Extroverts and Introverts

You know what I hate?  Humanity.  You know what I hate worse?  The blindly stupid.  This particular extrovert felt bad about not being part of the new under-represented, disenfranchised cool-kids and so claims to be pissed about the myths surrounding extroverts.  Like the myth that they’re outgoing, or that they’re self absorbed. 

This is not to say, “introverts are awesome and you should try to be one.” We are awesome, but really you should go live your loud little lives elsewhere and leave us the fuck alone.  That would make everyone happier.

Anyway, here are her gripes:

Myth 1. Extroverts don’t have feelings.I can only assume that introverts think this about extroverts when I read articles like Revenge of the Introverts.I get it. I talk too much. I’m loud. You feel overlooked and marginalized. You’re afraid you’re being left out.That said….WE ALL FEEL LEFT OUT.You don’t have the market cornered on feeling unwanted or under-appreciated..I’m not your enemy, and it hurts my feelings when you label me as one. Stop it.

Listen, loudmouth, we’re not afraid of being left out.  Introverts will participate when we damn well feel like it.  If we don’t go to your party, it’s likely because you’re going to be there, and you won’t shut up for five minutes, not because we’re afraid of being left out of the party we didn’t want to attend in the first place. 

You are loud. You don’t say smart things. Don’t feel bad because I don’t want to be your friend. You probably don’t want to be my friend. I'm kind of an asshole.

Myth 2. Extroverts are naturally outgoing.For reasons completely beyond my powers of comprehension, introverts think they have the market cornered on social anxiety.

Who said this?  You may be socially awkward, or you might be the second coming of Zig Ziglar.  You still talk entirely too much, and really ought to stop wanting us to validate your meaningless chatter with our attention.

Well, I’m here to inform you otherwise.

Gee, thanks.

Take a moment to dip into my world.

I’d rather drink from a public toilet.

I consistently embarrass myself in public, because I just can’t seem to STFU.Do you even know what happens to the loud kids? THEY GET LAUGHED AT. ALL THE TIME.True story.

You know what that’s called?  Being loud and embarrassing.  If you’re loud and stupid in public you deserve to be laughed at.  Social anxiety arising from a history of doing stupid things in front of other people is natural.  Embrace it and maybe learn from it instead of saying stupid shit like:

I wish I could be like you. You know when — and how — to keep your mouth shut. It protects you from the particular brand of bullying, wherein kids pick on what you have to say.

Right, because the quiet kids are always the ones left alone by bullies because they fit in so well.  Also, the entire internet is about picking apart what other people say.  It’s an effective tool for weeding out bullshit.  Pointing out dumb things isn’t bullying. It’s social upkeep.  Really you ought to thank us for keeping you from being taken seriously.

Do you know how demoralizing that is? It’s enough to make a kid feel like the world’s biggest loser.

Don’t be a loser, then.  Loser.

Now, I know there’s rampant bullying in schools, and it gets a lot worse than tricking a girl into thinking you want to talk to her, just so you can pick apart her words.

Like being the quiet kid who hates going to school because “they” are going to insist he participate in the mind-numbing process of fitting in, and practicing social protocol with the knuckle-dragging mouth breathers that take up 85% of the school?  Or working in groups that will take your work and the credit and then whip your ass in the hallway because you corrected their spelling, or grammar, and because nerds are soft targets?  Or getting the shit kicked out of you because you’re a dopey looking kid with a book waiting for the bus to arrive?

Body snarking. Class warfare. It all goes on, and it needs to stop.

Oh, you mean being kids, not actual bullying.  Gotcha.

Can we set that side for a minute, just so you can feel what I’m saying? I’ve been burned before, publicly.

And obviously didn’t learn anything from it.

I’m just as scared to open myself up to you, as you are to me.

Aha!  Now I get what your problem is.  You assume because we’re introverts that we’re scared to talk to you.  We’re not.  You’re not intimidating; you’re ridiculous. We don’t participate as fully as you extroverts do, not because society frightens us, but because it tires us. 

Some extroverts present as shy and don’t even realize that they are, in fact, extroverts.

What the hell?  You obviously haven’t been reading the articles and books you’re complaining about because EVERY.SINGLE.ONE.OF.THEM takes great pain to say “shy and introverted are not the same thing.”  Shy means you’re scared.  Introverted means interacting with people drains you of energy.  They have a large correlation, but they are not the same thing at all. 

Because somehow we’re not allowed to feel insecure.

Again, "What the hell are you talking about?"  I am pretty sure, that as a SWPL-Female-Blogger you’re encouraged to feel insecure.  It’s almost a requirement if you’re going to succeed in that world. You can't be confident and act the ingenue.  

Myth 3. Extroverts aren’t introspective.A common argument is that introverts think and extroverts act.As my counter-argument, I present this entire blog.

You are a PR Hack and you use the word “unfettered” non-ironically.  Your counter-argument is hereby refuted.

Myth 4. Extroverts don’t want to hear what you have to say.Nothing could be further from the truth! I’m intensely interested in other people. That’s kind of the definition of extroversion. I get high off being around you.

What if what I want to say is nothing?  Then you’ll just talk and talk and talk and talk and soon I’ll lose my fucking mind because you’re so interested in filling the silence with bullshit.  It's not my job to get you high. 

But I do understand the source of the confusion — and it’s something I work on every day.

Doubt it.

When I get excited, I tend to talk my ass off. I can’t seem to help it, although I am getting better. Later, I am totally traumatized, because:A: I am petrified of being a bore, and I’m certain you don’t like me.B: I wanted to learn all about you, and I totally sabotaged myself.

That’s not my problem.  Introverts don’t typically want to share with extroverts OR introverts.  That’s kind of how it works.  You may get high off being around us, but that’s because you’re an energy-suck.  You can’t seem to help it.  Just like we can’t seem to help hating that part of your personality.  You might be super-entertaining, but that doesn't mean we want to be entertained.  You might be a great listener (doubtful…) but that doesn't mean we want to talk to you. 

So I stop myself, sometimes mid-thought, to turn the conversation back on you.

If you extroverts would confine yourselves to just stopping the conversation, we might be able to get along.  The problem is the second half of your sentence. 

But here’s the thing about us extroverts. We aren’t comfortable with silence. For me, silence = social rejection.

Since social rejection is probably what is being conveyed, then you get points for being astute enough to realize that.

This is problematic, because introverts generally take more time to choose their words.

So, by implication extroverts don’t?  Doesn't that conflict with your “myth 3” counter-argument?

So when the silence stretches on too long, we freak out and start to fill it.

And that’s why we hate being around you guys. SHUT.YOUR.MOUTH.

Opportunity lost. :(

Maybe for you.  We’re happy when you leave.  It’s quieter then.  WIN!

Myth 5. Extroverts are self-absorbed bastards, who are stomping all over you.

This is two “myths.”  1) You’re all self-absorbed bastards. 2)You’re stomping all over us. 

Isn’t this the crux of those articles? That we’re at war.

Nope.  If we were at war, you would have lost already.  You’d still be chatting about the appropriate uniforms and flags and holding dedication ceremonies so that everyone got to talk about their feelings about the war and how it made them feel special and anonymous and part of a group and an individualist and tough and all that hippie bullshit flag waving mental vocal masturbation that you talkative types do.  Meanwhile, the introvert defense command would have launched the ICBMs chock full of Nuculary-goodness.

However, we do frequently find ourselves in conflict with extroverts.  I understand that due to the watering down of the language*, you might confuse “conflict” and “war” but they really are two distinct words.

The conflict arises because you insist on holding a conversation and having a god-damned life experience every time you see someone.  We want to conduct our business and go home where it's quiet and probably dimly lit.  The point of these articles, and my screeds against extroverts, is to show that we don’t like to participate in your madness, but since explaining it in person will only feed into your extroverted need for conversation, we need to write articles (and screeds) to explain it.  The reason you feel like you’re being picked on when you “read” these articles, is that you’re unable to insert your bullshit into our bullshit.  An article isn’t a conversation, it’s a declamation.

This is intentional.  You can’t interrupt an article.  You can’t overpower us with your enthusiasms.  You either read it or you don’t.  Articles (and screeds) are the ultimate way to “get” an introvert.

If you’re really interested in what we have to say, you’ll ask us in an email.  Or post a nutty article like yours to the internet where introverts like me will be mean to it.

Fuck that.

Okay.

Extroverts, by their very nature, really, really, really want to get to know you. We don’t win by marginalizing you.

No, you win by monopolizing our time and forcing us to be a part of your life.  I don’t want to be made into an audience, and I REALLY don’t want to be a bit player in whatever little costume drama you’ve concocted this week.

Once again, you’re conflating “not participating” with “not being allowed to participate.” 

Sure, we can — and should — work on being more sensitive to your needs. I agree with that. Every human being should work on empathy. That’d be awesome.

And also unworkable.

Also. It goes both ways.

Agreed.  You extroverts shut up, and I’ll listen.  Works for me.

If I have to get over my fear of prolonged silences, then you can work on being more spontaneous with your responses.

You realize you’re asking people to deliberately act stupid, right?  “Don’t think about what you’re about to say, just say it!”

(Tip: something as simple as saying, “Let me think about that for a second,” works wonders to allay our fears.)

Really?  And how much quiet time to think will this get us?  A minute?  Forty-five seconds?  I’m betting on something like ten seconds, which is the same as nothing.  You don’t need to teach the quiet types how to be polite, we’re quite accustomed to it already.

Deal?

No.  You keep to your side of the conversational fence, and we’ll keep to ours.  The problem is, your conversational is to test and test and test the boundaries.  Ours is o retreat into enough silence to not lose our shit.  Keep cutting holes in that fence and we’ll keep poking holes in your over-sized egos.

Reject the dichotomy. We’re in this together.

The hell we are.  You might be in this with someone else, but I’m not in it for you.  And this is the REAL problem.  You want to be in a group, and face life as a team and make sure everyone gets a chance to play.
 

We don’t. 

Your problem with that is like the problem faced by someone served with divorce papers.  The person who cares least, wins.

So far, that seems to be the introverts. 

God is an Iron

If a felon commits a felony, then naturally an iron would commit...

Drug-testing is the latest rage at the St. Clair County courthouse. Why not? They’ve got a judge in rehab for heroin. Not just a judge, either. The drug court judge. Actually, the former drug court judge. He has offered to resign. They’ve got another judge dead of cocaine intoxication. He was partying with the drug court judge. Furthermore, the man who has admitted supplying the cocaine to the judges works in the probation office.

Summed up nicely, I think.

This is without a doubt, one of the clearest glimpses you'll ever have of the mindset of the average baby-boomer.  This is the generation that cast Gordon Gecko as the villain, but sucked off his hind tit to the tune of ALL THE DOLLARS.

You know what?  You people are not, as one commentor to the article says, biting the hand that will feed you for the next 25 years.  You're biting the hand that WOULD HAVE fed, clothed and kept you for the next 25 years.

Just hurry up and die, already.  Fuck.

That awful 99.999%....

...making the rest of us look bad.

Hey! (part 3)

Remember how I said we were staging for the next totally awesome war, this time against Iran?

I win at prognostication, again!

Without much media attention, thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran.
Tensions between nations have been high in recent months and have only worsened in the weeks since early December when Iran hijacked and recovered an American drone aircraft. Many have speculated that a back-and-forth between the two countries will soon escalate Iran and the US into an all-out war, and that event might occur sooner than thought.

All hail to the king, baby... wait, what? FUCK!

Whelp, I knew it was bound to be shitty, but the Evil Dead remake has just shattered the previous record for terrible remake ideas.  (Sorry, Blues Brothers T.V. Show, this beats you hands down.  That doesn't mean you should ever exist, just that you're not the most offensive thing I've ever read any more.)

Well, instead of dealing with this problem head-on and trying to find the perfect person to play the new Ash, it looks like the creative minds behind this new Evil Dead are throwing us a curveball. In this movie, the main character is no longer Ash. Ash is now Mia, and the role is going might be played by…Lily Collins.

I know what you’re asking yourself right now, you’re asking yourself, “Who the heck is Lily Collins?” I know, I had the same reaction. Well, she’s a young actress who was not only in the movie Priest (did anyone go see that one?), but she was also the daughter in The Blind Side. Oh, and she is also Phil Collins’ daughter.

Yeah.  That just happened.  Good-bye terrible-pun-making, wise-cracking, slightly-assholeish action hero, hello women's lib sop thrown to the masses to make EVIL FUCKING DEAD more palatable to the tween set.

Look at it.  Look at what you have done, feminists.  You ruin every god-damned thing you touch.

Let's guess how long until this vapid personality bucket says something about how it's "rilly kewl" and references Twilight.  A week?  As much as three days?

I totally understand why they chose a woman for the lead.  They want to sell it as some hot skank in the woods getting her clothes ripped off for the "dudes, and bros, and dude-bros" while avoiding the whole question of whether you can kill a woman in a movie these days.  Answer: you can't.

Not unless she's talented, a christian, or a right-winger.  Those are the accepted women in hollywood to beat up.  All the others, every single one, is chock full of grrrl power and can legitimately stand toe-to-toe in a fist fight with any man on the planet and is sexy at any size and probably smarter than everyone.

But don't you dare pick on them, because that's mean and nasty and not fair and patriarchal which we're told by ugly women with short hair is a bad word.




Looks like someone already got smashed.  In the face.  With a patriarchal ugly tree.  She's not pretty.







































Pick a lane, Gloria!  What do you want? Equality or nice treatment?  If you settle for equality, you have to settle for being treated like a man, which typically is pretty shitty.




The best of both worlds?


You slut walkers want to dress like the blue light special, feel free.  Please, we men love seeing your pallid, lumpy flesh paraded about in hot pants and training bras.  When we stare you get to call us perverts, and when we look away you calls us assholes for trying to shame you into acting like women, or horror of horrors, "Ladies."  After all, well behaved women rarely make history, right?  Guess what ladies?  Women don't tend to make history, they tend, like 99.999% of the world, to benefit from it.

Give me all the power, none of the responsibility.  Sounds fair, right?

Who wants to bet that this Evil Dead is going to try to hammer this Lily Collins into an Ash-shaped hole (yes, an Ash-hole...), using attitude instead of humor and grrrl power instead of "Hail to the King" style bravado?  She will undoubtedly have an evil female tree demon to fight before the final boss battle (which has to be a male, obviously).  In the battle with the female tree demon, she will use the word "bitch" no fewer than three times, because... well, I'm not sure really. 

Feminists are unclear about whether they're proud to be called words like "bitch," and "slut" and "smelly rotten cunt loser" or whether their use is akin to a hate crime.  Reginald Denny never got called a slut, so it must be a pretty bad word, right?




"Whore!"


Women should project an innocence. Women, whatever their actual personalities, should still wish to project a public innocence.  Innoncence is what makes men want to protect women, rather than just want them.  Wanting them is part of it, sure, but being worthy of protection is the huge majority of why men will give up their lives for women.

A lady can be beautiful, or even simply pretty, but the best a slattern can hope for is "hot."  The difference should be readily apparent.  One is valued for what she is, and will continue to be forever, while the other is valued for what she looks like right this minute.  When the whore hits the wall on looks, life is over for her.  Her and whatever poor soul she trapped into throwing away his life and fortune for her.

Doesn't he get your juices going, ladies?  Woo-hoo! Hot stuff coming through!

Hey!

Who wants to start another war in the middle east?  Looks like you just might get your festivus wish!

"The enforcement of the decision to close of the Strait of Hormuz is certainly within Iran's armed forces' capability, but such a decision should be made by the country's top authorities," Iranian Navy commander Habibollah Sayyari was quoted as saying by the semi-official ILNA labor news agency.

Yes, plugging the Strait Of Hormel Chili may very well be within the power of the Iranian Navy, but it's KEEPING it closed that would be the problem.  Also, who wants to bet that this isn't going to happen anyway?  Not me.  Eventually the Gulf of Tonkin will be synonymous with the Straits of Hormones.

Also, while it is definitely within our power to topple the Iranians for humanitarian reasons, and oh-so-coincidentally get our oil going again, we have proven over the last ten years or so to be incapable of actually winning a war against a backwards, illiterate, and most importantly foreign nation.  We have spent ten long years fighting the slack-jawed inbred hillbillies of the world to a draw.  John Wayne wouldn't have stood for this shit.  Of course, John Wayne wouldn't have stood for the Iraq War, either.

How well do you think we'll do in the coming war with Iran?  Without changing the rules by which we operate, I'm willing to bet "not well."




"We may have manufactured the hell out of this emergency, but it IS an emergency now.  Pay raises all around!"



For several reasons

I'm linking to this little piece for a few reasons.  First, as I think I have mentioned, I'm not a fan of the boomer generation, and I like it when other people beat up on them.

I also like that the author puts the blame at the feet of "the greatest generation." I've felt for a long time that those old shits have been resting on their laurels since they got home from the War. If they hadn't gone half-hard when they came back, I'm sure their kids wouldn't have turned into god-damned dirty apes... er, hippies.  (Same thing, really, though apes tend to smell better.)




And if you'd done a better job, asshole, we could have colonized it, but you left most of it intact.  You and your generation are the WORST imperialist aggressors in history, with the exception of your kids.


Mostly though, I like this bit:

That about captures the asshattery that is the Baby Boomer generation and how they've caused utter economic and cultural stagnation as they've built their idol to Mammon, which is not a Golden Calf, but rather a Golden Mirror.

It just has a nice little ring to it, and since February is coming up, and with it my yearly re-read on the bible, it really caught my attention.

That is all.

Danger!

It's also the leading cause of drownings in the world!  Won't someone please think of the children?!?!

Optimism will kill you

Or something.

In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) show that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world...

The researchers found that people did, in fact, update their estimates based on the information given, but only if the information was better than expected. For example if they had predicted that their likelihood of suffering from cancer was 40%, but the average likelihood was 30%, they might adjust their estimate to 32%. If the information was worse than expected – for example, if they had estimated 10% – then they tended to adjust their estimate much less, as if ignoring the data.

This is because Optimism is Stupid.  The second law of thermodynamics is pretty clear on this, and yet people are stupid and mostly they should die. 

No, thermodynamics isn't meant to be used as a philosophy, but I've always thought that if something explains the way the world works, it must also be a better philosophy than anything else running around out there. Here are the three laws in plain language, see if you know a better way to view the world:

1. You can't get out more than you put in.
2. Entropy Always increases.
3. You cannot stop change.

And those are the rose-colored versions of the laws.  My Physics teacher read them, as I do, thus:

1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't stop playing the game.

So, suck it Happypeople (tm).  You're wrong, I'm right, nana-nana boo boo, stick your head in a car door and slam it shut repeatedly.

Happy? Probably a sign of brain damage.

Scientists say optimism is the result of a faulty brain.  The glass was half empty all along:

Scientists have discovered that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events could in fact have a "faulty" brain.

The study, which was published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that the brain is very good at processing information, whereas some people ignore anything negative, leading them with a positive outlook.

This is the lowest rung on the ladder of response to the terminally happy.  Step two is genital mutilation.

Hear that, you happy shit heads?  You are wrong.  Not just in the way you think, but in the way you were made.  Wronger than any wrong person could wrongly believe they could be wrong.  Built incorrectly.  Less perfect than your brethren.  By destroying your happiness and self-esteem I am helping to fix you.  Because you need fixing, you lousy sacks of happy-clappy shit.



Also, please die.



Fuck all you guys. Right in the head.

I'm getting one of these, and not made out of Legos.

Robots, Zombies, yankees... it works for anything!