There are some topics about which one frequently hears people say “I am so sick of X”. In fact one hears that so much that there is far more discussion of people being sick of X than there is actually X, whatever X is.
Two that come to mind for me are:
(1) The 1972 Miami Dolphins. So so many people in Super Bowl threads mentioned their violent hatred for them and their purported champagne toasts when the last undefeated team is beaten each year, and incessant coverage of said toasts, etc. But, at least from my perspective, I wasted far more minutes of my life (albeit still a fairly small amount) hearing/reading people complain about wasting minutes of THEIR lives hearing about the 72 Dolphins than I did hearing about the 72 Dolphins.
Persecution of Wiccans and other neopagan types. I know most of y’all are not in this target audience, but I just gotta vent. This is a collective of people that have made up their (our) history whole cloth, and yet we still choose to invent a past in which we were the persecuted. There’s a martyr’s complex epidemic, and I’m so bloody sick of hearing about people afraid to wear a pentacle to work. Fuck you, people! Fuck you for buying into the paranoia and not having the courage to stand up where your hypothetical ancestors burned for their faith. If it’s such a noble thing to do that you have to invent it to justify your religion, then shouldn’t you be making the same sacrifice you so admire? There are, what, a dozen incidents nationwide annually that ever make the papers - of job and school discrimination, not hangings and burnings! Thousands of us practice completely openly, and you’re afraid of having a bottle of bath salts out when your mother in law comes over? Have some godsdamned pride in yourself and what you believe it and tell her to shove it if she’s got a problem with it, Sister!
There is WAY more complaining about “discrimination” against Wiccans than there is actual discrimination against Wiccans. *Way *more.
I think I love you, WhyNot. If only I’d met your kind of Wiccan first instead of the… other sort, maybe I wouldn’t have this irrational antipathy towards them.
I offer up Fred Phelps. He’s pitted oh so regularly here, when he’s the world’s most marginal figure, with zero following. So why are we obsessing about him again?
True. I hadn’t even heard of him until I came here. (Of course, I live under a rock with very little TV exposure.) He doesn’t seem to make the news sites I generally read.
Not that he doesn’t deserve the vitriol I’ve seen here, but sheesh, you guys do seem to have a hard-on for that guy.
It’s funny you should mention political correctness. When I was in college, the campus was wildly obsessed with racism. The way some people went on about it, you’d think there was a cross burning there every week. However, there was very little actual racism manifested on campus.
Oh, gods, I know! There are a whole lot of them who make me cringe and make me wish they weren’t on “my side” sometimes.
The thing is, we are as subject to confirmation bias as anyone. For every 4 inch ankh wearing eyeliner smearing rats nest hair sister of the spice rack you’ve ever met, there are three perfectly “normal” women (or men) going to their corporate jobs, their teaching jobs, their secretarial jobs, whatever, who you’d never guess was a neopagan.
Just as I try to remind myself that not every Christian is represented by Phelps, not every Muslim by those who stone rape victims, and not every Jew by the Pharisees, maybe you could try to remind yourself that not every neopagan is batshit insane.
Yes, but they don’t come off so nice in the Christian Bible, being the ones who pressured Pilate to kill Jesus and all*. The word has come to mean something fairly negative in the eyes of non-Jews:
My point being that there are gazillions of Jewish people with gazillions of approaches to their religion, not just the strict observers of Mosaic law OR hypocritically self-righteous people.
*unless my rigorous Biblical study in the form of listening to Jesus Christ Superstar 8 bajillion times in high school has failed me
My impression is that Wicca attracts people who want a persecution complex. That of course doesn’t make it unique among religions. A lot of young Christians seem energized by the idea that society is against them.
I dated a Wiccan once so I when she went to the local pagan club house (I kid you not) I’d go along. There was a big mural painted on the front window depicting the “burning times” and plenty of conversations about how evil Baptist were.
There’s more complaining about “strident angry man-hating feminists” than there are feminists, period. (Hell, there might be more people complaining about that than there are women. Ok, maybe not.)
Every holiday season, there is way more complaining about complaining about people saying “Merry Christmas” than there is actual complaining about people saying “Merry Christmas”.
The High Priest and the Sanhedrin who allegedly turned Jesus over to Pilate were mostly Sadducees, not Pharisees.
Also, the depiction of both the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees in the the New Testament is a deliberate distortion and villification and is not an accurate presentation of what they were like.
