The Archlich gets his rant on
Jan. 7th, 2011 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yukie((It seems Toronto's local exclusive contingents of white, yuppie/hipster Christians and Atheists are hypocritically snipe fighting about each others' colonialist bus adverts again and making their respective sides wish they'd stop making everyone else look stupid. I, in my migraine-blurred state, just got annoyed by this latest hissy, but hypocrisy really burns Kel'Thuzad's biscuits so I'll turn the entry over to him. he's funnier than me, and more eloquent. He's also something of a cranky old sod. XD -Y.))
All sentient beings, from what I have personally observed, are inclined to be divided to a greater or lesser degree over ideology (the schism between the Blood Elves and High Elves comes to mind), but I find that humans outpace their compatriots by leaps and bounds when it comes to cultivating animosity based upon these divisions. A disagreement is one thing; an ongoing, obnoxious public two-sided tantrum is quite another, and that is ALL your fight has ever been. I am addressing the 'intellectual' side more than I am the 'faithful', but rest assured: rudeness annoys the life out of me regardless of its source. As well, it is the 'intellectuals' who are demonstrating the most hypocrisy in this present case. Since they currently are the noisier faction, they are the ones I shall address first and foremost.
This does not man I am sparing anyone my ire, mind.
As well, I am critiquing the behaviour, not the beliefs/ideology/what-have-you, of any loud individuals mentioned beyond this point.
This ongoing tiff between allegedly-opposing philosophies (don't get me started) is not new, nor is it as important to the fate of humanity at large as the participants so loudly claim it is; I would be happy to leave them to their squabble if they were not so inclined to bring their squabble into others' lives. I would have far more respect for these people who turn their philosophy into a commodity and advertise it so zealously that it would scare a goblin if a single one of them had in him- or herself the presence of backbone and conviction and integrity necessary to own ALL of it - fools and nonsense included. Warts and everything. The Kirin Tor, children, does not pretend that I was never one of its foremost Archmagi. And why should it? Rather than fussing endlessly about and wasting time with endless denials whenever I am mentioned, the other magi of the Tor will admit that I was once one of theirs...and then strive to set a better example than I did. I am but one 'bad apple', yes, but I did grow upon a tree in their orchard, to drive that metaphor into the ground. So it is with any other inclined to spoil the batch.
You must own the blots upon your transcript. To do otherwise is disingenuous at best and downright craven at worst. You must not deny the fact that your ideology, however pure, has been used to do harm. (That would be one thing the Cult of the Damned has on the rest. None of THAT happens, but perhaps a group that strives to makes its transcript nothing but blots is not the best object of comparison.) Do not bother to use the sins of the other side as an excuse for your own, either. 'Tu quoque' is an argument I do not accept as valid. (If any of my students had the audacity to use it in a thesis, he or she would receive an immediate failing grade. Just ask them.) Any ideology, no matter how honourable or compassionate, can be exploited, commercialized, perverted and twisted. Righteousness and good intention is no guard against foolishness. Observe, for example, the Scarlet Crusade - or the Scarlet Onslaught if you prefer. The atrocities committed by that order 'in the name of the greater good' and 'in the name of the Light' are many in number and often quite creative. They claim they must do these things. They claim they have Azeroth's best interests in mind. They claim they are the enlightened ones. Now - do their acts taint the Light itself? No more than a drop of water falling on the moon's reflection causes ripples on the lunar surface. However, those ripples - what we see - affects us. This is what we judge by: what we can observe.
There are those who deeply mistrust the Holy Light's champions on account of the damage done by the Scarlet imbeciles. It is their right to have this mistrust. Howling in their ears about it will not change their minds. Better to say to them "I am sorry that you were treated poorly and suffered thus at the hands of people who claim the same beliefs as me. I will try to prove that not all of us who follow that path are so ignorant and unkind." Then, after that, PROVE YOUR POINT. That would be the part neglected by most everyone who gripes for ages and ages about others' mistrust. If you want the trust of these people, you MUST fight against those who would make hatred the sole face of your philosophy. Prove them wrong! You must become an exemplar of your beliefs. You MUST strive to excise your own ignorance and examine your own actions, most of all! What good does it do to leave your own thoughts unexamined, I ask you? For pity's sakes. You cannot defend your philosophy and claim it to be the more open-minded if you prove yourself through your actions to be as 'open-minded' as that bloody idiot Garithos.
Do not bother to tell me that your ideology and your order is free of ignorance and judgmental nonsense if you cannot stop blaming others' sins on their differences from you. Do not tout yourself as enlightened and then crack tasteless jokes about the diets of Vol'jin's people. Do not describe the acts of a group still persecuted and smeared as primitive with the word 'savagery'. Do not blame the 'inherent violence and cruelty' you claim a philosophy teaches on the culture in which it originated. That same violence and cruelty is present in your own minds as it is present in this culture. The only thing differing is the amount, and any dose of poison will make one ill. Subtle or hidden cruelty is not 'better' than overt. These concepts should not be difficult to grasp, my friends. And yet...
Your sins, 'enlightened intellectualist' children, are the sins you so loudly condemn in others. Proselytization, constant insistence upon your way or the highway, discrimination, closed-mindedness, ignorance, arrogance - in short, the mindset that this culture calls 'colonialist'. You believe yourselves to be saving the primitives from their own minds, as did before you the people you now condemn at the top of your lungs. How hypocritical. How sickeningly typical! You are humans as much as your opponents are, and you make the same human errors. Proselytizing is proselytizing; your philosophy differing from that of the group you're whimpering about does not change the fact that you pound on the podium just as obnoxiously. You'll whinge about how very annoyed and upset you are by those who harp on endlessly about their beliefs, their lifestyle, their philosophy as if it were the only valid means of living...and then you turn round and do the selfsame thing to others. That would be - say it with me now - hypocrisy. That would be the root of my utter lack of respect for you and for your 'opponents'. You do the same things; the only difference is in your inspiration and the flag you fly.
Not a one among you can admit to the mess of your own carrel and you howl about the clutter overtaking your neighbour's. Do not demand that the other side throw its crucible out with the reagents if your experimentation is creating the same bizarre aroma. You were raised within the same culture and with the same teachings as your 'sworn enemies', and you make the same errors. Failing to examine this dooms you to losing badly in your staring contest with the abyss.
Personally, I find the commodification of philosophy to be absurd, and I would rather your respective sides' enormous, juvenile, petty block-lettered posters did not contribute to making the visual landscape that much more choked with dreadful typographic faux-pas and horrid illustrations. Yes, you all annoy me equally. You are as loud as they and they as rude as you. Your self-righteous tantrums are an affront to my eardrums and retinas. Discuss your beliefs without the raised voices and ad-hominem, or be quiet. You are annoying the people around you, you are annoying me, and you are bothering my cat. Stop it.
If you wish for people to look past the sins committed under the banner of your ideology, be an exemplar. Demonstrate the qualities you wish people to see in your philosophy. If you must pound the podium, you are obliged to walk the talk, as it were. The best demonstrator of this, in my opinion, is Highlord Fordring. He is more than allowed to discuss with me the Light's virtues, because he does more than just discuss them. He exemplifies them. (And he doesn't pound podiums.) As well, you will never see him in a snit over the Forgotten Shadow's existence (unlike yourselves and your opponents, both of whom spend an inordinate amount of time wishing the other into oblivion). Hells - had the Scourge kept to itself in Northrend and not endeavoured to crush everyone beneath its heel, I dare say he would hardly have given half a damn about us. That we were sitting so rudely upon his doorstep attacking the people he swore himself to defend was his quarrel with us. I doubt he could possibly have cared less about us had we simply sat about that the roof of the world doing nothing save singing the praises of the Frozen Throne's disgruntled occupant. It was our intention to murder everyone in Azeroth whilst singing these praises that was the problem.
Tirion Fordring is someone whom I will listen to when he says the Scarlet Noun-of-the-Day does not represent or exemplify the true teachings of the Light, or the true spirit of the philosophy. I will listen to him and believe him because he strives to live and demonstrate his own beliefs. He does not do this for fame, or a desire for anything material. He does this out of faith, and out of compassion. The depth of his faith is the reason he sees no need to howl in my ear. You and your opponents, on the other hand, ALL seem to require everyone else under the bloody sun to believe as you to in order to be truly certain of your own beliefs. Do you think that a greater number of adherents makes your philosophy the more valid one? Do you believe that shouting your opponent into silence means you 'win'? That would be playground logic. The immaturity of such a mindset astounds me. You are not harbingers of wisdom. Not a one of you. What you are is overgrown schoolyard bullies. I see in you the same mindset as I do in children who go about pantsing classmates.
If the slightest bit of disagreement with your philosophy offends you deeply, you ought to now back very slowly away from me; I shall offend you more deeply than the Tauren Chieftains' lyrics offend the Silver Covenant.
I am of the strong opinion that you and your 'enemies' ought to be silent until all of you possess the maturity and courage required to engage in respectful discourse with one another. Your raised voices and flailing arms and overuse of capital letters proves nothing to me beyond the fact that I was correct to think you all fools. Your tactics are no different from those of the Scarlets - you would so dearly love to break the backs of your opponents under your heels and terrify them into silence; you believe that this would somehow prove you to be the clever ones, the most right ones, the superior ones. Not even the Scourge stooped to hiding behind 'more righteous and correct thinking'. We never hid behind any damned banner of ideology and we LOVED resistance. We broke others' backs under our heels because Ner'zhul thought that sort of thing was entertaining to watch. We were horrid bastards, but we did not pretend to be righteous folk while being horrid bastards, at least.
If I wanted to listen to the blathering of a complete fool I would make a recording of my own inebriated ramblings, or else go and annoy Wrynn about something or another. Not a one among your side or the other side has any claim to the moral high ground. Not a one of you has the courage to examine your words or actions. Not a one of you is interested in saving a single person or solving a solitary problem. All you desire is to be right. You are so convinced of your own wittiness, so very certain of your more enlightened state... That would be the mindset, children, that made of me an undead seneschal.
Leave your thoughts and actions unexamined at your own risk.
And for pity's sakes, shout at one another over THERE, you're still scaring my cat.
-Kel'Thuzad
All sentient beings, from what I have personally observed, are inclined to be divided to a greater or lesser degree over ideology (the schism between the Blood Elves and High Elves comes to mind), but I find that humans outpace their compatriots by leaps and bounds when it comes to cultivating animosity based upon these divisions. A disagreement is one thing; an ongoing, obnoxious public two-sided tantrum is quite another, and that is ALL your fight has ever been. I am addressing the 'intellectual' side more than I am the 'faithful', but rest assured: rudeness annoys the life out of me regardless of its source. As well, it is the 'intellectuals' who are demonstrating the most hypocrisy in this present case. Since they currently are the noisier faction, they are the ones I shall address first and foremost.
This does not man I am sparing anyone my ire, mind.
As well, I am critiquing the behaviour, not the beliefs/ideology/what-have-you, of any loud individuals mentioned beyond this point.
This ongoing tiff between allegedly-opposing philosophies (don't get me started) is not new, nor is it as important to the fate of humanity at large as the participants so loudly claim it is; I would be happy to leave them to their squabble if they were not so inclined to bring their squabble into others' lives. I would have far more respect for these people who turn their philosophy into a commodity and advertise it so zealously that it would scare a goblin if a single one of them had in him- or herself the presence of backbone and conviction and integrity necessary to own ALL of it - fools and nonsense included. Warts and everything. The Kirin Tor, children, does not pretend that I was never one of its foremost Archmagi. And why should it? Rather than fussing endlessly about and wasting time with endless denials whenever I am mentioned, the other magi of the Tor will admit that I was once one of theirs...and then strive to set a better example than I did. I am but one 'bad apple', yes, but I did grow upon a tree in their orchard, to drive that metaphor into the ground. So it is with any other inclined to spoil the batch.
You must own the blots upon your transcript. To do otherwise is disingenuous at best and downright craven at worst. You must not deny the fact that your ideology, however pure, has been used to do harm. (That would be one thing the Cult of the Damned has on the rest. None of THAT happens, but perhaps a group that strives to makes its transcript nothing but blots is not the best object of comparison.) Do not bother to use the sins of the other side as an excuse for your own, either. 'Tu quoque' is an argument I do not accept as valid. (If any of my students had the audacity to use it in a thesis, he or she would receive an immediate failing grade. Just ask them.) Any ideology, no matter how honourable or compassionate, can be exploited, commercialized, perverted and twisted. Righteousness and good intention is no guard against foolishness. Observe, for example, the Scarlet Crusade - or the Scarlet Onslaught if you prefer. The atrocities committed by that order 'in the name of the greater good' and 'in the name of the Light' are many in number and often quite creative. They claim they must do these things. They claim they have Azeroth's best interests in mind. They claim they are the enlightened ones. Now - do their acts taint the Light itself? No more than a drop of water falling on the moon's reflection causes ripples on the lunar surface. However, those ripples - what we see - affects us. This is what we judge by: what we can observe.
There are those who deeply mistrust the Holy Light's champions on account of the damage done by the Scarlet imbeciles. It is their right to have this mistrust. Howling in their ears about it will not change their minds. Better to say to them "I am sorry that you were treated poorly and suffered thus at the hands of people who claim the same beliefs as me. I will try to prove that not all of us who follow that path are so ignorant and unkind." Then, after that, PROVE YOUR POINT. That would be the part neglected by most everyone who gripes for ages and ages about others' mistrust. If you want the trust of these people, you MUST fight against those who would make hatred the sole face of your philosophy. Prove them wrong! You must become an exemplar of your beliefs. You MUST strive to excise your own ignorance and examine your own actions, most of all! What good does it do to leave your own thoughts unexamined, I ask you? For pity's sakes. You cannot defend your philosophy and claim it to be the more open-minded if you prove yourself through your actions to be as 'open-minded' as that bloody idiot Garithos.
Do not bother to tell me that your ideology and your order is free of ignorance and judgmental nonsense if you cannot stop blaming others' sins on their differences from you. Do not tout yourself as enlightened and then crack tasteless jokes about the diets of Vol'jin's people. Do not describe the acts of a group still persecuted and smeared as primitive with the word 'savagery'. Do not blame the 'inherent violence and cruelty' you claim a philosophy teaches on the culture in which it originated. That same violence and cruelty is present in your own minds as it is present in this culture. The only thing differing is the amount, and any dose of poison will make one ill. Subtle or hidden cruelty is not 'better' than overt. These concepts should not be difficult to grasp, my friends. And yet...
Your sins, 'enlightened intellectualist' children, are the sins you so loudly condemn in others. Proselytization, constant insistence upon your way or the highway, discrimination, closed-mindedness, ignorance, arrogance - in short, the mindset that this culture calls 'colonialist'. You believe yourselves to be saving the primitives from their own minds, as did before you the people you now condemn at the top of your lungs. How hypocritical. How sickeningly typical! You are humans as much as your opponents are, and you make the same human errors. Proselytizing is proselytizing; your philosophy differing from that of the group you're whimpering about does not change the fact that you pound on the podium just as obnoxiously. You'll whinge about how very annoyed and upset you are by those who harp on endlessly about their beliefs, their lifestyle, their philosophy as if it were the only valid means of living...and then you turn round and do the selfsame thing to others. That would be - say it with me now - hypocrisy. That would be the root of my utter lack of respect for you and for your 'opponents'. You do the same things; the only difference is in your inspiration and the flag you fly.
Not a one among you can admit to the mess of your own carrel and you howl about the clutter overtaking your neighbour's. Do not demand that the other side throw its crucible out with the reagents if your experimentation is creating the same bizarre aroma. You were raised within the same culture and with the same teachings as your 'sworn enemies', and you make the same errors. Failing to examine this dooms you to losing badly in your staring contest with the abyss.
Personally, I find the commodification of philosophy to be absurd, and I would rather your respective sides' enormous, juvenile, petty block-lettered posters did not contribute to making the visual landscape that much more choked with dreadful typographic faux-pas and horrid illustrations. Yes, you all annoy me equally. You are as loud as they and they as rude as you. Your self-righteous tantrums are an affront to my eardrums and retinas. Discuss your beliefs without the raised voices and ad-hominem, or be quiet. You are annoying the people around you, you are annoying me, and you are bothering my cat. Stop it.
If you wish for people to look past the sins committed under the banner of your ideology, be an exemplar. Demonstrate the qualities you wish people to see in your philosophy. If you must pound the podium, you are obliged to walk the talk, as it were. The best demonstrator of this, in my opinion, is Highlord Fordring. He is more than allowed to discuss with me the Light's virtues, because he does more than just discuss them. He exemplifies them. (And he doesn't pound podiums.) As well, you will never see him in a snit over the Forgotten Shadow's existence (unlike yourselves and your opponents, both of whom spend an inordinate amount of time wishing the other into oblivion). Hells - had the Scourge kept to itself in Northrend and not endeavoured to crush everyone beneath its heel, I dare say he would hardly have given half a damn about us. That we were sitting so rudely upon his doorstep attacking the people he swore himself to defend was his quarrel with us. I doubt he could possibly have cared less about us had we simply sat about that the roof of the world doing nothing save singing the praises of the Frozen Throne's disgruntled occupant. It was our intention to murder everyone in Azeroth whilst singing these praises that was the problem.
Tirion Fordring is someone whom I will listen to when he says the Scarlet Noun-of-the-Day does not represent or exemplify the true teachings of the Light, or the true spirit of the philosophy. I will listen to him and believe him because he strives to live and demonstrate his own beliefs. He does not do this for fame, or a desire for anything material. He does this out of faith, and out of compassion. The depth of his faith is the reason he sees no need to howl in my ear. You and your opponents, on the other hand, ALL seem to require everyone else under the bloody sun to believe as you to in order to be truly certain of your own beliefs. Do you think that a greater number of adherents makes your philosophy the more valid one? Do you believe that shouting your opponent into silence means you 'win'? That would be playground logic. The immaturity of such a mindset astounds me. You are not harbingers of wisdom. Not a one of you. What you are is overgrown schoolyard bullies. I see in you the same mindset as I do in children who go about pantsing classmates.
If the slightest bit of disagreement with your philosophy offends you deeply, you ought to now back very slowly away from me; I shall offend you more deeply than the Tauren Chieftains' lyrics offend the Silver Covenant.
I am of the strong opinion that you and your 'enemies' ought to be silent until all of you possess the maturity and courage required to engage in respectful discourse with one another. Your raised voices and flailing arms and overuse of capital letters proves nothing to me beyond the fact that I was correct to think you all fools. Your tactics are no different from those of the Scarlets - you would so dearly love to break the backs of your opponents under your heels and terrify them into silence; you believe that this would somehow prove you to be the clever ones, the most right ones, the superior ones. Not even the Scourge stooped to hiding behind 'more righteous and correct thinking'. We never hid behind any damned banner of ideology and we LOVED resistance. We broke others' backs under our heels because Ner'zhul thought that sort of thing was entertaining to watch. We were horrid bastards, but we did not pretend to be righteous folk while being horrid bastards, at least.
If I wanted to listen to the blathering of a complete fool I would make a recording of my own inebriated ramblings, or else go and annoy Wrynn about something or another. Not a one among your side or the other side has any claim to the moral high ground. Not a one of you has the courage to examine your words or actions. Not a one of you is interested in saving a single person or solving a solitary problem. All you desire is to be right. You are so convinced of your own wittiness, so very certain of your more enlightened state... That would be the mindset, children, that made of me an undead seneschal.
Leave your thoughts and actions unexamined at your own risk.
And for pity's sakes, shout at one another over THERE, you're still scaring my cat.
-Kel'Thuzad
