“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Jonathan Swift
Think iambiguous and the pinheads here, say.
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. Frank Zappa
The only expiration date now known is death itself.
“In the Universe it may be that Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth." Stephen W. Hawking
This Earth for example.
“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.” Julian Barnes
Let's name names.
“If it is stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.” Mercedes Lackey
I believe in hanging. Just so long as I'm not the one being hanged.
Great! A willingness to compromise!!
In school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us.
Or here: In a philosophy forum some only learn to use words up in the intellectual clouds, but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us.
Starting now, okay?
Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the key and let terror walk right in.
The part less talked about.
You want not to give a damn, to exist without responsibility, without faith or friends or warmth.
Though sometimes they'll leave you with little choice.
Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.
See if that shoe fits, okay? Then get back to us.
Time rarely weighed upon him, for he had many methods of passing it.
I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
Of course that's all changed now.
It has, hasn't it?
In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.
Wow, just like all the objectivist bastards do here!
He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.
And then, of course, the equivalent of that here.
When I was all set to go, when I had my bags and all, I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I don't know why. I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, "Sleep tight, ya morons!" I'll bet I woke up every bastard on the whole floor. Then I got the hell out. Some stupid guy had thrown peanut shells all over the stairs, and I damn near broke my crazy neck.
And then, of course, the equivalent of that here.
I'd never yell, "Good luck!" at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it.
In other words, "You'll need it!!"
Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy--he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody--you can be a good guy and do it.
David Foster Wallace from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
Hmm, even the tourists here?
If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting.
And suicide is always an option, right?
Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.
I challenge anyone to be more disgusted with it than me.
It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get---the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.
See, didn't I tell you: fractured and fragmented. And all the way down.
What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer-a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory-into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values...more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved.
Depraved? Okay, what's that make "me" then?
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.
Next up: juicy posts here. Great or not great?[/quote]
He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.
Next up: south of the neck.
The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.
Next up: Not Right posts here.
I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said I didn't give a shit.
My kind of six year old.
The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into.
Not exactly politically correct.
Or is it?
I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.
Well, I think I've been there anyway.
I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while.
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.
Pick one:
1] rather insightful
2] rather ridiculous
We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.
In other words, past, present or future, time is still nothing short of mind-boggling.
...an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.
Right, nothing is less problematic than death.
The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.
Uh, whatever, for all practical purposes, that means?
Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.
Next up: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’. The proviso ‘in the cosmic scheme of things’ is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral values. But the Principle says that all such values are themselves anthropocentric: they explain only the behaviour of the scum, which is itself insignificant.
...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.
Let's imagine Kevin's reaction to that.
I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.
In other words, "it's always never nothing."
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
Or for some there: that everyone else ought to be like them.
It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.
Tell me about it...
In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
Lock and load.
I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
What? You’d dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?
That’s when you need a drink the most.
Just "one of those things", right?
It was the first time i had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.
Me? Double it. At least.
Someday, I told Jan, when they demonstrate that the world has four dimensions instead of just three, a man will be able to go for a walk and just disappear. No burial, no tears, no illusions, no heaven or hell. People will be sitting around and they’ll say, 'What happened to George?' And somebody will say, 'Well, I don’t know. He said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes'.
What's the latest on that?
You bitch, I whispered, I love you. Then I came.
Let's run this by, well, you know...
I kept telling myself that all the women in the world weren´t whores, just mine.
Let's run this by, well, you know...
I've given you my time. Its all I've got to give--its all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour.
You know, back then. And only until the workers of the world unite.
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?
Mine? It starts with a d.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
On the contrary, solitude is actually the existential solution.
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
Ah, the masses.
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Does this actually work for anyone here?
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Yankee caps?
THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me -- not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience -- that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic.
That certainly follows.
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Next up: the pornographic philosophy here.
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood -- or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
Of course the odds [by far] favor the latter.
My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
Yeah, what about that?
A new thread perhaps?
I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.
"The asshole jocks in particular," he blurted out.
There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.
Asshole jocks of course.
...a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.
Next up: a good philosophy.
Well, if there are any.
It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.
A hell of a lot safer sometimes.
At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.
A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.
Just follow the news in other words.
We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.
Some more than others, he suspected.
Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.
Mine soon enough. Then yours.
Do reflections also travel at the speed of light? What does your buddy Albert think? When the light hits the glass and starts back in the opposite direction doesnt it have to come to a full stop first? And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark. What’s in a shadow? Do they move along at the speed of the light that casts them? How deep do they get? How far down can you clamp your calipers? You scribbled somewhere in the margins that when you lose a dimension you’ve given up all claims to reality. Save for the mathematical. Is there a route here from the tangible to the numerical that hasnt been explored? I dont know. Me either. Photons are quantum particles. They’re not little tennisballs. Yeah, said the Kid. He dredged up his watch and checked the time. Maybe you’d better go eat. You need to keep your strength up if you aim to wrest the secrets of creation from the gods. They’re a testy lot by all accounts.
Pick one:
1] science
2] philosophy
3] theology
4] all of the above
5] none of the above
Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet.
Pick one:
1] too enigmatic
2] not enigmatic enough
You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none.
The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.
Go ahead, put that in perspective.
What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
Go ahead, put that in perspective.
Every star may be a sun to someone.
Or, sure, only ours is.
We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
After running it by God first, of course.
Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.
Tell that to, among others, Hitler.
Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.
