[ExI] christmas songs 2

[Seien]

On 11/12/2007, John <desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >You quadrupleposted, btw.
>
> I know.  I have had it with my Yahoo account!  I think I will be switching
> to Google.
>
>

Ahh, Okay.


>
> Please explain exactly what you mean by Scrooge figuring out what he was
> doing "madly?"  I don't understand.
>

Whoops! I meant badly, sorry.

How would you rewrite the story to make you happy with it? lol  I cannot
> grasp how you consider this classic story "horrible" and "immoral."  When
> Scrooge made a financial commitment at the end of the story to some charity
> workers does that make him foolish?  Perhaps, but it was in his moment of
> transformative elation!  I would suspect Scrooge later on looked very
> carefully at how his charity dollars were used.  Dickens was trying to make
> a statement about social injustice and poverty, which was a huge problem in
> the England of his time (and these problems are still overwhelmingly with
> us, if you havn't noticed...).
>

Okay, well. The story assumes that charity is a good thing. This is just
plain wrong. If I give my money to a poor guy to buy food, well, he'll use
it to buy food. Or drink. Or cigarettes. That's what that amount of money
can be used for - not things like education or books or things that would
promote the poor guy learning stuff/bettering himself, because food would
come first. I'm more rational than he is, I know better how to make other
people happy. It's better that I use the money I have to make myself happy
and help me learn more and better myself, because then I can make things
better in general for people by coming up with better philosophy and ideas.

So, in light of that, I guess I'd write the ghosts out of the story - the
supernatural is boring compared to human achievement. I'd replace them with
real people, philosophers and the like, who are rational and know things.
They would explain their good ideas to Scrooge, who would then implement
them and infer more rational things from them. He would then spread his good
philosophy to everyone he knew/met/could get to listen, to replace their bad
antirational memes.

I'm half joking, of course. The story as a piece of fiction is, as you say,
a classic, and a fascinating insight into nineteenth century attitudes and
culture. But it's not a story to be adulated for the ideas it contains,
which are actually bad ideas.



-- 
~Seien
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