January 13, 2009

  • Renounce Violence!

    There’s a bully in the playground. He says he owns the playground. You get to play in one pitiful corner of the playground with one swing and a rundown slide but only for two hours each day. 

    Then over time the bully reduces the time frame. It become 1 hours 55 minutes, then 1 hours 50 minutes. One day he even takes away your swing leaving you with just the slide. You complain, of course. You say we had a deal didn’t we? But the Bully laughs at you and beats the crap out of you when you do.

    1 hours, 40 minutes. 1 hours, 30 minutes.

    So you try to get the support of your fellow playground dwellers an you start saying “The Bully has NO Right to be in this playground!”, “The Bully should not exist here!”  “We have to fight back!” Many support you. Many hate you. But what can you do? If you don’t fight back soon you fear you won’t have a playground left to play in at all!

    Soon you end up going on a crusade against the bully. You play pranks on him. Sneak dirt in his drink, tie his shoe laces together. You try to sabotage his games. Some of your pranks are dangerous and cause serious brusies but nowhere near the damage that you take when he beats the crap out of you. You do all kinds of various things that annoy the hell out of him, but nothing that comes anywhere close to actually stopping him. But you do it all the while continuing your taunting. Every few weeks the bully catches you and beats the crap out of you demanding that you stop your tricks. But it doesn’t stop you.

    After a while, the opinion of your fellow kids starts to turn a bit in your favor, thanks you presume, to your pranks and your rants and speeches. And that worries the Bully. So the Bully switches strategy. He starts painting YOU as the bad guy. Here’s how he does it.

    He starts off by saying “Listen everyone. We have to learn to share the playground.  Let’s all stop fighting and playing tricks on each other and sit down and talk about how we want to split up the playground. Already I’ve been willing to let the kid have a section of the playground for 1 whole hour and 15 minutes every day. If we sit down and talk surely we can come up with a reasonable balance.”

    Everyone nods sagely listening to the bully as if he were the most reasonable person in the world.  You, however, know he’s full of crap so you continue your pranks and your speeches, trying to get support against the Bully.  That’s when the Bully pounces!

    “Look at him!”, the bully says. “Now, I as much as anyone want the playground to be at peace. However, how can I do that if he won’t talk to me.”

    You say “Sure I’ll talk. I’ve always been willing to talk.”

    But the bully says “No you’re not! All you want to do is play pranks on me! All you do is say that I have to leave the playground and that I have no right to be here at all! How can I talk with you under those conditions?”

    The crowd of kids, tricked, nods in agreement.

    You say: “No, really, I’ll talk. Let’s talk. I think it’s fair that we split the playground in half. And we can each spend equal amounts of time in our respective halfs.”

    But the bully steadfastly ignores you. Instead he makes a demand of you:

    “You *must* swear never to play a prank on me again! Renounce pranking or fighting or any other form of violence altogether, and declare unequivocally that I have a right to the playground! If you do that, then we’ll talk.”

    The day after he says this, the bully beats the crap out of you.  And the amoutn of time you can spend in the playground is reduce to 1 hour, then 45 minutes.  So you keep up your retaliatory violence and keep saying the bully HAS TO GO.  Every day you do minor annoying pranks to the bully. Every month or so the bully beats the crap out of it. Only now everytime he does, he says he’s ONLY doing it in order to prevent your cruel terrorizing pranks.

    What would you do in such a situation? Do you give into his demands and “say” you renounce violence? Even at the same time that the bully commits extroardinarily worse violence against you? Do you give into his demands to acknowledge his right to the playground in spite of the fact that he’s made your life a miserable Hell so far?

    And let’s take a step back here. He’s asking you for *words* whereas you are complaining about his real devastating *actions*.  Don’t you have freedom of speech to say whatever you want? Why can’t you *say* you want the bully gone? That surely causes no harm. It’s if you DO something immoral to get rid of the bully that should be rejected. Obviously your pranks are wrong and should stop, but how is it fair that you stop your pranks when the bully continues to beat the crap out of you regularly? Why doesn’t the BULLY have to renounce violence and make an oath never to reduce the time you can spend in the playground or the space you have to play any further as well as not to beat you up anymore?  Why is all the onus placed on you?

    It makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. That’s why.   What would a sensible scenario look like? What would be fair?

    Well for starters the bully should stfu about *words*  and worry about actions. There should be fundamental rules of the playground that all actors must abide by, including you AND the bully equally. These rules are about actions not words. The actions that are illegal would include beating the crap out of a fellow playgrounder, or playing pranks on another playgrounder, as well as monopolizing the playground’s time or space unfairly. Whenever either actor violates these rules they should be stopped, tried in a court of their fellow children, and if found guilty punished. Severely if necessary.  That would make sense. Any idiot can see that.

    But of course it doesn’t work that way right now. Not in Palestine.

Comments (12)

  • the United Nations has no power due to the veto, that the USA keeps on using to please some of its own population.

  • Hoo-boy, you are blogging dangerously, sir…

    I approve. :P

  • @relaxolgy - this is what i don’t comprehend. Especially given 70% of the US Population believes we should be neutral. Why does the US still cater to that smaller percentage of the population.

    And yeah in general the UN is designed moronically. The idea of the veto states is sick and unjust. The continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one of many disastrous consequences of this structure.

    @ClockworkBunny - I’m glad you approve.

  • Oh, and I saw what you said on Dan’s posts regarding timestamping and how it really shouldn’t be seen as a big deal….

    I do agree with you. Actually, I prefer your idea regarding the overhaul of the inbox, letting us mark posts as read, rendering excessive timestamping meaningless.

    However, I don’t expect Xanga to do anything that expensive/complicated. I have realistic expectations of their business practices, unfortunately. :(

    As for the timestamping itself… my reaction is related to the reactions of others. People are flipping out. If something isn’t done soon, I don’t know what they’ll do.

    Besides, when Nori introduced the idea that would eliminate timestamping entirely, that made me nervous. She collected quite a few votes all by herself. I was afraid we’d lose timestamping, though it does serve a function- in moderation.

    So I support that idea developed by the Dans- which you might know, if you’ve seen my most recent post. I just wanted you to hear my side of why I wrote that post… the emotional reason, that is.

  • Israel, as formed in 1948 is actually a UN decision. Maybe, if they had make both parties happy with the deal before enforcing it…

    It’s not the preecentage that matters, it’s where in the food chain you are, Don’t they say 2% of the world’s population own 90% of the world’s resources? …that sounds insane (I probably got the figures wrong, but the proportions ARE insane anyway)

  • @ClockworkBunny - the times tamping finction WAS gone for a while, when they introduced future posting, and then it came back  Point is, nobody died from not have the time stamp function.

  • @relaxolgy - Yeah, but people are flipping out now at the idea of losing it.

    If it was gone before and nobody cared, it was probably because it wasn’t allowed to become a controversy. But now that everyone’s adrenaline is flowing, it can’t calm down. No matter what happens, a lot of people are going to be mad. But I can’t stand everyone being mad as they are right now. :(

  • @relaxolgy - as of the year 2000 one estimate showed 16% of the world’s populations consumed 80% of it’s resources.  I don’t know if it’s gotten worse but yeah it IS insane.

    Presumably in “principle” at least in a Democracy the position that is held by the vast majority of the population should at least be seriously considered by the leaders. But our democracy is apparently utterly dysfunctional.

    Yeah in 1948, the US had all the power and no opposition and we decided to help impose our will by establishing Israel. It was a mind-numbingly stupid thing to do. Best idea I’ve heard is that we probably should have have put Israel in Montana or Texas or something. Makes sense to me.

  • @ClockworkBunny - @relaxolgy - actually if you have future/past posting, Time Stamping, CAN’T go away. It just becomes slightly more annoying for people to do. (They have to look at the clock and see what time it is, lol, sooo hard).

    Actually, even WITHOUT future/past posting, timestamping, the actual act CAN’T go away. At worst case, people just REPOST the same entry with our without deleting the old one. That’s not that hard.  But it’ll be even MORE annoying than timestamping. Because people will forget to delete the old one.

    All these things that make it harder might make it less common but they might not. We don’t KNOW the impact.

    I agree with Dan’s earlier post about the forces pushing Timestamping to be more common. If we recognize and acknowledge these forces, we should do what is necessary to eliminate them. At the same time we can always do things to make timestamping less annoying all around.

    Adding a price to timestampign though, I think is just kind of a screwed up thing to do. It’s putting a price on a trivial feature that Xanga created for us in the first place. That’s sort of like a Xanga Tax. And… I’m just not sure we want to open that Pandora’s box.

  • @nephyo - that IS a good idea! Too late now though…

    democracy is strenghen and weakened by lobbying.

  • But what are the forces pushing timestamping?

    Ish sites. Those aren’t going anywhere. There could easily be more introduced in the future.

    Too many recs in the inbox. We already saw the storm directed at those who recommended too often by the estimation of others… it didn’t stop anything, just increased bad blood between everyone.

    Too many pulses in the inbox. Xanga won’t even give us a tab for pulses alone, there’s no way they’ll do anything really constructive. Besides, if people would rather pulse frequently than blog reasonably, there’s nothing for it.

    There’s also the simple, uncomfortable fact that traffic is thinning so much on Xanga that the sites who wish to be read are practically fighting over those readers. There just AREN’T enough readers to go around. Hence crazy amounts of timestamping. Anything to get people to look at your post, at least LOOK at it.

    The issues that have increased timestamping to explosive proportions aren’t going away. :(

    I don’t even know anymore.

  • @ClockworkBunny - hmm, I agree they aren’t going away on their own. But I’m nto about to just give up on it. I think things can be done that will significantly improve xanga without legislating timestamping.  I may post in more detail on the subject.

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