Philosophy Now Forum

As dystopias go this isn’t far beyond imagining one day. Besides, after the Holocaust, what could be? Children can be indoctrinated to believe practically anything is reality. And when some of the pieces don’t fit they simply rationalize it.

In Hailsham all the girls are pretty and all the boys are handsome. And, without exception, white. They are being bred for their organs, you see. Why take any chances.

And how many folks deep down inside don’t wish they had whatever they need donated donated on demand. As for those doing the donating [and then the “completions”] you devise the applicable narrative. This “reality” is now woven into social fabric. It’s just understood to be the way things are.

Death by the book. Death by completion.

Still, given the way we approach organ donation in my own culture, isn’t it just another kind of dystopia. All that religious bullshit again wrecking lives.

But what is the point of “souls” when it was only organs that were taken. And surely that did not include brains.

And the parts left out: the people who receive the donations and efforts made to revolt against them. It’s just the way it is.



Never Let Me Go

Kathy [voiceover]: My name is Kathy H. I’m 28 years old. I’ve been a Carer for 9 years. And I’m good at my job. My patients always do better than expected and hardly ever classified as agitated, even if they’re about to make a donation. I’m not trying to boast, but I feel a great sense of pride in what we do. Carers and Donors have achieved so much. That said, we aren’t machines. In the end it wears you down. I suppose that’s why I now spend most of my time not looking forwards, but looking back. To the Cottages and Hailsham and what happened to us there. Me. Tommy. And Ruth.

Everything else is on a need to know basis.

Miss Lucy: None of you will go to America. None of you will work in supermarkets. None of you will do anything, except live the life that has already been set out for you. You will become adults, but only briefly. Before you are old, before you are even middle aged, you will start to donate your vital organs. And sometime around your third or fourth donation, your short life will be completed. You have to know who you are, and what you are. It’s the only way to lead decent lives.

Now all you have to do is to accept it.

Ruth: They never, ever model us on people like that woman. We all know it, we just never say it. We are modeled on trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, as long as they’re not psychos. If you want to look for Possibles, you want to do it properly. Look in the gutter.

Any Possibles here?

Nurse: Is that someone you know?
Kathy: Yeah. Actually, we grew up together.
Nurse: Oh.
Kathy: How is she?
Nurse: …Were you close?
Kathy: We haven’t seen each other now for almost ten years.
Nurse: Well, Ruth isn’t as strong as we would hope, at this stage.
Kathy: She’s done two donations?
Nurse: She has.
Kathy: …You think she’ll complete on the third?
Nurse: I think she wants to complete. And, as you know, when they want to complete, they usually do.

Then the part where they're all...clones?

Ruth: I expect I look a bit broken, Kath. It’s okay. I don’t think I’d want to survive my third donation, anyway. You hear things, don’t you?
Kathy: What kinds of things?
Ruth: Oh, you know. How, maybe after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way. And then you find out that there are more donations, plenty of them. There are just no more recovery centers. No more Carers. Just watching and waiting. Till they switch you off. I don’t think I fancy that.

Let's run that by Madame.

Emily: You have to understand, Hailsham was the last place to consider the ethics of donation. We used your art to show what you were capable of. To show that donor children are all but human. But we were providing an answer to a question no one was asking. If you ask people to return to darkness, the days of lung cancer, breast cancer, motor neurone disease, they’ll simply say no.

Wouldn't you?

Madame: There are no deferrals. And there never have been.
Emily: We didn’t have The Gallery in order to look into your souls. We had The Gallery to see if you had souls at all.

Just out of curiosity, can souls be cloned?

Madame: You poor creatures. I wish I could help you.

I doubt that.

Kathy [voiceover]: I’ve been given my notice now. My first donation is in a month’s time. I come here and imagine that this is the spot where everything I’ve lost since my childhood is washed out. I tell myself, if that were true, and I waited long enough then a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy. He’d wave. And maybe call. I don’t know if the fantasy go beyond that, I can’t let it. I remind myself I was lucky to have had any time with him at all. What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.

Uh, que sera sera?

This film is inspired by true events. So these things actually do happen.

It basically depicts [historically] the manner in which one’s identity revolves around dasein. Who you come to think you are is profoundly rooted in the manner in which your life unfolds existentially. The lives of the sisters here were once virtually identical. Then their father dies and they are sent tumbling down two very, very different paths. Suddenly how they view themselves and the world around them come from entirely different frames of reference.

“I” then is always – either more or less – a fabrication; a narrative reconstructed “out in a particular world” evolving over time. And yours and mine are no different.

Here though they are reared in Europe at a time when the Nazis come to power. In this context therefore one’s identity can literally become a matter of life and death.

As children we become absorbed in the world around us. Then it is a matter of either discovering this or not. And for those of us who do deciding what can then be known as “true for all of us”?

IMDb

"1920s Germany. Two Sisters aged six years, no sooner see their remaining parent buried when they are torn apart. Lotte goes to live with her upper middle class Dutch aunt in Holland, Anna to work as a farm hand on her German uncle’s rural farm." IMDb

You can see where this is going. But can you really grasp its implications regarding identity?


Twin Sisters [De Tweeling]

Relative: You can have the sick one. Just the sick one. Final offer.
Ferdinand: It’s a disgrace. Twins belong together.
Relative: Be quiet, Ferdinand. We’ll go along with it. Everyone will get something.

And isn't that "the best of all possible worlds"?

Jetje: Dinand? We have to decide now. Do we send Lotte’s letter to Anna?
Dinand: And then? She’ll want to go there when she is better. And then they’ll keep her.
Jetje: I can’t bear to see it.
Dinand: They’re barbarians, Jetje. Stupid farmers. Stupid, Catholic farmers. Do you want her to grow up there? She has to forget Anna.

Good point, right?

Lotte: It’s cruel. All those letters. My sister. How could you do something so terrible? All that time she was waiting for a letter from me! Who would do such a thing? Why? Explain that to me!
Danand: We saved you from a bunch of illiterate barbarians.
Lotte: Why didn’t you save her then?
Danand: You were sick. And if you had visited Anna, they would have kept you there. Your life wouldn’t have been so nice.
Lotte: I would still have my sister!
Danand: Yes, you would now both be marching behind Mr. Hitler, waving flags.

Good point, right?

Lotte: Does she still live there? With the barbarians?
Jetje: Why?
Lotte: Because I am going to her.

What could go wrong?

Anna: I’m the delicate, retarded girl you’re looking for. I could read and write when I was six years old. My uncle kept me home to work for him for free. He allowed his wife to terrorize me, he beat me up. And no-one…No-one ever came to check whether what he’d written was true.

And even if it wasn't?

Lotte [showing Anna a picture of her boyfriend]: What’s the matter?
Anna: Oh, nothing. He’s handsome.
Lotte: What was it?
Anna: For a moment I thought he was a Jew.

And if he was?

Twin Sisters [De Tweeling]

Lotte: She’s an anti-Semite.
David: Don’t be silly. Just because she thought I was a Jew? You want to know something? I am a Jew. I look like three Jews put together. So bring your sister over.
Lotte: I won’t have anything to do with that whole German thing.

Tell that to the Germans. You know the ones.

Anna [reading Lotte’s letter]: “Considering the circumstances I think it’s better if you don’t come here. Your country is at war. Better not.”
Woman: Anna, we’re going. Are you coming? Something wrong with your sister?
Anna: I have no sister.

Something that would once have been unthinkable.

Anna: Why does she say that? ‘Better not.’ Better for whom?
Martin: Who said that?
Anna: Lotte. My sister. First I had to come, and now I can’t. Why not, all of a sudden? What have I done wrong? I only want to go to her.

Politics, let's call it.

Lotte: Buchenwald? Buchenwald, Buchenwald…What is there, Buchenwald?
Danand: A sort of work camp, for young men.

Or sort of something else.

David’s mother [to Lotte]: Strange how things go, isn’t it? If you hadn’t forgotten your bag…

Yo, Benjamin!

David’s mother: Auschwitz. Now it’s Auschwitz.

Or...Rafah?

Time

“You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you.” Rick Yancey

No exceptions, of course.

“The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.” Alan Bennett

And then it's gone forever.

“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is” W.B. Yeats

How many for you?

“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.” Han Kang

Remember that, okay?

“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.” Samuel Beckett

If only all the way to the grave?

“How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.” David Norris

Next up: you're flat broke.

Twin Sisters

David’s brother: Gas?
Danand: Yes, gas.
David’s brother: What kind of sick idea is that?
Danand: It was in the paper. I’m not making it up.
Lotte: What was in the paper?
Danand: Something about shower rooms where the enemy prisoners, it said, were driven in naked and gassed.
Lotte: Naked?
Danand: And that the capacity of the chambers has been raised from two hundred to a thousand people per day.
Lotte: Of course that isn’t true.

What if it was though?

Husband: Start a fight, curse her, hit her, I don’t know…but do something. This is terrible. You have to talk to her. Get over it. She can’t help it. And you don’t know anything about her. They’re not all Nazis. Talk to her. You’ll find out. She’s family, Lotte. She’s your twin sister, for God’s sake.

How much should that matter? You know, philosophically.

Lotte [seeing the picture of Anna with her SS husband, then the picture of David]: Get out! Get out of my house, Nazi! Nazi!! You killed him. You and that man…
[to husband]
Do you want an SS whore in your home?
[to Anna]
Get out! Get out of my life! I never want to see you again! You’re not my sister any more!!

Fair enough? And had they not been separated as children?

Anna [now very old]: If I’d had TB instead of you, the roles would have been reversed.
Lotte: The question is: Would I have made the same choices?
Anna: Of course. You wouldn’t have known any better, just like me.
Lotte: I would never have married an SS officer.
Anna: I didn’t fall in love with an SS officer…but with Martin, the best man in the whole world.
Lotte: I would never have fallen in love with a murderer.
Anna: Martin was no murderer.
Lotte: Don’t be so naive. You just told me so yourself. Poland, Russia…An SS officer who was there at the time, took part in clean-ups. Don’t tell me he didn’t kill anybody.
Anna: Of course he took part, because he had to. But I know for certain that he hated war. He was a good man.
Lotte: SS men were murderers out of conviction.
Anna: There are all sorts of people, aren’t there? Same in the SS.
Lotte: That way, you can understand any murderer if you study him hard enough. That’s very dangerous, Anna.

Could it really be as complicated as all that?

Anna: You don’t have to forgive me for anything. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve always tried to do the right thing and you’re treating me like a monster. I didn’t kill David.
Lotte: Oh stop it, Anna. You and I live in two different worlds. They can never ever meet.

But then somehow they do. Way, way too late though.

God

“Then I remember that God is really, really old. So maybe God has God arthritis. And maybe that's why the world sucks. Maybe God's hands and fingers don't work as well as they used to.” Sherman Alexie

That would help to explain some things, I suppose.

“You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child. The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can't understand His will; He can't be explained in a book. He didn't abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change. He simply is. I don't pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don't need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.” Nando Parrado

Next up: Judgment Day for Nando. Up? Down?

“I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?” Catherynne M. Valente

Uh, start here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... SjDNeMaRoX

“If it’s not one god it’s another. Allah or oil. Jesus or Jewels. Lenin or lust.” Victor Robert Lee

Get it?

“We are human, and we suffer, and unlike the animals on the farm, we are self-aware, and we know that we suffer, and it doesn't hurt more or less if God caused it or could stop it, at least for me. I am definitely of the school that believes God has bigger stuff to worry about than me.” Jon Katz

New thread, IC?

“God hides the fires of hell within paradise.” Paulo Coelho

How ominous might that be...if it's true.

Is football really like this? Probably. It is big business. It drains the players dry and then discards them. And it’s all about the bucks. Either way, some argue, it is an utterly contemptable pursuit. It epitomizes our culture in so many despicable ways, they declaim.

Unless, of course, they're wrong.

And then there is the crony, phoney capitalism behind it. Plenty of that here too. Back again to Chinatown.

Against All Odds

Sully: Well football’s changed quite a bit since I was a player.
County Supervisor: Right. I guess that run of injuries kind of hurt you guys last season.
Sully: Yeah, we had a lousy bench last year. We had to play alot of ballplayers that were injured, that shouldn’t have played.
Ben: Well, that’s part of the job. You say you never played injured?
Sully: Yeah, but I was dumb. I just don’t like the idea of my boys hurt permanently.
Ben: You can see why they call him “mother”.
Sully: Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about being a supervisor and I sure as hell don’t know anything about being a lawyer. 'Course if I was a lawyer, I wouldn’t know shit about football, would I?

Let's come back to Sully later.

Terry: I could smell what they were thinking. I give them any trouble, they cut me.
Sully: Terry, they’d cut you anyway. They’re rebuilding. More profit, less talent. You cost too much, my friend.

Cue Jake.

Jake: Look, I was a bit of an asshole. I got crazy and I popped her a few times. She came after me with a knife. She just missed my balls.
Terry: Was she going for them?
Jake: Don’t they all.

No, really, do they?

Jake: You know what it feels like to be one of Mrs Wyler’s possessions don’t you Terry?

"Only a pawn in their game".
Not unlike most of us, right?

Terry: Mrs Wyler is Caxton’s biggest client, isn’t she?
Edie: Oh, yes. In fact, he’s doing business for her right now.
Terry: Oh, yeah? For the Outlaws?
Edie: No, Mrs. Wyler’s real business is real estate. Mr. Caxton wants a zoning variance on Mrs. Wyler’s canyon so she can build houses there. His guest of honor could vote against it. Trust me, he won’t now.

Or is Terry completely oblivious to all the "show me the money" political machinations?

Ben: I think just a few members of the team would have been enough. Having the Outlaws here full force is kinda crowding it.
Mrs. Wyler: Well, I have to get some use out of them. I don’t like football.
Ben: Shh…Shh…Shh.

Not too loud!

STOP RUINING OUR THREAD IDIOT.

Against All Odds

Jessie: Should I be afraid of you?
Terry: I don’t know.

Too close to call at this point.

Terry: Is that what you’re doing down here, hiding?
Jessie: Yep. From you, right?

In other words, from Jake.
Or Mommy?

Terry: You know something, I came down here for the hell of it. Only trouble is, now that I’m here I find myself in the middle of something I have absolutely no feeling for.
Jessie: Well, you’re not doing this for free. You’re getting paid, and paid well, aren’t you?

One suspects she might be on to him.

Terry: I figure fuck em. Fuck you too, lady.

That's right around the corner, of course.

Jessie: I want to know why I should believe you won’t tell Jake where I am.
Terry: Hey, look, there are probably people who care what you believe. I don’t see 'em in the room.

Exactly what she wanted to hear.

Terry: I have a broken shoulder. Both my knees are shot. There are guys crippling themselves right now so that you can act like a 13 year old runaway from some mansion in Bel Air. I could really give a shit what you believe.

Exactly what she wanted to hear.

Walker wrote:Climate Change isn't really about the climate.

(we both vote for Trump you know)

attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:12 am

Walker wrote:Climate Change isn't really about the climate.

(we both vote for Trump you know)

Source of the quote, from the horses' mouth.

viewtopic.php?p=712843#p712843

Against All Odds

Terry [at a Mayan ruin]: The games they had here must have been incredible. Look at this. They even wore face masks and shoulder pads.
Jessie: The games were a little more serious than the ones you played. They’d play for days, and the losing team would get their heads chopped off. The guys who bet on the games would wager themselves and even their children. And if they lost, they were slaves.

Progress?

Terry: I love you. You’ve become everything I’m about! Don’t you understand?
Jessie [fiercely]: Can’t anyone love me without it being like life or death to them?!
Terry: You know, most people are afraid they’re never going to be loved like that.

Now that's still true, isn't it?

Terry: Let’s go to the sweat house.

Cue Sully.

Sully [just before he dies]: What are we doing down here?

That's what pawns do though. They go where they're told.

Jessie [back with Jake]: I think about you.
Terry: I think about you too lady. Let’s leave it at that.

More to the point: the way he said it.

Terry: You came back to this fuck.

This fuck:

Jake: Sully kept me up on injuries that might affect upcoming games. And Kirsch let me know what players weren’t going to have their contracts renewed.
Terry: It’s a shitty business.
Jake: It’s a shitty world.

It still is. And now in most states here in America you can bet on it.

Jake: What the hell made you think you could handle Jessie? I bet you used to bring her home flowers.
Terry: No, you don’t have to do that when you’re living in the jungle. You just take her outside and show her what tree you’re going to do it under. Hell, we had lots of trees.

The look on Jake's face? Priceless.

Ben: I get things done in this town. And the people I work for like your mother have no interest in how that happens, just that I do it. She wants Wyler canyon developed but she can’t get through to everybody with campaign contributions so I have to go into business with some very strange people.

Think the Michael Cohens in this still ongoing Machiavellian cesspools.

Terry [to Ben]: This town really does belong to people like you.

On the other hand, he will get Jessie eventually.

Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:15 am

attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:12 am

Walker wrote:Climate Change isn't really about the climate.

(we both vote for Trump you know)

Source of the quote, from the horses' mouth.

viewtopic.php?p=712843#p712843

Walker, me 'ol Trump voting chum. Why don't you edit the TITLE of the OP and change it to something appropriate since iambiguous has fucked us over.

Perhaps:- "iambiguous ONION quotes of the day" - -- > makes more sense right?

THEN - we can create a thread called "Quote of the Day" for us all to return to getting a chance to post a single quote, that doesn't get drowned in the iambiguous crap - and rather than having two titled the same?

Mmm, me 'ol village mate?

attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:21 am

Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:15 am

attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:12 am



(we both vote for Trump you know)

Source of the quote, from the horses' mouth.

viewtopic.php?p=712843#p712843

Walker, me 'ol Trump voting chum. Why don't you edit the TITLE of the OP and change it to something appropriate since iambiguous has fucked us over.

Perhaps:- "iambiguous ONION quotes of the day" - -- > makes more sense right?

THEN - we can create a thread called "Quote of the Day" for us all to return to getting a chance to post a single quote, that doesn't get drowned in the iambiguous crap - and rather than having two titled the same?

Mmm, me 'ol village mate?

Well, get to it then. I'll be a contributor.

I see no reason to change this thread.

Brings to mind a recent musing about, "Mistakes," prompted by the musing of Astro Cat.

God doesn't make mistakes. No mistakes, is good. Therefore, God is good.

(You may quote me, again.)

Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:29 am

attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:21 am

Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 1:15 am
Source of the quote, from the horses' mouth.

viewtopic.php?p=712843#p712843

Walker, me 'ol Trump voting chum. Why don't you edit the TITLE of the OP and change it to something appropriate since iambiguous has fucked us over.

Perhaps:- "iambiguous ONION quotes of the day" - -- > makes more sense right?

THEN - we can create a thread called "Quote of the Day" for us all to return to getting a chance to post a single quote, that doesn't get drowned in the iambiguous crap - and rather than having two titled the same?

Mmm, me 'ol village mate?

Well, get to it then. I'll be a contributor.

I see no reason to change this thread.

Brings to mind a recent musing about, "Mistakes," prompted by the musing of Astrocat.

God doesn't make mistakes. No mistakes, is good. Therefore, God is good.

(You may quote me, again.)

Walker - you still don't understand - what iambiguous is posting in this thread is MULTIPLE quotes - PLURAL - ergo, logically the thread title is NOT appropriate for THIS THREAD.

All you need to do is change it to perhaps: "iambiguous ONION quotes of the day"

Then we can all have a "Quote of the Day" thread (a totally different and more appropriate title)

OUI?