Quote of the day

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Emil M. Cioran from The Trouble with Being Born

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

Any Christian insomniacs here care to comment?

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

Ah, of course, ambivalence!

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

Sort of, as it were.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

Next up: as philosophy sunk [long ago] into paralysis.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

More to the point: especially here.

Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

A rather glum obsession let's call it.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Ex-Christian Makes Uncomfortable Small Talk After Running Into Jesus Christ At Store

No, really, I wonder what I would say.

Off-Duty Officer Instinctively Reaches To Turn Off Body Cam During Argument With Wife

On the job training let's call it.

God Refuses To Grant Any More Transcendent Near-Death Experiences To People Who Crash Snowmobiles

Talk about mysterious ways!!

Report Reveals Jesus Christ May Have Benefited From Father's Influential Position To Gain High-Powered Role As Lord And Savior

I knew it!!!

Husband Buys Wife Tickets To See Singer She Wants To Fuck

And it's Taylor Swift to boot.

Mom Changes Words Of Prayer To Be More Cheerful

Report: God is anything but cheerful about that.

[iambiguous]

Here's that thread. I knew it was around here somewhere.

''Fuck the fuck of you dipstick''

I don't know about anyone else, but I find Sculptor's style hilarious

Okay, a "condition" it is then. She's off the hook.

[iambiguous]

Albert Camus from The Stranger

Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

Next up: for the last time.

I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow.

Pick one:
1] existentialist
2] sociopath

I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.

Now that takes me back. Way back.

He wasn't even sure he was alive because he was living like a dead man.

Or worse [for some]: a man who wished he was dead.

I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another.

See, gib, Maia and I told you so.

For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

Calmly indeed.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Area Man Remembers Less Politically Correct Time When Christmas Was About Honoring The Glory Of Saturn

On Titan for example.

Stargazing Woman Reminded Of How Small Own Tits Are In Grand Scheme Of Things

Next up: how big her ass is.

Smithsonian Devotes New Exhibit To First African-American To Use Whites-Only Glory Hole

Come again?

Apple Announces New iPhones Will No Longer Be Compatible With Human Hand

Just out of curiosity, did they explain why?

New Pam Ad Campaign Reminds Teens That Pam Can Get Them High And Is Easy To Obtain

Anecdotes please.

Short Death Row Inmate Strapped Into Electric Booster Seat

Talk about humiliating!!!

[iambiguous]

Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

Don't overthink it in other words. Whatever that means.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

How preposterous is that?! Though, sure, point taken.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Right, like they consent to it. Though, sure, point taken.

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

Talk about a "general description intellectual contraption"!!!

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Ah, the unbearable lightness of being part.
Next up: the unbearable burden of living it.

Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

Not counting cockroaches and pinheads of course.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Studio Offers Free Kanye West Tattoo Removal

Must be in the thousands by now.

Most Popular Sex Toy In Every State

And the one in yours is...?

Winklevoss Twins Spend Joyous Afternoon Jerking Each Other Off

On Facebook.

Crypto Confidence Soars After CEO Defrauds Customers Just Like Real Bank

Ah, the real scandal.

Childless Man Wonders Who’ll Be There To Neglect Him When He’s Old

A spouse maybe.

Pride At Using Big Word Causes Man To Completely Lose Train Of Thought

Antidisestablishmentarianism this time.

[iambiguous]

Sylvia Plath from The Bell Jar

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

In a crucial situation yourself? Want me to look at it?

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

Anyone here still pure? Want me to change that?

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

That ever happen to you? Me? Not so far.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

Well, still animals, anyway.

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.

Well, that's how it works though. In the real world anyway.

I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.

He wished he could say that.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Disappointing Box Office Numbers For ‘Bros’ Force Biden To Ban Gay Marriage

That'll do it.

Elon Musk To Cut Twitter Staff To Single Devoted Hunchback Who Laughs Hysterically At All Of Boss’s Genius Tweets

Didn't this pinhead promise to step down? You know, if he is a pinhead.

Existential Horror At Wealthy Elite Selling Off Humanity’s Future Successfully Sublimated Into Yelling At Cashier

You wouldn't think so, would you?

Zombie Virus Revived After 48,500 Years In Permafrost

With any luck then we're doomed.

Man Up To 8 Soul-Searching Walks A Week

Next up: Man Up To 9 Soul-Searching Walks A Week

Man Forced To Venture Pretty Far Into Wilds Of Internet To Have Opinion Confirmed

Here I'm told: https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php

[iambiguous]

Ralph Ellison from Invisible Man

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a Well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time.

Make of this what you will, of course.

But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

You know, for the invisible.

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear...

The ruling class, let's call it.

I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

And race has nothing [or everything] to do with it.

For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.

Take God, for example.

Boo'ful, she said, life could be so diff'rent...
But it never is, I said.

How about we split the difference.

They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men . . . For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke.

See, I told you.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Last Pickle Delighted To Finally Have Whole Jar To Self

Still, its fate is, well, shit, right?

Police Release Composite Sketch Of What They Would Prefer Murder Suspect To Look Like

Good idea, the murderer thought.

Hospital Patient Arrested For Switching Off Neighbor’s ‘Noisy’ Oxygen Machine

How noisy, right?

Brett Favre Makes Amends By Sending Photo Of His Penis To Every Mississippian On Welfare

Copper Fit execs rejoice.

NRA Congratulates School Shooter For Terrific Aim Given Such Small Targets

To wit: https://youtu.be/liusEeP1QcE

Reformed Nazi Puts Swastika Tattoo In Sarcastic Quotation Marks

Satyr immediately bans him from Know Thyself.

[iambiguous]

Oliver Sacks from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?

Obviously: it depends on just how grim the reality is that having your faculties intact reveals.

Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.

Just for the record:
"aphasia : involving or exhibiting loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words"

Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.

I'm actually looking forward to it myself. If you know what I mean.

...animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

Next: animals die...

Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.

That'll do it no doubt.

What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.

Trust me: I do.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Can Of Soda In Freezer Realizing Owner Never Coming Back For It

A Dr Pepper no less.

Each Member Of Family On Edge As Vacation Has Gone By Without One Blowout Fight

At a White Lotus no less.

Area Man Always Thought He’d Squander His Life Differently

Me? I was right on the money.

Report: 1 In 5 Air Ducts Contains Person Looking, Listening In On You

Remember when it was only 1 in 10?

Asshole Moves To Part Of City Where All The Assholes Live

Or: asshole posts at philosophy venue where all assholes post: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

Man Who Got Word-A-Day Calendar Keeps Trying To Shoehorn ‘January’ Into Conversation

Well, this is certainly the best month for that.

[iambiguous]

Max Stirner from The Ego and Its Own

Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."

Of course, it's not for nothing this keeps getting updated.

If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more.

Not counting the real world, of course.

Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.

At least until the workers of the world unite.

In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud—crime, doesn't it rumble in the distant thunder, and don't you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?

Cue Ayn Rand, he demanded.

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

Well, their things, anyway.

He who has might has—right; if you have not the former, neither have you the latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain?

Of course, you actually have to have the might here.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Nation’s Men In Bathroom Stalls Announce Plan To Breathe Really Loudly

Let's explain all the reasons why.

Gay Man Unaware He Is Focus Of Thousands Of Prayers

Not only that, but to hundreds of Gods.

Woman Suspects Hidden Camera In Public Restroom After Noticing Boom Mic Operator In Corner

That'll do it.

Vacationing Woman Asks Friend To Assume Identity For Next Couple Weeks

What could go wrong?

Entirety Of Objectionable Human Behavior Explained To Toddler As Person Acting Silly

Any toddlers here actually believe it?

Brutal Reality Check Turns Three

You know, if you make it that long.