Hanging Out

Posted on November 27, 2002 in IRC/Chat

I hang out in a room called #nuthouse at IRCQnet (irc.icq.com) where some Australians and Canadians like to gather. They’re mostly background noise, but friends — something that I can be included in while I work on solitary tasks like revamping City of the Silent or writing this blog. It has the same effect on my temperament as writing in a coffee shop where some salespeople have clustered around the next table to swap customer stories. I like the atmosphere.

I also hang out on the #politics channel at Dalnet, an experience which has become distinctly less pleasurable for me. Too many people argue from the same, constricted perspectives. For example, this evening, someone told me that she was nervous about pointing out that Fox News, the favorite of the conservatives on the channel, also liked to run programs featuring fake psychics and UFOologists. “But a lot of these are on our side,” she protested. To which I said: “If you don’t speak the Truth courageously, then there is no way you can defeat a liar.” “I do my best,” she replied. But if she won’t remark on this aspect because she fears turning some New Agers into gun-toting reactionaries, can she really claim it?

People on Dalnet #politics seem all too content with canned utterances of no rational weight that disappear from memory almost as soon as they are typed and scroll up off the screen. I could take the nick of any liberal or leftist radical — my allies — and pose as them without arousing suspicion: their particular limits are that distinctive. Or, for a real chuckle, I could assume the identify of a welfare-hating conservative and just make up anecdotes about millionaire welfare queens, Muslim human sacrifice, and liberal terrorists injecting flouride into the bathroom plumbing. Many would applaud me for my remarks if they had not been informed in advance of the hoax and my intentions of showing them as absurd.

I’m getting tired, you see, of rebutting arguments effectively, being reduced to a straw man, and being declared burnt to a crisp. It can be entertaining to act out a role, to play the straight man or a comedian as I sometimes do in #politics these days, and then, when I have exhausted my wind, simply smile and utter enigmatically the Shakespearean phrase “the rest is silence”. Then I can go off to perform some entertaining task like weed out the spam that has somehow evaded my filter; read the one or two bits of real email; or backup a database.

My conversations in #politics are no where near as substantial as those I hold with my eldest cat who cries and paws at my arm while I type. I pick her up, hold her close, and whisper advice on how to earn fishie-flavored treats from me. Or else, I emit sussurant platitudes like “Oh what a silly cat”, “old cat”, or “my poor senile baby”.

Those whispers have more content and feeling, I dare say, that much of what others fob off as intellectual discussion in Dalnet #politics these days.