Alright! I'm fricking tired of the complete lack of competence and the passive-aggressive behavior of living in small-town Midwest. Add to it what now seems to be widespread incapability to reason. The most recent episode was when my wife and I went to a condo association (yes, condos are invading small-town America). The guy who mows our lawn has successfully run over my water gauge, some plants, and he has damaged some of the other condo building’s with his heavy machinery. My wife, some people from California, and I start complaining abut the damage to property. All the people here start coming to his defense because "he's a nice guy". Remember how I wrote to you all about the faculty committee I sat on and how when I questioned how ethical it was to have a Dean chair a faculty committee, their "reasoning" was that she was a nice person? What kind of fricking excuse is that? I'm not saying she's not nice or that I don't like her, I'm saying that *any* dean should not sit on *any* faculty committee, by virtue of it being a *faculty* committee. You know, there's lots of "nice" people in this world, and being "nice" in the upper Midwest is a meaningless claim when *everybody* is "nice" (read: passive aggressive and disingenuous). The fact that this guy who is reckless with the heavy machinery is nice is completely irrelevant to the fact that we are paying his company to mow our lawn, and it is damaging property that *I* have to pay for (and the CA people). OK, people, we're going to go through this slowly. Say ad hominem. Yes, I know those Latin words sound scary, but how nice a person is has nothing to do with culpability or ethical arguments, either this person's employees damaged property or didn't, and if it did, he should pay for it. This is why people are so fricking passive aggressive out here. If you are assertive at all you are labeled aggressive and mean. And if that happens, well, no one will do anything for you or believe anything you say and hold you guilty for things that didn't happen because you're "not nice" (read: assertive). Maybe I should just start being real "nice" and then go around stealing people's stuff and "accidentally" dropping sledgehammers on cars. Maybe I won't be held liable because I'm so "nice". What a joke.

This kind of crap is the same reason why there's so much incompetence around here. People just figure if they're nice, they can not give a shit about anything they do, carelessly fumbling through the day, because they don't have to be responsible; no one will hold them accountable. No wonder this place is so backwards; nothing evolves, because no one's actually motivated to do anything. There's little, if any, social control that I can see (other than reprimanding the 'not nice' people). Get me the F out of here.