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When you're feeling a bit down in the dumps it can be hard to read
about other people doing better. Let's say you're sent an old school
magazine saying how well all your peers have done, on tv, writing
books, inventing this and that, sleeping with famous people, its a
horrible thing naturally.
So you may well turn quickly to the obituary
section hoping some ex-pupils have died young, achieving nothing.
And you may be lucky. But chances are even the obituaries are full
of glory, even though luckily all passed. But the point is, you only
want Them to send you stuff about the real failures and life disasters
i.e. your peers who became wastrels, very unhappy, got injured and
died uselessly. The sAme goes for the internet in general. E.g.
Facebook. So you at the flip of the low-self-esteem setting switch
you only see people who are even bigger losers than you, in horrible
houses with hideous children. And you feel ok again
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Although porn sites are excluded cos you still want nice
porn, i.e. Above your standard. Not pics of nudes from
camps or a burns unit |
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Would this be a website or a cell phone app? |
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It would be equally good to be informed about contemporaries who, despite the outward trappings of success, are living miserable, hollow, unfulfilled lives, spend time and money on therapists, and are lonely and depressed. |
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Actually, that would be better than reading about the drunks, nomarks, spendthrifts and failures - knowing that someone's worked really hard and achieved "success", yet is deeply unhappy, would be much more satisfying, particularly that oily creep Peter who always aced the maths tests, seemingly without effort. |
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I have checked with my ratings team, and we agree that this is an excellent idea. [+] |
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Does this have anything to do with the women and men who
always come up with ideas that are either baked, impossible,
too expensive to produce, almost there but completed by
someone else, or just plain old bad ideas? Just wondering. |
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Is this the Schadenfreude switch most think off as a German invention, but is really French? |
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or
last lines of the poem "I'm Fine Thank You" |
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I get up each day and dust off my wits,
And pick up the paper and read the 'obits'.
If my name is still missing, I know I'm not dead -
So I have a good breakfast and go back to bed. |
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I don't LIKE the idea, but I like the IDEA (+) |
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A [+] to promote much-needed self-esteem. |
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Engendering a diminshment in the self-esteem of other is even better. |
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I'm not a big fan of self esteem. I normally get the housekeeper to do the ironing. |
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It begs the question, how do you measure a society, if parts
of that society need to negate/put down other parts. |
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It's the easy positivity from a differential with negativity
rather than putting in some energy to be more positive.
Positive pictures of things that are in easy reach might
stimulate better overall more lasting thought patterns. |
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//It's the easy positivity from a differential with negativity rather than putting in some energy to be more positive.// Yes but, [wjt], these days we're all supposed to be being more energy efficient. |
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Only when we are kicking our future selves. |
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Couldn't you just turn on the news, to achieve a similar effect? |
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But who needs to buy walls? |
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//Wallmart// It's pronouced 'WHALE-mart'. |
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hmmm... wall-mart > vallmart > voldemort... |
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The Store That Shall Not Be Named. |
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You could have your Facebook feed read by Marvin
the paranoid android. |
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I think this might have been baked - by the North Koreans |
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Hopefully the guys who get chosen to make you feel better
about yourself aren't made aware of it. Could you imagine?
Being down and out and on your Facebook page you see
"23,560 people have picked you as their pathetic loser to
make them feel better about themselves!" |
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Would having to consciously set your own esteem settings each morning make you a better person? |
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The switch should simply turn off the main power
for a set time period. |
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Wow. For the first time in my life I understand reality TV |
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The Jerry Springer show was the ultimate lowlife circus. |
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Thing is, you'd watch a few of these losers and feel good
about yourself by comparison, until you started feeling
bad
about yourself for watching a bunch of retarded morons
for
entertainment. |
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Plus the dopamine receptors probably get worn down so
the
viewers need grosser and grosser people to get the same
rush of feeling superior. |
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Personally, I watched bits of a couple of episodes, noted
that during the fist fights nobody ever punched each
other in the face, (I've seen enough, and been in enough
real fights to know
this is always the primary target.) realized this stuff was
all scripted and staged and lost what interest I might have
had. |
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Plus, I'm already like, superior 'n stuff with the
intellectual deal or whatever. |
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// this is always the primary target // |
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Only for amateurs. Don't punch for the head, punch for the throat, middle finger pushed forward - try and break the hyoid bone and collapse the trachea, or a chopping blow to the side of the neck, pinching the carotid or the jugular vein.
Otherwise, directly over the heart, or the solar plexus, or even dive low and hit the side of the thigh. That puts them on the floor, then you can use a chokehold or punch the back of their neck. |
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Put them down, then take them out. |
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Well, there are good and bad outcomes to fist fights. I've
become friends with a couple of guys I duked it out with in
my youth. Probably wouldn't have happened if I had killed
them. |
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Great fun. If you're energetic, then a ghillie suit and a .375 H&H with a decent 'scope will give hours of fun, but the best way is a well-placed pit trap with metal spikes at the bottom. After all, "The young hunter chases; the old hunter waits ..." |
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// wouldn't have happened if I had killed them. // |
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On the plus side, they might have killed you. |
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Doubtful. I'm pretty good. |
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You were better than them, is all. Either they weren't very competent, or weren't trying hard enough; or possibly both. |
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I'm not going to get into numbers of fights won or women
bedded, but I will tell this, my second favorite fight
story. I've probably told it before but I'll tell it again for
those who might not have heard it. It's how I
stopped a rampaging gang of 15 to 20 thugs with one
sweet
martial arts move. |
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I was about 11 or 12 walking with a buddy through the
drainage canal in the bad part of town when a bunch of
people from another affiliation spotted us, pointed out
that were members of the enemy group and said "Get
'em!" |
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They all started jumping over the fence to get us and
presumably leave our beaten, possibly dead bodies in the
drainage canal, a pretty popular place for that sort of
thing. |
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We were doing a reasonable job of staying ahead of them
when one guy caught up with me and did an admittedly
pretty sweet sweep move with his foot that tripped me
and took me down. Imagine sliding into home base, it was
that kind of move. It's gutsy because you have one chance
to make it work and you're hitting the ground pretty hard
yourself so if you miss, you've just slammed yourself into
the ground and slid several feet for nothing. |
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So I was down and alone, my buddy having been saved by
the old addage: "I don't have to be faster than the
rampaging gang of thugs, I just have to be faster than
you." |
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I had only one option, fight them all as best I could and
take whatever happened. Hopefully I could land a few
blows before they took me out. What else was I gonna do? |
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I jumped up, turned around and faced the raging mob,
and struck a fighting pose I had seen in a martial arts
movie once. This is where the interesting part happens. |
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They all stopped dead in their tracks with shock in their
eyes. I'd like to think it was fear, but I think it was mostly
shock to see this skinny little white dude stand up to do
battle when he was outnumbered 15 or 20 to 1. But the
look on the face of the guy closest to me wasn't shock. It
was fear. He knew the first battle of this war was going to
be fought by me and him alone, and clearly he wasn't
going to
get out of this unscathed before the reinforcements
arrived. |
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Then it slowly something dawned on him, not sure what,
but I believe it was the idea in his mind that "This guy is
bluffing."
and his look changed from
fear to that look a cartoon cat gets when it finally
catches the mouse. That "Now you're gonna die." look. As
the rest of the group stood there dumbfounded, he
assumed the same pose as me and gave me the universal
unspoken body language signal for "Your move". |
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Want to hear what happened next? |
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Oh well. Maybe some other time. |
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One of the other gang's mum came around the corner? or you spent 6 months in a coma making the brilliant person you are today. |
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It's not guns/fists that kill people, it's technical training, or random chance. Of course if you can't shoot more high speed chances helps. |
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//you spent 6 months in a coma making the brilliant
person you are today.// |
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Oh, you've heard this one before? |
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I took the opportunity afforded me be the fact that they
had all stopped. |
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This time, I'm not sure why, they didn't chase me.
Respect for my sweet martial arts moves? Fear struck by
my intimidating fighting stance? I'd like to think that they
all knew that there as a slight chance that any one of
them might have been the recipient of one of those dying
punches. |
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But they probably just lost interest. |
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//It's not guns/fists that kill people, it's technical
training, or random chance.// |
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But mostly heart attacks. |
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// technical training, or random chance.// |
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When you're alone and a group attacks, and you hit the first one to come close once - just once - and he goes down like a sack of potatoes, and stays down making horrible choking noises, and you take the opportunity to slowly admininster a few well-placed kicks so the noises stop and he goes completely inert, and then you just smile at the rest and make a small beckoning gesture, oddly they're the ones that run. |
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That gives you the chance to break a few of your would-be assailant's fingers and greatly reduce his chance of ever reproducing before slowly walking away, whistling. |
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Sadly, not all evenings are that much fun. |
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You may have had better training that I did. My method
was: |
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1- Receive punch to the face.
2- Punch attacker in the face.
3- Receive another punch to the face.
4- Punch the attacker in the face again.
5- Dodge the attackers next punch if possible.
6- Punch the attacker in the face again.
7- Repeat steps 5 and 7 as necessary. |
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Here's what I remember about fights: If you loose, it
really fucking hurts. However if you win, it still really
fucking hurts. (Unless you get lucky early on, which
doesn't happen too often.) |
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I've always been civilized about it, never STARTED a fight
in my life and once my man was
down the fight was over, but for some of the monsters I
encountered growing up, once you're down, THAT'S when
the beating really starts. |
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Well, hopefully these stories make people feel better
about their own lives, at least their youth, in keeping
with the idea of this
post. If you were smart enough to avoid that kind of crap,
that's definitely something to be proud of. |
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Wow, [8th] - I'm impressed. That must have been a hell of
a movie you watched. |
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It's brilliant. The scene where Carrie Fisher opens up on Jake and Elwood with an M-16 is priceless. Do you want to borrow the DVD ? |
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//This time, I'm not sure why, they didn't chase me. Respect for my sweet martial arts moves? Fear struck by my intimidating fighting stance? I'd like to think that they all knew that there as a slight chance that any one of them might have been the recipient of one of those dying punches.// |
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Biological organisms respond in preprogrammed ways to given stimuli.
When the stimuli from current circumstances change to something previously unthinkable there takes place a pronounced cognitive dissonance which can last several seconds depending on the inherent mind-set or training of a given individual. |
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Then comes the respect given any critter able to trigger this new response whether it happens to be a garter snake, a cobra, or even if it's your own species. |
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The predator sees you were going to go out swinging.
Grit counts. |
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