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Monday, July 23, 2012

Hello Monday, You Do Not Disappoint

Today, after being away from the internet for a few days (bless, thanks Heide!) I ventured back into the virtual world that's really the real world outside my door, only to be annoyed by it again.

Three things:
It was made for pressing other more dangerous buttons

1. It's the 1 year anniversary of the Utøya shootings. Anders Behring Breivik's reason for killing nearly 70 teenagers? Because they supported multiculturalism, thereby "letting down Norway and the Norwegian people".

The world we live in today wouldn't exist without multicultural assimilation. For some, it's apparently fine to accept German Vorsprung durch Technik, but easy to forget that the father of algebra was a Persian mathematician named  Al-Khwarizmi. Multiculturalism is not a curse. It is not bad, and it is not the prime cause of cultural dilution. People manage to let go of their own traditions for a wealth of complicated reasons, not because they accept others for who they are.

2. The New Zealand government trying to have cigarettes sold in non-branded packaging, and in the process costing taxpayers obscene amounts of money to fight their legal battles for them.
     Stop it.
Sure, smoking is bad for you. I was a smoker for ten years and I knew perfectly well what I was doing to myself. Not because anyone told me, but because I read, and took responsibility for my own actions. I am sick to death of being told by a government what I can and cannot do with and to my own body. In the bigger scheme of things, they're doing a hell of job taking away personal responsibility - never mind personal choice - from citizens, in the process creating a society of sheep. But I guess governments like that.

Apparently, smokers summon the devil & other lesser demons
Some moron was talking on the news about how people choose specific branding because it reinforces their femininity/masculinity/coolness, and he cites this as a major reason for why the government wants branding removed. Excuse me, but aligning yourself with a brand is a personal choice and a right, despite Apple enslaving people on a daily basis, numerous brands of alcohol helping people to wrap themselves around trees every weekend, McDonalds making a valiant effort at bloating (hah!) obesity levels around the world, and Coca-Cola going gangbusters at elevating the planet's diabetes statistics. I hope then that the government is planning to remove branding from all take-away food joints' packaging, all liquor bottles and every can/bottle of soft-drink imaginable. Because that shit isn't bad for you at all.

3. The use of the word "evil". I thought after George W. Bush left the White House, this would stop. But no. Today, Barack Obama disappointed the hell out of me by calling the actions of James Holmes, the shooter in the Aurora TDKR incident, "evil".
     Stop it.
In doing so, he invoked the tenets of Christianity to associate perfectly human actions with the demonic. Insane, psychotic actions, but still ultimately human. Aligning these actions with the word 'evil' in a country that involves religion in its justice system is a very dangerous thing to do.

I understand that Obama used the word to try and make sense of seemingly senseless actions. But what happened in Aurora was the actions of a mentally disturbed human. Attributing such an instance with something supposedly outside the realm of humanity does nothing to help us understand - and potentially prevent - such occurrences from happening again in the future. If anything, it's a little "evil" itself.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There was a relatively interesting piece on "thinking allowed" recently about the word "evil" which basically said - it's not a useful analytical tool.

Lynne Jamneck said...

It really isn't useful at all. Too much baggage. It's a lot like when I was writing my thesis - people would ask me what it was about. I'd say, "The occult properties of language" and they'd think I was writing about satanism.