8/15/2007

Verbosity: A valid reaction to linguistic normalization within institutionalized hegemony?

failure flounce
When you get right down to it, I'm a martial artist, I do weapons, I am a fucking weapons for god's sake. And I blog.

Think about that.

Yeah words are another weapon, one that The Man uses in a variety of ways, like boxing or tae kwon do - hard, opposing, all His force against a target, unrestrained and crashing - but also like Aikido or Jujitsu - yeilding, accomadating, quite happy to put His opponent into a bad position and then to let His opponent do all the work in defeating themselves - and words, being cheap, infinite in nature, and tuneable like the words most perfect keyboard, are a weapon He uses indiscriminately and with the long practiced skill of the old expert.

There are waiting words, and watching words, hiding words and hurting words.

One of the notable things about propaganda, imho, is that, primarily, the official propaganda as used by The Man does not really serve the purpose of informing people of the wrong things. Instead it seems to exist to ensure that such bumf and useless information is transmitted to the peopleflowers He cultivates that it ensures, not so much that lies are implanted into their minds (though that may be a pleasant side effect), but that truths are kept from being viewed.

This doesn't mean that FOX is broken because it does the whole Fair and balanced thing, on the contrary, it is not what is said or not said, but the volume that counts. Most people do not think or listen or watch critically, they have had what tentative version of critical sensing that they had in childhood beaten out of them by Offical Histories and lying text books backed by teachers who didn't care waht was taught, so long as a general "teachieness" was occuring in general within their class rooms, and this is then reinforced in adulthood with a world where inquisitiveness leads to the doubt they've been taught to fear, and to answers that can only give a person who's honest more problems than they're worth. This means that if you say one true thing and surround that truth with so many lies, so many hiding words that the truth is effectively buried and only the lies remain visible. It really does seem to work like maths.

And when presented with an issue, and only one view point on it, the mind, abhorring a vacuum almost as much as cats and nature do, will absorb that view point. The mind in question may later absorb another view point, or think of one itself, but if it is not exposed to an alternative viewpoint, or if it is not routinely used to thinking, or not provided information enough to base thinking on, then that first viewpoint is the only view point it'll have.

Being understood is good, but being heared is something of a pre-requisite to that, and being heard is not just a matter of being heard once, but of being heard enough that what is said is actually understood.

But that's just the big Official fonts of disinformation, The Man has his softer methods of getting certain ideas understood, and certain ideas hidden.

There's the watching words. These are the words that judge, that rely on a disjoint between what is and what is supposed to be. These are the owrds on the billboards, in the adverts, in between the programs. They say "why don't have this?" or "why aren't you this?"
They are the words that ask questions designed to make you doubt yourself, and to buy not just products but His Attitudes along with them.

The best thing about those words is taht fortunately marketing people are idiots to the point of hilarity, which is why there's at most about a dozen actual watching words in the world - those marketing people hit on something that owrks and BAM! five billion bare distinguishable adverts that all contain a man in his underwear looking off vaguely into the distance, or a woman in various stages of undress while Grinning like an idiot for no obvious reason. Often there are feathers flying about, muted sepia or monochrome predominates also. To be fair nobody has the slightest idea why exactly this is all so, but I posit idiocy and a great deal of people not knowing what the hell they're doing, because it feels like it's probably a result of people flailing about in the dark.

And because people who go on and on repeating the same two or three variations on a theme tend to be... not that intelligent? Thick as a harry potter book? Lacking any creativity?

Oh gosh, meta shit, how original. Unlike self effacing eye rolling, of course

The last sort of words are the waiting words. I call them such because they are like people at a bus stop (lots of bus stops in this post. people who do not like bus stops will probably not like this post) they look, on the surface, to not actually be going anywhere, but you know from their position at a bus stop - some might say context becaue that's the right word - marks them as words that are definately going somewhere.

These are the words that are woven in and out of the institutions; the acronyms, psychobabble, tech jargon of the professionals and academics and clique-speek of the conformist rebels that are produced with every trust fund. These are the words that say in a single word what could be send less cryptically in more than one word, but do so only for those with the luck and privelage to have been taught the language of the institution in question.

These last ones fascinate me incredibly, largely because I've been home studying past high school since it became clear that the one child the family was going to send college was, by edict of my father, a man who beat my mother and who I broke a knee cap of at my eldest brother's wedding, going to be one of my brothers for not particularly complex reasons.

This has led to me developing a process for learning about stuff from a particular branch of science, it is a two step process, and thus not something that is readily transformed into a form of tap dancing.

The first step involves learning the langauge the subject uses, the second step is learning how the subject's various prophets and saints used that language to describe stuff.

Before wikipedia (whcih is good for physics I find, less so other subjects though) and that year or two I spent in a college town (RMildred is in ur colleges, fucking ur professors, who are beeeg fans of airheads who giggle when the mighty men of science speak technical, heh) this largely involved books.

Not that that's pertinent to anything, but I felt like sharing anyway. Yes thank you for that long rambling thing with no actual pay off, the readers love it I'm sure

One of the things about the waiting words is that, in many ways, they exist to stop otehr words getting onto the bus when it comes, and they seem not to worried if the bus does not appear to be coming. Indeed waiting words are waiting words because they do not care so much for anything other than waiting, and view the act of hanging around a bus stop to be, first and foremost, about the wait, and if a bus hsould happen to come, well they get only only to stop other people taking the seats they waited so long for.

I'm not going to go on about how we need to have the sciences enbrace fringe science, or say that colleges need to embrace wider view points on stuff ranging from holcaust denial to whether the toltecs really were so stupid they really needed aliens or greek geezers to have done anything white people might find impressive.

But I can't help but notice that a specific group of people go to college, can't help notice the inflation hitting academic qualifications in this country, can't help noticing they way that the learned professions that pretty much garuntee a steady income tend to require that would be professional learn various greek and latin words - while the rest of the country is pissing and moaning about how "thems immigrunts orta lern themselves sum inglish" no less.

Call me odd, but I like to call a cryptogram a cryptogram when I see one, just for giggles and accuracy and shit. Nothing important.

It's a clear weapon, the watching words could be passed off as mere advertising, the hiding words as nothing more than bad editors and writers, maybe even bureaucratic faffing with teh public education system, but the hurting words - which I feel need no description really - and the waiting words... they're weapons, clearly and plain for all to see.

So I know which countries spics and wops come from repsectively, as indeed do I know the difference between gweilos and ghoras, and the complete lack of difference between goyim and gaijin.

And I ended up basically rebuilding economics from teh ground up until it was useful as a defensive weapon (the highly probable, and penultimate, domestic credit market crash should make the elections fun next year folks, and if you're going to run up large credit card bills, do so after the credit market corrections plateau around late december imho, before you miss the chance to) in fact, and had to do something terrible to the subject using Dirac notation to make it work for my purposes.

You don't have to, like the various quantum electrodynamics puns I've made over the years, actually understand that, I'm being verbose to make the point that I know shit, that despite what I'm able to put on my CV, I'm fucking learned mutherfucker.

Having to prove that me and my college diploma are not drooling morons has been something I've come up against again and again, and I find the ability to spit the local dialect better than the locals, faster, better, stronger and with more fire, has always hep me to shut up the would be Otherers, the snobs, the petty middle class downpressers who love to inform me of shit.

I'm told over and over again that the blogosphere is meritocractic, but largely I see just a bunch of people who bought a degree and want to act like that makes them smart, spitting out waiting words as if they mean anything.

This is in fact the conciously chosen reason for my rather overly technical and wordy writing style. It's a co-option of a sick language in an attempt to twist it back on the people who usually weild it as a weapon, much as I sometimes troll stormfront and nitpick their routine and innacurate use of racial slurs, or threw that holocaust joke at those fuckwit jews who'd decided that ashkenazis weren't totally assimilated white folk and were sure that "schwartze" wasn't racist, hell no.

What you looking at me like that for? It triggers me somewhat, and I don't really have middle gears ffs, I thought I'd made that clear.

Indeed, I routinely use a juxtapositioning of that style of writing with a shit load of cussing to add emphasis to certain insults that I throw at people who say they're smart but who's writing doesn't support such statements.

I developed it fighting right wing trolls in fact who routinely make claims to authority such as that, that it works so readily on the Concerned Liberals of Leftblogistan is probably pertinent to something or other.

But apparently that's not a style of writing people can understand.

now the thing is that, it is one thing to be heard, but it's more important to be understood, and even being understood isn't that important as long as you say something that is worth being understood in the first place.

but as I am heard but not understood there is no way for me to know if I am saying anything worht understanding.
I don't consider this acceptable, not at all.

I'm interested that everyone has apparently been keeping quiet about this, you know, praising me to my face but it's apparently been a big well known joke. I say "it" of course, I mean "me" don't I? Oh well.

Of course my paranoid neurosis led me to have been assuming that everyone's compliments were just extremely veiled insults Anyway, but to have it confirmed is, well it bugs me to tell teh truth.

I mean it's nice to know NOW, you know after I've been a hypocrite for mocking the big Oranges' crappy writing, and it's nice to know that when people call me fiery tehy mean that reading it is like trying to make out the detail on teh side of a burning log - impossible, and when they call me intelligent they're being plainly sarcastic to such a degree that everyone is hard pressed to not get it - well except me of course, obviously.

Adn of course you mention this after I've been doing it so long that it's become something of my naturalistic writing style - not back when it was just a way of talk that shut up most of the fuckwits I spent my time argueing with, hell no, NOW you tell me.

Thank you. No really, from the the heart of my bottom I thank you all.

Of course the kicker is that I need to be told isn't it? I mean, I 've been the synonum for stupid for ages right, but even I could tell that the whole holocaust joke thing was seriously funky, and indeed could quickly figure out why it was so.

After all, getting that upset at someone doing some act of bloatedly self important bigotry he's been taught form a young is okay is okay, but do I flip shit like that at the white bicyclists who do similar shit? Well no, not really, it's too expected, isn't it, to bother.

Then why the jews? Because they're members of an oppressed minority to watch out for, and therefore should know better of course.

DING DING DING! Holding arguably non-white people to a higher standard of "not racist" than unarguably white people who ride bicycles alert! failure to judge people by the colour of their draydels rather than the content of their character alert!

Yet I wonder why everyone has been laughing at me behind my back, huh.

But the thing is that I didn't need someone to point out to me that that was a bad thing, nor did I need to be told what was wrong wit it, my ability to be self critical worked fine, and I've now peeled yet another layer off of my sublte bigotries.

And more importantly can be assured that I can peel off yet more in the future until I become free.

But my system of self analysis, that allows me to improve myself in various ways, doesn't work for my writing itself, quite patently so.
Indeed, one of the various reasons why I am so mind numbingly verbose is because in my head are things that are just movements and these indescribable feelings of... flow that are ideas but aren't readily translatable to english. And sometimes I need words like "matrix" or the thousand and one words ending in "-ic" or the "-isms", because they're the only way I can readily describe some of the ideas in my head.

But I'd actually worried that I was being too wordy, but I thought, well they'll tell me if I'm too wordy, they'll ask questions and shit.

But that assumes that I haven't been speaking in what amounts to an overly wordy form of esperanto, that they have, in fact, been able to follow what I've said well enough to even ask questions, but silly egotistical notions of mine are clearly not true are they?

Which means that the one check, the one source of feedback I thought I had, because I am just not able to see what is wrong with my writing when it crops up well enough to act upon such awareness in a constructive manner, does not exist.

poof, just gone.

Which leaves me in something of a bind really, because if none of that was true, I'd be able to just change my writing style, maybe borrow someone else's who's I like and rework it until it becomes natural for me.

But I have no way of knowing when or if such a style would be complete shit, again, and would be doing nothing more than setting myself up for repeat of this whole stupid thing, which is undoubtably what Z ren was expecting me to do when she revealed to her little pet straightman (moi) the punchline to this joke.

Except...

Except that while writing anotehr comment on her blog, another comment to bat at teh silly strawmen she's waving around in lieu of actually replying to any arguement I've put forth and shit like that...

But then again, I am incomprehensible so what do I expect?

...Except that while writing such a comment, I was struck by how, if I clearly can't write, and I am therefore clearly not fit to blog, and that I am clearly also lacking the resources, both mental and social, to in anyway improve my writing to the point where it isn't crap... then the only thing to do would be to stop blogging all together isn't it? If I'm gonna throw words around like "logic" and "consistency", that's the only sensible conclusion, and one far better than the alternative of being your buttmonkey for the recent of eternity Actually, it'd make more sense to just fix the problem and not be a big flouncy, histrionic baby.

So I figured I might take this recent cufuffle with my old apartment as a gift, maybe go back to LA, visit a few graves I haven't seen since I left that human cesspit when I was younger finances say; no.

If I figure out a way to become an acceptable blogger I might be back blogging, but I sincerely doubt I can do that, so...

Goodbye then.


Flounce cancelled, stay tuned.

9 comments:

Renegade Evolution said...

RM:

Sheesh. Okay, first off, I do think you are honest to gods intelligent. Very much so. And it’s a kick to my own ego when I don’t understand you, or get lost along the reading way or whatever else. I was put off by that whole last thing because, well, I felt like amid all the words people were utterly missing my point and, once again, attributing sentiments to me which I’d not said or expressed. Which yeah, is frustrating as hell. My whole gist there, which I thought was so simple to get was Not an Excuse, a Reason I’d seen Men Apply to Why, so perhaps that Why should be considered. That’s it. And I felt as if everyone (well, not everyone) but a lot of folk were missing that completely. I don’t expect the world to agree with me, but as you said, I would like them to at least hear what it is I’m actually saying.

Two: You’re right, words are weapons. It has always been and shall always be, I suspect. A person who can take a punch to the face without nary a tear can cry after reading something that truly hits home for them. People know this. A great many people use these weapon-words most effectively. You’re not alone there.

Three: I also understand the desire to out think/out talk/ out write people who have, in essence, purchased their degrees and grew up with everything…that in and of itself is a timeless tale…

And always get it or not, I LIKE your style. I don’t have to always understand something fully to appreciate it, but you have to remember when you use words as weapons, well, sometimes they do cut, and when cut, others will fight back. That, I think, is just the nature of the beast.

Lack of communication and misunderstanding are nothing new, but ffs woman, you do write well and understand all of it or not, I sure as hell wouldn’t want you to stop or change your style. And I sure as hell can’t believe I’m actually saying this either, but, Peace? Truce? Bygones be? I don’t have to always get or agree with you to think you’re a good blogger…hell, I check here often for a reason….

Even learned some of that science shit too….

Anonymous said...

Whatever happens, please know that I love you.

Kai said...

For what it's worth, Mr. Elephant, I have no problem understanding your words. Always makes perfect sense to me. On the other hand I also spend hours staring at burning logs.

Ravenmn said...

That pile-on at Ren's came out of the blue for me as well. I don't understand it, I don't agree and I don't like it.

BUT, consider the subject under discussion was not your blog, it was a specific comment or two at Ren's. Comments are short-form writing, the most difficult kind and the easiest to misconstrue.

Dammit, though, RM, those weapons used against you at Ren's -- I've seen you handle them well in the past. I've seen you at your warrior best letting them bounce off you as you come back with more truth and knowledge than most of us can dream to possess.

So maybe I've been depending on your warrior wit too long without appreciating the cost to you. For that I apologize. I'm sorry I didn't back you more often or comment here more often. Because I do appreciate you and I love your writing style.

Like, Kai, I definitely understand you. Your latest comments on the whitosphere over there and here was awesome.

I don't want you to stop, but I'll honor your needs and your decisions.

Nanette said...

I don't know what is going on, but my most frequent response, when I read your writing here or in comments at other places is... I *heart* R. Mildred.

I have no problem understanding you... although a sentence or two may take more than one reading to make sure the full enjoyment is gotten from it.

Daisy Deadhead said...

Well, I often do not understand you, but people often do not understand me either. That's not a big deal, we are all from very different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, etc. I'm more surprised when I find people I do understand.

The problem is when people deliberately don't want to understand each other, not when they honestly try and sometimes fail.

Anonymous said...

"wordy" is what people are when they use a lot of words and its filler or flash. when people write the way you can, it's called "gifted," no matter how many words are there.

Anonymous said...

I remember the first time I realized (something on punkass blog, I think) there was a hell of a lot more than impressive profanity to your writing, that the leaps and twists weren't random at all, and that it was a hell of a lot of fun to read along. It stretches my brain, forces me to work to keep up, and for that I'm genuinely grateful. I'm so small time as to be an electronic nonentity, but I feel compelled to speak out and say that you're far from ineffectively communicating. I'd guess it's your unwillingness to play by the rules that sets people off, and that's always a good sign.

Anonymous said...

I think you're awesome. I don't always understand you, but that's because you're a lot better informed than I am. When I have the time to sit down and go through what you're saying slowly and let it sink in, I learn a lot from you.