5/13/2004
| { | what happened to this thing? | } |
2/12/2004
2/11/2004
| { | when you keep your standards and goals low you don't disapoint yourself. for example, i like to set really easy goals for myself, like "i will pick up that pencil." then, if i manage to do it, i will feel good about myself. however, this can be kind of an unfullfilling life cuz you don't end up doing anything. thats why you should set small goals AND big goals. like: i will pick up this pencil, and then use it to write a prizewinning essay. that way, if you don't win the prize, at least you still half succeeded, and if you do you feel great! | } |
2/8/2004
| { | HOLY BAJEZZUS, this thing still exists?!..........-JESUS AND THE SUPER FRIENDS | } |
1/15/2004
| { | when i say "ideas" i really mean "random groups of words" | } |
| { | it all really does depend on what happens after you die. you can never really know, can you? it is true that death is the only way to avoid pain. but what if life after death is hell? like what if its just you die and then are tortured for the rest of eternity? no heaven, no god, no reincarnation, just torture. i know htis sounds like it just came out of my ass, and thats true. but yeah wouldn't that be interesting? maybe if everyone killed themselves at once life would stay the same. what the fuck am i talking about? just spitting out ideas. ok thats it. | } |
1/12/2004
| { | I posted this on my personal blog ( shameless self-promotion) and it got a lot of comments, so I thought it might be good to but it up here: If you really think about it, the best way to assure that you have a good life is not to have one at all, that is, to die. If you use pure logic, the only asnwer is suicide: life is painful with little respite, you will not get what you want most of the time, and you die in the end anyway. Fortunately (is it?) most people don't use logic. Humans are genetically programmed to fight for their lives to the very last. Maybe people who are suicidal are just uber-logical. But that's usually not the case. Usually it's "AHHHHH LIFE SUCKS GET ME OUT", not, "I've thought this through, and I think the best choice is to kill myself." Or is it? I really don't know, I'm not suicidal, and I have never really had dealings with anyone who is. Not enough to know their motives. Another thing is, no one knows what happens when you die. I mean, what happens to your...soul? The part of you that knows and feels things. I'm a very scientific thinker, so I believe that there must be a physical representation, a soul organ. Somewhere, there is a part of us that IS that. I have a hard time believing there isn't. But maybe there isn't. That leaves a whole slew of possibilities for what happens after death. I think my favorite version of that is reincarnation. Because unlike the Christian view of heaven and hell, it doesn't call for some reigning deity. Well, whatever, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, which I hope will be a long time from now. CLARIFICATION: I hope its obvious that I personally do not intend to end my own life ever. What I mean by "the best way to assure that you have a good life is not to have one at all" is that if you want to avoid pain completely, death is your only option. However, although I don't know this for a fact, I doubt there would be much pleasure in death either. Discuss.  PS: Nessa wants everybody to know that it was her that started this train of thought. | } |
12/30/2003
| { | everyone should watch bowling for columbine right now. theres this freak that believes that by having 15 something guns in his house he is safe. safe from what? its kinda more dangerous, isn't it? some freak comes in and just takes them all and shoots this fool in the head. without guns i think young-ish people [<30] would have it a lot easier. everyone's always suspicious of kids. when they see someone in baggy pants they think O MY GOD THAT GUY HAS A GUN! or if they see someone reach into their jacket they think they're gonna pull a gun out. of course, this happens sometimes, which is why the suspicions arise, but without the guns the problem kinda goes away, right? unless people start smuggling guns. guh. | } |
12/24/2003
| { | no, i disagree and agree with shagee...although I can only read like 2 words under that giant picture.....the US has the highest gun crime rate of any civilized country in the world...the difference there is not the media or any crap like that, they are not allowed to have guns except under very special circumstances (like hunting I think, and they do not have Charleston Heston arguing that you need a machine gun that can shoot 60 rounds per second to hunt deer)---that is the difference, the profusity of weapons here | } |
12/22/2003
| { | thats true, but without the guns hte people couldn't really do the bad things, right? in britain the cops don't even have guns. | } |
12/20/2003
| { | The thing about making guns illegal is that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. The only thing that work is making all guns disappear from existence. But that's dumb. I agree with what Kevin said. And it's true what you said, Shagee, but there can't be "no handguns" because there are already thousands of them, and you could never get rid of all of them. People wouldn't let you. Yeah. Guns aren't so bad, it just what they do to people that is the problem. I think the core of the issue is that people are doing bad things with guns, not that guns can be used to do bad things. PS: Kevin, get rid of that damn picture. Or make one for all of us... :). | } |
12/19/2003
| { | I'm back from my hibernation. to me, just about all guns seem stupid. handguns I can understand, for self defense, to an extent. I don't think that personal guns are ever truly necessary, but it makes sense that some people would want to hunt as a sport, and would use guns for that. I think that handguns in the house with children are a very bad comination. unless someone is trained about how to use a gun without unintentionally hurting themself or others, and is shown exactly what a bullet does to another person, they should not be handling guns of any kind. | } |
12/16/2003
| { | people don't use handguns for hunting! and if there were no handguns they wouldn't need handguns to protect themselves. | } |
12/14/2003
| { | Self protection and hunting. | } |
12/8/2003
| { | hey i htought of a clever topic that most people have thoughts on [if they don't they should]: handguns. what is their purpose? also: hunting for sport. | } |
11/28/2003
| { | I think that some advertising is necessary...information advertising, but immersing into this culture we live in, where the average person sees over 3000 ads per day, it breaks down the walls of individuality through constant hammering.....and contrary to katie I un-reccomend that movie, I thought it was dumb and only rehashed and vocalized things that I knew all along, or had learned in one of the earlier movies on ads we watched in that class.... | } |
11/27/2003
| { | without advertising, a capitalist society would be terribly dysfunctional. i mean, capitalism has many a downpoint, but its the basic thing that this country runs on. so without advertising, america would basically cease to function. some might say "who cares?" and i agree. however, this country IS a superpower, and it's collapse would affect the whole world, which would be bad. however, advertising can still be evil, it's just that it is kinda needed for the world to keep on running as it does. im gonna put a cool quote that i like, if anyone wants to comment on it. "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." --my hero: gandhi. he also sed this when asked what he thought of western civilization: "i think it would be a good idea!" heh heh heh. | } |
11/26/2003
| { | True, but how else are you going to survive in such a wildly capitalist society? I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it IS. The substitute just came up and told me to get back to work, so I'll continue this later. Keywords to help me remember what i was thinking: alternatives, word of mouth, damn the ringing bell. | } |
11/25/2003
| { | ok. i'm going to tell you why advertising is evil. this is very much influenced by the documentary "the ad and the ego" which we watched in broadcast journalism class and which i highly recommend. first of all, most of us will say that we aren't affected by ads, because we don't pay attention to them. but, gasp, we ARE. subconsciously. we are led to accept the ideas of beauty and success that we are shown in commercials as reality. advertisements do not function as solutions to your problems. they GENERATE problems and they GENERATE anxiety and then they give you solutions to these things. a dumb example, but for instance, body odor. it was ENTIRELY created by advertisements. before body odor products, no one even thought about body odor. go figure. ads are, as the documentary says, a kind of reverse therapy. they create in us an inner state of conflict rather than an inner state of peace with oneself. advertisments are also in some way responsible for abuse towards women. obviously not entirely. but the first step of violence towards another human being is making that person seem like they are less than human. which is how women are portrayed in many commercials. and the worst thing of all? the reason our culture of consumers is able to be so capitalist and have so many resources is a result of the countries plagued with scarcity who provide these resources. by being so immersed into the capitalist culture, mostly by advertisements, we no longer view the people overseas as real people, but simply as competitors for our precious resources and products. which is why we can accept all the violence and war we wage on them. also, we as humans view freedom as freedom from government. but we don't even consider the huge corporations who subconsciously control our insecurities- and make us think that we will gain fulfillment and that we NEED fulfillment through these objects they sell us. we are just as much brainwashed, probably more, by them as we are by the government. that was really long. and basically just a less effective summary of that documentary, which YOU SHOULD SEE! | } |
| { | advertizing is like a mixture. there's good advertising and there's bad advertising. it all depends. just like how there's good people and bad people. actually, now that i think about it, there only seems to be bad people nowadays. o man thats sad. but anyways, advertisments can be a very good thing when they're used properly. for example, ads for awareness. actually those are public service announcements. they're related though, right? hmm... some ads are funny... ok my point was not well argued. i agree with zack though, that advertising is necessary to survive, because without it you can't make enough money, meaning that you can't survive. but it is also true that advertising is becoming more and more manipulative, by twisting statistics and lying. as my english teacher said today: "you can prove anything with statistics..." for example, i could take a survey of how many people got a 1600 on the SAT's. when i do this however, i could be sure and take the survey of all indians which i KNOW got 1600's, and all white people who i KNOW got like a 4. [which is sad cuz they give you like 40 points for your name, don't they?] well anyways i could use this data and say that "all indians are smarter than white people." which isn't necessarily true. thus, by using this in an ad, i would not be lying.. or at least not directly. if the advertisers just used ads to tell people that their product was out there, it would be fine. o wait! advertising IS evil, because they pre-empt shows with hour-long advertisments about some miraculus new crappy product, which comes with like 15000000 different FREE GIFTS, and it only costs 14.95!! YAAAY! wait a second, all gifts are free. why would a gift not be free? i thought that was the point of a gift! why be redundant? BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL! | } |
| { | I don't think advertising is evil, but I think lying to people you want to take money from is evil. So is saturating everybody's mind with usless junk. Like it or not, the US is not a ararchic socialist paradise, it's a democratic capitalist not-so-paradise. So basically, you need money to survive inside the system (les not get out of the system right now) and you get money by selling things. How do you sell things? You advertise, or else you won't reach enough people to make enough money to supporrt yourself. But there is a point at which youare just a greedy bastard invading the lives of Americans. That point isn't very well defined, though. PS: But Blogger must be better because I have one. In fact, I have FOUR. WHAT NOW? | } |
11/24/2003
| { | whoo, i want a bagel! yeah anyway. people blog because they like writing down what they did in a day. it makes them feel accomplished or something. and online journals are doubly appealing because you get to see what people think of you/ your thoughts. moreover people just like to rant. xanga is better because i said so. and i have one. so it must be better. end of discussion more questions! 1. is advertising evil? why or why not? (i will respond later. and whoa will it be big.) 2. actually i only had one question. this one is a freebie! yay! | } |
| { | Actually Scott, that's not true. I use blogger for my own personal site, and if you go to http://xanga.com/iwantabagel, you'll see a xanga created by our very own Katie Frank, where anybody can post anything. And also, you didn't answer the first two questions. PS: I think the site looks good this way. You don't like it? Start posting more and maybe you can have some influence over what the site looks like. Arr! | } |
11/23/2003
| { | If i knew HTML, it would be smaller... I use Xanga, I use blogger, I have no prefrence. Xanga is more of a journal that you let everyone see for some reason, where as this is more of a forum. | } |
|
