In which I sing a song for JonMon

[harrock.livejournal.com]

My creative energy has been just about zero lately, thanks to a very busy schedule at work. But I'll say this for JonMon: His Lawsuit of Mass Destruction has inspired me. My wife, firstfrost, has received a threat letter, but she is not yet named in the LMD. I'm proud of everything she has said about JonMon. I didn't need JonMon's validation to be proud of her, but data is data.

I haven't been named or threatened in the LMD (yet), and I don't mean to make light of the anxiety that it has caused in our community. In particular, if you have taken something down or remained silent thanks to JonMon's toolbox of intimidation, I want you to know that I think no less of you for it. Every situation is unique, and we all have our limits of what we can deal with right this minute. My limit is high right now, so I'm standing up.

Likewise, I respect the opinions of those who have counseled caution or outright silence. I disagree with some of your key points, and I feel that some of your arguments apply better to people who are more concerned with anonymity than I am, or who cannot afford to risk an extended legal fight. The bottom line for me is this: One of the basic functions of any community is to sound a warning when a predator is around. If we're not sure the law can handle that, then it's time to get out and push.

This song is about JonMon's Lawsuit of Mass Destruction, and it is sung to the tune of "Charlie on the M.T.A." Permission is hereby granted to $verb this song, for all values of $verb, for every human being on planet Earth with the exception of Jonathan Graves Monsarrat. No permission of any kind is willingly granted to Mr. Monsarrat. In case he hadn't noticed, that's what happens when you are in the habit of excreting on your community.

---

Let me tell you the story
Of a man named JonMon
Who would really like to have his way...
He's the internet icon
Who you can't use your Psych on
He's the man who never will learn!

  Oh, his bridges are burned
  Please don't let him return...
  'cause his lesson's still unlearn'd!
  He may scam forever
  In the Square of Davis
  He's the man who never will learn!

He used to go by JonMon
But his rep has gone creepy
What's a smooth operator to do?
When you need to sound wholesome
Though your act is still loathesome
Then I guess that "Johnny" will do.

  Oh, his bridges are burned
  Please don't let him return...
  'cause his lesson's still unlearn'd!
  He may lurk forever
  On the blogs of Davis
  He's the man who never will learn!

Johnny says he's a victim
Because people keep on talking
Of some things no court has ruled
He says "come on and prove it
Or I'll make you remove it"
He's amazed when nobody's fooled

  Oh, his bridges are burned
  Please don't let him return...
  'cause his lesson's still unlearn'd!
  First he's looking your pants off
  Then he's suing your ass off
  He's the man who never will learn!

In Johnny's world the only law
Is what he gets away with
'less it's something he can use
To club his detractors
And intimidate their backers
And escape from paying his dues

  Oh, his bridges are burned
  Please don't let him return...
  'cause his lesson's still unlearn'd!
  He will leave you disgusted
  His ways won't be adjusted
  He's the man who never will learn!

Now the citizens of Davis Square
Are standing up to Johnny
And we all know what to do
When he says that you've been served...
And whines "I'm not a perv"
Just smile, and answer "fuck you!"

  Oh, his bridges are burned
  Please don't let him return...
  'cause his lesson's still unlearn'd!
  He'll play his games forever
  In the Square of Davis
  He's the man who never will learn!
  He's the man...who never will learn!

Comments

[moechus.livejournal.com]

"Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity. He must feel, that, when he shall knock at the gate of heaven, no semblance of an unspotted life can entitle him to entrance there. Penitence must kneel, and Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate will never open!" -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Schopenhauer asserted that compassion is the basis of all morality. Christian/Buddhist ethics stripped of their religious origins and supported by rational argument (or rationalization--see my post above). Theologically, I am an agnostic pagan; ethically, I try to be a Christian (or is Buddhist?--at their core, they're so similar). We're all stuck in the same boat of existence, each one of us struggling against the rest. Compassion is the only way out. Judge not lest ye be judged.

[anyee.livejournal.com]

I don't hold to bullshit Christian morality, so I can judge all over the damn place without being a raging hypocrite. My morality lets me judge, as long as I am willing to be judged. I can offer compassion, but turning the other cheek is a part of bullshit Christian morality, which I gave up for Lent years ago.

So take the sanctimonious stuff and turn it into a hat or something.

People who are angry are allowed to sing songs. Sing. Songs. They're not rioting. They're not demanding his business be shut down. They are protesting in a form as old as existence. However, you don't like it (from what I've read and seen) when people violate your brand of bullshit Christian morality, though your own sins seem to be mysteriously above reproach.

And this is why I hate Christians. Their religion must always win, even when they say it doesn't. Your God is wrong. Mine is right.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

You completely missed my distinction between theology and ethics. Your last paragraph has nothing whatever to do with Christian ethics and suggests that you know nothing of my "brand of bullshit Christian morality" by which I mean what Jesus preached, particularly the Sermon on the Mount). Instead that last paragraph refers to Christian theology. I reject that too. Most people who call themselves Christian seem to believe that accepting Jesus as their savior allows them to ignore what he actually said (so very similar to what the Buddha, Gandhi and many other non-Christians have taught).

And I don't where you get the idea that I consider my own sins "mysteriously above reproach." Quite the contrary. Let me quote Shakespeare again:

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer, doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy."

Or, as Hamlet put it: "" I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?"

[anyee.livejournal.com]

Toggling between Christ and Shakespeare doesn't make you a brilliant critic of the human condition. It makes you at best pretentious, and at worst, unable to articulate your own brand of views correctly.

Buddha and Jesus do not have anything in common when you get to their actual theology and actual messages. It's a disgusting misrepresentation of both religions to say, well, they were nice to poor people and said to treat each other well, so they're the same thing.

I know what Jesus preached: cut off your own limb if it offends you. Abandon your family to follow me. There is a God who you must follow or be cast into hell forever. I will kill this fig tree because it's not bearing fruit when I want it to. Buddha...not so much. The sermon on the mount is a fraction of the so-called New Testament. You may want to haul through all four gospels and do some comparisons with the writings of the Buddha. You're a scholar...and yet you've decided that Jesus is about peace, love, and poverty. Er, no, not really.

Keep throwing your quotes at me, though. Maybe some combination of words might prove to me that you're not just using life as a buffet.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

I was quoting Shakespeare simply because he makes the points so much more eloquently than I ever could. Again, you miss my distinction between "Christian" theology and Christian ethics. I used quotation marks because Christian theology is mostly the work of St. Paul, whose works make up most of the New Testament of which the Sermon on the Mount is indeed a fraction.

Stripped to its essence, both Jesus and the Buddha taught that all life is sorrowful and preached compassion to all. That their followers (this applies much more to Jesus than to the Buddha) have buried this message under layers of theology is unfortunate.

[anyee.livejournal.com]

Stripped to its essence, Jesus and Buddha are still very different things. Jesus' overriding message is not be nice to people. It's do things through me to get to heaven. The righteous pagan has zero place in Jesus' message. Remember that.

You don't need eloquence when merely being articulate is sufficient. In using other people's words put into an old English dialect, you're obfuscating what could be easily said in simple language. It requires more mental effort to read a couplet in a rusty dialect than a sentence in a familiar one.

I know a lot of Christians. Their Christian ethics leave much to be desired. After all, a good Christian believes in the inferiority of women to men.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

Again you miss the distinction between theology and ethics and what you call Jesus' overriding message is really Paul's message and I suspect that the Christians you know are Christians more in their theology (again deriving from Paul, not Jesus). Certainly the part about women's inferiority has to be laid at Paul's feet, not Jesus.

Sometimes a little mental effort is worthwhile and pays off.

[anyee.livejournal.com]

Ah, so by playing the no true Scotsman game with Christianity, you're able to accuse others of following a polluted version of Jesus' teachings while you get the real one. Whose translation are you using? What makes yours true?

My mental effort is being well and truly used by things that aren't LJ. I am fond of saying that the burden of communication is on the communicator. Why deliberately make things harder in a forum that isn't a place for dense prose?

[moechus.livejournal.com]

I use the King James translation like most people. Again, you miss my point which is based on one simple and unassailable observation: only the Gospels purport to give an account of the life and sayings of Jesus. The Old Testament doesn't, nor do the Acts of the Apostles, nor Paul's epistles. Ever since the Biblical canon was closed (4th century or so), there has been a long and often respected tradition of focusing on the life and sayings of Jesus (to be sure, Giordano Bruno was burned for it and today's evangelicals reject it). It was especially prominent in the 18th century Enlightenment, e.g., Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (who went so far as produce his own version of the Bible based strictly on the Gospels). It has more recently gained renewed prominence with the discovery of previously unknown texts purporting to be the sayings of Jesus, e.g., in the work of Elaine Pagels. And I'm hardly the first to notice the close resemblance between the teachings of Jesus and those of the Buddha. Joseph Campbell is just one prominent example.

You find my prose dense? Ah well. I try to be as clear as possible and I think I usually succeed. Would you prefer that I write in loose fragments? Would that be easier? The burden of communication may be on the communicator but he shouldn't be required to assume a complete lack of effort on the part of the reader. For example, I write "Theologically, I am an agnostic pagan; ethically, I try to be a Christian." What could possibly be clearer than that I am making a distinction between theology and ethics? How could I be make that distinction clearer than by the contrast of "theologically" and "ethically"? Yet somehow you repeatedly missed that distinction. Since it requires only the most minimal effort, I disclaim all responsibility for your failure to recognize it; I made it more than clear enough.

I too have better things to spend mental effort on than LJ, For one thing, I do enough reading so that simple prose like mine (and it really is pretty simple) doesn't seem dense and I don't miss elementary contrasts.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

I try to be as clear as possible and I think I usually succeed.

"But of course you are, my dear."

I do enough reading so that simple prose like mine (and it really is pretty simple) doesn't seem dense and I don't miss elementary contrasts.

If someone isn't understanding what you're saying, you really have two useful options: rephrase, or admit "I'm sorry, I can't really say it any clearer than that". You have chosen Option #3: insult your audience, suggesting that communicating is not really the point of the exercise, and you're about to take your ball and go home.

...and that's fine.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

No, I chose the second option. Communication is indeed the point but I really can't it say any clearer than I did. How could I have made the fact that I was making a distinction between theology and ethics any clearer than by contrasting the words "theologically" and "ethically"? I'm sorry but if you can't catch the distinction phrased thus, then it really is your fault.

[anyee.livejournal.com]

"I use the King James translation like most people. Again, you miss my point which is based on one simple and unassailable observation: only the Gospels purport to give an account of the life and sayings of Jesus."

Which is why the concepts I threw at you were from the Gospels. The fig tree parable was in Luke. The line about achieving holiness through Jesus is in John. Leaving your family is from Luke. Are you saying that I'm confusing Paul for the Gospels or are you willfully ignoring the interpretations I am taking from the same fucking source material?

What you're saying is that some number of people (n) see Jesus and the Buddha are the same.I know the Gospels pretty well, thank you Catholic upbringing. I know the message is superficially like that of the Buddha, but once you scrape past the surface, the paths diverge significantly. You don't need Paul to see that Jesus is preaching about a life thereafter full of holiness and a very different way of achieving it (versus that preached by the Buddha). Being nice to people is meshed with accepting Jesus as the savior...or were you and I reading a very different Gospel of Luke?

"You find my prose dense? Ah well. I try to be as clear as possible and I think I usually succeed. Would you prefer that I write in loose fragments"

And now you're just being obtuse. You use Shakespeare, which I call out as being dense, then backpedal and reassign it to your writing style. I write in fragments because this isn't a legal brief or a dissertation. This is a computer post that I'm slapping out in the space of 10 minutes or so. I don't need to string together paragraphs when in this setting, brevity is preferred.

"What could possibly be clearer than that I am making a distinction between theology and ethics? "

Christian ethics and Christian theology are intertwined.The basis for the ethics is the theology. You can't skim the top off, as I said, and pretend that the base doesn't exist. At best, it's like listening to Wagner as a Jew, when you need to actively accept that he made wonderful music while being a hateful person. To avoid being in that mental space, why even use the word? You can be nice to people without even referring to Christianity. Call it tikkun olam. Call it a variant of dharma. Are Jews and Hindus just not cool enough for you? Or do you use Christianity because the plebes will have an easier time understanding it.

You can insult me and I will insult right back. I'm a very persistent forum troll.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

You certainly seem to have had the Catholic interpretation of Christianity beaten into you. Suffice it that there are others.There was this little thing called the Reformation, which gave rise to myriad other interpretations, some very close to the Catholic, some very different.

Call me out on quoting Shakespeare. He has some difficult passages but the one I quoted ain't one of them. I can be sure whether it was freshman or sophomore year in high school that we read Hamlet in English class. It was one or the other (I had read it several years earlier). That should give you an idea of reading level required.

You may intertwine Christian ethics and Christian theology but it is not necessary and one can argue (as Jefferson did repeatedly in his letters) that it is theology that is the scum to be skimmed off the ethics rather than vice versa as you think. Forgive my obtuseness as you call it and let me throw another quote at you, this time from Benjamin Franklin (I am far more agnostic than he concerning the existence of a Creator and the immortality of the soul but agree almost completely concerning Jesus):

"Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence.That he ought to beworshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal,and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever Sect I meet with them.

"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble."

If you had read what I have written here, you would see that I hardly limit myself to Christianity. I have invoked Buddhism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer and quoted the Hindu Upanishads (tat tvam asi). I see no reason to exclude Christianity.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I can't speak to Christianity, having never been one or studied the religion much, but I have studied Buddhism. Which is pretty solidly on the side of calling people out on their bad behavior as a form of compassion - people need to know they're fucking up their karma. You see, bad karma is not punishment as a result of behavior, it's a negative behavior pattern we're stuck in that keeps bringing us grief. Sometimes you need a really hard shove to get out of that pattern, which is why Zen masters sometimes engage in physical aggression toward their students to get them closer to enlightenment. And this is just a song!

In other words, letting someone continue to act in a horrible fashion isn't just failing to show compassion to their victims (and I am appalled by how little consideration you have for them, given how much you talk about compassion), it's failing to be compassionate toward them. You should ponder on that for a while.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

Buddhism does not condone needless cruelty. It may be just a song but it is hurtful, cruel and totally unnecessary. I certainly don't advocate letting him continue to act in a horrible fashion but if you think this will help, I fear you are mistaken and merely rationalizing the community's lust for revenge. I think it more likely to reinforce his image of himself as victim and make the maintenance of that self-image all the more vital. Which could lead to even worse behavior as he has less and less to lose by it and nothing to gain by changing it. I know that he has made promises before and broken them but that doesn't mean that we should block the path to change (unless you want to make his inability to change a self-fulfilling prophecy).

I certainly have compassion and consideration for the victims but that's not what the song is about. The best writing on compassion that I have ever read is Schopenhauer's "On the Basis of Morality." He was deeply influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought and sees all normal behavior as driven by the individual's will to live, i.e., by self-interest. Acts done out of self-interest are neither blameworthy or praiseworthy. They are merely natural. He sees malice, which he defines as disinterested cruelty (i.e., hurting someone when it does not serve our self-interest) as inherently blameworthy and compassion, defined as disinterested kindness (i.e., helping someone when it does not serve, and even harms, our self-interest) as inherently praiseworthy, indeed as the basis of all morality. It is the instinctive recognition that underneath it all, we are all one (tat tvam asi as they say in India), subject to the inexorable and lacerating will. As such it extends to all. To feel for the victim only because one sees oneself as potential victim is self-interest. True compassion requires the obliteration of the distinction between victim and perpetrator, indeed the obliteration of all distinctions between individuals. All are in the same boat as living, suffering beings. As the First Noble Truth puts it, "All life is sorrowful."