I'm sort of old
I no longer qualify for a young person's railcard and I'm starting to hate most new music (all these emo bands sound the same, don'tcha know?) so I guess that puts me on the road to fogiedom.

In my life to date I have been mystified by many things. I think, though, that these mysteries have a common thread leading to their explanation.

Some of these mysteries include:

* Why people are terrified of paedophiles but not worried about driving their 3 tonne 4x4 at 45mph along a residential road.
* Vernon Kaye's career.
* Why people can't grasp the most basic ideas of computing and act as if its witchcraft.
* Reality TV.
* The fact that 20% of people are planning their lives around the zodiac.
* Scientology.
* People who moan about property prices and then furiously oppose any residential development within 10 miles of their house.
* Why, when presented with two escalators, one with people on it and one without, people will jam themselves onto the occupied one rather than be 'different' and and use the empty one (Next time you're on the tube off-peak watch this. I swear its true).
* Why people reply to spam (if people didn't no-one would bother sending it, so someone must be).
* Ditto 419 scams and people who buy £2 "Gibson" guitars off ebay from china with £400 postage and act surprised that they've been scammed.
* People who believe in homoeopathy.
* People who watch, or, worse, agree to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.
* People who took out 110% mortgages whilst being on benefits "to get on the property ladder".

You'll be glad to hear that I think I've figured out the common denominator for this whirlwind of weirdness, and it's this:

People are fucking stupid.

Not all people of course, the rest are *really* fucking stupid.

I'm with Charlie Brooker:
"I hate people. What's their appeal, exactly? They bumble around with their haircuts on, cluttering up the pavement like so many gormless, farting skittles. They're awful."
(Axeman Jim, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 16:49, 12 replies)

I moan about property prices
But if you were to build any more houses where I live the traffic will gridlock every single day.

There are vast areas of the country where very few people live. Even better from the point of view of development, there are large areas of teh country which are not London and the South East. And yet no-one will bother to move their businesses there. So no-one wants to live there.

It's not the people moaning about too much development that are the problem, they are just a symptom of the problem.

Sorry, didn't mean to rant. I agree with the rest of the post entirely.
(Bazongaloid, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 16:54, closed)

Charlie Brooker is the King.
However, I sometimes watch Jeremy Kyle and imagine myself on there. I always see myself putting him and his shitty audience to shame with purely reasonable behaviour, at which point I get to point out he's a jumped up little bully.

I should also point out that you will get to a stage where you start liking the generic music of the day, because it is different to the generic music you grew up with and hated. This happened to me a few years back. I'm getting tired of it now, though.

Getting older is the pants.

Edit: Oh! The small village where I live has doubled in size since I was a lad, and is set to double again in the coming years with a massive new development project. I seem to be the only person looking forward to it...... we're getting a Wetherspoons and everything! Currently, we have one pub and one shop. However...... you can no longer drive through the streets as the bastard incomers all have 18 cars each and park them either side of the roads. Twats.

We also have junkies now. Swings and roundabouts.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 16:56, closed)

* Althegeordie
The trouble is, the "empty" bits of the UK are pretty much the pretty bits, and people don't like those being built on either.

As an aside, the CPRE (Campaign for the protection of rural England) are a right bunch of Daily Mail-reading scumballs - if you actually read any of their stuff, their message is basically "We don't want any ghastly proles interfering with our country estates. We think our pretty view out of the East Wing is much more important than the nation's economic wellbing or giving disadvantaged people a chance of a decent life."

Twunts.
(Axeman Jim, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 17:05, closed)

The problem is
is that bits of cities get run down and shit. And they need redevelopment. But in order to get a company to redevelop them the incentive is to make as much money as possible, therefore you try and cram as many houses or flats onto the smallest bit of land possible.

And since the planning laws have been raped to make it easier for the government to get away with building airports and power stations, which understandable no-one wants near them (although the power station thing is whole other debate) it means people get really jumpy that pretty much anything can get forced on them.

For example, I bought a place last year, and they are threatening to put a massive development just down the road, and it will screw up my chance of being able to park near my house in the evening, or on saturdays, which is going to make my house far less desirable when I come to sell it.

I've kind of lost where I'm going with this. I'm just grumpy about the whole thing.
(Bazongaloid, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 17:16, closed)

As a person who is also
sort of old I really agree that it's stupidity that links these things.

I've also decided that the cause of people being stupid is that they're lazy and can't be bothered to think about things properly.

I've yet to demonstrate my theory experimentally though. I don’t suppose that there’s there anyone working for a funding organisation reading b3ta?

My experimental method includes Daily Mail readers and a car battery, I’ll require about £10 000 for the experiments, and quite a lot more for liability insurance...
(Lord of Marzipan Fact: Clouds are worse than Hitler, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 17:25, closed)

I hate people too
and when I feel like this I go out and spray weedkiller over next door's petunias.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 17:39, closed)

"I hate people too
and when I feel like this I go out and spray weedkiller over next door's petunias.
(crackhouseceilidhband If there's one thing you can say about mankind..., Tue 24 Jun 2008, 17:39, Ignore)"


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( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 18:09, closed)

My neighbor's dog bit my daughter
and then blamed her for it because she didn't stop to pay attention to the dog, preferring to just walk by with her iPod playing and not look up. Since then relations have been extremely strained.

So now whenever I find a slug in my yard I throw it into his flower beds.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 24 Jun 2008, 18:55, closed)

*click*
for all of it.
I would also like to add to your paedophile/4x4- parents who think that they are the first people in the world to have procreated.

The problem is that bits of cities get run down and shit.
^^Kudos to al for being "down with the kids"
( Madam Marlboro wonders if you've found her yet, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 19:02, closed)

Well....
Spot fucking on! Anyone who has worked with members of the public can verify the dangerous levels of stupidity that you come across a fair bit of the time - you know - that realy special level of thickness that actualy makes you wonder how the person concerned managed to dress themselves and how many times it must have taken them to get their underwear under the rest of their clothes.

This is not only mostly true - but is also pretty similar to my theory about news stories - that 90% of news stories can be divided into two categories: 1) People are stupid and 2) People are evil. And most of the other 10% fall into the category people are stupid and evil.
(Fredz A graveyard of hopes, a dump of ambition, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 19:32, closed)

I've
always had a dirty little sneaking desire to be in the audience of the Jeremy Kyle Show... it'd be the nearest modern experience you could get to being in a Roman Amphitheatre.
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Tue 24 Jun 2008, 19:34, closed)