Care and feeding of your pet peeve

I desperately want to convince myself that I have nothing in common with the people who desperately want to convince themselves that they have nothing in common with the people who disagree with them; but even as tired and ickly as I am, I can't quite manage to ignore that particular absurdity.

So it seems to be a natural feature of the hnau of this planet to try to place everyone into a little box as we decide who is like us, who is unlike us. And the ones who are unlike us and who we happen not to like must be wholly unlike us, incomprehensible to us and uncomprehending of us. This saves us time. If we already know that we will never understand nor be understood, then all the hard work of communicating may safely be skipped over and we can go straight to the vilification and the fighting. We're so much smarter than they are, anyway. We have logic, intuition, morality, and common sense on our side, you know. If our opponents do not recognize this, it is only proof of their inferiority.

Said a few days ago to the incredible skygypsy: "if you simply must define yourself, define yourself in a way that leaves your box open-ended. Define yourself as the efflorescence resulting from the collision of a jack-in-the-box and a distant sun. Call yourself a cross between an African tea rose and a pan flute. Explain calmly that you are what happens when an iridescent sense of justice is painted with pink polka-dots. But don't tell people you're a mixture of a wolf and a hummingbird, because your totem animal has that one covered." I did pick my name, this cross between two disparate creatures, as a way of trying to escape being categorized as one thing or another based on my handle. Of course, people categorize you anyway. They assume gender, religion, fashion statements based on nothing more than a name. Let them see your face or learn about your past history, and they become certain of incontrovertible facts about your psychology and your potential future based on nothing more substantial than side effects of genetics and circumstance. It makes things interesting.

If you are foolish enough to engage my opponents in debate, they will commit the logical fallacy of making appeals to authority, stating that X must be true, unquestioningly, simply because some high leader or spurious bit of scripture stated X. We do not commit that fallacy. When we cite authority, everyone knows that our authority is always right.

Sometimes they will try to convince you of something by stating that "Everyone knows X is true," that all the ignorant masses gathered in their herd like sheep must be bleating in unison because of some self-evident truth. But everyone knows that throughout history the majority has frequently been altogether in the wrong. When we appeal to common sense, we do so only when the truth clearly is obvious to every sane and rational person.

Our opponents, when questioned, will add to their words many specious and complicated arguments in a feeble attempt to hide the evident contradictions of their position. When they complain that we seem to be contradicting and overcomplicate our arguments, it is because they have no appreciation for the beauties of subtlety and paradox.

There really is no arguing with these people. We have nothing in common.

There really is no arguing with these people. We are far too much alike.

2004 in 12 Sentences

Everybody else is doing it. Baa! Anyway, this is the one where you take the first sentence of your first post in each month of 2004 and make a brand-new post consisting of those sentences. Here goes:

In spite of vague thoughts of going out and looking for trouble, I rang in the new year in moderate fashion, sitting here at the computer and chatting with friends while the TV showed a ball dropping in New York. When the founders of Little Elves Preschool in Virginia named their new school, they never dreamed that one day the students would gather in a ring, playing wild, unearthly music that would make the teacher dance until she dropped dead from exhaustion. Last week I realized that all this walking to & from the library was wearing me out, so I decided to take a day off, just to rest at home and do nothing at all. The Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer. Woke up far too early because of animal noises outside (probably raccoons fighting over somebody's garbage). So, given that my income is still less than half of what I should be paying in rent and utilities and seems unlikely to change in the near-enough future, I'm probably going to have to move out of here soon. [That sentence was from a f-locked post. June's first public sentence was: "Ever have one of those days where it seems like one half of your brain has chosen to be stupid and the other half is reduced to looking on in disbelief?"]

This afternoon Mother Nature provided a cool spectacle--probably the most impressive hailstorm I've ever seen. My nap was disturbed a while ago by what sounded like military planes overhead. Last night I had this dream where a bunch of people who played werewolves on a TV show with a cast of hundreds were detained and questioned because the government had found out that someone had brought flax seeds into the building. Favorite post-debate comment so far comes from frawst: "See this whole shebang wasn't going to change my mind. In the Fairfax Apartments (Apartment 12-J)
A very small, very small shirker named Jo-Jo
Was standing, just standing, and bouncing a Yo-Yo!
I don't believe in astrology, mind you, but some of you will be wholly unsurprised to learn that Mercury is now retrograde.

Okay, maybe I didn't have to interpret the rules in such a way as to make frawst quote Dr. Seuss, but I liked it that way. What he actually said back in October was, "See this whole shebang wasn't going to change my mind. Unless maybe aliens clawed out of Kerry's belly and started eating Jim Lehrer. Which would make me undecided."