Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

The Fabulous Baker Boys

Back to…

Frank: My name is Frank Baker and you know my little brother Jack. My brother and l have been playing together for…l don’t know. Jack?
Jack: 31 years.
Frank: But of course, back then… it was a little different. We were just kids. The only one who’d listen to us was the family cat, Cecil. We must’ve shaved 3 lives off that cat, huh?

Huh, Jack?

Jack: What’s happened to you? Have you been kissing ass so long, you’re starting to like it? You let that guy turn us into clowns tonight. We were always small time, but we were never clowns.

The "telethon".

Frank: l want to explain something to you, little brother. There are people in this world who depend on me. l got a wife and kids who expect to wake up with food on the table and heat in the house. l got a mortgage. l got car payments. And l got you, my little brother Jack. He’s so hip, so cool and sure that he’s better than everyone. Don’t you think l’d like to walk up to one of those assholes and blow smoke in his face? God damn right l would! But l can’t. l have to be responsible. l have to make the numbers balance in my favor every month so everyone else can go on living their lives. There’s no medals but you’d notice if l closed up shop. Don’t talk to me about dignity.

Ah, the real world. And for millions upon millions of us.

Jack: Would you stop that please.
Nina: [while loudly playing with her paddle ball] You want me to make some coffee? How 'bout some eggs? I can make you some eggs, if you want.
Jack: Knock it off with that fucking thing…it’s driving me nuts! Jack you want eggs, Jack you want coffee. You’re not my housekeeper, I’m not your fucking father. I can’t babysit you every time your mama gets an itch!

Nina. I almost forgot about her.

Later up on the roof…

Nina: You’re having a bad day, right?
Jack: Right.
Nina: lt’s okay. My mom had a lot of those. Sometimes that’s why l came down.
Jack: Hey, teach you later? What are you going to do, go around playing ‘‘Jingle Bells’’ the rest of your life?

He's really one of the good guys.

Henry: I’ve got Tuesdays and Thursdays open. There yours if you want them, Jack.

We gotta have a happy ending right?

Frank: Let’s cut the bullshit. You came here to talk business, right? We’ll put the other night behind us. ln a couple of weeks, it’ll be the same. Now you can go.
Jack: l’m not coming back, Frank.
Frank: Then what’s there to talk about?

Next up: Jack and Susie, sitting in a tree...

[iambiguous]

Deliverance

Lewis: There ain’t gonna be no more river. Just gonna be a big, dead lake.
Ed: It’s a very clean way to make electric power. Those lakes provide many people with recreation. My father-in-law has a houseboat on Lake Bowie.
Lewis: You push a little more power into Atlanta…a little more air conditioners for your smug little suburb…and you know what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna rape this whole landscape. They’re gonna rape it.
Ed: That’s an extreme point of view, Lewis.
Bobby: It is. Extremist.

On the other hand, it's not fractured and fragmented.

Bobby: Talk about your genetic deficiencies—isn’t that pitiful?

It was rather stark.

Drew: Goddamn, you play a mean banjo. Hey, you wanna play another one?
Bobby: Give him a couple of bucks.

Fucking Bobby. But he'll get his, right?

Lewis: Your name Griner?
Griner: What you wanna know for?
Lewis: I was wondering if you and your brother could take a couple of trucks down to Aintry for us.
Griner: Drive 'em down there for what?
Lewis: Me and my buddy here are taking a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee. We’d like our cars to be down in Aintry when we get there. Be there about Sunday noon.
Griner: [sarcastically] Canoe trip?
Lewis: That’s right, a canoe trip.
Griner: What the hell you wanna go fuck around with that river for?
Lewis: Because it’s there.
Griner: It’s there all right. You get in there and can’t get out, you gonna wish it wasn’t.

Oh, yeah.

Ed: [to Lewis, whispering] Look, Lewis, let’s go back to town and, ah…play golf.
Lewis: [ignoring Ed] I’ll give you thirty dollars to take those cars down to Aintry.
Griner: I’ll take fifty.
Lewis: Fifty, my ass.
Ed: Lewis, don’t play games with these people!
Griner: Whud you say?
Lewis: I said “fifty, my ass.”
Ed: [whispering urgently] Lewis!
Griner: I’ll do it for forty.
Lewis: Mm-hmm…
[to Ed]
Lewis: You good for ten?
Ed [relieved]: Sure.

Aintry, it is then. The hard way.

Lewis: [Ed and Lewis are driving to find the river and come to a dead end] Well, we fucked up.
Ed: You better let them show us.
Lewis: You’re missin’ the whole point, Ed.
Griner: Where you goin’ city boy?
Lewis: We’ll find it. We’ll find it.
Griner: It ain’t nothin’ but the biggest fuckin’ river in the state.

Next up: his cousins.

[iambiguous]

Free Will

“Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.” V.S. Naipaul

Next up: most people here.

“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.” Leo Tolstoy

It sure seems that way.

“Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.” Neil Gaiman

James Kirk...meet Apollo.

“You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.” Sam Harris

Not counting all of the secret "internal components" of the human brain that may or may not actually exist to "somehow" give you autonomy.

“But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of naturalism) that they lean the other way: free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don't have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what? It has nothing to do with morality or the meaning of life. Their advice to me at the symposium was simple: recast my pressing question as whether naturalism (materialism, determinism, science...) has any implications for what we may call moral competence. For instance, does neuroscience show that we cannot be responsible for our choices, cannot justifiably be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished? Abandon the term 'free will' to the libertarians and other incompatibilists, who can pursue their fantasies untroubled. Note that this is not a dismissal of the important issues; it’s a proposal about which camp gets to use, and define, the term. I am beginning to appreciate the benefits of discarding the term 'free will' altogether, but that course too involves a lot of heavy lifting, if one is to avoid being misunderstood.” Daniel C. Dennett

We'll need context of course.

“God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.” Jim Butcher

Yet another example of someone asserting something about God to be true simply by asserting it.

[iambiguous]

Deliverance

Bobby: We beat it, didn’t we? Didn’t we beat that?
Lewis: You don’t beat it. You don’t beat this river…

Prescient, let's call him.

Lewis: Machines are gonna fail. And the system’s gonna fail. Then…
Ed: And then what?
Lewis: Then survival. He who has the ability to survive. That’s the game: survive.
Ed: And you can’t wait for it to happen, can you? You can’t wait for it. Well, the system’s done all right by me.
Lewis: Oh, yeah. You got a nice job. Got a nice house…nice wife…nice kid.
Ed: You make that sound rather shitty, Lewis.
Lewis: Why do you go on these trips with me, Ed?
Ed: I Iike my Iife, Lewis.
Lewis: Yeah, but why do you go on these trips with me?

I forget: did Ed tell him?

Ed: He knows the woods, though. He really does.
Drew: Not really. He learned 'em, he doesn’t feel ‘em. That’s his problem. He wants to be one with nature and he can’t hack it.
Bobby: This is a hell of a time to be tellin’ us that.

Drew in particular, right?

Ed: Look, what is it that you require of us?
Mountain Man: What we, uh, “re-quire” is that you get your god-damn ass up in them woods.

Bobby's ass too.

Mountain Man: [to Bobby] Them panties. Take 'em off.

That can't be good.

Lewis: Anybody know anything about the law?
Drew: I was on a jury duty once. It wasn’t a murder trial.
Lewis: Murder trial? I don’t know the technical word for it, Drew, but I know this: You take this man and turn him over to the sheriff, there’ll be a trial all right. Trial by jury.
Drew: So what?
Lewis: We killed a man, Drew. Shot him in the back. A mountain man. Cracker. Gives us somethin’ to consider.
Drew: All right, consider it. We’re listening.
Lewis: Shit, all these people are related. I’ll be damned if I’ll come back and stand trial with this man’s aunt and uncle…maybe his mama and his daddy sittin’ in the jury box.

Good point?

Drew: This ain’t one of your fuckin’ games, Lewis! You killed somebody!

Trying to save Bobby's ass?

[iambiguous]

Deliverence

Lewis: Now you listen, Ed! Damn it, we can get out of this thing! Without any questions asked! We get connected up with that body and the law this thing’s gonna be hangin’ over us the rest of our lives. We gotta get rid of that guy.
Drew: Just how are you gonna do that, Lewis? Where?
Lewis: Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere. You know what’s gonna be here? Right here. A lake. As far as you can see. Hundreds of feet deep. Hundreds of feet deep. Did you ever look over a lake and think about somethin’ buried underneath it? Buried underneath it! Man, that’s about as buried as you can get!

So, is that more or less logical?

Drew: It is a matter of the LAW!!!
Lewis: The law? Ha! What law? WHERE’S THE LAW, DREW?

So, is that more or less logical?

Ed: Lewis, you’re the guy with the answers. What the hell do we do now?!
Lewis: Now you get to play the game.

The "survival of the fittest" game, let's call it.

Sherrif: Let’s just wait and see what comes out of the river.

And he wrote the book on that.

Taxi Driver: Right there’s the town hall. Right over there’s the old fire station. Played a lot of checkers over there, sure did. All this land’s gonna be covered with water - best thing ever happened to this town.
[a truck in front of the cab is carrying a small church building on a flatbed trailer]
Taxi Driver: We might have to wait a minute for the church to get out the way.

Then the coffins being "relocated".

Lewis: What happened on that last set of rapids? I don’t remember nothing. Nothing.

I forget: did he lose that leg?

Sherrif: Don’t ever do nothin’ like this again. Don’t come back up here.
Bobby: You don’t have to worry about that, Sheriff.
Sherrif: I’d kinda Iike to see this town die peaceful.

Whatever that means?

[iambiguous]

Though author Herman Raucher admits to moving the order of certain events around and interchanging some dialogue, the movie is (according to those involved) an accurate depiction of events in Raucher’s life in the summer of 1942 on Nantucket Island; he didn’t even change anyone’s name.

Summer of '42

Hermie [narrating as an adult]: Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I’ve ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant.

"It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.” John Fowles

[the three friends are gawking at a medical journal about sex]
Oscy: Now listen! Before I saw these pictures, I didn’t think it was possible, either. But these are pictures, Benjie, pictures! These aren’t drawings! I’ve seen those drawings! These are pictures!

Of course, you have to be old enough to actually get this.

Hermie [reading from the medical journal on sex]: What the hell is this in number four?
Oscy: That’s Latin.

And that's not all it is, of course.

Oscy: Point six, Hermie, very important.
Hermie: Foreplay.
Oscy: Right! That word keeps cropping up.

You know, back then.

Hermie: Look, Oscy, if I follow these 12 points, she just might end up with a kid. And I can’t afford a kid at this stage in my life.

Being a kid himself.

Druggist: Do you know what these are for?
Hermie: Sure. You fill them up with water, and then you throw them off the roof.
Druggist: Well, I just wanted to make sure you knew what they were for.

Clever enough for you?

Dorothy: Oh, you drink coffee, don’t you?
Hermie: [trying to sound like an adult] … I consume a couple of cups a day.
Dorothy: Well, I have milk.
Hermie: Oh, no. I take it black.

He said, puffing on his pipe.

Hermie [to Dorothy after reading the telegram]: I’m sorry.

Next up: the irony, of course.

Dorothy [in a letter]: Dear Hermie: I must go home now. I’m sure you’ll understand. There’s much I have to do. I won’t try and explain what happened last night because I know that, in time, you’ll find a proper way in which to remember it. What I will do is remember you. And I pray that you be spared all senseless tragedies. I wish you good things, Hermie. Only good things. Always, Dorothy.

"During an interview on The Mike Douglas Show, Herman Raucher said that after the novel and movie were released, several women wrote letters to him claiming to be Dorothy. One of the letters was indeed from the real Dorothy, who wanted to know if she had psychologically damaged Raucher, and also informed him that she had been happily remarried and was now a grandmother. It was the last time that Raucher, by that time married with children, heard from Dorothy."

Hermie [narrating as an adult]: I was never to see her again. Nor was I ever to learn what became of her. We were different then. Kids were different. It took us longer to understand the things we felt. Life is made up of small comings and goings. And for everything we take with us, there is something that we leave behind. In the summer of '42, we raided the Coast Guard station four times, we saw five movies, and had nine days of rain. Benji broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica, and in a very special way, I lost Hermie forever.

The part I "root existentially in dasein". What do you root it in?

[iambiguous]

Hermie...meet Fresh.

Fresh

Cousin: Michael?
Fresh: What?
Cousin: Why you come home so late? You know Aunt Francis be gettin’ worried when you come home so late. It’s hard enough on her without you be worryin’ her all the time. If she gets too fed up and gives all of us up, I’m gonna kill you. ‘Cause ain’t none of us can go back to our parents…and I ain’t goin’ back to no group home, you hear me? You my cousin and all, we all cousins here…but if you ruin it for the rest of us, I’m gonna kill you.

No idle threat one suspects.

Corky [to Fresh]: You one bad motherfucker. Only reason you ain’t the man is you still too goddamn little, but, when you get bigger, you gonna be the man.

And how ironic is that?

Sam [Fresh’s dad]: Chess ain’t fun, boy. How many times I gotta tell you that? Don’t you listen to a word I say?
Fresh: Maybe if I seen you more.
Sam: Well, you don’t, so you’d be well served to retain some of the knowledge I’m impartin’ to you rather than giving me all your hard-ass street-attitude bullshit…Ain’t so much fun now, is it? Gettin’ to be less and less fun every second here. Uh-uh, think about it. Forget the clock for a second, Michael. What kind of player am I? Am I an offensive man or a defensive man? That’s right; I’m neither. I play my opponent. If he likes to attack, I force him to defend himself. If he’s a cautious man, I draw him into dangerous waters. See, you get so frustrated playing defensive positions you make stupid moves you’d never make if you were thinkin’. When you come here, boy, check that shit at the door.

Next up: dope moves.

Strung out girl: Look, maybe I better talk to Jake myself, you know?
Fresh: You know you don’t be talkin’ to Jake. You know that.
Strung out girl: Look, you tell Jake that I’ll suck his dick good, okay? You tell him I’ll suck him off real nice.
Fresh: Damn, you know Jake down with them fine bitches. Why he want that from you?
Strung out girl: All right, listen, how about you and me, baby? We get in that car, I’ll suck your sweet little dick for ten bucks.
Fresh: Get out of my face, bitch.
Strung out girl: Okay, how about I let you fuck me? Okay? I let you bang this good thing if you just ask Jake to talk to me…
Fresh [slapping her in the face]: Get out of here! Go over to Lenny. He be likin’ them no-tooth, old bitches like you!
[Jake is in the background laughing his ass off]

Run that by Hermie and his pals.

Fresh: Why you don’t go to Esteban then?
Nicole: I don’t like the way he looks at me. I don’t need no spic pimp motherfucker looking at me like no fuckin’ queen. I’m just a sorry-ass n***** whore.

Fresh to the rescue?

Fresh: Don’t Aunt Frances think you ain’t nothing. She think you’re something.
Nichole: Aunt Frances is a fuckin’ saint. Aunt Frances loves every damn dog on the street the same as she loves me. Ain’t no shit to be loved by no fuckin’ saint.

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.

[iambiguous]

Logic

“Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.” Douglas Adams

You know, if you're not a philosopher.

“Facts don't care about your feelings.” Ben Shapiro

On the other hand, over and over and over again, feelings don't care about the facts.

“As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?” Rowan Atkinson

Uh, theoretically?

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked” Oliver Wendell Holmes

And who decides that?

“It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.” Albert Camus

“Shepherd Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?
River: Fixing your Bible.
Book: I, um... What?
River: Bible's broken. Contradictions, false logistics - doesn't make sense.
Shepherd Book: No, no. You-you-you can't...
River: So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem.
Shepherd Book: Really?
River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat.
Shepherd Book: River, you don't fix the Bible.
River: It's broken. It doesn't make sense.
Book: It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you.” Ben Edlund

If only on this side of the grave?

[iambiguous]

Fresh

Sam: You like that horse, don’t you? You like his crazy jumps all over the board. Think he’s your friend, hate to lose him…almost as much as you hate to lose that lady. Well, he is your friend, boy. They all are. But you’re gonna have to use him, just like you use the others. If he falls by the wayside, well, that’s just life’s little game, ain’t it? And until you come ready to play her game, you’ll never beat her at it.

Too bad human interactions are far, far, far more elusive.

Fresh: You’re losing to homeboy Shipman too.
Sam: Well, he’s a U.S. Grand Master. That’s right. He don’t go to the park. But he comes here to play me.
Fresh: He’s winning.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, I know he’s winning. But let me tell you something. Put the clock on him, put the show on speed I chew his ass right up. See that picture there? That’s Pal Benko. That there’s Bruce Pandolfini. That’s Mikael Botvinnik. And that’s Paul Keres. Played all them boys. Sometimes I won. Mostly I lost. But you put the show on speed I chew all they asses up. All them Grand Masters and them Europeans with they government subsidies and whatnot to sit on they asses and play all day… they ain’t livin’in the world. Put the clock on ‘em, put the heat on they backs, they break down. Put ‘em in the park fishin’ for dollars, and they break. That’s Bobby Fisher, Some say he’s the greatest player to ever play the game. I never played him. All them patzers sittin’ around the park waitin’ for him to go back there like Jesus. Me, I don’t give a shit. Put the clock on that motherfucker I’ll chew his ass up just like the rest of’em. Chew it right up.

Next up: putting the clock on me here.

Fresh: All them niggers be on Nicole all the time…
Sam: Don’t be talkin’ that trash. I don’t wanna hear that goddamn word out of your mouth!
Fresh: I’m gonna say what I want. You can’t tell me nothin’. I ain’t even seeing you.

No tears this time.

Estaban: I got some very important shit for my man Fresh to do. Why should I take you on too?
Chuckie: I got the dope moves.
Estaban: You got what?
Chuckie: I got stupid juice, I bust the stupid move.
Estaban: Chuckie, huh? It was nice meeting you, Chuck.

Chuckie!

Fresh: The more people there is, the lonelier it get.

I hear that.

Aunt Frances: I’m sorry, Michael. That’s the way it’s gotta be. If it were just me, I wouldn’t even consider it but I got 11 other children to mind. They all scared to walk out the door with you to school. They even scared to sleep at night case somebody’s gonna come and shoot down the doors. I spoke to Miss Patterson at the Bushwick Group Home. She says there’s gonna be an opening next month. I’m sorry about your friend, I’m sorry about all your friends but you should have known better. I’m gonna miss you, Michael.

Next: what it's all leading up to.

[iambiguous]

Robert Louis Stevenson from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.”

Or selves as the case may be.

That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.

Not unexpectedly though.

I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.

How terribly strange to be 70? How about 82, Paul?

“O God!' I screamed, and 'O God!' again and again; for there before my eyes--pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death--there stood Henry Jekyll!”

Next up: "O God!" for all the rest of us.

It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.

Next up: the horror of being fractured and fragmented, grimly awaiting the arrival of godot.

I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment.

In other words, depending on the answers.

[iambiguous]

Fresh

Corky: You know what this is? Look at it! What is it?
Fresh: Look like base.
Corky: That’s right, little man. Five thousand dollars worth of pure base cocaine. You didn’t even look to see what you was carrying, did you? You’re just a little kid in way over his head, I know that. But Esteban gotta be sent a message about horning in on my business.
[picks up a chain]
Corky: I’m afraid you gonna have to be my little telegram.

But then...

Fresh: I ain’t run no base for no Esteban.
Corky: Oh no? Who was it for then, Santa Claus?
[slaps Fresh]
Corky: Who was it for?
Fresh: He gonna kill me if I say.
Corky: [Drops Fresh on the floor] I’m gonna ice you right now if you don’t!

If only we could all "just say no" to drugs!

Esteban: Where’d you come to find out about all these interesting developments?
[no response]
Esteban: Look, time is money and money is time little homey, and right now you are costing me a lot of both.
Fresh: You gonna get mad. You gonna get real mad.

Meanwhile, we know that all of this is actually Fresh -- a kid -- calling the shots!

Nicole: You don’t own me. I’m nobody’s slave.
Estaban: No. You are a slave to the pudra blanca…the god of white dreams, and I am his master, me. And as long as he is mine, so are you. You are mine.

He does seem to have a point, right?
You know, "for all practical purposes".

Detective Perez: You’re gonna have to move, all right? We’re gonna find someplace for you to move to.
Fresh: My sister too. It ain’t gonna be safe for her, neither. You gotta move her too.
Perez: Your sister too, She’s gonna be as safe as you are. We’ll find you somewhere together, okay?
Fresh: I don’t wanna live in no more projects.

The look on Nicole's face? You tell me.

Sam: [Last lines in the film. Speaking to Fresh] You're over an hour late. I passed up two easy fish waiting here for you. That makes me poorer by two dollars. Not playing games here, got no time for that. Life's got no time for your little boy games. Leave all that nonsense at home when you come here. Alright, gonna put it on speed today. I ain't stopping to give you any little tips either. You sink or swim on your own today, cause I'm not always gonna be there to hold your hand for ya. Alright, you ready for the real thing? You read to come get it? You ready to come take it from your old man, you ready to be the king?

Cue the tears...

[iambiguous]

Coming of age with a stutter. Not only that but one attached at the hip to the horrors of a hopelessly introverted personality. It’s painful to watch at times. Especially on the debating team.

Is this a love story? It is if you hate love sories.

Hal surmises that understanding life and love shouldn’t be like “rocket science”. But rocket science is like a game of tic tac toe in comparison. After all, rocket science is far more about either/or than neither/nor.

Rocket Science

Narrator: And so it goes. The high school debate, like the war that rips through your city and ravages everything in its path; Kids wielding words like weapons and brandishing ideas like axes. Nothing else mattered in that final round. There was no world beyond it.

Like the philosophy fanatics here.

Narrator: That year’s National Debate topic was farming subsidies. And if you don’t know how farming subsidies could inspire all this commotion then you don’t know life and there’s nothing to be said about it. Suitcases end marriages and farming subsidies launch cataclysms.

Then the part where many debaters can argue either side. It's the arguments themselves that count.

Ginny: Coach Lumbly, with the pilgrim hat, she teaches Patterns of Adult Living. On her third husband, name of Wallace Lumbly, Wallace the third. That’s a particular pattern she doesn’t lecture us on in class. Well, she came up to me after a presentation on egalitarianism and said that although my argumentative skills were at the fetal stage she sensed, somehow she intuited, my potential and invited me onto the team and, so, two years later, here I am doing the same with you. Recruiting. Ferreting out the debating talent from the masses. That’s you. I’ve ferreted you.

And he falls for it.

Ginny: …deformed people are the best debaters. Maybe it’s because they have a deep resource of anger. It serves them well.

Next up: deformed ohilosophers.

Ginny: Have you ever felt like you can burn the world down?
Hal: Every day.

Me? Take a wild guess.

Ginny: Write down these template arguments against abstinence: One, supporting it violates the barrier between church and state; Two, it’s an enforcement of a dated, sexist agenda; Three, sexual freedom is the basis of human freedom; Four, it separates us from Western cultures, Europe in particular, when we should be drawing closer to our international allies; Five, psychologists say that repressed sexual functions can create adult neuroses; Six, abstinence programs actually increase risky sexual behavior among teens; Seven, it creates barriers between free- love-generation parents and their more conservative children; Eight, and finally, we oppose abstinence because the world might end and then basically everyone we know dies a virgin.

Anyone care to encompass the "template arguments for abstinence"?

[iambiguous]

Epistemology

“In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.” Lois McMaster Bujold

New thread?

“We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can't be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.” N.T. Wright

Got it?

“The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Clearly, some will take advantage of this more than others.

“The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.” Anthony Doerr

My point, of course.

“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.” Alan Watts

Mine in particular, he suspected.

“Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.” Felix Alba-Juez

You know what's coming, Mr. Objectivist:
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

[iambiguous]

Rocket Science

Student in library: Descartes. Man, oh man. [looking over at Hal] Hey, would you be interested in joining my club? The Junior Philosophers.
Hal: Oh, uh, well, I uh…l…my plate is kind of full.
Student in library: I know what you’re thinking. We read everything, but no Hegel, if that’s your concern.

Something we can all agree on, perhaps?

Hal [to Ginny’s mom at the door]: You, could…will you just tell her that…that I’m done and over with the masturbation defense? Tell her that, will you? Just assure her that I’m…that I’m…that I’m…that I’m done with masturbation and I’m ready to show her.
Ginny’s mom [closing the door]: You take care now.

That could have gone better.

Hal: I spent the last seven minutes of my round-one speech trying…trying to say the resolution.
Speech teacher: Oh, man.
Hal: Yeah.
Speech teacher: Well, there’s that video I gave you, “Singing Instead of Talking.”
Hal: Yeah, did, uh…did rat poison and a straw come with that video?

Singing philosophers?

Debate coach: Do you know Mento Buin, who doesn’t speak more than six words of English? Or Evie Spedarsky, who has such pronounced Irritable Bowel Syndrome that she’s being studied by a team at Princeton?
Hal: No.
Debate coach: What about Elvis Hunsinger, the boy who pees himself in gym class?
Hal: Well, everybody knows…Elvis.
Debate coach: Ginny tried to recruit them all. Never crossed my mind that this could be some scheme of hers, but, when you think about it looks pretty pat.

I know what you're thinking: what scheme?

Girl: So how far did you get with her?
Hal: Does…does it count as second base when it’s groping through the shirt?
Girl: Maybe in public school.

True.

Ben: It’s all so pointless. That’s the realization I came to at States last year. Life is nothing but repetition, the same thing over and over. Somebody might give you a trophy and that’s supposed to mean you’re making progress but there’s no such thing. The fights you fight today are the fights you fight untill you die.

Win some, lose some. On the other hand, as Mary Pickford once suggested, "failure is not falling down, but staying down".

Hal: You know, love shouldn’t be…shouldn’t…it really shouldn’t be like rocket, uh…shouldn’t be rocket, um…Sometimes, I don’t know, I guess I just wonder when it all starts to make sense, you know?
Dad: All what?
Hal: All this. You know, everything.
Dad: Oh. Well, I guess there comes a point, you see, when you reach a certain age and you’re in Jersey, or someplace just like it, and you stop trying to figure it all out.

Or, if you're lucky, you never start?

[iambiguous]

Of Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy once famously said, "every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”.

How does that fit in here? I don’t know. I know very little of this literary rift. But even if it is applicable to Julia it matters little. It could have been. And almost certainly came close to being true for…how many?

Julia

Lillian: I’m not scrappy. Don’t call me scrappy. You make me sound like the neighborhood bulldog.
Dashiell: You are the neighborhood bulldog, Lilly! 'Cept you got some cockeyed dream about being a cocker spaniel.

Let's pin this down.

Lillian: I can’t work here.
Dashiell: Then don’t work here. It’s not as if you’ve written anything before, you know. Nobody’ll miss you. It’s a perfect time to change jobs.

Another smartass. Just what the world always needs.

Dottie: Way down deep he’s very superficial.

In other words, way up in the clouds.

Julia: They took me to see Cairo. They told me how beautiful Cairo would be, bit it wasn’t. I said to my grandfather, “Look at these people. They’re hungry. They’re sick. Why don’t we do something?” And he said, “Don’t look at them.” I said, “But they’re sick.” He said, “I didn’t make them sick.”

Next up: "I didn't send them to the concentration camps."

Lillian: There are women who reach a perfect time of life, when the face will never be as good, the body as graceful or powerful. It had happened that year to Julia.

Tell that to the Nazis?

Lillian: What are you reading now?
Julia: Darwin, Engels, Hegel, Einstein.
Lillian: You understand Einstein?
Julia: Sure.

I still don't.