Entries Tagged 'the human condition' ↓

What’s new about FAILure?

Failure has been part of the human condition ever since the Fall of Man. Every one of us learns of the ubiquity of failure, almost from birth. Failure generally means that you tried something that didn’t work, with consequences all too often catastrophic. In a larger sense, you can also fail by not bothering to make an adequate effort in the first place.

Failure, actual and impending, of every stripe, is celebrated hilariously on an ever-growing cornucopia of blogs and websites, such as The Darwin Awards, Fark.com, There, I Fixed It, The Smoking Gun, numerous demotivational poster sites, and one of my own favorites, the Lords of Logistics series on Dark Roasted Blend.

During the past decade, the familiar word “failure” has become the Internet meme “FAIL”. The infamous Urban Dictionary defines Fail in various ways, including “The glorious lack of success.” The FAIL meme has propagated in tandem with the seemingly exponential growth of FAILure in the world at large.

I’ve occasionally experimented with the FAIL meme myself, both on deviantART and on 1389 Blog. The following example suddenly became more relevant after John McCain won the 2010 Arizona Republican primary election:

The unfortunately leftist online Slate Magazine contends that the growth of the FAIL meme reflects Schadenfreude, defined as pleasure at the misfortunes of others:

Slate: Why is everyone saying “fail” all of a sudden?

the good word
Epic Win: Goodbye, schadenfreude; hello, fail.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2008, at 11:55 AM ET

…What’s with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be “epic”?

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game’s obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: “You beat it! Your skill is great!” If you lose, you are mocked: “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!”

Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone’s feelings on the Web—”You fail it” became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor. “It” could be anything, from getting a joke to executing a basic mental task. For example, if you told me, “Hey, I liked your article in Salon today,” I could say, “You fail it.” Convention dictates that I could also add, in parentheses, “(it being reading the titles of publications).” The phrase was soon shortened to fail—or, thanks to the caps-is-always-funnier school of Web writing, FAIL. People started pasting the word in block letters over photos of shameful screw-ups, and a meme was born.

The fail meme hit the big time this year with the May launch of Failblog, an assiduous chronicler of humiliation and a guide to the taxonomy of fail. The most basic fails—a truck getting sideswiped by an oncoming train, say, or a National Anthem singer falling down on the ice—are usually the most boring, as obvious as a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos. Another easy laugh is the translation fail, such as the unfortunately named “Universidad de Moron.” This is the same genre of fail that spawned Engrish, an entire site devoted to poor English translations of Asian languages, not to mention the fail meme itself. A notch above those are unintentional-contradiction fails, like “seedless” sunflower seeds or a door with two signs on it: “Welcome” and “Keep Out.” Architectural fails have the added misfortune of being semipermanent, such as the handicapped ramp that leads the disabled to a set of stairs or the second-story door that opens out onto nothing. Even more embarrassing are simple information fails, like the brochure that invites students to “Study Spanish in Mexico” with photos of the Egyptian pyramids. These fails often expose deep ignorance: One woman thinks her sprinkler makes a rainbow because of toxins in the water and air.

The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.

Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude. What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.

It’s no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for fail surged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like “failed mortgages” and “bank failures” seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs.It’s rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It’s as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet’s tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it’s not an exaggeration….

Read the rest.

Somebody else’s troubles may be our own

As with the gapers block phenomenon, we can never quite look away from failures that are not our own. Whether trivial or spectacular, whether humiliating or oddly heroic, whether well-deserved or the outcome of pure happenstance, failure gets our attention, and well it should.

I don’t think it’s always schadenfreude. Sometimes we laugh out of relief because the troubles belong to somebody else this time around, even though we know it could have happened to us.

Other times, we laugh about failure even when the failure DOES embroil us in its consequences, as with the ongoing political, social, and economic debacles in the US and the EU. (If you need a good laugh right now, check out the Sunday Funnies political cartoon series on Flopping Aces.) When we can share a good laugh, it not only underlines the lessons that we can learn from these failures, but also lightens the burdens that we all must bear as we work our way through.

H/T: Herbert Sobel:

A C-141A Starlifter had been delayed for takeoff for over an hour at Thule Air Force Base, Greenland, because its sewage container had not been pumped out. An Airman meandered up to the aircraft with the containment pump, fiddled around for a while, then got ready to leave.

The young Captain who was the aircraft commander confronted the Airman, and stated, “You have caused me to be two hours late for my takeoff. I’ll see that you are not only reprimanded, but punished as well!”

The young Airman smiled and said, “Sir, with all due respect, I have no stripes, I’m stationed at Thule, Greenland, it’s 20 degrees below zero, and I’m pumping s*** out of an airplane. Just what kind of punishment did you have in mind?”

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out: once the authorities take everything away from a person, he is free all over again.

If you ever wondered what side of the fence you sit on,
this is a great test!

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it’s a foreign religion, of course!)

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a conservative reads this, he’ll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.
A liberal will delete it because he’s “offended”.

Well, I forwarded it to you.

The above photo of protesters at the University of Washington is from Twitpic via Instapundit.

What these manifestly ignorant clowns FAIL to comprehend is that we each have a duty…not a right, but a DUTY…to educate OURSELVES to the best of our ability.

Long ago, I observed that each human being is issued one (1) human head…one cranium per customer.

Given that we don’t all share the same head and brain, it behooves each of us to USE the faculties with which we have been endowed, and NOT put the burden on teachers, parents, the government, or anybody else to do all the work of instilling knowledge and wisdom into us.

In a nutshell, the assertion, “But nobody ever TOLD me that!” is not a valid excuse for failure to cope with life.

Having been given powers of observation and cognition, it’s our job to go out and collect data about the world around us, to distill it into knowledge, and, insofar as is possible, to make a contribution to the wisdom available to humankind.

If we don’t, we have ourselves to blame.

Desperate Unemployed Software Engineer Attacks IRS Office Building

By now, many readers will have heard the news story about pilot Joseph Stack having crashed a small plane into the IRS office building in Austin Texas (for details, see Fox News, Pilot Crashes Into Texas Building in Apparent Anti-IRS Suicide.)

The Inevitable Media Reaction

Whenever anything like this happens, the same kinds of articles tend to appear in the media and on blogs. There are the articles that, often with a self-righteous tone, wax eloquent about the horrific nature of the act, the despicable character of the attacker, and (often) the pristine innocence of the victims. Given that the victims in this event were IRS employees, little has been said about them in the media.

Then there are those other articles that sympathize with the attacker’s motives, ideology, or political stance, but condemn the attacker’s use of violence. Here again, I haven’t seen much of that this time around. Joseph Stack’s manifesto encompassed such a mixed bag of grievances, accusations, and quotations that it is impossible to tell where in the political spectrum he was coming from. I suspect that he himself had no clear idea.

Finally, there are articles calling out for more and more government legislation, regulation, or law enforcement to prevent any similar incidents from occuring in the future. In this instance, there were acknowledgements that it is all but impossible to prevent this type of suicide attack, but no amount of reasoning or common sense ever seems to stop the flood of demands for draconian repressive measures.

The “Powers That Be” Knew Something Like This Was Bound To Happen

No matter where you live in the world, you know that the worldwide economy has been bad for over two years, and there is no improvement in sight. The rot started in the US, largely due to actions on the part of the US government and various corrupt oligarchs, such as George Soros. The collapse and supposed “bailout” were engineered by various corrupt politicians and financiers to take money out of our pockets and put it into their own. Everything done by the US Congress and the Obama administration has served only to deepen the depression. From here, the economic rot has spread worldwide; two notable examples are Iceland and Greece.

Then there’s the issue of the U.S. economy having been hollowed out by outsourcing, offshoring, and the H-1b visa program. This has had a particularly devastating effect on the American middle class in general, and the American IT worker in particular.

Even with the real unemployment rate in many areas of the US matching or exceeding that of the 1930s Great Depression, it is truly scandalous that the H-1b program remains in effect. This insures that any effort on the part of American IT workers to get jobs, or to retrain themselves for future jobs in the industry, are doomed to come to naught.

The H-1b program never had anything to do with aiding the competitiveness of US firms in global markets; that ship sailed away years ago. Instead, the H-1b program is simply a testimony to the power of multinational technology megabusinesses to deceive, corrupt, and intimidate US elected officials. (Please see IT Business Edge: AFL-CIO Report Takes Critical Look at H-1B Visa Program for more on this issue.)

How is this relevant to the story? The attacker, Joseph Stack, was an unemployed IT worker who was also bedeviled by a long battle with the IRS and, apparently, ensuing difficulties with his home life. I would like to point out that the overwhelming majority of people faced with such situations never “go postal” or resort to any form of violence. But the US government has enough statistics and historical data at its disposal to know that, whenever a large group of people is pushed too far into desperation, a tiny percentage of them will go over the edge.

Let me make it clear that I am NOT claiming that anybody connected with the US government knew ahead of time that this particular individual, Joseph Stack, would do what he did. I said no such thing, nor did I mean to imply it. But I do intend to say that the US government knew that it was only a matter of time before someone whose life had been destroyed by government policies would commit a high-profile violent act.

The “Powers That Be” Could Have Prevented It Without Repressive Measures

The US Congress and the Obama administration could cut unemployment significantly just by eliminating the H-1b program, but they do not. Part of the reason why H-1b remains in effect is simply because the Obama administration not only is thoroughly corrupt, but also is engaged in a covert war to disempower, plunder, and eventually eliminate most of the US middle class. In other words, the Obama administration is not going to do anything to help out a segment of the population that does not provide the Democrat party with significant political or financial support.

But that’s not the only reason. Whenever anyone who is not part of the administration’s political support base reacts to oppression by becoming violent, this violent act provides those in power with a convenient excuse both to discredit their political opponents and to increase government control by cracking down on everybody by any means available.

If Violence Is Not The Answer, What Is?

Supposed “democratic election” or no, recent polls in the US have made it clear that neither the Obama administration nor the US Congress enjoy the consent of the governed, in any sense of the word. The US economy remains in free fall with no recovery in sight, and with the levels of debt and irresponsible spending being what they are, little possibility of recovery in the lifetime of anybody old enough to read this blog. Glenn Beck proclaimed that we don’t need a revolution; we’ve already had one. He is correct that we don’t need a “revolution” in that sense, but incorrect that we have already had one. The American Revolution in 1776 was not really a revolution in the usual sense, but a war of secession. What we need now is not revolution, but secession, and not just one secession, but perhaps fifty of them. And if enough people understand what they want, secession need not involve bloodshed.

Keep watching this blog for more about secession.

Here we go again, this time with the “Pentagon Shooter”

Michelle Malkin has the story here: About the Pentagon shooter – Update: Stop playing games, MSM. John Patrick Bedell was a registered Democrat

Yes, we’re still around…

As I have mentioned elsewhere, we unfortunately no longer have the time, energy, or resources to devote to blogging that we once had in the past. Political blogging takes a heavy, and often a truly staggering, personal and professional toll on anybody who does it. Moreover, I have had some severe health issues and have had to cut back on certain activities, so it is a matter of priorities. Thus, in recent months, we have been blogging on a very infrequent basis.

When the 2008 US presidential election came down to Hillary, McCain, and Obama, followed by the worldwide economic collapse, it became clear to us that there was not much more that we could contribute by blogging at the same rate as we had previously been doing. Fortunately, we had reached the point where all of the points that we have been trying to make are also being made by many other bloggers, and even by a few conservative journalists and other public figures. We do not aspire to be acknowledged as the leaders of any particular movement.

Therefore, at this point, we have decided to post an article only when we have something to say that nobody else is already saying.

We do welcome your comments and feedback.

I just now visited The World According to Carl, which is another blog in the Hillbilly Ecosystem.

There I saw a post entitled 8 Things. It’s a blogging game, and the rules are as follows:

Players start with 8 random facts about themselves. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts. Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

Okay, here are eight random facts about 1389, the admin of this blog:

1. One of my few pleasant memories from elementary school was the Bell Labs series of science documentaries, including Our Mr. Sun.
2. I used to take care of the birds and snakes for a small zoo in Ohio.
3. I once worked on an IBM 1401 Autocoder conversion. My, that goes back a ways…and that wasn’t even my first programming job.
4. I once saw a tornado…from the inside. Not an experience I would care to repeat.
5. My maternal grandfather made his own beer during Prohibition.
6. My father drove a soft drink truck during the Depression.
7. My first computer was an IBM PC with two floppy drives, a green monochrome monitor, and an Epson dot-matrix printer, which cost me roughly five thousand dollars. To do graphics, I added a CGA board and used an RF modulator to route the results to an old black-and-white television set.
8. Many years ago, I lived and worked in downtown Chicago. At that time, I remember that there was a herd of stray cats living near the train tracks under the old U.S. Post Office building. I found out because I saw someone in an office building elevator who was bringing them food.

Now I have to find eight other bloggers to pass this along to. If you’re a blogger and you don’t have time to deal with this, I’ll understand; otherwise, I invite you to give it a try. This is an opportunity for us bloggers to get more acquainted with one another, and for the public to get to know us a little better.

If you are seeing this blog post now and you feel like joining in, consider yourself “tagged” by 1389!

Update #1: I did manage to send the tag out to eight other bloggers, but not all at the same time. Hardware problems intervened, and I can no longer recall everyone who was on the list. Oh, well…

Update #2: Here are some random links from the same chain, both before and after me:

• Alabama Improper
• Amazingly Enough
• Conoscete Chi
• Days of Future Passed
• Each Day is a Gift
• Harvey Olson at Bad Example
• I Am My Kids’ Mom
• Maranda Under Stress
• Right Truth
• Scott Allan

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If you are not a liberal when you’re 25 you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re 45, you have no brain.

This saying, sometimes credited to Winston Churchill, seems to hold a bit of universal truth, as does the notion that the young people of a generation affect change, while the older folks lend stability. This certainly seems to be the case when it comes to politics online in the 21st century (allowing, of course, for exceptions such as the Young Republicans clubs and the die-hard hippies).

Web 2.0 technology affects our lives online in the form of blogs, online citizen journalism sites (social news), wiki’s, folksonomies, social networking sites, collaborative bookmarking sites, podcasts, aggregators (e.g. RSS), semantic web, collaborative software, and other online scenarios in which users create and share content such as graphics, news, information, technology, creative writing, software, photos, and videos. The original World Wide Web gave us the opportunity to share information by posting what we had to say, and by reading what others had to say. Web 2.0 takes that concept to the next level, by giving users the opportunity to collectively influence what information is available and how the information is distributed.

Today’s twenty-somethings grew up online, and generally seem to be more intuitively tech-savvy and more comfortable with online collaboration than those of us that are older (“older,” in this case meaning anyone over 35!). It is no wonder, then, that there is a noticeable liberal/progressive majority in the politics discussions of any of the social networking sites, which extensively utilize the newest technologies and the art of collaboration.

Largely due to Web 2.0 technology as well as increasingly interactive search engines, there is a growing body of knowledge online that is taking on a life of its own, and it is very influential. Features such as Google PageRank assure that the majority view of any issue is likely to be the first available information on any given topic. Anyone interested in the accuracy of the information that is being disseminated online, needs to have a voice in this increasingly important global discussion.

As conservatives, we need to understand and utilize Web 2.0 technology if we want this body of knowledge to even partially reflect our values, attitudes, respect for history, and vision for the future.

(Go to Part 2 of 3)
(Go to Part 3 of 3)

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