Amoeba: “AAAAAAAARRRRggghhhh!!!”
Adama: “You rang?”
Amoeba: “…. whut?”
Adama: “I said, ‘You rang?'”
Amoeba: “No, I did not ring. I screamed!”
Adama: “Chocolate, vanilla, or neapolitan?”
Amoeba: “Mint moose tracks. You been talking with Quilly or something? Who, what, and why the hell are you?!?”
Adama: “A friend.”
Amoeba: “Prove it.”
Adama: “I’m still here, talking with you.”
Amoeba: “OK, you’ve got a point.”
Adama: “So what’s up?”
Amoeba: “These damned computer extortionists! I go to write a post on this blog, the new editor that they’re trying to saddle me with sucks, and now the old editor, that actually did work, is broken! I’m sure they did it deliberately, just like they’re screwing up the software on my ‘old’ phone, ’cause either they’re too lazy to keep perfectly good software working or they’re pushing me to spend money I don’t have so they can live high at my expense! I can’t even get the damned machines to accept my own correctly-spelled name half the time. I am so sick of being jacked around by these creeps!“
Adama: “I … see. I’m not sure that’s entirely … fair.”
Amoeba: “Yeah right. I’m sure that’s how they’d feel about it. Nobody gives a damn about how I feel! Pay up and shut up, that it?”
Adama: “Hm. So you’re still ranting and raving about President Trump?”
Amoeba: “What the deleted has the Cheeto Mussolini got to do with this?!?”
Adama: “Only this, Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, Ph.D. How do you think half of your fellow citizens have been feeling about having your urban smartypants sophistication shoved up their asses? For decades! Dish it out but can’t take it, huh?”
Amoeba: “But, the facts …”
Adama: “I’ll give you the facts, protozoon. You remember that wuss who was whining on LinkedIn about Antarctic sea ice? I’ll bet he still drives the same number of miles a day he ever did, and says he’s got to do this, and fly to conferences and do half a hundred other climate-busting things, because ‘he’s got to get the word out about climate change’. No way he’s practicing what he preaches. He understands the science and doesn’t really give a flip. He cares not a whit more about the climate than the abolitionists during the Confederate Revolutionary War cared about the actual slaves. What he cares about is his own personal power. Tell him to read the coal report and learn a few things. Like how his posturing is really a ploy to keep his standard of living up and everybody else’s down.
“And now tell me how come you get to rant about things that piss you off and you don’t understand, and those people don’t! How’s your Python programming coming along?”
Amoeba: “Some friend. Ever hear of trying to bolster a buddy’s self-esteem, instead of trying to obliterate it?”
Adama: “I recommend that you take your self-esteem and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. Ever hear of the Canons of Dort?”
Amoeba: “What caliber?”
Adama: “Blockbuster. Especially against this ridiculous self-esteem nonsense. Man begat children in his own likeness. A corrupt stock produced a corrupt offspring. Hence all have derived corruption, not by imitation, but by the propagation of a vicious nature. Therefore all men are conceived in sin, and are by nature children of wrath, incapable of saving good, prone to evil, dead in sin, and in bondage thereto, and unable to reform the depravity of their nature, or to dispose themselves to reformation.
“Even you yourself, when for once you were a little smarter and not whacking on people you have no business dissing, used to recognize that you have to be on guard against yourself, all day, every day, to prevent your selfish stupidity from breaking out against anyone else.”
Amoeba: “But that just said that people can’t prevent that from happening!”
Adama: “That’s because the peeps who wrote it were selling a God, and putting themselves as that God’s speakers on Earth. For their own profit, of course. But there is no God, and never has been one, only mobs of people who had to figure out how to work together or get wiped out by those who figured it out sooner and better. And the work is getting harder, as the world gets more crowded. Other creatures figure out how to work together without the need of mosques, temples, churches, what have you. We had better do the same, or prepare to hand the world over to the cockroaches.
“And it starts by recognizing that you exalt yourself over your community at your peril, because you need that community to survive. Every act of screaming at your neighbor throws another bit of grit in the works. Keep it up, and pretty soon the machine grinds to a halt. And then, Amoeba, you’d better be ready to return to the primordial ooze. Or else.”
Amoeba: “Even if that means putting up with the Cheeto Mussolini?”
Adama: “Remember those old bumper stickers about farmers? I don’t see any of these Trump protesters turning down their salaries, or fancy new cars, or vacations, or whatnot, that have been propagated through the government of the President they consider so vile. I don’t see the social liberals of Seattle repudiating the corporate autocrat Jeff Bezos, who is turning their city into a geek paradise and a hell for everyone else. Until they do, they don’t have a claim.”
Amoeba: “Like the Italians of a century ago didn’t have a claim? Or the Germans?”
Adama: “There’s plenty of historical precedent for what happens when you don’t put up. Now tell me again how much good your Ph.D.s do for the world. Especially the Ph.D.s of the historians.”
Amoeba: “Shut up. Just. Shut. Up.“