Fuck me... I bunk off for a week and come back to arguments and accusations and worrying flirtations... Value... how do you define value?... is this some tory "value for money" idea by which they would seek to inflict further cuts to our already fucked public services?... But I digress... Perhaps we should talk about expectations... what do we expect of our nurses (and other health professionals)?... we expect them to make us better when we are ill... nothing complicated there, eh?... after all, the human body is an incredibly simple organism... if things get bad to the extent that we require a stay in hospital, we expect them to ensure that we are well looked after in an environment that is clean and are provided with nutritious food in addition to first class medical treatment... we want our health professionals to ensure that we are comfortable and free from pain... we want them to provide us with emotional support, especially if we find ourselves facing a difficult and possibly terminal condition... extremely simple if you ask me... And what do we not want?... we don't want to be human... because to be human means you make mistakes... no, we expect them to be superhuman... to be perfect... and if they are not, we'll just sue them, eh?... And for all these expectations, we are happy to see them rewarded with a genrally poor level of financial security... Contrast this with our expectations of our topless models?... we expect them to have big tits... and to show these big tits to us on a regular basis... and preferably in a variety of interesting ways... we expect them to appear in the tabloids on an almost daily basis with stories of the type of excess and abandon that we would love to fill the vacuum of our empty lives... we want them to be visual symbols of perfection (thanks to surgical enhancement) but we prefer them to be intellectually empty... and for this, we will read about their lives day after day and sacrifice huge slices of time to worship them from afar through the church of the holy television... we want to fool ourselves that we wake up one day and find our dull and worthless lives have been magically transformed into theirs... or at the very least, we want to fool ourselves into thinking we could fuck them... And what do we not want from them?... oh, taste and decency perhaps... And for all these expectations, we are happy for them for them to be rewarded with obscene levels of riches and fame... Yup... thinking about it, I think our society has just about got it right... Fly...
That's exactly what I asked I was thinking about it in a utilitarian way ... "the greatest happiness for the greatest number". It's not necessarily as straightforward as simply saying that nurses are valuable to society while nude celebrities are not... It is, after all, us, within the confines of our system, who choose to reward footballers and models in this way. Clearly we have a need for people like this in our lives - if the demand was not there, they wouldn't exist. Arguably they enrich our lives and fulfill a deep need we have. Also, Abi's career as a celebrity will probably be rather short-lived, but in that short time she will enrich people's lives on a huge scale. Compare this to nursing which for many is a lifetime vocation.
yeah the world is corrupt but aslong as we are true to ourselves and not societies view then i guess thats all we can really do!
:X That's a very neo-conservative free-market capatalist way of looking at it... supply and demand... there is a demnd for vacuus celebrity culture so we supply that demand according to the laws of free-market economics... so, if we find there is a demand for readily available prostitution, we should supply that demand without considering the potential implications for our society?... we should allow MacDonald's to continue to supply poor nutritional quality food because of the demand for it... we should continue to supply arms as long as there is a demand for them... we should continue to rape the planet's resources for oil because of the continued demand for it... Just because something is popular does not always mean that it is good... Fly...
That is a perceptive overview of what is happening, yeah. On the question of what we "should" do, it depends how restrictive of people's freedoms you want to be, and in what image you want to shape society. There's a clear case for restricting freedoms when the activity in question actually harms people - you could make this case in all the areas you mention above. I'm not sure you could say that celebrity culture is as deleterious as the other things to which you compare it though. People have always needed idols to worship; now instead of dedicating our lives to Jesus we dedicate our lives to David Beckham and treat celebrities with the reverence which would previously have been reserved for other kinds of cultural or symbolic leaders. This seems to indicate that the activity of worship is more important than the actual content of the ideas being revered. This is the way our society has developed... should we ban people from being shallow?
Well... here is a point that tears me in seperate directions... I believe in the fundamental importance of liberty and freedom... the freedom to decide what to do with your life... my anarchist feelings say we should abolish all forms of control... however, I don't believe that it is possible to move from a capatalist system straight into an anarchist way of living... it would take a world-wide socialist system a long time to undo the psychological effects of capatalist life... I'm tempted to say "yes"... I would hope that we could educate people to take an interest in deeper things... however, how is it possible to achieve that when education itself as been dumbed down?... Perfect system of control, don't you think?... By the way, I agree 100% with your comment about the nature of worship... "Hello" magazine is the new Bible... maybe that makes Abi Titmus the new Virgin Mary?... Fly...
