Just a slight rant.

I heard a radio caller the other day call in and say "I agree with you... 200 percent!" Class, can we please NOT use percents higher than 100 in situations like this? It just starts getting rediculous. It reminds me of an old magic store catalog I used to get. The guy would rate products in stars: eight stars, nine stars. Soon it was ten stars, then ELEVEN and TWELVE stars? What?! What scale are we using here?

Quoted from a meatheed on the Real World last night: "I'm a big believer in Fate. What's supposed to happen is going to happen." Is there a bigger copout than this? It obliterates the idea of any sort of personal responsibility. I guess there's a lot of room for a quite deep metaphysical discussion of free will vs. fate here, so if you're going to make a claim, you better be able to back it up, and not just be a meatheed who had a one-night stand and is trying to rationalize it.

"Everything happens for a reason". Essentially the same as the above, but in reverse. Frequently, someone just fucked something up, and then says, "Hey, everything happens for a reason". Yeah, the reason that the thing happened was because you did it. The sentence implies that the reason is some quasi-religous, metaphysical force (Fate, I guess), which I think too many people say they believe in just because it's easy to get away with more stuff and blame it on Fate.

I guess my main problem isn't with the idea of Fate itself, but when a meathead claims that something happens for a reason to exonerate himself from the responsibility.

Cue: Baditude.