Okay, I'm still updating DU For Guests, the 2009 edition, although nothing's been posted. I had been putting up portions as updated and completed, but then decided it would be better to wait until the whole book's done, and then post it in its entirely.
For the meantime, of course, one can always consult the old version of DU For Guests, which is somewhat dated, but not terribly so.
The below's a current chapter; the figure of "117,000" will be changed to "140,000."
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Characteristics of DUmmieland, Skins's island. The DUmmies, or primitives, have many characteristics strongly reminescent of lesser-developed societies, chief among them their fanciful imaginings of the wider world.
Since the DUmmies live on an isolated island, and have no idea of the real world, they are compelled to create fantasies of what lays beyond the water; dragons and monsters and all sorts of beasts.
Or, as the primitives imagine history to have been, or economics or sociology or civics or religion are; all sorts of fanciful fire-breathing deformed miscreations that bear no resemblance at all to real things.
Despite their utter ignorance, DUmmies imagine they possess a sort of intellectual and moral superiority over those out here in the real world, as if they are the cultured, and we the savages.
Of course, the primitives are fooling only themselves.
On matters carnal and spiritual, DUmmies succumb to the base one.
Primitives, generally, have no desires other than simply to eat, sleep, possess the latest in electronic toys and glittery trinkets, and if one can get something going, hop around in the sack, the more partners the better.
The DUmmies tend to think of themselves as "beautiful people," when in both body and soul, they actually repel; they oftentimes self-indulgently post photographs of themselves, and are offended when those in the real world look at them with revulsion.
The "average" male primitive is in his mid- or late-50s, early 60s, pot-bellied or worse, thinning or little hair each strand of which is desperately kept long; the "average" female primitive tends to be three or four years younger, and about half the time, as hefty as her brother primitives. The female primitives not as bulky tend to wear wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a bitter, Hate-filled grimace.
The DUmmies are both individualists and an amorphous lynch-mob; individualists when it suits their selfish egos, and members of the lynch mob when compelled by the lash of group-think.
Each primitive wishes, really, to be distinctive in his own right, but the lash is harsher.
The greatest fear of DUmmies is to be booted from DUmmieland, away from those things familiar to one.
Exile from Skins's island means re-location to some smaller place, even further out in the wide ocean, and the primitives in those places may not be as accepting as those on Skins's island had been.
Finally, DUmmies have a high mortality rate; not many survive.
Out of nearly "117,000" primitives, there are actually only circa 5,000, which appears to be the natural maximum population of Skins's island.
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Anybody think of any other characteristics of the primitives?
The one I've been thinking about is the DUmmie yearnings for a "final solution;" a final solution to all problems of mankind that would bring paradise on earth.
If only, if only, if only.....
The primitives fail to understand--again, perhaps because of their lesser cerebral capacities--that the world has always been imperfect, is imperfect, and will always be imperfect, despite the best attempts of man to "perfect" it.
The problem lies in that while the DUmmies might have their ideas about what it takes to make a paradise on earth, God and Nature, together or separately, have Their own ideas about what the world needs.
And even human agencies other than the primitives, have their own ideas about what the world needs. One suspects there's very little, if any, common ground between what the DUmmies think the world needs, and what decent and civilized people think the world needs.
Just so much friction, so much tugging-of-war, between all these elements.
And it's going to go on, until the end of Mankind.
"Friction" and "competition" are not bad things; in fact, they're rather good things.
Without the friction between the concrete of the highway and the rubber of the tires on an automobile, nobody would go anywhere.
Another one of those ironclad laws of physics the DUmmies tend to ignore.
In the end, the only "final solution" to one's problems is.....death, and what comes with it.
But that's not a final solution one can get too enthusiastic about.
Unless one is a primitive, or a DUmmie.
