Turn 58

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 9:34 pm

Just getting the thread started. I've also created this template for any arena rivalries to minimize the length of this thread:

++++++++++++++
[insert team name] record is now [insert record] versus [insert team name]. Then choose 1 or more of the following of the following:

a. Nice DC!
b. Now let's see you shoot your mouth off.
c. Since at least one of my challenges didn't go through, you are obviously avoiding me.
d. First you dissed [insert obscure inactive manager from late 80's] and then you insulted [insert popular inactive manager from the '90's] and now you are targeting [insert new manager]. You are pathetic! And when anyone goes after you, you hide behind [insert alliance friend] and call everyone else [insert derogatory term]. Who is the real [insert derogatory term again] now? [insert typo-laden closing line misquoting a thread from a different post and calling out a tangentially involved manager who must then weigh in].
e. While we might have our differences, let [insert new manager] and [insert new manager] carry the torch.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hope this helps streamline things.

SwineTiger

p.s. this is based on numerous rivalry threads and not just the current ones. All in good fun too.

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 10:43 pm

To all readers: This is not a tickle-your-ears, politically correct letter. If you want to read something that's filled with rhetoric, read something else. If you want the truth, then read this letter. One of my objectives is to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim that a person with a functioning brain does not oppress, segregate, and punish others. Nature is a wonderful teacher. For instance, the lesson that Nature teaches us from newly acephalous poultry is that you really don't need a brain to run around like a dang fool making a spectacle of yourself. Nature also teaches us that no one has a higher opinion of Gentleben than I, and I think Gentleben's a mad, unstable scaramouch.

I've always thought that a day of reckoning is coming, and Gentleben will be called to account, and hearing the rubbish that Gentleben spews forth proves it beyond all doubt. We must face the fact that my purpose here is not to make efforts directed towards broad, long-term social change. Well, okay, it is. But I should point out that my goal is to expose the connections between the unimaginative problems that face us and the key issues of snobbism and nativism while remaining true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations we hold most dear. I might not be successful at achieving that goal but I indubitably do have to try. As another disquieting tidbit the following must be stated: Gentleben will probably throw another hissy fit if we don't let him promote the sort of behavior that would have made the folks in Sodom and Gomorrah blush. At least putting up with another Gentleben hissy fit is easier than convincing Gentleben's allies that Gentleben's peons have been running around recently trying to move increasingly towards the establishment of a totalitarian Earth. Meanwhile, Gentleben has been preparing to use cameralism as a more destructive form of antiheroism. The whole episode smacks of a carefully orchestrated operation. If you ask me, Gentleben claims that he can be trusted to judge the rest of the world from a unique perch of pure wisdom. That claim is preposterous and, to use Gentleben's own language, overtly discourteous. No history can justify it.

The ultimate aim of Gentleben's ideologies is to restructure society as a pyramid with Gentleben at the top, Gentleben's loyalists directly underneath, lazy fogeys beneath them, and the rest of at the bottom. This new societal structure will enable Gentleben to base racial definitions on lineage, phrenological characteristics, skin hue, and religion, which makes me realize that before he initiated an animalism flap to help promote his perfidious homilies, people everywhere were expected to show Gentleben how he is as wrong as wrong can be. Nowadays, it's the rare person indeed who realizes that any rational argument must acknowledge this. His inhumane half-measures, naturally, do not.

Although there's no denying that Gentleben must be suffering from some severe mental strabismus to think that a plausible excuse is a satisfactory substitute for performance, it may be somewhat more controversial to allege that stereotyping and victim-blaming is not more respectable when it is performed by a member of the group being demeaned. Once we realize that, what do we do? The appropriate thing, in my judgment, is to illustrate the virtues that Gentleben lacks—courage, truthfulness, courtesy, honesty, diligence, chivalry, loyalty, and industry. I say that because if there's one thing that he's good at, it's spreading the germs of hatred, of discord and jealously, of dissolution and decomposition.

When all is said and done, Gentleben's calumnies symbolize lawlessness, violence, and misguided rebellion—extreme liberty for a few, even if the rest of us lose more than a little freedom. Hostility is a primary component of Gentleben's behavior. In reaching that conclusion I have made the usual assumption that we should give parents the means to protect their children. (Goodness knows, our elected officials aren't going to.) At the risk of sounding hopelessly randy, Gentleben has warned us that in a lustrum or two, deranged jabberers will put a clog on all attempts to limit Gentleben's power. If you think about it, you'll realize that Gentleben's warning is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that Gentleben says that he wants to make life better for everyone. Lacking a coherent ideology, however, Gentleben always ends up causing riots in the streets.

Gentleben's ideological colors may have changed over the years. Nevertheless, his core principle has remained the same: to supply the chains that bind the individual to notions of self-loathing and unworthiness. If you don't believe me then note that Gentleben wants to get me thrown in jail. He can't cite a specific statute that I've violated, but he does believe that there must be some statute. This tells me that Gentleben has already been able to reward mediocrity. What worries me more than that, however, is that if Gentleben ever manages to put the prisoners in charge of running the prison, that's when the defecation will really hit the air conditioning.

By the same token, if you'll allow me a minor dysphemism, the nicest thing that can be said about Gentleben's cult followers is that they are doctrinaire power brokers out to subjugate persons of culture, refinement, and learning to deceitful upstarts. Or, to phrase that a little more politely, Gentleben will probably never understand why he scares me so much. And he does scare me: His philosophies are scary, his viewpoints are scary, and most of all, cocky and splenetic, his platitudes resemble a dilapidated shed. Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will collapse, proving my claim that I really profess that there is a vast empirical literature on this subject. My views, of course, are not the issue here. The issue is that I can say one thing about him. He understands better than any of us that psychological impact is paramount—not facts, not anybody's principles, not right and wrong. I'm not suggesting that we behave likewise. I'm suggesting only that I must admit that I've read only a small fraction of Gentleben's writings. (As a well-known aphorism states, it is not necessary to eat all of an apple to learn that it is rotten.) Nevertheless, I've read enough of Gentleben's writings to know that our path is set. By this, I mean that in order to think outside the box, we must build a true community of spirit and purpose based on mutual respect and caring. I consider that requirement a small price to pay because Gentleben wants to control every aspect of our lives. He wants us to rise, fall asleep, work, and live at the beat of a drum. Then, once we're molded into a uniform mass, we'll be incapable of seeing that Gentleben has been doing "in-depth research" (whatever he thinks that means) to prove that he can achieve his goals by friendly and moral conduct. I should mention that I've been doing some research of my own. So far, I've "discovered" that Gentleben may unwittingly squander irreplaceable treasures. I say "unwittingly" because he is apparently unaware that he operates under the influence of a particular ideology—a set of beliefs based on the root metaphor of the transmission of forces. Until you understand this root metaphor you won't be able to grasp why I am aware that many people may object to the severity of my language. But is there no cause for severity? Naturally, I assert that there is because our battle with Gentleben is a battle between spiritualism and elitism, between tradition and subversion, between the defenders of Western civilization and its enemies. With the battle lines drawn as such, it is abundantly clear that Gentleben's theories are geared toward the continuation of social stratification under the rubric of "tradition". Funny, that was the same term that his emissaries once used to create widespread hysteria.

We can quibble about many of the details but we can't quibble about the fundamental fact that we must hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties. Let's start by informing people that Gentleben would have us believe that he is the arbiter of all things. Yeah, right. And I also suppose that cannibalism and adversarialism are identical concepts? The fact of the matter is that if the human race is to survive on this planet, we will have to encourage opportunity, responsibility, and community. To inform you of the grounds upon which I base my deeds, I offer the following. I will stop at nothing to address the legitimate anger, fear, and alienation of people who have been mobilized by Gentleben because they saw no other options for change. My resolve cannot fully be articulated but it is unyielding. As evidence, consider that there are lots of weepy, wimpy flower children out there who are always whining that I'm being too harsh in my criticisms of Gentleben. I wish such people would wake up and realize that Gentleben likes to quote all of the saccharine, sticky moralisms about "human rights" and the evils of authoritarianism. But as soon as we stop paying attention, he invariably instructs his cohorts to mete out harsh and arbitrary punishment against his adversaries until they're intimidated into a benumbed, neutralized, impotent, and non-functioning mass. Then, when someone notices, the pattern repeats from the beginning. Though this game may seem perverse beyond belief to any sane individual it makes perfect sense in light of Gentleben's effete hastily mounted campaigns.

Although it requires risk, commitment, and follow-through to initiate meaningful change, the world would be better off if Gentleben had never been born. Regular readers of my letters probably take that for granted, but if I am to stop this insanity, I must explain to the population at large that if you ever ask Gentleben to do something, you can bet that your request will get lost in the shuffle, unaddressed, ignored, and rebuffed. I want to make this clear so that those who do not understand deeper messages embedded within sarcastic irony—and you know who I'm referring to—can process my point. Gentleben insists that he has no choice but to trade facts for fantasy, truth for myths, academics for collective socialization, and individual thinking for group manipulation. His reasoning is that anyone who resists him deserves to be crushed. Yes, I realize that that argument makes no sense, but prudence is no vice. Cowardice—especially Gentleben's vitriolic form of it—is. The only appropriate attitudes in a society overrun by condescending, mephitic calumniators are fear and distrust. But let's not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: his poxy squibs.

While Gentleben puts on a good dog-and-pony show, he likes bombarding me with insults. That's the most damnable thing about him. It's also why it's a pity that two thousand years after Christ, the voices of acrimonious reprobates like Gentleben can still be heard, worse still that they're listened to, and worst of all that anyone believes them. He has called people like me delusional savages, unbridled lugs, and scary loan sharks so many times that these accusations no longer have any sting. Gentleben decidedly continues to employ such insults because he's run out of logical arguments. I suppose an alternate explanation is that I once had a nightmare in which Gentleben was free to ransack people's homes. When I awoke, I realized that this nightmare was frighteningly close to reality. For instance, it is the case both in my nightmare and in reality that Gentleben's communications manifest themselves in two phases. Phase one: promote the bloodthirsty equivocations of wretched adulterers. Phase two: impose a one-size-fits-all model on how society should function. It is high time for someone to spread the word about Gentleben's harebrained mottos to our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers—even to strangers. Will that someone be you?

Unchartered Poster Joined: Nov 22, 2008 Posts: 23

Uhm....Okay. Whatever. Try sectioning all that off into easily readable minutes, like the fights. Maybe then I'll bother with it. Prolly not though.

I hope Shotgun Wedding kicks the crap out of Brick Mouse! WOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Cheers,
The Director

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:57 pm

The_Director wrote:

Uhm....Okay. Whatever. Try sectioning all that off into easily readable minutes, like the fights. Maybe then I'll bother with it. Prolly not though.

I hope Shotgun Wedding kicks the crap out of Brick Mouse! WOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Cheers,
The Director

Hey, I just entered "Gentleben", hit "Generate", and did a quick copy and paste!

Anyway, I thought I'd offer a little more incentive for the Consortium to join in Shadowspire:

I'll pledge that if the Consortium returns to Shadowspire, I will cease any and all feuds, arguments, sparring, and assorted anti-social activities until either one year has passed or he leaves the arena, whichever happens first.

Of course, you'll be stuck with Scott, who's a lot more boring, if agreeable, than is Ichabod, but that's the trade you make, I'm afraid. I may have to resurrect Kage for the duration.

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 2:54 am

Ichabod, nice post. (We guess). All we could think of is that it read like a scum vs.scum fight.

Get ready to change your ways, (as committed in your post above) The Consortium is definitely coming.

When we arrive, do we have to join the anti-Ichabod/Kellumbo/Tripwire/et al sector?

Advanced Master Poster Joined: Mar 08, 2004 Posts: 481

The Consortium wrote:

Ichabod, nice post. (We guess). All we could think of is that it read like a scum vs.scum fight.

Get ready to change your ways, (as committed in your post above) The Consortium is definitely coming.

When we arrive, do we have to join the anti-Ichabod/Kellumbo/Tripwire/et al sector?

Please join Very Happy

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 4:03 am

You join the anti-us sector just as I'm bound to keep my mouth shut?

You're an evil, evil...er...group of people!

And here my insomnia had just made me come here to post a recap of last week's fun that would have actually been somewhat amusing!

At least for me....

ArchMaster Poster Joined: Jul 18, 2006 Posts: 1170

I think in Poker terms, this is called "going on tilt". In other words, I think Gentleben may have truely gotten under our friend Ichabod's skin (At least that was my initially thought after actually reading the entire post above).

I must say, how can people not love Shadowspire when we have rivalries and banter like this going on? This arena rocks and I love it!

Good luck on turn 58 everybody!

Advanced Master Poster Joined: Jul 15, 2008 Posts: 382

More of the same, tired, excrement from Ichabod? Shocking.

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:46 am

Ichabod wrote:

To all readers: ...

edited for ease of reading...

It's also why it's a pity that two thousand years after Christ, the voices of acrimonious reprobates like Gentleben can still be heard, worse still that they're listened to, and worst of all that anyone believes them. He has called people like me delusional savages, unbridled lugs, and scary loan sharks so many times that these accusations no longer have any sting. Gentleben decidedly continues to employ such insults because he's run out of logical arguments. I suppose an alternate explanation is that I once had a nightmare in which Gentleben was free to ransack people's homes. When I awoke, I realized that this nightmare was frighteningly close to reality. For instance, it is the case both in my nightmare and in reality that Gentleben's communications manifest themselves in two phases. Phase one: promote the bloodthirsty equivocations of wretched adulterers. Phase two: impose a one-size-fits-all model on how society should function. It is high time for someone to spread the word about Gentleben's harebrained mottos to our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers—even to strangers. Will that someone be you?

I quess that would make me the Anti-Christ, I quess I picked the right team name after all... Twisted Evil

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:49 am

Sadly, I thought my kickoff post was intended for people to post less on the rival front, so my apologies if my rivalry-based humor resulted in the current tangent. Now somebody will have to post a new thread called "Turn 58 - The Official Thread about results from turn 58."

ST

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:14 am

Good grief, have none of you ever seen the insult generator? All I did was enter Gentleben's name here...

http://www.pakin.org/complaint/

...select 10 paragraphs, and hit "complain". Then a quick copy-paste and it it's here. It's got a pretty unique style of writing that I thought for sure everyone here would recognize. Go ahead, try it yourself. It just tosses out long-winded, nonsensical 'complaints' for amusement value.

So no, Gentleben didn't get under my skin. I posted that because I stumbled across an old reference to it on a friend's blog, and thought it would be amusing. At worst, i figured y'all would recognize it and lay into me for using an outdated meme.

I didn't in my wildest dreams think you'd all assume I sat here long enough to type up THAT wall of text and seriously mean it. Thanks for the laugh!

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:18 am

Ichabod wrote:

Good grief, have none of you every seen the insult generator? All I did was enter Gentleben's name here...

http://www.pakin.org/complaint/

...select 10 paragraphs, and hit "complain". Then a quick copy-paste and it it's here. It's got a pretty unique style of writing that I thought for sure everyone here would recognize. Go ahead, try it yourself. It just tosses out long-winded, nonsensical 'complaint' for amusement value.

So no, Gentleben didn't get under my skin. I posted that because I stumbled across an old reference to it on a friend's blog, and thought it would be amusing. At worst, i figured y'all would recognize it and lay into me for using an outdated meme.

I didn't in my wildest dreams think you'd all assume I sat here long enough to type up THAT wall of text and seriously mean it. Thanks for the laugh!

I enjoyed it Cool

Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:19 am

gentleben wrote:

Ichabod wrote:

Good grief, have none of you every seen the insult generator? All I did was enter Gentleben's name here...

http://www.pakin.org/complaint/

...select 10 paragraphs, and hit "complain". Then a quick copy-paste and it it's here. It's got a pretty unique style of writing that I thought for sure everyone here would recognize. Go ahead, try it yourself. It just tosses out long-winded, nonsensical 'complaint' for amusement value.

So no, Gentleben didn't get under my skin. I posted that because I stumbled across an old reference to it on a friend's blog, and thought it would be amusing. At worst, i figured y'all would recognize it and lay into me for using an outdated meme.

I didn't in my wildest dreams think you'd all assume I sat here long enough to type up THAT wall of text and seriously mean it. Thanks for the laugh!

I enjoyed it Cool

Glad you did. I have to appreciate the irony, there. Cool

ArchMaster Poster Joined: Jul 18, 2006 Posts: 1170

Never seen that before. Well, at least that explains things. It now makes the post a bit more humorous, whereas before I was beginning to become concerned about you with the thought of you furiously typing up your manefsto in a dark basement in the middle of the night while consumed with rage! Laughing