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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BBEXB1Wf9c

Romnesia.            

If I get you right, then I totally agree.

Whoops, just found out that changes to primaries rules in Likkud preclude all of those leftie infiltrators from even participating.

Oddly enough, there's a very similar discussion going on in leftist circles in Israel, despite the fact that we basically have a multi-party system. People who are left of center end up voting closer to the center than they'd like just to make sure their vote gets counted. But in Israel as in the US, not voting doesn't empower anybody. It just allows your perspective to continue being ignored. Of course the system is geared to encourage this. In the US more than Israel, I'd say. Voting doesn't make anything better, but not voting contributes to things going the way they're going already. I think the only solution is to vote for a party that has more than a snowball's chance in hell and focussing your energy on changing things outside the electoral system. Voting is just putting your finger in the dam. You still have to work on repairing that hole or pushing back the tide, and that requires real work, not just putting a piece of paper in a box.

BTW, in Israel there's a significant movement of lefties registering in Likkud (the big right-wing party) in order to participate in primaries and try to keep them from veering off too far to the right. They then vote for a leftist party come real elections. It's a response to right-wing extremists (settlers) who do the same thing, except come elections they vote for the outright fascists, whom their plants in Likkud give a place in government. In America you have the Tea Party doing that kind of thing to the GOP, and I wonder why no lefties have registered as Republicans to sabotage that effort (or maybe they have and I haven't heard of them). Probably because of how entrenched partisan lines are and because of the idealistic hope that if the GOP goes off the far end they'll never win an election again. And I think we're starting to see that people are way too stupid to be expected to act that way. The GOP has for a long time been really bad for most of its voters and outright crazy, but they manage to win some races anyway because their tactics aren't based on sound policy. Even their politics aren't based on policy.

Yeah. Just Lady Depression reminding you that your circumstances are nothing to her, and she scoffs at your happiness. Don't give her a chance. She doesn't deserve it.

Luna, fwiw, and only imho – ymmv – parsing out "legitimate reasons for depression" from others is not a useful way to go. It gets you, or at least me, running around in mental circles carefully reviewing all the bad shit in your (my) life, which is precisely the kind of mental state that gets one (more) depressed.
My depressions have always been mild, in the greater scheme of things, but the only thing that has helped me beat them is to realize that I can make the choice to be happy, which by no means means it's easy – it's nigh-on impossible when I have zero willpower and am in the fetal position on the couch and can't bring myself to fucking move – but it does mean that no external circumstances justify depression. I find it useful to think of depression as something that happens to me, which I can stave off but can't really predict or even necessarily detect, and which is never, ever justified. It is antithetical to resolving problems. It is not a defense mechanism, it is a self-destruct mechanism. It's not a response to a problem, it is a problem. And I've found that when it's not so bad that I actually feel unable to get off my ass (which has thankfully been rare with me) I just have to get pissed off at myself, get up, put some shoes on, take a walk, and my head starts clearing. And ultimately I have to find that little switch in my brain which makes me inexplicably happy, which is the only real antidote to being inexplicably sad.
Again, I have no idea how this shit works for other people, but on the off chance that this might help you, there's how it work for me.
Hang on in there.

How does this fit in with not confusing the map for the territory?

The idea is still amorphous, as far as I'm concerned, but as I see it the idea that the projection of persona is not necessarily identical to the personality.

Or further, while you can have a pretty damn accurate map, you cannot have a mask that is not distorted in some way. Every mask, regardless of how many different masks can be made of the same person, will be a caricature, some grotesque, some idealized. But all of them have an inversion. The idealized masks have the blueprint for a grotesque counterpart on the concave side (for the narcissistic) and the grotesque masks have the blueprint for the idealized on the concave (for the perpetually self loathing).


Hmmm...

I hadn't thought of that before, but I like it.

THIS.

I think the way this ties in with the map-territory thing is that both are parts of some human tendency to hang on to simplified, orderly, structured, easy-to-understand summaries of reality, rather than dealing with it in all its incomprehensible complexity. The masks are how we try to summarize ourselves, both for ourselves and for others, thereby inevitably ignoring some details, providing a simplified, comprehensible but incomplete picture of who/what we are. But with masks, more than with other maps, there's a lot of emotional baggage attached to our choice of summary – the writing on the back of the mask, the stuff we don't want (certain) people to know/think about us and hence work hard to negate.

Masks are a special case of maps. Masks are maps designed to be confused for the territory (your face.)

Awesome. FB'd.

[ant-vaccination]

It's Flu Shot Day at work.  Which means I get to find out who the stupidest people on my team are, while being forced to listen to their bullshit ant-vaccination misinformation.

Whoa, there's a vaccine against ants? My friend's gonna be thrilled to know, he was just telling me today about how ants somehow managed to destroy his family's electricity meter out in the country a few years ago. (Seriously, that shit happened.)

I just...I can't...I...what?! She sounds pretty serious.

Interestingly, media representation is more about presenting an idealized form of social norms in order to maintain the status quo than about presenting reality.

Obviously, I'd think.  Their owners have a vested interest in the status quo, and in pleasing fairy tales about how things are.

While I'm sure that's a significant factor, I also think a part of the explanation is something far more boring: if what you propose to produce is too unusual, the media people tasked with okaying it either won't get it, or will feel it's too weird.

And there's this thing Chomsky talked about in the documentary "Manufacturing Consent" (no idea what the overlap is with the book of the same title) – that (commerical, American) television is so fast-paced that you basically don't have the time to say anything new; if you can't package an idea in a soundbite comprised of familiar words and ideas, you're going to get interrupted or edited, because introducing a new thought requires a bit of thought.

That probably applies to the process behind making TV as well – I take it that mainstream media is a very fast-paced business, and if you sit down with some execs and start trying to explain why they should make your thing despite its unconventional gender roles, there's a pretty good chance you're gonna get interrupted, and they might never get it.

This all ties in, for me, with the binary choice between conformity and marginalization. Creatively repackaged status quo is just easier to get produced, not only because of the interests of those who own the means of production, but also because people can have a very negative reaction to nonconformism – especially when they have to keep in mind what other people will think, which media execs always, always do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlwilbVYvUg&feature=plcp

It's some weird crazy remix of the first presidential debate, with lipdubbing and pure incoherent insanity. I haven't laughed this hard in a while.

WHAT IS THAT THING?!?!?

I read once that in some depression/burnout expert's estimation, the root cause of depression is always stuff you are hiding from the world, like secrets. Maybe it's masks, too.

Good luck, Sita.