Topic: What are YOU mad at?

[MG]

I read in the news that people all across America are angry about something or other. Tea Party types are screaming their heads off about how America is not the same as it was 70 years ago.  Well, d'uh.     Thank God for that.

Myself, I am always amazed to the point of stupefaction by the number of people who are willing to take to the streets to protest the injustice of a system that allows children in America to be seen by a doctor regularly but who never raise a voice in protest when we spend trillions tiptoeing through the poppy blossoms in Bumfuckistan, slaughtering innocents and building up generations of abiding hatred for the US of A.

What's up with that?   

My mind also boggles at the people who spend their entire lives screaming their lungs out in front of the local abortion clinic and then go home and plead with their elected representatives not to approve one penny of government money for the poor and downtrodden because the only reason they are poor and downtrodden is they are lazy, shiftless and stupid and won't do anything to help themselves. Maybe we should take all our poor and put them on an iceberg and set them adrift in the Arctic Ocean the way the Inuits do?   

And what is even MORE stunning to me is the number of these folks who purport to be Christians. Hello?     Have any of you actually READ the Bible? Jesus spent what little time He had on Earth ministering to the poor, the sick, the feeble and the helpless. And then there was that "Eye of a Needle" thing. Are any of you paying attention? Or are you just using your religion as a crutch to prop up your empty, shriveled up souls?

Anyway, that's my rant for the morning. Since AutoPuzzles has such an international membership, I thought some of you folks with a different perspective might want to chime in.  What are YOU mad at today?

[Allan L]

I, and I dare say a number of other UK members, are having a difficult time because there is to be a General Election soon. For several weeks now we have been assumed by the newspapers, television and radio to have suspended our interest in everything else, so we have overdosed on politics.
Sadly the major political parties we have all offer a mixture of policies ranging from excellent to unacceptable, and as you can't mix-and-match a rational decision is hardly possible.
Some of the Labour party's policies that might be acceptable have not been implemented in the 13 years it has been in office, so why should that change?
The others have to propose their policies from their position out of office - which means that they haven't accurate data about where the outgoing government it going to leave things, as quite naturally the Labour party talks up what it thinks are achievements at election time.

In most of the UK we have the old system of voting in the constituencies where a simple majority gets a Member elected to Parliament. It is therefore normal for more people to have voted against any elected Member than voted for him.  It is therefore also normal for a party in government to not represent the majority of the voters, and it is also possible for it to have more seats but fewer voters than one of the opposition parties.

[MG]

Why, thank you, Allan! JUST the sort of stuff I had hoped to encourage.   

Isn't it amazing that after all the centuries filled with various experiments in governance that there has never been a moment in recorded history where the people of a nation have sat back and said: "Yes. We have quite a good government and we, being pleased with it, intend to keep it just as it is."   

[Otto Puzzell]

Nothin'. Life's too short. 

[MG]

Are you deliberately trying to ruin my thread?   

Nice thought, though.   

[Otto Puzzell]

Are you deliberately trying to ruin my thread?   

Nice thought, though.   

No. I'm away from home (again) and I tend to wax melancholic and philosophical when I'm away form my loved ones. And my friends here (among whom I number you), too.

[Ultra]

That the clamor for peace on the left has dried up now that their man has the levers of power.

Both sides of the duopoly sell their souls for power and, hence, must be rejected in order for real change to come to pass.

[ateball]

Frustrated? Mad?.............Hummmm?....................Let's see.............All the above...............

I think that it stems from a case of the "helplessness" of watching my country go down the tubes.............with such apathy of so many of our citizens...........

For instance............Arizona is cracking down on illegals.............while our President is calling the Tea Party types rascist, biggots........

Folks counter demonstrate in Tuscon/Phoenix cause what...................There will be "profiling"...................Oh my God! 

Affirmative action.................it's unconstitutional......................Profiling.............it's not right either,,,,,,,,,,but the Arizona law specifically deals with profiling in it's language...........People of any race, creed, religion, sking color, nationality, cannot be stopped without "due cause"..........like they are breaking the vehicle code, robbing a store/residence......doing something that is unlawful.  Ok..........Now you run and I.D. check on them...........and if they aren't here legally...........you got'em.

I'm not a hard nosed @#$%, I'm just frustrated with Gerrymandered districts that keep absolutely criminal behaviored politicians in office ................

I'm tired of hearing the silence when politicians put on the spot with questions about.........."Where are you going to get the money from?"........when it comes to these humongous entitlements.

I'm tired of folks who believe that the U.S. Constitution is a "flexible, living breathing" document that can be re-interpretted as our country's cultural mix changes..................that includes it's religious, mix or absence there-of.......

The U.S. Constitution is manmade, but it is the best darn piece of paper, that mankind has come up with through the eons........it trumps the Magna Carta, Roman Democracy, greek philosophy, Hammarabi's code................etc......

Clarence Thomas was attacked unmercifully because he was a constitutionalist................thus we had the pubic hair on the coke can episode.....................What a set-up.................! 

I even think that this great document had inspiriation far and beyond just human wisdome/intellect...........As it says that all men are endowed by their Creator.......................The problem we have is that not all men are willing to respect and use that endowment.............to further the common good, and insure domestic tranquility, and insure that individual liberties of every citizen of this great land is respected, and held up as a priority.

[Ray B.]

What am I mad at?

I'll make it rather short, my english being not good enough to allow for long developments.

Mostly, a strange disease that strikes people troughout the world: refusal to open themselves, to learn things, to look around them, to see the obvious, when it risks to contradict their beliefs. It principally affects religious people of the three "revealed" faiths (jewish, christian and muslim fundamentalists, they're all the same to me), but not only. Voluntary stupidity is not too strong a word for it.
The list of consequences of this illness is too long to quote. Creationism, forcing your wife to walk in the streets with a bed sheet over her head, pro-life commandos, etc. No need to mention djihadism, everybody agrees against this except djihadists.
And this not only religion connected. Whenever something threatens our old habits or way of life, or is too remote so we can't see how it concerns us, we are tempted to believe that it doesn't exist. Examples? In my country there is  (I'd have to check the exact numbers) 20 times more money gathered from public generosity for "orphan" diseases than for AIDS, who kills much much more people than those diseases. Mostly in Africa, unhappily for Africa.
Or the developed countries managed to raise, in order to save their financial system, about 10 times more money (same remark) that would be required to solve the hunger crisis in the third world.
The most obvious example of this blindness is climate-change scepticism, who gave birth to a large number of ostriches troughout the northern hemisphere.
This disease, last but not least, manifests itself in a growing belief that many things aren't as we're told, and that it's part of a PLOT. You know, like man never set foot on the moon, etc.
But I won't get more into this because it's slippery terrain.

[Otto Puzzell]

Wow. I'm sticking with my previous answer. 

[Ray B.]

This said, your first two remarks were quite wise, Otto.

[MG]

Ray, your English is fine and your thoughts even finer. Well done, sir!   

I think I have said pretty much the same things at various times. 

[Allan L]

Yes Ray we native English speakers are often embarrassed that the rest of you do so well writing in our language when we can hardly order a beer in yours.

Back on thread it makes me mad that man-made climate change has become and is treated as another "revealed faith". Therefore anyone who points out that the climate had had cyclic changes since well before recorded time and that, although there may be a correlation between something you are studying and global warming, it is not proved to be a causal relationship is treated as the antichrist.
Or an ostrich.

[Ray B.]

I am sorry if I called YOU an ostrich, Allan. I never treated anyone as an antichrist.

I know that there have been cyclic changes in the past. The thing is, 15-20 years ago the debate was still open. Now about 95% of the climatologists say that this is unprecedented and that there is a causal relationship. I don't see why I shouldn't belive them (unless this is also part of the ... PLOT.)

But you're right, this is ultimately a question of faith, because John Doe is not a climatologist himself. Too bad.
I personally have been thinking it over, decided that the basic phenomenon they describe was quite easy to understand. That we should be intelligent enough not to be deterred of this understanding by an especially cold year in my backyard.
I think that people who don't see that hide their heads in the sand, no more, and that they too may call me whatever they want.

Speaking of faith, we had a philosopher-theologist in France in the 17th century called Blaise Pascal. He wrote that, ultimately, there was at lest ONE good reason to believe in the existence of a God: if you were not a believer, but he indeed existed, you'd find yourself in serious trouble when arriving at the pearly gates. Same thing here. If those 95% are right and we don't do something drastic about it right now, we'll make our children will pay the high price for this.

[MG]

Another excellent post, Ray.  The thing about mankind is that we don't even know what we don't know!  But we can be pretty damned certain that if our little spaceship called Earth develops a condition that makes human life inhospitable, we are in deep, deep doo doo.   

I read recently a short article about people with red hair. The writer opined that during the last Ice Age, all humanoids in the European neighborhood migrated south to a small band of coastline around the Mediterranean. Where a certain amount of "mixing" of genes occurred. (Oh, those randy Cro-Magnon types!) When the ice retreated, the humans followed behind, with the red headed people gravitating to such places as Ireland and Bretagne - and Poland, of all places. 

There is a tribe of black skinned people in darkest Africa that all bear the distinctive genetic marker of the descendants of Abraham, particularly the Cohen clan.

There seems to be little doubt that SOMETHING about the weather is different. And those differences are going to visit hardship on a significant number of our homo sapien brothers, as parts of the earth become desert-like and incapable of producing enough food for the current population. The REAL question is not so much what is causing it as it is "what are we as human beings going to do to assist our brothers and sisters in times of significant stress?" Traditional notions of nationality and patriotism may be severely challenged as a result.

Maybe Sarah Palin will lead us all to a new Utopian paradise in Alaska, where we can cavort with the moose and make rude gestures at Vladamir Putin across the Bering Strait........

[DeAutogids.nl]

That we have the audacity to call ourselves "civilized" or even worse "intelligent". That makes me mad. If we would be so civilized or intelligent, why do people still die of hunger and war?

[Ray B.]

... Alaska, where we can cavort with the moose and make rude gestures at Vladamir Putin across the Bering Strait........

Well I'm no lover of Mrs. Palin, but I do get along well with the moose and I'd positively love to make rude gestures at Vladimir Putin across the Bering Strait.
Have you noticed how Alaska became fashionable and lots of people, I hear, think of moving there, among them, I am sure, many guys persuaded that global warming is bullshit.

Now let's make room for other guys telling us what THEY are mad at.