Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Stupidity...

“The power and intensity of that experience made me shake and tremble with fear. The reality and tangibility of God in that moment was so jarring that I threw the rest of the weed away and decided to just stick with the opiates. I knew that using drugs to get off drugs was stupid.” Michael J Heil

That ever happen to you?

“Religion is not a crime simply because stupidity is not a crime.” Mecha Constantine

Actually, I wouldn't go that far myself.

“Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity, which is worse.” Virginia Woolf

Is she asking us or telling us?

“Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice.
Nice comes from the Latin word for 'stupid', said Griffin. We don't wanna be nice.” R.F. Kuang

Actually, it comes from the Latin word "nescius", meaning “unaware, ignorant.”. But point taken. Especially here.

“Biggest leap of human evolution; from Artificial Intelligence to Natural Stupidity.” Vikrmn

Pick one:
1] any day now
2] it's already happening

“Like a child, it grows the more you feed it.”
“Like a fashionable dress, it can be fetching in youth, but looks particularly bad on the aged. And unique though its properties may be, stupidity is frighteningly common. The sum total of stupid people is somewhere around the population of the planet. Plus one.” Brandon Sanderson

We do what we can here, of course.

[iambiguous]

Stieg Larsson

She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck You.

A whole minute will do it. Even virtually.

We need to have a talk on the subject of what's yours and what's mine.

She can take whatever she wants from me.

It did no good to cry, she had learned that early on. She had also learned that every time she tried to make someone aware of something in her life, the situation just got worse. Consequently it was up to her to solve her problems by herself, using whatever methods she deemed necessary.

You tell me: https://youtu.be/1h80T96Nsbw?si=6tRbFsjiz3tQOxNC

If love is liking someone an awful lot, then I suppose I'm in love with several people.

Not that they're in love with me.

Men could be as big as a house and made of granite, but they all had balls in the same place.

You know what to do.

I believe that everyone has it in them to kill another person. In desperation, or hatred, or at least to defend themselves.

And not believing it doesn't make it any less true

[Gary Childress]

All is God or all is not God. This begs the question of what is God and whether there is one. To that, I know no answer. I am, however, unable to speak for others. And I don't wish to either.

[iambiguous]

John Lennon

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...

And, so far, going all the way back to the Big Bang?

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

...before he met Yoko or after?

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

Peace, sure. But who decides what that entails? The whole point of wars often being to assure that.

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.

Misunderstanding All You See.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

The rest, as they say, is history...

I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.

The other kind being Paul McCartney.

[iambiguous]

Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I would only believe in a god who could dance.

Let's start with the Christian God, okay, IC?

I hate you most because you attract, but are not strong enough to pull me to you.

The gall!

Untroubled, scornful, outrageous --- that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.

And here we are stuck with, well, you know who.

Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon nod off.

Yo, Olivia!

Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.

Actually, it's more likely to be the other way around.

I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

That might be me. But only more or less than it might be you.

[iambiguous]

Viet Thanh Nguyen from The Sympathizer

The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

I forget why though.

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

Pick one:
1] genes
2] memes

That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.

Next up: what reactionaries do.

We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit.

Not only that but keep me far, far away from yours.

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

Double parked here for the time being.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

Different folks, different strokes. At the strip mall here, for example.

[iambiguous]

Suicide...

“Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Uh, any day now?

“If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think 'How lucky are the dead.'” Dorothy Parker

June 7, 1967. Heart attack actually.
But point taken.

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax. This won't hurt” Hunter S. Thompson

February 20, 2005. Self-inflicted.

“By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead.” Warren Ellis

AM or PM?

“You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.” Shaun Hick

That's actually not true. Unless, of course, it is.

“We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...” Michael Cunningham

Fit yourself in there. Then get back to us.

[iambiguous]

Karl Ove Knausgård

Go somewhere you know nothing about and see what happens.

Then [of course] get back to us.

For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

Thank God?

Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Next up: breaking down philosophy.

And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it.

I can think of one way.

The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing.

Then repeat as necessary.

It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.

A new thread?

[Gary Childress]

Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Next up: breaking down philosophy.

Philosophy is like religion, politics, science, and other things. Do you think those things are "breaking down" also?

[iambiguous]

Edith Wharton from The Age of Innocence

I want -- I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that -- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.

In a novel, for example.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

In a novel, for example.

Everything may be labelled -- but everybody is not.

Everyone here sure as shit is.

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

Of course, that's all changed now, right?

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

Besides, they were all the wrong reasons.

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?

That and come down out of the clouds.

[Gary Childress]

https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curric ... he%201930s.

[Gary Childress]

http://www.lacrl.org/

[Gary Childress]

The best way to promote living organisms that don't live off the flesh of living humans is to preserve ones that don't.

[Gary Childress]

The next best thing to do is to preserve things that will only eat dead humans.

[Gary Childress]

If the first two imperatives fail, then it's best to try to make friends.