[b]so sad today
i’m not dead inside but it sounds so beautiful[/b]
Now that I think about it…
i’m alive in a dead way
And getting deader all the time.
i don’t care what anyone thinks about me except i totally do
Not only that but is it really a contradiction?
oh that? it’s just my emptiness
No, that other thing beside it.
fuck the meaning of life
Right, like that will make any difference.
stop not loving me
Me? Don’t even start.
[b]Dashiell Hammett
The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.[/b]
That’s why we call them contexts.
Who shot him? I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.
To be or not to be a smartass.
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
Seems worth tell to who though?
You always have a very smooth explanation ready.
What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?
The one and only Sam Spade meets the one and only Humphrey Bogart.
We didn’t exactly believe your story.
Then…?
We believed your two hundred dollars.
You mean… She seemed not to know what he meant.
I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth, he explained blandly, and enough more to make it all right.
The key of course is to tell it blandly.
I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.
Or here [perhaps] a reasonable amount of stupidity.
[b]Masha Gessen
In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed.[/b]
Okay, so what explains Trump?
Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows.
Cue the hackers. And Don of course.
They are just doing their jobs, said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.
Really, don’t be surprised if this is actually true.
There was a game called “Work.” and on of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”.
Tell that to some government workers here.
…every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime’s explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime’s ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.
And around and around they go. And not just there.
Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.
And around and around they go. And not just there.
[b]Tara Westover
First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.[/b]
Though [as often as not] not necessarily in that order.
My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.
And, for some, not just as a kid.
We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.
Tell them that. Or just say fuck it and move on.
The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.
You know what I call it.
The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
I tried that a few times myself.
I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.
A few assholes here might consider that.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” Aristotle[/b]
Okay, but why do some repeatedly do things that others repeatedly insist they should not do?
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Picasso
So, is that something to be proud of? You know, whatever it’s supposed to mean.
“War remains the decisive human failure.” John Kenneth Galbraith
Tell that to the folks who own and operate the military industrial complex.
“The creature born is the creature dying.” Zhuangzi
I think that means all of us.
“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” G. W. F. Hegel
Though sometimes it’s the other way around.
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” F Scott Fitzgerald
Though not always.
[b]Barbara Kingsolver
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.[/b]
Hoped for it long, long, long ago. Nothing yet though.
The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.
Especially able-bodied ubermen. You know the ones.
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’.
Don’t expect this to actually work.
Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.
If only until death do they part.
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
Tradition?
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
Yeah, I tried that too.
[b]Pat Conroy
It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.[/b]
Why, he wondered.
Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
Fortunately, there appear to be no great writers here.
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.
They don’t call them the lords of discipline for nothing.
The human soul can always use a new tradition.
Let’s start one here.
I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win.
He must mean something else, she thought.
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
That makes [at least] two of us.
[b]Nein
A gentle reminder that social media has not destroyed civilization. But I’d like to think there’s still time.[/b]
Unless of course you die first.
For best results: never remove the plastic wrap.
Better still, never take it out of the box.
A gentle reminder that it’s not your Wednesday that feels like a Monday. It’s your 2019.
Not unlike all the other years.
The good news: the year is ending. The bad news: I’m told there will be another.
With any luck though, your last.
Monday. The cruelest month.
And then every once in a while the cruelest year.
It was the casual Friday. Of our discontent.
If only 52 times a years. Or 365 if you count the other days.
[b]John Fowles from The French Lieutenant’s Woman
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it … fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.[/b]
The real reality? Right.
I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman’s house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.
You tell me your real color and I’ll tell you mine.
He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.
Talk about an intellectual contraption!!
Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.
Let’s elaborate. You know, if that’s even possible.
But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.
And not just wolves for most of us.
When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear a healthy agnostic. What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would’ve been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist.
And a hundred years later…?
[b]Werner Twertzog
The 5-second rule is not applicable to foods that are sopping wet.[/b]
Unless, of course, you are starving.
Vacations are important for relearning that you will never be happy.
That’s why I never took them.
Be the corpse at every wedding and the bride at every funeral.
Indeed, rub their faces in it.
When people show you who they really are, run like hell.
Here, of course, we just log out.
Postmodernism will be appropriated by reactionary conservatives to destabilize commonly-held notions of evidence.
When Trump is impeached for example.
Dance like you are being surreptitiously recorded, and the video will be posted to YouTube, so that you will be publicly humiliated, daily, for the rest of your life. Even your great-grandchildren will speak of you with shame.
Or, if you’re Jacob, philosophize. 
[b]Zhuangzi
The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?[/b]
No one like that here, right?
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
Is this profound or not?
A path is made by walking on it.
Not counting where it takes you.
Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.
Tell that to Skinner’s behaviorists.
The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.
Maybe back then, right?
Happiness is the abscence of the striving for happiness.
Maybe back then, right?
[b]Bernhard Schlink
To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting on the reader, and Hanna didn’t need that and neither did I.[/b]
I’m with them here.
The value of being brave, working hard, saving money keeping order depends on what it’s for.
On the other hand, isn’t everything?
I wanted reality to drive out the clichés.
Or at last come up with new ones.
All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life’s functions are reduced to minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators , too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenary, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk.
Fortunately, I can’t even imagine it.
I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers.
And then some grow up to be Kids.
Don’t they?
When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.
If you know what he means.
[b]Jan Mieszkowski
Early capitalism: Be all you can produce
Middle capitalism: Be all you can borrow
Late capitalism: Sorry, you’ve been sold for scrap[/b]
And that’s not even counting the Third World.
Philosophy 101: Why?
Philosophy 201: Why why?
Philosophy 301: Why oh why did I study philosophy?
Let’s pin down Philosophy 401.
Philosophy 101: Everything you believe is false
Philosophy 201: Everything you believe is true and false
Philosophy 301: Truth and falsity don’t believe in anything, especially you
Let’s pin down Philosophy 401.
[b]A Typology of Philosophy Tweets
Let’s just say it will be true eventually.
Your childhood ends when you stop pretending to have finished The Brothers Karamazov and start pretending to have finished War and Peace.
Unless of course it’s the other way around. Like it is for most of us.
The Metamorphosis: Kafka’s famous short story about the abject humiliation of a family that learns that their son
a) can’t land a TED Talk
b) has only 9 followers on Twitter
c) applied to work for Trump but didn’t get the job
d] posts here.
[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen
Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. [/b]
None of us though, right?
Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.
I’m just a regular American, he thought.
I sipped my scotch. It was smoky and smooth, tasting of peat and aged oak, underscored by licorice and the intangible essence of Scottish masculinity. I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth.
Single malt truths, anyone?
And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination.
The key here is to become “one of us”.
Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself.
You know, whatever that means.
All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.
What could be or not be more natural?
[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it/[/b]
I know: what if that was really true?
…it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
That and a damn good reason.
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly.
And haven’t I been saying that here for years? It’s not what you believe so much as that you believe it. Objectively for example.
Yes, I’m paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?
Like that’s even possible.
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
That makes two of us. At least.
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.
Just not anymore.
[b]Existential Comics
Analytic philosopher: let’s simplify this to the point it has no relation to the problem.
Continental philosopher: let’s complicate this to the point no one understands it.[/b]
All of the above?
Harry Potter, and the Purging of the Socialist Wing of the Party.
Maybe on another planet.
The thing they don’t tell you about channeling your despair into art is that you have to be good at art or you just end up with shitty despair.
Let alone channeling your despair into philosophy?
Philosophy is important because it teaches you to not understand things.
Or, if you are really lucky, not to want to.
It’s weird when people thank military members for their “service to the country.” As if we got any benefit out of invading Iraq. If you want to thank someone for their service, thank your garbage man.
Or, more realistically, your mailman.
The reason for morality being defined as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” took thousands of years to formulate is because you have to write huge volumes of philosophy first in order to get anyone into a confused enough state of mind to actually believe it.
Or not believe it.
[b]Dave Eggers
Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.[/b]
And not just from the deep state.
Don’t you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this shit, is scared, don’t you think you should be scared, too?
Who said that I wasn’t?
People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.
On the other hand…
Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.
So, who controls that here?
Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds.
Okay, but where exactly is this Circle?
Then why are you talking about exhibitionism? It’s a ridiculous term. Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. It’s niggardly. If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself.
Right, like you can’t take that too far.
[b]Timothy Snyder
This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.[/b]
That works for me. Sort of.
Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States—fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.
Okay, what does that really mean?
Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap.
Has Don already trumped this?
A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.
While swallowing one or another religion hook, line and sinker.
A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency.
Like for example the war on terror.
Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.
Now hold on there!
[b]James D. Watson
The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.[/b]
Are there any of those left?
A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.
Really, what if there was one?
I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.
Let’s connect the dots between this and…Hitler?
I don’t think we are here for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating a good lunch.
This is actually quite profound, he thought.
Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration .
Anyone here care to collaborate with me?
If scientists don’t play God, who will?
Let’s make a list.
[b]The Dead Author
It’s 2019 and we still haven’t given up on linear history.[/b]
Define “we”.
Raindrops are just dead snowflakes.
And God wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s never too late to start writing but always too early.
That can’t be good.
Why did Narcissus go to a nude beach when he can’t swim.
Why would anyone not go?
The name of your Kafka character is the job your father wanted you to have + the first name of the last person you ghosted + K.
He means the other Kafka, of course.
If you’re feeling empty, at least you still have space inside.
And if that doesn’t console you?