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We live in an era of frivolity and venality; when the few true misfortunes of our age are exaggerated and our society boldly strides forth into decadence with all the confidence of a blindfolded man walking onto a gallows.
***
I was talking to a friend of mine at the company. He knew this character named Dan Zwirn.
Dan Zwirn was once a hotshot hedge fund manager, whose fund blew up and went through SEC-forced liquidation because of a procedural mistake involving less than one percent of his fund's assets (basically a small bit of cookie jar raiding to fund a private jet.)
Even so, his assets didn't have a lot of losses... mainly because, it was later found out, a lot of his shit was so illiquid and crazy mismarked that there was no way to figure out how much it was really worth. Now it's a little harder to unload those assets in one of the worst credit crises to hit in the past half-century. This is in spite of the fact that a lot of the assets are still producing revenues--those crazy cds's and bonds are still chuggin along... it's just that the baby needs to be shat out with the bathwater.
Well, anyhow, apparently, my friend was telling me about how this was the greatest tragedy he'd seen--how Dan was a really dedicated guy, how Dan really doesn't deserve this, how those assets were still good, hence this was unfair, how it was like a greek tragedy, yadda yadda.
Here's a reality check.
A real fucking greek tragedy is when you die, not when you have to sell your Learjet and Park Avenue penthouse.
Seriously. Sometimes I think the world needs a war, an epic war, to teach all the noobs that walk and breathe a lesson. A lesson about greatness, that mediocrity and venality are in the end, vices and not virtues, as much as Lil' Jon may try to teach us otherwise.
You wanna hear a real story of tragedy? Read about the story of man men who killed his their own brother(s) in the Irish Civil War, or the family that saw all of its male members die in China's forgotten Stalingrad, the
Second Battle of Changsha in the Sino-Japanese War. Or how about Mary Lincoln, a slaveholder who saw her male blood relatives killed by the civil war through starvation (a nephew), disease and bad medical care (a nephew and a cousin), shot in battle (a son and a nephew), or assassinated (a husband.) And not all for the Union either.
My anime friends watch Naruto and cry. Seriously, it's a fucking ANIME. NOT REAL LIFE. You want real sadness, go talk to the black cop that became a cop because his best friend got shot when he was thirteen. Yea. I was talking to this friend I met lately, Officer Cameron of the Chicago Police Department. He's watched colleagues die in the line of duty, gunned down by some maniac wielding a gun and high on PCP. Officer Cameron was shot three months ago, but he's now recovered--and guess what--is back to patrolling a precinct with an even higher crime rate.
And yet, when I crack open the Wall Street Journal, all I see is how some debtholders are bitching that they can't get private-market rates from the government bailout of their bankrupt company. You know what, big fucking deal, if it wasn't for Uncle Sam you'd be shitting yourself at 14 cents on the dollar, now you're complaing that you're getting 65 instead of 70. Wow! Go suck a cock.
I'm sure that we'd all be happier if the Fed just shut up about maintaining a currency that actually stored value instead of acting as injections of adrenaline into a heart attack patient, and pumped money at negative interest rates into the economy to keep the US version of Nipponese zombie companies alive (Linens 'n Things, I'm talking about you.)
Oh WAIT! It's already happening. The collective bitching of the 15% of the economy that does nothing but shuffle financial paper around has hijacked the rest of the economy, but I guess it doesn't matter since finance was the #1 avenue of job creation in the US from 2000-2008.
Our civilization is cluttered with so much fake deadwood. It's time to get rid of the bullshit. We need a fucking war. Balls out war, none of that treaty bullshit, fight until the unconditional surrender, with all the big powers lined up like siege tanks in a row blasting away at each other.
/rant
 
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konadora
Singapore66364 Posts
Who the fuck watches Naruto and cry?
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If we have a war I hope you die first 
For a rant about people needing reality checks, you sure seem to need a reality check on what you're calling for 
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On June 16 2009 15:20 blue_arrow wrote:
my life is average
I just got my degree in statistics. ;_;
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On June 16 2009 15:21 Ellis wrote:I just got my degree in statistics. ;_;
hah
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sometimes i think kids like you need to join the military and see what war, or at least the training for it, is like before you pop off
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So, we are bad people if we haven't suffered a tragedy?
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You have not thought this through enough.
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lol
People don't need a tragedy. They don't honestly think their lives are so bad, they just whine and complain because they want a better situation and whining and complaining works in our system. And because people often aren't smart enough to actually do something a little more useful about their problems.
And honestly, I don't know what wars you've lived through but I would never wish that upon anyone.
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Awful troll is terrible. 4/10 for creativity, though :D
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I'm sorry but the first thing i have to say is: Like you would know.
Talk to my father about this, he was around during the war that absorbed and literally destroyed his country (Dalmatia). It simply isn't there anymore. Hell, 8/10 people living in that small country were killing in the 50's-70's. Your life isn't so bad, you're just now realising that everything isn't perfect. Hell, i've helped lay down telephone line in the small town where i was born. The old line got destroyed by shelling. Honestly, you're life isn't so bad. Go back to being a worker bee and ignoring the futility of human life. (/Counter rant)
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On June 16 2009 15:20 Trumpet wrote:If we have a war I hope you die first For a rant about people needing reality checks, you sure seem to need a reality check on what you're calling for
phael.
im always down for a war against the n00bz.
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On June 16 2009 15:38 SirKibbleX wrote:
Awful troll is terrible. 4/10 for creativity, though :D
At least now you have some good copypasta to troll some other communities with.
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How the fuck do you know what real life is? How the fuck do you know that anime isn't more real than this thing you call reality?
Just some shit to think about while you think you know something. If anyone ever says they are smart they are fucking stupid. It's because a smart person will realize they know so very little.
Don't sit up on a pedestal and judge people. That is something someone who bitches and complains would do.
I know this is hypocritical, but I am very much so that.
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Not sure where you are getting your history.
Or how about Mary Lincoln, a slaveholder who saw her male blood relatives killed by the civil war through starvation (a nephew), disease and bad medical care (a nephew and a cousin), shot in battle (a son and a nephew), or assassinated (a husband.)
Only one of the Lincoln's sons died during the Civil War - at age 11, and not in battle. The assertion that she was a slaveholder isn't really backed up anywhere either (her father was though). Also a husband isn't really a blood relative, unless there's some incest involved 
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You don't have to have war to be an ultimate badass king of reality. I'm sure a lot of people share your angst about modern society, but I don't think many people would agree that everyone killing eachother is a valid solution the problem.
In our reality, things are, when attempted to be objectively judged, "really pussyass weak". But they seem so gripping and intense because our brains do not work objectively, they work relatively, and relative to an average kid's day in school, something on naruto can be pretty intense.
Personally I think that trying to look at anything from an objective standpoint is never going to yield a meaningful analysis, because any objective solid ground we find is just something we made up to begin with.
That said, I agree that the world as we know it is too watered down, and I'd genuinely appreciate it if some scary, epic, and romanticized shit went down. The trick is that we have to realize that all we really have to work with in our experience on earth is our experience on earth, and we can control our own experiences. We can make them more intense.
One time, I went backpacking, and my friends and I ran down a steep and rocky stream in freezing rain and sang an impromptu song about being badasses. It was really intense compared to the rest of our lives, and so we laughed and felt strongly about it. We didn't bother to think about how much cooler it would have been if there were orcs chasing us and we had to carry the princess, who was unconscious and bleeding to death, because that would ruin the fun.
Life is as intense as you want it to be. If you want it to be more intense, just blatantly break some laws and refuse to let the police touch you. It'l be just like in the movies, I promise........
Plus, just an aside, modern war sucks. I press a button, and somebody dies. I press a bigger button, and a million people die. I make a trade agreement, and a billion people are forced below the poverty line. Weeeeak.
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EPT
