How ILE Won The War

(I may be way way off on all of this, I haven't really been here that long)

Though maybe it's not - a lot of us have met each other and have certain opinions of one another. DOES that damage the ability to have discussion like this? There are certain posters that I can read their posts and imagine, for better or for worse, just how they are saying it and how it is meant, because I know them well enough. Which sometimes results in "unwarranted" behavior towards the people in question, because I just look at it as behavior is behavior online or offline and I don't stop to think that other people DON'T know the way the person is in real life, so the in-jokes and, conversely, the in-nastiness is not understandible to most readers.

Does anyone else find this a problem or am I nuts?

There was just a news conference with AG Ashcroft saying there was a credible threat of more attacks within the next week and law enforcement was being put on alert. All I want to do is work on an altar for El Dia de Los Muertos. Can't the world leave me alone?

The noticeable trend since the 11th for me has been people posting "I have this problem. What should I do?" threads, asking for the advice of the community, and a general rise in the level of intimacy and informality. I think that is attributable to the 11th-threads, because we all used the boards in our different ways during that time and we got through it without biting each others heads off and if you look anywhere else on the web that is quite surprising.

So why aren't we talking about the war now (actually there were a couple of big - 60 or 70 message - threads when the bombing started, and a handful of small ones since)? I think partly because we're all a bit talked out. I think partly because a lot of us were on ILE before and wanted to do our bit to put ILE 'back to normal', or back to an exaggerated normality. I think also partly because we're all a bit surprised by what ILE did become during the week or so after and we're not sure we want to push things to see if it could be that again or if whatever community formed then can withstand continued high-level debate.

Or of course it might just be Fatnick.

Without trying to sound awful, but it must be said -- I would guess most Afghanis are thinking the same thing right now. I understand the impulse towards wanting to hide away, but there we are -- the situation exists. I too would rather like to be left alone, though...

Is this not pretty much inevitable, though? Not to deny the truth of it, but it seems the corollary here is that you must feel pretty uneasy with just about any group you find yourself in.

*There's* a movie plot for ya. Cheney needs blood and it's discovered that the only person in the world with the same exact type due to a rare condition is...OSAMA BIN LADEN! Now secret agent Hank Rockjaw must battle both the Taleban and the US Armed Forces in a desperate race to both save and capture America's greatest enemy! Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You -- _HARD BLOOD_.

Probably the main reason these hierarchies and pet norms develop (and kill much of the interesting debate) is because one by one, the dissenters and the supposed quare pegs allow *themselves* to feel unwelcome and fall silent and/or drop away.

Often it seems as if people are working under the assumption that most others are only interested in the opinions of some inner circle that probably only half exists and is certainly not exclusive, and the very idea that it is runs contrary to the fact that this discussion is here and not in someone's living room, and also the other fact that anyone is free to join.

That is, unless it's all just some perverse trick to make interlopers look foolish of course. (nyeah nyeah) Anyhow - I'm off topic.

The war stuff - yeah, I think this escapist attitude is taking hold everywhere and not just here. It's at the point where we all know what's going on, we're all watching the news for and waiting something else big and bad to happen, some of us are deep down scared but are sporting the good ol' stiff upper lip, we're all upset and disturbed on different such levels that talking about it just feels as if it takes too much energy and does more harm than good.

quare = square

Sixty-second Op-Ed piece: Bush and Dick are TWATs. Who is surprised, less than a year after Indecision 2000, at the state of our world? I do feel like I am watching The Omen IV sometimes. Like Bush, OBL is a spoilt rich kid who is far removed from the chess game currently under way, and Western imperialism/the Palestine situation, sinister as these things are, does not excuse his actions or incitements. A lot of this is a one form of macho bullshit fighting another form of macho bullshit, and we need less of that. The West did not give a ripe shit about the Arab nations either way until black gold was found in them thar hills. There is a shitload of oil under Afghanistan's rough terrain - and there are a few failed oilmen in government who see the acquisition of this as a long-range goal - and all this talk about justice for the 9/11 victims is just obfuscation. The only fitting memorial to all these lost lives is to use our freedoms wisely and ensure they can be shared by others, without the good cop/bad cop approach taken by our public servants.

And let's do find the rednecks sending anthrax letters, although there is a perverse genius at work in sending white powder to newsrooms. I wonder if they put it in wraps, as that would lend Friday afternoon authenticity (seriously, I know of at least two tabloid reporters who used to be their papers' Medellin operatives, so there). I'm a little bit jumpy about all this because I live right in between the ITN building, the Mount Pleasant post/sorting office, the big Holborn CID office, and Cherie Blair's chambers are right across the street.

You may be interested to know that my friend Hugo, who is currently stationed in Batumi in Muslim-held Georgia, will soon be sent to Afghanistan by the satellite network for whom he is currently working. He's ace: a year ago he and three others successfully completed a challenge to the UK government in the EU Court to equalise the age of consent for gay men to 16, thus is everything the Taliban hate and also would make Dubya squiffy (memo to Theban Horde - he's also *yummy*). He will be joining the 1000 other journalists who are paying Northern Alliance interpreters $100 per day to guide them through the area ('this is so they can keep tabs' sez H). If he has time and access to his Hotmail, I will ask him to post here, from there.

Oh, and is anyone with me in this definition of 'recession': I define it as someone with a very good job telling those of us who don't have one that we can't have one.

The boards' quality, as Suzy notes, is very much dependent on who's around to post.

That is what it has sometimes been for me.

Thinking about current world events, I am filled with a deep sense of powerlessness and despair. For me, talking about it only seems to make things worse. I haven't posted much on the political threads not because it bores me or because I don't care, but because it just reopens fresh wounds.

An eternal complaint about just about every society. I don't buy it.

God, it certainly feels that way. Although I might be able to get back with the company I left in April... who are now doing much better. Yay!