h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can't think of any right off.

okay.

you've played a few on me so I thought maybe ...? but, I agree with you, practical jokes may appear funny but they're, in my opinion, painful, embarrassing and even cruel. kind of like saying dark comedy or black humor, ya know?

okay, thanks for the polite response to my yahoo whine, appreciate your being tolerant! it's good, in some ways, not to be your punching bag ... hope it lasts, though, come to think of it ... you were making contact each time you swung, but, nah, this way will probably get us much further ... ya, do think so!!

In the beginning I thought you might crowding me a little that's all. I don't usually go around swinging at people or playing practical jokes unless its on some pushy taipo. I'm sorry I mistook you for that but it's an understandable error and most of the time it ain't erroneous.

Ana you took me or any of mine for Taipo, just cause I wanted, no want you to think?

unnhhh, that is painful!!!

now what do you mean about "...understandable error and most of the time it ain't..."

ps: yesterday, sorry, I just got a bit punchy tired ... had jury duty the following day ... so stepped away. see you in a bit.

That's been my experience with taipo that's all. Yeah, it's presumptuous. So what? I got over it with you just like I get over being pigeonholed myself a lot.

As far as getting me to think goes, well, that one I sort of got the impression I was supposed to think in a certain way, your way to be specific, and I really didn't have the background for that sort of thinking. But I adapted a little maybe. I'm not sure why except I guess I think it's worthwhile to talk to you rather than telling you to leave me alone.

Like I found out who Rumi was and few other things from you so all in all it's been a painfully enlightening experience probably for both of us.

And I still got it in the back of my mind that you're really some CIA or FBI agent either slumming or looking for victims or doing research on the opposition. That's probably very paranoid too, but like they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they ain't out to get you, although I'm really pretty small fish. Still a lot of times they just make out like you're a big fish so it'll look better when they reel you in, which is easier than with the really big fish.

"Well, gosh, she might not look like much on the deck but you should have seen her fighting the line!"

Anyways, it don't matter I guess. You got your ways of getting at people and I got mine and probably neither one works that well.

One thing's for sure, I definitely don't get along with either Australians or New Zealanders and that's a little puzzling but I'm thinking they got their own indigenous issues that probably color everything they think I'm saying.

Except I'm halfway around the world so they probably think they can get away with being rude, and they're right. But I think they're scared shitless of their own "little brown sisters and brothers" and that panic gets dumped on me. Oh well.. Hah!!

you do invite a measure of panic little fish.

even if you allowed yourself to be reeled in, the effect you'd create would ensure you your freedom and much else perhaps!

you do matter.

don't pigeonhole yourself, spread your wings, spring from the water, fly, see the world with eyes and mind and heart wide open.

does not mean you be any less alert.

You know something? From this and other comments you've made recently I'm starting to get the impression that something's going on here.

Like if people don't criticize people like Hamish then maybe it's assumed they support him, while if nobody actively supports me it's assumed they disagree with what I'm writing. Could that be true?

If it is, I'm not surprised really. Hamish and his ilk are, whatever their rudeness, one of them, not one of me, so it follows then that I'll be held to a different standard of conduct, one that might assure my ultimately invisibility if not demise. Oh well..

Being invisible has advantages if they're not pretending and really can't see you.

Please ana won't you explain just a little better to me? As for me, I hold you to the same standard I hold myself. Try as they might, can anyone be perfectly invisible anymore, even when not here in the now?

I don't know if I can explain better.

Right now I'm sort of weighing different elements of the struggle as it relates to me, wondering about the values of flying, invisibility, resistance, questioning or whatever. Wondering if it even makes sense for me to get involved in all the little trivial debating that goes on around here. Wondering what people do when they finally turn off the computer and turn around to face whatever their real world is really like, and suspecting it's pretty different from mine in lots of ways.

It's good I get the exposure probably to different ideas, cultures or whatever, but it also gets very discouraging at times wondering what if anything matters in all this stuff?

Maybe I'll stick to storytelling for awhile since the debating doesn't seem to do anything except rile people up. Admittedly I get some inspiration from the debating but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble. I'm probably better at sarcasm anyways and it's nice to have an underappreciated skill right? NOT!!

Your last post is thoughtfully written rusty. The triviality of the debates here is really disheartening. You are probably right when you think that a different persona manifests when people are on their computers; it's perhaps akin to the transformation in personality that takes place when a person gets behind the wheel of an automobile.

I for one, when I turn away from my computer, face a quite different world than the one that manifests here. It is not however inconsistent in that what I write of here is what I speak of to the flesh and blood people around. I have a lot of time on my hands as I am no longer tied to a scheduled workday. It is exhilarating and scary all at once, that's my real world.

This forum makes it possible to make contact with persons it would never otherwise be possible to but beyond contact, just as you ask, does it serve any useful purpose. When I first started to post ideas my purpose was to share an alternative view of how things are and might be; to hearten those who felt similarly, to learn new means of making a stronger argument, to perhaps even bring some fence sitters to a more open minded and caring point of view, and to give the opposition pause. Maybe it is too grand an agenda, because most people don't seem interested in listening or learning; they seem interested only in being the smartest kid on the block.

So, I must agree it is very discouraging. It is doubly so when you turn away and things around you, in your non silicon mediated world (well at least relatively less so) are not going as well as you might like them to. It is also extremely frustrating, at least for me, to have to give up the other senses and to rely almost entirely on interpretation which perforce can be no better than the filter provided by the sum of my experience and the moral compass of my character.

I used to tell many stories when I was much younger, especially when there were younger cousins and friends around; I can still make up stories for the children but I often feel tired. The problem with stories is that you need to convey context and cultural landscape sufficiently, especially when using a language other than that most familiar to you or which most closely fits your system of belief, if you are to strike a chord of understanding in the hearts and minds of the readers. That is a difficult task.

Still it is important to do good just for the sake of doing good, not with an expectation of reward. Perhaps out of the many or the few that happen buy even just a very few will be worth the effort and you for each of those few.

Sigh...

Yeah maybe even those who lurk and say nothing in response are actually considering and do rather than talk about. We can always hope right?

Even the totally bastard ( in it's original meaning) and widespread race that I come from ( the White Englishman ) understands that to know where you are going, you have to know where you came from.

For me that means that I am British. But even that is not so clear. Britain is a much invaded country, the last time being the Norman Conquest.

My Dad's dad was a Canadian Soldier. My Mother's dad Died fighting with the Wehrmacht. BTW the Wehrmacht were just regular Dog soldiers, not Nazis, but I digress.

My point is that you are lucky to be able to point , and say that is who and what I am. Some of us are not that lucky.

Well, Ghost, I guess it depends on whether you want to keep emulating the conquerors or try something different.

If you conquer, people will point, make no mistake, it's not a very nice thing to be conquered after all which you should appreciate historically, however, don't let the convoluted history of conquest confuse the issues.

It's not inevitable because it's not human nature, it's human nurture so maybe you can try nurturing something different so that nobody has to point at you or anybody else in the future.

And besides, you're very lucky to be a Brit. You've prospered because others have been deprived, but once in awhile you need to give something back that's all. Or in time there's nothing left to plunder.

Historically the English discovered that in France so they looked elsewhere and followed up on the Spanish "discovery" of America. And that made as many wealthy Englishman as France ever did if not more.

And much the same thing was done in India, Africa and elsewhere. You benefit from the legacy of colonialism which is by means dead. They just call it by a different name now, globalism.

British railroad investors benefitted enormously from the free land the US government ceded to the railroads, but it wasn't the government's land to give away, despite their plenary power claims. Much of it was taken fraudulently by repudiating international treaties. That's not a good thing and it needs to be addressed sooner or later.

But what you do about it is up to you.

You can agitate for what's right, for paying the bills finally or you can continue to defer the debts to future generations. It'll impact your bottomline one way or the other as it should. Profitability would be so much easier if you didn't have to worry about the liabilities, but if you don't, full faith and credit become nonsense and the only thing left is war. And that hurts the victors as well as the vanquished.

I have the distinct feeling that we "Brits" are paying for our ancestor's faults in our loss of true nationhood.

Yes my ancestor's did some really bad shit, but just like Germany, can you continue to blame the second and third generations?

The Japanese used to kill the entire family of a criminal for one person's crime.

I had hoped that we as a race had evolved further than that.

All nations and peoples have bad press. Ritual Mutilation of battle casualties was used as a reason for lots of the atrocities against the American Indian.

All races and nations are guilty of something.

Why do we still point the finger? Those days are gone. We must look to the Future.

I have to tell you that I agree that the sins of the parents must not be visited on the children. This does not preculde the need to recompense the disenfranchised in an equitable manner. Certainly it is imperative that we look to the future but if we don't comprehend the past we cannot hope to act in the present. All time is now.

How you might ask might one make the first move. Please allow me to provide an example, albeit abstract: Think of it as being at intersection with cars at each stop sign who've all reached there at virtually the same moment.

Let the others go first.

From your comments, Ghost, I get the impression that maybe the message is getting garbled somewhere maybe by some filter you're using to justify things. I'm not familiar with that filter so I have a hard time figuring out how to proceed.

So maybe to start you can explain what you mean by "loss of true nationhood"?

Pending your answer I'll try to address your other concerns.

Regarding killing whole families, that might or might not be excessive given the familial duties incurred. For example, I think that traditionally certain Japanese were duty bound to avenge the injury or death of family members. Given that, anyone presuming to discipline a family member would have been wise to include all family members since there was a certain inevitability of blood feud otherwise.

On the otherhand this might have been just a way of intimidating other families.

Ritual mutilation was actually copied from British and American soldiers in most cases. The Brits and other European powers invented scalping for example as a way of totaling kills for bounties that didn't impose the same burden on the people making the kills as whole heads would.

It was observed then that such "trophies" could be more easily stored and displayed by all who adopted the custom. That isn't to say it was unheard of prior to the conquests but it certainly became much more prevalent.

The bad press came when the atrocities committed by the whites were considered justified while like behavior on the part of the indians was represented as savagery.

A good example would be the attack on a encampment of Southern Cheyenne in 1864 by members of the Colorado Militia. This attack was followed by the mutilation of women where their vulvas were cut from their bodies and stretched over the saddle horns of the victorious militiamen. These were in most other respects considered well-behaved Victorian gentlemen by the way.

When Custer's men were mutilated after the Battle of the Little Bighorn it was in retaliation for such acts. Someone has said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and the 7th Cavalry was flattered with a vengeance, which truthfully I think they hardly deserved. They deserved far worse and would have gotten it at the hands of their own kind probably, but that's also probably another issue.

Anyways, it's important not to let the details get lost in the generalities here. Under the perpetrators' own standards of conduct these and other acts were crimes and should have been treated as such. The breaking of treaties is a crime that is usually punished without mercy, as the current war on Iraq illustrates, the pretext being the breaking of a UN resolution.

Under the United States Government's own standards it has been far more culpable in treaty breaking for practically its entire history than Saddam Hussein's regime, yet the US government goes unpunished. Moreover the British government treats with it as if it could be trusted when the historical record is fairly clear that it cannot. Which leads me to wonder why unless the British government sees a greater advantage in cooperating with the pirates than hanging them in this instance.

British people are often quick to point out that Americans were slow to abolish slavery after the British government banned such trafficking. This in itself is a criticism worth considering in the present situation. Clearly the American government did not conform to British ideas of proper conduct, so why did they become allies?

I suspect the answer is common to almost all communities of strangers. They held common ambitions to subjugate the world to their common interests.

Perhaps this was justified in the case of combatting Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan but that doesn't mean it was justified in other respects. Certainly the activities in Suez and Palestine, Iraq and other "former" colonies represent the sort of collusion you would expect from criminals with similar goals.

It's precisely these criminals who have benefitted from the failure to render compensation for past and present injuries and they are the ones maybe you need to complain about because they give their people a bad reputation by acting reprehensibly on their behalf.

It is all fine and well to forgive and forget if the criminals reform out of true contrition, but clearly that hasn't happened and it's not going to as long as they get away scot free.

I think it's up to you and every other British citizen, just as it's up to every American citizen to insure that their respective governments behave well, and if that doesn't happen, the very least you could do is avoid providing excuses, especially the puerile ones like, "Well everybody else does it."

As Kyaa says, let the others go first. You might decide then that going their way ain't exactly a good thing.

wherefor art thou or rusty ...

rusty, boo?!? anything?

Boo back and nothing.

This place gives me indigestion okay? So look for me in the wind or the clouds or something. Through talking. Life's turning around, shaking and baking or whatever. Got to get out for awhile. Maybe forever.

Cya bro, been fun hasn't it? But now the spirits call and I'm answering them not you. Take care okay? Hang on to your family if you can. That's what I'm doing. They're all I've got.

Being invisible, disappearing, beauty and danger.

That's all.