The Thoughts Of Chairman Whatsisface
Oct. 6th, 2004 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanThis is only a brief capriccio on a theme which may blow into a full-blown discursuive rant at some point (it's safer here), but:
I'm only recently beginning to notice how many thoroughly and deliberately objectionable people there are on Mono these days. I think there are two reasons for this:
a) various sane people have, for various reasons, left, thus skewing the percentages, and:
b) everyone's getting older.
The second is the more compelling - the mean age of a fairly representative slice of Mono users is 29 years old, and by that age people are thinking differently to when they were 16. Tony Parsons says something in "man & Boy" about turning thirty, which is relevant - that thirty should be a good one, because you can look back on what you've achieved, while you still have some life in you.
I strongly suspect that there are a lot of spods who are reaching that sort of age and realising that, for all their intelligence, the list of achievements is very thin.
And, crucially, that the world out there really doesn't give a fuck about them.
Perhaps Mono's least endearing aspect is a turgid undercurrent of intellectual bullying, generally from people who can't really understand why the world hasn't accomodated them. The archetype of this style of behaviour, and a man who practised it as his life's work long before it came into vogue, is well known to you all, but it's becoming more widespread all the time.
There are two fair responses to defeat:
i) do something to reverse it
ii) accept it, and leave the game
(in many ways, my life over the last 18 months has been an application of this second response)
What is not a valid response is to use the defeat as a reason to attack everyone around you who you do not feel is sufficiently part of your approach.
However, in the end I come back to the same internalised response I feel when I get sniggered at by chavs - "Fight's over. You lost". And it's true of Mono's more intellectually thuggish element too - the world shakes you off as a horse shakes off fleas.
[None of this is to suggest, incidentally, that Mono is not also more full of simply wonderful people than a pomegranate is of pips]
Believe it or not, that was only a brief witter, and didn't mention the dread word "cliques" once (a subject on which I have Views, as those who know me know).
And so to bed...
I'm only recently beginning to notice how many thoroughly and deliberately objectionable people there are on Mono these days. I think there are two reasons for this:
a) various sane people have, for various reasons, left, thus skewing the percentages, and:
b) everyone's getting older.
The second is the more compelling - the mean age of a fairly representative slice of Mono users is 29 years old, and by that age people are thinking differently to when they were 16. Tony Parsons says something in "man & Boy" about turning thirty, which is relevant - that thirty should be a good one, because you can look back on what you've achieved, while you still have some life in you.
I strongly suspect that there are a lot of spods who are reaching that sort of age and realising that, for all their intelligence, the list of achievements is very thin.
And, crucially, that the world out there really doesn't give a fuck about them.
Perhaps Mono's least endearing aspect is a turgid undercurrent of intellectual bullying, generally from people who can't really understand why the world hasn't accomodated them. The archetype of this style of behaviour, and a man who practised it as his life's work long before it came into vogue, is well known to you all, but it's becoming more widespread all the time.
There are two fair responses to defeat:
i) do something to reverse it
ii) accept it, and leave the game
(in many ways, my life over the last 18 months has been an application of this second response)
What is not a valid response is to use the defeat as a reason to attack everyone around you who you do not feel is sufficiently part of your approach.
However, in the end I come back to the same internalised response I feel when I get sniggered at by chavs - "Fight's over. You lost". And it's true of Mono's more intellectually thuggish element too - the world shakes you off as a horse shakes off fleas.
[None of this is to suggest, incidentally, that Mono is not also more full of simply wonderful people than a pomegranate is of pips]
Believe it or not, that was only a brief witter, and didn't mention the dread word "cliques" once (a subject on which I have Views, as those who know me know).
And so to bed...
