The sharp friar and the golden jew discuss your options
Occam Aww! Well... super polite and honest, but sorry.
Goldberg
Well, while I do think calling what I had in mind product placement is a misrepresentation, I can definitely see the "we're not looking to make more friends" angle.
Best of luck,
Mircea Popescu
Occam Aww. You're unhappy about it, huh.
Goldberg Yes. Fucktards you know ? People somehow go to school developing this notion that this is an option in principle and by default, declining such things.
Occam Of course they do. And it IS their option.
Goldberg Hardly.
Occam It might not be a good one, it might lock them out of all sorts of shit...
Goldberg Think about it. A bird lands on your balcony.i Do you have the option of declining the bird landing on your balcony ?
Occam Yep.
Goldberg You can shoot it, yes. But that's not declining anything, that's shooting the bird. Unless you're willing and able to shoot it, you learn to love it.
Occam I can deck my balcony out in swinging wifters and scarecrows and spikes and whatnot.
Goldberg IE, passive-aggressive shooting it. There is not this space between things wherein you could "decline". Which is how Trudy ends up with a bunch of cats : they're the only ones willing to put up with the sort of fucktard that imagines they can go about declining reality.
Occam ;/ well that's pretty sad.
Goldberg 'Cause in school, right ? School is an artificial environment, like a hotel. And so this fictitious "declining" is instituted to compensate for the other problems of trying to implement fiction. It has to do it, in order to have a vague shot at even working. But reality is not like school. It's not a work of fiction, and as such it doesn't need the props, nor can it use them.
Occam Well here's something: if it's not an option, why ask? Is it that what you perceive as being polite they perceive as being a query? Something that gives them an option?
Goldberg Yes. It's literally that, I go "please pass the butter", they go "no ty" and I'm like... wait, what ?
Occam Aha. Well that's a pretty tough realization/lesson, I imagine most people'll never get it. Because yes, they absolutely perceive an option, and with something presented that'd linguistically facillitate this interpretation of reality there's little reason to suspect anything else is going on unless you happen to be very smart or lucky in retrospection.
Goldberg I'm sure they never will. They'll just be "raped". And now I'm fucking torn for a second, because this is a valuable discussion I'd like published for the benefit of said fucktards, but on the other hand it stems from a private conversation which is needed for context.ii 'Course it's only a second. Why am I trying to be polite again ? It obviously doesn't work in this context.
Occam Why the quotes?
Goldberg For the direct reason : if you're not willing to shoot the bird you can't be raped by the bird, because you can not rape the willing.
Occam And lack of violence works as an indication of consent?
Goldberg No.
Occam Then how is he who doesn't shoot the bird "willing"?
Goldberg He who isn't willing to shoot the bird is willing to have the bird on his balcony. You can be one or the other. There isn't a third.
Occam Metaphors are mixed by now. Is the bird being on the balcony a placemarker for rape? I mean, you can't rape the willing. I get that. But the other statement is that if you're not willing to shoot the bird you can't be raped by it. This makes me think that a conclusion could be that he who doesn't shoot is in essence offering himself up to be fucked.
Goldberg No. "Rape" is a misnomer.
Occam Oh I see, I was taking a very literal view of the term.
Goldberg When the average fucktard perceives that reality did not ask for his "option" in terms that he perceives adequate he misrepresents what just happened as "rape". This is never the case. First off, he has no such "option". Second off, reality isn't Mr Reality in Geography class.
Occam TBH I think the misuse of the word rape in that context at least subconsciously admits the speaker knows he hasn't quite been dealt the cards he's complaining of.
Goldberg Exactly.
Occam That not having an option bit is pure anathema by now, I think. Most'd rather rage against the notion that they don't have an option than actually look at what options they DO have left.
Goldberg And why ? Because they know it's the case, otherwise why bother with complex religious ritualsiii. Who the fuck asked you if you wanted tits, you know ? Or how big ? So they go whining to the modern priest, a man in a white coat still, to FIX reality. And this works, in their own mind.
Occam I don't think it even gets quite that far. There's a ready social concept for what happened there: she had to choose whether to "sell out" or not. There's no need to consult anyone to fix anything; the disadvantage of "selling out" (or moreover being seen as/called a sellout) is weighed against the imagined remuneration.
Goldberg Well that part is the misrepresentation. I am not looking to take her in as a slavegirl, and it's quite presumptious to imagine otherwise.
Occam Presumptious? It's not something she actually thought about to that degree.iv She had an available interpretation that's large and widespread enough to coax someone into not having to think about it. Someone offers you money for what they'd like to insert/change/have a say about in your "creative work", it's an offer to sell out. I doubt she knows how else to interpret the conversation.
Goldberg Yeah, your razor wins.
Occam (Except, of course, with the last exchange, she can now rest on some kind of "oh well, what an asshole" cloudy confusion of gratifying anger and the sense she made the right choice).
Goldberg Isn't it amusing how OFTEN that "option" is "available" ? The option of, "well done dear, he was an asshole, props for standing up for cunts/niggers/butterflies" ? I guess if one's Neo captive in the matrix, what he's well advised to do is look for so called options that are always available. They're probably fake.
Occam I think it's more or less always there for and when people fuck something up. The colloquial group-oriented recovery mechanism from failure.
Goldberg Suicide, the only actual option that's actually always available, doesn't quite present itself as such. On the contrary, while it may be generally and universally available, it is nevertheless practically impossible, or at least seems to at every single juncture.
Occam Lol good point.
Goldberg Anyway, so I got an article. I wonder what name goes with Occam. Goldberg ?
Occam Murphy.
Goldberg I like Goldberg!.
Occam manZIERE!
Goldberg Lol.
- A bird landed on her balcony and ate all her lovage. [↩]
- Turns out on closer examination that it actually isn't. [↩]
- Anathema is, of course, an orthodox thing. You can generally tell heretic terms from orthodox terms by how the former are derived from Latin and the later from Greek. [↩]
- Ironically, this is after a week spent thinking about it. But yes, this is a point, thinking long is not necessarily thinking a lot. It all depends on how good your thinking tools are. [↩]
