Loser's Guide to Life
I just put that rubric there because I saw it on some gaming site and was strangely moved by its magniloquence, its unanswerably righteous no-nonsense tone.
But as an observer of loserdom, I found this post by Sara Robinson at Orcinus to be a good description of the whole pathetic, double-or-nothing manner of someone who is getting into a pickle and won't back out, something the author refers to in an update as an “authoritarian logic trap”.
Robinson writes, “These people are lifelong right-wing authoritarians (RWAs) because they believe that a world without strong authority enforcing black-and-white rules is a world in which chaos must reign.” That's kind of interesting, because a blind insistance on black and white rules is surely the easiest way to foster chaos, if that's something you'd like to do. You can wreck just about anything by forcing it to be governed by simple rules. It's a good way to ruin your health, bust your computer, alienate your friends, etc.
She ends on a fairly cheerful note:
The good news is this: The stranger it gets, the closer we are to done. This is how Great Awakenings end in America -- with the last handful of remaining True Believers yelling ever-crazier things on street corners, while the sane and sober citizens sidestep them on their way to doing the real work of the country.
