Shit I hate

Honorable mention: Morristown, TN. That place is primarily responsible for my hatred of entries 8, 5, 3, 2, and 1, but I'll cut the hellhole some slack and assume these concepts are somewhat universal.

8. "Sin" taxes. People shouldn't have to pay extra to slowly kill themselves. If you want to raise revenue and punish the right people at the same time, raise the taxes on reality TV shows, Will Ferrell movies and Hummers. Oh, and any music albums where the "star performer" didn't write at least 75% of the material.

7. Midgets. Look, if you're a midget and you're on TV and people are laughing, they're laughing at you because you're a midget. But I'm not laughing, because you're creeping me the fuck out. Especially those two midgets who host that real estate scamfomercial.

6. Single women with kids. Sorry, but if it makes you feel any better, I'm not going to buy a half-eaten sandwich, either.

5. Stupid people in general. The dumbasses that don't fit into the top four categories, yet manage to make life harder for the rest of us in ways many and varied. If there's a warning label on something, it's your fault. Cigarettes are unhealthy, you don't eat those little packets that come in shoeboxes and if your head hurts so badly that you're taking your twelfth Tylenol in two hours, see a fucking doctor. Or just die.

4. Myspace. People use the phrase "race to the bottom" to refer to shit getting worse and worse in any given situation. Well, the race is fucking over and Myspace won. When you see a 16 year old girl posting allegedly "sexy" pictures of herself in a bikini for the whole world to see, there's nothing else left. Except to nuke the planet from orbit. Just to be safe.

3. Confederate Apologists. Look, the South fought for slavery, lost the goddamned war 140 years ago, the Confederate Flag is America's swastika and fuck you. To clarify a misconception, I'm not offended by the Confederate Flag. In fact, if you think it's worth displaying, I prefer that you do so. That makes it easier for me to tell that you're a total fucking retard in the event you've managed to obscure the swelling of your water-filled skull (most likely with a trucker cap bearing said flag). And you might not think you're a racist, but you probably are and your great-great-grandfather definitely was.

2. Bigots. Racism has to be the dumbest ideology on earth, if you want to call it an ideology and risk ruining the word "idea" forever. Sure, fundamentalism takes whatever the given ideology is and runs it straight into the ground, but making assumptions based on someone's race? That's a kind of lazy I don't understand and I once spent three hours hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock every seven minutes rather than get up and go to class or just turn the damned thing off. And not only is it race, but it's skin color, too. When I was in middle school there was this kid Jeff, who was pretty well tanned. One day, this total piece of white trash that lived a few miles from me got on the bus and I noticed his knuckles were shredded. I asked him what happened. He said something like "I took a swing at that fuckin' Mexican Jeff and he ducked. I punched the wall." I said, "Michael, he's not a Mexican. He's a really tanned white guy." "Oh." (Michael was also the first person I remember having a mullet, which he gave himself in a drunken stupor. At the age of 13. He also had a mustache. At the age of 13.) Homophobia, though, takes the cake. You're basing your opinion on who someone is fucking? Are you out of your goddamned mind?

1. Fundamentalists of any stripe. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Capitalists, Socialists, Conservatives, Liberals and any other ideology that has adherents who buy into whatever theory they've been sold in whole and become dogmatically rigid, unable to see outside of whatever perspective they've taken up. That, in and of itself, isn't the problem. What pisses me off to no end is when these assholes try to reshape society in the image of whatever bug crawled up their ass. Living in America I have a great distaste for Christian fundamentalists, but if I lived in, say, Iran, I'd have been stoned to death by Islamic fundamentalists. (The only thing keeping Jerry Falwell from having people stoned to death is that we as Americans just aren't going to put up with that shit. Yet.) If I lived in Israel, I'd be torn between having to kill the Islamic fundamentalists or the fundamentalist Jews that think Israel should rule over all of the Holy Land. Fundamentalist Atheists like Mary Murray O'Haire give Atheists like me a bad name, anti-tax jihadist Grover Norquist should be drowned in a bathtub and I want to reanimate the corpses of Joseph Stalin and Joe McCarthy and let them battle to the death. Then I'll kill the winner. Actually, I got a bit off track there. The point? Fuck fundamentalists.