Pet peeves

I suppose if I've put together a list of my favourite things I should also list my least favourite things. I don't know whether this is one of Gideon's paedagogical exercises, but here goes, in no particular order. As you can see, it sometimes takes a bit longer to describe my pet peeves than it does things loved.

1. telemarketers (this has to rank on virtually anyone's list. . . unless you yourself are a telemarketer)

2. radio stations boasting weather "guarantees"

3. wrong-number long-distance phone calls where someone with an accent at the other end asks for Usama

4. bacon and other pork products

5. caffeine

6. aspartame

7. the current craze for piercing various parts of the body (ouch!)

8. ecclesiastical authorities who indiscriminately ascribe every progressive social and political trend, no matter how outrageous, to a fresh movement of the spirit

9. the first-past-the-post electoral system

10. judges legislating from the bench

11. students who believe the burden of proof is on me to show why they don't deserve an A

12. Greek nationalists

13. reality television shows (which are unlike any reality I am acquainted with)

14. terrorism

15. political leaders who believe they and they alone have the capacity to end terrorism

16. drug store magazine racks

17. people who believe all political deliberation can be reduced to simple assertions of rights

18. shortening days

19. students who have the gall to come up and ask me what the exam will cover when they've plainly not attended the class in which I already explained this

20. bigotry

21. those who accuse others of bigotry simply because they don't agree with them

22. one-party governments exercising all the political power with only 38%-43% of the vote

23. people who believe it their God-given responsibility to tell you how to raise your children

24. professed conservatives who are really Lockean liberals and can't bring themselves to admit it

25. professed feminists who effectively deprecate female corporeality and implicitly make male embodiment normative for everyone

26. people who reduce human society in all its complexity to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed and refuse to acknowledge their debt to Marx

27. students who come to me the day of the exam, claim they had trouble studying (or something or other) and ask if they can take it the next day

28. nurses in an NICU who tell parents that their daughter, who was born 14 weeks premature and for whom they are responsible for caring, is just one more baby to them (believe it or not, this happened to us!)

29. those who appeal to "sensitivity" to stop (or prevent) discussion of an issue

30. French secularists

31. those who believe we can shape the world to suit our desires (read my book for more on this one)

32. those who believe the free market is the answer to all of society's ills

33. those who think public ownership is the answer to . . . well, you get the picture

34. politicians who are afraid to invoke section 33 (the notwithstanding clause) in the Constitution Act, 1982

35. dry skin in winter (ouch!)

36. people who reduce authority to a mere ideological justification of an empirical concentration of power

37. Turkish secularists

38. students who miss virtually every class in the semester and then come to you with a doctor's note every time they've missed an exam, expecting you to give them a make-up exam at their convenience (yes, this has happened, which is why I instituted an attendance policy in my introductory courses)

39. those who attribute terrorism (and indeed all human sin) to economic privation

40. those Christians who believe that the work of the Holy Spirit ends at the outer boundaries of their particular ecclesial communion

41. Ravel's Bolero

42. Richard Wagner's music, rap, hip hop, praise choruses (most of them)

43. students who do not perform as well as you know they are fully capable of doing

44. people who sign diplomas in disappearing ink (unfortunately I have one of these on the wall of my office)

45. separatism (Québec, Corsican, Basque, &c.)

46. partition (e.g., India, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Yugoslavia)

47. anti-Catholicism in the media (or anywhere else for that matter)

48. those who would give up their citizenship to secure a life peerage (I won't mention anyone by name)

49. dispensationalism

50. those who would reduce the gospel to a social reform programme