This is a response to a question posed by lydia in Live Feeds. My answer has nothing to with Live Feeds and represents something I've been wanting to say about this season.

lydia wrote:
>The past three seasons have been full of "weasels", as you call them. How about the fact that an alliance was formed and noone was swayed by the other side as each kept to themselves throwing insults back and forth, with the central alliance keeper having the ability to get the others to take out the other side?

This is not to pick on lydia but to quote what I think is a reasonable question that several newer posters have asked who seem to be confused about why 99% of this board's regular posters loathe the FS alliance and rooted for the Jedi. Are we all just reinforcing our own group of bashers? Are we haters for no reason? I don't think so, and here's why.

I was thinking about this alliance question last night before it was asked:
what makes the FS alliance so loathsome and disgusting compared to Tagi or Ogakor or Boran, or any of the Survivor seasons where a strong alliance held? I have nothing against strong successful alliances per se.

Yet with the FS alliance: I hate it, most people here hate it, and there's been no lack of saying why. But how do they differ from past alliances that don't make people so much want to gag and puke on a minute by minute basis.

The dominant alliances I mentioned from Survivor held together as an acknowledged game strategy, pure and simple. They made a pact to go to the end prior to the merge, at least Tagi and Boran did. (Ogakor never sealed a deal with Jerri and Amber.)They all were out front about being there to win. They didn't pretend that they were just playing to stay in long enough to go to the cushy jury house.

They didn't act like they achieved dominance because they were Superior Beings. As Tina said, "I'm here because of a little bit of stategy and a whole lot of luck."

They didn't revile the players not in the alliance. They didn't fortify the alliance by not talking to the others, not sharing, by rubbing it in their face, or by camping out in a superior private shelter provided by the producers that they regarded as their own property even though the right to use it was temporary.

They didn't hold the alliance together with hatred of others and pretend that the core was love. They made friends with the other players like Lis and Rodger and Tbird and Lil Kim and they were SORRY to let good people go. Sometimes they were happy to let annoying players go, or happy to have eliminated a strong competitor, but it was never: great, one less EVIL person in our camp!

*Except when they bounced Jerri, Keith did sing "ding dong the witch is dead* but that would be more like the FS bouncing one of their own for being annoying, which never happened, and we were singing along at home*

The FS epitomize the so-called popular clique of kids in junior high and high school who didn't like anyone who didn't conform to the group. Anyone who is really intelligent or individualistic or creative threatens them, but they won't admit that.

The Jedi epitomize a bunch of individuals who are brought together when they find themselves labeled as outsiders by the vicious clique: I guess a lot of us here relate to the Rebel Alliance. (Anyone notice that the blonde bombshell Janie reads a lot and also reads music and plays it by ear? Michael is an artist and Kaysar a graphic designer?)

Sure the Jedi indulged in making fun of the silly FS who camped out in the HOH room with their silly creepy Crappy shrine staring at the spy screen. But the Jedi only struck back verbally after the FS had become too noxious to bear in silence.

The FS liked to say they talk about their lives and don't trash-talk other people. Every conversation that started out about their lives turned into: see what nice lives and families WE have; WE are good honest deserving people; SHE is so evil, SHE could never want to have a baby; SHE has a dog and a MOM like a regular human being? SHE is so fake but all my fake parts are fake for some better reason; SHE had sex with someone she only knew for a week; SHE must have made up having a boyfriend; SHE must have cheated to win the challenge; BB hates us; America hates us, WHY? WHY? WAAH! WAAH!

To quote my son who was watching:
"Call for the Waaaambulance and take them away."

If you watched the Live Feeds you would see that Howie, Rachel, Janie, Kaysar rallied themselves to compete and practiced competition skills, and made up a nickname or two as a way of dismissing the non-stop nya nya nya nya vibes coming from the HOH campers. Juvenile tricks begot juvenile antics. Sure.

But compare The Nerd Herd and Girl Scout Troop to calling Janie, EVIL, SOULESS, FAKE, MEAN, HABITUAL LIAR, CHEATER, HO, SKANK. Or calling gentlemanly Kaysar a potential TERRORIST. That's some scary bigotry coming out of the mouth of someone who is part of an ethnic minority and should know better!

What ended up happening here is that posters wanted so much to be able to grab these pathetic losers and shake them and wake them from their delusion that America ADMIRES their BS--but we couldn't make ourselves heard except through America's Choice. And then the Fiendship didn't get even that message and chose to view the choice as a BB conspiracy and a dozen other reasons--anything other than the simple fact that we can't stand them.

So when JBLO thought she was such hot shit for backstabbing Kaysar, we LOVED it when Howie and Janie went off. They were going off for all the people out here who wished they could tell these guys they were bitches. Are we normally mean people? (Only as satirists, we're not sadistic.) Is Howie a mean person? No. He was just channeling some kind of mass frustration at having to deal with people who won't even admit they lied and reneged on a deal.

You know what I mean?

As for Maggie, or "the central alliance keeper" as you put it. Keeper is about right! She uses hateful techniques reminiscent of cult leaders and she uses hateful techniques that were used by the Nazis.

She created a Good Us and an Evil Them. A Clean Us and a Dirty Them. She ostracized them; she lied to make them seem like liars; she led the gullible but still culpable Ivette and let Ivette brainwash April into the following Nazi-type mentality: the Others have no souls, are DIRTY, EVIL, and otherwise less than full human beings. Some of the names for the Others: Terrorist, Prostitute, Shady gray hag, Old pervert, Sexual predator, Satan (James).

Maggie fostered the idea that it was torture to have to be in the same house with them. Flashback to Hitler's Germany anyone? I swear if the rules allowed for the HOH winners to round up the Jedi and put them in a special isolation room for a week on PB&J the FS would have been ecstatic and seen it as divine intervention!

Don't even get me started on the "God is on our side guiding everything that happens in the house for a reason" crap. Not to mention "Don't worry, even if we lose, God will punish the evil ones and take away whatever they win." I personally watched them spew this over and over.

Have you EVER seen Howie and Janelle saying, oh well, if Ivette wins hopefully her new house will burn down? April said that about Janie!

Compare that to Howie who always said: they beat me fair and square and they deserve it. Or Rachel saying, "we blew it. We made serious mistakes. Or Janie saying she lost a competition because she sucks.

As for Keeper Maggie: she says she loves them and is their bestest friend. A true friend would have mediated when her friends started to fight with each other. Instead, Maggie only intervened when the fighting veered towards something that could lead to a critique of how Maggie acted. Instead of encouraging people to work through their differences she shut them down by saying it was bad to talk about such things.

She did nothing to promote mental health, only to put her "friends" under a kind of sick spell. One day April woke up from the spell! Maggie made sure all April's blame deflected onto Ivette. Maggie's love gives people the creeps.

For those of you who read the whole Narnia series: in the Silver Chair, there's a witch with a magic fire and an instrument that she strums while she talks soothingly to the protagonists who have come to rescue the Prince. She makes them think that she has to keep the Prince restrained because HE is dangerous and crazy and suddenly they don't know what is true any more.

The kids and the Marshwiggle keep trying to resist and she takes whatever they say and twists into a bad logic that the reader sees is bad, and the reader has to watch helplessly going no! no! don't listen to her! Finally the spell gets broken because the Marshwiggle sticks his foot in the fire so that sheer PAIN will snap him out of it.

Well, listening to Magwitch soothe and stroke her little sheep so they would stay in the fold made me remember that scene.

Of course you are taking me to F2. If you didn't and won, that would be DIRTY MONEY. You wouldn't enjoy DIRTY MONEY, would you Ivette?" "Oh no, of course not. I would never want DIRTY MONEY. My family wouldn't like it if I took DIRTY MONEY. There was never any question in my mind I would take you." Barf.

A lot of us are looking forward to seeing them snap out of it.
Most of us realize they're not capable of accepting reality. But here's one harsh reality for the fiend sheep:

No fans for you!

We're not falling apart without Cappy, but they think with their ass without Kaysar ~ Puppette