Truth! - part 7
The following statements are truer than Truthy McTrutherson from Truthville, North Trutholina. Some Truth may contain peanuts:
I do not want Hillary Clinton to get the nomination for president, and it's not for political reasons. The longer she stays in the race, the more we will hear a certain grammatically incorrect phrase over and over: "First woman president". If I have to hear that for the next two years that is going to drive me into a bell tower with a rifle. "Woman" is not an adjective. The correct phrase is "first female president". Plus she's a warmonger.
Speaking of going ape shit and killing a bunch of people, it is absolutely appropriate and commendable that NBC broadcast the tapes that Cho Seung-Hui recorded before his Virginia Tech killing spree. Despite the public outcry, NBC should be congratulated for their courage and practicality in the face of a very painful reality. We all want to know why people do that sort of thing. We all want to know what separates us from them. "Am I or somebody I know at risk for suddenly snapping like that?" We will never know, if the words of the killer himself are suppressed. You can pin it on a nondescript, abstract evil, like we so love to do (Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11), but that is a lazy, self satisfied, and completely impractical stance. If you reduce something like this to morally infantile terms like good and evil, and refuse to look at it square in its horrific face, the real cause goes unexamined and will certainly fester and return to haunt you.
A lot of people disparage the US for spending billions of dollars on a space program, sending gizmos to Mars and such, when people here on earth are starving and living in poverty. They are not wrong. They are, however, incomplete in their rightness. We should be exploring space, we should be expanding our collective minds to encompass the grandeur of the universe, we should be looking for other life and bettering ourselves on a cosmic scale, but we just don't deserve to and that is the tragedy. It is 2007, two thousand FAWKING seven! I never pictured life beyond 2001. We're off my map here. We should be better than this. It brings a tear to my eye to think of where we were supposed to be by now, and look honestly on the hell we have made of the "future". We have the ability to feed every human on the planet many times over, but we are hobbled by greed, religion, ignorance, enforced powerlessness and apathy. We should not fault the scientists for wanting to go into space. We should fault ourselves for not being evolved enough to live up to that noble dream.
I often wonder why people as a rule do not automatically defer to the judgement of those who are obviously more intelligent than them. Then I realize, "Oh yeah, that would be a smart thing to do."
You can make sweeping statements like "An unexamined life is not a life worth living.", and you would be correct, but a more down to earth concern might be "What do people who live unexamined lives do all day? Don't they get bored?".
I think it would be a good world if we dealt with languages like they did in the Star Wars universe. Since alien races all had different vocal apparatuses, and consistent good pronunciation was just plain impossible, no on ever had to learn to speak anybody else's language, they just had to understand it. I can nearly understand many other languages (mostly the European Latin-based ones), but damned if I know what to say back. It would be great if everyone understood every other language, but never had to worry about speaking it. That would eliminate one of the big problems many of us had with Spanish in High School: the whole anxiety about bad pronunciation.
A hard line Muslim might consider me a vassal of the 'Great Satan' for this, but I really like the fact that I live in a culture where women can tell me I'm full of shit.
I do not want Hillary Clinton to get the nomination for president, and it's not for political reasons. The longer she stays in the race, the more we will hear a certain grammatically incorrect phrase over and over: "First woman president". If I have to hear that for the next two years that is going to drive me into a bell tower with a rifle. "Woman" is not an adjective. The correct phrase is "first female president". Plus she's a warmonger.
Speaking of going ape shit and killing a bunch of people, it is absolutely appropriate and commendable that NBC broadcast the tapes that Cho Seung-Hui recorded before his Virginia Tech killing spree. Despite the public outcry, NBC should be congratulated for their courage and practicality in the face of a very painful reality. We all want to know why people do that sort of thing. We all want to know what separates us from them. "Am I or somebody I know at risk for suddenly snapping like that?" We will never know, if the words of the killer himself are suppressed. You can pin it on a nondescript, abstract evil, like we so love to do (Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11), but that is a lazy, self satisfied, and completely impractical stance. If you reduce something like this to morally infantile terms like good and evil, and refuse to look at it square in its horrific face, the real cause goes unexamined and will certainly fester and return to haunt you.
A lot of people disparage the US for spending billions of dollars on a space program, sending gizmos to Mars and such, when people here on earth are starving and living in poverty. They are not wrong. They are, however, incomplete in their rightness. We should be exploring space, we should be expanding our collective minds to encompass the grandeur of the universe, we should be looking for other life and bettering ourselves on a cosmic scale, but we just don't deserve to and that is the tragedy. It is 2007, two thousand FAWKING seven! I never pictured life beyond 2001. We're off my map here. We should be better than this. It brings a tear to my eye to think of where we were supposed to be by now, and look honestly on the hell we have made of the "future". We have the ability to feed every human on the planet many times over, but we are hobbled by greed, religion, ignorance, enforced powerlessness and apathy. We should not fault the scientists for wanting to go into space. We should fault ourselves for not being evolved enough to live up to that noble dream.
I often wonder why people as a rule do not automatically defer to the judgement of those who are obviously more intelligent than them. Then I realize, "Oh yeah, that would be a smart thing to do."
You can make sweeping statements like "An unexamined life is not a life worth living.", and you would be correct, but a more down to earth concern might be "What do people who live unexamined lives do all day? Don't they get bored?".
I think it would be a good world if we dealt with languages like they did in the Star Wars universe. Since alien races all had different vocal apparatuses, and consistent good pronunciation was just plain impossible, no on ever had to learn to speak anybody else's language, they just had to understand it. I can nearly understand many other languages (mostly the European Latin-based ones), but damned if I know what to say back. It would be great if everyone understood every other language, but never had to worry about speaking it. That would eliminate one of the big problems many of us had with Spanish in High School: the whole anxiety about bad pronunciation.
A hard line Muslim might consider me a vassal of the 'Great Satan' for this, but I really like the fact that I live in a culture where women can tell me I'm full of shit.
posted by John McKenna at 11:55 AM
0 comments
