Slack Don't Sneer: Comments on the Sociology of Sneering
It is a well known fact that SubGenii harbor in their systems a substance
called, slack, which by an as-yet unknown process disables or in some
cases alters beyond recognition the programs placed in the minds of humans
by the Conspiracy. Thus, while normals see the world the way the
Conspiracy wants them to see it, SubGenii see the world as it actually
is. The naive might think that this would give the SubGenius instant
status in the eyes of the Normals. But obviously, since their Conspiracy
programs--many layers of distortion filters--are in good working order,
Normals are unable to correctly interpret the words and pictures
emanating from the SubGenius.
Thus, when the SubGenii report on what they see, it is taken by the
slackless to be "satire," "irony," "a joke," and sometimes even
"sneering," when, in fact, it is a straightforward unambiguous report of
the way things actually are. The SubGenius is only being honest, and yet
everything he or she says is taken as a big joke.
When a Normal who happens to be under the tragic delusion that they are
something other than, discovers "Bob," a Bobbie is born. Since the
Bobbies lack the substance slack, all the Conspiracy programs are in
place and in fine working order. Even though they like "Bob" and
devivals, since they haven't yet obtained slack, they, like other
Normals, misinterpret the honest reports of SubGenii as satire. Wanting
more than anything else in the world to be like those SubGenii (but
forgetting that this requires slack), the Bobbies endeavor to copy them
and thus create (over and over and over again) the BIG SNEER, devoid of
any truth or information, except the fact that it is a sneer, and thus
NOT the product of a SubGenius.
Sadly, this phenomenon is not confined to tiny subGenius zines or to
postings on alt.slack. It also infests national "humor" magazines, many
internet news groups, and entire subcultures. The sneer has become a
signal that pseudo-weirdos of all stripes flash, so that they might find
the true humans, but instead, they find only each other.
Computer De-Programmer, Kossy
***
Subject: Re: Slack Don't Sneer
From: house127@teleport.com (127 House)
I must voice my support for the findings of Dr. Kossy. Sneer is
obviously the correct term for what many, including myself, had been
falsely calling False Slack. False Slack would, by definition, still be
Slack, while Sneer is never Slack, True or False. I would add the
Slack/Sneer polarity also explains why fringe science is, well, fringe:
it's still science, but it gets sneered at or generates Slack. Which is
why so many SubGenii are involved in both the Fortean scene and the
skeptic scene. For the next two thousand years, let us adopt the
Slack/Sneer polarity as the only truth.
Dr. Onan Canobite
127 House - Box 2321 - Portland OR 97208-2321 USA - house127@teleport.com
***
From: nenslo@teleport.com (NENSLO)
I agree 1000% with Onan (as I usually do). Dr. Kossy's analysis
is one of the most astute things I've seen here and to give her her due,
I urge you all to go right out and buy a copy of the book which is tied
for "Finest literary achievement of 1994" with a certain other book which
also has work by myself and the pseudonym of Dr. Canobite, namely
KOOKS- A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, Feral House,
$16.95, ISBN 0-922915-19-9
and don't forget to look for all the secret dobbsheads and the portrait
of MIGHTY ME on the unbelievably beautiful cover painted by KDV. It's a
regular orgy of SubGenius whadyacallit... where you hire your own
relatives or pals to do everything, you know.
But yes, Slack/Sneer is not only a brilliant tool for the
SubGenius it can also be turned into another stupid self-destroying
weapon for the "others" and weak ones to stab themselves repeatedly in
the back with while mistakenly thinking they are proving they are not
what they really are.
D. Kossy, will you marry me?
--
----Copyright NENSLO KDV 1995--------------
"First batter this present world to rubble,
Then the other may rise, if that's the plan."
-Goethe, Faust pt.1
***
From: trtrout@aol.com (Trtrout)
I thought he *liked* her. Well, a short-duration union wouldn't be too
bad. Oh, What am I saying???
***
From: ljduchez@en.com (Lou Duchez)
Praise "Bob", we're closer to defining Slack by defining what it can
never be! Truly a sign of the End Times! Herr Doktor Kossy, I salute you!
Sneering is one of the Con's better traps to lull people into complacency.
"Well, I can't change the world, but I can laugh at it!" Thus, another
potential rogue is placated.
As has been noted, the Con either wants you totally placated or totally
despairing. In either situation, your potential to rock the boat is
eliminated. That's why anger is your most important resource. It is
anger that reminds you that the Con is out there and has completely
EARNED destruction, whenever we can pull it off. It is anger that keeps
you from falling into one of the Con's traps: when you're angry, they
can't sweet-talk you into giving up. It is anger that makes you demand
better, it is anger that fuels your quest for Slack.
Unfortunately, anger is difficult to sustain ("The Menagerie", episode 2),
and it does create some level of destructive backlash. That's why humor
is so important: to channel the backlash into something enjoyable, not
only buffering the harmful side-effects of anger, but giving you something
to enjoy about it.
But this humor may never be sneering; nope, sneering is selling out.
It's too easy of an excuse, and doesn't provide any joy unless you can
find someone to sneer at. This is not good enough for the Yetinsyn.
Macaulay Culkin can sneer, but he can't excremeditate. Remember that.
~***
From: mtownsend@interramp.com (Michael Townsend)
Don't mind me budding in on this fascinating thread, but I couldn't help
notice that...
> house127@teleport.com (127 House) wrote:
> > I must voice my support for the findings of Dr. Kossy. Sneer is
> > obviously the correct term for what many, including myself, had been
> > falsely calling False Slack. False Slack would, by definition, still be
> > Slack, while Sneer is never Slack, True or False. I would add the
> > Slack/Sneer polarity also explains why fringe science is, well, fringe:
> > it's still science, but it gets sneered at or generates Slack. Which is
> > why so many SubGenii are involved in both the Fortean scene and the
> > skeptic scene. For the next two thousand years, let us adopt the
> > Slack/Sneer polarity as the only truth.
Therein lies the crux of your dilemma, fellow Subgenii -- in the Great Tao
of Dobbs, "Slack" and "Sneer" are but two aspects of the same primal
force. You must learn to accept them both, use them, live them, surf
them, and in so doing, conjoin the two into a single pulsing glowing
hideous fiery web of insanity! Thus is the One truth of "Bob".
Rev.Dad
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Send tapes to Dad's New Slacks, P.O. Box 4272, Portland ME 04101-4272
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Mor(e)on Sneer
From: nenslo@teleport.com (NENSLO)
Dr. Kossy's astute perception and statement of the Slack/Sneer
duality has got my brain whirling like a hamster in its wheel. Now let's
see if I can get out of it without getting my little foot caught between
the bars.
The beauty of the Conspiracy program is that it sets its victims
up to shoot themselves down. All the effort involved is on the victim's
part! The victim is first trained by its fellow victims to feel very very
small. It sees others around it who are NOT small, and it wants to know
how they got that way, so it goes to the only source of information it is
allowed to know about, the Conspiracy, which tells it that the way to get
others to think it is BIG instead of SMALL is to "act like this." Victim
proceeds to "act like this," and the Conspiracy sits back and tries to
stifle its giggles as victim behaves in a manner which clearly says to all
perceivers, "I am a SMALL person trying to act BIG!"
The Conspiracy says that BIG people sneer at things which are
smaller than them. The SMALL person looks for the biggest thing they can
find, the thing they most want to look bigger than, and loudly, publicly
sneers at it, thinking that others will hear those sneers and see them as
REALLY BIG, even bigger than the thing that was supposed to be so big
NOBODY should sneer at it. The individual's size is in INVERSE PROPORTION
to the size of the object of their sneers! Bad news for God-Mockers, eh?
Sometimes it's a person who is the object of the SMALL one's
sneers. The SMALL one picks someone they really want to be bigger than,
someone who provokes a strong emotional or intellectual reaction, and
WORSHIPS that person, makes them a focus of their time and energy. The
Sneerer (and this is what is so beautiful) actually believes that they are
publicly proving themselves BIGGER than the object of their Sneering,
never knowing that to all the rest of the world they only look SMALLER AND
SMALLER as they talk about, think about, write about, and Sneer at the
person whom they are publicly holding up to the world as the only thing
they consider BIG enough to be the focus of their attention!
The Conspiracy is, in essence, telling the SMALL one that the way
to BIGness is by putting on a clown suit and capering around someone or
something important, chanting "You're so BIG and I'm so SMALL!"
It would be sad if it weren't so FUNNY. And it would be funny if
it weren't so sad. It's survival of the fittest in living action, and the
unfit are duped into snuffing themselves by doing what they think is the
only way to survive! The victim class never seems to realize that it's
only COWARDS who need to "act brave," only TEENAGERS who ever talk about
being "mature," and only SMALL people who need to try to look BIG. And,
of course, it's only BOBBIES who accuse other people of being "pink."
Yes, that part is especially true. In all my years of contact
with high ranking SubGenii of all genders, races and ages, I've NEVER
heard any of them call anyone else pink except in an arena situation, to a
crowd of over 200, or as a blanket reference to an imaginary "them" class,
as in Onan's TOTALLY BRILLIANT essay "Listen Little Pink," in RevX. The
surest way to spot bobbies is by watching to see who is OBSESSED with
proving that others are pink. When someone spitefully and sneeringly
calls YOU pink, dear reader, that is their way of saying "Look what a
sorry insecure little sack of dung I am! Look how tiny and pitiful I am!
Look at me, please, because you are bigger, better, more important than I
am!" Then try to be kind, friend. Try not to let them catch on to the
GREAT BIG DUNCE CAP they are wearing because they believe that D-U-N-C-E
spells "superior individual." Once they realize how unbelievably, publicly
stupid they have been they tend to shrink down to one inch high and run
hide in a mouse hole for the rest of their lives and we don't want them to
do that because we like to have them around so we can LAUGH at them OVER
AND OVER AGAIN!
It is wonderfully true and truly wonderful that the ones who pride
themselves on their magnitude are the ones with the least inside. Hot
air, my friends, but you know how fun a simple balloon can be. We all
know that there are people who pretend to take themselves seriously and
people who pretend NOT to take themselves seriously. Those latter ones
are the tricky ones to handle but luckily the Con keeps most of its
victims so tied up they are engaged in a constant pretence of utter
unpretentiousness which is the most OBVIOUS and absurd of all pretences!
One of the biggest flaws in "cyberspace" is that it permits the
Small ones much greater leeway for the hit-and-run stupidity spectacles at
which they excel. (What an idea, excelling at inferiority!) If we were
all at a really big party in a hotel, with each room representing a
newsgroup, there would still be a lot of this attention-consumption
display, but the physical proximity of real people would give the
creatures some qualms. Being naturally fearful, they would constrain
their displays out of fear of the physical consequences which result.
Here, though, we are all just little words on a screen, completely
dehumanized, and SAFE as targets for any infantile vituperation or moronic
mockery the weaklings wish to toss at us. They don't have to worry about
being grabbed and slammed against a wall by someone they've pushed too
far, so they can let themselves run wild in an endless public display of
their clumsy, embarrassing efforts to prove they are not what they really,
obviously are.
The most fatal of all the fatal errors to make is PROJECTION; the
assumption that what affects ourselves will affect others equally. When
The Sneerer Sneers, it is making a grand declaration of its weaknesses,
pointing out all its soft spots and saying, "This is where I will hurt
you!" Always its own worst enemy, and usually its own Only Friend, the
Sneerer proudly shoots itself in the foot, the knee, the groin, crying,
"Now I've got you! How do you like THAT?" When the pain finally creeps
the long long pathway up to the brain the Sneerer attributes it to the
machinations of the conspiracy of evil enemies it mistakenly believes it
is important enough to have provoked! How can such things be? How can
such creatures live?? Their every act seems to bounce back and inflict
another gaping wound, for which they blame the person they aimed at and
missed!
The genuinely useful lessons of the Con are invariably missed by
the victim class, the self-victimizing class. The Conspiracy always
displays true power as static, placid, immobile. It portrays those who
are subject to that power or who vainly strive for power as frantic,
chattering, jumpy little things who could never handle power if they got
it. (I should say, rather, that creative and perceptive individuals are
permitted by the Con to portray power in that way because the powerless
never seem to learn from it.) The Overlord is the one who sits in the Big
Chair, gestures vaguely toward an offending galaxy and mutters,
"...destroy it..." and the gumchewing flunkies scamper off jabbering,
"Yes, bwoss! Shuah ting! Ryda way!" The twitchy chatterers are only
threatening because they are TOO STUPID for their actions to be
predictable, and they are just as likely to blow themselves up, and their
betters with them, as they are to do anything right.
Yow! Oh, hey, my hind leg's caught between the wheel and the
stand, and I don't know how to get out of it! Damn, here comes another
hamster trying to run on the same wheel! Ow, damn! Hey, help me willya?
Ouch! Somebody get me outa this! Stop this crazy thiiiing!
Oh, what a copout. Can't even end an essay.
--
----Copyright NENSLO KDV 1995--------------
"First batter this present world to rubble,
Then the other may rise, if that's the plan."
-Goethe, Faust pt.1
***
Original file name: Slack Don't Sneer
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