For facts about politics and policies (okay, and some opinion)

 
Evil is as evil does

That needs to be something that people understand. I mean really understand, not just mutter or chuckle at. Back when I was a total degenerate I saw plenty of evil and spoke with many evil people. Made up names to follow...

John seemed like a normal guy. Of course his infatuation with Dungeons and Dragons was a little extreme but in today’s modern age of Gothic and the love of the dark and mystical, to most folks, it probably seemed as if it was just "cutting edge".

I knew better though. I lived with him for a while and learned that there was a personal connection to that whole gothic thing for him that he believed the average mortal couldn’t understand. Again I will remind you that this was a person that seemed like a normal every day guy. He worked in retail and spoke with eloquence and respect to customers.

They never knew the disdain that he had for civilization. He told me when he was a younger teen, 14 or so, he grabbed his father’s shotgun and went to the local ATM machine and waited. When an older man approached the machine he jumped out and stuck the shotgun in his face and told the man to withdraw the maximum amount from the account or he would blow his head off. I don’t know about you, but having someone shove a shotgun in my face isn’t exactly going to make me think that this person is the salt of the earth. He got the money and fortunately didn’t blow the person’s head off.

Here’s where John added to the story. First of all let me add that he told it with glee, absolutely no remorse or regret. Then he said, “You know, all my life I’ve been the rogue”. “Everyone walks around and does their stupid things day to day and it’s like they’re just victims”. Yeah, he was blowing pot smoke as he was describing this but it was something that had been going through his mind his whole life and that is what he thought of society. The way he was talking and what he was talking about that evening made me understand that this guy truly had many brain screws turned in different directions then they would normally go.

A short time later we were playing a group game of space D&D. I had never played before & wondered how people could spend so many countless hours playing these types of games. Of course I was looking at it from a psychological point of view and check out the characters of the game compared to the people that were playing. Remarkable similarities. If you ever want to know how good or loyal an employee is have them play D&D, forget the psych. tests. Tests can be fooled, nobody can keep their cool in a game like that.

For those of you uninitiated out there, D&D type games are ones where you pick a race and an “alignment”. The race is fairly straightforward, human, elf, dwarf etc.. The alignment is where it gets interesting. It ranges from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil and everything in between.


Here’s a URL to see what kind of D&D character you are
http://irulethe.net/~neppyman/dndwho/

It pegged me as a Lawful Good Elf Ranger Paladin. Why it couldn’t pick me as a human I don’t know. Matter of fact, according to this I was least likely to be a human.

This is like taking a psyc test to see where you’re at because you are supposed to answer these questions as if your reality has changed and you pretend that you are in another world. You don’t answer them as if you are sitting where you are, but as if this life didn’t exist and you are now in dragon land.

Does the line get blurred between the pretend and the reality? Does the pretend just reflect what is going on in the real pretend mind? I think as in many other situations you can have varying degrees of reality. To some it’s a game, to others it’s a waste of time, but to another group of people, it is reality. Real life isn’t real because it’s stupid and boring and can’t be all that there is to life. So many kids are in search of something else besides the day to day grind. When they find this type of game it gives them a chance to invent themselves as they really see themselves. They feel stronger and more in control. They make friends and stage murder and pillaging parties, and then celebrate over beer and bongs.

This isn’t meant to be a rant about D&D. The point is that people are what people do. We so often hear about “temporary insanity”, or I couldn’t control myself & other babble like that. We do what we do because we want to most of the time. I know that there are moments of insanity, and that we can drive ourselves insane, and also that our brains can just freak out and go insane on us out of the blue. It’s more of the day to day situations that I am referring to.

Most of the time we have built something up over time. We have repeated something in our heads so many times that it became our reality. A counselor in rehab told me something that was so powerful and obvious that I couldn’t believe a brain geek like me didn’t get it years ago.

She told me that sometimes we drift away from reality and we don’t know it. How can we know it? The drifting might have taken place over years or even over a smaller period or time, but somewhere, if we don’t somehow stay aligned with humanity, our thoughts and perceptions of the world and our existence change to a way that we can’t relate to society anymore. We don’t fit in, at all. Her answer to that problem was that I needed to not think for myself for a while. I needed to let her think for me and for me to open my mind to what it is that I am doing and what is normal. She described it as us needing a mirror once in a while to see what we look like. We use mirrors to clean ourselves, shave, brush our teeth and so on, but there is no life mirror. Without a life mirror, how do we know what we look like to others? How do we know what proper behavior is? Lets face it, there have to be standards. I know, some folks out there hollering “your morality isn’t my morality!”. Whatever, I’m just saying there has to be some morality because without it there is only chaos.



For those of you having a cow out there thinking “who is this guy to say that because I don’t fit in I’m deranged or something”, chill out. I know what it’s like. I’m 41 and still don’t fit into the world as we know it. After all, here it is 3:43 a.m. and I’m not even tired.

I said sometimes we don’t fit in at all. Like the rest of the world is turning and doing stuff but we’re not part of it. Maybe thinking that my problems are the worst in the world & so on. What did I do to solve my problems? Well, with my “alignment” traits, I turned self destructive internally. I drank, did drugs, broke the law and hung out with unseemly characters that more closely reflected my state of mind.

Which brings us back to evil is as evil does. If I had continued to go down the wrong path I most likely would have committed suicide or wound up a permanent fixture on the streets panhandling as one of the world’s muttering helpless class of people. But John wouldn’t have had that problem. He classified himself as a self sufficient rogue. One that could prey on anyone and take what he needed/wanted.

8 hours later in the D&D game. It had taken me all day to build up this character. I had to build up his strength, speed, agility and so on. Finally I had a character that was a good beginning as I understood the game. Then in one quick swoop my “friend” killed me. I was totally stunned and looked at him and said “why the heck did you do that?” He simply said…

“Because I could”



to be continued tomorrow

posted by Peter Shinn at 1:26 AM

 
Let's look at the liberal point of view. They don't like change, they are opposed to anyone that doesn't have their view, they are cautious with everything that they don't like & more. Let's break down these few statements with some facts:

1) Liberals were all for the out of the blue passage of the idiotic law supporting the pro-death movement killing millions of innocent babies/humans a year, telling the rest of us who are pro-life to "live with it, it's the law". Now that it might be possible the law will be overturned they are doing everything possible to stop that from happening. Don't they like change?

2) Freedom of Speech - Yep, only when it's for them. When people speak against them it's considered "hate speech". When we speak out against homosexuality, S&M, pornography, Jesse Jackson and the rest of those profiteering racists, that's hate speech. Speak out against political correctness and the "reparations" garbage and you're a racist & a hate monger. They can display "art" consisting of Jesus in urine. They want conservatives to "tolerate" them with their behaviors as they spit on ours.

As Josh McDowell says on his page at http://www.family.org/fofmag/pp/a0010615.html

"For years I puzzled over why a crucifix, a Christian symbol, suspended in a jar of urine is considered art, yet displaying a homosexual symbol in a jar of urine would be decried as a hate crime"

3) Cautious with the Gulf and other world situations - They keep saying "we want proof" over and over. Anyone with a brain knows that the UN resolution passed back in '91 is all the proof we need to knock Saddam off his high chair. They aren't cautious, they just believe in the touchy-feely everyone is good inside attitude. Even when 3000 of our citizens are killed in cold blood they wonder "what did we do to deserve this"? We need to be asking who is going to do this to us again & get them first. I don't know about you, but I remember back in the old days when I was a kid, if there was going to be a fight & I was staring at some guy who I knew was going to hit me, I hit him first. Anyone who fights knows that the best defense is a good offense. Of course that was when we fought like men. Nowadays when someone gets his tail whupped he runs and grabs a gun like a coward. I'm sure that's what our friend Saddam is doing. Don't believe me? Check this:

http://www.nci.org/sadb.htm
posted by Peter Shinn at 4:31 AM

 
Is it possible to be mellow and conservative? I think so. Matter of fact, I don't think that the definition of conservative fits the modern day. As defined at dictionary.com it seems as if we are sticks in the mud & scared of change.

Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.
Traditional or restrained in style: a conservative dark suit.
Moderate; cautious: a conservative estimate.

I guess I would go along with the first part of the first definition, I do favor traditional views and values. I don't think that we should walk the streets naked, make love in public, disrespect each other & our elders and not value women enough to open doors for them or pull out their chairs.

As for change...
I work with computers, and as anyone who works with computers knows I had better keep up every day with what is changing. If not, I am history. As J.B. Trudeau wrote in one of his Doonesbury cartoons...when Mike asked a fellow employee why he was fired, the employee answered "I went to lunch". Mike says "you didn't!", the employee responded "yep, when I came back the whole industry had changed". (from memory of the cartoon, close enough)


posted by Peter Shinn at 3:40 AM