House of Eratosthenes

You can’t reliably, or regularly, generate good results when you do this preening. Because those who preen are not predisposed to improve, to repair flaws. To do that, you have to 1) hang around to see how the Awesome Wonderful Grand Plan works, 2) find some flaws and 3) be honest, with yourself first of all, that the flaws are there. That gets in the way of The Preen.

Which means, ultimately, that The Preen has to get in the way of improvement. Any improvement. All learning…

I have had the idea germinating in my head that the preens that do the most harm, are limited in number. I worked this over a bit, masticating it between the molars of my mind, and came up with…in the current troubled times in which we live…seven. Huh. Interesting. Just like the deadly sins from Paradise Lost. Also, the castaways in Gilligan’s Island. What is it with that number seven?

Well, maybe with some more thought put into it, I’ll be seeing the number change. But for now…

Green Preen
Gelding Preen
Pantsuit Preen
Guilty-White Preen
Gadget Preen
Egghead Preen
Special Needs Preen

What these all have in common with each other, is that the person preening has embraced an urgent need to get some communicating done, without offering any sort of opportunity to actually exchange ideas or information. The narrative is all set. The audience is supposed to react the way the script-in-his-head says, and if that doesn’t happen…well, I was just talking about that, wasn’t I. Conflict ensues, and it’s all the fault of everybody else.

I think you’d have to have been living in a cave, to require any sort of introduction of the first one. The narrative is that the planet is on its last legs — because of “us.” The preener is entirely innocent of this planetary destruction, or if he is not then he is at least aware of his guilt, which is the same as not having any. And then there are these poopy heads who doubt the message. “Skeptics,” they’re called. So the green-preener toils away, like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain in the underworld, to get the message out so the planet can be saved. This would necessarily involve the skeptics no longer being skeptics. But nobody’s really sure how that is to be done. Also, if it happened, you have the “dog caught the car” thing happening there, the preener wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do. Conflict is essential to the exercise. There have to be some BadPeople making BadFeelz with their BadThinking. Can’t have drama without a villain.

Now the Gelding Preen is a special case, a kind of “negative preen.” He does not seek upward social mobility by saying the right things. Rather, he seeks to avoid social deterioration by distancing himself from the wrong things. It happens in office environments. And it starts out with the right intentions; we’re all there giving up a third of our day, so we can make an honest living, and that means everyone is deserving of some measure of respect. Also, nobody should be doing anything to make the day unnecessarily longer. Human decency: If we’re all stuck in an elevator car together, don’t take a shit. The problem is when the definition of “shit” is broadened to include any & all male-associated actions and characteristics. In much of what we regard as civilized society, it’s happened already.

Bows and Depos If you’re a man who works in an office and you speak with a voice pitch that is much higher than what’s comfortable, you’re part of the problem. Yes, it’s unthinkable that we should run around talking in natural voice inflections, an octave or two below middle C if that’s what comes naturally to the male voicebox. And it’s horrifying that we should have pictures of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models on our work computers. But why? It’s these “evolving standards” that are cocked up here.

The Pantsuit Preen is the opposite of the Gelding Preen. This is, women seeking to elevate their social status by not appearing to be women. Maybe they cut their hair short. Again with the questions: Why? More importantly, who? As in, who likes this? Whoever that is, that’s the one with the real problem. Women are women, it’s just a fact. Women wear skirts and dresses. They look good wearing these things, and men don’t. And if your skepticism doesn’t completely ping off the charts when you see a woman wearing a pantsuit all of the time, you just haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on lately and can’t see the calling cards. Same way it’s a fact that a man is a man, it’s also a fact that a woman is a woman. When did this become something we have to pretend is not true? What slipped? Who’s responsible? There’s the problem, those who are responsible won’t say. They just keep contributing — anonymously — to the problem.

The Guilty-White Preen is responsible for all sorts of misery upon us. And it has recently shifted into high gear with all this business about “check[ing] your privilege.” It doesn’t stop there. All sorts of “Those People” conversations begin, and end, with a whole lot of hand-wringing about the plight of “those people,” and what sort of rigging of the system has to be done to get them back where “they” belong. But so seldom are the shenanigans ever designed by anyone with the slightest intention of living among “those people.”

Check Your Privilege There is a strange sort of dirty earnestness about the Guilty-White Preen. Its narrative aligns with reality, if only temporarily, when its adherents recognize that fate has blessed them with advantages they don’t deserve. But it seems to go flying over their heads that fate has also burdened them with a challenge, along with an opportunity, to prove themselves worthy. They become self-fulfilling prophesies, blinded by their own unearned advantages from ever seeing the good side of anything. Example: A Republican President makes the case that military action is required, over here, for these reasons…the preener immediately expunges as even a remote possibility, that the President could be arguing for this action in good faith. No can do. Suddenly, it’s all “he lied to get us into an illegal/unjust war BushCheneyHitlerHalliburton.” It is almost as if they know their privileged upbringing has imbued them with a lifelong, unsupported skepticism against the necessity of any chore. Someone needs to take out the garbage? I doubt it! Prove it! That’s anti-war activism in a nutshell: A dirty job that has to be done? I never saw anything like that when I was a kid. There must not be any such thing.

The Gadget Preen is unique in this list because, apart from the Gelding Preen, it is the only one that is resolutely apathetic against the details of any issue. This type of preener glides above it all, preferring not to get bogged down in the pros and cons of Quantitative Easing. Why should he bother? He already knows everything. He has an iPhone!

Not to be confused with the Egghead Preen, which is best thought-of as an almost-scientific study into how to make the most consistently wrong decisions, with the greatest confidence. It is truly frustrating when you see someone pushing an idea so wrong, that you just know it wouldn’t have held any appeal for them if they weren’t in such a hurry to show their smarts. Always always always, there is some morsel to their thinking, some 180-degree hairpin-turn, away from some slothful inept status-quo idea that had consumed the attention of us slope-foreheaded morons before the egghead came along and showered his enlightened thinking upon us. And what a good thing for us that he did!

Our current President has become rather enslaved to this sort of thinking. It’s embarrassing to watch Him in action, after awhile. Thought exercise: Wait for the next time He tells us “we can’t” do something, and imagine yourself as the guy who — according to His narrative — had been previously intellectually incapable of processing this. Imagine yourself saying “Aw gee, because that was like my plan and stuff.” We can’t turn against each other. Guess I’ll have to throw out my caveman plan, of us all turning against each other. Ditto for my plan to wait for Congress (which the Caveman’s Constitution says you’re actually supposed to do), also I wanted to become numb to school shootings…and, defund ObamaCare. Me am to want to pass on to me cave kids a bill they can’t pay. Me am to want to be a bystander to bigotry. Me am to drill meself to lower gas prices.

President Obama is supposed to be, if nothing else, original, creative, fun to watch, entertaining. If you’re a one-trick pony, you’d better know the trick. I’m not sure this pony does. What do I miss, exactly, if I miss the latest Obama speech? Someone please tell me. Each one is pretty much interchangeable with all the others, at this point, right?

A common mistake I see the Egghead Preeners making, is to confuse a point about increments on a spectrum between the endpoints, as license to conflate the two diametrically-opposed endpoints with each other. I will support that with an example. I could choose from several. The first that comes to mind is Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, to which I made a casual reference already. After this had become a pressing issue, John Kerry ran against George W. Bush for the presidency, as a challenger, on an unofficial platform that he had the intellectual fortitude, the “nuance,” that the Crawford Dimbulb was lacking. “He thinks in shades of gray” was one meme that took on a life of its own, as I recall. It is certainly true that there were shades-of-gray involved in the hypothesis that “Saddam Hussein has WMDs.” Somehow, this metastasized into something like: We need to start thinking of this guy as a victim, even though our intelligence and common sense tell us he’s dangerous, and might even be up to something. After all, if you can’t trust Michael Moore then who can you trust? Another example: Socialism. One of my Facebook friends, inclined toward the lefty-leaning side of things, a few hours ago said

The one thing that defines a socialist at their core is that they nationalize private industry. If they don[‘]t do that then they are not socialists. Period.

Yes, it’s another tired debate about Hitler being a left-winger or a right-winger. Isn’t it odd? Certain things, like socialism, are to be defined as narrowly as possible. Other things, like “lied to get us into an illegal/unjust war” as mentioned above, are to be defined very broadly. Well that’s the thing about definitions: You have to do it with some consistency, or else there’s no point to even bothering with the exercise. If people have to keep running back to you to say “Are we interpreting this the right way? Are we interpreting that the right way?” — then you haven’t defined anything at all.

And the difference between confiscating someone’s business by way of “nationalization,” versus letting them keep it but dictating to them exactly how they’re supposed to run it, is more a distinction than a true difference. It’s like the difference between feeding your neighbor’s dog steak laced with arsenic, or just shooting it. And that’s the funny thing about eggheads. They’re so eager to show how smart they are, that they forget the basics. They see different things as the same, and they see functionally identical things, as somehow, inexplicably, different. This defeats whatever advantages their eggheaded-ness might have brought. To mix my tortured metaphors a bit more, under the “in for a penny, in for a pound” rule: Who cares how powerful your mighty engine is, if your tires won’t grip the pavement?

But the Special Needs Preen is the most toxic out of all seven. Anytime you’re dealing with an argument that so-and-so must have some sort of advantage not available to the general population, and the rationale is that so-and-so doesn’t have something else or can’t do something else…you’re dealing with this.

Some people make the point that we have to do everything they want, and nothing anybody else wants, and the reason for this is that they can’t handle their own emotions. Yes that is absurd. Offensive, even. But they get away with it. When they do, it reflects poorly on all of us.

Others try to mix their special needs preening with their guilty-white privilege preening, and paint themselves into the risible corner of arguing that we have to make everything equal-equal-equal, and at the same time, preserve for them (or their targeted sympathy-class) some special privileges, to prove how committed we are to making everything equal-equal-equal.

Others provide documentation “proving” their kids have real-or-imagined “learning disabilities.” Some of these parents act like normal parents, insisting that their disabled children be given as normal a life as possible. You will often find these kids have real disabilities. For if they didn’t, surely such parents would not be conjuring up wild tales about disabilities that don’t exist. But other parents want their children to be sheltered. I just cringe when I see them doing this; it’s as if they’re embarrassing me, and not themselves. They saturate the very air around them with all these wild tales about their kids’ handicaps…but when the time comes to define what exactly these handicaps are, suddenly there are no details to be found. And of course it is improper to ask…somehow.

These people are mired in a personal vendetta against human potential. They’re against it. They, like all the above, reflect poorly on the rest of us. Or at least, I think they do. I think, maybe, if it became the rule rather than the exception for others to ask these contraband questions…

…like…

Oh, so you’re failing the class because your professor is so mean? Does the professor have any other students in his class? Are they all failing too?

…and…

Oh, so you got a bad employee review because your boss is unreasonable and a jerk? Does your boss have any other employees? What kind of reviews did they get?

…and…

Oh, so you can’t get to work on time because you live really far away? Are there any other employees of this company who live in that area? Are they chronically late too?

…things would be different. I think even the casual reader can pick up the gist. This is a conflict between two opposite mentalities.

One mentality says, “If it’s a problem for any one person to get it done somewhere, that it’s unrealistic to expect anyone else to get it done, anywhere.”

The other mentality says “If any one person can get it done, anywhere, then that means everybody has the opportunity to do it, and everywhere.”

The second mentality is more difficult because it brings with it the weight of some obligations: You have to look toward people who getting things done that you’re not getting done yet, and then you have to have the courage to learn. The first one is easier, because of this. But that doesn’t mean it is natural. It is actually the more onerous of the two opposite mindsets, that is the natural one. We are built, down to the individual strands of our DNA, to look to people who are stronger than we are, and learn from their superior example.

Don't Give a Good Jolly Fuck The obstacle is just this: It takes balls. That’s all. You have to have courage. It takes a lot of courage to be a “hero,” to be sure. But it takes a lot more courage and balls to find a hero, recognize that he is a hero, treat him as a hero, recognize you have something to learn, ways to improve…and start going to town on it. It isn’t easy, nobody ever said it was. But that is how we improve. And improving is how we survive.

Astute readers will observe that I have come full-circle, I have carried you back to the very first paragraph at the top of this post. Preening looks, at first glance, like a token payment with which we have to contend to continue living in a civilized society. Like a bridge toll or something. That is not what preening is. Preening is acceptance of everything that kills us, and a rejection of everything that nourishes us and protects us. Preening is anti-life. It is pro-death.

But that’s heady talk for a Saturday night, so I’m going to commit this to the ether and slap some steaks on the grill. No, I don’t give a good jolly fuck what anybody thinks of it.

[…] Many types of preening […]
- Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Worthwhile Reading | 04/11/2016 @ 16:01

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Types of PreensSaturday, February 27th, 2016

Types of Preens
Saturday, February 27th, 2016