Quote of the day

General chit-chat

Moderators: AMod, iMod

User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Emily St. John Mandel

A life lived in a simulation is still a life.


Not unlike our virtual lives here?

The truth is, Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.

Yo, God!

...she shared Lilia's suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax.

No, really.

No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

You're dead, for example.

This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.

Not counting this one of course.

High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

Any here?
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Edward Abbey

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.


Resolved: That's going too far.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

And on Wall Street of course.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

My guess: not much wilderness left here.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Maryland? No fucking way.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

I'll bet I'd find something.

I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patriotism.

That or witless.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Joe Abercrombie

There’s nothing worth less than what men think of you after you’re back in the mud.


Especially if they put you there.

It’s a rare man who’s made better by a bit of power.

Next up: a rare woman.

Knowledge is so often the antidote to fear. But not here. Not now.

Not here. Not ever.

Fine lies beat tedious truths every time.

Well, actually, not every time.

Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.

Or, on this side of the pond, a line.

Prickomo fucking cocksca. That bastard old arsehole-fucker.

You don't hear that every day.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Philosophy Tweets

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte


You can't being this back around too often.

"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." Aristotle

Right, "the light".

"Silence is one of the great arts of conversation." Marcus Tullius Cicero

Perhaps the greatest, Mr. Pinhead.

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered. ” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or, sure, just a weed.

"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead." Aristotle

Okay, I agree: let's not go there.

"To arrive is to be in prison.” Henri Matisse

Up or down as it were.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Ligotti

For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born.


Yet here we are.

Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die.

How stringently you might ask.

There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race — no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book.

With one possible exception: https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-again ... 0143133144

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willing consume the terror of the tomb... and find them to our liking."

That loud enough for you?

In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent.

Feculent to say the least.

Although few would own up to it, even to themselves, we love havoc in both life and art. What we call "evil" captivates us from childhood to old age, never paling in its seductive entreaties, its heady effects on our imaginations and our glands. We are gluttons for atrocity and yawn at the quiescent. The most prominent of the angels is the one who started a war in heaven.

Problematic enough for you?
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Philosophy Tweets

"Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed." Dwight D. Eisenhower


Right, like that will stop them.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies...a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Dwight D. Eisenhower

Right, like that will stop them.

"I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge." Herman Melville

That's still the case, right?

“The Eyes of Others Are Our Prisons
Their Thoughts our Cages” Virginia Woolf


Well, as was once suggested, hell is other people.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

See, I told you.

“I am rooted, but I flow.” Virginia Woolf

At least try to think this through.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Bart D. Ehrman

And so we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian tradition. The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times.


Ironic and then some to me.

...to cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees “and all the Jews” washed their hands before eating, so as to observe “the tradition of the elders.” This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.

Yeah, what about this?

...few religions in the history of the human race have shown a greater penchant for conflict than the religion founded on the teachings of Jesus.

Well, it is, after all, the One True Path.

Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

This can't be true, right?

...some believers took the Christological views of the Gospel to an extreme and maintained that Jesus was so much God that he could not really have been a man. The book 1 John was written, then, to counter that view by insisting that 'Jesus Christ came in the flesh' and that anyone who refused to acknowledge his fleshly existence was in fact an antichrist.

That settles that then.

The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back.

Anyone here back from it?
User avatar
Sculptor
Posts: 8477
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2019 11:32 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by Sculptor »

image_2022-06-25_171226675.png
image_2022-06-25_171226675.png (224.62 KiB) Viewed 1088 times
This is a work event, Boris Johnson
User avatar
attofishpi
Posts: 9939
Joined: Tue Aug 16, 2011 8:10 am
Location: Orion Spur
Contact:

Re: Quote of the day

Post by attofishpi »

Looks like that must have been when he was younger, after attending a Sex Pistols concert, and someone smashed most of his teeth out.
User avatar
Dontaskme
Posts: 16940
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 2:07 pm
Location: Nowhere

Re: Quote of the day

Post by Dontaskme »

I like Boris, he's a good looking actor. He never gives in, and I like his stamina to get the job done.


I've heard rumours he's at the minute in the process of bankrupting the UK..oh well, shit happens. :D
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Brian Eno

It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.


Either that or not amazing at all.

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

No good in it either.

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

He means like I do here.

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.

Or, sure, absolutely nothing like this at all.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Next up: the internet.

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

What to make of it here?
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

God

I am always here for you.
Unfortunately, you're there.


In fact, you're still there.

The people who think life begins at conception also think it began 6,000 years ago.

Got a few of them here, of course.

One day someone should start a religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Hint, hint.

When a rapist gets a woman pregnant, only one of them should be considered a criminal.

Tough one, isn't it?

I commit 70 thousand abortions a day and no one tells [/i]Me[/i] it's a sin.

Exactly my point!

Everything's bigger in Texas. Especially the fear of the 21st century.

On the other hand, "remember the Alamo".
You know "manifest destiny" and all that imperialist crap.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Steven Pinker

Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.


Not including philosophers, right?

Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.

Not that they aren't of course.

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don’t do anything.

Let's start there for a change.

Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

See, I told you!

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns.

Back again to this: https://youtu.be/6Zp7dq6b2PI

The two deepest questions about the mind are “What makes intelligence possible?” and “What makes consciousness possible?”

In other words, if perchance it's not God.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Yuval Noah Harari

Tolerance is not a homo sapien trademark.


And I suspect we're no exception here.

The heated debates about homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

Yo Satyr! You're up!!

The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation.

Next up: the United States over or under Russia.

In year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo Sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today's dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500 humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day.

You know, and on and on and on.

At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world are either humans or domesticated animals.

Hint, hint.

In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.

Meh?
Last edited by iambiguous on Wed Jun 29, 2022 1:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Impenitent
Posts: 4305
Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2010 2:04 pm

Re: Quote of the day

Post by Impenitent »

"Yeah, I’ll start with the babiest of the babiest of baby steps. Open abortion clinics on federal lands in red states right now!"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

-Imp
Post Reply