A strange thing happened. I couldn't get internet in my room on my custom pc (Laptop and phone works fine) and I wound up buying a 25ft long usb cord so I can put the adapter in a room where I can get the internet, but now somehow the adapter is stiing in my room and I can get on the internet......and its speed is fine.

Well, he is. He's generally a ridiculously ego-centric megalomanic shithead that probably even a mother wouldn't be able to love but he's being an exttra cunt towards me. He's condescending, insulting and whatnot, yesterday he once again provoked me in a manner where I was moments away from getting up and breaking a chair on his head. He has reached a new low as we got a new guy recently, a really bright and good guy I'm perfectly getting along with and who respects me both professionally and as a person and the fucktard is trying to compromise me, to make me look stupid and incompetent in front of the guy. The idiot does this stuff whenever I'm accidentally revealing him to be a brainless fuck, usually when he's specifically asking for a second opinion on a matter and I'm giving him solid input which is too complicated for him to understand but everyone else in our department instantly gets and supports. Basically it's some sort of defense mechanism that is deseperately trying to protect his massive ego and makes him launch ad hominem attacks against me for absolutely ridiculous reasons, in situations where I'm literally trying to help him.
Shit. I hope you will be able to work these things out without lawyers although I know how unlikely that is in these situations.

I don't understand why it's so hard for some people to be civil and not act like a fucking arsehole. I'm speaking generally, but in my experience this is especially true on multiplayer games and programming forums. I'd love to find just one server for any game that isn't populated by fucking dicks. Jesus. It's like there is a whole bunch of people out there that jump on the internet and act like pricks because hiding behind a screen and being an arsehole is the only way they can feel good about themselves. I was browsing an x86 assembly programming board today and a novice posted some perfectly valid questions about why his program wasn't working and all he got was ridicule (from a moderator no less).

Sometimes I just want to shut myself away. I just don't have the energy to deal with people.

Thanks, I appreciate the thought. I have my first consult next week and am hoping we can at least do mediation rather than having to go the route of litigation.

Not holding my breath, but hoping! :)



I forget which server it was, but there was a WOW pvp server that at one point (2008ish?) had seriously like 10,000 horde and 100 alliance. It was brutal out in the world - though that was part of the fun - but it did really make for some pretty strong camaraderie.

But yeah, I've dialed my web presence back a lot. I rarely play MMOs and mostly solo now when I do and avoid the boards. Even for non-gaming stuff a lot of boards are either brutally mean or political. While there is the occasional burst of bad will, part of why I frequent here is that it's generally less so.

Even though we're all pretty anonymous, there is still a sense of identity at least for the regulars and relatively few people who troll just to be awful.

If you smash a chair over his head, he will win and you will lose, unfortunately.

You should stop helping him and just watch him closely. Then every time he fucks up, record it in a video or take a pic of it with your smart phone. And on top of that, every time he is being an asshole towards you, record it in a video or take pics. You should also be extremely nice to the guy at all times. What this will do is make him try harder to piss you off and in the process, he might do something really stupid(something employees are not supposed to do or something illegal) just to get under your skin. Then hopefully he will do something really stupid just to make you angry and then you record that or take a pic of it. Then after you have a massive amount of evidence that proves he is a shitty worker, an asshole and someone who does stupid shit during work, show it to the boss. I believe, this guy's greatest enemy is himself.

It's been a shit week. Shit is hot, there's people shooting shit up at shit churches. Shitty flags are getting shit on, shitty shit is getting banned from shitty companies that hire shitty workers. And on top of all that other shit, I'm sensing shit winds a' comin'. Goddamn shitty winds comin' like a shit blizzard, raining shit down on all our shitty heads.

Mr Lahey, how do we deal with the shit winds? Shit if I know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R8At-Qno_o

I know.

What the hell, dude.

What are you trying to say???
Time to stock up on febreze.

There hasn't been a shit-spray that could possibly remove this shit-stain caused by the endless shit-icane that engulfs us all.

Three terror attacks on the news today: in France a factory boss was beheaded, in Tunesia 37 tourists where shot dead on a beach and in Kuwait someone blew himself up taking 27 fellow muslims with him.

What in the name of Darwin is it that makes people DO such things?

Me not being to able to sleep because of it is very minor compare to the 65 destroyed lives and 65 times the lives of friends, families and colleagues of all those people that are put into severe grief - and for what? For fucks sake?

I will whine about outsourcing work...Think about all the people who lost their jobs to that. Think about all the people who were unlucky enough to get into a trap where you get just a bit more but not nearly enough to move forward in your life :P You do the same job like people in the providers country but you get paid 3/4 times less.

Very tired today, the news of the terror attacks and the question WHY kept me restless till 6 o'clock in the morning before I finally succumbed to my tiredness and slept.

*edit: my mind fails to understand any choice of behaviour that isn't grounded in rationality or morals. The golden rule, the thought "how would I myself liked to be treated by others" should be the rule-stick for any action. I am sure the terrorists wouldn't wan't to be beheaded or shot or blown up, so WHY WOULD THEY DO SO TO OTHERS?

I don't understand!@!@!

I understand how you must be feeling. Maybe the best way to cope with this situation is to accept that you can't change what happened but that you can change what will happen.

What I am going to say may be a bit harsh but I think it has to be said.
Every day countless of lives are destroyed and most people accept that. The same people are shocked if a person is killed in an unexpected assault. This is an emotional reaction as opposed to a rational reaction. Keep in mind that such an emotional reaction can be used to make the situation even worse.
A rational reaction would be starting to do something against (statistically) predictable deaths. There are far more people who die in traffic accidents or who commit suicide for example. There is a lot you can do about traffic accidents for example and I think it is not so hard thinking of a way to keep a person from committing suicide.

If you feel as bad as you say about the killings I urge you to do something about other deaths. There simply is no point in feeling bad or afraid about what happened if you aren't willing to change something.

1) A first approach would be Yasmina Khadra's novels. Check if "Les agneaux du seigneur" is translated in english or dutch. It's a nice chronicle of religious radicalisation in an algerian village, showing how personal frustrations and bitternes can be lead to religious escapism and channeling of despair into heineous self-righteous violence.

2) The kantian imperative can easily be trumped by grand ideology, be it religion, capitalism, communism, nationalism, ethnicism, etc. The Greater Good, the Causes That Are Beyond Individuals seem to justify atrocities. Propaganda and manipulation can pretty quickly shift people's values into murderous ones, and the 20th century if full of exemples of that. The internet, by the way, is particularly good at locking people into little cyber-communities where radicalizing discourses can be thoroughly hammered into "common sense".

3) Violence is part of many people's fantasies, inhibited by collective morals. And many people are just overjoyced when a different moral system (full with its own righteous legitimating logic) allows them to indulge in it, at various levels (warmongering, capital punishment, destructive riots, and other forms of "oh these are the bad guys therefore we are allowed to ? cool"). Islamist radicalism is a door on a different world, where having "an epic adventure" is possible and "beheading baddies" becomes okay, whether these "baddies" are designated to you or you designate them to your group.

There's always a series of elements, both "collective" and "individual", that enable such behaviour. They are not historically rare, even though it takes various forms through the ages and contexts. Islamism as a geopolitical phenomenon is the early 21st century's nazism, and is particularly spectacular as spectacle is a deliberate element of it. But its psychological enablers are not necessarily much different from, say, those of the golden dawn killers who roam the streets of Athens with much less publicity. Human life devaluation is easy to achieve, and our own politicians are not really above it either (although they offer us nice proxies and euphemisms to feel good about it).

I think fascism would be a more fitting word.