Homestead mailing list

["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

Bill, took you, what?, six posts to get that out?

The reason why your post was moronic is an objective one:  instead of 
addressing any one of the ideas in the post, you ignored them all and made a 
direct 'ad hominem' attack.   If you had addressed any of the issues being 
discussed in the thread: health, overweight, socialism, drug use, ... any of 
them, then it would have been just another post with which some would agree 
and some would disagree and most would not give it a passing thought. 
Instead of that you resort to sort of slack-jawed drooling blather as the 
antagonist in Cyrano de Bergerac when invited to comment on Cyrano all he 
could come up with is "Sir, you have a large nose."

So to recap, in case you got lost in all that, if you are have anything to 
add to, challange, contrdict, refine, etc. what I posted, it's just another 
post.  When all you have to say is "James, you are a bad person" ... that's 
moronic.

As to:
> As I recall you called every other person

This list, a good many years ago now, used to be nearly half posts about 
something directly focussing on homesteading.  There were still the 
political and religious jibes, most of it good natured, and most of it in 
the end found its way back to some homestead related topic.  Then the list 
became dominated by a curious few people who were struggling with various 
non-homesteading-related problems in their lives:  personal, health, mental, 
and most of them self-induced at that.  The threads became dominated not by 
homesteading per se, but rather by 'being overweight and on drugs and 
homesteading', 'having serious financial problems [repeatedly] and 
homesteading', 'making horrible personal choices and homesteading', and 
'having a broken marriage and family and homesteading.'   It isn't that 
those things don't enter into SOME people's homesteading experience, it's 
that it became the list PC that if you posted anything that did not contain 
some deference to the bad choices the whiners had made it was 'telling them 
what to do.'  If you dared post any observation about your own homestead or 
homesteading in general that contained any reference to being in GOOD 
health, or making GOOD choices, or being finacially stable, or was a 
function of a good marriage and sound family, it was decried as "childish 
howlings"  and worst.   Homestead discussions ground to a halt because no 
one dared post anything that did not include taking drugs, going through a 
divorce, bankrupting their farm, having half a dozen rare diseases, or being 
half again over over a healthy weight.

Then the whiners decided to migrate.  Most ended up on the "Robinson's 
Loosers"
list where the practice is to mix in every sort of bad malady and bad 
decision with equal parts of homesteading and view that as the norm.  It's a 
very entertaining list, there's enough material there for a great book or at 
least a series of essays on how to lose the farm.

But the thing is, those whiners are gone.  Or at least they don't post any 
more.  And I and those like me are still here.  And although the list is a 
bit involved in politics and partisanism, in main it has been conducted with 
civility (except, of course, your post, Bill).  In the past I was irritated 
by the amount of political crap that went one but I've had to change my mind 
about that.  The thing is, whereas any actual homestead discussions were 
quelled when the list was dominated by a culture of whining, now that it is 
dominated by a culture of politics, there are some very good homestead 
thread going on.  Some very good topics have spun off of the political and 
even the religious threads.  None ever came from the 'I'm a fat prescription 
drug adict' threads.

But another interesting bit remains hanging:  why did a reference to the 
expectations under socialism of overweight people taking too many drugs send 
a round down your smokesack?  Why did it push your buttons so cleanly that 
you came out of left field with personal comments stemming from a discussion 
of socialism?  Hit a little too close to home, did it?

It's true I've posted some outlandish opinions on this list (most everyone 
has).  Yet I've never had anyone get their hackles up over an opinion, not 
even once.  What gets their hackles up is when the truth lands a little too 
close to home.  That's the thing about truth, it isn't very popular.

It's all been instructive.  When we were planning on building a house, we 
explored the idea of building a log house.  Even cut and hauled the logs. 
Then, as in every other aspect of homesteading, we found out as much as we 
could before we committed any more time and resources.  We visited every log 
house to which we could wrangle and invitation (and some we couldn't!).  We 
had heard tht they were not what they were cracked up to be unless you 
literally built a whole studded and insulated house within the house.   The 
log house builders fell into three types:  1)  Those who had a bad 
experience and there was nothing good to be said about the $&$^#^% log 
houses.   2)  Those who would not entertain, nor allow you to entertain, 
that there was one thing, one tiny thing, wrong with a log house.  After all 
they had spent many tens of thousands of dollars on their house and they 
were not going to allow that they might have made a mistake.  The epitome of 
this was the log home owner who became very defensive and testy at the 
notion that log houses built with the type of construction as his tended to 
be cold ... he derided the notion to some length pulling the two sweaters 
closer and putting another log on the fire.   3) The third type was the only 
useful type.  To our inquiries they's sigh an bit then say "Well, I can tell 
you the advantages of a log house but first you better let me show you some 
things here, it's not all good news."   The success we've had at 
homesteading is because of this last type of paradigm.  In any project or 
task we evaluate it with the bias that we've done something wrong somewhere. 
What did we DO that was not right, what did we think or believe that did not 
stand the test?  This has afforded a slow (and sometimes painfiul) but 
steady improvement.

Whiners are more like our man with the two sweaters, long johns, sweat shirt 
and parka throwing logs on the fire and vehemently denying that his house 
was cold.  Everything is either unavoidable circumstances or else it is 
someone else's fault ... and at any rate, how dare you bring thermometer 
with you or notice that your breath is condensing in my living room!

The lesson here is that discussions toward exploration and improvement do 
not mix with discusssions based on whining.  They are for two different 
purposes.  I really think that the homestead portion of this list has once 
again turned toward exploration.  And that, Bill, is what I mean by 'we'.

James