"IDIOTS! It's anthrax or scorpions! Choose the SCORPIONS!"

[sibelian]

"Yeeees, I can see that if it's anthrax or scorpions you should probably choose the scorpions. It's just that I don't actually believe that it really is anthrax versus scorpions. It think it's shitty stuff versus good stuff."

"Fool that you are. It has ALWAYS been anthrax versus scorpions."

"It used to be anthrax versus kittens."

"Oh, KITTENS. Kittens, YES. Look around you, do you see any kittens? NO. Choose scorpions, kitten-lover."

"Scorpions are bad."

"ANTHRAX LOVER! YOU LOVE ANTHRAX!"

"No, I don't love anthrax, I think anthrax is bad. I can see that scorpions are better than anthrax, but that doesn't mean I should treat scorpions as if they're good."

"Why do you hate scorpions? You're a neurotic scorpion hater. You have scorpophobia. You're paranoid about scorpion stings! You're weird and mad and stuff!"

"Dude, scorpion stings are actually unambiguously BAD, okay? This is a position that has been well understood for some time."

"EVIDENCE."

"Sigh. No, I'm not going to go and get evidence for you that scorpions are bad. They are just bad. We probably can't exterminate them from the face of the earth, and actually probably shouldn't, but that doesn't mean we should choose them."

"Well what sort of kitten do you suppose is going to make the grade, huh? Where are all the kittens?"

"There's no point in my bringing my kittens to your scorpion nest, they'll all get stung and die."

"Well, there you go! HA HA! You've admitted defeat! If you can't have scorpions and kittens at the same time, obviously that means that scorpions are better than kittens! You need to choose scorpions."

"I don't understand why you can't choose kittens."

"Oh KITTENS. Kittens my ass. What good are kittens against anthrax?"

"I don't really see how scorpions are any better. The only reason you chose scorpions is because you're scared of scorpions as well as anthrax and you think that means anthrax is going to be scared of scorpions. Anthrax isn't scared of anything. Actually, scorpions aren't scared of much either, but that doesn't mean they're worth anything. I think if you want to deal with anthrax you have to DEAL WITH ANTHRAX, not choose scorpions. Vaccination's good. That's why I propose kittens AND vaccinations."

(Long pause.) "It's polio, isn't it? You love polio."

"No."

"You want a pony."

"I do like ponies. But kittens are cheaper and simpler to feed. If I wanted a pony I would have said so."

"You love small pox."

"NO I DO NOT LOVE SMALL POX."

"You're so aggressive! You're a troll!"

"I am NOT a troll. I just want a clear explanation out of you regarding why you think we have to have scorpions."

"How many times do you have to be told!?!?! If we don't have scorpions, we'll all get ANTHRAX."

"I don't see what's so different about us that we get either scorpions or anthrax. There are people all over the place that have neither. Look at Sweden! They have flamingos."

"We're nothing like Sweden!"

"That's because we never put any effort into TRYING to be like Sweden. Do you think Sweden got their flamingos without any effort? They got fed up with anthrax and scorpions years ago. They decided to get nice things that they actually liked instead."

"Flamingos are totally lame. Who feels threatened by flamingos?"

"Why are we supposed to choose THREATENING things? Sweden didn't choose threatening things, they chose vaccinations and flamingos and now they're really happy. They have Ikea as well. When was the last time you saw a scorpion go to Ikea?"

"Scorpions are supposed to be MEAN. If we don't get mean scorpions we won't look frightening to the anthrax!"

"We've discussed this, anthrax doesn't get frightened. Anthrax just wants to infect everybody. I have NEVER understood why you think scorpions are a solution to anthrax! They don't even affect anthrax!"

"You love Ebola."

"This is useless. It's like talking to a poorly programmed robot. ARE you a poorly programmed robot?"

"You love cancer."

"No. I don't love cancer."

"If we choose kittens, we'll all get anthrax."

"All my kittens are vaccinated. Most of your scorpions have anthrax."

"EVIDENCE."

"Look over there. Lots of them are dead. Did you forget that lots of them suddenly died? They scarpered about all over the place like creepy little vermin just before getting anthrax and dying. Not particularly surprising, really, as you can't vaccinate scorpions."

"You're a hippy."

"You're pretty much a Republican."

"You INSULTED ME!!!!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake. FORGET IT."



boooooooo

[sharp_stick]

1. That looks like it took a long time

I almost wish it had some context but then it wouldn't be so performance arty.

[sibelian]

5. Maybe it should have been anthrax-riddled elephants

and mules with laser beams coming out of their eyes...

[sharp_stick]

19. No that may have

been a little too much. You stopped at just the right point.

[snooper2]

2. I haven't smoked a bowl yet today

3:07 CST right now, guess it is time to start

[Louisiana1976]

3. I want flamingos and kittens, not a choice between scorpions and anthrax.

[Maedhros]

7. I saw a lizard eat a scorpion once.

I was about 25 feet up a cliff face working on a measured section (a vertical "map" of a rock formation) trying to get strike and dip from a sandstone-shale interface. I was contorted and upside-down, wedged onto a narrow ledge, when a scorpion came scuttling toward my face, menacingly. As I prepared to panic and likely fall from my perch, a lizard appeared from nowhere and gobbled down the scorpion in two gulping motions. He turned to me, nodded, and scampered off back from whence he came.

We need lizards!

[sibelian]

11. VACCINATED Lizards.

Vaccinated lizards of independent means.

[Jamastiene]

32. I'll take two of whatever drug you and the OP both seem to be on right now.

[sibelian]

16. There's nothing more annoying than wanting kittens and flamingos

and being told you want a pony.

[awoke_in_2003]

20. Socialist...

[sibelian]

23. Hmmmm, what would socialism be...

Pygmy marmosets?

[Maedhros]

4. Excellent deconstruction.

[hfojvt]

6. kittens

will scratch your eyes out.

I'd rather have a puppy.

Plus, why can't we get flying scorpions, who could fly in to Albertville under heavy enemy fire?

[sibelian]

8. Puppies, kittens, tamanduas...

Koalas, baby mice, WHATEVER, it's all good, I just think that globally we need to get over the scorpion thing.

Plus, why can't we get flying scorpions, who could fly in to Albertville under heavy enemy fire?

If we had flying kittens we could go to Neverland instead. I know it looks fictional but other people have actually gone there in a very real and non-fictional and NON metaphorical sense. HONEST. In small numbers, perhaps, but...

(And at this point my metaphor is beginning to get stretched a little tight...)

[hfojvt]

10. not kittens, I tell ya

Once I had a new puppy and took her over to my girlfriend's farm. They had some new kittens. My pup was not hostile to the kittens at all, but the kittens were all scratching at her and stuff - just mean and nasty.

Maybe it was a numbers/tribe thing. Introduce a kitten to a bunch of puppies and they might be mean and nasty too - hey, you aren't part of this tribe.

My parents had some kittens living wild in the pine woods in the corner of their property. I tried to pet one, but they were all hostile and running away.

Just not very friendly. Or maybe I am just a dog person.

[sibelian]

12. Hm, yes, kittens CAN be very easily spooked.

I have to say that I wouldn't expect a kitten to be nice to a bunch of dogs HOWEVER nice the dogs are to him/her - cats aren't really domesticated. They're incredibly highly strung when they're young - all instinct - and they treat anything they don't know with pin-sharp wariness, curiosity and suspicion. If it's got teeth, it's dangerous, thinks a cat. They're well aware of how small they are. They have to be properly acclimatised from birth to human living, dogs take to it pretty much straight away as most of the natural hostility has been bred out of them. Cats can become incredibly affectionate if you bring them up properly but you have to know the rules. Also, when they are kittens, they are scratchy little devils. You can get them out of the habit if you know how... but they aren't like people or dogs. To persuade them that you are nice and not going to eat them you need to remember that they are their own little beast and NOBODY'S property. Make a space for them where they are allowed to do what they like and they calm down and start nosing around you to see what you're all about. After they've satisfied themselves that you aren't evil, they start to try to make pals...

It wouldn't ever even occur to a dog that you might be evil. They don't understand evil at all.

[noiretextatique]

9. funny

step away from the anthrax-infected scorpions. i like kittens and vaccines

[denbot]

13. Replace the scorpions with millipedes and I'll sign on.

That will teach those punk kitties!

[sibelian]

15. WHY DO YOU HATE KITTENS?

How about baby foxes?

[bvar22]

14. Well Done!

DURec!

[SomethingFishy]

17. Well I do prefer Rock You Like A Hurricane over I'm The Man...

[sibelian]

18. I have an abiding fondness for "I'm in Love with a German Film Star"...

LOVIN' the echoplex...

[F4lconF16]

21. This post just made my day.

I have no idea how long it took you, but thank you!

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. I think stick insects are what we need, especially globally

Something low maintenance, doesn't eat much, doesn't produce much poop, because this is a small apartment we live in. But it's a very similar problem - people think kittens are lovely and cute, but don't think about what they'll grow into. It turns out these kittens are actually cubs - lion cubs. And you're not going to be able to live with them much longer.

But what we see is that, even with free choices, a lot of people actually prefer scorpions or anthrax, because they look 'cool'. Look around your neighbours, and you find that anthrax is pretty fashionable these days. An awful lot of people really don't care too much about their neighbours - they think anthrax is something that happens to other people, and it will keep those others away anyway. Scorpions can probably act as good guard animals too.

So when there's a massive marketing campaign for scorpions and anthrax, with Christmas ads about how your scorpion really, really wants a scorpion mate, and how its 100 years since we first used anthrax, and everyone loves an anniversary, don't they, you can't expect the nation's cat rescue centres to be the go-to place for present shopping.

The reality is we here on DU are a tiny community, and when we talk politics, it's a far larger society we're considering. We have to think about how the average person in the US, or elsewhere, thinks and is influenced. What we'd like is theoretical; what we can achieve is about practicalities. The 'D' stands for 'Democratic', as in the party, as we have to remember that parties mean working with large numbers of the population, not our little corner of the internet.

[sibelian]

25. Scorpion infestation is particularly troublesome to shift, I agree.

It's similar to cockroaches... sometimes people get so fed up of having to constantly battle against them that they give up. But giving up isn't the right thing to do.

Just because other people let scorpions and cockroaches into their houses doesn't mean we have to. Nor should we be silent when people brandish their scorpion sting scars bravely claiming that this indicates wisdom.

So when there's a massive marketing campaign for scorpions and anthrax, with Christmas ads about how your scorpion really, really wants a scorpion mate, and how its 100 years since we first used anthrax, and everyone loves an anniversary, don't they, you can't expect the nation's cat rescue centres to be the go-to place for present shopping.

Well we need an advertising campaign for kittens, then! Marketing, baby.

BTW...

B. anthracis bacterial spores are soil-borne. Because of their long lifespan, spores are present globally and remain at the burial sites of animals killed by anthrax for many decades. Disturbed grave sites of infected animals have caused reinfection over 70 years after the animal's interment...

Sound familiar? Anthrax doesn't need an advertising campaign. Anthrax isn't something people choose, it's something that happens to them....

This metaphor's getting rather intricate now...

[muriel_volestrangler]

28. Dispensing with the metaphor (fun, but there's always a limit) look at the rise of far right parties

UKIP in England, Front National in France, and others. Their rise seems to be because there really are a lot of people who feel like that, rather than because of corporate marketing. The Tea Party in the USA did have big money behind it, but the way it took off so quickly indicated there was a lot of support waiting for it too. I think people did choose these parties/movements. I don't think there has been widespread support for socialism in the UK since the 1970s; Germany's SDP has always seemed moderate - more like the scorpions than kittens, I'd say, and France has an on-off relationship with socialism. And even then, given that France sank the Rainbow Warrior, protesting against nuclear weapons testing, under a socialist president, I'd say that's pretty scorpion-ish too.

As for the USA - I think the Democrats have always been pretty centrist; maybe FDR's work programmes were socialist, but they look more like ways to save capitalism from itself than a genuine move away from it. And I have more faith that change can happen in European countries, where political advertising is limited, than the USA, where the budgets are in billions. No-one wants to spend that kind of money on left wing campaigns, and when 'the American Dream' is still talked about, and people want to be wealthy middle class, marketing to them that says "this is how you'll achieve that" will do well.

[sibelian]

31. Yeah, I think that right wing thinking is kind of an *inherent* flaw in human cognition...

UKIP in England, Front National in France, and others. Their rise seems to be because there really are a lot of people who feel like that, rather than because of corporate marketing. The Tea Party in the USA did have big money behind it, but the way it took off so quickly indicated there was a lot of support waiting for it too.

I don't really think that that support consists of very much... I think the corporate marketing schemes are just exploiting weakness in human thought processes. It's very easy to make people scared.

I think it just reinvents itself. When you analyse the right wing globally in comparison with the left the thing that strikes me is how similar all the right wing parties are and how disparate the left wing ones are. With the right it's all the same ideas, across the planet. The left generally specifies it's policy according to location. The right just lumbers uselessly through the same prejudices and dumb rugged individualism.

It's a series of emotional processes, really, and I think it sort of just resurges whenever there's space for it to do so. I don't think there was any consciously robust "support" for it beyond people's natural instincts for self-preservation. I don't think the rise of the far right is a the fault of the right, I think it's the fault of the LEFT... for failing to show that there are alternatives to fear and ignorance. Hence my vaccination metaphor!

I think right wing thinking is natural. I think the left has this idea that the right arrives at its conclusions through flawed logical processes and so when the right realises it's made a mistake it won't do it again, but the right, to me, isn't really like that. It's just naturally emergent. The core principles of right winging thinking revolve around the extent to which human society is responsible for it's individuals, and where we draw our boundaries around what's reasonable or unreasonable for us to give up or choose for one another is, ultimately a choice, a complex choice, so fundamentally an unresolvable, universal question. It's very difficult to "prove" that collective endeavour is the safest or most productive path, the goals collectivism achieves can very easily be dismissed on the grounds that they are the "wrong" goals. People then lose faith in collectivism for irrational reasons and then lose faith in one another. The instinctive sense (I want to emphasise that I believe it is an instinctive sense, not a rational conclusion) of what the society around actually is starts to melt and warp... Consequently you end up with lots of fearful people buying guns, freaking out at Muslims, etc. Ignorance and fear are the natural instinctive states of human beings regarding how they perceive one another. Hence my anthrax metaphor! Anthrax spores just sort of sit there and wait until the time is ready... You can't reason with anthrax...

I think people did choose these parties/movements.

Yeah, but if you look at what the people who are actually advocating for these parties, their ideas are all over the place. They don't appear to have "arrived-at-through-examining-cause-and-effect" positions on anything outside loyalty to their new pals through a sense of having been betrayed. It's all grievance, they have no real solutions to anything, they have no interest in moving forward positively towards something that might solve any problems, it's all wincing and flinching and this deep sense of having been let down. That emotional current is ubiquitous across these new movements. Maybe they have a point. Maybe we ARE letting them down.


I don't think there has been widespread support for socialism in the UK since the 1970s; Germany's SDP has always seemed moderate - more like the scorpions than kittens, I'd say, and France has an on-off relationship with socialism. And even then, given that France sank the Rainbow Warrior, protesting against nuclear weapons testing, under a socialist president, I'd say that's pretty scorpion-ish too.

I don't know about that. How are you defining socialism? I've always used the word to mean "the propensity for political movements to place emphasis on the advantages conferred to individuals in terms of general safety and security by using human capital to support a maximum of benefits for all..." I regard the NHS as socialist, Alex Salmond's free prescriptions, free university tuition... etc. Germany's just decided to get rid of university tuition as well. I don't really have a hard and fast system of policies which I label as socialist, I regard the term as describing a tendency rather than an instruction manual.

I don't know that I'd call France's behaviour towards the greens as being outwith or within the definition of socialism, you could just as easily argue that in it's current state France's nukes are socialist because they're protecting an instantiated socialist paradigm in the form of the nation of France. The anti-nuke crowd have always been on the left but I think that's an incidental artefact, I don't see a direct conceptual link between them and socialism per se unless we're going back to the Internationale... maybe you're right. I don't know. I thought they ended up on our side because there was nowhere else for them to go. Communist Russia had nukes, too...

As for the USA - I think the Democrats have always been pretty centrist; maybe FDR's work programmes were socialist, but they look more like ways to save capitalism from itself than a genuine move away from it. And I have more faith that change can happen in European countries, where political advertising is limited, than the USA, where the budgets are in billions. No-one wants to spend that kind of money on left wing campaigns, and when 'the American Dream' is still talked about, and people want to be wealthy middle class, marketing to them that says "this is how you'll achieve that" will do well.

Yes, that's weird. Left wing societies are perfectly capable of being far more stable and wealthy and right wing ones. There doesn't really seem to be a clear relationship between the wealth of a country and it's overall position on the left-right spectrum and yet and the belief that there is persists. I can't imagine billionaires can't see this strange blinkeredness. Norway's rich! They totally body-swerved the recession through their sovereign oil fund and none of the rich seem to have noticed... It's not just public services that are being cut across the board, corporations are reporting record losses and struggling through the recession as well and they don't seem to realise that deregulation is the problem and that it fucks with them as well. Poor customers mean no sales! Bad banking means poor customers. I think it's bizarre.

[Live and Learn]

24. I am feeling a sense of deja vu. Didn't I just have this discussion on DU recently.

At least it seemed pretty similar. lol

[woo me with science]

26. Good god,

I love you.

[sibelian]

27. ...

[tavernier]

29. The only thing lacking

is the narrowing of posting space as each reply goes farther and farther to the right of the screen. It's like a little rectangular battlefield.

Bravo!

[truebluegreen]

30. Good on ya!

That was so well done....and so familiar. I've had that conversation all too often.