Dignity
Dignity, or the desire to maintain ones composure, integrity, and respect, even in the face of adversity, is a hard-sought goal, striven for throughout history. Though, it is only now, through the horrific discovery of the inter-tubes, that it has become truly unattainable. In this modern age, netizens have explored a plethora of methods in an attempt to achieve dignity -- and they have all failed, in astounding, plummeting, and even epic, ways.
Dignity Through the Ages
The grand story of human history is oft times the story of how man attempts, however cloying or cringeworthy, to be dignified. The myriad ways this has been attempted have shifted from culture to culture, and time to time, but the underlying story is always the same: People wind up in states of embarrassing undress, are humiliated in various fashions, or are slaughtered in undignified ways.
Ancient Times (BCE)
Long ago, after God created the earth in six days, after the dinosaurs were wiped out by Noah’s flood (RIP), early civilizations often focused their energies on putting on airs of dignity. The result of which was, typically, to enrage their enemies, who would promptly attack, giving birth to early versions of the finger-wagging slogan, Bitch, you ain’t all that!
Greece
Much of what we know of ancient Greece has to do with the promulgation, and subsequent loss, of dignity. Sparta famously expanded its sway over much of Peloponnesia, but quickly showed itself to be shit at governing or expanding any further, and, despite the victory at Thermopylae, it was pretty much left to the boy-fucking, wine-sipping Athenians to drunkenly prevail over Xerxes and the Persians at Salamis.
And of Athens, what? What little dignity Athens gained from humiliating the invading Persians was surely lost by their needless embrace of the early philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Aristotle, who, after the conquest of Athens by Macedon became the teacher of Alexander the Wino, was eventually humiliated when his allegedly great pupil failed to conquer the world, and instead proceeded to listen to his pedophile soldiers, and stop their delicious conquering and enslavements at India, (as they preferred the fine Persian shota to the inferior Indian race.) Realizing not only that naming every conquered city “Alexandria” wasn’t as creative or practical as he had originally believed, but also that he had unleashed the earliest form of NAMBLA upon the earth, Alexander returned to Greece and promptly drank himself to death at the age of 33.
After its conquest by the Romans in the second century BCE, the Greeks, (their culture, gods, and boy-fucking ways having been appropriated by the Romans,) devolved into the spittle-dripping inbred mountain people they continue to be to this very day. Modern Greeks exist as undignified, hunchbacked goat-fuckers who can’t even be arsed to make a decent mead anymore, and who are doomed to forever whine about their neighbors, the glorious Turks.
יְהוּדִים
The Jews began as an ordinary tribe obsessed with circumcision, but steadily developed unrealistic expectations in a rather untoward and rapid fashion, famously culminating in their proclamation that they are the sole favorites of the only god. After the colossal ingrate, Moses, assumed a false air of dignity, they were kicked out of Egypt by their formerly gracious hosts. They then proceeded to spend the next generation wandering around the Sinai peninsula subsisting on sand, and fashioning golden calves while Moses was “communing with God” on the tops of a mountains. Moses, pissed off and decidedly undignified after spending so much time alone with YHWH, proceeded to have the golden calf ground to a powder, and to have his fellow Jews drink the resulting delicious paste with the finest creek water available.
After colonizing part of Palestine many years later, they regularly went to war with their neighbors like any good Israelites, and as proof of their kills, cut off and collected the foreskins of the dead to bring back to the ruling entity of the day. This ruling elite, ultimately, proved to be a series of kings, one of whom, King David, was rejected by his wife Miriam after dancing in an undignified fashion, naked, in the streets of Jerusalem.
Unfortunately for the Jews, their twin kingdoms of Judah and Israel were no match for the surrounding kingdoms, and while the Judeans were drug off by the Persians and later permitted to return, the Israelites were summarily deported by Assyria to various places, and eventually lost their cultural identity as a people. Modern Historians find this truly hilarious, as it means that you are, in all likelihood, a Jew.
The tribe of Judah, permitted to return, was eventually and predictably conquered, enslaved, and humiliated in various fashions by a variety of kingdoms, empires, and tribes. This treatment continues to the present day.
Modernity
America
There has never been anything dignified about, or produced by, America.
The INTERNETS
Discovered by Ted Stevens in 2007, INTERNET represents the peak of human failure, existing as a monumental cesspool, filled with desperate losers with unrealistic expectations and nerdy teenage boys with bad skin who strive endlessly to win the admiration of their e-peers in those long, awkward years where they are shunned by both society and the objects of their sexual desire.
Naturally, the lengths individuals go to in their attempts to achieve dignity will frequently result in a public humiliation so severe that they may eventually cast themselves off this mortal coil.
Unfortunately, not nearly enough of them do.
Blogs
Everyone on The Internet is an attention-starved whore with SOMETHING TO SAY. This phenomenon began in the late twentieth century, but blissfully remained the province of a small few until the whole www/internet thing was forced on an unsuspecting public by cash-hungry venture capitalists and the egomaniacal con-artists who fleeced them for money through the clever use of powerpoint-ready business plans.
By way of this, a great deal of hype and advertising watered an evil seed in the hearts of many:
Inner voice prima: You have something to say!
Inner voice segunda: I do???
Inner voice primage: Yes! And you can do it on The Internet! People will listen and you will be their sage!"
Inner voice segunda: Wow! Maybe I am special snowflake after all!
And so it began, first it was a trickle, then a torrent, until finally the internet was filled with a noise not unlike the clanging of gongs and the clashing of cymbals. Web 0.9 was not a dignified place, but the descent into unholy undignified madness did not begin in earnest until the dot com boom, after which a peaceful time had been lost, a time where useful pages of drug and bomb-making instructions were not as easily found; a time where furries could not as easily find each other in order to justify their own personal failings.
LiveJournal
The original motherlode of blogs, its emo userbase exploded in the early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century - it quickly and deservedly became known as the place to whine about one's parents, one's significant other, or any other petty travail which afflicted its original, middle-class, fifteen-to-twenty-something-year-old demographic. As one could guess, it instantly filled with undignified drama from the moment of its horrific birth onto the shores of the internet. The true fruit of this being the class of dramaticians who cast ED into existence.
It has been left to historians of another age to determine whether or not anyone on livejournal ever bothered to attempt to achieve dignity, but for those so close to the dramatic epicenter of all internet drama, to ping long into that abyss is to risk the abyss pinging back, and to begin the slow descent from lulz to self-cutting and eventual suicide.
LiveJournal is home to: the undignified antics of Tigerwolf, the terrifying menstrual paintings of lulzy radfem Demonista, continual flounces, rampant internet disease, the community dedicated to finding it all, and ohnotheydidnt, which is at the center of an ongoing drama maelstrom so massive that it pulls in visitors from all over the internet -- meaning that plumbing the depths of its undignified comings and goings would take a full time staff of the Mongolian Horde.
See Also
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