My own compulsions, tenacious in argument where I just won’t let it go, my tendency to over explain appearing like I’m lecturing the other person and think they’re stupid. Not getting enough sleep. Authoritarians that place leaders and prestigious figures over principles and good arguments. Cruelty. Stepping on beetles by mistake when I walk out on my patio (they weren’t doing anything). Bureaucrats. Rubrics. People who use words like “rubrics” as if they enhance things. People who think they’re entitled when they haven’t put in the effort. People who believe in rank not contributions. People who hate others based on race, gender, etc. People who think the truth is dangerous like advocates of abstinence only education. Fighting with others. Misunderstandings. My tendency to project and assume. Those that don’t think the world is enough but that it needs an otherworldly supplement. Consumer capitalism. The fact that I enjoy consumer capitalism. Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh. Censorship in schools. Those that suggest that Enlightenment is responsible for the Holocaust, Gulags, and the ravages of technology and capitalism rather than human ego, continuing mythology, racism, nationalism, and greed. Adverserial, combative, confrotational, and unctious people. Testosterone fueled academia in the humanities. Difficulty in seeing the circumstances of other people that might render their actions rational. Hurtfulness. The indifference and cruelty that the inability to see context engenders in others. Cliches. Self-destructiveness. The inability for us to collectively act on climate change even though it’s in our self-interest. Men that kick down the sand castles that others build on the beach for no reason. Enslaving others through the creation of economic debt. That I don’t have more time to garden. Partisanship and misguided loyalty. The belief that one’s discipline is the foundation of all others and disdain/contempt for other disciplines. Contempt. Legalism. Selfishness. Sarcasm. The absence of sincerity. Those that are motivated by their resume rather than love of what they do. Classism. Elitism. Failure to recognize how one has benefitted by their privilege and connections, believing one is self-made. And, again, not getting enough sleep.
October 27, 2011
Advertisement
October 29, 2011 at 8:52 pm
As much as I admire your honesty here, and as lists of things not liked go this seems a reasonable one, apart from a concern I have.
As a member of the disabled lumpenproletariat in the UK who has recently had to put up with a fair bit of useless eater bashing I was wondering how particularly you measure the following:
“People who think they’re entitled when they haven’t put in the effort. People who believe in rank not contributions.”
Because whilst most of the above seems fairly liberal, the above has been used by the right in some serious poor bashing recently.
What is ‘making the effort’? How do we judge? How do we decide what is effort and what is not.
Some days for some just living is effort.
And I agree with dissing rank, but I’d hardly rate ‘contribution’ higher not least when some exploitative tosser quotes a meritocracy at me to explain his high wage. (Meritocracy the excuse to expalin why you think because you earn more you are worth (merit) more).
I call being human contribution and effort enough.
But then i suppose I come from the background where when I run a hearing voices group, knowing the hell people have lived through, we say ‘you are welcome to contribute but you are just as welcome to be here and say nothing if that’s how you feel’ because just being is contribution enough.
I’ve never come across someone who doesn’t want to be productive to some extent. As the saying goes (can’t remember source) mental illness is often a reasonable reaction to intolerable conditions. There is no laziness or sloth, idleness is a resonable disaffection and resistance to putting up with the judgments of those whose inability to deal with their own unconscious drives. Lethargy is the reasonable reaction to being affected by such overwhelming oppression.
There’s another saying, ‘what we have renounced in ourselves we are least likely to permit in others’. It seems to be what you are mulling over in this post with both self-criticism and judgement but those two phrases worried me.
Just saying is all. (Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit: Para. 654)
Not having a go, just concerned is all.
October 30, 2011 at 1:01 am
Schizo,
No I wasn’t suggesting anything like that. There’s a back story to that remark that I won’t share here. Soon an interview of mine will be released that speaks a great deal about poverty and whatnot.
October 30, 2011 at 11:03 am
Look forward to interview.
I chuckled at the phrase “poverty and whatnot” it reminded me of an Irish sit com called Father Ted about two useless Irish priests stuck on a small island for reasons unknown, who go on a protest carrying the sign ‘Down with that sort of thing’
November 17, 2011 at 10:43 am
“Those that don’t think the world is enough but that it needs an otherworldly supplement.”
The people who think along these lines – I among them – think they’re making a truth claim.