What annoys you most about your culture?

[Vykromond]

I'm going to teach you a french phrase: "Lassez-faire".

it's laissez-faire

[gran guerrero]

the money I use to pay for my drugs goes to some white guy who works at burger king (did a drive-thru drug deal once) and gamestop

with all the money he's getting for his shit, I don't see why he has two jobs, must be that he is bored...

[Spider]

It's all good in the 'hood

I'm a full time student that works anywhere from 15-30 hours a week as well as having 2 projects to film (one this weekend) and another project to edit at the moment. And yes, sometimes I smoke weed and drink a few beers.

But go ahead and keep kidding yourself like you've earned some sort of elite status from joining the military.

Oh I forgot, I am against drugs too. Here is why though. I'm not exactly against what Squeezer does. Sure, it probably isn't helpful to our moral fabric but its not a huge problem either. He takes care of his shit.

I know lots of people in university (I'm a full time student too) with the same attitude. What they don't know (and maybe you don't either, or at least don't consider it on a daily basis) is the effect that drugs have on other users. The student weed smoker archetype is not a big deal.

Here is a quick background on myself. Most my opinions and ideas come from these facts of my history. My mom died of cancer when I was about 15 after a 5 year battle with the illness. I am thankful for the excellent care she recieved from the public health care system in Canada which does an absolutely brilliant job for everything except covering the cost of a few drugs (which are usually ineffective anyway and thus not covered but in some tragic cases are effective and should be) and (relatively) worthless procedures such as hip replacements for old people. My great grandma waited a really long time for a hip replacement. Nobody in my family cared, not even her, because we understood treatment for a person like my mom with cancer was more important. It just is.

Secondly, I went to school in a poor disadvantaged area of my city (thats where they put all the kids with high IQs - I am a "brilliant scientist"). I lived, however, in one of the wealthy parts of the city. As you can imagine I witnessed first hand a lot of social class related stuff. Like, contrary to some peoples popular beliefs, on the ground, it seems to me, people from poor areas tend not to advance to university even if they are smart well meaning kids. I know this because I knew them.

Anyway, what the fuck was I talking about? Oh, right, drugs. The weed smoking student archetype that you know and support is not bad. But those drugs are very harmful to people in poor areas. Your money probably goes to some guy that lives in the dorm on campus but in lower class areas (where most of the using happens) it goes to gang related shit. It takes money away from poor people who can't feed their children. It takes hope out of those families and communities. Criminal convictions (which don't actually happen in Canada for most offense - thankfully) just further serve to take hope out of those families and communities and as a result drive them further into lives of crimes. Additionally the pusher of drugs tends to be poor anyway and have a shit life. So not even that guy is well off. Also, how do you think that impacts the life expectency and wellbeing of everyone involved - users, dealers, etc.

Anyway, make no mistake drugs are a very bad thing. If you think different you probably just aren't considering drug use outside the context of someone who goes to school mon-fri, plays in a band on the weekends, and smokes up with his buddies. What to do about it is something that I am less sure about. I don't believe, obviously, that criminal convictions help anyone. At least not for the users. To be honest I don't care all that much because I don't live in a poor community and I don't (nor do my friends or family) do drugs. One time I have a speech like this to someone who got pissed off and said "oh ya well it's no different than smoking or drinking" to whom I replied "would you like to hear my sermons on those issues too?" hahahaha. He was trying to suggest I was a hypocrit and was assuming I smoke or at least drink. I argued and won anyway that smoking and weed are different.

FUCK I AM RANTING SO HARD!! GOD DAMNIT! I have to leave my house. Have a good day! hahaha.

[Squeezer]

-White castle burgers

Commie.

[Spider]

Oh boy! What a topic. I have millions of things that annoy me about my culture (North American Consumerism). IRL I have to watch what I say because I am so peeved with our "culture" that anyone who knows me well (who I bitch to about it) get really tired of me. I wasn't socialized properly.

Keeping in mind I could write a 500 page manifesto about what pisses me off and I'm just not in the mood right now because I wrote my last (of 5) finals yesterday I will just throw some jot notes down

Alcohol - I'm not some OMG BEER IS SO BAD FOR SOCIETY kind of guy but I don't drink personally. What annoys me is the simplistic attitude towards alcohol and how nobody can ever think of anything else to do. Every birthday, new job, friend of a friend getting married, moving into a new house, found that lost sock, whatever. It always results in "LETS GET WASTED" to some people. Not everything is a big fucking party.

Racism - I was naive for a long time about this because I usually keep only at least half-assed intelligent company. I've come to notice there are a lot of ignorant racists out there.

Religion as an excuse for bigotry, violence. Someone else bitched about this too and then dropped a reference to Muslims in there. Up until the Muslim reference I actually assumed he was talking about Christians. All religions get in on this in a big huge way and as a devout Atheist I am constantly surprised at the hypocrisy.

Dumbing society down to the lowest common denominator generally. - All our fancy technology which should allow us to achieve great things. As a society we do (there is some dork in a lab coat doing amazing things with his brain somewhere out there right now) but the average person seems to be getting more and more ignorant. For example the news. Now we have cell phone cameras and shit so when the V-Tec shootings happened all CNN had to do was use that "footage" for their news cast. That's not in-depth insightful reporting. Then again the whole damn thing was a text book case of sensationalism in journalism. Not that we shouldn't be informed about that kind of suffering but there should be some moderation and some thoughtfulness drizzled on top of those ratings.

Political discourse - Polarization of political debate. It's caused for the most part by having a two party system. It's what you're seeing on the news when one guy says "Lets cut funding to the military for reasons x, y, and z." then the other guy says "Ignore x, y, and y, why do you want the terrorists to win? You don't want our people to have the best possible defence? Do you hate democracy?" then later on the second guy quietly realizes "oh shit, x, y and z really is causing us a problem" so he cuts funding for those reasons and you never hear about the subject again. This happens frequently you just don't notice. I'd like to see a "study" of some sort on that subject.

I noticed these things all the time (and some funny retractions most people don’t realize which usually are just an incorrect name but some things are much bigger than that) when I used to read the news from 4 sources (including 2 daily news papers cover to cover) every day. If you ever want to be disappointed about society critically analyze the news from at least 4 sources every single day. Wow. That blew my mind and pushed me from critical and annoyed to plain old "fuck this bullshit".

Oh man I'm ranting already...

[Zeebu]

hasko ksjkol;

so j-man

what youre saying is... for the companies i mean, "I was here first, it's mine"?

[Liquid Blue]

-Obsession with the media / celebrities

-Lack of accountability

-Fucking rehashed, unoriginal anime that's pumped out to the states and idolized

-White castle burgers

[project dragon]

I'm actually not good at math, and I don't end every sentence with "la".

[Galleleo]

I have to write like 2 papers in the next 2 weeks, like omg..

And who says I am not doing important work next to my studying? I bring people there cars, if some CEO didn't get his car when he was supposed, therefore misses an important meeting, after which the whole company crashes down into failure costing the jobs of thousands of people.. how is my work then not important HUH?! HUH?!

Seriously: I am so done with the whole studying and learning and making exams and having to pass them shit. But it's really just a good thing, cause it means I want to be done as fast as possible with my study (4 years) and then go to work, instead of wasting 3 years of my study and taking 8 years to finish it.

[thesearcher]

Izor responds alot in this thread considering hes supposed to be ultra busy in the military right now, with no free time at all, unlike us university kids.

[Izor]

well i dont know whos doing it but people are saying how rich kids that have it easier than they do still manage to whine about how rough they have it. So I just wanted to shed some light that you're not on the bottom of the chain because there are people that have to work 50 hours to go to community college lol..and I doubt they whine about the work they have there

[Facetious]

I'm really not trying to sound arrogant about it or anything but my point was that if you decided this is really what you wanted, then quit whining about the work you have to do to achieve whatever goal it is you eventually want. You havent HAD a meaningful job as a student most likely so you can lose focus I guess. I wasn't trying to make it about me or why I made whatever choices I did. I brought up myself because I have goals I want to achieve and dont bitch about the stupid shit like reading a damn book. A bachelors degree really isnt complicated..you'll always have one or two courses you dont want to be in but suck it up

There isn't much I can possibly post in response to this that isn't completely off topic from what I was originally trying to say, which is that no matter how shitty your life is, people always have it worse, so there's no point in complaining. You chose to be in the military and that's really rough. However, you aren't in Iraq right now, so whatever you've got to whine about (and don't say that your little 'my life is so tough, you pussy college students' stuff isn't akin to whining) sounds just as stupid to an Army Ranger in the field as my whining (which you essentially asked for) does to you. I brought up the college stuff initially merely to show an example where someone I know whines all the time about their college situation, while my college situation is worse, and it's annoying. Your life is much worse than mine, I get it.

[Epinephrine]

stuff

Jerome using his immense powers of high school debating to justify his worldly knowledge... oh boy! High school debating is pretty silly. I appreciate their efforts, but generally high schoolers don't know jack. I know four world champion university debators, and even they will tell you they don't know shit compared to those in the real world with actual experience. Basically everyone in the world agrees that monopolies are bad, especially people who know much more than you or I and have much more experience dealing with such things.

Jerome, think about it for a second dude. You're actually coming out and supporting monopolies here! You're saying that it's actually a GOOD IDEA for one person to be in charge for a significant portion of the economy, and that it's actually good for everyone that this is allowed. I can't believe anyone would be stupid enough to actually believe this and not be someone who is benefiting from this (i.e. the person who runs said monopoly) and be proud of it!

Why are monopolies bad?
1) Decrease reasons to innovate - why try inventing new things, when whatever you have is selling anyway? You will have business no matter what you do.
2) Prices - competition drives down prices. How can anyone who believes in the free market not understand this simple fact?
3) Concentration of power - Why oh god why do you want one person or one company in charge of everything about a certain part of the economy?

You speak of Microsoft... actually wait a sec... once they controlled the browser market, remember what we got? IE5 for about 5 years with it's endless problems until Firefox came out and forced Microsoft to innovate. Not to mention the fact that they can and do charge whatever they want for software until now when they are finally using more aggressive pricing thanks to competition from other companies.

Deregulation in terms of the telephone business refers to government forcing AT&T to allow competitors to use it's lines. It broke up the company and all of the sudden we have massive innovation in terms of much lower long distance rates, much different ways of doing things, and many new phone services never before imagined. A similar thing happened in Canada many years later when Bell Canada's monopoly was broken. Suddenly I didn't have to pay $1/minute for long distance because hey... there was COMPETITION.

This is the same with Standard Oil. Yes Rockafeller did earn it by running a successful business. But Rockafeller had immense power. He could dictate how the country ran and he could pay his workers next to nothing because there was no one else to work for. There was also no one else to buy oil from, so he could charge as much as he wanted to still make money (instead of charging as low a price as possible to help out consumers, which was the crux of your $3/gallon argument). Because once Standard Oil broke up, there were a lot more companies which were competiting against eachother, with good reason to charge lower prices and have better ways of doing business, more reasons to expand technology because... well there was competition!

Each successive post, you've shown your increasing ignorance at things. I hope that years from now you will realize how misguided your views are now, although it will probably take a while for you to realize. The worst is if you don't end up realizing at all that you're wrong and just take your ridiculous views to the real world with you.

[Squeezer]

I'm really not trying to sound arrogant about it or anything but my point was that if you decided this is really what you wanted, then quit whining about the work you have to do to achieve whatever goal it is you eventually want. You havent HAD a meaningful job as a student most likely so you can lose focus I guess. I wasnt trying to make it about me or why I made whatever choices I did. I brought up myself because I have goals I want to achieve and dont bitch about the stupid shit like reading a damn book. A bachelors degree really isnt complicated..you'll always have one or two courses you dont want to be in but suck it up

Just because the eventual destination is where I want to be doesn't mean that there will be certain aspects of the journey I wont enjoy. When those times come up I find it helpful to vent my problems and bitch about it. It's not that I wont do it, or that I dislike where I am in my life, nor is it because I think my life in necesarially difficult, it's simply that I've been sitting in front of a computer for half a day editing 20 minutes of video, and I'm burned out and tired.

[Izor]

hilarious..overall message is stop whining because you have it easy and no one here seems to understand that..I think the majority of this forum probably goes to class the same as you and manages not to cry about doing a paper..in fact the only ones that are really crying are squeezer and face. I dunno why everyone else is trying to jump on me for this. not even a rant at all college students this time. Only the ones who think they have it rough cause they got a paper due or something.