WoW, Glenn Beck, and Context

So last night a few things pissed me off in World of Warcraft and, as always, Glenn Beck said idiotic things on his show. This morning I've tried to mix these two things together to, in a manner similar to Voltron, form a more significant and powerful rant than the two piddly rants I could form using either part. After grappling with this for a while, though, I realized that no one pays me to write these things and I'm not beholden to anyone but myself in writing them. So today I'm going to rant about some things which piss me off and if you don't like it then you can write your own little structured, organized, engaging rant.

Show me your Stats!
You know how in Pokémon there are a plethora of hidden stats which drastically influence gameplay? You know how one has to inductively guess at them to maximize one's Rattatta? Well, World of Warcraft has that same enraging problem. Unlike Pokémon, however, in World of Warcraft one may install addons which display these hidden stats and so allow a player to better understand their class. While most Pokémon players would give their left bidoof to see these hidden, useful, meaningful stats many World of Warcraft players obstinately refuse to allow their self access to them.

And fuck-all if I can understand why.

Omen is an addon which displays a user's threat. Threat is, generally speaking, what determines whether or not a mob tries to beat the living shit out of you. So, seeing one's threat would be useful, right? Well, last night when I suggested to some people that they install Omen they got pissy and said that if an addon is required then the game itself is somehow flawed.

Which, if you didn't notice, completely misses the fucking point. When discussing addons we are not critiquing the game itself. We're talking about gaining access to hidden stats which influence gameplay; we're talking about learning.

You know how Disgaea was awesome because it displayed everything? Do you remember how great it was to be able to see pages of stats regarding damage, character abilities, past accomplishments, etc.? Well, addons basically do that; addons transform World of Warcraft from Pokémon into Disgaea.

And hell if I can understand why someone would choose to play the Pokémon version of WoW over the Disgaea version of WoW.

Glenn Beck vs. Academia
I really like it when a Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly take issue with academia and spew forth puny little tirades about how liberal academics are indoctrinating our children with "the views of the terrorists".

Think about it. On one side you have professors who spend their lives reading, writing, teaching, and learning who attempt to educate young adults and instill in them a sense of curiosity and open-mindedness. On the other side you have recovering alcoholic Glenn Beck. That right there, to me, ends the debate.

Last night Glenn Beck was upset. Upset because liberal academics are on the side of the terrorists. Liberal Academics do not want us to indiscriminately bomb brown people as a result of our being terrified by something that happened seven years ago. Liberal Academics want us to treat captured terrorists well, to maintain a sense of decency and not stoop to their level. Liberal Academics want their students to be aware of the world in which they live and understand nuance.

And, sure, professors are human and make mistakes. Professors are not infallible. But it still seems foolish to advocate Glenn Beckian ignorance and terror over, say, nuance and understanding.

What confuses me the most, though, is how inharmonious these views are.

Liberal academics, to use Glenn's term, want the policies of the United States to be subject to the ideals to which we as a nation supposedly cling. Liberal academics do not want to torture people because torture is bad; we have defined it to be such. Liberal academics want the policy of the United States to be subject to rules which are in accord with ideals.

People like Glenn Beck, though, want that same thing. Only the ideals to which Glenn Becks cling are more focused on men fucking other men and women being homemakers.

Each group want to subject their self to ideals. But what they disagree on are the ideals to which they must be subject. One thinks we must uphold our ideal of foreign policy but may release our ideal of heterosexual marriage. One thinks we must release our ideal of foreign policy but must uphold our ideal of heterosexual marriage.

And both seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they're each making the exact same arguments. They're just using different nouns.

Bringing it together
What I wanted to do was combine these rants to show how context matters, how context is basically the thing from which all others operate. A proper understanding of context would allow Glenn Beck and Liberal Academics to agree. A proper understanding of context might spur far more WoW players to install addons.

The problem is that we have different views of these contexts. There is a context in which torture is good and a context in which torture is bad. There is a context in which homosexuality is good and a context in which homosexuality is bad. There is a context in which Disgaea is better than Pokémon just as there is a context in which Pokémon is better than Disgaea.

Our job as human beings constantly subject to the human condition is to assess these context, to forever effort towards understanding them. It does not behoove us to pick a context and stop, to become entrenched in our own self-supported Dogma. We need to question ourselves and rethink what we are doing. We need to accept contexts for what they are and so engage them in an effort to better ourselves. We need to be aware of ourselves and learn.

And we really need to stop being dipshits and take care of our puppies rather than treat them as pieces of furniture with which we occasionally play fetch.