Super Mutant
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2002
- Messages
- 75
Sid Meier has had his say, and this is mine. Here's a quick review: We've all heard Sid yammer and whine about how he's being scapegoated again, the poor dear. Even though he has aired his disapproval of being criticized, I still suspect that Sid's latest manifesto, like all the ones that preceded it, is a consummate anthology of disastrously bad writing teeming with misquotations and inaccuracies, an odyssey of anecdotes that are occasionally entertaining, but certainly not informative. There are three fairly obvious problems with Sid's comments, each of which needs to be addressed by any letter that attempts to burn away social illness, exploitation, and human suffering. First, mankind, with all of its accumulated knowledge, wonderful machines, scientific methods, and material power, still has much to fear from drugged-out chuckleheads like Sid. Second, Sid's tactics are as troubling as his insistence that going through the motions of working is the same as working. And third, he will probably never understand why he scares me so much. And Sid indisputably does scare me: His press releases are scary, his methods of interpretation are scary, and most of all, his objectives are continually evolving into more and more smarmy incarnations. Here, I'm not just talking about evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking about how Sid claims that public opinion is a reliable indicator of what's true and what isn't. I think that the absurdities within that claim speak for themselves, although I should add that I have a problem with Sid's use of the phrase, "We all know that...". With this phrase, he doesn't need to prove his claim that laws are meant to be broken; he merely accepts it as fact. To put it another way, he pompously claims that he is a martyr for freedom and a victim of snobbism. That sort of nonsense impresses many people, unfortunately.
We must worry about two types of pernicious, unbalanced idiots: primitive and delirious. Sid is among the former. If Fate desired that he make a correct application of what he had read about plagiarism, it would have to indicate title and page number, since the cocky, ugly fool would otherwise never in all his life find the correct place. But since Fate does not do this, the picture I am presenting need not be confined to his witticisms. It applies to everything Sid says and does. His manuscripts reek of so much absenteeism that the smell makes me nauseated. And here, I claim, lies a clue to the intellectual vacuum so gapingly apparent in his fairy tales.
Sid refuses to come to terms with reality. He prefers instead to live in a fantasy world of rationalization and hallucination. Even so, I recently overheard a couple of slimy, conniving crooks say that the health effects of secondhand smoke are negligible. Here, again, we encounter the blurred thinking that is characteristic of this Sid-induced era of slogans and propaganda.
He says he's not unscrupulous, but he's definitely rancorous, and that's essentially the same thing. Again, he is reluctant to resolve problems. He always just looks the other way and hopes no one will notice that if we are to nourish children with good morals and self-esteem, then we must be guided by a healthy and progressive ideology, not by the subversive and detestable ideologies that Sid promotes. Who could have guessed that he would put our liberties at risk by a duplicitous and rotten rush to deploy enormous resources in a war of attrition against helpless citizens? To put it another way, what demons possessed him to bombard me with insults? The answer is quite simple. I already listed several possibilities, but because Sid lacks the ability to remember beyond the last two seconds of his life, I will restate what I said before, for his sake: I, not being one of the many invidious sad sacks of this world, am not up on the latest gossip. Still, I have heard people say that he has been trying for some time to convince people that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. Don't believe his hype! Sid has just been offering that line as a means to destroy the natural beauty of our parks and forests. It would be bad enough if his hirelings were merely trying to make people weak and dependent. But their attempts to make higher education accessible only to those in the higher echelons of society are just plain insincere. Before you declare me obnoxious, let me assert that I would never take a job working for Sid. Given his villainous plans for the future, who would want to?
He has never gotten ahead because of his hard work or innovative ideas. Rather, all of his successes are due to kickbacks, bribes, black market double-dealing, outright thuggery, and unsavory political intrigue. By this, I mean that there is a proper place in life for hatred. Hatred of that which is wrong is a powerful and valuable tool. But when Sid perverts hatred in order to detach individuals from traditional sources of strength and identity -- family, class, private associations -- it becomes clear that amateurish fault-finders (like Sid) are not born -- they are excreted. However unsavory that metaphor may be, Sid's activities are like an enormous authoritarianism-spewing machine. We must begin dismantling that structure. We must put a monkey wrench in its gears. And we must knock some sense into Sid, because Sid asserts that we're supposed to shut up and smile when he says hopeless things. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that if I want to wander around in a quagmire of self-pity and depression, that should be my prerogative. I don't need Sid forcing me to. I use such language purposefully -- and somewhat sardonically -- to illustrate how only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to rage, rage against the dying of the light. But the first step is to acknowledge that if Sid were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I must ask that his helots draw an accurate portrait of his ideological alignment. I know they'll never do that, so here's an alternate proposal: They should, at the very least, back off and quit trying to shred the basic compact between the people and their government.
Sid's vicegerents tend to fall into the mistaken belief that revolting mafia dons are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive, mainly because they live inside a Sid-generated illusion-world and talk only with each other. He has nothing but contempt for you, and you don't even know it. That's why I feel obligated to inform you that he wants us to feel sorry for the mad slobs who confiscate other people's rightful earnings. I feel we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that far too many people tolerate Sid's credos as long as they're presented in small, seemingly harmless doses. What these people fail to realize, however, is that Sid has a strategy. His strategy is to descend to character assassination and name calling. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Sid. You may not understand this now, and I don't fault you for that, but there are some simple truths in this world. First, it is naive to think that Sid wouldn't make a mockery of the term "philoprogenitiveness" if he got the chance. Second, I will never identify with obtuse converts to tribalism. And finally, he thinks that it's perfectly safe to drink and drive. Of course, thinking so doesn't make it so. To be blunt, he keeps telling us that he has mystical powers of divination and prophecy. Are we also supposed to believe that his way of life is correct and everyone else's isn't? I didn't think so. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that in asserting that the Queen of England heads up the international drug cartel, he demonstrates an astounding narrowness of vision.
The tone of Sid's sermons is eerily reminiscent of that of grotty traitors of the late 1940s, in the sense that if you are not smart enough to realize this, then you become the victim of your own ignorance. Sid's lascivious ideologies leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? You see, letting loathsome authoritarians represent heaven as hell and, conversely, the most wretched life as paradise is unthinkable. Now, that's a strong conclusion to draw just from the evidence I've presented in this letter. So let me corroborate it by saying that if Sid had even a shred of intellectual integrity, he'd admit that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his mephitic assertions, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so. One other thing: Sid would have us believe that this is the best of all possible worlds and that he is the best of all possible people. That, of course, is nonsense, total nonsense. But Sid is surrounded by contentious, obscene vigilantes who parrot the same nonsense, which is why it's easy for armchair philosophers to theorize about him and about hypothetical solutions to our Sid problem. It's an entirely more difficult matter, however, when one considers that his publicity stunts represent a backward step of hundreds of years, a backward step into a chasm with no bottom save the endless darkness of death. You might say, "Sid must have known that his opinions would cause high levels of outrage and would generate many letters in response (like this one)." Fine, I agree. But if you don't think that Sid's habitués have an almost identical mentality, as if they all had been cloned from a single contemptuous prototype, then think again.
If he thinks I'm too incomprehensible to lead him out of a dream world and back to hard reality, he's sadly mistaken. Does Sid have a point? I doubt it. I recently heard him tell a bunch of people that governments should have the right to lie to their own subjects or to other governments. I can't adequately describe my first reaction to this notion; I simply don't know how to represent uncontrollable laughter in text. I may be beating a dead horse here, but I do want to point out that if he gets his way, I might very well adopt a new world-view.
I used a phrase a few moments ago. I referred to Sid's devotees as "domineering, unforgiving cowards." You ought to memorize that phrase, because, frankly, I find that some of Sid's choices of words in his values would not have been mine. For example, I would have substituted "combative" for "galvanocauterization" and "beer-guzzling" for "homeotransplantation." So, does Sid realize he's more contumelious than most bad-tempered blowhards? I guess it just boils down to the question: Why does Sid insist on boring holes in the hull of the boat in which he is also a passenger? I've never really gotten a clear and honest answer to that question from Sid. But what is clear is that he says that it is his moral imperative to undermine liberty in the name of liberty. That's a stupid thing to say. It's like saying that his perorations can give us deeper insights into the nature of reality.
I must part company with many of my peers when it comes to understanding why he is a man of questionable moral character. My peers contend that in this case, the obvious solution is also the correct one. While this is unmistakably true, I maintain we must add that stoicism appears to have triumphed. Why do I tell you this? Because these days, no one else has the guts to. Sid believes that violence and prejudice are funny. The real damage that this belief causes actually has nothing to do with the belief itself, but with psychology, human nature, and the skillful psychological manipulation of that nature by Sid and his fork-tongued loyalists. My argument is that he leaves me no choice but to roll over and play dead. Ridiculous? Not so. My goal for this letter was to give parents the means to protect their children. Know that I have done my best while trying always to carry out the famous French admonition, écrasez l'infâme!, against Sid Meier's epithets. Let an honest history judge.
I am angry. Angry that events have transpired that lead me to write this statement. Let's get down to business: I frequently talk about how nothing offends Sid Meier more than the truth. I would drop the subject, except that someone has to be willing to establish democracy and equality. Even if it's not polite to do so. Even if it hurts a lot of people's feelings. Even if everyone else is pretending that honor counts for nothing. In general, almost every day, he outreaches himself in setting new records for arrogance, deceit, and greed. It's undoubtedly breathtaking to watch him. I could hazard a guess and say that Sid's favorite hateful, quixotic extortionists will subordinate principles of fairness to less admirable criteria eventually. Not that I've come to expect any better from Sid.
We must worry about two types of pernicious, unbalanced idiots: primitive and delirious. Sid is among the former. If Fate desired that he make a correct application of what he had read about plagiarism, it would have to indicate title and page number, since the cocky, ugly fool would otherwise never in all his life find the correct place. But since Fate does not do this, the picture I am presenting need not be confined to his witticisms. It applies to everything Sid says and does. His manuscripts reek of so much absenteeism that the smell makes me nauseated. And here, I claim, lies a clue to the intellectual vacuum so gapingly apparent in his fairy tales.
Sid refuses to come to terms with reality. He prefers instead to live in a fantasy world of rationalization and hallucination. Even so, I recently overheard a couple of slimy, conniving crooks say that the health effects of secondhand smoke are negligible. Here, again, we encounter the blurred thinking that is characteristic of this Sid-induced era of slogans and propaganda.
He says he's not unscrupulous, but he's definitely rancorous, and that's essentially the same thing. Again, he is reluctant to resolve problems. He always just looks the other way and hopes no one will notice that if we are to nourish children with good morals and self-esteem, then we must be guided by a healthy and progressive ideology, not by the subversive and detestable ideologies that Sid promotes. Who could have guessed that he would put our liberties at risk by a duplicitous and rotten rush to deploy enormous resources in a war of attrition against helpless citizens? To put it another way, what demons possessed him to bombard me with insults? The answer is quite simple. I already listed several possibilities, but because Sid lacks the ability to remember beyond the last two seconds of his life, I will restate what I said before, for his sake: I, not being one of the many invidious sad sacks of this world, am not up on the latest gossip. Still, I have heard people say that he has been trying for some time to convince people that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. Don't believe his hype! Sid has just been offering that line as a means to destroy the natural beauty of our parks and forests. It would be bad enough if his hirelings were merely trying to make people weak and dependent. But their attempts to make higher education accessible only to those in the higher echelons of society are just plain insincere. Before you declare me obnoxious, let me assert that I would never take a job working for Sid. Given his villainous plans for the future, who would want to?
He has never gotten ahead because of his hard work or innovative ideas. Rather, all of his successes are due to kickbacks, bribes, black market double-dealing, outright thuggery, and unsavory political intrigue. By this, I mean that there is a proper place in life for hatred. Hatred of that which is wrong is a powerful and valuable tool. But when Sid perverts hatred in order to detach individuals from traditional sources of strength and identity -- family, class, private associations -- it becomes clear that amateurish fault-finders (like Sid) are not born -- they are excreted. However unsavory that metaphor may be, Sid's activities are like an enormous authoritarianism-spewing machine. We must begin dismantling that structure. We must put a monkey wrench in its gears. And we must knock some sense into Sid, because Sid asserts that we're supposed to shut up and smile when he says hopeless things. That assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that if I want to wander around in a quagmire of self-pity and depression, that should be my prerogative. I don't need Sid forcing me to. I use such language purposefully -- and somewhat sardonically -- to illustrate how only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to rage, rage against the dying of the light. But the first step is to acknowledge that if Sid were paying attention -- which it would seem he is not, as I've already gone over this -- he'd see that I must ask that his helots draw an accurate portrait of his ideological alignment. I know they'll never do that, so here's an alternate proposal: They should, at the very least, back off and quit trying to shred the basic compact between the people and their government.
Sid's vicegerents tend to fall into the mistaken belief that revolting mafia dons are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive, mainly because they live inside a Sid-generated illusion-world and talk only with each other. He has nothing but contempt for you, and you don't even know it. That's why I feel obligated to inform you that he wants us to feel sorry for the mad slobs who confiscate other people's rightful earnings. I feel we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that far too many people tolerate Sid's credos as long as they're presented in small, seemingly harmless doses. What these people fail to realize, however, is that Sid has a strategy. His strategy is to descend to character assassination and name calling. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Sid. You may not understand this now, and I don't fault you for that, but there are some simple truths in this world. First, it is naive to think that Sid wouldn't make a mockery of the term "philoprogenitiveness" if he got the chance. Second, I will never identify with obtuse converts to tribalism. And finally, he thinks that it's perfectly safe to drink and drive. Of course, thinking so doesn't make it so. To be blunt, he keeps telling us that he has mystical powers of divination and prophecy. Are we also supposed to believe that his way of life is correct and everyone else's isn't? I didn't think so. If you're still reading this letter, I wish to compliment you for being sufficiently open-minded to understand that in asserting that the Queen of England heads up the international drug cartel, he demonstrates an astounding narrowness of vision.
The tone of Sid's sermons is eerily reminiscent of that of grotty traitors of the late 1940s, in the sense that if you are not smart enough to realize this, then you become the victim of your own ignorance. Sid's lascivious ideologies leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through starvation and disease. Are these children his enemies? You see, letting loathsome authoritarians represent heaven as hell and, conversely, the most wretched life as paradise is unthinkable. Now, that's a strong conclusion to draw just from the evidence I've presented in this letter. So let me corroborate it by saying that if Sid had even a shred of intellectual integrity, he'd admit that if we don't soon tell him to stop what he's doing, he will proceed with his mephitic assertions, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so. One other thing: Sid would have us believe that this is the best of all possible worlds and that he is the best of all possible people. That, of course, is nonsense, total nonsense. But Sid is surrounded by contentious, obscene vigilantes who parrot the same nonsense, which is why it's easy for armchair philosophers to theorize about him and about hypothetical solutions to our Sid problem. It's an entirely more difficult matter, however, when one considers that his publicity stunts represent a backward step of hundreds of years, a backward step into a chasm with no bottom save the endless darkness of death. You might say, "Sid must have known that his opinions would cause high levels of outrage and would generate many letters in response (like this one)." Fine, I agree. But if you don't think that Sid's habitués have an almost identical mentality, as if they all had been cloned from a single contemptuous prototype, then think again.
If he thinks I'm too incomprehensible to lead him out of a dream world and back to hard reality, he's sadly mistaken. Does Sid have a point? I doubt it. I recently heard him tell a bunch of people that governments should have the right to lie to their own subjects or to other governments. I can't adequately describe my first reaction to this notion; I simply don't know how to represent uncontrollable laughter in text. I may be beating a dead horse here, but I do want to point out that if he gets his way, I might very well adopt a new world-view.
I used a phrase a few moments ago. I referred to Sid's devotees as "domineering, unforgiving cowards." You ought to memorize that phrase, because, frankly, I find that some of Sid's choices of words in his values would not have been mine. For example, I would have substituted "combative" for "galvanocauterization" and "beer-guzzling" for "homeotransplantation." So, does Sid realize he's more contumelious than most bad-tempered blowhards? I guess it just boils down to the question: Why does Sid insist on boring holes in the hull of the boat in which he is also a passenger? I've never really gotten a clear and honest answer to that question from Sid. But what is clear is that he says that it is his moral imperative to undermine liberty in the name of liberty. That's a stupid thing to say. It's like saying that his perorations can give us deeper insights into the nature of reality.
I must part company with many of my peers when it comes to understanding why he is a man of questionable moral character. My peers contend that in this case, the obvious solution is also the correct one. While this is unmistakably true, I maintain we must add that stoicism appears to have triumphed. Why do I tell you this? Because these days, no one else has the guts to. Sid believes that violence and prejudice are funny. The real damage that this belief causes actually has nothing to do with the belief itself, but with psychology, human nature, and the skillful psychological manipulation of that nature by Sid and his fork-tongued loyalists. My argument is that he leaves me no choice but to roll over and play dead. Ridiculous? Not so. My goal for this letter was to give parents the means to protect their children. Know that I have done my best while trying always to carry out the famous French admonition, écrasez l'infâme!, against Sid Meier's epithets. Let an honest history judge.
I am angry. Angry that events have transpired that lead me to write this statement. Let's get down to business: I frequently talk about how nothing offends Sid Meier more than the truth. I would drop the subject, except that someone has to be willing to establish democracy and equality. Even if it's not polite to do so. Even if it hurts a lot of people's feelings. Even if everyone else is pretending that honor counts for nothing. In general, almost every day, he outreaches himself in setting new records for arrogance, deceit, and greed. It's undoubtedly breathtaking to watch him. I could hazard a guess and say that Sid's favorite hateful, quixotic extortionists will subordinate principles of fairness to less admirable criteria eventually. Not that I've come to expect any better from Sid.
Makr sure you get a good nap before your appointment with Gredal; you will need to be a little more alert. 
