Olympics Makes One Think…
Don’t Be A Dick
One of the things I miss the most about living in the pre-internet age was the lack of anonymity. In 2016, everyone and their cat is online. Tossing up a few proxies, or registering with a false name on social networks isn’t cutting edge science. You can be as much of an asshole online as you want to. The odds of consequences happening are in most cases low.
It’s cool to be a dick, everyone does it.
If you don’t like what someone is saying, downvote their forum post or reddit piece. Hell, if you don’t like them or just think they look stupid, throw down those downvotes. Don’t bother with actually reading the piece. Don’t go as far as to actually think of how you’d offer feedback, because you won’t. Thumbs down, move on.
Disagree with the opinions or actions of someone more successful than yourself? Don’t debate, don’t discuss, don’t read up on the facts. Just call them names, post a couple of sarcastic pictures or gifs, and call them a fucking idiot. No one is going to turn up on your doorstep and punch you in the teeth for it.
I love the accessibility of information in the 2010s. I can look up most things in a matter of seconds. I have the whole world at my fingertips. Unfortunately, that also means that the whole world’s assholes are staring me in the face when I log into facebook.
It takes a lot of effort to sort through actual criticism and feedback, and utter waste of bandwidth. It takes a lot of mental surplus to keep coping with people spewing negativity at you no matter what you do. At some point, a straw breaks the camel’s back. People give up participating or creating. The confidence is gone.
Please, world, think about what you do online. You don’t have to piss on everything someone does. You have the same choice everyone else does: Don’t read what they write, don’t look at their art, don’t buy their product. If you want to engage them in debate, do it properly.
Hiding behind downvotes and memes doesn’t make you an internet warrior. It makes you a petulant child that has yet to learn to communicate.
Bare Necessities
Epona TV’s newest blog article, Bare Necessities, touches in beautifully on the infamous Milgram experiment and on how we as riders tend to cave for authority rather than for horse welfare.
Read it here.
One Goal Achieved…
New Years resolutions. I usually never make them. This year I did, though: I told myself, I’m going to get this arm to heal back to normal, and I am going to lose enough weight to feel safe in the saddle, because horses are the second best thing in my life, with my husband coming in at a first.
This morning I showered and washed my hair and for the first time, I could do so with both hands instead of sort of awkwardly trying to do everything with my left. Sure, my right arm felt like lead, but it moved as I wanted to. It’s back, bay-beh. That was the first goal, and it’s only January 9.
The second one is going to be… a little bit harder.
The thing that scares me the most about getting back into the saddle is the knowledge that my extra weight makes my reaction time longer, the strain on my muscles stronger, and gravity is not, totally and utterly not, on my side.
This one’s going to be really hard, and so is admitting to myself that I have a problem with comfort eating besides the very obvious problem of not being able to really walk or move around a lot. Being a chronic pain patient isn’t always just a matter of more pills; sometimes it makes you feel exhausted, sometimes it just hurts too much, and sometimes, it makes you outright depressed. The lack of ability to walk for more than twenty metres or stand up for more than a few minutes, they don’t help either.
I hear people say that you can do anything if you really want to. Well, I really want to shed some serious tonnage, so let’s do this.
Not Everyone is a Critic
Today, Equitandi will be removing her controversial video clip in which she comments (loudly and hilariously) on Tina Lund’s statement that it’s okay to use sharper bits because if the horse didn’t like it, it wouldn’t win.
I can’t say I blame her. I read a fair number of the comments on her video, and while many of us agree with her, the amount of anger that the clip caused in Tina Lund’s supporters is… staggering. Rabid. Foaming at the mouth levels of crazy in some cases. Equitandi uses facebook as a free space for herself, and does not want to be the target of such sound and fury so she’s taking the clip back down and telling people to move on.
I just wish that people would take a breather sometimes, count to ten, and agree that few things are black and white before they start penning threats and abuse. Come on, whether you think Tina Lund’s riding is okay or not, you have to admit that saying that horses win because they like pain is bloody stupid. Maybe it didn’t come out quite as Tina intended. Maybe she is just stupid. I don’t know, and I don’t care much, either.
Criticizing a highly controversial statement such as that one does not constitute an attack on everything Tina Lund is or has been, and it does not warrant a barrage of hatred and abuse in return. It means she said something stupid. We laugh, and then we move on.
Thank you, Grumpy Cat, for coming to the rescue of my sanity.