Adaptive Curmudgeon knows:
Among us, are monsters. They are not rare. They are not unusual in their monstrosity. You are not unique in being their potential victim. Within a mile of you, wherever you sit, right now, as you read this silly blog, there are many assholes who’d happily send you to Auschwitz. They’d ruin your life. They’d hurt you. They’d feel good about doing it.
You saw it during COVID. Monsters that didn’t need to be coerced into doing evil, only excused. Evil wasn’t planted in their heart; I was already there. Their destructive urge seeks naught but release. It starts with “we’re the good guys”, transitions to “people should be forced to be like me”, and ends in a sea of skulls. Every busybody, HOA Karen, squishy middle manager, militant vegan, media addled youth, gullible old fool, Marxist grade school teacher, or devoted party hack is potentially Stalin’s handmaiden.
This is the end of the serious portion of this post. Now for an irritable rant about acronyms, or TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) as they are sometimes called.
HOA stands for Home Owners Association. I suspect most people are familiar with this acronym, but there are still people who aren't familiar with it, or who have just woken up and whose brain is not fully engaged, so I include the definition here as a courtesy. I am also waging my own brush fire war against unexplained acronyms. There are so many of them that no reasonable person can be expected to know them all, so if you are using acronyms in your writing, include a note that explains them. Problem is that anytime you get involved in a subject where acronyms are common they become part of your normal vocabulary, but if someone from outside your field wanders in they are likely to be at a complete loss as to what you are talking about. COVID has taken on a life of its own. I think it was originally a contraction of Corona Virus Disease, or maybe strain D.
7 comments:
I don’t know if this is true or not: Read once somewhere that when the Nazis needed female prison camp guards, they’d round up about 100 women otherwise of small use to the war effort, bring in a Jewish woman and order the candidates to slap her hard. Almost all complied immediately; two or three would comply once peer pressure was applied, and occasionally one would simply refuse. That last one ended up in the camps.
But more to the point: the true monsters were women that seemed like normal people - until all external restraints were removed. Once they could hurt and murder people as much as they wanted, that’s what they did.
When you say the last one ended up in the camps, did you mean as a guard or an inmate?
Inmate.
Power corrupts...
COrona VIrus Disease.
It's hard to read anything these days that isn't riddled with acronyms.
But I did read some very good advice;
Never accept a “NO” from someone who does not have the power to say “YES”. Eleanor Roosevelt
If only there were a giant interlinked information network where even the most moderately curious, halfway-motivated person could look up terms they didn't understand. Think how useful it would be! You could even use the excess bandwidth for cat pictures!
Very funny Tam. Unfortunately it doesn't always work. You get off in the weeds someplace where they have developed their own acronym laced lingo and le Google is at a loss.
I’ll let you know if I ever run afoul of that.
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