House of Eratosthenes

Something is going on lately in our culture and I’m not entirely sure what it is. My best guess at this time is that it’s not one single causative event, but measurable metrics moving along, each in one direction over time, failing to course-correct or to check the speed. The attention span is steadily declining while the feral-hunger drive to WinWinWinWinWin all the time, is riding a vicious cycle and being carried upward.

That’s just a theory. There may be some other explanation, perhaps many other explanations. But the effect is something like this:

It’s certainly not a female trait, or at least, it isn’t that anymore. Of the five examples I’ve seen just since Friday morning, two of them are from males. One is embroiled in an entirely unnecessary legal fight because he thought the amount being demanded by a collection agency was so off-the-beaten-path, that their communications were unworthy of any response out of him. Last month, in the episode that probably got me to start thinking about all this, the woman who’d been using the in-house-built computer application the longest was explaining to me why it was throwing an exception. I knew it couldn’t be happening the way she was speculating on it because I’d been maintaining the source code on it, and I knew it didn’t process things in that order. I offered to bring up the project so we could look through it together and she said “Oh no, I don’t look at source code” — and insist that her theory of what was happening, was the right one.

Happened again last night. I shared a picture that had been put up on the Hello Kitty of Blogging by a buddy of mine, a picture of a woman’s gorgeous rack which was made (technically) work-safe because the lady in question had just finished immersing her appendages in some delicious, and reassuringly opaque, ice cream. One of Mrs. Freeberg’s friends accused me of objectifying women and I replied something like, oh good, maybe this is the part where someone can FINALLY explain it to me: Admiring a woman’s boobs, somehow, since womens’-lib and all that nonsense, reduces her to boobs and nothing more. How does that happen? It doesn’t work like that with a woman’s brain, or associated talents. Come to think of it, doesn’t work that way with a guy’s eyes, face, abs or butt. Why are we so easily controlled with this cultural-agitprop about “objectifying women”?

Some of my other Facebook peeps, equally curious, began to participate with similar questions and observations. Once the complainant saw she was outnumbered, she declared the discussion over. And, herself to be the victor.

Repeatedly.

For the better part of an hour.

Another acquaintance from work, years ago, resolves to hide — and announce to everybody that she is hiding — any and all posts with images of the likeness of Emperor Barack The First. She hates His policies so much, has personally suffered from their effects so much, she says she’s sick of looking at His face. This has been going on for quite some time, and since the “win all arguments by hiding from them” thing has lately piqued my curiosity, I asked for some clarification about this. He Who Argues With The Dictionaries is still our President, therefore remaining a real problem, regardless of who accepts and who refuses opportunities to look at His graven-image. Her response to this was that she just refuses to tolerate His regime. To that, I said something like: “Hiding is a form of tolerance,” and she came back with “No, it isn’t.” Now there, I think, may be the source of our cultural confusion; we’re having a disagreement about that question. And the harmony with which this issue integrates into military metaphors, sheds some light on how this came to be a male-female thing (to whatever extent it is one). Can an army declare victory on the battlefield, while retreating from that battlefield. It could have been a fascinating conversation, but while I was at work some other acquaintance accused the female of being a racist, the conversation got nasty, and by the time I was back at home it no longer existed anywhere but in recollection.

I have many other examples, but going through them one by one will just alienate people unnecessarily, which I suppose is something I might have done already.

So perhaps it is a gender thing. I have trouble seeing it that way because I’m noticing a lot of males doing it. It has gender origins, certainly. The retrograde man, the lowbrow, the paramilitary thought process, will get it immediately: The enemy appears, the enemy must be confronted and stopped or else the enemy will win turf. It’s one or the other. Go or stop. Can’t win the battle if you don’t prevail on the battlefield.

We’re moving out of that, rejecting the “cage match” two-go-in-one-comes-out mentality. However, in doing so we are not becoming more civilized. We’re becoming less so. You don’t reject things by running away from them; it may look like that within your limited sphere of perception, but whatever problem you don’t confront today will surely come back to confront you tomorrow. I remember when that was the very basis of what kids were supposed to be taught while they were still kids. Seems nowadays the parental wisdom is something different: If you feel like you should’ve won, that’s good enough, and if you feel like you did win, you did. Or…something.

It fascinates me that the very people who drone on incessantly about “sitting down with our enemies and talking out our differences with them,” are the very ones who don’t really do that. They’re the ones who seem to be most frequently relying on this “win it by running away” thing.

Run away!!

This isn’t making us more civilized, though. And it isn’t eradicating conflict, making us any less contentious. What it’s making us is unsure of reality, insecure, weak and bossy. And it is further supporting another theory I’ve had for quite some time now, of which I’ve written before: Barack Obama and His weird, corrupt regime do not represent the source of any particular problem. They are merely a symptom. The problem is cultural, it has been building for a very long time now, although the recent events it has been bringing about loom large on the nation’s landscape. Our continuing survival as a superpower, and our way of life, is being threatened by the savage impulses of the immediate-gratification generation(s). They talk of acceptance, but they don’t practice it because they don’t realize any power from accepting things. They only see how they can wield more power through rejection — they see rejection as the first step toward achieving a dictatorship. Not quite so much reject…perhaps the better word to use is dismiss. They achieve power, or something that feels like power, by way of dismissing. That’s why all these charges of “racism” are floating around, all day, every day. The ObamaBots are gulping big gulps from this Koolaid. They don’t know, or care to learn, how to properly argue the point they want to make, so the answer is to stretch out the perimeter of definition for this “racism” word, to include whatever has upset them most recently.

They just want what they want when they want it; they want to WinWinWinWinWin. That explaining-why stuff is just too hard. They’d rather skip that. It’s boring.

The very crucial distinction between victory and defeat is entirely lost on them. Run away!! And…We win.

mkfreeberg: Can an army declare victory on the battlefield, while retreating from that battlefield.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ — Winston Churchill, 1940
- Zachriel | 01/26/2014 @ 08:43
[…] Going to Get Into That Right Now” What a Feminist Looks Like Winning by Forfeiting What the Rules Are The Thing About Abortion Kirk is Better Than Picard Dudes’ and […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/26/2014 @ 11:48
Yelling “I win!” over your shoulder as you run away won’t cut it at a high school debate meet, but it’s a great tactic for avoiding narcissistic injury. I think it’s the flipside of the “more-ideologically-pure-than-thou” comment you see so often on political blogs. Either way, “victory” in a “debate” isn’t really the point — you might be arguing in the comments section of a blog, but they are starring in the summer blockbuster film The Awesome Adventures of Captain Correct, now playing in their heads.
- Severian | 01/27/2014 @ 12:03
It depends on what your goal really is, strategically. An army can win a battle, or even a war, by retreating if their goal is to lead their opponents into a trap of some variety.

In a rhetorical fight, this trap is often characterized as getting the opposition to lose its cool before you do, especially if they can be made to do so in some kind of public forum where (presumably) they will give a bad impression of Their Side and thus encourage the undecideds in the audience to declare for Your Side. The goal is not to beat the opposition by convincing them to concede; the goal is to win the crowd by convincing them to walk away (figuratively) with you when you leave, or, alternately, to win validation for your ego by having Said the Right Thing in the Face of Hostility.

The winner is not who has the best word, it’s whoever gets the last word.
- Stephen J. | 01/27/2014 @ 14:52

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Winning by ForfeitingSunday, January 26th, 2014

Winning by Forfeiting
Sunday, January 26th, 2014