Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Miguel de Unamuno from Tragic Sense of Life

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

Anyone here actually know?

Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

Think about it, okay? Just don't get back to us.

And usually the philosopher philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.

Let's put them in the proper order.

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

But that's only so far.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

On the contrary, any number of those I've known who perished couldn't possibly have deserved to more.

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.

Well, at least it's either one or the other.

[iambiguous]

Orson Scott Card, from Ender's Game

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

And, for some, in the blink of an eye.

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.

Like that could ever actually happen. Much anyway.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

I'll get back to you on that.

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

Tell me about it.
No, really, how does that actually make sense?

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.

Pick one:
1[ psycho
2] somatic

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

And certainly the wrong words.

[Gary Childress]

Those who live in dwellings built of organic matter, fear termites. Those who live in dwellings built of non-organic matter fear erosion. Can non-organic matter build? Can non-organic matter stop erosion any more than organic matter can stop termites? And if there is no erosion or termites, then what is left standing becomes little more than matter without movement. Fossils are matter without movement. But can non-organic matter conduct "archeology"?

[iambiguous]

Barbara Kingsolver from The Poisonwood Bible

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

Misunderstanding what?

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

Anyone here doubt that?

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Or, from time to time, liberating.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which is at home at the moment.

Walking on eggshells, anyone?

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

That must happen here all the time...

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Or, perhaps, wholly compelled to?

[iambiguous]

Nihilism...

"Our lives are so brief and unimportant. The cosmos cares nothing for us. For what we've done; Had we wrought evil instead of good. Had I chosen to abuse the Apple instead of seal it away. None of it would have mattered. There is no counting. No reckoning. No final judgement. There is simply silence. And darkness. Utter and absolute..." Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad

Unless, of course, he's wrong.

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it." Flannery O'Connor

Sometimes you're saying it and sometimes you're hearing it.

“I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.” Alan Moore

Hell, that practically makes me a Watchman!

“Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.” Gorgias

Pick two:
1] the gap
2] rummy's rule

“Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle” Werner Herzog

Pick one:
1] it could be worse
2] it can't be worse

“I whispered to my heart, 'Is everything meaningless?'
'It doesn’t really matter, It smiled. Nothing matters.'” Juansen Dizon

So, by all means, make the most of it.

[iambiguous]

Stupidity...

“There is no such thing as a foolproof plan. If there are fools about, no plan is proof against them.” Marsha Hinds

Next up: a fool-proof post.

“I thought Candy Mountain was a real place.” Sarah Martin

Next up: Sugar Mounhtain.

“There's a difference between benevolence and stupidity and even God knows it.” Sonali Dev

Maybe even your God.

“A cop is a human creature born stupid and raised in stupidity.” Norman Mailer

It would have to be both. You know, if it's even true.

“I do not want to be labeled as an atheist; I do hate religions’ stupidity and insanity, but there is nothing else I can be called?” M.F. Moonzajer

Cue IC: "an Atheist".

“Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision...” Iain M. Banks.

What about that, NASA?

[Gary Childress]

“I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.” Alan Moore

Hell, that practically makes me a Watchman!

The last "Rorschoch test" I did for a psychologist, I sat there and looked at the piece of paper with the big blob of ink and told the psychologist that I just couldn't do it. I told her all I could see was a piece of paper with a smear of ink on it. I even told her how the opposite side of the inkblot was created by folding the paper in half so that a mirror image of the one half was imposed on the other.

When the results came back it was determined that I was "overly obsessed with reality".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[EDIT: It was also concluded that I "may" have a sense of "entitlement"]

[iambiguous]

Mary Roach from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, “The possibility of reuse must be considered".

The shit detail they'll call it.

...it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation’s Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club.

And, of course, the equivalent of that here.

After six months, you forget how heavy things are. Like, yourself. You also, after months of weightlessness, forget how to use your legs. Your muscles don’t remember what to do.

He wondered about his muscles. And then that other thing.

Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much, wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

Tell that to Jim, Jack and Fred.

Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the “SPCA Suit”—certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man, U.S. Spacesuits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. That was a mind boggler.

And the equivalent of that with the Commies.
And just for the record: https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/wh ... so%20flown.

Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis.

But only for those who truly do have the right stuff.
Same here of course.

[iambiguous]

Voltaire from Candide

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Come on, we have those with everything in the world to live for and those with nothing at all to live for. Philosophy never enters into it at all.

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable.

And it's not for nothing that fool clearly rhymes with pinhead.

But for what purpose was the earth formed? asked Candide.
To drive us mad, replied Martin.

Might I suggest some more than others.

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Shitholes?

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?
That is a hard question, said Candide.

Next up: my hard question.

Do you believe, said Candide, that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?

Do bears shit in the woods?

[iambiguous]

Fyodor Dostoevsky from Crime and Punishment

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

A note from underground, perhaps?

The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?

When you're not both?

Life had replaced logic.

If only when down out of intellectual clouds.

He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him - he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him...

Next stop: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

You’re a gentleman, they used to say to him. You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.

Yeah, how do you explain that?

…everyone needs a somewhere, a place he can go. There comes a time, you see, inevitably there comes a time you have to have a somewhere you can go!

Here, right?

[iambiguous]

Mario Puzo from The Godfather

I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

Anyone here still remember what that was?

Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.

On the other hand...

“When they send for you, you go in alive, you come out dead, and it's your best friend that does it.” Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero to Donnie Brasco

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

Okay here though.
After all, what could it possibly matter?

Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.

Tell that to Nicholas Van Orton.

A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.

Tell that to Hank Reardon.

The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.

Cue Woody Guthrie...

"Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

"And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home."

[iambiguous]

Frank Herbert from Dune

What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.

Starting now, okay?

Give as few orders as possible, his father had told him once long ago. Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.

Nope, none from me.

My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing, he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.

Fractured and fragmented is what it is.
Except, of course, when it's entirely objective.
Need me to explain that? No charge.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

The concept of lots of things, in fact.

A killer with the manners of a rabbit --- this is the most dangerous kind.

No, really, try to explain that to me.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

This and, here on Earth, crony capitalism.

[iambiguous]

Viet Thanh Nguyen from The Sympathizer

Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.

Let's sychronize our calculators.

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.

Next up: race in essence here.

She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.

Yo, phoneutria! Grow a pair and come back!!

Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking.

At the very least, however, you'll have to first admit it.

Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.

The fucking masses. What would the Trumps of this world do without them?

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.

Then, one by one, hammering them in to fit the mold.
Then, one by one, the Vietnams.

[iambiguous]

Suicide...

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” Albert Camus

Of course, back then the fucking Nazis were after him.

“I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.” David Levithan

Okay, but who isn't?

“A lot of you cared, just not enough.” Jay Asher.

Just out of curiosity, how many would you need to care?

“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” Vincent Willem van Gogh

How about the recognition he deserved?

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.” Tiffanie DeBartolo

Tell me that can't make all the difference in the world.

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.” J. Michael Straczynski

You tell me: https://youtu.be/vLAQiwEGGKs?si=S_rDNEGcZUd9qznk

[henry quirk]

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

Suicide is painless (suicide)
It brings on many changes (changes)
And I can take or leave it if I please

The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn't hurt when it begins
But as it works it's way on in
The pain grows stronger watch it grin

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

A brave man once requested me
To answer questions that are key
Is it to be or not to be
And I replied "Oh, why ask me?"

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please
And you can do the same thing if you please

Written by: Johnny Mandel, Michael B Altman

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Is_Painless

Director Robert Altman had two stipulations about the song for composer Johnny Mandel: it had to be called "Suicide Is Painless" and it had to be the "stupidest song ever written".