Firing on less than all cylinders.

[silveradept]

...today was a very hockey day for me. 20+ goals, three games or so, pretty good stuff. Although I came back from the one game I saw live to see video artifacts all over my screen. So I rebooted, thinking the OS had frozen... not so much. Video artifacts continued in a very patterned way. Neither OS booted fully, and Windows returned an "infinite loop" BSOD. Which means my video card is probably dying. Swell. I sent home for the card I took out of the replacement box when I moved everything over. I'll probably have to redetect the settings on it for both OS - not a painful or time-consuming process, just a necessary one. Have to love these sorts of things when they happen - never major problems, just minor ones, annoyances. The timing is perfect, of course - it's a day I took off from work, and now there's a bit more enforced time off because of this wonderful problem. I'd say I was ticked, but I'm not. Not yet, anyway. It is nice having a computer lab not too far away in cases like these - were this not so, I would start being annoyed. I'm beginning to see the virtue in keeping a spare computer (basically) around for parts, with the way things like to go out on me. Ah, well. Such is life.

Science is still getting a bad rap. Apparently, the image of Science (SCIENCE!) is not hip enough in the UK. (And here in the US, too, I'm sure. But here they tell you that any sort of being smart is bad.) Must mean we need a good does of Mad Science or something, so that all the attractive girls either fall in love with the scientists or can be rescued by other scientist-heroes... or the girls get interested themselves in Mad Science, and you have attractive Mad Scientists in the profession. Bet that sparks interest.

Today wasn't a complete loss, though. I got cheap popcorn, and I found a five-dollar bill outside the arena at the end of the game. Plus, I read the rest of the manga I bought with my VEWPRF money, picked up a substitute shift tomorrow for water polo, and will have my computer running again then. All told, minor gains and minor setbacks, but nothing serious.

Also, I'm bitten by a creativity bug. I want to see what happens if I have the time to keep adding onto this story about a gentle giant. Although it's finished, there are probably some chapters after that which could be of use to a writer. For some reason, this story intrigues me, both as metaphor and as reality. Then again, if I peer around at the culture I've been growing up in, I think I'm drawing parallels already.

Ah, one other thing for tonight, a wayward thought that has entered my head just now. It's not really related to anything in this post so far, so nothing that you've seen before will help you here on this.

I was going backwards through the lists, and re-ran across the couple posts or so I saw about the "OMG-Furries" video - the one that may have spawned some meme where "I want to kill myself" is the ending tagline (Kind of like the occasional OTT Goth Poetry Night in #fleet, where the line is "I want to die."). It very well may be that this person, with perhaps this documented exception, is normal, and may perhaps have a few oddities herself. This gets me thinking: Aren't all of us really a conglomeration of odd traits? I mean, yeah, normal is subjective and all that, but this may be one step farther. Most of us are told that what makes us different makes us special (or at the very least, "unique", which can be a backhanded compliment), the hundred tiny variances in our physical appearances due to genetic factors and the hundred-thousand variances in our mental states and patterns.

Yet, at the moment, if you display a certain subset of those hundred-thousand variances, you're different in a bad way, "weird". It used to be physical differences (and still is, to certain members of the Government and other organizations devoted to an impossible purity), but for the most part, people get along, regardless of physical differences. Let's strip away those variances that are obviously harm-causing to self and others, so persons compelled to kill, steal, and other such actions are taken and placed in the category of Causing Actual and Demonstrable Social Harm. (The category lines are a little fuzzy, as always when generalizations come out. Your mileage and definitions are at variance with mine. This will become important later.)

We now have a second set of characteristics that still render a person "weird" and/or "socially unacceptable", but which cause no actual demonstrable social harm. For my sake, I put in anime, geekdoms, furriness, soulbonding, Something Awful Goondom, and several other visible fandoms (that includes religions!) that can generate drama at the drop of a hat (Avala Kadavra! ZZZT!) as examples of this set. Most people I know, and that you know, have at least one of these subsets in their existence. (You can probably think of some eccentricity about all the people you know well enough.) More likely, though, the people that you know have more than one of them - they have several, some of which may be better hidden than others. (You'll notice on the list, excepting for Goondom, all of those can be at least somewhat applied to me.) To quote somebody that a lot of people think is really swell, "Let him without sin cast the first stone." Well, it happens, anyway. If a hard sci-fi fan is causing strife and discord on an anime fan because of his choice of fandom, does he gain some sort of moral superiority? If a non-fur is absolutely mortified at the prospect of associating with a fur, and they claim it because "furries are perverts", is there some moral decree that gives the non-fur the ability to be Right, especially if they happen to be quite avid fans of tentacle hentai? Mind you, slinging that back in the face of someone is only likely to provoke further hostilities - that's why it's an effective flamebait.

Anyway, looping back to the original point, the one I really intended to make, is that every person consists of these potentially socially unacceptable elements, and that it's really much of a pot-and-kettle problem for one to accuse the other of anything deviant. What I wonder the most about is why only some elements get the scrutiny and others avoid the detection - after all, if they're not causing societal harm, why should you care? Sure, it might creep you out personally, but that's not really enough cause to go on a crusade and claim the moral high ground. ("It's over, Trekkie! I have the high ground now!" "So? Han shot first, remember?" ZORCH.)

I guess what I'm really saying is that I don't understand why people, including me, do these sorts of things. (And what they were thinking all that time ago when they wrote some of those things into their holy books...) Do they honestly believe that these people are committing some sort of social harm by existing and having their fandom? (A certain snarl pops into my head about how many people think that much, if not all, of anime is hentai. Or the Internet, for that matter.) Or, like the President, do they think God talks to them and tells them to go crusade against these people? Or is it more of the monkeysphere problem, an artificially constructed "Them" to make a safe "Us" out of? Graaaaaagh. I don't get it. And I'm more worried that when I'm about twice my current age, I'll be one of those people making crusades against the deviants. (the whole "If you're not a Democrat by the time you're thirty, you have no heart. If you're not a Republican by the time you're forty, you have no brain thing.")

That's what's happening in our neighborhood. Your mileage and experience may vary, and probably will.

Comments

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

People are inherently social animals. This comes, inevitably, with the concept of "us", and the contrasting concept of "them".
As people have a natural social group of around 150 individuals (roughly the same value is returned from generalising primate studies to the human brain, from examining social group sizes in tribal societies and from looking at the number of Christmas cards people send, on average), there is a natural tendency for us to generalise people outside that group in terms of their most obvious qualities. (That is, we compact groups into a representation of the group as a whole, which enables us to deal with much more than 150 individuals conceptually.)

This, of course, immediately biases people towards a generalised "us" and "them", based on whichever properties are unusual in their own group of 150 friends. So, Republicans with a lot of Republican friends are likely to see Democrats as "them", and the converse is true of Democrats with Democratic friends.

I suspect that television has a certain role in setting the mode for "us" behaviour, too. So, the increased appearance of ethnically-diverse people on television has reduced the importance of skin colour as a differentiator for the generalised social group.

Moral Crusades, when it comes down to it, are all about "Us" vs "Them". So, it's not surprising that we exhibit the behaviour stated. We just need to work harder to move more things into our "Us" space (and develop extensions to the human brain, beyond what extelligence has provided us, to allow us to move significantly beyond the hard 150 limit).

[silveradept]

That's mroe what I was afraid of - that there's some natural limitation that will stop us from being evolved people about this unless we can find a way of chunking things properly to put more stuff into our memory banks and behavorial deciders.

I just wish the "Us" concept could be expanded into a more global way, or that we'd be more blacklist than whitelist in our decisions.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) *raises hand* What does VEWPRF stand for?

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

After a surprisingly bad return from Google, and a bit of digging around on LJ, I discovered that VEWPRF stands for "Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival", being an overarching term for all of those Winter Festivals that people celebrate around the 25th of December. It was invented by greyweirdo as a sardonic response to the factionalisation over which religion gets to be dominant for this holiday period.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) Ahhh. Thank you!

F) *much happiness*

[silveradept]

Also, a swipe at the commercial nature of the various named festivals and the tendency for shopkeepers to start on their displays before the nominal Novermber holiday has passed.