Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Stupidity...

“If you're gonna be stupid you gotta be tough.” John Grisham

Hang in there pinheads!

“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.” Carl Sagan

Still, stupidity is a close second. Or, here, right at the top?

“One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid." Douglas Adams

Let's hear first from the genuinely stupid people.

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” Robert Heinlein

For starters?

“And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.” Leo Tolstoy

Here? The stupidity of intellect. You know, up in the clouds.

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.” Jeffrey Eugenides

Let's decide: Does this go too far or not far enough?

[iambiguous]

The Onion

ICE Agents Hurl Pregnant Immigrant Over Mexican Border To Prevent Birth On U.S. Soil

You Google it this time.

ChatGPT Required To Notify Users That It's On Sex Offender Registry

Another one, in other words.

Insane Man Makes It Through Another Day Without Anyone Catching On

Or here: Sane Man Makes It Through Another Day Without Anyone Catching On

Mark Wahlberg Claims 9/11 Would’ve Gone Down Differently If He Were In Al-Qaeda

Well, he is, after all, Dirk Diggler.
And then this part: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/01 ... d-911.html
Now do you see how the Benjamin Button Syndrome works?

Nation’s Top Pseudoscientists Harness High-Energy Quartz Crystal Capable Of Reversing Effects Of Being Gemini

Okay, maybe it is all real.

‘I Want To Be In The Olympics Someday,’ Says Delusional Kindergartner Already 4 Years Behind In Elite Training

Best to start in the womb.

[iambiguous]

Truman Capote from In Cold Blood

The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.

In other words, a couple of sociopaths needed money?

All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over.

Ah, another "general observation".

Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they’re fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment.

Sometimes, well, yeah.

Deep down, Perry continued, way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.

A thing like what? You tell me yours, I'll tell you mine.

And we never used the lights again. Except the flashlight. Dick carried the flashlight when we went to tape Mr. Clutter and the boy. Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me—and these were his last words—wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep, and I told him it wasn’t long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed. I wasn’t kidding him. I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

Go figure.
No, seriously.

Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

Go figure.
No, seriously.

[iambiguous]

P.D. James from The Children of Men

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy.

Your sex life first, okay?

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Me? Don't even think about it.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

Bummer, isn't it.

Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

On the other hand, "he charmed the panties off her"?

But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?
That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.

Next up: religion.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

See, I told you.

[iambiguous]

David Foster Wallace from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange—of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money...

All of them eventually.

The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decadence is our fear of theocracy or autocracy or any ideology whose project is not to argue or persuade but to adjourn the whole debate sine die. It's this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics.

Let's imagine his reaction to...MAGA?

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

Next up: the scientific method.

The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.

Next up: the whole deontological setup

David Cronenberg’s mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film.

Next up: David Cronenberg's Videodrome.
Or, my own personal favorite, Spider.

It always seems to be important to have at least one person in the vicinity to hate.

And, yes, virtually counts.

[iambiguous]

David James Duncan from The River Why

At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing--a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.

Pick one:
1] a sour mood
2] an actual philosophy of life

Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.

Your weakness first, okay?

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

Wow, like our own cozy little village here.

The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest.

Or, here, fractured and fragmented, brutally honest.

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants.

And, sure, the equivalent of that here.

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

Next up: sometimes a touchdown...

[iambiguous]

Jerzy Kosiński

I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity.

Or oblivion?

There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.

See, I told you.

It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself.

Fuck that!
Right?

I'm sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as I know I am completely loved.

Shudder to think.

Life is a state of mind.

Well, that too, perhaps.

It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself.

If only in, say, fractured and fragmented bits and pieces.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Conservationists Confirm Only Remaining Species Are Humans, Pigeons, Dandelions

Though not necessarily in that order.

Woman Mentally Scans Everything She Knows About Friend Before Launching Into Rant Against Healing Crystals

That's always advisable these days.

Single Misogynist Ready To Settle Down And Hate One Woman For Rest Of His Life

Uh, vegetariantaxidermy?

Lunch Place Uses Way Too Much Mayo In Fruit Salad

Actually, it was mustard.

Experts Advise Against Throwing Laptop Across Office Even Though It Will Feel Incredible

I'm now up to three myself.

Jimmy Carter Wins 2023 Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest

Why would anyone else even bother competing?

[iambiguous]

Eugene Thacker

A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.

Well, one of them certainly.

What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse.

All the way up to the grave in particular.

But already there is some ambiguity, for does black designate a “color” that does not reflect light (and if so, why label it a color?), or does black designate the “color” that results in the total absence of light? Without light, no color, and without color, there is only black – and yet black is not a color.

Let's decide how important it is to actually understand this.

For Nishitani, then, the only way beyond nihilism is through nihilism. And here Nishitani borrows from the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, conventionally translated as “nothingness” or “emptiness.” In contrast to the relative nothingness of modern nihilism, which is privative, and predicated on the absence of being (that is, an ontology), Nishitani proposes an absolute nothingness, which is purely negative and predicated on a paradoxical foundation of non-being (that is, a meontology).

Of course: nihilism, the intellectual contraption.

What is repulsive about children - all children - is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults - whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things don't go their way. Far from what we tell ourselves, children are the most concise expressions of humanity. At least children are unaware of this.

How about we make them aware?

When solutions produce problems, when thought flounders in the absence of order, unity, and purpose, when healthy skepticism turns into pathological sarcasm – this is usually when pessimism enters the fray.

Uh, to say the least?

[iambiguous]

Richard Rorty

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Bullshit. If you know what I mean.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

For example, if you let them.

...members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.

Right, as more and more of them flock to Trump.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

Next up: chance and change.

The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

Of course: like the pinheads here.

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

And then what we do here...

[iambiguous]

Pessimism...

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it." Emil Cioran

And now you do know.

“Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.” Kingsley Amis

Hear! Hear!

“Those who have been pulled out of the calm tranquility of the void and trapped for life to a bodily existence have a single consolation: everything that lives, also dies. Sooner or later, the tragedy will be forever over. Every life is destined to return to the sweet nothing from which it emerged without its consent. This is our consolation.” Selim Güre

Hear? Hear?

“There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.” Christopher Hitchens

Make of this what you will.

“I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.” Haruki Murakami

He means pinheads of course.

“Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist.” John Kenneth Galbraith

Man as in women too.

[iambiguous]

Barbara Kingsolver from Demon Copperhead

Sometimes a good day lasts all about 10 seconds.

Next up: the other 86,390 seconds.

What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance.

Thank you, Big Pharma!

When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.

Well, it certainly does sound ominous.

Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas.

Hmm, I didn't know that.

Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot.

And we all know who they are.

If wishes were horses, like they say. We’d all have different shit to shovel.

You tell me.

[iambiguous]

Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger

I think that if there was a reason then that would just be one more thing to inquire about. My notion is you probably make up reasons after you’ve decided what it is you’re goin to do. Or not do.

Ah, the tricky part.

It’s just that the passing of time is irrevocably the passing of you. And then nothing.

Ask him about that now.

Do you think you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself?

Ask me about that now.

It must surely be true that there is no such collective domain of joy as there is of sorrow. You can't be sure that another man's happiness resembles your own. But where the collective of pain is concerned there can be little doubt at all.

Well, maybe?

He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. To that I have no answer.

Nope, me neither.

I suppose it should be a comfort to understand that one cannot be dead forever where there’s no forever to be dead in.

Nope, doesn't comfort me a bit.

[iambiguous]

Stupidity...

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. ” Adam Smith

Capitalism let's call it.

“Intelligent people know they are intelligent. They also know that one person cannot know all, hence a person is not stupid simply because he is ignorant of one thing or another. They know that, to another intelligent person, they will not appear stupid in asking for an explanation of what they do not know, and so their ignorance on any particular issue does not become an embarrassment." Lynsay Sands

He wondered if that was applicable here.

“Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be." Lois McMaster Bujold

We'll need a context of course.

“I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.” George Bernard Shaw

Just go to the dictionary and look it up.

“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?” Orson Scott Card

Let's run that by the idiots here.

“You're just another American who is willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick being shoved up your asshole every day...The owners of this country know the truth...it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!” George Carlin

Ouch!

[iambiguous]

Truman Capote from In Cold Blood

Perry said, Am I sorry? If that’s what you mean—I’m not. I don’t feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human. I’m human enough to feel sorry for myself. Sorry I can’t walk out of here when you walk out. But that’s all. Cullivan could scarcely credit so detached an attitude; Perry was confused, mistaken, it was not possible for any man to be that devoid of conscience or compassion. Perry said, Why? Soldiers don’t lose much sleep. They murder, and get medals for doing it. The good people of Kansas want to murder me—and some hangman will be glad to get the work. It’s easy to kill—a lot easier than passing a bad check. Just remember: I only knew the Clutters maybe an hour. If I’d really known them, I guess I’d feel different. I don’t think I could live with myself. But the way it was, it was like picking off targets in a shooting gallery.

Go figure?

If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.

Now imagine it in Hell, right IC?

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

And then it did.

At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again—those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.

Next up: the big city.

...the “Bible Belt,” that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces...

Ah, God "for all practical purpose".

The question is this—do poor, plainly guilty defendants have a right to a complete defense? I do not believe that the State of Kansas would be either greatly or for long harmed by the death of these appellants. But I do not believe it could ever recover from the death of due process.

Due process. When it isn't bought and paid for.