Random Thoughts & Annoyances

If you've been reading IMHO, you know I can get a little verbose. To cater to those with a short attention spans, I try to correct that here. I keep collecting ideas I want to comment on, but never seem to get around it. I might do better if I simply post a few thoughts as they occur to me and as time permits. Your comments and feedback are welcome. Or add your own pet peeves and annoyances.

What's bugging me now? So very much stuff it would take a three volume book to cover it all. Here's today's short list: TV commercials and serious abuse... of my native language!

• Advertising
  
  Prescription drugs Assuming you pay any attention to these commercials at all, you may have noticed that there are about fifteen seconds of happy people--pain-free, sleeping well, leaping out of bed ready to conquer the world! The other forty-five  seconds are warnings about possible side effects. Personally, I'd rather live with my stuffy nose than trade it in for nosebleeds, indigestion, constipation, and occasional thoughts of suicide or... the possibility of bleeding to death unexpectedly (not that any of us expect to suddenly and for no apparent reason, just fall down on the floor and bleed to death)!
  
  My sister had two close-call bleeding-to-death episodes from two different NSAID drugs. If her husband hadn't been home when they happened, she would have died years earlier than she did. Think I'm gonna try those drugs? No way.
  
  
  Know why those makeup ads always show beautiful women who look like they're fifteen?

The Dark Side of Political Correctness

What follows is basically a lead-in or preface to my next article, a rant about my efforts to understand what’s happening in the world and how we got where we are today. Some stuff I’ve learned has either led me to some (possibly) weird or hair-brained conspiracy theories. As a consequence, I’m trying to be rational and base my information on not-easily-verified but interesting information from outside sources.

The article below was first published on Helium.com on May 24, 2008 under my Helium pen name.

Political Correctness Gone Wrong

by Sondra Deuber, May 2008 [lightly edited in 2011]

Here's a purely rhetorical questions: how can something that was wrong from the start go wrong? Political correctness was never a good idea, but the ramifications are either worse than its creators ever dreamed or (heaven forbid!) it's exactly what they had in mind from the beginning.

According to Philip Atkinson, "Political Correctness (PC) is the communal tyranny that erupted in the 1980s. It was a spontaneous declaration that particular ideas, expressions and behavior, which were then legal, should be forbidden by law, and people who transgressed should be punished."

Mr. Atkinson points out that freedom of choice and freedom of speech are the community's safeguards against tyranny and states