OT: Much of our culture is based upon ...

[MrToxin]

Moral of the story?

Ignore everything.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Cell phones and telephones are neither unnecessary or meaningless. They are simply annoying in the way they tend to intrude.

[capnq]

Randallw said: I feel the same way about the idiosyncracies of a piece of paper that is more than 200 years old, out of date, a lie when it was written (Tell the slaves all people are equal)

This common misconception is a pet peeve of mine. "All men are created equal" was never intended to be the statement of egalitarianism that it's commonly interpreted as today. It was a direct denial of the Divine Right of Kings. A less ambiguous wording would be something like "everyone is equal in the eyes of the Creator".

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Which makes slavery undesirable - after all, enslaving someone you love is abhorrent.

[AgentZero]

When it comes to mobile phones, I see no reason why everyone shouldn't have one. But none of them should have ringtones anymore. Stick it on vibrate, put it in your pocket and stop abusing my ears with your horrid taste in "music". </endrant>

And cell phone etiquette should be taught in elementary schools with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. I can't count how many times I've been sitting in a lecture and someone's phone goes off and they run out the door, or worse yet, answer it in class. You're in class to learn, and nothing in your life is that important, so sit down, shut up and turn the phone off. </endrant2>

When it comes to all that political malarky, I'm thoroughly apolitical. I really just don't care anymore. Political parties in democracies across the globe have become so focused on the lowest common denominator that there's no difference between them anymore. On voting day it comes down to whether you prefer the sound of "Tax Hike" or "Temporary Income Adjustment". All the same [censored] at the end of the day.

Set up a dictatorship (Irish blood prevents me from suggesting a monarchy) for all I care. Nothing will change, except we won't have to put up with the mind-numbing amount of *****ing, back-stabbing, and mud-slinging of today's politics. Oh, and political commentators will be out of a job. And hey, if it gets rid of Bill O'Reilly, that can't help but be a good thing, right?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

The only thing a dictatorship will change is make the back-stabbing literal rather than figurative.

Also, the whole country will loose its rights a lot faster.

That may just be important to you.

[capnq]

AgentZero said: When it comes to mobile phones, I see no reason why everyone shouldn't have one.

Why should anyone who doesn't need one pay for one?

Winston Churchill said: Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.

[Suicide Junkie]

capnq said:
Why should anyone who doesn't need one pay for one?

That's my biggest issue, bills for stuff that should be 1/100th the price these days.

[AgentZero]

capnq said:
Why should anyone who doesn't need one pay for one?

Given how little time the average person spends actually in the home in today's society, one could ask the same question of the ubiquitous land line. Why pay for something that's only going to be available for use 3-4 hours a day, when you can pay roughly the same amount and have the same service available to you, with the added benefit of being free from geographic constraints.

Them crazy Europeans are catching on quickly, and on the other side of the pond, the land line is quickly disappearing in favour of the mobile phone. Hell, I lived for Ireland for 6 years and only had a land line for that last 2, and only then because it came bundled free with my internet connection.

As for dictatorships, you only run into problems with them when the egomaniac in charge starts taking people's complaints as personal insults & reacts accordingly. The ideal solution would be an apathetic dictatorship that dispassionately rule with the best interest of the state/nation/world in mind. Of course, humans aren't too good at that, but I've found a little company that's got some pretty good ideas about how to deal with that problem. They go by the name of Cyberdyne Systems....

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I prefer apathetic democracies to apathetic dictatorships.