Thread: Certain
View Single Post
Old 10-20-2013, 10:16 PM   #14
oats
Steel Cut
 
oats's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2013
Posts: 5,084
Battle Record: 19-10

Accomplishments
- OM HOF (2x)

Champed
- Fight Night LXXXIV
- Art of Writing League

Rep Power: 79005428
oats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant futureoats has a brilliant future
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Darth Yoda View Post
Answered good enough. Now, just one more thing to ask you, sorry to make this an interrogation -I'm just genuinely curious. You made it evident in your last statement, but I wanted to make sure. Is someone who abides by a certain respectable morale and goes to work, helps out, blah blah, does this mean they contributed? To you atleast. Also, if someone creates light bulbs and creates a light bulb that is economical, and cost efficient, would this fall under that certain group of 'great, determined, world changing people'?
Definitely not. I was going to address this in my previous post because it's an expected response to my little diatribes, but I felt my post was already getting too long.

But no. Even though I'm referencing/alluding to massive, sweeping changes, I don't believe that is the path for the majority of people. It is just as important for people to be cogs in the wheel - they are the ones who allow great changes to happen. Someone can build a car that runs off of farts and gets 100MPG with no emissions etc etc, but you need people to produce those cars, service them, sell them, and so on.

That being said, I truly believe we're at a unique junction in history, where the world is changing so much faster than we are able to keep up with, as individuals and societies. As a result, I think we need people to question why they are working the way they are. I'll give you another example.

When I was working for a state representative in 2010-2011, I dealt with/wrote a lot of legal documents. I'm a good writer - I have a degree in it, and wrote people's papers in college for them for extra money. But I was apparently the worst legal writer ever (at first). Why? Because I wrote things with the intention of simplifying and clarifying, to trim the fat so people could actually understand what the fuck the document said. This, however, is not how things are supposed to be written. I needed to use weird syntax, specific phrases, and all sorts of templates that muddied the actual content. When questioned about why this was necessary, I was only told that it's "how it's supposed to be." I dug deep enough to figure out that the precedent was set almost a hundred years ago, and the language reflected it. Thing is, legally speaking, precedent is policy. Ask any lawyer, they'll tell you the same. Regardless of how pertinent that case that set the precedent is today. In my eyes, I think legal writing is a mechanism to perpetuate the need for lawyers; no one else can decipher that shit, so they need lawyers to do so (since lawyers wrote it). Look at how Smith v. Maryland (1978) made the NSA metadata monitoring and collection legal.
__________________
You should be water
oats is offline   Reply With Quote