in your own journal, so that you may rant for others.
2. Watch my journal for your rant.
3. Post this in your own journal, so that you may rant for others.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-27 07:11 pm (UTC)Never heard the word "swunked" before. :P
no subject
Date: 2005-01-27 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
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.
and here's the rest...
Date: 2005-01-28 08:18 am (UTC)They take the worst features of mankind and make money out of it. They exploit the masochistic need of the protagonists to show that they exist at all, and the voyeurism of a public that wishes to see things that debase them (as the debasing of a human being debases us all). Personally, I find the processes involved so vile that I have never managed to bring myself to watch more than a piece of an episode, and that was in Italy where it involved a beautiful actress I had had a crush on long ago. And I watched the rest of the celebs involved gang up on her and force out. This is the sort of behaviour these shows encourage.
Catholic doctrine vs. Protestant doctrine
Well, how can I speak of that which does not exist? There is no doctrine that a Protestant body has not held or denied at some point; there even are bodies like the Jehova's Witnesses and the Mormons, who, while visibly Protestant, are not actually Christian at all. Protestantism is not a doctrine: it is an attitude. It is the attitude of the person who, coming upon a doctrine or religious practice which s/he does not understand, immediately declares it unsound. On the other hand, Catholicism certainly is a doctrine. It is even too much of one, as anyone who has a look of the Catechism of the Catholic Church knows. But it is also an attitude: the attitude of someone who, having inherited a huge body of doctrine developed by a community of saints and sages down twenty centuries, even where s/he does not understand or even sympathize, accepts it on the witness of the Church (i.e. of our shared historical past). It follows, by the way, that, now that the Protestant churches have existed for centuries, there are a lot of Protestants - perhaps the majority - who have the Catholic attitude of trust in the common past, if not the Catholic doctrine.
people who can only speak one language
Of course, it may not be your choice. It may be a misfortune. But if it is a matter of choice (as it is, for instance, for the majority of Britons), then it is rude to the majority of the world, arrogant, and profoundly self-damaging. To speak another language is not only to have an extra instrument, but to be open to a slightly different way of seeing the world, to new experiences, and last but not least to new people. And it is nice. My German is nothing to write home about, but I will never forget the bright, incredulous, grateful smile of a group of German tourists in Rome, when I answered a question from them in a few broken words of their own language.
Re: and here's the rest...
Date: 2005-01-28 11:57 am (UTC)And I couldn't agree more on the subject of reality TV shows. Big Brother, a fascinating psychological experiment? Give me a bucket.
Re: and here's the rest...
Date: 2005-01-28 05:48 pm (UTC)Actually, the whole passage was addressed largely to myself.