You know what bugs me, or more accurately, do you know what bugs me today? It's the Ideological Pretentiousness Syndrome (IPS) that infests some peoples' intellects. This peculiar disease is characterized by this person's uncanny ability to easily annoy others with the constant haughty expounding their pet cause. Most often people of college age are stricken with IPS, since they have just enough education to be dangerous, kind of like a drunken chimp with a loaded shotgun. Fortunately, they usually grow out of it once they get real jobs and realize that they don't know shit. Sometime, though, they don't. That's when they're REALLY irritating.
"Wait a minute," shouts the hippie chick wearing a "I'm a love child of Karl Marx" T-shirt, "you're the most ideologically pretentious person we know, always telling us what to think!"
I kindly tell her to sit down and toke up, which she does. You just have to know how to deal with these people.
Anyway, the difference between me and someone with IPS is that I'll never hold a position that I cannot prove either through direct evidence or through impeccable logic. I'm also willing to hear new evidence, and when faced with contradictory facts, I'll readily switch sides or officially move to "neutral". People with IPS don't do that, since they've defined themselves by the adherence to their cause of choice.
Also, I don't make a point of identifying my politics or beliefs to just anybody, nor do I get a superiority charge from them. That's right, people with IPS typically look down smugly at those heathen masses who haven't jumped on their boat, and as such, are either not interested in converts at all or desire only drones as mindless as they. After all, if everyone agreed with them, who would they have to look down on?
An excellent example is some guy I had this displeasure of communicating with over the Internet recently. This knucklehead said in his profile that he has "no great love for the American monoculture" and has since moved to Japan. The ol' "everything that's American sucks and everything that's not is cool" mentality is nothing more than a cheap way to feel superior to everybody else. American monoculture indeed! We're a lot more polycultural than, say JAPAN. What does an Arizona cattle rancher have in common with a Maine lobster fisher? What does an inner-city Miami Cuban refugee have in common with a Virginian old-money debutante? That idiot has obviously never stepped outside his hometown.
For my own part, I find the tendency for some people to cling to irrational and sometimes insane beliefs rather then use their friggin' BRAINS annoying. They certainly don't have to agree with me, but they should be able to back it up with common sense and evidence! After all, there are certainly a lot of gray areas where there are not for sure correct answers, and a lot of things are value calls. That's all cool, but they have to actually make use of that mushy gray thing in your head.
Of course, if you're a fan of Marx, then you're automatically an imbecile. Just so you know.
