Part of a long, rambling post Robert put up the other day on his blog really made me nod and say "yes". Because, you know what, yes. Because it touches on something I've been arguing for years.

Despite what I had to say in the last post about on-the-job word ninnies, I am about the job at the job, and my actual response to other people's reaction to the way I talk is...I tone it down when I know I'm around somebody the swearing will bother.

I hold back on the trucker talk, you hold back on the Jesus talk, and we don't jump down each other's throats when some of it slips out.

If you can't do that, hold it in for other people, you're a jackass and you'll just keep getting in trouble and wondering why. If you run to HR whenever somebody's else's Stuff That Irritates You comes out, everybody around you will hate you, you will not get that tolerance when you need it, and...you probably won't figure out why, either.

See, that top bit? That's what I do, too. No, not here in my journal space, though I may and have if asked by someone sincerely, but if you know me in-the-flesh, you know it and know I won't poke at it, whatever "it" happens to be for you.

But it's really about this:

If you can't do that, hold it in for other people, you're a jackass and you'll just keep getting in trouble and wondering why.

I want everyone to look at that, and instead of going, "Yeah, see? That's what people need to do!" also look at the other half of that, which is:

If you run to HR whenever somebody's else's Stuff That Irritates You comes out, everybody around you will hate you, you will not get that tolerance when you need it, and...you probably won't figure out why, either.

People need to do that, too. And the nuance here is what I think the various critics who have shook their finger at me about these things, and various anti-racism (or anti-whatever) activists and leftist "oppression" and "correction" and "privilege" experts, just don't get. Those folks end up being the hated, clueless git who can't get the tolerance they keep demanding when they actually need it, precisely because...well, they can't figure it out.

(Which is amusing, because Robert is talking about the right-wingers who don't get it, either.)

But it's not that hard TO figure out, so I leave it to anyone who is in the "doesn't get it" boat, or the "I deserve not to be tweaked by my issues" boat, who can't figure out the balance between those to work out for themselves (ie: those who have a horse to ride about privilege and invisible knapsacks and cultural racism/sexism/discrimination and "welcoming" environments and so forth).

And we're not really talking about a business environment or HR here, which I hope we all get. It becomes an analogy for the bigger social environment. Really, they're running to the media, or the government, or their friends, or anyone who will listen to them for five seconds every day complain about how bad everyone else is for upsetting them and how they all better just stop because they're bad people, especially if they don't.

And we're talking about how those people hear that criticism of that behavior and think it means they have to just shut-up all the time and get run roughshod over and so forth and OMG-more-oppression-oppression-oppression. Which is why I said they don't get it.

Discussed here:

Contacting employers, contacting family, threatening to kill people and talking about how they deserve to be sexually assaulted, cracking passwords, contacting webhosts to report them for alleged Terms of Service Violations, contacting a show’s producers and actors to blast them for another set of fans’s actions. Most of the most egregious behavior doesn’t get documented out of fear of both sides going after the document-er for getting the story wrong... [Ed: all the above is also done to those who do document.]

...Fail fandom is generally about some one taking offense at something someone did or said or implied. Sure, yeah, the subtext of fail fandom is often about a power play in fandom but at the onset, it generally doesn’t look that way... [Ed: as it is dressed up to be about racism or sexism or vulnerability, etc.]

...The attacker looks for vulnerabilities. They look for places where they can exploit your weakness in order to push you out of fandom, to get you to stop being in conflict with them and to further their own agenda.

All that is stuff I saw in the RaceFail crowd, both before and during that fiasco. It's a good part of why I think they are wrong, philosophically and logically, and why they disturb me so, with all the rage and violence and hate-talk, and all the social dominance behaviors. ( ...during the Fail... )

Earlier this year there was a push to ban a horror movie called "Orphan". I'll let you read all about it here and then the sane view here.

I'll say only: this is what post-modernist activism bullshit nets you. Everyone's personal, internal issues--and fears of being "left out" or perceived badly--become a crime. No separation of fiction and reality, or grasp of context.

Gods forbid any of these people actually manage to force legislation on things like this. Think about how we laugh at Christians when they freak-out because somebody mocks or "misuses" Jesus or sacred ritual, but we're all so stoic and sober and run to the lawmakers when some personal issue of ours is mocked or "misused", or even appears to be.

In the "not really news" category: Another wealthy, bootstrap-believing, poor-hating, foul-mouthed, sociopathic right-winger sets out to prove not all conservatives are wanton wastes of human flesh and breathable air all conservatives are jerks.

Because, you know, picking on kids, the poor, and senior citizens from your ivory tower gated community really shows what a man's man you are.

Every now and then while browsing for info. I accidentally stumble across a thread to the RPG-discussion-forum-that-shall-not-be-named (not on my journal), and it reminds me that, in comparison, RPGnet ain't so bad. In comparison.

Because the level of prickish, snotty, self-assured, absolutely political bullshit and character assassination presented as "no nonsense discussion" is on the level with FOX News propaganda like "We report, YOU decide!" (with the reporters completely buying into their own BS about themselves).

And it ends up being kind of like when you slow down to watch an accident scene: you really want to look away, but you can't. You keep looking, knowing you're going to see something spectacularly disturbing that you don't want to see.

( ...why the fuck am I writing about this even?.. )

So I end up wasting a bunch of time reading, thinking 'wow, what a bunch of giant dicks', seeing all the names historically known for being giant dicks on RPGnet (and/or having been banned from RPGnet for being giant dicks), and read about how they believe everyone else is the dick and RPGnet is the cesspool. It's like watching someone swimming in turds and rotting bodyparts sneering and complaining about how dirty that other pool is, the one someone peed in once...

Then I waste a half-hour brain bleaching myself by complaining about it on my journal, even though I should have just looked away and spared myself the hassle completely.

Never get into a discussion with a right-winger. They like to play the blame game with you. What's the blame game? Well, you know what it is if you're poor, non-white, gay, or non-Christian.

( ...it goes like this... )

There is an article in Scientific American about how people use television shows and movies to stave off loneliness, and create parasocial relationships with imaginary characters to replace real relationships with real people.

Part of the study reveals people do so to the point that they may feel the relationship is more real and more satisfying than relationships with real people, become hyper-sensitive to social cues (imaginary or real) and hyper-reactionary TO those cues (esp. threats to the perceived relationship and its status quo). Especially if they are already lonely. Basically, they engage in an unhealthy one-way completely illusory relationship.

While reading the article, I started wondering if this didn't explain--to a ridiculous amount--fandom. Especially ultra-vicious fandom wank?

You know, people who almost literally explode over a writer "getting it wrong" or a character doing something they personally don't like, to the point one would believe they are responding to an attack on or by a family member. Treating stories, or elements of stories, especially minor and otherwise unremarkable elements, or other people's lack of similarly extreme reactions to such elements, as great social injustices on par with (or even more disastrous and important than) genocide in Africa or indefinite detention in American prisons. (Or so we assume, given the amount of text and emotion spilled over the character or story and the amount of time spent thinking and discussing it, or trying to do something about it.)

I think this may occur in some instances because:
1) The relationship is one of acceptance and inability to get hurt or rejected by the character, they literally can't say "no" to your friendship.
2) Eventually the character does something that, if it were a real friend, the person in question would be terribly, personally hurt by.
3) The person takes the action in that manner, reacts as though they have been deliberately and literally targeted and, already super-sensitive, take the "betrayal" by the perfect friend hard, especially because (in a real relationship) the friend would have known better.

Seriously, given that people react to losing a TV show in the same way they react to losing a real flesh-and-blood friend, is any of that at all a stretch? We've all seen people who act exactly that way in fandom, to varying degrees. And given we all get caught up in shows and books and such, to varying degrees, because people are programmed to do so.

I think it is interesting that somewhere in our brains, not too deep even, we are still monkeys who can't tell the difference between a real monkey and our own reflection in a mirror.

Hrm...addendum:

I'm also thinking about how this ties into religion and how sometimes we have created and defended beings who are always on our side. Are gods (or rather, certain gods with certain interpersonal traits) an expression of human loneliness? A built-in healing mechanism in the mind that helps us overcome what would otherwise result in severe damage to the organism: physically and emotionally crippling feelings of social isolation?

Well, that's an untested hypothesis, anyways.

Thanks to government stimulus money, we're having the attic floor and the basement ceiling under the porch insulated, storm windows put in the back porch, and better insulation put into the walls (assuming they can figure out a way to do it -- there's not much space in them between the wall and the lathe-center, so they can't just blow insulation in). The guys are going to be here all week finishing the job.

This should really help cut down on our heating bills for winter (yay!).

Drama ensues: yesterday, they fire up their generator to blow the insulation at around 9:30am. One of the guys tells me some lady from the duplex across the street was screaming out her window at them, saying she was going to turn her boombox on in the mornings and wake up our kids. The foreman tried to apologize, but she didn't say anything else or come out of her house so he wasn't sure who it even was. I figured either idle threat from a local buffoon or frustrated parent blowing off steam.

Sure enough this morning, at 7:30am, when I go to let the dog out and open the door to the backyard, I discover someone is absolutely blasting their stereo with the base turned up to a bone-throbbing level. I'm thinking at first it is coming from the mechanical shop just across the alley, but I wonder.

Regardless, the dog runs out, does her business, sniffs around for a bit, then starts barking her head off. The minute the dog starts barking, a white van I've never seen before pulls out from directly behind our garage and drives off down the alley, stereo still blaring, circles around the block and then drives away.

I'm just thinking, "Wow, we have a lot of 'Real WinnersTM' in our neighborhood." (We also have a trio of perma-drunks living next door who seem to think my yard is theirs to use as they wish and not my dog's, yell and fight on their porch and downtown at the bars regularly, and give everyone dirty, mumbly looks.)

I've been reading a number of things lately, and a recent post over on Judd's journal about China Mieville's literary philosophy caused quite a revelation for me after all those things stirred around in my brain some.

( ...revelations... )

Dyer admitted before the commission that he came to know about the meeting at the Jallianwala Bagh at 12:40 hours that day but took no steps to prevent it. He stated that he had gone to the Bagh with the deliberate intention of opening fire if he found a crowd assembled there.

"I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself." — Dyer's response to the Hunter Commission Enquiry.

Dyer said he would have used his machine guns if he could have got them into the enclosure, but these were mounted on armoured cars. He said he did not stop firing when the crowd began to disperse because he thought it was his duty to keep firing until the crowd dispersed, and that a little firing would do no good. In fact he continued the firing till he ran out of ammunition.

He confessed that he did not take any steps to tend to the wounded after the firing. "Certainly not. It was not my job. Hospitals were open and they could have gone there," was his response.

From The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

Cheney must be pissed he couldn't hire this guy...probably an ancestor of his if we take ethics and propensity for spinning the inhumane as righteous in to account. So, question, how do we screen for and prevent individuals like this from gaining any power, especially over others, in our political and military systems?

I've been thinking about that a great deal lately. I wonder if testing for Authoritarian Personality Disorder might be one way, with too high a score barring you from service? Can people with APD learn or be taught to be more humane and critical, and less authoritarian, selfish, paranoid, and easily led around? We do account for and correct for other destructive or self-and-other-harming personality disorders.

Of course, APD folks would try to cheat themselves around failing the tests (for numerous reasons). How would that be prevented?

(Also, no, this isn't about conservatives vs. liberals; I've sadly met plenty of APD liberals on-line, despite the significant statistical difference between liberals and conservatives in this area. Hrm, are APD liberals just louder on-line?)

Raising Katie:

"All else being equal, I think she should be with people who look like her," says Mark. "It's not fair that she's got to grow up feeling different when she's going to feel different anyway. She wears glasses, her voice is a bit squeaky, and on top of that she has to deal with the fact that her mother is 70 and black."

America isn't done with its racism yet. We have inherent feelings about section of our populace that have been passed on culturally and almost without our noticing. "Tropes", to be succinct, that are still writing the fiction in our head for us, unobserved until confronted.

This isn't critical race theory's insidious "invisible racism", however, cropping up in everything from billiards to the name of your breakfast cereal like the face of Jesus in your burnt toast.

This is real racism, quiet racism: actual judgment and perception of a person based on their physical type and the cultural story of what that type is like.

...the African-American man—six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt—watching the girl's every move. Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop. "Nice riding," he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming. "Thanks, Daddy," she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

Surprise you? Get nervous? That's a trope worming its way through your skull, about the roles of certain people and the interactions they should have, at least some of it racial (the rest is "all men are dangerous around little girls", and "six-foot men in hoodies are no to be trusted, no matter what color their skin is" because, fuck, scary, mugger).

There are definitely racist tropes involved in this story, though:

...Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought "we might be lynched." And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn't being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, "Are you OK?"—even though Terri is standing right there.

Honestly, I've never been that blatantly fucking racistly stupid.

Be smart enough that you can take a situation as it is, not according to the story being spun in your skull. Compare and contrast, do a "if I change these variables" self-check and see if your reaction is the same. Be honest. Don't listen to the story your head tells of whether you are or aren't racist, because that's a story, too. See truth. Or try to.

Our country isn't done with racism, but that's only because the tropes haven't changed yet (more on that some other time). And unless you realize you often function according to assumed tropes--culturally-programmed reactionary feelings--unless you learn self-examination skills, you can't do anything to achieve clear, rational thinking-over-reaction with your biases labeled and hopefully contained.

Try Zen Buddhism. It provides a nice set of such skills and wake-up calls about the nature of reality and perception. Also an understanding of the brain, consciousness and self-hood, as explored in modern psychology. They complement each other nicely.

I recently posed a question about a specific situation and how certain groups of anti-race activists might respond to that situation.

Here's why: I actually based that question off a real example; and not just any example, but an example created by the behavior of a well-known anti-racist who, ironically, has repeatedly attacked and scolded others for doing exactly the same thing.

( Read more... )

"He raped my eyes with his body!"

Well, I'm not sure if that exact language has been used, but I'm not putting any bets down. Basically, we're talking about a woman suing a man for sexual harassment for changing his shirt in public and thereby violating her with his show of masculine dominance.

What is it? The language of the New Left being used to fuel the aims of the Old Right. And you need to be careful, kids, because it isn't as easy to spot as you think. If you wonder why I bitch about certain modern activists or their posse? That subtlety is why.

( Read more... )

I am surprised and appalled by how much of the internet, and especially LiveJournal, is populated by people with the attitude that "I get to say stuff in your journal and criticize you, and I'm entitled to do it; but if you come to my journal and criticize me and say stuff, you're a dick".

Seriously. WTF?!

People who will GLEEFULLY AND UNAPOLOGETICALLY tear the shit out of someone in that person's blog or journal space, and then treat anyone who comes to their own (or a friend's) blog or journal to criticize or tear the shit out of them as though they have committed some grievous, terrible error that no sane, rational, mature human being would ever stoop to and outs them as some kind of Super-Nazi for doing so.

The internet is treated as a private space for them and their friends, but a public space for everyone else. Seriously...WTF?!

Irony and hypocrisy: it's what the internet is built from!

The more women I read on-line, the more glad I am I found Jenny. Way down at the bottom: "There is very little as creepy as spending four pages talking about how to draw fetishistically oversexualized women and then signing off with 'Now if you wouldn't mind, my creation and I would like a little privacy.'"

I really fucking HATE those "men who talk about/refer to sex and/or sexy women and/or liking women are creepy" women, whom I have sadly met more than my share of on-line peripherally or in discussions (for example in this puerile nonsense, especially the "ew! ew!" part). Fucking soccer-moms (CONTEXTUAL IRONY!).

Because "creepy"?! That's AWESOME! Excuse me while I draw some sexy women and then go spank the monkey to it like a healthy, normal, adult, human male. As opposed to, say, a robot. Or a wooden chair.

If I were with a woman who thought the above was "creepy", rather than recognizing it's a perfectly normal thing for either gender (and a pretty good self-deprecating joke about that normal thing), we would have been gladly divorced a long time ago. BLEH. And it would have been good riddance to rubbish! So, thank you, Jenny, for not being some sexually repressed "feminist" Puritan!

PS: why do all the hypersexualized "masculine" men in the first linked post look...queer? (And I don't mean as in "odd".) I know it's not the case, but I can't help but wonder if it's Freudian feminine undergarment, perhaps?

Every time I feel the need to remind myself just how stupid the monkeys actually are, so I can feel better about just how stupid the monkeys are, I go read Not Always Right. And then I can forgive them. Well, maybe not. But it puts it all in perspective: our race is just very, very dumb. Even the smart ones.

We all know what trolls are, right?

They enter or begin discussions with the purpose of sowing chaos, discord, hurt feelings, confusion, and basically causing a shit-storm, and the more people they can drag down with them, the better! (Especially if they don't have to do much of the work themselves, just get it started, or keep it moving.) And they're good at using a group's own logic and vulnerabilities against it, and exceptionally good at hiding the fact that they are doing so, claiming innocence and honest intent.

( Read more... )

This will blow back your hair. I'm up to chapter 4 right now: seriously, read it.

I had the "Does too! I have a chemistry degree!" argument thrown at me tonight. The folks at cards tonight were discussing how glass flows, and I added in that did they know it is an urban legend? To which the reply was the above furious exhortation.

It's the "I've read more than you, so I am automatically right and don't have to explain it to you" argument that it seems formally educated people (and well-educated people with ideologies) love. Though it's not really an argument at all, just a way to stop the conversation .

I've noticed how often that argument--the "I have a formal education, so I am automatically right!" or "I read this book and it says this is true!" argument--is used as a counter-argument to either disagreement or to factual or logical responses.

I've personally been met with "I have a physics degree!" argument, and "I've read more books about race equality than you"/"Go talk to those other white folk who agree with me" argument as responses to logical refutations on my part of certain points, as though either overturn the logic or are the last word.

I'm sure I've done it, too, but it's a really interesting point of behavior. We think once we receive an education or hold a point of view, that that point of view is IT. Perfect, complete, unassailable...foundational. And we become upset when something we've been taught and accepted as true turns out to be vapor and legendry and non-factual.

(BTW, for the curious, glass does not flow. Actually, it theoretically does, but it would take longer than the current age of the universe for it to occur.)