can i get a volunteer?

let's say an opportunity comes up for a problem to be resolved. not a problem like hey we need people to collect the trash or clean the bathrooms. it would have to be a problem that has some upside attached to the resolution, some prestige down the road. some creature comforts. perhaps a little glory, the opportunity to be the king of some pond or at least a member of the royal court. name in the papers. kid on the team. plaque on the building. some chance to be on the inside track to make decisions to mold the outcome to be recognized. that's what the sociopath sees, and that's why whenever these particularly juicy opportunities come up the sociopaths "volunteer" to help. they will be the first to jump at the opportunity because they love you so much see they want to sacrifice their time and energy for the good of the community.

yeah.

but don't laugh, that's exactly how the spin works and it works like this over and over again. you might hear sometimes people complain that the same people always end up volunteering or helping out, and that is sort of true, but you have to look at the type of job to see which same people keep showing up, because there are actually two types of jobs and two types of people. i guarantee you that if the job has no prestige the same people who keep doing it will be lovely people accustomed to doing shitty jobs because they need to be done and they don't consider themselves above doing shitty jobs, and if the job has some kind of power levers the same people who keep volunteering will be some variety of sociopath. and these will be the very same people who remind everyone in a loud voice that it's always the same people who do all the work you ingrates. meanwhile the people who do the shitty jobs tend not to complain about it they just get it done. but you see it's really two groups of people and they get conflated by the sociopaths, and that is on purpose to lure more good people into the trap to do the many shitty jobs while the sociopaths glom all over the few power positions, because they sense power like sharks sense blood in the water. predators. and then they lord it over everyone, but nicely see? because they're volunteers and they've been in on the gig since day one, selflessly volunteering their time, so they know what's going on, so hey why don't you get involved we could use a little help there's so much to do?

and you might sit there and cock your head and think something doesn't add up but i'm not sure what it is. you might come under quite a lot of pressure, especially so if you have some useful skills. and if you decide to get involved but you don't know what's going on in the invisible interpersonal dimension where all this takes place, you *will* be stuck doing some shitty job in exchange for a nice pat on the back. but these matters definitely fall well within the parameters of things that are rude to notice because everybody is volunteering, see? so the second you say you don't like how things are run you will be told to just shut your mouth or get involved. and it's hard to argue with that.

except unless you are some kind of sociopath, your getting involved will *not* change how things are run, no matter how tasty they make that bait sound to a do-gooder who wants the best for everyone. you will simply be stuck doing shitty jobs while the sociopaths continue making all the power decisions from their thrones from which they are ensconced with a generous application of gorilla glue until the perks and glories have been handed around. and that can be arranged to go on a long time. and if they're ready to step out of the way, you can be pretty sure something must be ready to blow and they need someone to hold the bag for a sec while they take a powder from all that hard work volunteering.

not to cast aspersions on people who volunteer. that would be so rude. some of them are actually great people.

could be that patriots are rude

allright here's the thing. now we all know about native americans, who were here before everyone else, and how now we outnumber them by a lot and the native americans, well you don't see too many of them unless you live in certain states. but otherwise you can go a long time without knowing a real native american because they comprise less than five percent of the total us population and they don't have a large presence in our culture.

now some people might believe that native americans have a special quality that can't really be isolated. you'd just have to be born a native american to know about this personally otherwise just take their word for it, you know they're just kind of superior to other people because they were born that way. it's something about their race their culture their history, they're kind of like gods compared to everyone else. so really we ought to listen to them and furthermore we can justify all sorts of special treatment for them because they have these unspecified special qualities. and furthermore *furthermore* they've had a really tough time in the past because people have always been jealous of them or something and blamed them unjustly for things and so we owe it to them to be extra careful. nobody can really prove their special qualities or anything it's just commonly accepted knowledge and you can't get away from this idea no matter where you turn because everybody somehow decided to believe this, and it might be true but mostly it's just something people believe. and if you say hey you know i'm not sure about this you will be accused of being anti-native-american and you don't want that it's like having hester prynne's scarlet letter A on your forehead, so zip it.

now we know that even if some people believe this that the world doesn't revolve around native americans. but just imagine if you turned on the teevee one sunday and all the talk shows had native american guests and you opened the sunday papers to read a rich collection of native american columnists and writers, and even the miss manners q&a was a native american lady giving you advice and quoting native american wisdom and so forth and so on. and all of a sudden you had the native american perspective in your face but it was all as if it were totally normal to have this perspective very prominently displayed throughout our culture. now that might be a little strange but hey, at least the native americans did live here in north america before everybody else. so at least as a quote unquote ordinary american you could say to yourself, well you know historically we, meaning our ancestors, did treat these people very badly and they were here first and after all, they had a pretty cool culture before our ancestors came and stole all their land and killed them and forced them into ghetto reservations, so i'm not going to complain about this at least it has a degree of justice to it. i mean it would still be strange but all i'm saying is that the idea does hang together in a certain way, it has a sort of logical consistency to it.

ok now the strange thing is we don't have this situation with native americans we have it with jews, which when you think about it makes no sense. and of course it didn't happen all of a sudden it was more like when your eyesight goes bad over time, and then a day comes and you're like damn i can't see a thing i can barely function, i better go to the optometrist, and he puts the lenses in front of your eyes and suddenly you can read the letters on the bottom of the eye chart again, and you realize it says there at the bottom of the eye chart that jews are controlling america, clear as day. blink again if you need to rewet your eyeballs but that's what it says. now maybe you think that it's totally normal that american culture has this enormous jewish slant but i don't. sorry about that i know it's probably really rude to notice but hey, i'm not jewish. and we don't have a native jewish population in this country, it's not like they were here living off the land in the 1600s so i find it strange that the jewish perspective is so prominent in this country on teevee and in the newspapers when jewish people comprise about two or three percent of the us population and furthermore they came over here just like everyone else except the native americans who were already here. and i'm sorry but i don't think it's because jews are so much smarter or in any way superior to everybody else because i am not a racist and i don't believe those kind of racist ideas. which is not rude of me but the weird thing is that it's actually supposedly rude *not* to believe the rudest thing ever like the racial superiority of jews just because some jewish rabbis said so. they have absolutely zero evidence for this claim it's just a self-serving racist canard used to manipulate people. but people believe it and then they have the nerve to call other people rude for not thinking this rude and racist nonsense, except they use the word anti-semitic instead of rude. same thing in their book. hey whateves. think what you want and call me rude all day long, but in my opinion only idiots and racists believe in jewish supremacy. and i'm neither an idiot nor a racist. i'm just an american and i want my country to be run by americans and not the dual national variety sneaking around with their special interests. i think that's called patriotism. and if that's rude we've got serious problems, which we do.

prelude to rudeness

i notice that people persist in anger over mostly-predictable issues, like obama having beers with so-and-so or whatever the whine was this past week. i honestly don't know because i don't watch tv and i don't waste much time on fake outrages aka big fat distractions from the real outrages that most people don't begin to imagine. you know, because it would be rude to notice how we're getting fucked by our so-called leaders and so-called best friends. but it's also rude to notice that people tend to waste their perfectly good outrage on nonsense put into their heads from so-called experts, so anyway it poses a conundrum sometimes if you want to engage people on current events.

i mean, where the hell do you even begin to disabuse people? how do you take a basically hard working guy at the blue collar bar who gets his chest all puffed up over obama and explain that the coke he just snorted up his nose came into this country because the cia wanted it to and the money he spent on it will probably get laundered through the cigarette company that made the poison wads he's smoking or maybe the beer company that brewed the beer he's drinking. and they'll take that money and add it to other giant piles of money from illegal weapons trading or the sex slave trade or pornography or whatever money they shake down from people with various human frailties and we're talking enormous sums of money that form the black economy, and this is on top of the money they shake down from people "legally," and corrupt intelligence and law enforcement and governments and corporations use this money to set up illegal covert ops and other corrupt schemes all over the world to keep everyone sick and fighting and dying and addicted, and he'd be like what are you a fucking whack job? um yeah. i guess so. i mean i've been reading about this stuff for years and seriously the corruption will just turn your hair white. you know when they produce some of these hollywood movies what do you think they make all that stuff up?

sometimes i say hey you have to stop watching tv just don't even watch that shit. if you want to know what's going on you have to take some time out of your day and go find out, you have to go get your own news. they tell you lies on tv and in the papers from morning till night you can't believe these people, these experts, they're full of shit. too many people just want to collect their paychecks so they tell themselves little lies and they compartmentalize everything they do all day long, just like the people who work in the banking industry they process their transactions their little piece of the giant crime puzzle and their piece doesn't look so bad so they just say hey i'm not doing anything wrong i'm just doing my job. my company is ethical i have to quadruple check my work i can't make a single mistake or i'll hear from my boss so there's no way that there could be anything corrupt going on here so we're good. somebody else will have to be a hero because i can't do it. that's what people tell themselves because they're all so scared they're gonna lose their house and car and the kids have braces and have to go to college. and the american dream hangs over our heads ready to fall down and snap our necks like dry little twigs off a weak wooded tree if you miss a mortgage payment or something. meanwhile the guys upstairs have a different rule book. they're not being single checked double checked triple checked, nothing. no checks. they do what they want and they want to have plenty of easy money. and they're getting it. but it's rude to notice because in america people who succeed surely only did succeed on the basis of their own hard work and superior talent you slacker you're just jealous, and if you want to insist on taxing them to death then you must be some commie socialist liberal like obama so fuck you. that's one line of reasoning i have heard.

then again it's rude to notice that we're really not going communist or socialist we've pretty much arrived at police-state fascist and that's from the other side of the political spectrum the george w bush side but it's rude to notice that either because he's gone now so don't be looking that way you're just trying to distract people from the liberals. then again obama and bush have basically the same damn policies but it's rude to notice that either because all these well meaning people have spent lots of time and money getting obama elected so that we could have change and oh crap, sorry but that turned out to be a big waste of energy so you don't point that out either because they will surely be bummed and it hasn't been that long and a few still have hope. you know it would be cruel to dash their hopes on the rocks like all those poor iraqis and afghanis and palestinians having their dreams and lives smashed into little tiny pieces by american foreign policy. but i digress. and the bush people still don't want to admit their guy totally sucked even though that's plainly evident but see they survived that and now they're off the hook so ha. basically you can't notice anything without bumping into somebody's glass feelings.

and all that is really just beating around the bush, because the stuff that is really *really* rude to notice i haven't even begun to touch yet.

Just In Case

Good bloggers tend to go missing from time to time. It's a mysterious thing. Should that ever happen to my blogs Twelfth Bough or After Armageddon News, I plan on hanging out here.