From 2004 to 2009, Diane decided to jump into electoral politics after hibernating for 20 years. She thought she could help “change the party from within”, but discovered that was a bunch of hokum. She tried media reform and dove into blogging and even had a weekly local radio show called first “Citizens’ Voice” and then “Democracy’s Edge”. She interviewed authors like Stephen Kinzer, NY Times political journalist, and Matt Taibbi of “Rolling Stone”.
“To err is human. To cover it up is weasel.” (Scott Adams).
And so, the author and cartoonist, Scott Adams lays out his explanation of how things are in our workaday world. In his book “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel: A Guide to Outwitting Your Boss, Your Coworkers, and the Other Pants-Wearing Ferrets in Your life” written way back in 2002, Adams explores “The Weasel Zone”. This is the “gigantic grey area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. And “it’s where most of life happens.”
He adds, “Sometimes also known as Weaselville, Weaseltown, the Way of the Weasel, Weaselopolis, Weaselburg, and Redmond.” [reference to where Microsoft is headquartered].
“In the Weasel Zone everything is misleading, but not exactly a lie. There’s a subtle difference. When you lie, you hope to fool someone. But when you’re being a weasel, everyone is aware that you’re a manipulative, scheming, misleading sociopath.”
When the weasel knows that you know he’s weaseling, Adams feels it is a form of honesty–“a weasel form”. Examples that he gives are that “No one believes the engineer that says he will explain things briefly. No one believes a contractor that says the job will be done in a week… No one believes a politician who says that large contributions don’t influence his decisions.”
Political writers have called this behavior in Washington, Japanese Kabuki theater signifying a lot of bluff and bluster but it’s all staged. Around 2008, the word kayfabe popped up which is a term for the unspoken art of fakery in pro-wrestling.
A therapist friend recommended a book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Tavris and Aronson. I read a couple chapters and then skimmed through the rest. The premise in “Mistakes” is that people use a lot of self-justification to defend bad decisions or hurtful behavior. Another phrase for this is “cognitive dissonance”.
But Scott Adams’ book is much more fun than the Tavris and Aronson book. He doesn’t pussy foot around. Plus, it’s got cartoons
I don’t think those guys are Jungians. The physician, Carl Jung, saw that people were different as did many physicians like Hippocrates. It was a simple as that. People different from me aren’t bad, they are just different. People are born with a certain kind of hardware, he reasoned. They are maybe a MacOS or Microsoft Windows or some kind of Linux. We are born with preferences in the way we take in information, how we make decisions based on that information and where we get our energy from i.e the outside world of people and places or by being alone with oneself. As we grow up our family, friends and work act like software. They enhance or inhibit our growth as a unique human. Jung recommended working on our own strengths, our preferences until well into our twenties. Then we should try to get in other people’s shoes and try to understand them from their point of view. He called that individuation. I call it growing up.
For the record, Adams is a critic of the Jungian psychological test known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. “The idea is that people can be categorized by personality type and you can work with them better if you take that into account. Okay, I buy that. My quibble with the theory is that if you aren’t bright enough to know that people have different personalities, you’re asking a lot of the Myers-Briggs training to get you over the hump. My second quibble is that their personality categories don’t include weasel, moron, or flaming butt-hole. I don’t know about you, but I rarely have problems with any other type of personality.”
This is exactly what my rancher husband says every time I talk about someone that displays no empathy. I try to explain it by personality type or Asperger’s. Rancher will say, “He’s just a”butt-hole”. But rancher theory breaks down when his own friend displays butt-holeness. “Oh, he means well,” or “he’s a good guy”. See that’s what we hear every day on the news about politicians. “He has good intentions, I’m sure”. Really? Really? Well that gets into defending your tribe or being a particular male way of looking at friendship. And that’s another essay.
So, this is where I’m supposed to come up with some uplifting idea or advice. I learned this from Scott Adams too. Adams advice is to embrace the inevitable and go weasel. (He may be winking a bit with this advice.) But I’m one of those who is still part of the resistance. So here goes my uplifting advice: living in Weaseltown works for most people. Again, to err is human, but to cover up the mistake is weasel. They go with the flow. They talk themselves into a peaceful conformity. But for we few, we happy few who feel exhilarated by using curiosity and self-examination to discover the man behind the curtain, it’s time to put on our flippers and goggles because we need to get into that river once again and start swimming upstream as difficult as that may be. But we could also channel the Scott Adams of his book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter”” and try to persuade the others that the non weasel way might be the best way to get you where you’re going.
(This was originally published in 2010 and I think it’s time for re publishing it. With all the hubbub and disagreement surrounding the film “American Sniper”, we should try not to fling around the word “treason” for people who disagree with you. I heard about Christine Shupp at our watering hole, The Grand from a neighbor.)
So you are a little girl in grammar school in 1917. Your name is Christine Shupp. You related to a neighbor here in Montana that as a child you were forced every morning after the pledge of allegiance to the flag to kneel down on the floor and kiss the flag. It is because you were German. And say you are a rancher in Rosebud County, Montana and you call WWI “a millionaire’s war”. Whamo, you are dragged off by neighbors to jail. You’re in a saloon and call war time food regulations “a big joke” and you are sentenced to from 7 to 20 years. http://www.seditionproject.net/index.html
Montana played a huge part in suppressing free speech during WWI. In light of all the noise about Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and Joe Lieberman’s “upgrading” The Espionage Act of 1917, it ‘s probably a good idea to take a look backwards to the Montana Council of Defense. (Yes, President Obama and MSNBC, it’s a good idea to look backwards because leaning forwards can more often than not have you falling on your face.)
Historian K. Ross Toole wrote a chapter called “The Inquisition” in his book “Twentieth Century Montana: A State of Extremes” about a very dark time in Montana’s history. At the beginning of WW I, Woodrow Wilson formed a National Council of Defense and asked each state and each county in the state to help with war propaganda, helping in recruitment of troops, and getting people to buy Liberty Bonds. The Montana Council of Defense went whole hog into this endeavor and was especially keen on finding “slackers” and “draft dodgers”. The Governor of Montana, Sam Stewart called a special session of the legislature in part to make the Montana Council of Defense a legal body with funding by the state. The legislature also passed the Sedition Act and the Criminal Syndicalism Act, which the federal government would use as a model for the federal Sedition Act which was an amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917. This act was probably one of the harshest anti-speech laws ever passed in the United States. Continue reading →
Most of us at one time or another experience a cooperative organization as opposed to one of hierarchy. In smaller cities especially in rural America there are food cooperatives and banking cooperatives. There are also insurance cooperatives. That’s how “insurance” started hundreds of years ago amongst merchants who sailed the seas and had to worry about shipwrecks. Farmers would lend each other seed if one’s own crop was destroyed. They pooled their machines. Continue reading →
Who does the rain belong to?
Is it the lord or is it thee?
Who does the mist belong to?
Is it the master or the tree?
Whoever owns the tree and plain,
Will own the water and the rain.
The rain should belong to all of life
And not the owner and his wife.
This morning I was discussing rich people with my husband; specifically the rich who own and race horses. My husband likes to bet on the ponies. A few times a year I join him in the action. Yesterday was “The Breeders’ Cup” where rich people bring their best horses from all over the world to try and win gobs of money and get lots of prestige in a win or two. One rich guy rented a whole 737 to transport just one horse. This in the same week the satraps in Congress refused to extend the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program of 2009 aka food stamps for hungry people.
In yesterday’s comments there was a link to a video called “The Four Horseman”. In it a scholar mentions that one of the marks of the end of empire is the raising up of the chef to celebrity status. That happened in the Roman empire. And yesterday, as I watched chef Bobby Flay interviewed about his race horse, I commented that the end might really be nigh. I like Bobby Flay, by the way, and use a lot of his recipes. He’s really good at what he does and came from the working class, so I’d rather see him with a fancy schmancy horse than some rich fracking heiress. But the whole bread and circus aspect of it coupled with poor folks betting in the hopes of sitting in the box seats is just too much for me to enjoy the day. Continue reading →
Is there revolution in the air? Russell Brand is talking about it. Yves Smith at “Naked Capitalism” asks if it’s time to look at alternatives to capitalism. She cites Brand’s writings and recent essays by Ian Welsh as examples of whiffs of revolutionary expressions.
Where to start? I am reminded of one of Gary Larson’s great cow cartoon entitled “Cow Poetry” in which the beatnik cow laments the confines of the electric fence.
The distant hills call to me. Their rolling waves seduce my heart. Oh, how I want to graze in their lush valleys. Oh, how I want to run down their green slopes. Alas, I cannot. Damn the electric fence! Damn the electric fence!
Don’t be afraid of the electric fence. Roam free on the free range.
Notes: Russell Brand doesn’t vote. He never has. It took me awhile to get to that place, but I wrote about it last year in “Power to the Apathetic”. And as Brand points out, it’s not apathy but more like righteous indignation and not wanting to be complicit in the wrong doing of the corrupt system.
This afternoon I’m starting my next series called “Ruminating with the Ruminants: Conversations with the Cows.” I’ve been chewing my cud for the last 4 weeks on the notion of charity and philanthropy.
I’ve been going to various summer fundraisers and appreciation picnics. Here in beautiful Big Sky country with its rivers running through it, the summer residents have arrived. Summer is the perfect time for community groups to invite these people to partake in the community by giving them an opportunity to rub elbows with the locals and to contribute monetarily to the various non-profits that vie for scarce dollars in a county that has only 3500 people in it and is the size of the state of Rhode Island.
I often sigh a lot when I’m eating my plate full of food at these affairs. By and large, the people that run these organizations and those that sit on their boards are dedicated and goodhearted folks. The reason that I sigh is that I wish we didn’t need these charities. I wish everyone made a living wage so we didn’t have to help people get decent food to eat. I wish everyone made a decent living with short work hours and work weeks so that they could spend time with their kids instead of having after school volunteers take care of them. If we had free college education, we wouldn’t need to have fundraisers for scholarships or to buy a kid a tuba. If we banned chemicals and other crap from our crops and our cows, we wouldn’t need as many cancer care groups. If we really embraced community, we would take care of our retirees and respect their wisdom and reward their work years with decent pensions. In a my wishful world, everybody would be at the picnic because everything would be done in mutual support of each other. There would be no classes of the haves and have nots.
Might be a good idea to have a Weasology Handbook. To his credit Today Chris Hayes on his show “UP” signaled a problem with the words “high quality” as in “high quality charter schools” after one of his guests, Darrell Bradford of something called “Better Education For Kids” praised some charters in Chicago. Yeh, of course high quality charter schools are just great, he laughed. He was right to warn us about this phrase. But he let the phrase “high quality pre-school education” be defined by his guests without analysis. As defined by most of his guests this morning, high quality pre-school education was about learning…get this…”persistence, “discipline” and my favorite, “finishing things.” The professor (and to my chagrin a woman) also emphasized how spongy little brains are at 4 years old. Ugh. Continue reading →
This is a good site for information on the U.S. Post Office. So is this one at On the Commons that gives a great history. Surely this is an issue that should unite all Americans and even those of the two warring tribes, the Democrats and Republicans.
This was a very good blog even though I disagreed with some, well OK a lot, of its perspectives. Contributors like Gregg Smith and Dave Budge kept things interesting. And Rob Natelson perspective as a constitutional scholar was much appreciated. He did a lot of work. They are closing down the blog. There is a lot of that going around.
As a friend recently said, this is a time for more action and less words, words, words. But I am grateful to those hardy souls who can take a lot of the noise out there and help us connect the dots and in so doing connect with each other again without interference from our feudal lords and their lackeys.
Weaseltown -An Homage to Scott Adams (Written in 2013 and revised 2026)
“To err is human. To cover it up is weasel.” (Scott Adams).
And so, the author and cartoonist, Scott Adams lays out his explanation of how things are in our workaday world. In his book “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel: A Guide to Outwitting Your Boss, Your Coworkers, and the Other Pants-Wearing Ferrets in Your life” written way back in 2002, Adams explores “The Weasel Zone”. This is the “gigantic grey area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. And “it’s where most of life happens.”
He adds, “Sometimes also known as Weaselville, Weaseltown, the Way of the Weasel, Weaselopolis, Weaselburg, and Redmond.” [reference to where Microsoft is headquartered].
“In the Weasel Zone everything is misleading, but not exactly a lie. There’s a subtle difference. When you lie, you hope to fool someone. But when you’re being a weasel, everyone is aware that you’re a manipulative, scheming, misleading sociopath.”
When the weasel knows that you know he’s weaseling, Adams feels it is a form of honesty–“a weasel form”. Examples that he gives are that “No one believes the engineer that says he will explain things briefly. No one believes a contractor that says the job will be done in a week… No one believes a politician who says that large contributions don’t influence his decisions.”
Political writers have called this behavior in Washington, Japanese Kabuki theater signifying a lot of bluff and bluster but it’s all staged. Around 2008, the word kayfabe popped up which is a term for the unspoken art of fakery in pro-wrestling.
A therapist friend recommended a book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Tavris and Aronson. I read a couple chapters and then skimmed through the rest. The premise in “Mistakes” is that people use a lot of self-justification to defend bad decisions or hurtful behavior. Another phrase for this is “cognitive dissonance”.
But Scott Adams’ book is much more fun than the Tavris and Aronson book. He doesn’t pussy foot around. Plus, it’s got cartoons
I don’t think those guys are Jungians. The physician, Carl Jung, saw that people were different as did many physicians like Hippocrates. It was a simple as that. People different from me aren’t bad, they are just different. People are born with a certain kind of hardware, he reasoned. They are maybe a MacOS or Microsoft Windows or some kind of Linux. We are born with preferences in the way we take in information, how we make decisions based on that information and where we get our energy from i.e the outside world of people and places or by being alone with oneself. As we grow up our family, friends and work act like software. They enhance or inhibit our growth as a unique human. Jung recommended working on our own strengths, our preferences until well into our twenties. Then we should try to get in other people’s shoes and try to understand them from their point of view. He called that individuation. I call it growing up.
For the record, Adams is a critic of the Jungian psychological test known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. “The idea is that people can be categorized by personality type and you can work with them better if you take that into account. Okay, I buy that. My quibble with the theory is that if you aren’t bright enough to know that people have different personalities, you’re asking a lot of the Myers-Briggs training to get you over the hump. My second quibble is that their personality categories don’t include weasel, moron, or flaming butt-hole. I don’t know about you, but I rarely have problems with any other type of personality.”
This is exactly what my rancher husband says every time I talk about someone that displays no empathy. I try to explain it by personality type or Asperger’s. Rancher will say, “He’s just a”butt-hole”. But rancher theory breaks down when his own friend displays butt-holeness. “Oh, he means well,” or “he’s a good guy”. See that’s what we hear every day on the news about politicians. “He has good intentions, I’m sure”. Really? Really? Well that gets into defending your tribe or being a particular male way of looking at friendship. And that’s another essay.
So, this is where I’m supposed to come up with some uplifting idea or advice. I learned this from Scott Adams too. Adams advice is to embrace the inevitable and go weasel. (He may be winking a bit with this advice.) But I’m one of those who is still part of the resistance. So here goes my uplifting advice: living in Weaseltown works for most people. Again, to err is human, but to cover up the mistake is weasel. They go with the flow. They talk themselves into a peaceful conformity. But for we few, we happy few who feel exhilarated by using curiosity and self-examination to discover the man behind the curtain, it’s time to put on our flippers and goggles because we need to get into that river once again and start swimming upstream as difficult as that may be. But we could also channel the Scott Adams of his book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter”” and try to persuade the others that the non weasel way might be the best way to get you where you’re going.
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Posted in Bar Codes, Media, Social Commentary, The Accidental Activist, The Cowgirl Contrarian
Tagged Carl Jung, Myers/Briggs, Scott Adams