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Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2023 5:47 pm
by iambiguous
John N. Gray from Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals
Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?
No doubt about it: for some this is actually a really dumb question.
Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.
Next up, pick one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy
We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.
See, didn't I [and Benjamin Button] tell you?
Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.
How about we meet somewhere in the middle? At the Pentagon, say.
Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.
Again, back to this...
Pick one:
1] too cynical
2] not cynical enough
...humankind's presence on Earth is nothing but a cancer...
Pray for the Big One?
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2023 9:35 pm
by iambiguous
The Onion
Guy With Huge Head Not Even Smart
In fact, he's a fucking idiot!
Elon Musk Botches Twitter Rebrand By Misspelling Letter X
Who would have thought that was even possible.
Biden Forgets Nation’s Name
Hint: It starts with an A.
Taylor Swift Concert Causes 2.3-Magnitude Earthquake In Seattle
No, really: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp ... gle+Search
New Charges Suggest Trump Asked Mar-A-Lago Employee To Tape Over Security Footage With Rerun Of ‘Hong Kong Phooey’
Just for the record: "Penrod Pooch leaps into action as Hong Kong Phooey to fight villains."
Greyhound Announces Successful Bus Voyage To View The Titanic
Implosion proof to boot.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 2:38 pm
by iambiguous
Jeanette Winterson from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.
Of course, she's only paraphrasing, well, you know.
It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.
Unless, of course, for you it actually was one thing or another.
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
Any dead things here?
If you think about something for long enough, she explained, more than likely, that thing will happen. She tapped her head. It's all in the mind.
Right, and how is that working out for you. Ask me how it is working out for me.
By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.
That's betrayal alright.
What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?
How about this: I don't get you started if you don't get me started.
I love her.
Then you do not love the Lord.
Yes, I love both of them.
You cannot.
I do.
Hell it is then.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 8:29 pm
by iambiguous
David James Duncan
It’s incredible to me how blithely even intelligent people sometimes toss around terms like “transcendence” and “crucifixion.” The words move us on paper. They feel noble upon the tongue. But when they cease to be sounds and begin to caress the flesh and bones, when they leave the page and get physical, there is little that even the best of us woudn’t do to escape them.
Anyone here ever succeed?
Because I wasn’t anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive?
On the other hand, killed what? Or, for that matter, even who?
There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head.
Next up: in Baltimore.
The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he’d inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.
On the rock?
But point taken.
There were some crucial things Vera’s parents were forgetting about crosses, was what Peter said. One was that Jesus was nailed to His by enemies, not by Mary and Joseph. And another, he said, was that it killed Him. Christ’s cross killed Him. We’ve got to remember what crosses are, Peter said. They’re not just decorations on steeples. They’re murder weapons, he said, the same as guns, or gas chambers, or electric chairs.
And then the part where He's God of course.
I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
Or maybe not?
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:35 pm
by iambiguous
Cynicism...
“I sometimes think that 'friend' is just a word I use for all the people I haven't murdered yet.” Scott Lynch
Now that's cynical.
“That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he'll stick to the rules.” Mike Carey
Or, really being cynical, flout them.
...motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.” Frank Herbert
Right, like that will ever stop us.
“To sum it all up, the Ayn Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.”
Matt Taibbi
Or certainly close enough to it.
“Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way." Julian Barnes
Or certainly close enough to it.
“The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took”. Dennis Lehane
If only all the way to the grave. With any luck.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2023 9:21 pm
by iambiguous
Herman Hesse from Steppenwolf
You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.
Unless, of course, it's the other way around.
For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
He wondered if that described him.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
Not to be confused with the rock band.
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages...
You know, being a Steppenwolf.
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
Well, the second part anyway.
How absurd these words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men...They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.
Come on, how hard can it be being nothing other than what you were never able not to be?
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2023 3:42 pm
by iambiguous
Hernan Diaz from Trust
While grateful for it, he was suspicious of the American notion of freedom, which he viewed as a strict synonym of conformism, or, even worse, the mere possibility of choosing between different versions of the same product.
And, no, not just toothpaste.
Because money is all things (or can be all things), something strange happens to the person who has it. As Marx says, it's like someone finding, by pure chance, the philosopher's stone. You know the philosopher's stone?
Yes, I know what the philosopher's stone is.
The philosopher's stone gives you all the knowledge. All of it. All the knowledge of all the sciences. Imagine that someone just finds this stone. By luck. Suddenly he would have all this knowledge, regardless of his individuality. Even if he's a perfect idiot. All of it. All the knowledge.
Or, here, the philosopher's pebble.
A vicious circle has taken hold of our able-bodied men: they increasingly rely on the government to alleviate the misery created by that same government, not realizing that this dependency only perpetuates their sorry state of affairs.
Think the white working class and Trump.
So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.
Next up: money is not fiction.
All we have left to choose is different forms of terror. Terror and imperialism. That’s all. Fascist imperialism. Soviet imperialism. Capitalist imperialism. Those are our only choices now, it seems. The time has come for radical action.
Okay, workers of the world...unite!
Now, for fuck sake!!
...know my days are numbered, but not every day is a real number.
Well, this one is.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2023 8:45 pm
by iambiguous
Ernest Becker from The Denial of Death
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Not counting philosophers, right?
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Uh, posting here?
When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening.
Next up: when we are old.
We are gods with anuses.
Next up: passing gas here.
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
No, no bullshit...this is probably true.
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.
See, I told you.
Too, in other words.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2023 6:38 pm
by iambiguous
Carrie Fisher from Postcards from the Edge
Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, “Instant gratification takes too long."
Next up: instant karma.
My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.
Among other things: Huh?!
My heart's in the right place. I know, cuz I hid it there.
Until Paul found it?
Remember what it was like when you’d be getting ready to jump rope... two people were turning it, and you were waiting for exactly the right moment to jump in? I feel like that all the time.
No, really.
Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.
Just another postcard from the edge?
While she'd been drying her hair, she'd come up with a new message for her answering machine - "I'm out, deliberately avoiding your call" - and that simple burst of creativity had raised her spirits a bit.
It raised mine a bit too.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2023 9:31 pm
by iambiguous
Eudora Welty from The Optimist's Daughter
The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
Uh, cue dasein?
Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Pick one:
1] Dateline
2] 20/20
3] 48 Hours
You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable?
Well, I'm an optimist.
I didn't know there were any more such animals, said Dr. Courtland.
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Next up: the pessimist's daughter.
For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.
Yes, alas, even here.
The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Fantasy? As good as any description, I suppose.
People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel.
I know that I intend to.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2023 6:15 pm
by iambiguous
Alan Sokal
Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded.
Next up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idDoRft ... SjDNeMaRoX
A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.
Not counting the real world of course.
We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.
Here for example.
"None of us, I think, in the mid-’70s would have thought we’d be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed." Ian McEwan
Nope, not as long as death and oblivion are still around.
But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
They imagine, perhaps, that they can exploit the prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer of rigor. And they seem confident that no one will notice their misuse of scientific concepts. No one is going to cry out that the king is naked. Our goal is precisely to say that the king is naked (and the queen too).
Buck naked here.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 12:21 am
by iambiguous
Pessimism...
“What is the therapeutic path? Is there one? How can we remedy a wound the size of existence?" Thomas Moynihan
Forget about it.
“The charm of sleepless nights is the idea that tomorrow will not come.”
Jean Baudrillard
If charm is the right word?
“At what point was it morally reprehensible to bring a life into a chaotic, toxic world?” Kristy McGinnis
Don't get me started.
“The truth is, I was never a nihilist at all. I just wore nihilism like a shield to protect my unrelenting tragic optimism.” Sean Norris
You know, whatever that means.
“I can’t think of a more misused phrase than ‘I can’t,’ except in this instance.” Craig D. Lounsbrough
Clever?
“I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing.” Fernando Pessoa
Well, it's not called "The Book of Disquiet" for nothing.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 4:50 pm
by iambiguous
Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger
Too soon old and too late smart. You dont know anything till it gets here. You told me once that maybe the end of the road has nothing to do with the road. Maybe it doesnt even know there’s been a road. You ready?
Of course, being ready has nothing to do with it.
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, not even close.
I see your look. I know that you see me enfettered in some cognitive morass and I’m sure that you would contend it to be the ultimate solipsism to believe that the world ceases when you do. But I’ve no other way to look.
Okay, but what about now, Cormac?
Ultimately there is nothing to know and no one to know it.
Well, practically ultimately, anyway.
If someone said to you that you had thrown your life away over a woman what would you say? Well thrown.
Yo, Supannika! Well thrown?
Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.
Well, in that case, fuck them.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 3:23 pm
by iambiguous
Emil M. Cioran from The Temptation to Exist
Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.
In any event, it is pursuing you.
Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action.
Next up: every post.
I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing."
Of course, look where that took him. To oblivion. Just like all the rest of us.
The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome.
Next up: Your tyranny?
A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired intellectual abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble.
Yep, here I am.
You too?
The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality’s detriment.
Well, not counting what we do here, he stammered.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 10:28 pm
by iambiguous
John N. Gray from Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals
Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality.
My guess: this can get trickier than it sounds.
You know, in reality.
Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
And, here and now, that is relevant how?
It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.
Okay, being optimistic.
Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them. In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.
Trust me: for millions and millions among the toiling masses, it still is.
Right, Mr. Sweat Shop?
Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.
Save for the distractions anyway.
Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.
Let's run this by Sisyphus.