--- In [email protected], "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@...> wrote: > > ... I was genuinely curious, seeing there were so many > gaps in my mind. I wasn't making a dig at Ann. I wasn't > thinking indirectly about a dig at Robin either. In fact, > I can't even remember the motivation for writing the post > we are discussing here. I am going to have to reread it.
Continuing my ongoing raps on the theme of "Everything you need to know about Fairfield Life you can learn from Yahoo's Message View" :-), I suggest that you don't have to reread anything. You gained the same impression that many others did, that so far Ann's presence here pretty much revolves around her perception that FFL delivers up Robin to her as a captive audience. He's never responded to anything she writes, nor even acknowledged her existence. Yet she's still on the "Robin was and still is brilliant" bandwagon. Call me crazy, but I think the best commentary on this so far was someone's comparison of her to Squeaky Fromme. 'Nuff said. > You make up this stuff in your mind. The mind manufactures > fictions. This is the enlightenment trip, to see through > those fictions. You presume that folks here actually have a real interest in enlightenment. If FFL has done anything for me over the years of my participation here, it has dissuaded me of this notion. Nothing dies a faster death here than *actual* discussions of enlightenment and its many mysteries. They are derailed quickly into digs at the person who attempts to ponder those mysteries *from their POV*, attempting to denigrate that POV and the person who holds it, and ignor- ing the larger issue of enlightenment completely. Often (and the subject of this rap), such derailments seem to not even be aimed at the person they are presumably written to. In many cases, the derailer is "writing to" someone who has made it crystal clear that he or she wants nothing to do with the derailer, and in many cases doesn't even bother to read what they write. They have been, in as real a sense as in the romantic one, been "dumped." And, just as one finds in bars full of sad men and women desperate for someone -- anyone -- who will sit there and listen to them drone on endlessly about the person who dumped them and what horrible, nasty, inexcusably inexcusable people the act of dumpage makes them. In bars, you could deal with such people the same way people do in real life -- get up and move to the other side of the bar and leave them ranting to themselves. Here, you can't. They can continue to rant, often pretending that they are *still writing directly to the person who has made it clear they aren't reading a word of it*. (Or, as in my case, only the first 10 words or so shown in Message View.) Few call them on this. WHY? Because IMO *they're* the ones reading it, and in fact *they're* the ones being written to. It's all part of a phenomenon we discussed briefly earlier, trying to form what you call "associations" with other people, what I call cliques. On one level, I think that people on Internet forums who continue to rant angrily at people who have dumped them (or defend and praise them just as embarrassingly) are in the same ballpark as stalkers who stand outside the apart- ments of men or women who have dumped them romantically and scream at their closed, double-paned-for-soundproofing-purposes windows. The ranting is *not* for the purpose of communication; it's a way of either venting their own line-on-stone anger at the person who has dumped them or a way of (in their minds) trying to "get them back." Because the dumper is not paying any attention to the some- what deranged dumpee, and thus refusing to become a "captive audience" for those they've dumped, the dumpees settle for the "next best thing." That is, the same thing that the drunks in the bars settle for if they can get it. Someone -- anyone -- who will listen to them rant endlessly about the horrible dumper and then hopefully either pile on to ragging about them or, at the very least, respond with an occasional "Uh huh" or "Whatever you say," which the raging dumpee interprets as meaning "You go, girl" or "You rock, man." Meanwhile I'm over here in another corner of the bar, wondering why others are still sitting there listening to someone drunk on attachment carrying on endlessly about it.
