hey my wings are titanium alloy. i’ll see myself out.
[b]Iain McGilchrist
…our age will be viewed in retrospect with amusement, as an age remarkable not only for its cynicism, but for its gullibility. The two conditions are not as far apart as they seem.[/b]
Next up: the age after ours.
A too great emphasis on the sound and feel of words as ‘things’ separate from their meaning, or alternatively on the meaning as something separate from the sound and feel of the words in which it exists, destroys poetry.
Next up: what destroyed philosophy here.
Language is not necessary for thinking, just for certain kinds of thinking. What was it for, then?
Bullshit, maybe?
Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.
My guess: some words more than others.
And other words not at all.
To speak of truth sounds too grand, too filled with the promise of certainty, and we are rightly suspicious of it. But truth will not go away that easily. The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’.
How about a “private and personal” truth to go along with a “private and personal” God?
As a result considerations of quantity might come actually to replace considerations of quality altogether, and without the majority of people being aware that anything has happened.
Of course, we’re fully aware of it here.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.” Arthur Schopenhauer[/b]
Imagine him around today. Here for example.
“If you want to reach a large audience appeal to idiots” Arthur Schopenhauer
Imagine him around today. Here for example.
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau
He wondered if it could possibly be both…
“A person hears only what they understand.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sees too. And here, of course, reads.
“If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.” Anatole France
Me, I always ask where it leads.
We have our factory, which is called a stage. We make a product, we color it, we title it and we ship it out in cans." Cary Grant
Tin cans for all intents and purposes.
[b]Joe Abercrombie
The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that.[/b]
Huffing and puffing he called it.
You want a thing when you can’t have it. When you get it you suddenly sprout doubts. Then when you think you might lose it you find you need it worse than ever.
Your thing for mine?
The trouble with being able to lift heavy things is that when heavy things need lifting folk step out of the way and smile at you.
No doubt applicable somehow to us.
Savor the little moments, son, that’s my advice. They’re what life is.
For example, making fools our of the pinheads here.
Nothing had worked out the way he’d hoped. He should’ve expected it by now, maybe. After all, things never had before. And yet he kept on pissing into the wind.
Next up: pissing into the tsunami.
One day you’re something, so promising and full o’ dares, so big the world’s too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you’re old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you’ll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.
Let me know when you get there too.
[b]Werner Twertzog
Who cares anymore?[/b]
Or suppose you still do. Now, who cares anymore about that?
Science is political. Religion is political. The death of everyone you love is political.
Not only that but [possibly] personal too.
Robespierres, all of you.
Let him eat cake!
We are governed by sociopaths, on a good day.
One a bad day? The pinheads of course.
Sarah Palin, fading into obscurity, grasps, once again, at notoriety, thinking it is fame.
Oh shit, what this time?
It is important to transform work into exploitation and complicity with evil.
Ah, the wage slave labor market.
It seems exhausting. Or maybe I just need a nap.
[b]Thomas Ligotti
Every story needs to be told in just the right way.[/b]
Next up: every story needs to be heard in just the right way.
…the logic of supernatural horror is a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle states: “Existence equals nightmare.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure…
Yo, God! You’re up!!
God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one has yet written the obituary of the Devil.
Come on, no God, no Devil.
If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.
Either that or fractured and fragmented.
Jens Bjørneboe wrote that “he who hasn’t experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child."
Or, for some, a fetus.
Long exasperated by questions without answers, by answers without consequences, by truths which change nothing, we learn to become intoxicated by the mood of mystery itself, by the odor of the unknown. We are entranced by the subtle scents and wavering reflections of the unimaginable.
I know that I am.
She spends hours and hours on these posts. So, sure, it must be exhausting. [-o<
Dude. I’m in school. I got reasons to be tired.
Correction…
She spends days and days on these posts. So, sure, it must be exhausting.
On the other hand, if it’s elementary school she’s in, that might explain it too. 
I know you are, but what am I?
This miraculously clever post could only have come from a God, the God, her God, Himself.
In a dream perhaps?
Or in a horoscope? [-o<
[b]Werner Twertzog
No, Judy Collins, sending in the clowns has failed.[/b]
Let alone the pinheads.
It is important to ban books if you want people to read them.
One of life’s sweet ironies let’s call it.
No, I shall not contextualize my work in relation to Foucault.
In fact, fuck him.
“Of course, in Hollywood, you haven’t really made it until you’ve been recognized by those in the field of parasitology.” Jeff Daniels
Next up: In Bollywood.
Never forget that nothing will be remembered.
Eventually, for example.
Dear America: You are getting Woke Superman forever. Also, Woke Batman, Woke Aqua-Man, and Woke UnderDog. If you don’t like it, move to Russia.
You tell me.
[b]Fernando Pessoa
Every gesture is a revolutionary act.[/b]
Let’s think of possible exceptions.
Better to dream than to be.
Let’s think of possible exceptions.
Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.
He means The Book Of Disquiet, of course.
Life is whatever we conceive it to be.
Or what others force it to be.
There’s a tiredness of abstract intelligence, and it’s the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn’t weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It’s a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
Next up: utterly exhausted intelligence.
Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.
Well, virtually perhaps.
[b]Existential Comics
I’ve learned that some people voluntarily wake up earlier than they absolutely have to. This is something I don’t think I could ever comprehend, no matter how much philosophy I study.[/b]
Of course I’ll never believe that.
The CDC recommends that all Americans become accustomed to the fact that the icy grip of death comes for us all in the end.
Not counting those who pull the plug themselves and welcome it.
You can measure the wisdom of a man by how many emails he has not bothered to read.
I dare you to send one to me.
If I ever write a science fiction novel I’m going to just write the future in the dumbest possible way I can imagine. One thing I’ve learned is that the problems that actually occur are always a thousand times dumber than sci-fi authors imagined.
Human nature, he figured.
No sci-fi author would write something like “but everyone refused to take the vaccine because they read on Facebook that it implants a brain controlling chip”, or “and they global warming was destroying the planet but they couldn’t stop mining bitcoins for their pyramid scheme.”
Unless of course they’re sci-fi author pinheads.
Marx failed to predict that even in a post-scarcity world a bunch of morons would still try to scam each other out of money so they could “own” shitty pictures of monkeys.
A little help with this one please.
[b]Judy Garland
If I’m such a legend, then why am I so lonely? If I’m such a legend, then why do I sit at home for hours staring at the damned telephone, hoping it’s out of order, even calling the operator asking her if she’s sure it’s not out of order?[/b]
Can anyone here explain that?
I’ve never looked through a keyhole without finding someone was looking back.
You know, Hollywood.
I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot.
Shirley Temple? Age three.
It’s lonely and cold on the top…lonely and cold.
At the top here, too, he chortled.
How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as though you’ve lost a child.
Objective morality for example.
If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.
Like in the soap opera here, Mr. Pinhead.
[b]Doth
It’s not you, it’s my shattered dopamine receptors.[/b]
Or, come on, with some, both.
I took my 99 year old grandfather out for lunch today & all he wanted to do was drive around & look for a white owl. “One day I’ll see one” he said.
I know I’m rooting for him.
Sometimes being alive is just rude and uncalled for
Next up: sometimes being born.
Practice self-care like a plant, drink water once in a while & thrive by being left alone.
So, which plant are you?
I wasn’t built from millions of years of stardust to “reply to an email”
Let alone to post here?
In honor of Mozart’s birthday I will also be living paycheck to paycheck & die of a mysterious disease.
True enough?
[b]Sia Furler
I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist.[/b]
You ever done that?
I don’t want to be famous, or recognizable.
Let’s explore the difference.
Worst music ever sells millions. The worst music with the shittiest lyrics. The fact is that they pay radio stations to put it on the radio, then you’ve heard it a million times when you’re driving from your shitty job to your shitty house. It’s indoctrination, it’s sad.
So, what are the odds of this not being true?
I liked when I was naive and I thought it was just about making good music.
Of course, we all know the equivalent of that here.
I get to sit at home with the dogs on the sofa, record in a closet in the office, send them off and, if I’m lucky, make a million dollars.
Let’s call it “the Australian dream”.
If anyone besides famous people knew what it was like to be a famous person, they would never want to be famous.
Not counting those who will literally kill to be.
[b]Jan Mieszkowski
“Capitalism is a religion that offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.”
Walter Benjamin
“Capitalism is the belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the good of everyone.”
J.M. Keynes
"Capitalism has worked very well.
Bill Gates[/b]
Indeed, Bill, for some…
"The world’s billionaires are accumulating wealth at a rate ‘unprecedented in human history,’ according to a recent report from Oxfam International.
The charitable organization’s ‘Inequality Kills’ report found that the planet’s 2,755 billionaires saw their cumulative wealth increase by $5 trillion — a sum greater than the market caps of Apple and Amazon combined — since March 2021, from $8.6 trillion to $13.8 trillion." cnbc
Aristotle: I never promised you a good life!
Kant: I never promised you a rational life!
Nietzsche: I never promised you a real life!
Beckett: You’re dead. I promise.
Well, he’s dead anyway.
That feeling when Wordle won’t accept your first guess.
Thank God for another one tomorrow though, right?
This Covid season, wear the mask that says: You can’t see my face because it’s turned toward the past. Where you perceive a chain of events, I see only a single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it at my feet.
Available at Walmart?
“Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.” Walter Benjamin
More Good News of the Kingdom!
"There is a finished feeling
Experienced at Graves
A leisure of the Future "
Emily Dickinson
Well, if you want to call it leisure.
[b]Steven Pinker
George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians…[/b]
Yo, God! What gives here?
So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.
Yo, God! What gives here?
Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."
Unless, of course, they really were the good old days.
…a free market puts a premium on empathy.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.
Gee, what to make of that, right?
Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery.
And thus the expression, “the devil is in the details.”