I guess we're back here again...
To re-iterate soapbox rules:
You have one (you hear me? ONE) topic you're allowed to rant about, and it can be as serious or non-serious as you'd like it to be: Idiot NBC cancelling Community? Idiot Fox cancelling Almost Human? The Keystone pipeline environmental pros/cons? The poke rims fad in Texas could be good for society? Or maybe you don't think the Universe is expanding but losing mass?
As usual, if your rant involves a complaint of some sort, post your proposed solutions!
Communal living: Used to be really into the idea, but I've been extremely burned by it over the past year.
"In theory" it works. Pool money, buy bulk, "we own it", happy smiling faces:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~atwu/firstcultural/domes/savethedomes_566x800.jpg
In practice? Social structures develop, your problems become everyone's problems, the "cool members" bring corruption with them, any sort of accountability is absent, and people end up building a bubble in which they become ignorant of the realities outside their community.
It's charming to see years upon years of people's afternoon projects become permanent fixtures of a house, but the beer bottles, the plates of rotten food, the fire hazards, the leaking pipes, and the rats start to erode those feelings when they become a part of your daily life.
OK mine. Kraftwerk. I get that they're crazy pioneers of live electronica/techno, and I respect them a ton, but I just don't get how people can go so insanely crazy over them. Is it just a nostalgia thing? In my opinion, their music has not aged well in any way. I would love to hear from fans of Kraftwerk about why they love Kraftwerk. Especially if there are fans of them who are under the age of 30. Other groups around in the 70s like Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), Tangerine Dream, or Jean Michel Jarre, I can totally get into. Just not Kraftwerk. Not a single song.
I have a feeling that the way older people feel about Kraftwerk is the same as the way I feel about (older) Underworld circa late 80s/early 90s, e.g. ~dubnobasswithmyheadman. I wonder what kids these days would think of that Underworld album.
Hippies
Problem: They're the most judgmental and close-minded people out there. I was once at a David Grisman Quintet concert in Bozeman MT. It's not really my style of music but I became engrossed in it and neared the stage and stood to watch/listen. A young hippy girl spun all around me and said, "If you're not gonna dance man you should just leave." I've never been so annoyed by another person at a show. She makes my skin crawl to this day. My response, "I'm actually listening."
Hippies tend to listen to a small handful of bands/artists but in heavy rotation and are, despite popular opinion less open minded than most.
Solution: Hippies, stop sucking. thenewgreen, stop generalizing.
I'd like to tell you a story about two siblings from a working-class family.
One was an older female. She hated where she lived, saw nothing for her, and got out. She was law-abiding, conscientious, a good student, and she went to college, got her bachelor's degree, worked three jobs every summer to pay for it, and then got a master's degree. She got married at 36 and had a (planned) kid.
One was a younger male. He didn't apply himself, barely got through high school, never had an honest job in his life, sold pot, had dealings with the local Mafia, got married at 19, and made money off of suing people for petty accidents and falsely claiming injury.
The older female is my mother. The younger male I do not consider family at all and is currently all over the place with an opiate addiction and calls my mother about three times a day, every day, and is despondent about his life and his decisions. His son, who is as stupid as he is and has $20,000 dollars in debt for going to a fucking mechanic school instead of maybe having near zero student loans for going to community college and getting a real, four-year bachelor's degree and actually getting educated, has started physically abusing him. His wife, who is also as much of a stupid, uneducated fool as he is, can't fucking figure out how opiate addiction works and thinks it doesn't have a physiological component to it.
The moral of this story, I guess, is that I get really pissed off when I hear other upper-middle-class, college-educated left-wingers like myself talk about the working class like they aren't participants in making their lives shitty and like they're Blameless Angelic Martyrs for the Evil Elites, and the solution is to make education and mental health care accessible to everybody. I think people who oppose nationalized healthcare and universal access to higher education are goddamned short-sighted, egocentric scum.
EDIT: And someone on here will unleash holy hell on me for supposedly being a classist, but at some point opposition to classism turned into the non-racist equivalent of the Noble Savage trope.