Stats working again

[Guru]

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Join the MURC SETI team! | SETI @ MURC

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless..

[Jorden]

It cost Ant an arm and a leg and 2 crates of his beer, I heard...

[Guru]

He should send theme one of these:

My complaint about Gamers Alliance
In a previous letter, I stated that Gamers Alliance's lackeys are nothing more than doctrinaire, stubborn weirdos. That will be my position in this letter, as well. Although not without overlap and simplification, I plan to identify three primary positions on Gamers Alliance's doctrines. I acknowledge that I have not accounted for all possible viewpoints within the parameters of these three positions. Nevertheless, anyone who hasn't been living in a cave with his eyes shut and his ears plugged knows that if you were to tell Gamers Alliance that of particular interest to me is the way that it continuously denies that it finds it easier to discuss other people's problems than its own, it'd just pull its security blanket a little tighter around itself and refuse to come out and deal with the real world. Developing a policy of inclusion will not be easy, because it takes more than a mass of meddlesome thieves to improve the living conditions of the most vulnerable in our society -- the sick, the old, the disabled, the unemployed, and our youth -- all of whose lives are made miserable by Gamers Alliance. It takes a great many thoughtful and semi-thoughtful people who are willing to rub Gamers Alliance's nose in its own hypocrisy. Gamers Alliance's commentaries are based on two fundamental errors. They assume that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not. And they promote the mistaken idea that violence and prejudice are funny.

On a more personal note, we must appeal not to the contented and satisfied, but embrace those tormented by suffering, those without peace, the unhappy and the discontented. Our children depend on that. In order to advocate social change through dialogue, passive resistance, and nonviolence, tremendous sacrifices and equally great labors will be necessary. I always catch hell whenever I say something like that, so let me assure you that because of its obsession with unilateralism, Gamers Alliance's emissaries seem to be caught up in their need for enemies. Or, to express that sentiment without all the emotionally charged lingo, Gamers Alliance is possessed by the devil. (Actually, Gamers Alliance uses hooliganism as a hammer to forge the intellectually stultified idiots who will cause riots in the streets in a matter of days, but that's not important now.)

It's really amazing, isn't it? We can put people on the Moon and send robot explorers to Mars, but Gamers Alliance is right about one thing, namely that fear is what motivates us. Fear of what it means when vicious ex-cons force its moral code on the rest of us. Fear of what it says about our society when we teach our children that Gamers Alliance defends the real needs of the working class. And fear of caustic con artists like Gamers Alliance who lead people towards iniquity and sin. The fact is, if I recall correctly, we could opt to sit back and let Gamers Alliance restructure the social, political, and economic relationships throughout the entire society. Most people, however, would argue that the cost in people's lives and self-esteem is an extremely high price to pay for such inaction on our part.

After being called "self-righteous goof-offs" a hundred times or so by Gamers Alliance and its secret agents, my friends and I have reached the conclusion that Gamers Alliance seeks scapegoats for its own shortcomings by blaming the easiest target it can find, that is, catty slimeballs. It's easy enough to hate Gamers Alliance any day of the week on general principles. But now I'll tell you about some very specific things that Gamers Alliance is up to, things that ought to make a real Gamers Alliance-hater out of you. First off, its comrades have learned their scripts well, and the rhetoric comes gushing forth with little provocation. Let me put it this way: Gamers Alliance's premise (that doing the fashionable thing is more important than life or liberty) is its morality disguised as pretended neutrality. Gamers Alliance uses this disguised morality to support its biases, thereby making its argument self-refuting.

It's one thing to develop a Pavlovian reflex in us, to make us afraid to punish Gamers Alliance for its headstrong equivocations, but wanting to make us all miserable is indisputably going too far. Someone once said to me, "I'm giving Gamers Alliance the benefit of the doubt, which is more than it's ever given me." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. That fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence.

I do not find ventures that are bitter, uncompromising, and bloodthirsty to be "funny". Maybe I lack a sense of humor, but maybe Gamers Alliance operates on an international scale to popularize a genre of music whose graphic lyrics explicitly urge viperine numskulls to force us to tailor our complaints just to suit its haughty-to-the-core whims. It's only fitting, therefore, that we, too, work on an international scale, but to make efforts directed towards broad, long-term social change. In the end, we have to ask, "Why is Gamers Alliance so compelled to complain about situations over which it has no control?" The answer to this question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture. Gamers Alliance pompously claims that it is merely trying to make this world a better place in which to live. That sort of nonsense impresses many people, unfortunately. There are two related questions in this matter. The first is to what extent Gamers Alliance has tried to work both sides of the political fence. The other is whether or not just because Gamers Alliance and its proxies don't like being labelled as "resentful, discourteous rapscallions" or "unpatriotic mischievous-types" doesn't mean the shoe doesn't fit. Please don't misread my words here; you should never forget the three most important facets of Gamers Alliance's undertakings, namely their treacherous origins, their internal contradictions, and their tendentious nature.

Gamers Alliance's claims reek like rotten eggs. But that's not all: Its cause is not glorious. It is not wonderful. It is not good. Although Gamers Alliance wants to undermine the basic values of work, responsibility, and family, if we fail to provide people the wherewithal to turn its hopeless, silly philippics to our advantage, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sometimes it seems the worst classes of brutal ignoramuses there are are like a farmer who, in the spring, would work the ground, plant seeds, fertilize, and cultivate the ground for a period of time. And then, perhaps, he decides to go off to Hawaii and have a good time and forget the reason he planted the crop in the first place. Well, a farmer wouldn't do that. But Gamers Alliance would deny minorities a cultural voice if it got the chance.

Gamers Alliance's attitudes always follow the same pattern. It puts the desired twist on the actual facts, ignores inconvenient facts, and invents as many new "facts" as necessary to convince us that newspapers should report only on items it agrees with. Almost without exception, someone has been giving Gamers Alliance's brain a very thorough washing, and now Gamers Alliance is trying to do the same to us.

An inner voice tells me that I have a dream, a mission, a set path that I would like to travel down. Specifically, my goal is to carry out the famous French admonition, écrasez l'infâme!, against Gamers Alliance's "compromises". Of course, this is the very source of the factionalism of which I accuse Gamers Alliance -- justly, as is now more clear than ever. Sadly, lack of space prevents me from elaborating further. Once again, everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that the tone of Gamers Alliance's philosophies is eerily reminiscent of that of supercilious lounge lizards of the late 1940s, in the sense that it may seem difficult at first to express our concerns about Gamers Alliance's depraved, unsophisticated threats. It is. But it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of Gamers Alliance's screeds in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must confront and reject all manifestations of conformism. Lest I seem like a hypocrite, I should tell you that if it were up to Gamers Alliance, schoolchildren would be taught reading, 'riting, and racism.

I really wouldn't want to biologically or psychologically engineer audacious drug addicts to make them even more primitive than they already are. I would, on the other hand, love to solve the problems that are important to most people. But, hey, I'm already doing that with this letter. Armed only with a white shirt, pocket protector, slide rule, thick glasses, and some other neat stuff, I have determined that Gamers Alliance keeps telling us that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior. Are we also supposed to believe that everyone and everything discriminates against it -- including the writing on the bathroom stalls? I didn't think so. To end this letter, I would like to make a bet with Gamers Alliance. I will gladly give Gamers Alliance a day's salary if it can prove that its litanies are a breath of fresh air amid our modern culture's toxic cloud of chaos, as it insists. If Gamers Alliance is unable to prove that, then its end of the bargain is to step aside while I take action. So, do we have a bet, Gamers Alliance?


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[Jorden]

If he did that, I think you'd be saying on some other site tomorrow that the whole of MURC was down without reason...

Jord.

[Ant]

My approach is far more subtle I shout and swear and them.