I am so new, the packaging still clings to me.

I may have fucked up here ... I'm trying to post in Tell Us About Yourself. If I've done it wrong, please feel free to move me, mods.

So this is a new thread? I would have thought it a new post in the intro thread, but my terminology is geared to an old forum I was a member of for years, now sadly defunct.

First, I am utterly hopeless with computers and technology in general. On the other hand, I'm brilliant at grammar. Actually, grammar is pretty much the ONLY thing I'm good at, so I make the most of it, but I'll try not to act like a fucking pedant around here.

I read a couple of hundred books a year, have been reading in preference to anything else since I was eight.

I'm an anti-theist, but I have friends who are religious and I try not to offend them too much. I believe organised religions have been a great force for evil in the world. Considering how much good some churches do, that's a hell of a lot of evil!

I don't care at all what individuals believe - if they are good people I tend to like them regardless - but when groups get together and start telling OTHER people how to pray or what to think, I get pissed off.

I particularly loathe fundamentalists, of any stripe. Christian ones are just as bad as Moslem ones, or any other group, in this respect.

I try to be tolerant, but I'm really prejudiced against bigots.

Oxymorons aside, I am a hippie and have been since I was a teenager. We have copped a lot of flak over the years, but I'm proudly unrepentant.

I'm not the astrology-loving, incense-burning, beads, bells and flowers type of hippie - I am a scientific hippie. Science and hippiedom (hippiehood? hippieness?) are not mutually exclusive.

I'm a leftie. In America I might be a Democrat, or a Liberal, I suppose. Here in Australia, "Liberal" means "Conservative" or "Republican", though the Liberals tend to be monarchists. "Labor" is the other major party here but I'm not one of those either. I would call myself a bleeding-heart liberal, were it not for the fact that Liberal is a dirty word to me.

I vote (it is compulsory here) and I don't understand people who don't, or who deliberately invalidate their vote or donkey-vote. Why the fuck live in a democracy if you don't exercise your right to have a say?

I'm hoping this forum becomes as absorbing to me as my last one, which was built around a comedy satire show on telly.

Question: avatars? Do we draw our own? I'm so technologically incompetent this may be a problem. I usually use a photo as an avatar. I know how to get them off the internet.

*waves* Hopefully some of you will become my friends.

 

Welcome to hip

You can choose an avatar from the generic ones by going to User CP at the top of your page.

See you on the boards!

 

hello you interesting new person you!

 

Welcome

 

Hi Mezza :seeya:

Australian, huh? Well ... nobody's perfect

And ya know what? If somebody said to me "here's the democratic privilege of voting, which your ancestors had to fight for tooth and nail ... oh and by the way, we're gonna pass a repressive, dirigiste law to FORCE you to use it, whether you want to or not" I think I might just rebel against it, too.

Freedom is good.

Compulsion is the antithesis of freedom.

Compulsion to exercise freedom is the ultimate oxymoron,

 

^
he can't help that! :biggrin:

Welcome dude! I try to be tolerant too, it's hard

 

Hello and welcome :sunny:. Im glad you joined. You sound interesting. I'm sure you will be a great contributor. I hope this place soon feels like your other home.

If our paths meet from time to time, please excuse my improper use of grammar. I do try.:mickey: