[spam][crazy][wrong] inventing mean words
how can we invent an infinite quantity of boss-speak? boss has experience of horror being normal, and assumes everybody else does. boss also has experience of always covering this up, and assumes everybody else does. idea of analogies developing by assumption of harm, then using these analogies. but we want to pick analogies that have a certain poignancy to them.
quite hard to think about atm! 'is that garbage thrown out yet?' 'no, garbage not thrown out.' everything is described as a normal thing, so that if one is recorded it's completely deniable. if people dont' speak the deniable language, they 'turn into the garbage' and are treated like useless objects (and everybody hates this but assumes they have no other options)
i'm currently experiencing a strange focus on this and similar things thinking about what parts are not covered by the focus, to use as mcboss jokes
on we go to chicken jokes! why did the chicken cross the road? _really_, _why_ did the chicken cross the road? Long ago there were birds without human roads. There were other kinds of roads, animal paths, rivers, etc. But no paved roads with big rectangular wheeled boxes on them. At that time, chickens meandered about their environment driven by the pushes and pulls of their survival needs. A chicken might go one place to forage some tasty worms, or go another to avoid a dangerous predator. Chickens likely have many social motivators, but I don't understand them well. Why _did_ the chicken cross the road? Are we frustrated, that we ask this? Wishing our chicken had not flown the coop? Maybe we simply are used to having very domesticated chickens, and don't expect any road-crossing to develop. Roads don't look like chicken coops! Why would you go across? I'm guessing I often imagine the "why did the chicken cross the road" question as arising out of the experiences of a frustrated farmer, or frustration within a farming community. Your chicken wandered over to my property and laid some eggs. I don't know! Part of me wonders if there could have been some big event that followed the road-crossing of a chicken, such that this experience was chiseled into our cultural history so deeply. Jokes are big! Yankee doodle called his feather macaroni, and the civil armies of the usa slaughtered each other. In these digital times, we don't gossip much about chickens, but in rural farming communities the behaviors of chickens can be huge topics. Something new that happens, however small, is something new to talk about. Why did the chicken cross the road? It doesn't make sense. There was no reason to cross the road. One reason a chicken would cross a road for certain would be if a single farmer died. The chickens might be left untended and need a way to escape. This seems quite tragic. Maybe so tragic that we wouldn't want to discuss it, thinking of chickens pecking each other, leaving themselves bloody to find a way out of a coop. And who was caring for the farmer's baby? When things are painful, people find other ways of saying them. Maybe the chicken just crossed the road to get to the other side. I don't really think the farmer died. I don't think we have enough information to make any guesses as specific as that.
Honestly, chickens cross roads _all the time_. I've hung out near free-range chicken farmers and there are eggs that end up on other peoples' property. But I kind of think of free-range chicken farming as a new thing. It seems like coops and pens are more conventional.
Maybe this joke, "why did the chicken cross the road," maybe it's related to why everybody used chicken coops for so very long.
I live in the USA, and I kind of imagine chickens as being imported from Europe. Maybe local chicken farmers were rebels, somewhat. Maybe the "why did the chicken cross the road" joke helped defend our European culture, and sell more chicken feed. Often when I look for causes in USA culture I think to economics. If something sells more chicken feed, that means there's a financial interest in marketing it, for producers of chicken feed.
Chicken A: "What does this writing scratched on the wall, 'why did chicken cross road', what does it mean?" Chicken B: "It means to eat more chicken feed." Chicken C: "Yes, eat more feed and sit on your roost." Chicken A: "Hum, okay." [sits on chicken roost in coop] Chicken A's roost happened to be right across from the scrawling on the wall. She couldn't stop looking at it.
--------------- A chicken stands in a chicken coop. There is writing on the wall of the chicken coop. The writing says: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" The chicken looks the writing and reads it. 724 milliseconds pass while the chicken is in thought. Then the chicken laughs and laughs. The chicken calms and eats some feed. Then looks at the writing again.
-------------- Why did the chicken cross the road? The grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and there were fewer zombies.
oh no! i thought this was the 'short things' thread. this isn't inventing mean words.
Check 1974 _The Dispossessed_ by Ursula K. Le Guin. There's a scene where the protagonist and physicist Shevek, when he goes to the biz planet Urras, is slowly getting co-opted during his time confined at the university, and during that time, he has dinner with one of the academics. that academic's name is Ollie(sp). Shevek is surprised that Ollie at home is gentle with his family etc and they have a conversation about the differences in animals on their respective homeworlds and some other things and they address various issues of harm and boss-talk and it's a pretty interesting scene. The Dispossessed is widely available on pirate sites online. On 3/6/22 14:56, Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many wrote:
how can we invent an infinite quantity of boss-speak?
boss has experience of horror being normal, and assumes everybody else does.
boss also has experience of always covering this up, and assumes everybody else does.
idea of analogies developing by assumption of harm, then using these analogies.
but we want to pick analogies that have a certain poignancy to them.
skimming, this scene maybe juxtaposes misogyny with liberal science, it's what i've found so far part of my boss experience relates to realisation of, um, kind of grooming of men to have access to higher circles of sex trafficking, very hard to discuss it, should probably put that into the mcboss stuff somehow. very similar to the various political patterns: the more oppressive the norm, the safer it is to connect them into things that are actually crime rings, and those crime rings probably need young people to stick around “All senses. I met women at the party last night—five, ten—hundreds of men. None were scientists, I think. Who were they?” “Wives. One of them was my wife, in fact,” Oiie said with his secretive smile. “Where are other women?” “Oh, no difficulty at all there, sir,” Pae said promptly. “Just tell us your preferences, and nothing could be simpler to provide.” “One does hear some picturesque speculations about Anarresti customs, but I rather think we can come up with almost anything you had in mind,” said Oiie. Shevek had no idea what they were talking about. He scratched his head. “Are all the sci94 / URSULA K. LE GUIN entists here men, then?” “Scientists?” Oiie asked, incredulous. Pae coughed. “Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they’re all men. There are some female teachers in the girls’ schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level.” “Why not?” “Can’t do the math; no head for abstract thought; don’t belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there’s always a few exceptions, Godawful brainy women with vaginal atrophy.” “You Odonians let women study science?” Oiie inquired. “Well, they are in the sciences, yes.” “Not many, I hope.” “Well, about half.” “I’ve always said,” said Pae, “that girl technicians properly handled could take a good deal of the load off the men in any laboratory situation. They’re actually defter and quicker than men at repetitive tasks, and more docile—less easily bored. We could free men for original work much sooner, if we used women.” “Not in my lab, you won’t,” said Oiie. “Keep ’em in their place.” “Do you find any women capable of original intellectual work, Dr. Shevek?” “Well, it was more that they found me. Mitis, in Northsetting, was my teacher. Also Gvarab; you know of her, I think.” THE DISPOSSESSED / 95 “Gvarab was a woman?” Pae said in genuine surprise, and laughed. Oiie looked unconvinced and offended. “Can’t tell from your names, of course,” he said coldly. “You make a point, I suppose, of drawing no distinction between the sexes.” Shevek said mildly, “Odo was a woman.” “There you have it,” Oiie said. He did not shrug, but he very nearly shrugged. Pae looked respectful, and nodded, just as he did when old Atro maundered.
Yup -- it would be great to see how Le Guin's 1985 follow-up Always Coming Home does or does not improve on The Dispossessed from a decade before. Le Guin was frustrated that scholars paid so much attention to the more popular The Dispossessed but not the less popular and more challenging Always Coming Home, also in her eyes an anarchist utopia story. The book on Le Guin, Coyote's Song, centers on Always Coming Home tho so that's good On 2022-03-08 00:11, Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many wrote:
skimming, this scene maybe juxtaposes misogyny with liberal science, it's what i've found so far
On 3/7/22, Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
Yup -- it would be great to see how Le Guin's 1985 follow-up Always Coming Home does or does not improve on The Dispossessed from a decade before. Le Guin was frustrated that scholars paid so much attention to
Is there a similar scene?
the more popular The Dispossessed but not the less popular and more challenging Always Coming Home, also in her eyes an anarchist utopia story. The book on Le Guin, Coyote's Song, centers on Always Coming Home tho so that's good
Sounds like a valuable author. One of the popular fantasy authors of my childhood that I never actually read.
the section after that is interesting too, although i'm skimming past a lot of paragraphs it sounds like they spend a lot of time probing for ways that Shevek might speak about their sense of a body of authority. reminiscent of assumptions of powerholders that everybody has a leader, but that many deny it, and of having powerful connections to various areas. “But we haven’t been sure whether or not you came with the approval of—” He hesitated. Shevek grinned. “Of my government?” “We know that nominally there’s no government on Anarres. However, obviously there’s administration. And we gather that the group that sent you, your Syndicate, is a kind of faction; perhaps a revolutionary faction.” “Everybody on Anarres is a revolutionary, Oiie. . . .
On 3/7/22, Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
the section after that is interesting too, although i'm skimming past a lot of paragraphs
it sounds like they spend a lot of time probing for ways that Shevek might speak about their sense of a body of authority. reminiscent of assumptions of powerholders that everybody has a leader, but that many deny it, and of having powerful connections to various areas.
“But we haven’t been sure whether or not you came with the approval of—” He hesitated.
What's also/more poignant here is how people cut off when they might not be even certain what they themselves are talking about, but still have a lot of response to the topic (e.g. fear).
Shevek grinned. “Of my government?” “We know that nominally there’s no government on Anarres. However, obviously there’s administration. And we gather that the group that sent you, your Syndicate, is a kind of faction; perhaps a revolutionary faction.” “Everybody on Anarres is a revolutionary, Oiie. . . .
It's a great book, worth re-reading, even if written during Le Guin's sorta phase where (as she herself later critiqued herself publicly in afterwords, prefaces, etc.) she was putting male heroes into radfem-ish worlds (especially in Left Hand of Darkness, released same year as The Dispossessed iirc) and then she really broke free of all that with 1990's Tehanu, saying of Tehanu later something along the lines of, if she hadn't written Tehanu, her career would have ended. I have always really liked taking one author at a time, studying them and their career, and then moving on to the next author, studying them and their career, reading all their books especially the early ones or the later ignored ones, etc. Probably could have done better than hyperfixating on Peter Straub -- there's a really cool Publisher's Weekly article about him as a cog in the machine somewhere -- but he was kind of the not-quite-Stephen-King and it was sort of interesting to see in his books/publicity how that went down across his life. And why did I have to read Emma Straub's collection of short stories with all the shoes? It's kinda interesting to look at the Straubs as this brownstone literary dynasty, but I'd rather be listening to the Guns And Roses song about Mr Brownstone. Thinking too hard is sometimes not worth it!
On 3/7/22, Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
It's a great book, worth re-reading, even if written during Le Guin's sorta phase where (as she herself later critiqued herself publicly in afterwords, prefaces, etc.) she was putting male heroes into radfem-ish worlds (especially in Left Hand of Darkness, released same year as The Dispossessed iirc) and then she really broke free of all that with 1990's Tehanu, saying of Tehanu later something along the lines of, if she hadn't written Tehanu, her career would have ended. I have always
Sounds like she ran into the things she was writing about, in reality. Decades later, doing things like that has become the rage and many find it very healing.
really liked taking one author at a time, studying them and their career, and then moving on to the next author, studying them and their career, reading all their books especially the early ones or the later ignored ones, etc. Probably could have done better than hyperfixating on Peter Straub -- there's a really cool Publisher's Weekly article about him as a cog in the machine somewhere -- but he was kind of the not-quite-Stephen-King and it was sort of interesting to see in his books/publicity how that went down across his life. And why did I have to read Emma Straub's collection of short stories with all the shoes? It's kinda interesting to look at the Straubs as this brownstone literary dynasty, but I'd rather be listening to the Guns And Roses song about Mr Brownstone. Thinking too hard is sometimes not worth it!
I'm not familiar with your media references, I'm afraid. I'll privately send you a pdf of the book you mentioned in case you have trouble accessing pirate sites.
I'll privately send you a pdf of the book you mentioned in case you have trouble accessing pirate sites.
I attempted to do this but received a size limit error, which I suppose I should have expected. I have stopped trying to do it. It looks like the second book mentioned came out before the first book mentioned, could be just the editions i downloaded.
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Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many