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So bloody damn tired
Feb. 9th, 2012 11:43 pmToday is a day of bone-dragging exhaustion and I don't know why. I went to sleep a bit earlier last night (yay!), slept well, so ... ugh. When we were eating dinner, I was staring at nothing in particular and not really following the conversation and Mum said I was 'definitely away with the pixies tonight.'
I did manage to make dinner (chicken and almond stirfry with orange zest) and I finally finished a book I've been slogging through for the past week, in hopes it would improve and come together. Why I bothered I do not know. In the last ten pages of Civilizations by Felipe Fernández-Armesto I came across these lines concerning modern Western civilisation:
'Enfeebled by its inconsistencies, our liberalism could get wishy-washed away. Abortion and euthanasia are the slashed prices of life cheapened by glut: advocacy of them imperils the inviolability of other unwanted lives: of criminals, say, the socially subversive, the genetically undesirable, the surplus poor and sick. In secular hands, liberal principles become the forerunners of death camps and eugenics.'
The fucking fuck? And this was the first and only time abortion and euthanasia were mentioned in the whole book. It's as thought he thinks they're modern inventions. Does he think criminals weren't merrily tortured and executed for most of history? Where the fuck did that argument come from? And where's the rest of it?
If only that had been in the first ten pages I wouldn't have bothered with the book and I'd be a lot less annoyed about the wasted effort now. It sounded so interesting ... I haven't been so irritated by a book since David Starkey's Six Wives of Henry VIII.
I did manage to make dinner (chicken and almond stirfry with orange zest) and I finally finished a book I've been slogging through for the past week, in hopes it would improve and come together. Why I bothered I do not know. In the last ten pages of Civilizations by Felipe Fernández-Armesto I came across these lines concerning modern Western civilisation:
'Enfeebled by its inconsistencies, our liberalism could get wishy-washed away. Abortion and euthanasia are the slashed prices of life cheapened by glut: advocacy of them imperils the inviolability of other unwanted lives: of criminals, say, the socially subversive, the genetically undesirable, the surplus poor and sick. In secular hands, liberal principles become the forerunners of death camps and eugenics.'
The fucking fuck? And this was the first and only time abortion and euthanasia were mentioned in the whole book. It's as thought he thinks they're modern inventions. Does he think criminals weren't merrily tortured and executed for most of history? Where the fuck did that argument come from? And where's the rest of it?
If only that had been in the first ten pages I wouldn't have bothered with the book and I'd be a lot less annoyed about the wasted effort now. It sounded so interesting ... I haven't been so irritated by a book since David Starkey's Six Wives of Henry VIII.
