Aunty Acid by Ged Backland for August 18, 2022

true – or wearing chairs and calling them high heels

How’s the weather up there?

It’s a form of bragging.

Worked for the Queen of Hearts.

On the other hand, as with plants, sometimes an unsightly, gangly human specimen must be headed back at its point of “interminal” out-of-control growth, lest it topple over or break apart. Cutting-down-to-size is something Aunty is good at. Just don’t call her a pruner, yikes!

I am tall and I didn’t cut anybody’s head off.

Don’t knock being short, AA. You won’t easily hit your head on the overhead stuff on a warship.

Certainly a lot of that going on around lately.

Anything to get ahead.

Leveling. Nasty tactic.

This kind of thinking comes from the belief that everything is a zero sum game.

A zero sum game is one where the total of the winnings equals the total of the losings. So if one team wins by a score of 7 to 5, the other team loses by a score of 5 to 7. Or like a poker game where each of three players starts with $50. At the end of the night they walk away with a total of $150 in their pockets – it just might be distributed differently.

So in order for another person to gain something, I MUST lose something. If I want a slice of pizza and I don’t have one, the only way I can get one is to steal one of yours. The concept of a bigger pie doesn’t exist.

Positive sum games do exist where the winnings are greater than the losses. I raise grain, you raise mules. You lend me a mule to plow my field, I give you grain to feed your mules.

However as long as people have a binary outlook on life: one, zero; black, white; win, lose. They don’t see this possibility.

So we live in a world where people are so paranoid of losing, we wind up playing negative sum games: the sum of the losings is greater than the sum of the winnings.

War is an example of a negative sum game. Nobody wins a war; one side loses it to a lesser extent.

And some cut others off at the knees.

we’ve found that people spend way too much time pulling each other down…

Preying Mantis Syndrome!

But then it’s your turn

This kind of behavior is usually done by bullies with low self-esteem. I’ve had the unpleasant experience of working with a few like that.

Others by cutting the legs shorter on all the other chairs in their house…