8 Oct 2007 - S-S-SCREW YOU! I ONLY LISTEN TO DOUBLE MUSIC!

[V-Adore]

Same here. I spent my college years being moderate-liberal ("well, I dunno, the issue has a lot of sides...") and drinking cola from traditional containers. Oh, the time I've wasted!

[littlefallsmets]

Fortunately they have brains the size of a peanut - well, maybe an almond - and don't give a damn.

I mean, okay, that explains the objectivists, but what about the poor poor animals?

[theinevitable]

CANNED FOR BRILLIANCE.

also: Plato is making me kind of stop liking Democracy. But... all the other options are hell of worse. Think of that Churchhill quote (or maybe it wasn't him.)

[littlefallsmets]

The problem with benevolent dictatorship is that even if you do find a truly benevolent dictator, the next one won't be.

The next one will surely be an asshole who likes abusing power or an idiot or both.

So many of the problems of being human come down to the fact that we have life expectancies on a scale of mayflies... just at the point when we start to figure out how the world could work fairly and equitably, we're pretty much dying. Eighty years just ain't enough, people.

Every new generation comes along and takes thirty years to even figure out how to use their genitals properly and then the whole fuckin' dance begins again.

Wisdom is not perfectly transferrable as long as our lifespans are the time it takes for a god to blink out an errant eyelash.

We're all gonna think we're Marxists or Scientologists or Catholics or Randalorians or some kind of well-defined and functionally-worthless dualism until we've been kicked around by life as adults... or worse... we'll be so busy toiling for our bread that we'll never get to consider these things at all.

And by the time we're fully-formed adults who MAYBE had the time and resources to consider a Middle Path AND taken the punches to the gut to make us realize that no extremes will ever work... our economic model deluges us with bills and obligations that disallow us from anything other than surviving and MAYBE feeding our kids.

It didn't develop like that on accident.

So then we're sixty or we're seventy and we've finally got the time and the stability to start really acting on this wisdom and...

Whuh-oh! Time to start dyin'!

We're goddamn mayflies, all of us. Might as well stick with democracy in that scenario.

At least democracy can sometimes work on accident.

[jay-ell]

He's in college, it's what you do.  You either get into anarchy or communism or objectivism.  And you drink beer from unusual things.  Adulthood is for normal politics and normal alcohol containers.  Go nuts.

When I was in college, I was a socialist.  I was also pretty into transcendentalism.  I didn't drink beer, though.  I drank bourbon from a glass.  Sometimes even with Coke in it. 

Now that I'm old, I'm a democratic socialist.  I still dig transcendentalism, actually, but I view it through the lens of my religious faith.  So, you see, I've gotten considerably more conservative in the last ten years. 

Hell, when I was sixteen I was a Marxist.  I had nowhere to go but up. 

[melack]

I double majored in Political Science, so my personal beliefs changed every quarter. That is to say, whatever was the exact opposite of what we were studying that quarter.

[Carlos del Vaca]

I drank beer from a condom once.  (Unlubricated.)  Ah, peer pressure.

[pmcd9]

I drank beer from a condom once.  (Unlubricated.)  Ah, peer pressure.

Way to kill the discussion Mayor.

[lprkn]

Why'd you kill the discussion mayor? (I nominate this as a new term for moderator, so, dibs.)