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Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2023 10:04 pm
by iambiguous
The Onion
Liberal Relieved He Never Has To Introspect Again After Assembling All The Correct Opinions
Don't fool yourself, vegetariantaxidermy, it works the same way for conservatives.
Man Worried Harassing Messages He Sending On Dating App Getting Lost Among Abuse From Other Guys
Next up: the equivalent of that here.
Library Drops Dewey Decimal System By Organizing All Titles Under ‘B’ For Books
Uh, no really?
Illinois Becomes First State To Outlaw Book Bans
Uh, no, really: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/us/illin ... index.html
Andrew Tate Offers To Train Elon Musk In Cage Match With Zuckerberg
Place your bets.
OceanGate Announces Submersible Debris Still Safe To Ride In
And cheap too.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2023 3:31 pm
by iambiguous
Stupidity...
“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.” Kurt Vonnegut
Well, for some here, maybe that.
“I've always believed that a person is smart. It's people that are stupid.” Marilyn Manson
Tell that to Evan Rachel Wood.
“I doubt you can understand the magnitude of the stupidity in your statement” Robert Jordan
Pick one:
1] Me to you
2] You to me
“Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.” Slavoj Žižek
That actually comes close to making no sense at all.
“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.” Richard Buckminster Fuller
And then the pinheads here...
“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.” Thomas Mann
Trust me: not always.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2023 8:34 pm
by iambiguous
Truman Capote from In Cold Blood
Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey's silence. It had been his ambition to learn "exactly what happened in that house that night." Twice now he'd been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger - with, rather, a measure of sympathy - for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey's sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged - hanged back to back.
What goes around comes around. And, as often as not, fairness has nothing to do with it at all. Or not in a No God world anyway.
The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry.
Tell that to the Clutters.
Dick loves to steal. It's an emotional thing with him - a sickness. I'm a thief too, but only if I don't have the money to pay. Dick, if he was carrying a hundred dollars in his pocket, he'd steal a stick of chewing gum.
Tell that to the Clutters.
'How much money did you get from the Clutters?'
'Between forty and fifty dollars.'
Come on, though, that's not what they expected.
Because one thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won't. Or it will - depending. As long as you live, there's always something waiting, and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.
Options we call them. And what could possibly be more important than having them.
But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrol-men, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.
Without horns and tails and pitchforks.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2023 4:45 pm
by iambiguous
Lauren Oyler
I had been lured into an intellectual trap and had only myself to blame.
Or, sure, blame me.
People often say my generation values authenticity. Reluctantly I will admit to being a member of my generation. If we value authenticity it’s because we’ve been bombarded since our impressionable preteen years with fakery.
Or just plain stupidity these days.
A drunk coworker had once let me know that I’d established myself as a somewhat retrograde cynic, a toxic presence in the office but ultimately safe from firing because, among other skills, I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked; my leaving was a wash.
Of course no one really knows; not really.
Throughout my childhood, I had been warned that I would spend a significant portion of my time doing something I could barely stand, but I had been lead to believe I would be paid for it.
Also: "Twenty years of schooling and they put you one the dayshift."
Donald Trump was the dumbest person on earth and there was nothing I could do about it.
Unless, of course, there's another Donald Trump.
Already the project was requiring more research than I’d anticipated. I’d thought I knew a fair amount about astrology, particularly for someone who didn’t believe in it, but the only signature traits I could really recite if pressed corresponded to my own sign. It turned out to be incredibly boring to learn about the made-up characteristics of other people.
Cue Fixed Jacob!
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2023 9:04 pm
by iambiguous
David Foster Wallace from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hotpink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork.
Okay, but how surreal is still rooted existentially in dasein.
A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own.
Unless of course it's something that only assholes think is good.
It's painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot.
Still, don't forget to vote.
It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imaging gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and HOT WET SLUTS are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief.
Cue Donald Trump?
Or is it actually more complicated than that?
Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate-what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.
Fit me in there somewhere, why don't you.
It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.
The pinhead in him no doubt.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2023 5:19 pm
by iambiguous
Mary Karr from The Liars' Club
I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.
Like the ones that take you here.
The big cat cages also stank in the heat. This was before zoos built natural habitats with boulders and waterfalls, and the cages back then were painfully small, the animals miserable. The Bengal tiger had flies creeping all over its eyelids, and he didn’t even blink. There was a kid throwing peanuts at him, and Lecia somehow menaced the boy into stopping. When I grew up and discovered the German poet Rilke, it was this zoo’s sorry-looking cats that I thought back to. As a young poet, Rilke had been sent by the sculptor Rodin to study zoo animals, and he captured in a few lines the same frustrated power that I sensed that day in the dull-coated panther: It seems there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
Next up:
https://youtu.be/T5xuzSjl8eU?t=114
https://youtu.be/0inij7Z47p0
Pollock once paid a fortune for a Picasso drawing, then erased it in order to see how it was made.
She made that up.
Smart people suffered; dumb people didn’t. Mother had said this back in Texas all the time. We’d be driving past some guys in blue overalls selling watermelons off their truck bed and grinning like it was as good a way as any to pass an afternoon. She’d wag her head as if this were the most unbelievable spectacle, saying God, to be that blissfully ignorant.
Not unlike believing in God itself.
She felt that Paolo’s story would teach me a lesson, the punch line of which was something like divorcing a salary man for somebody who punches a clock was bad manners.
Among other things no doubt.
The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said.
And Ken would do it.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2023 7:56 pm
by iambiguous
David Deutsch
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.
Now that's ridiculous. For one thing, the cow is oblivious to oblivion.
To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down.
God's will?
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
Thank God?
rta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won’t ever think of changing anything.
The first pinheads?
It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.
Well, given free will, anyway.
...the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
The other queer of course.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2023 6:59 pm
by iambiguous
Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek
If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.
Uh, he's gay?
You can knock on a deaf man's door forever.
He's got to leave the house sometime.
But, sure, point taken.
Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.
Coming here for example?
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all…is not to have one.
Does posting here count?
Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’
Which of us was right, boss?
Too close to call?
All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them!
Next up: the mysteries of death.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2023 10:08 pm
by iambiguous
Charles Bukowski from Factotum
Have you ever been in love?
Love is for real people.
Not counting me of course.
When I went to the Yellow Cab Company I passed the Cancer Building and I remembered that there were worse things than looking for a job you didn't want.
Not some jobs.
You look down in the mouth. You all right?
Lost a woman.
You’ll have others and lose them too.
Or think of it as them losing you.
All right, one of the women said, we know you think you're too good for this job.
Too good?
Yes, your attitude. You think we didn't notice it?
That's when I first learned that it wasn't enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.
Never did learn that myself.
The Bible says, 'Love thy neighbor.'
That could mean to leave him alone.
Anyone here know for sure?
The strength of the two cultures was very different too: Japanese women instinctively understood yesterday and today and tomorrow. Call it wisdom. And they had staying power. American women only knew today and tended to come to pieces when just one day went wrong.
Lost In Translation?
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2023 12:06 am
by iambiguous
The Onion
Navy Reveals They Knew About Titanic Submersible Explosion Right After They Blew It Up
Well, one does go with the other.
Report: Your Father Currently Typing ‘Naked Women’ Into Yahoo Images Search Bar
Mine from the grave then.
Justices Expand Supreme Court To 40 Right-Wing Buddies
Billionaires of course.
Horse Remains Recovered From Titan Sub Wreckage
That could certainly explain it.
Janitor Trying To Turn Off Beeping Noise Destroys Decades Of Scientific Research
No, really:
https://www.wsaz.com/2023/06/30/janitor ... -research/
Dog Who Successfully Detected Cancer In Owner Put Down For Practicing Medicine Without A License
Doesn't seem fair to me.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2023 6:00 pm
by iambiguous
Eugene Thacker
What if depression...is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason?
Not to worry. I won't explain it to you.
The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?
See? Didn't I tell you?
Two kinds of pessimism: “The end is near” and “Will this never end?"
Too close to call...and then some.
The question that runs through these disputatio is the following: What if horror has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?
Too close to call...and then some.
The world is increasingly unthinkable – a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all – an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time.
Let's think about it anyway.
The indifference of the everyday gets the better of us all.
Next up: every week, every month, every year.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2023 8:29 pm
by iambiguous
N.K. Jemisin from The Fifth Season
Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.
And how much can that be?
Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
Let's make sense of that.
We aren't human.
Yes. We. Are. His voice turns fierce. I don't give a shit what the council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.
Woke let's call it.
Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined?
Sooner or later, all of us?
There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.
Or, here, the equivalent of that with emojis?
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall;
Death is the fifth and master of all.
Yo, God!
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2023 5:57 pm
by iambiguous
Pessimism...
"How does knowing 'things could be worse' than what I already deem awful make me feel any better? You mean I could sink even lower?” Richelle E. Goodrich
Make a note of that.
“It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.” P.D. James
Make a note of that.
"Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.” Arthur Schopenhauer
Next up: a woman is begotten.
“Once is never. Twice is always.” James S.A. Corey
Three times? Forget about it.
“Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.” Brando Skyhorse
Cue Richard Rorty...Mr. Ironist?
“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.” Aldous Huxley
Name one.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2023 10:26 pm
by iambiguous
Barbara Kingsolver from Demon Copperhead
I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids’ heads.
No, they mean the woke ideas!
Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.
I know! What if that is actually true?!!
Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.
Around here...
https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora
...too.
But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.
Miners Mills! Well, if only two months a year.
All God’s children have to take a shit, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones who have to clean it up.
So, do souls shit?
The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.
Next up: all that and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2023 5:54 pm
by iambiguous
Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger
To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause.
Settle for the win, right?
She knew that in the end you really can't know. You can't get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.
Point taken. On the other hand, come on, it's hardly all the same.
Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning.
Next up: the world without pinheads.
Or, for that matter, this forum.
In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get.
Like that'll stop them.
So how bad is the world? How bad. The world's truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?
Tell that to Maia!
She asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said dead.
Just what the world needs, another smartass.