cookie-cutter comments

Oh, check this out! I saw that here.

I just have to join in! Talk about being an unthinking lemming! Bah, who cares!

Xiaxue laments that no one’s defending her. This from a person who regularly snips comments from her blog because she doesn’t agree with them. That’s all well and good, but to call for sympathy and then disable comments is like… I don’t know. Stupid? Silly? Eh, how are people supposed to show support if you don’t even allow damn comments?!
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On the job I see this. Unassuming, normal, a little dirty but what can you expect from a workshop, eh?
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It must be all well and good to sympathize with the victims of tragedies, and in my more cynical moments, I wonder at how people can pour their hearts out in response to such lyrically “beautiful” disasters. They evoke the sentiments, the feelings. It would be a blanket observation to say that we all commiserate with heart-felt words and then dismiss the whole thing with a whisk of the keyboard, or the errant remote control.
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Mills on the tyranny of the majority, from On Liberty, is quoted below. I think they present a pertinent, existing problem with majorities and such, in reference to discussions in my previous post. Tangentially related, perhaps? Maybe not.

“But the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place. On questions of social morality, of duty to others, the opinion of the public, that is, of an overruling majority, though often wrong, is likely to be still oftener right; because on such questions they are only required to judge of their own interests; of the manner in which some mode of conduct, if allowed to be practised, would affect themselves.
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