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The Future is a Tang-Coloured Monkey
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Thumbs Up/Down
12.24.2002 by , every Wednesday.
Well, folks, I am back from the dead with a special Christmas edition of Thumbs! Something to distract you from that bursting feeling coming from all the turkey in your gut.
Acadaemia
 I have recently noticed that acadaemia (more specifically, the "arts") is a load of crap. The problem is summed up best in our philosophy department's guide to writing philosophy essays, in which they say "It is better to be clearly wrong than vaguely right". This seems to be the big problem, in philosophy as well as in other arts disciplines. There is less concern over who is right as there is over who has the most complicated argument. There are still people who follow Plato. Can you imagine if in physics there were still guys who doggedly followed Newton? In science, although there are competing theories, the goal is to arrive at some sort of a consensus. The goal is to figure out who's right. In the arts, it seems that the game of argument is the goal itself, and notions of winning and losing are mean. There is about as much correlation between talent and success in the arts as there is in the music or acting businesses. Even people who are right often don't make a difference. There is brilliant work going on in ethics, but the laws get written by politicians in the end - who are as apt to listen to their local priest as to their local philosopher. Too bad it took me till the third year of my arts degree to figure this out. I guess it's off to law school for me!
Winter
 Even though the days are ridiculously short and the process of getting dressed takes a lot longer, it is always nice when that first dump of snow falls, and hides the filth and grime of the big city under a blanket of hospital-white. And actually, there is something quite refreshing about walking around in the cold - it seems that the various dreary odours of town disappear too, perhaps getting frozen solid and precipitating out of the air in powder form. That, the end of exams, Christmas, it makes one almost giddy. Too bad so many people dread winter (half my street are retirees who spend their entire winters in Florida) and treat it like some sort of curse. Of course that is their problem - I'll take my windchills and frostbite, and go skiing, thank you very much.
This whole war business
We all called this Iraq business from day one - yes, they'll make up some reason to invade Iraq, even if they don't find any weapons of mass destruction. Witness Tony Blair's recent discovery that "Iraw has a bad human rights record". Not exactly a discovery, they've known that for years. As well, so do North Korea, Cuba, Israel, Turkey and Russia, and I don't see the US or British practicing to invade Moscow... Not that they'd have much of a reason to invade Iraq even if Saddam did have WMD. He had them before, and only dared to use them against his own people, which is sad but so was Bambi. Frankly, who cares whether he has them or not? I don't. Bah. Humbug.
Action!
You know what's better than sex? Sex with random strangers! I've ranted before here about our ridiculous failure to take full advantage of birth control, and our continuing adherence to backward Christian sexual morality. So it's nice to see that there are some among us who share the love. That's all I had to say. Not that I got laid recently or anything...
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