The Ranting Room

 

future rants are sure to be:

 

Facebook - the constant need for validation

People who drive and text

People who drive and don't signal

People wearing hats in restaurants

People

 

 

I'm originally from a similar sized town and left 25 years ago because I hated the small minded people and the lack of  .. anything.

 

As an adult I can handle the small town - if I need to go to the city - I can drive there. I never get bored - I have plenty of things to do - working on the house alone will keep me busy for years.

 

But here's the thing - I recently joined Facebook again just to post photography.

I LOATHE Facebook. (That can be a whole other rant) but it's good as a picture warehouse.

I only have a couple of friends on it and I hide their feeds.

 

I discovered a number of local area Facebook pages that are buy and sell forums ..

All kinds of stuff - usually really cheap.

I haven't bought anything yet but I have given things away to needy people ...

 

and that's my rant - what the hell is it with these small town hick morons having kids at 17 - 18 years of age - with some baseball hat wearing truck driving unemployed moron who cant even begin to take care of the family he's responsible for ????

 

These are the people constantly on the buy and sell. I'm looking for used CDs, maybe camera equipment - and all I see is kids looking for free stuff that needs to be dropped off because they have no transportation ...  yet their profile pic shows them in a cheezy posed department store photo hugging some punk.

 

I guess this crap has been going on for centuries .. it's just the first time in 25 years I've come face to face with the thing that drove me out of my hometown in the first place. (not to mention the bigotry, sexism, and homophobia)

 

Ok - I feel a little better now.

 

Does anyone read these things or is it just therapy?

It is Social Network Emotional Blackmail. At its lowest level it's insidious and it's not nice. 

It has been criticised as an up-market wet T-Shirt contest but frankly from what I've seen that's more wishful thinking than any reality. If watching over-weight men running around a lawn squealing like teenage girls who've seen spider gets you off then go for it.

The ALSA funds stem-cell research - I make no moral judgement on that but some people do. If the message had been "pour a bucket of ice water over your head to raise money for stem-cell research" I suspect considerably fewer people would have participated and certainly none of the c-list celebrities eager for free publicity would have associated themselves with it quite so eagerly. 

The research the ALSA funds inevitably involves vivisection, animal experimentation and animal testing, again I make no moral judgement here, it is impossible to research motor neuron diseases without having a functioning nervous system to experiment on. It is an unpleasant reality for some people but a reality just the same. Pamela Anderson has famously declined the challenge on these grounds and good for her. Animal rights supporter Ricky Gervais was criticised for not taking the challenge, then criticised again when he did - damned if you do and damned if you don't.

The ALSA has countered both these claims by stating that donors can stipulate that their money is not to be used for either of these areas of research but that is an empty promise, if you pay money into a central fund that spends 10% of that on stem-cell research and animal experimentation then 10% of every donation is used for that purpose, it is impossible for it not to. By the same logic it is impossible to donate money to a large charity without paying for the administration costs involved in running it, this includes the salaries of the directors and CEOs of these charities some of whom are paid comparable salaries to the directors and CEOs of any large corporation. However, the major portion of the funds raised go to the care of people suffering from this horrible disease, the importance of this cannot be stressed enough.

Professor Stephen Hawking has suffered with ALS/MND for the past 51 years, I doubt that any able-bodied person can fully comprehend the challenges facing ALS/MND sufferers and the challenges their carers face every day. He supports the Ice Bucket Challenge, he was unable to partake of the challenge because of his health so his children took the challenge for him.