I keep asking you to consider WHY any information is PRODUCED.
This is very different from asking you to DOUBT. It goes deeper, and should take MORE time. The Tough Guy approach is to learn “both sides,” to aggressively Question. But he is already into step two. His big concern is LOOKING doubtful, not in analyzing reality. If you “study the question,” that means YOU know all about it.
And for the Tough Guy, everybody seeing that you know it all is where the process stops. What good does any Wisdom do if it doesn’t show how wise YOU are?
Please note that I began here by analyzing WHY the Tough Guy says what he says, not by casting doubt on it from my endless fund of information about all aspects of the question. Why do ***I*** use this approach? Because the Tough Guy is aiming to look tough. I, on the other hand, am interested solely in power in the real world.
Look at that word “real.” Do you think it is accidental that whenever we hear the word “reality” it means something awful? But you could do this for YOURSELF: WHY does the word “reality” always mean something awful? It is because the person using that word is saying,
1) ***I*** really know what reality is, because of my virtues.
2) ***I*** have “been there.”
3) ***I*** am tough and experienced.
In other words, the person who defines “reality” is talking entirely about HIMSELF, which is precisely what reality is NOT about.
The most Tough Guy things I have ever done were a COVER. If you have papers to show you are working with a sewing machine company and someone figures out that you are actually a combat merc, they stop looking. To look any further would be like finding someone is covering up an armed robbery and then saying, “Well, this must be a cover for something SERIOUS.”
Like acting the Dumb Southerner in DC, this analysis of reality has a very, VERY practical side. That is WHY it is REALITY. That someone may be using being a merc as a cover simply doesn’t occur to people. Why?
Because the information people are used to from Tough Guys is aimed at making Tough Guys look TOUGH. Merc is the toughest so merc is the end of the chain.
In other words, “reality” begins and ends with his being a Tough Guy.
#1 by Dave on 08/30/2007 - 12:11 pm
In personal conversations when I am getting to know people, I always look for who is not mentioned in the family to find out who the real family influence is.
This gets hilarious, for example, with Arabs (affluent Arabs in the US). I’ve discovered in these Arab families from the so-called “male dominated” societies that there is a real issue going on regarding females (mother’s and aunts) standing between boys and their fathers. Male effeminacy is big time in the Arab world, but opps, I’ve drifted off into political incorrectness, big time!
We are supposed to pretend that the macho façade of Arabs is real and presto everybody follows along and pretends. Isn’t it great? Sounds like life to me.
Anybody “up to snuff” in the world of street violence knows that there is no correlation between how somebody acts and looks and how tough he or she really is. Cops know this and that is why they are so damn careful regarding anyone they are dealing with.
You never know when you are going to get seriously conked by that old grandma.
#2 by Simmons on 08/30/2007 - 1:16 pm
Reality and Authority being interchangeable to some degree since the tough guy banks on his view of reality to garner authority (think ww11 vet sitting in the VFW telling us why we cannot fight authority). I basically work in a cult of personality and most of my co-workers repeat the reality they are told exists by the authority, and of course it really doesn’t exist. To bore everyone stiff I’ll relate a work experience. A tough guy supervisor told a co-worker of mine to never say “Merry Christmas” it being un-pc. Co-worker actually believing the toughness and realistic view of the super came crying to me about this injustice (chirstians crave martyrdom) My advice to co-worker go back to super and get all of this in writing in exacting detail so the worker could comply to strictest sense of what this man said was “reality.” Tough guys craving authority for their views of reality cannot handle responsibility, Merry Christmas restored. Next I want a channel to a respectable conservative asking them to explain in writing how intergration has worked.
#3 by shari on 08/30/2007 - 1:27 pm
It makes sense that men who are genuinely self confident, do not spend much time swaggering, or despising women.
#4 by Simmons on 08/30/2007 - 3:09 pm
So we can now assume that the “respectables” the Faithful Consrvative Companions to liberals are the capos of the PC concentration camps? They tell us how tough they are and they tell us how hopeless it is to fight the “reality” of the day. Sounds like AR and the CofCC and numerous other orgs that peddle “reality.”
#5 by mderpelding on 08/30/2007 - 8:04 pm
If I may…
“keep asking you to consider WHY any information is PRODUCED.”
Quotes are mine.
Can any of you tell the difference between information, as in empirical data, and what would define “PRODUCED”?
Note the caps here.
A million empirical scientists can publish endless reams of data. But guess what, NOBODY wants to think about all that information.
Instead, they rely on “experts” to make that data sensible.
So, a narrative is created to explain the data.
In Hollywood, a man who takes an idea to fruition is called a “producer.”
Bob says we must think for ourselves.
Become our own “producers”.
#6 by shari on 08/30/2007 - 8:46 pm
Too often, I have no idea WHY some information is produced. I just try to get enough together to have some discernment about what to accept, or think on, and what to reject. That much is not easy.
#7 by Pain on 08/30/2007 - 9:11 pm
“The Though Guy approach is to learn “both sides,’ to aggressively Question. But he is already into step two. His big concern is LOOKING doubtful, not in analyzing reality.”
I always thought that meant he knew who was wrong and was protecting him. So when he puts on the tough image, I’m thinking “What a wuss,” and he can tell he’s not fooling me, so he gets pissed.