sibelian
sibelian's JournalHello Admins, I have a slightly awkward question regarding MIRT
It came to light recently that a poster on DU, currently on the MIRT team, has boasted off-site on another forum of wishing to goad another contributor here into posting things that could be hidden with the specific aim of having them timed out.
Is this something which you feel is an appropriate attitude for a member of the MIRT team?
It seems reasonable to me that the MIRT team should be focussed on the freely undertaken conduct of members, not attempting to establish correctable conduct through manipulation, with the long-term desired effect of silencing their contributions, in order to skew the compisition of the site's membership. I would expect a member of the MIRT team to be impartial, and would find it difficult to assume that their MIRT role was being attended to with that impartiality had that member revealed such manipulative tendencies elsewhere.
I hope you can reassure me.
Sibelian
Control freaks never notice when their foundations are crumbling.
They only ever see it too late.
Control freaks tend to think in rigid systems that enable their thoughts to move quickly around nice steady, well-understood patterns. They don't want the system disturbed.
You'll tend to find that they will declare things in the system to be unchangeable. But it's not because these elements of the system can't change, it's because the control freak needs to suppose that they can't change because other processes dependent on those elements are attractive to them.
Emotional processes, typically.
The CEO of lampshade-making company X doesn't care about lampshades. He'll say he does, of course. He has to.
But what he really likes is the suits. Being the centre of attention in board meetings. Having a title. Comfy leather seats. Being good at looking important.
Such people have a great deal invested emotionally in these symbols.
They will talk up their lampshades until the cows come home. Thats what they have to do to get the suits.
They know that the lampshades are no better than anyone elses. They know that you know that, too. They don't care. So long as everyone behaves as if the lampshades are better than everyone else's they get the suits.
They'll say anything about the lampshades. They'll measure the extent to which the shades dim the bulb. They'll massage the costs. They'll paint pretty patterns on them. They'll pose with them in front of naked ladies. Sometimes "ironically".
They don't give a fuck.
But one day along comes someone with a bulb that doesn't need a lampshade.
The bulb manufacturer will suddenly become a narcissist. The bulb manufacturer will have no taste. The bulb manufacturer will be a materialist scum-bag. There's always something.
The CEO has to do something. He has to do something to hang onto the suit.
You may think all this is hyperbole, it isn't. The majority of people at the top of the pyramid are actually astonishingly shallow. You'd have to be to get there. You have to be able to stand on the soap-box and say ANYTHING AT ALL in order to get power, because power is almost always generated by collective perception and that's easy to manipulate. All you have to do is say what people want to hear. And you have to be amazingly shallow to be interested in spending your entire life saying what people want to hear.
The only people shallower are those interested primarily in saying what they want to hear.
Mr Lampshade CEO doesn't care if the lampshades in your house improve your life. He doesn't care if you can get a cheaper shade down the road. All he cares about is getting stuff out of you. Attention, time, money... anything. Because that's how his fragile ego gets its nourishment. He has such a deeply inhuman understanding of himself and such a poor understanding of other people that he can't imagine anyone else not wanting other people's time and attention as much as he does.
This being the case, most of the things that get thrown at the bulb manufacturer are things that the CEO is dimly aware of in himself. Mr Lampshade CEO doesn't know anything else. He isn't interested in other people. When other people speak, The first thing he thinks is "how does what this person says make me feel about me?" He can't say so, because he understands that that's against the rules.
But when the lampshade empire becgins to crumble, when the unstated reciprocity that he's built his life on begins to fall apart he starts to lash out in terror. Not because the lampshades aren't being taken seriously, but because he isn't going to get any more suits.
A lot of the time he doesn't even realise that all he wants are the suits. He'll convince himself that his lampshades really are better. The mind doesn't work in straight lines. It works in bends and twists and great coiling clouds of unprocessed symbols all merging and floating through each other, tripping each other off and sparking lightning storms.
The lampshade makers never know what to say when someone's trying to switch on the light.
It takes years of effort and very often many big life battles lost before one learns to disentangle oneself from the mirror of selfdom and learn to speak truthfully. We have to be destroyed again and again. Death stalks us, disease rots us, poverty strips away our pride. All of these things take away the pieces of ourselves that make us unwholesome. All of these things strip the dead ideas away. We have to be smashed into shape. Only the strongest parts of us survive, only the parts that refuse to look away. Only the pieces of ourselves that remain after the harrowing are worth anything. It's only the battle that can do it, and losing is as important as winning. More important, in some cases. Until we have had the crap beaten out of us, we aren't looking at other people properly, we look straight at living adults and see only things that we have scribbled all over them in our imaginations. Why? Beause the scribbling is all we can think of to do.
The alternative is terrifying.
Only when we've bled and dreamed nonsense and had our rotting selfishness flayed away entirely are we real. Only then, through humility and failure, can we become acceptable to ourselves, and then have the power to speak truthfully without fear and learn to hear it when others are speaking the truth.
Only after we've been completely destroyed can we be reborn. Only after all the lies have been told can we see the truth. Only after the last monument to arrogance and selfdom has been powdered and we are walking in its dust will we have the courage to look each other in the face and believe that we are looking at things that are more like us than unlike us.
All the divisions are artificial. They are scribblings, scrawled in place reflexively by people who need to draw, need to draw something. Anything.
I'm no exception.
The lampshade howkers have spent their entire lives lying. They can't afford to let go. They've protected themselves from destruction so well that the mirrored bubble encases them completely. They can't see the truth at all. All they can see is what they want to see.
But the Universe isn't interested in lies. Cracks start creeping through the glass, slowly.
The first thing that happens when a scribbler stops looking at what he's scribbling and what he's scribbling on and the craks in the surface disturb him and he starts looking at his pen and then his arm... is that he shouts "PROJECTION!" at everybody, because that's what HE'S been doing. But it still isn't true.
The truth is easy to see. All you have to do is put down the pen.
We convince ourselves that we remain distinct from our ancestors, that their minds were unlike ours, but a cursory glance at the merest smatterings of history reveal the same problems, the same feelings, the same games, the same tricks, the same lies, the same stories, over and over and over again. We stand on their shoulders just as others will stand on ours.
And sometimes someone comes along with a new light bulb. And the same things are said about them... every time.
Hello America! UK here. You think YOUR politics is fucked up? David Cameron £$%&$ed a pig.
You think YOUR politics is a mess...? Weeeellll....
Appaaaaaarently....
UK PM David Cameron stuck a ... COUGH... "part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig in his dim and distant youth, according to Lord Ashcroft, who has recently done a biography on him.
It's all over the UK press.
So. There you go. Take some comfort in the knowledge that no matter how low and dirty campaigning gets in the US... there's always still the UK...
"Cameron biography: Ashcroft makes new debauchery claims about student days"
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/21/david-cameron-pig-head-lord-ashcroft-unofficial-biography-drug-taking-claims
"No 10 says it will not 'dignify' Ashcroft's student debauchery allegations by responding to them"
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/sep/21/cameron-hit-by-student-drugs-and-debauchery-allegations-in-ashcroft-biography-politics-live
...and so on.
It's slightly odd that the first episode if Charlie Brooker's quasi-science-fictional Black Mirror's first episode is TERRIBLY similar to this story... He's tweeted about it saying he didn't know about it... waaaah!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_%28Black_Mirror%29
Anyway, puns all over the place now from fellow pols and others saying Cameron's "hogging the limelight" and so on. Ah, Blighty, you do me proud.
Daily Mash article is the best...
"Britons wearily accept that their Prime Minister put his cock in a pig's mouth"...
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/britons-wearily-accept-that-their-prime-minister-put-his-cock-in-a-pigs-mouth-20150921102114
"Teacher Mary Fisher said: “I can’t remember whether I had already heard this or just thought I did."
O Hai, American guys! UK PM DAVID CAMERON, PIGS AND... WHUUUUUUTTT??
You think YOUR politics is a mess...? Weeeellll....
Appaaaaaarently....
UK PM David Cameron stuck a ... COUGH... "part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig in his dim and distant youth, according to Lord Ashcroft, who has recently done a biography on him.
It's all over the UK press.
So. There you go. Take some comfort in the knowledge that no matter how low and dirty campaigning gets in the US... there's always still the UK...
"Cameron biography: Ashcroft makes new debauchery claims about student days"
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/21/david-cameron-pig-head-lord-ashcroft-unofficial-biography-drug-taking-claims
"No 10 says it will not 'dignify' Ashcroft's student debauchery allegations by responding to them"
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/sep/21/cameron-hit-by-student-drugs-and-debauchery-allegations-in-ashcroft-biography-politics-live
...and so on.
It's slightly odd that the first episode if Charlie Brooker's quasi-science-fictional Black Mirror's first episode is TERRIBLY similar to this story... He's tweeted about it saying he didn't know about it... waaaah!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_%28Black_Mirror%29
Anyway, puns all over the place now from fellow pols and others saying Cameron's "hogging the limelight" and so on. Ah, Blighty, you do me proud.
Daily Mash article is the best...
"Britons wearily accept that their Prime Minister put his cock in a pig's mouth"...
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/britons-wearily-accept-that-their-prime-minister-put-his-cock-in-a-pigs-mouth-20150921102114
"Teacher Mary Fisher said: “I can’t remember whether I had already heard this or just thought I did."
No. It's not "hate". It's DISAPPOINTMENT.
It's DISAPPOINTING to be told that one's country's military influence is to be expanded and developed after over a decade of consequences from a disastrous, cruel and bullying intervention in the history of an innocent people.
It's DISAPPOINTING to be told that one is supposed to vote for someone based on what they are instead of what they intend to do.
It's DISAPPOINTING to hear people invent baseless perception problems of an honest candidate when they are alone in an entire system driven by phoniness and dishonesty.
It's DISAPPOINTING to see fellow lefties "play the game" that was originally invented by Republicans and patting themselves on the back for scoring points in a sickly, neurotic, anti-human process.
It's DISAPPOINTING to hear grown adults talk about whole demographics as if they are populated exclusively by mindless lumps of Play-Doh incapable of listening to anyone or anything that doesn't remind them of themselves.
It's DISAPPOINTING to make honest attempts to clear the way for better politics only to be confronted with a tsunami of babyish riffs on the theme of "you have whatever personality flaw I need to pretend you have to make my behaviour look reasonable to myself and your ideas dismissable as fantasy".
And above all (and I say this as s Scotsman in Edinburgh with no real right to say it to any of you good people...)
It's DISAPPOINTING, CRUELLY SO, to see the wonderful nation I have admired and respected for so long, the source of so much powerful thought and beautiful acheivement for decades (you may think you're a country of fascists and righties, hah! BULLSHIT - the Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, Stonewall, the reconstruction of Europe post WWII, "One step for Man, a giant leap for Mankind", Iraq Vets Against the War (there is no similar movement of equivalent size and significance anywhere in Europe!), Chomsky... I could go on and on) abandon itself over and over again to exactly the same point-scoring, inward-looking, antidemocratic, prejudiced, class-and-character-based cynicism that its inhabitants crossed oceans to escape!!!
It's the same stupid, oppressive garbage that's plagued Europe for centuries. It's just better lit and on a bigger stage.
MORE screwy bank shenenigans. MORE wars. MORE faux politicians. MORE faux concern. MORE shadowy campaign finance. MORE posturing. MORE lies.
It's DISAPPOINTING.
It wasn't particularly surprising that opposing Clinton would be regarded as sexist...
It's not difficult. It's the simplest and most obvious defense.
IF you think you're talking to an ocean of fucking morons.
The only way it works is if there are any "swing" voters who might be persuaded that someone saying "I think voting for the Iraq War is likely not the kind of person we want" is sexist. But that's not going to work if it's been blindingly obvious since the beginning that the person you're making the accusation against has also opposed men who prosecuted the Iraq War.
If your opponent criticises a female candidate for connections to Wall Street and also criticises male candidates for the same thing, it's a little difficult for you to establish that the criticism aimed at the female candidate is sexist, as it actually just looks more like your opponent expects the female candidate to meet the same standards as everyone else.
And if you're not careful, you end up looking as though you're saying female candidates should be allowed greater leeway for ill-advised choices than male ones. You're essentially saying, albeit unconsciously, that female candidates shouldn't be expected to have the integrity we expect of male ones. It carries the inescapable subtext of "she can't be expected to know better. It's so unfair. She's JUST A WOMAN."
And that really would be sexist.
Wouldn't it?
Jeremy Corbyn has just won the Labour party (UK) leadership by FIFTY-NINE PERCENT.
Jeremy is not third way. Blair told everyone he was going to "drive everyone over the edge of a cliff".
I wasn't particularly surprised that Blair told everyone Corbyn was going to drive everyone over the edge of a cliff.
I was slightly spooked, as I had used that exact phrase as part of a barrage of phrases I imagined might be used against Bernie in a rather bluntly satirical post on this site not so long ago. "They're reading my stuff!" I fumed. "Plagiarists!"
Jeremy's a bit of a lefty. Bit of a radical.
He's going off to attend a refugee demonstration now.
Parallels, perhaps?
EDIT:
Closest competitor is on 20%!
Various Labour apparatchiks immediately after result read urging caution in various hinty ways. Talking about "reaching out". (I am getting really sick of that phrase. What does it actually mean? What's the actual result of "reaching out"? What does it DO?)
EDIT II:
BF has just suggested that this might mean the end of "American style politics" in the UK that we've been seeing the last 20 years. Corbyn's much more like a European lefty. He wants to renationalise things.
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