Deze week: Kritiek op het eigen team

Oftewel: pak-die-domme-rukker-week.

Hoewel de terminologie regelmatig wordt doodverklaard, beschouwen verreweg de meeste POL-users zich echt nog wel als "links" of "rechts". Zo niet, dan toch wel "anti-links" of "anti-rechts", "gelovig" of "antigelovig".

Daardoor maken we ons allemaal in meer of mindere mate schuldig aan het tolereren van rabiate, extreme uitspraken die "aan onze eigen kant" staan. Dit is een natuurlijke reflex, maar wel een heel foute: je laat daarmee domme rukkers wegkomen met onzin waarmee ze niet mogen wegkomen, en bovendien verdomt het debat met al die idioten die het hand boven de hoofd wordt gehouden.

Daarom stel ik voor dat je je hieronder aanmeldt in het format dat ik hieronder geef, en probeert zo veel mogelijk kritiek op het eigen "team". Probeer als je vindt dat je in geen hokje past jezelf toch te definieren.

Naam: Floripas
Signatuur: Links, elitair
Gaat dus letten op: Linkse en elitaire onzin

Herhaal vervolgens je kritiek - incidentele kritiek (op een andere user) of structurele kritiek is allemaal gewenst.

[ Bericht 6% gewijzigd door Floripas op 16-09-2007 20:51:13 ]

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 20:36 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Dit is een herhaling, toch?

Nee, toch?
Verwacht jij overigens maar wat

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 20:40 schreef sigme het volgende:
Hmm. Maar eens aanzien of dit een iets toevoegend topic wordt. Graag proberen er iets meer van te maken dan:
Jantje, signatuur X, gaat letten op X. Met de billen bloot! Wat is de zwakte in jouw ideologie, welke argumenten / standpunten van jouw medestanders van je zie je met kromme tenen gedebiteerd worden, maar val je niet aan?

En de kans een stukje Kousbroek te citeren laat ik nooit lopen, natuurlijk.
[..]

Dit is een begin. Ik ga citaten met mijn eigen kritiek in dit topic zetten.

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 20:44 schreef Monidique het volgende:

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Jawel. Je had al eens een ik-ga-het-eens-van-de-andere-kant-bekijken-periode.
[..]

Nou!

Ja, da's wel anders. Ik blijf ditmaal gewoon mijn eigen linkse betweterige zelf.

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 18:06 schreef ethiraseth het volgende:

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Rechts net zo hard tegenwoordig. "U wilt geen sinterklaas vieren, en wilt ook nog een bruiloft in Hindoestaanse stijl houden zegt u? Nee, dan mag u hier niet binnenkomen". Je bent hier alleen welkom als je woensdags gehakt eet, op zondag studio sport kijkt en op feestjes met zn allen rond een schaaltje nootjes zit.

Een potsierlijke overdrijving. Dat je van mensen die hierheen komen vraagt om zich aan te passen is niet raar - het enige dat je hoeft te doen is geen geweld gebruiken. Over Hondoes en Sinterklaas wordt niks geeist.

De morele kaart
Vaak wordt door linkse users een morele kaart uit de borstzak getrokken. "Dit mag jij niet zeggen, jij hebt geen hart." "Je bent echt een fascist als je vindt dat moslims vaker aanslagen plegen." Varianten hierop: mensen dom noemen, naief, of gevaarlijk en schadelijk.

Voorbeeld:

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 13:33 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Natuurlijk gaat het om olie. Wie anders denkt, is wel erg naïef.

Als je voordat het debat nog maar begonnen is iemand al naief noemt, valt er niet veel meer te discussieren.

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Op maandag 17 september 2007 01:46 schreef Kees22 het volgende:

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Dat Wilders laagopgeleiden aantrekt, geloof ik graag.
Maar dat boeren op Wilders stemmen, lijkt me errug onwaarschijnlijk. Al was het alleen maar omdat er veel buitenlanders in de land- en tuinbouw werken. En ook echt werken.
En de kwalificatie "niet al te snugger" zou ik niet meer gebruiken voor anderen.

Dat weet je niet, en dat is je het er gemakkelijk van af maken. Mensen met een andere mening niet al te snugger noemen is

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Op zondag 16 september 2007 21:32 schreef SCH het volgende:
Ik wil niet bij een team horen.

Je bent bij mij, SCH. Húp, in 't gelid!

Een ultiem staaltje zelfkritiek komt van de socialist Kurt Vonnegut. Hij heeft, net als ik, een gruwelijke hekel aan de hyves-mentaliteit die nogal veel voorkomt in het socialisme. Daarom dit korte, prachtige verhaal. Ook voor HenriO. (Ik wilde hem het boek kado doen, maar ik was blut).


Harrison Bergeron
by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.

“Huh?” said George.

“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.

“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”

“Um,” said George.

“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”

“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.

“Well – maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”

“Good as anybody else,” said George.

“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.

“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”

George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.

“You been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”

“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”

“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean – you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”

“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.

“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”

If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.

“What would?” said George blankly.

“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”

“Who knows?” said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen – ”

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

“That’s all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”

“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.

“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God –” said George, “that must be Harrison!”

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

“Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison’s scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

“Now” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”

The music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.

They kissed it.

And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.

But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.

“Yup,” she said,

“What about?” he said.

“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”

“What was it?” he said.

“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.

“Forget sad things,” said George.

“I always do,” said Hazel.

“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.

“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.

“You can say that again,” said George.

“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

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Op vrijdag 21 september 2007 14:18 schreef HenriOsewoudt het volgende:

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Ik denk niet dat Floripas het zo bedoelt. Die bedoelt gewoon het vanachter een dure whisky en sigaar in mooie volzinnen minachten van het klootjesvolk

Heh, nee, geen van bovenstaande.
Ik krijg vaak het verwijt te horen (zelden in het echt, altijd op internet) dat ik met mijn muzieksmaak en voorliefde voor klassikaal, ouderwets onderwijs over literatuur en geschiedenis "een elitaire trut" ben. Maar ik weiger me beter te voelen dan iemand anders - en ik weiger me aan te sluiten bij elitaire clubjes.

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Op vrijdag 21 september 2007 14:38 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Wat een heerlijke maatschappij!

Ieks.

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Op zaterdag 22 september 2007 18:18 schreef Inekris het volgende:
Naam: Inekris
Signatuur: Onafhankelijk, elitair en intellectueel
Gaat dus letten op: Floripas

Gefixt.

De egoisme-kaart
Ik word er een beetje moe van dat linkse users rechtse users zo vaak uitmaken voor egoistisch. Er zijn egoistische linkse en egoistische rechtse mensen, maar de meeste users in POL hebben een wereldbeeld voor ogen waar iedereen beter van wordt. Er zijn hier genoeg mensen die beredeneren dat door minimumloon en uitkeringen af te schaffen minder mensen aan de kantlijn hoeven te staan. Daar is niks egoistisch aan.