Interesting shit from back in the day.

[LHX]

LMNO found it in his dig - im not sure what thread it was in

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Yourself

And now it's here.

(edit: and now I have to erase that one too, because cramulus already got to it.)

[LHX]

damn

too much efficiency ITT

[LMNO]

It was called "as thou wilt", which is kind of a sucky name.  So I didn't use it.

[LMNO]

Title: Family

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  I want to discuss the topic of family. 
How do you reconcile family and BIP. 

I'll use myself as an example.

I grew up in a fairly conservative Baptist family.  The rest of my kin are all pretty religious and devout.  Additionally, we all grew up in a fairly isolated part of the world.  It really is a "Cleaver" mentality up there. Or, at least it was.

And now, I'm raising a family of my own.  I love this new family and I very much love my parents and the family up north.  And I feel, I could never, ever, share with them my thoughts and feelings and ideology as I've expressed them here.  I think the ideas we've bantered about here and in other parts would absolutely scare them.  Not so much the ideas themselves, but that I have those ideas and think about them, with others.  I really think my family would view this as some weirdo cult like Jonestown. 

So, is it a matter of going it alone in a sense?  Trying to advance change, in a minimalist way, but leaving my family out of it?  Do I risk freaking them out by trying to get them hip to what is "really" going on?  Does anyone else struggle with this?

LMNO:  No one in my family understands my ways of thinking, including my wife.  But I can get through to my dad sometimes, if I use almost purely scientific language.  Mostly, I keep my thoughts to myself, but I do speak quite often about where my thoughts lead me.  Last night, I realized that my use of the meme "barstool" is just about equivalent to my Scientologist brother's use of the meme "reactive mind".  Both are metaphors for some other phenomenon, and no one knows what the fuck it means, outside of a small social circle.

I'm not sure if this has any relevance to this thread, but it's early and I don't want to do any work.

East Coast Hustle:  I'll go a step further. I don't really have much in the way of family (my dad was an orphan, and I only like two people on my mom's side of the family - her and my cousin who lives with her), so I've always considered my close friends to be my "real" family. Now, it has never occurred to me to pick my friends based on their ideology or their politics, so I've got a pretty diverse collection of "family". These are the people I have chosen to be that close to, people I have always been able to talk to about anything and who have always been able to talk to me without fear of judgment...

...and they would probably hang me from a streetlight if they knew what I really thought about the world.

Now, most of these people think of themselves as being very liberal/progressive/open-minded/etc. (though oddly enough, the ones that fall more towards the conservative end of the spectrum seem to be more open to my way of thinking - I think they just like the conspiracy theory stuff and don't recognize it for the mental exercise I take it to be.) Most of them think they "get it". And yet, even these people (who are more like me than 99% of the rest of the world) recoil in absolute terror any time I attempt to make even the tiniest chink in their mental armor, even though I've always been relatively good at chipping through those shells without doing too much damage.

I don't know if I have a point here, but it strikes me as odd (and borderline tragic) that even the people who should be most sympathetic to our ideas and most likely to understand what the fuck it is I'm on about would probably rather choke me to death with their own hand than actually allow themselves to start dropping filters.

So what do we do about this? or can we do anything at all?

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  I think if I were to start talking barstools with my wife she'd just stare at me in wonder.  Like, "I wonder what the hell is wrong with him."  And the thing is, I think, strike that, I know she has some of the same thoughts, she just doesn't piece them together the same way I do. 

I think part of it is a Parental Instinct.  Consciously, or subconsciously, she couldn't afford to think subversively.  She has to be "normal" for our daughter.  I wrestle with that too.  My wife accepts me as, "Weird" or "Strange."  Hell, if I had been a normal shmoe I don't think she would have ever gone out with me. 

And I also accept that I have to give in to certain societal constructs if I want my daughter to co-exist in the society into which she is growing.  Like, I can't leave BIP pamphlets at the Christian Daycare that she attends. 

But then, when it comes to my biological family, my parents and siblings, it's another bowl of wax just because they grew up in bumfuck, Maine where all "Weirds" are somehow blasphemous. 

LMNO:  I have a feeling that, since breaking the filters and chains is such a traumatic experience, that it really can only be done to strangers.  Maybe.

East Coast Hustle:  Heh. I knew I'd found the girl I wanted to marry when I utterly shattered her filters one day (mostly by accident - I lost my temper in an argument and shouted out the horrible truth before I realized it).

She spent about a half-hour on the floor, weeping and banging her head into the wall in mourning for her worldview, then popped right back up and demanded to know how she could help me do that to everyone else.

Jenne:  No one has ever REALLY understood me, so if I expound on things Discordian-like, it's all the same "Just Jenne Gibberish" to them, anyway.

My husband, funny enough, has lived in a sort of chaotic order himself, so he probably understood this stuff almost before I was born.  *shrug*  I'm not sure how much he believes, but he does follow along with a BIP tautology all on his own.  He himself, though, believes too much in his own powers to break out, and I think he has yet to follow the logic straight into how much of an iron prison it really is.  Though, truth be told, you come from the depths of Hell like he has, and you have some bragging rights to be sure.

Myself, I don't worry about if someone understands me or not.  I've spent so much of my life caring if I'm understood that I've realized that it's virtually impossible, so I give as much as I think others WILL understand and leave it at that.  Otherwise, people are just turned off, mostly because it's coming from me, and they'll prejudge the message based on the messenger (I'm talking about friends and family here, not strangers/acquaintances).  I haven't toed the line that I grew up behind for so long that no one really expects me to live or speak within their memes any longer.

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe:  I find that family is not who you are related to, but the people who love and care for you, support you, not what they think is you. Many times these people may be related to you, but just as often they are not. In my fortune the family that is related to me is understanding, and the family that is not are like minded. Some of whom occasionally inhabit these forums.

Cain:  I personally don't really have to worry about my family.  They are agnostic central/left wingers who have traveled a lot and done and pretty much encouraged me to do my own thing and figure out stuff for myself.  I haven't really told them about Discordianism per se, though I've frequently bought up Discordian viewpoints and talked them out.

With me, it,Äôs more my friends and in particular girlfriends.  A couple have taken an interest, but the ones I most expected to were just not interested.  The problem is, many of them are what you might call the new left, the sort of people those on the right of the political spectrum like to rant about.  And if you bring up any separate viewpoint to theirs then you are automatically wrong - just like with most ideologues.  Which has kind of strained things now and again.

Kind of like with ECH, my experience with my girlfriend was quite odd and more than just a little upsetting.  I felt a real heel for a while, because I had basically torn down her perception of how the world really worked and shown her something she had put trust in was not worthy of that.  It was necessary at the time, not only for her but me too, but that didn't exactly make me feel better about what I did.

[Triple Zero]

"Family" by RWHN saved to the wiki: http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Family

(and somehow just after i saved, the wiki seems to be veeeeerryyyyyy slloooowwww)

also, what do we think is this wiki going the right way? is the first priority to get as much texts in as possible or is it maybe time to think up some kind of good structure or is this already happening?

anyone interested may probably want to google something like "wiki best practices" or something similar, i'm sure somebody has written up something about good ways to structure a wiki.

i just don't want this wiki to become like that other "thing" at poee.co.uk, no idea what it was called but it's also some huge chaotic collection of editable discordian texts that nobody wants to touch anymore with a 10foot pole. ok this is also probably due to the fact that 95% of it is dadaist fluff.

i don't want to sound alarmist or anything, maybe we're heading in the right course already.

one interesting thing to keep an eye on might be Orphaned Pages (that are not linked anywhere) and other Special Pages (the wiki software keeps all kinds of interesting lists for us)

[LMNO]

Thanks for throwing this stuff up there, TZ.

My idea was that i could take out the fluff from the original thread, post it here, and then we could wiki the stuff down to more concise points, be it the original poster or someone else.  We could edit the redundancies, and eventually turn it into a "position", but hopefully one that contradicts itself.

[LMNO]

Title: The Fear and Desire Loop

LHX:  Talk about Black Iron Prisons.  On the one hand people are scared of the unknown.  On the other hand people are chasing illusionary goals.  This cycle perpetuates itself as people run away from what they fear and run toward what they desire, never escaping or fulfilling except for in short-term stimulating experiences.  Meanwhile, the unknown has done nothing to warrant it being something worth fearing, and it has already been established that everything we could possibly want/need is well within reach on this planet.  The only way out of that loop is to eventually be crushed by it, or to literally bust out of it.  To bust out the loop / prison - a person needs to recognize it.

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  This perfectly explains my relationships before I met my wife.  I was running away from a fear of being alone and not having a family while running towards a desire to be with someone with whom to share intimacy and love.  So, yup, there were some short-term stimulating experiences, but the whole of the experience was leading me down a path that was destructive. 

DJRubberducky:  The real fun happens when the desire is the source of the fear.

LHX:  Bingo.  When ,Äúfear of,Äù blows to the ego, pride and reputation influence a persons decision making process.

DJRubberducky:  An example of desire producing fear:  I'm polyamorous.  Mostly polyfidelity, but I doubt that means anything to anyone here other than me.

Anyway, one of my lovers isn't currently in any sort of primary relationship.  He's okay with how things are between him and me, and the understanding is that if he gets himself into a "real" relationship with someone not into sharing, then he and I aren't an item anymore.

Absolutely reasonable, yes?  But it puts me into one of these loops: Because I love him, I want to spend that kind of time with him because I enjoy it, and we enjoy each other.  But also because I love him, I don't want to spend that kind of time with him because it means he hasn't found anybody yet, and wishing to see him again also means wishing that.

I don't guess I'm trapped in the loop yet (anymore?), because I can make tentative plans and look forward to next times without being paralyzed by the fear (and most of the fear I experience is paralyzing - I'm that kind of unstable).  And more often than not, I can take a deep breath and remind myself that he makes his own choices, and if for some insanely stupid reason he's putting off finding his own relationship because that probably means not getting to see me anymore, that's his "fault" and not mine.  But it's been very interesting to watch my own thoughts over the last six months.

Jenne:  I think the main problem is the contingency on someone else's judgments and reactions to your own decisions and actions.  When you rely that heavily on someone else for your own happiness/progression through life in general, you've got a problem that you cannot solve on your own.

Except to break free of that contingency.

LMNO:  Except Jenne, you run into the classic:  The Fear of being rejected, and the Desire to be accepted.  Be it love, sex, or any act of creation, you run into this all the time.

Jenne:  You  just have to ignore that.  It's a conditioned response, anyway.  I won't mention the sociopathy involved getting to that stage, however.  Maybe just being aware of how tied you are to others' reactions to you, as equally fucked up as our own are, is part of the answer. 

LHX:  Lets ride that train of thought for a second here though, because that,Äôs the type of shit that crashes.  A lot of groups come together out of that desire to be accepted, but over the past months (/years) we have determined on these forums that there is another reason for people to come together:  They come together when they are in the process of getting something done.  Because there is some people here (and in some other places) that do not express any fear of being rejected or desire to be accepted.


Rev. What's-His-Name?:   What about the fear of being rejected by this collective?  Or the desire to be accepted by it?  And is one ever totally rid of these fears and desires in general?  I will honestly answer for myself the answer is no.  I like to think I'm a macho, I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks of me kind of person.  But......I have to admit, I do have some level of desire, in this example, for the rest of you to not think I'm a total dunder-head.  I don't lose sleep on it or anything, but there is some level of it there. 

DJRubberducky:  Also, just because the fear/desire hasn't been expressed doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  In fact, I would venture that those among us who *do* express it tend to get dismissed as "attention whores".  And simply witnessing that act would prompt somebody in that loop to keep quiet on the topic, since they've then seen that expressing the fear/desire will realize the fear.

[Triple Zero]

My idea was that i could take out the fluff from the original thread, post it here, and then we could wiki the stuff down to more concise points, be it the original poster or someone else.  We could edit the redundancies, and eventually turn it into a "position", but hopefully one that contradicts itself.

sorry i don't quite follow you? (it's late in the afternoon, maybe because i'm hungry)

"the original thread" = which one?

i was just thinking of getting some sort of plan together, what needs to be done
1) get as much BIP related text up there as possible (this is the obvious one)
2) but maybe someone should go over these texts and make them a littlebit more pretty with markup, subheadings, tables of contents, etc. for all this stuff there exists wiki markup
3) also any relevant diagrams and images can be put on a wiki page did you know that (so LHX that is an even more safe place to store the diagrams than photobucket)
4) should there be some sort of index pages? like "all rants written by RHWN"?, "pages about the Machine"
5) also very important, where possible, pages should have internal links to eachother (even when they didn't appear in the original text)

on the other hand, as i said, maybe it's too early for these kinds of structural ideas. and maybe the wiki-concept is good enough that it'll grow organic-like into something useful by itself (i dunno, but wikis seem to be pretty robust against this).

also, i dug up some wiki best practices for the editors:

http://dowire.org/wiki/Wiki_best_practice

Make sure to edit anything as soon as possible. This is a wiki best practice. We don't want you just reading. We want to know what you think, and what you're interested in, and so on. And be bold in editing.

To be bold when you edit a wiki page is the most basic wiki best practice next to editing itself. If you aren't bold, your wiki won't work or will be hijacked by trolls: see evil and stupid.

http://dowire.org/wiki/Wiki_conventions

also there is a lot of bullcrap on that dowire wiki (cause they got edited heh)

[Triple Zero]

addition: should i coyp and mark up "The Fear and Desire Loop" or are you working on this now in the wiki?

[Cramulus]

I think we're still moving in the right direction.

It may be useful (though difficult) to break down the literature section into categories. The more stuff we add, the more difficult it's going to be to find the content you're looking for. The literature section also seems to be the fastest growing section so it should probably be featured more prominently on the main page.

Personally, I think the front page should be a bit better organized...

The "what are we doing right now" and "current projects" sections should be combined.

The "I don't trust any of this" and "why the wiki" should probably be a subpage instead of on the main page


I'm a novice at wiki formatting, but I'm going to tinker a bit on the main page. If it looks poor, feel free to revert my changes.

[Triple Zero]

and this sort of discussion should in fact go on the "discussion" page of the wiki

[Cramulus]

addition: should i coyp and mark up "The Fear and Desire Loop" or are you working on this now in the wiki?

I'll grab it.

Hey, can someone link to any articles or summaries of the Barstool talk? Or is that not even BIP related? (unsure, as I didn't follow it too closely)

[Triple Zero]

barstool should be in there, either way. as much possible variations on the story as well

also i think there should be a section for "discussions" which contain condensed discussions about the BIP, like GSP: the discussion and this fear & desire discussion, for example.

[LMNO]

YOu can throw the fear and desire up there.  it's cool.

What I'm doing is thread diving, then condensing the thread into it's most relevant posts.  What I think might be nice is for it then to be wiki'd even more, to reduce the dialogue into more of a whole piece.  But if you think it should stay as dialogue, that's cool, too.


Basically, I'm pulling out old content that we haven't touched in a while, because those are generally considered "done", if not "resolved".