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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Salieri82
Published Letters: 28 Editor's Choice: 2
Exactly how much blood has to be spilled over 'holy ground' before it's officially desecrated?
As long as grown adults use violent fairy-tales to govern their lives, there will never be peace in the world.
How people react to movies really baffles and disturbs me sometimes. Here's what I saw in the audience while watching I Am Legend:
- A human being (zombie or not) is violently killed: yawns all around.
- A dog dies: inconsolable weeping ensues.
The reactions of the people around me were the most frightening element of the whole experience.
Isn't this the same Norway that used to send its citizens out in long, skinny boats, armed with helmets and axes, to rape and pillage their neighbours as they saw fit?
My, what a difference a thousand years makes.
...you never know where it might lead you.
I spent 15 years in Ontario's Catholic schools, bombarded with every kind of religious proselytization you can imagine.
It only took one afternoon of critical inquiry to make an agnostic out of me (and make the last few years of high school a rough ride). Maybe that means I never had real faith. Maybe it means faith is built on much more fragile ground than most of the religious want to admit.
It's good to see you're willing to join the doubters, if only for a while. That doesn't make you a weasel - it makes you honest, and if there's one thing modern religion could desperately use, it's a bit more honesty. I think you'd be surprised how many of your fellow churchgoers feel the same way you do about their faith, but feel pressured by their peers into showing more credulity. They'll know how you feel now, at any rate.
Best of luck, and Happy Easter.
Ha-Ha!
As a 25-year-old man in a long-term relationship with a woman ten years his senior, I'd like to offer my own take on the situation.
I think one of the reasons young men are taking up with more older women is that older women are looking younger all the time. The night I met my girlfriend, I quite literally checked her ID. I couldn't believe she was as old as she said she was. Decades of cosmetic and other advances - and a culture that pushes women to fight every wrinkle like it was D-Day - have pushed the onset of aging well past the age where it used to set in with a vengeance.
Economic considerations also come into play. My girlfriend is an upper-middle manager - I'm a peon at writing desk. She's had an extra decade to rise up the corporate ladder, and her income reflects that. An older man might find the income imbalance threatening, but a young buck like me knows it's all relative. I'm in this relationship because I love her, not because I wanted a widescreen TV, but the sugar momma effect cannot be discounted.
The bottom line is, I'm with my girlfriend because she's smart, beautiful, funny, warm and loving. The fact she was born in the 70s and I was spawned in the 80s is just a detail.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have a conscience so I could get a sweet gig like the esteemed Mr. Damgard's. Honesty is so unprofitable.
Starbucks is eliminating 12,000 positions?
That's the equivalent of nearly 500 real jobs!
Think we could get something similar going up here in Canadia? We've got no shortage of creeps who could really use an electoral drubbing when the Harper government finally goes ass-up.
...please add a tidbit on Battlestar Galactica. That show jumped the shark with greater dash and vigor than any other program I've ever used to like.
Wait until energy prices start rising again. The petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides required for standard industrial agriculture will get too expensive again and we'll see organic make a comeback, not because it's gotten cheaper, but because the real costs of industrial food will finally start to surface.
"Trust...but verify."
Obama is a better breed of politician than the gangsters who have run the united States for the last eight years, but he's still a politician. Make sure he listens to the millions of people who gave him the money he needed to win the election.
I'd also like His Majesty to consider a federal ban on melisma (singing 27 different notes where the song only calls for 2 or three). The national anthem shouldn't take ten minutes to sing.
"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight." John Maynard Keynes.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
