Author Topic: A few Dingo Works  (Read 308 times)

PlacidDingo

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A few Dingo Works
« on: May 13, 2013, 01:17:10 AM »
All credited 'Placid Dingo'


I Heart Intangibles

You used to get your sausages from the person who killed the pig. They lived down the road, and you knew them, and you knew their kids were in school and you’d have conversations with them when you were buying your sausages. You had an emotional connection.

Industrialisation meant that you could then get your sausages and everything else from a supermarket, maybe from a company miles away full of people you didn’t know. You didn’t have an emotional connection with any of them. Go to the person you know, or get your sausages from a paper bag. It’s hard to make friends with a paper bag.

So, they gave it a face.

Now you didn’t know the person whose face was on the bag, so they made sure you met them before you even saw the product, through advertising. Suddenly it wasn’t your local butcher or your local paper bag, it was the butcher or farmer Joe.

People can form emotional connections to intangible concepts. Sports teams, religions (some religions in some sense), political groups… all form a sense of unity and community through a focus on a third thing. People are being brought together through a shared relationship with a TV show or a religious figure or a sports team.

This isn’t a problem as long as you don’t let the map become the terrortory. While we treasure and adore the ideas we form emotional connections with, we need to remember they’re ideas. They’re concepts. They can’t love us back.

The people that become part of our community can. Our fellow Broncos supporters, our Game of Thrones fans, our Communist Comrades build a culture, language and a set of rituals that we can engage in together to bring us all together. We’re like a group sitting around a campfire, singing songs to the flames. When it comes time for a hug, you need to remember- it’s the person beside you who’ll appreciate it, not the fire.

So for us as Discordians, we’ve formed a relationship through a deity generally considered explicitly a symbolic or metaphorical entity. I think we might need to remind ourselves that we are a collection of wonderful, curious people who are brought together by Eris…

But she can’t love us back.

PlacidDingo

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Dagney Shrugged
« Reply #1 on: May 13, 2013, 07:39:30 AM »
“I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”

“What man?”

“Robin Hood. He was the man who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I’m the man who robs from the poor and gives to the rich – or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.”

Dangney looked over Ragnar’s frenzied features and raised an eyebrow.

“What are you,” she said in an unimpressed, crisp clear tone, “some kind of asshole?”

PlacidDingo

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Clever Merry and the Naughty Headmaster
« Reply #2 on: May 13, 2013, 08:17:08 AM »
Clever Merry went to Illuminated Truth State High School. Her Headmaster, Mr Duncan-Duncan was a very naughty man.

In her first year, she noticed the school swimming team were full of kids who did very little work. They had to pass all their tests to prove they were ready to swim for the school. Merry didn’t understand how they could all pass their tests if they never did any work.

Then, a year later it turned out that Mr Duncan-Duncan had been passing all the swimmers no matter how badly they did on their tests. What a clever Merry! What a naughty Headmaster!

When she was in grade three, Merry saw that the team for the Spelling Bee was doing much better than ever, but the Team Captain couldn’t even spell his own name. ‘This is odd’ thought Merry.

Then it turned out that Mr Duncan-Duncan had been providing the answers via headset. What a clever Merry! What a naughty Headmaster.

Merry made a choice. NEVER AGAIN! would she be played for a fool. NEVER AGAIN! would she be tricked by that naughty Headmaster. She kept her eyes peeled, and soon she could see the extent of  his villainy. When the school sports day was cancelled because of predicted bad weather that never arrived, she knew that Mr Duncan-Duncan must have paid off the weatherman. When Jimmy Key broke his leg falling off the deck, she knew he had probably been pushed. And when there was a new room set up but unused she knew it was to be a holding pen for the naughty students to await medical experimentation.

Mr Duncan-Duncan watched Merry out his window, handing out fliers that accused the school of adding hormones to the drinking water.

“Well,” he mused to himself, as he applied whiteout to the school captain’s geography mark, “It was easy enough to get away with all this before… but now, it’s a cinch!”

PlacidDingo

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Re: A few Dingo Works
« Reply #3 on: May 13, 2013, 08:55:02 AM »
Also, the text from here is good for use; http://placiddingo.com/?p=331