What is your LATEST obsession/special interest

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Latest special interest? Mine changes fairly regularly, sometimes on a weekly or even daily basis. It usually has something to do with music I like or one of my stories I'm working on. Today/tonight, it's the music of Celldweller. I've been listening to Klayton's commentary tracks about his latest album, and paying attention to how he uses different elements in his music in order to learn more and improve my own music.

Minecraft.

Ballet Oh, just reading about it and listening to the music and stuff. I gave it up years ago, I don't dance. It's a very new obsession, actually, and I'm not v. consumed by it yet! Plus la Belle Epoque, for a while now.

And, suddenly, German again! More than ever. Grammar more than other stuff...nothing is more peaceful than memorising tables and copying things out of a grammar book and seeing it all fall into place...not sure it's an obsession though, at all. More a perkiness

I'm starting to find it amusing how when i post in a thread, everyone evacuates.

{Sound of Niall cracking head off keyboard}

Raj, if I see racism, I'll challenge it. I'll be the first to agree that Mel Gibson is an anti-semite (I would use stronger words, but I don't want to get banned), and when Passion of the the Christ came out, I did challenge it.

Adolf Hitler did not just read about Germanic history. He did and said things that were clearly racist.

Personally, I see no issue with reading up on Zulu history. The reason I haven't is because I haven't got round to it, not because I think it wouldn't be interesting. The same cannot be said of Indian, Chinese, pre- and post Columbian American history and several others, including, yes, pre- and post Christian European history. There are records of great achievements in all of them, just as there are records of vile brutality in all of them. Sadly there are too many good books around to read all of them.

That said, when someone calls European history "trash" (your word), then I will cry racism.

Calling European history "trash" is racist.

How would you react if someone described your history and culture as "trash"? You would, probably righly, conclude they were racist.

European history is no more trash than is the history of any other part of the world or group of people. Are we to ignore our history? Are we to forget our mistakes and thus be more likely to repeat them?

European history most certainly is full of more trash than any other history. Let me count the ways. Colonialism and brutal opression in India, colonialism and hooking millions on opium in China, Enslaving, beating and subjigating millions of Africans, murdering six million Jews, racially cleansing America of Native Americans, Apartheid and racial opression in South Africa, Segregation and abuse of African Americans in America, the brutal murder opression and erradication of Aborginals in Australia, atomic bombs on Japan, brutal opression and murder in South America, slaughter of thousands of Muslims during the crusades, slaughter of thousands of Jews during the inquisition, and on and on and on AND ON! How you can sit there and smugly say European history is not trash and manage to keep a straight face? In fact, European history is not just trash, it is just plain evil, as are 99% of whites. The rest of the world may have some feuds here and there, but whites are the only ones comitting these kinds of atrocities over and over and over. The white man is without question absolutely disagreeable to get along with. The sooner your kind are wiped off this damn planet the sooner the rest of us can get on living in peace. For thousands of years we have tried over and over and over to live peacfully beside you, but without fail you have stabbed us in the back and put your foot on our head. I do not want non-whites 2000 years in the future still facing this same white problem we are having to deal with today. Don't want them to have to be facing it even 10 years in the future! THE SOONER THE WORLD CAN GET RID OF YOU THE BETTER!! ! Shake you off like a bad case of fleas and never look back, I cannot wait for that day. We are finally starting to rise up and say NO MORE. So go ahead and study your precious white history, because that is exactly what you are, HISTORY!! !! !!

I will not debate further wth someone so clearly racist, who ignores atrocities committed by humans other than white European ones in the name of hatred of one particular group.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? Rwanda? Africans selling other Africans as slaves? The ongoing disgrace to a great civilisation that is India's caste system? The Japanese occupation of China? The ongoing occupation of Tibet by China?

The problem does not lie with "whites", whoever they might be (most Jews, for instance, look white to me!). The problem lies with human beings.

Raj62, you sound like Hitler in your desire to exterminate one particular group. This makes you a racist.

Last edited by Niall on 11 Mar 2011, 4:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

Mine is my job

My current interest is my Weatherstar 4000 project I'm working on. I currently have it working and operating with the satellite feed but my goal is to have it operate without the satellite feed. A Weatherstar 4000 is a custom graphics generator that generates the graphics and weather data to be displayed during the local forecast on the Weather Channel. It is installed in the cable headend and is connected to a c band satellite dish antenna and videocipherII receiver.

squidoo!

squidoo!

You just named ONE thing each various group has done, while whites have literally done THOUSANDS, Basically opressed and slaughtered every other people on earth at one time or another. The Khmer Rouge and Rawanda were bad, but who propogated the political ideology that was driving them, who manufactured the guns they used to kill each other, who profitted from the violence by supplying both sides and then stealing all the commodoties??... Whites!!

The caste system in India was begun by white nomads who wandered down from the north. Its original design was to segregate the white "elite" from darker skinned locals like myself. The Japanese occupied China to copy the European example. They figured the only way they could beat whites was to beat them at their own game, so took up colonialism even though it was not in their nature. Japan is now peacefull, admitting the error of their actions, while European nations still are ruthlessly opressing and exploiting those in the third world.

And the Chinese occupation of Tibet is unfortunate, but it pales in comparisson to the British occupation of India, Spanish occupation of Latin America, and the white genocide against the Native Americans in North America. How you can even compare the two is incredibly insulting and is yet another example of how whites try to pass the buck when confronted about their numerous crimes.

Africans selling Africans I won't even dignify with an answer. Not sure what you mean when you say "Africans selling Africans", Africans were not baught, they were CAUGHT and dragged by their white captors back to slave ships where they would be stacked like boxes on top of each other in the ship's "cargo" hold. And was it Africans sailing the slave ships to Africa and catching Africans by the millions to drag back to America to work to death? Of course not! You need to read about history because clearly you don't have a clue. When whites caught slaves in Africa, any members of the African family who were not strong enough to work were murdered. Any Africans they caught who were educated and could read were murdered. If they tried to escape they were murdered, if they cried in pain they were beaten. Little girls were routinely murdered because it would cost too much to raise them to an age where they coud be used to "breed" more slaves. And if they weren't murdered outright, then they were used as child sex slaves on the ships then as sex slaves for the "masters" in America, and if they refused guess what happened to them, you guessed it, they were MURDERED. I find your willfull ignorance on this and other issues to be incredibly insulting and degrading to the memory of the victims. First thing you need to do is get an education, and the second thing is go kill yourself, because that sort of hate based ignroance has no place in our modern world.

After ALL these things, six million killed in the holocaust, millions of Africans enslaved and murdered, Millions of people in the third world still working as slaves to supply fat white nations, you have the audacity to call me racist because I object? As I said before, we have tried to live in peace with you, but all you do is turn us into slaves. The white scourge on this earth must end NOW! I have six children and I intend to make sure they will not grow up suffering this same racial opression and abuse we are all experiencing now the world over thanks to you. To quote The Matrix: "I know that you're afraid... you're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible, a world without you!"

The Mortal Engines Quartet (AKA The Hungry Cities Chronicles) by Philip Reeve. I'm also going to look into other books in the steampunk genre of fiction.

My vast CD collection
My health
Easy ways to make money
Japan
My niece

Racism at that level, is it really significant? One does not (or at least I don't) choose my interests, they just come naturally, and forcing myself to study something that isn't naturally interesting to me would be torture, even if it might sound potentially interesting. I just have to wait and hope that someday it will become a true interest. And there are many things I hope that for, and I am interested in so few things at a time and they rarely change too radically. It is a shame, I'd like to be more diverse in my interests, but as of now, it wouldn't come naturally to me. To me, it usually is a certain aesthetic that I am interested in at a time, and not few things are truly within that.
Perhaps then it would racist then to only be interested in white cultures' history at a time, but is it so bad? The person might acknowledge that the history of non-white cultures is just as worthy as that of white ones, and that it might be just as interesting, if not more, were he to delve into it. That does not equal actual motivation, even if one wished so.

Perhaps I am a racist then, to admit that I probably have been affected to some degree by what information the world has fed me? For having formed atmospheres around different things, unconciously mostly, due to such information, which was probably prejudiced in different degrees. Some of it would be stereotypical and racist, some of it more true to reality, but all of it would affect a little some unconciously formed atmosphere, feeling, around a concept. Whether one likes it or not, whether one wants or not, I believe that this happens all the time, to everyone, even if they try to deny being affected. Even if someone knows and truly believes that all different kinds of people are equal, they might aesthetically prefer one to the other (be it in culture, appearance, language...). As in, one might not find an indian people as attractive in general as the japanese (example). They might find them more pleasing to the eye, and it'd be wholly subjective. Like they'd prefer them as romantic/sexual partners. A matter of taste. I wouldn't call it racist, I would call it taste, unless this preference would lead to actual prejudiced beliefs.

But, this is all a matter of definition. And I am a very unintelligent, irrational person, and I loathe to think how most of this probably doesn't even make any sense. I hope this didn't offend anyone that was NOT THE INTENTION. I do not believe in different kinds of people being unequal. But I DO have matters of taste. No human males are attractive. Some aliens/fantasy races are, but they do not exist. Human females of any "race" (I don't know what would be the correct word here? Surely they're not actually different races.) have a chance to be beautiful, but white women have been in general more attractive to me.
I do NOT believe the different kinds of people are objectively more beautiful/ugly than others. I DO believe for different people, subjectively, some people appear more beautiful than others. (And I've seriously got sidetracked, talking about subjective tastes when it comes to beauty in humans >_> )
I believe it's not racist to SUBJECTIVELY prefer one "race" to another, acknowledging it is not an universal truth, just a taste of their own.
I believe it IS racist to believe some "races" are OBJECTIVELY superior to others.
Call me a racist if you will, but these tastes can't be conciously changed. At least, I can't.

I'm probably clueless here.
Again, I do not mean to offend. Sorry if I somehow did. And I picked those nationalities earlier at random.
Sorry for the million grammatical mistakes I surely made. Feel free to correct me, I would like to learn. Some of them might have been accidental, careless mistakes, some the result of actual ignorance.

And perhaps the person interested in the religions of the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Vikings prior to christianity is racist. How'd I know? I don't know the person.

I tend to have a small handful of special interests but, at the moment it tends to be video games or the evolution of them from the days of the old Atari to modern pc and consoles included..