All is fair
Today there was a post on metafilter comparing the behaviour of pres. Bush and pres. Clinton, asking why Clinton was impeached for his behaviour and Bush was not. Despite the title “not a post about Iraq” it (of course) still degraded into a partisan discussion/flame war. There are several other angles to this. There’s a legal one, of course. But what interests me is the cultural one. Somehow I get the idea this is a phenomenon only noticed by outsiders, by non-Americans. And, wouldn’t you know it, the poster of the article is called Jan van der Ven, probably one of my countrymen. Just to make things clear I’ll summarise again. You Americans are screwed up. I mean, who would prefer violence to sex? That’s just sick. There is nothing wrong with sex. Sex is fun (and if it isn’t, you must be doing something wrong). Violence, however, is wrong. Glorification of violence is perverse. If anyone has any good arguments for violence, please let me know. Because I can’t see them. The only one I ever heard was to stop other violence. And the person who started that violence in the first place would probably come up with ‘pre-emptive’. After all, what’s pre-emptive violence other than starting such a spiral of violence? Speaking of pre-emptive, has anyone noticed how the language has changed? In the old days it used to be about love and war. Now it’s about sex and violence. Doesn’t that sound much more negative, dirty and wrong? Nowadays the word war is used as a label to make things look more positive, like the ‘war on drugs’. Maybe that will make the old slogan useful again: make love not war!
11:04:55 PM 
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