Two rings for the price of one, sort of. As I so often do when adopting rings with related themes, I'm administering these two as a unit. I am going to be very reluctant to agree to let anybody else join both rings; the sites you see on both were there before I adopted these rings. Think of this as being me doing my part to help get uniqueness ratings back up. I just don't see much of a point to having the same ten sites join a few thousand rings. The words you see below (with slight modification) were penned back when I had already taken over management of "I don't care who knows it", and hadn't yet gotten over to take care of "NOT! Politically Correct", but they apply with equal force to both rings. How, as an applicant, shold you decide which to apply to? Perhaps, by asking yourself this: as you talk about the absudities you're running into, do you feel more like laughing or screaming? Those with smiles on their faces should head over to "Not! Politically Correct", those with scowls to "and I don't care who knows it".






Joining one of these rings

Sometimes, life really is simple. Sort of. These are rings devoted to venting about the wrongness and absurdity that others bring into our lives as individuals and as citizens. If you run a Googlesearch on my pseudonym, you're going to find that I am rather to the right of center of most of the online population. That's going to tend to affect a lot of my choices as to who I will admit and who I won't, as it should, because the choice to embrace one's own conservatism is not like a choice between ordering vanilla and pistachio icecream, to take an absurd analogy I've actually heard used. It speaks to one's sense of right and wrong, and that can't help but affect the decisions one makes as to which complaints to take seriously and which not to. The decisions I make, however, may not necessarily be the ones that some would expect.

In an earlier era, back when there commonly was such a thing, I probably would have been a conservative democrat, not of the Jim Crow persuasion. "Conservative" has often come to be associated with an attitude that the unfortunate need to stop whining about their lot in life. I have never subscribed to that school of thought. There are legitimate grievances to be found in any society, my own included. When I fly the American flag over my main home turf online ("Conservative Midwestern Pagans"), the very real pride it shows is pride in a tradition that allowed people to talk through their differences. If every complaint is greeted, no matter what its merits, with arrogant disdain and a prideful refusal to listen to those who would seek a redress of their grievances, then that tradition has been short-circuited. How can we ask people to work through the system, if the system isn't going to listen to them? That system includes all of us, including you and me, and pride does go before a fall. A widespread stubborn refusal to accept that commonsense reality is why our society now has the expression "going postal"; unquestionably, as Americans specifically and probably as Westerners in general, we need to change our ways and see that morality and the need for justice touches all things.

That is not to say, however, that every complaint needs to be taken seriously. That kind of sensitivity was tried out during the 1990s, at least on behalf of the professionally oppressed, and the last thing it won the rest of us was peace; such overdone concern translated into having the rules of society set by those with the most overdeveloped anger management problems. The quesrtion that arises, then, is where does one find middle ground between being Phil Donohue and being Morton Downey Junior, because we'e not looking at a great future for ourselves in the directon of either extreme. There is that tricky business of finding a middle path. Those who'd like to know how this particular ringmaster makes the attempt are referred to this article. You don't have to read the whole article or even any of it to join the ring, but for those who desire explanations, there's a start on one. If you really want to know, look at those arguments, and you might get some sense of where my standards come from. Think "the basic, pre-political correctness, pre-social engineering middle class values of a well educated Midwestern American who can't stand the society crowd" (I really can't), and you can probably guess what they will be. If your complaint is that your boss sacked you three days before you were eligible for full pension and then invested the savings in a new yacht, you have my ear. If you feel traumatized because somebody said "policewoman" insted of "law enforcement official of the long oppressed historical gender role empowerement challenged, reproductively gifted female persuasion", or because restaurants serve people too much food showing that don't they care about the starving childen of Somalia, take it out of here. I don't want to hear about it.




Applying to either of these two rings is a simple matter. I keep them closed most of the time as a practical matter, because legitimate applications are few and far between these days, and spammers if anything are growing in numbers. This next step I require of you as an applicant achieves three worthwhile ends.

1. It insures that you're going to get my attention and speedier service than you otherwise might, just sitting in a queue.
2. If you're willing to stick around, it gives you the opportunity to become part of a community being built among the ring members. The Internet's been getting a little too impersonal lately. Let's try to turn a little of that around.
3. It discourages mass joining of rings. We've been getting a bit of a prisoners dilemma situation going on Webring of late, with so many people joining so many rings, that the traffic per ring has dropped to the point of forcing people to join more and more rings, just to get their sites visited. The problem feeds on itself, and it's time that some of us started trying to put on the brakes.
   
   Why bother to make the effort in the case of this one ring? Because the ringmaster's willingness to make people make the effort if they want to join means that the sites you see on this ring won't be the ones you see on hundreds of other rings. For all of the screaming about the uniqueness rating, a ring that offers sites tha you don't see everywhere else is a ring that visitors have more of a reason to want to travel. Being on it is going to mean more, if people give the idea a chance.

What do you need to do? Register for a board named Arrrggghhh!!! (appropriately enough), and start a thread in the section of that board dedicated to "and I don't care who knows it" or the one dedicated to Not! Plitically Correct (depending on which ring you are applying to), in which you talk about your site and mention your interest in joining this ring. Be sure to mention the url for your site, and please keep it clean, because this is a nonadult board. Be patient. Ring members are encouraged to look over your site and share their views and reasons for those views. Admission is going to be based on that great intangible known as "quality", and looking through your site thoroughly enough to make such an judgement well takes time. If I decide that your site would make a good addition to the ring, I'll open the ring for you so that you may join. I enjoy saying "yes" a lot more than I enjoy saying "no", so if you've put real effort into the your site, don't view the process with apprehension, your effort will probably show and I'll probably be appreciative of that. At the very least, no matter what my decision on admission is, you're welcome to stay on the board.

I think that should cover it.

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