From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Sun May 13 2001 - 10:30:01 PDT
Jay Thomas wrote:
...at 7:02 am on a Sunday, no surprise, bet he made it to church on time.
Hey Jay, I bet you had a wild and crazy and fun Sat. nite last night,
didntcha?
> Why? In what way is that [LITB] Hell?
Let's see: bland, sedate, rigid, authoritarian, homogeneous, passive...
terminally uninteresting. An isomorphic society of zombies. And that's
just on the surface. The "dark underbelly" you mention is a significant
concern as well...
> Desperate? Not at all. I just want my kids to grow up in a world where
> they're not bombarded with filth
Your filth is somebody else's art. Live and let live. Don't want to be
bombarded by "filth?" Then don't let your kids watch TV. (Lost cause, but
you can try it.) But IMO, that's a "hear no evil, see no evil" form of
denial. Much better to teach your kids to *cope* with the fact that the
world isn't always going to be just exactly the way you want it to be;
teach your kids to be tough, smart, critical, tolerant while not embracing
those things you despise for whatever reason.
> And
> if they won't police themselves, the gov needs to set limits for them.
Bullshit. What you're asking for is the gov't to do the job you as a parent
need to do, one way or another. Why don't you just step up to the plate and
take responsibility yourself for your kids' viewing habits and for giving
them the mental / moral / whatever tools to deal with what they encounter?
Instead, you --- and countless others like you --- are taking the cowardly
way out and abdicating your responsibility to gov't and censors.
> How does it impact me? Well, if it's not right in my face, it doesn't
> impact me, and I don't care about it.
So then an abortion doesn't impact you as long as you don't see it. Good
attitude to have, seriously, wish more of your ilk were like you. ;-) :-)
> Again, not trying to impose my
> views on others, just don't want theirs forced on me.
Don't seek them out. BTW, you and yours *are* trying to impose your views
on others --- such as the view that a fetus is a human being, such as the
view that sexual choices mean *anything at all* in various contexts
(military service, social contracts such as marriage, etc.)
> If there's a show
> on I don't like, I change the channel. But if sweeping social changes
> are implemented outside my house, then I do have to deal with it.
Here's a hot tip: "sweeping social change" has already happened since the
LITB house, and there's more to come. You can't turn back the clock. Each
generation mourns "the good old days," when in fact it's almost never the
case that the "good old days" were really that good. The problem with the
current crop of conservatives is that they're actually *trying* to turn back
the clock, rather than just sitting around bitching about things. The
"culture war" is a purely conservative creation --- and the rest of us are
damned sick of it, Jay.
> It seems to me we actually do.
What a load of horse shit.
> But there are enough idiots out there who don't have common
> sense, so laws are written.
Really, that's why we have them? Give me one single tiny itty-bitty shred
of evidence to support your contention that the reason we have laws is as a
substitute for common sense. You don't need a surrogate parent, Jay, you
need to go back and take high school level American history again. Though
unfortunately we've started using law as an attempt to create surrogate
common sense, that's clearly not the original motivation. It's all about
incentives and penalties.
> When you read the tag on the hairdryer that
> says "Do not use in the tub", it's because someone did.
Yeah, and it's too bad we've gone down that road. Why protect idiots from
themselves? Do you really want, say, your daughter marrying some yahoo who
would've accidentally killed himself by dropping his hairdryer in the tub,
except for some little tag? Darwinism, man. It's a good thing.
> Not all change is positive. I have no problem embracing good change.
Change is neither positive nor negative --- it just *is.* Positive and
negative are human interpretations, and are highly subjective. You and I
--- your kind and those unlike you --- will probably never achieve
significant consensus on what constitutes a positive cultural environment,
so just stop trying to legislate it and, instead, focus on how to achieve
what you want for yourself and yours in a changing environment that noone
controls.
jb
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 13 2001 - 10:50:48 PDT