He did experiment with psychedelic substances, maybe he was tripping?
So true. We all need a bit of solitude from time to time.
Elmore Leonard
…the one they used to call Club Fed. No fence, no guys with shanks or razor blades stuck in toothbrush handles. The worst that could happen to you, some guy hits you over the head with a tennis racquet.
Accidentally, of course.
All the information you need can be given in dialogue.
Next up: the information you want.
You know what happens when you play a country tune backwards? You get your girl and your truck back, you’re not drunk anymore and your hound dog comes back to life.
She said, “I was born in Nashville.”
Well, that settles that then.
You look back, Max said, you can’t believe that much time went by. You look ahead and you think, shit, if it goes that fast I better do something with it.
Some end up here, of course.
Here’s the deal, Raylan said. I’m giving you twenty-four hours to get out of this county and never come back. Raylan looked at his watch. That means you have until … two-fifteen tomorrow afternoon to clear out. If I see you’re still around after that, I won’t hesitate to shoot you on sight. You have any questions?
Seems clear enough to me.
If a man must make excuses for himself, continually argue with himself that he is a man, then he is better off dead.
Got it?
Suicide
“There are people who fantasize about suicide, and paradoxically, these fantasies can be soothing because they usually involve either fantasizing about others’ reactions to one’s suicide or imagining how death would be a relief from life’s travails." Thomas Joiner
Tell me about it.
“Imagine how many suicide victims would still be with us, if only the right person said the right thing at the right time.” Wayne Gerard Trotman
Click, of course.
“I’m moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.” Raymond Carver
Let’s explain that.
“I’m not afraid of dying, I’m afraid of suffering.” Raheem Kirlew
Enough said?
“The desire to commit suicide, however, has at its base a belief that life cannot or will not improve. Although that may be the case in some instances, it is not true in all instances. Death, however, rules out hope in all instances. We do not have any data indicating that people who are dead lead better lives.” Marsha M. Linehan
No getting around that, right?
“It’s impossible to fathom the sadness of those who are left behind, but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life” Baek Se-hee
The bottom line some will call it.
Ex Machina
Nathan [drunkenly misquoting Oppenheimer]: In battle, in forest, on the precipice of the mountain, on the… the great, dark sea. In the sleep, confusion. In the depths of shame… The good deeds a man has done before defends him. The good deeds a man has done before defends him. The good deeds a man has done before… defends him.
Let’s run this by the folks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ava: Caleb, you’re wrong.
Caleb: Wrong about what?
Ava: Nathan.
Caleb: In what way?
Ava: He isn’t your friend.
Caleb: Excuse me? I’m sorry, Ava, I don’t understand.
Ava: You shouldn’t trust him. You shouldn’t trust anything he says.
Or, perhaps, what she says?
Caleb: It’s obvious, once I stop to think.
He means “once I start to think”, of course. If it even makes any difference.
Caleb: There was one interesting thing that happened today.
Nathan: Yeah?
Caleb: Yeah. She made a joke.
Nathan: Right. When she threw your line back at you. About being interested to see what she’d choose. Right, I noticed that, too.
Caleb: Yeah, that got me thinking, you know. In a way, that’s the best indication of AI that I’ve seen in her so far. It’s discretely complicated. It’s like… it’s kind of non-autistic.
Nathan: What do you mean?
Caleb: She could only do that with an awareness of her own mind… and also an awareness of mine.
Exactly?
Nathan: [Kyoko spills wine] Oh, shit! Are you fucking kidding me? Did it get on you?
Caleb: No, no. It’s… it’s all right. I got it.
Nathan: Dude, you’re wasting your time talking to her. She doesn’t understand English. Just give her the napkin.
Caleb: Sorry.
Nathan: It’s like a firewall against leaks. It means I can talk trade secrets over dinner and know it’ll go no further. It also means that I can’t tell her that I’m pissed when she’s so fucking clumsy that she spills wine over my house guest.
Caleb: I think she gets that you’re pissed.
Nathan: Yeah? Good. Because I am pissed. Hey, Kyoko?
[waves her goodbye]
Nathan: Go-go.
Misogyny, let’s call it.
Nathan: I think it’s the next model that’s going to be the real breakthrough. Singularity.
Caleb: The next model?
Nathan: After Ava.
Caleb: I didn’t know there was going to be a model after Ava.
Nathan: You thought she was a one-off?
Caleb: I knew there must have been prototypes. So, not the first. But I thought maybe the last.
Nathan [Nathan shakes his head.]: Ava doesn’t exist in isolation, any more than you or me. She’s part of a continuum. Version 9.6. And each time, they get a little better.
Caleb: So - when you make a new model, what do you do with the old one?
Nathan: Download the mind. Unpack the data. Add the new routines I’ve been writing. To do that, you end up partially formatting, so the memories go. But the body survives. And Ava’s body is a good one. So I’ll do the same as I did with Kyoko.
In other words, “Ava, go-go”. And, of course, the equivalent of that in mere mortals.
Butterfly Effect
“In our disruptive world, the smallest changes can cause large impacts.” Roger Spitz
And then there’s my own rendition of that.
"Climate change may be far beyond the concerns of people in the midst of a life-and-death emergency, but it might eventually make the Mumbai slums uninhabitable, send enormous new waves of refugees across the Mediterranean, and lead to a worldwide crisis in healthcare.” Yuval Noah Harari
Fit yourself in there and get back to us.
“Our daily routines influence the lives of people and animals halfway across the world, and some personal gestures can unexpectedly set the entire world ablaze, as happened with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which ignited the Arab Spring, and with the women who shared their stories of sexual harassment and sparked the #MeToo movement.” Yuval Noah Harari
Then the part [however] where the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“Every decision or non-decision shifts the Universe in a whole new direction.” Ray A. Davis
Posting here?
“They say in our lives we’ll meet something like eighty thousand people. Most of them just in passing, sitting beside them on a bus, buying a latte from them, overtaking them too fast on the motorway. Others will become friends, lovers, family. Some will stay in our lives forever, and some will be swept away by the flow of life. But we touch all of these people in some way, tiny or huge, making more of a difference than any of us can imagine.” Eva Woods
See, I told you.
“The shadow of the past is longer than any of us can imagine,’ said Alma Leonetti softly. 'You cannot unweave the tapestry of time, Moonheart. Take any event, great or small, and you can trace the threads of cause back across century after century, threads that are woven from the smallest of happenings. In the same way, things that we do today, any one of them, may have implications and consequences a thousand years from now that we cannot yet begin to imagine.” Bruce Coville
This part [for some of us]: https://youtu.be/bLE3b7aIZdQ?si=dmEI0tmcmG0Lkmhk
Infinity
“There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.” Dejan Stojanovic
Or, perhaps, a leap of faith?
“Something that doesn’t actually exist can still be useful.” Ian Stewart
Uh, starting with God?
“…we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite.” Ilyas Kassam
Go figure?
“The only kind of universe that I can even begin to conceive is an inconceivable one.” Ilyas Kassam
Now you’re talking!
“Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation.” Conrad Aiken
One by one by one by one of us.
“Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.” Herman Melville
And that certainly includes the hunt for whales.
Stupidity
“Dean Rusk never beat his wife. He was a decent man. He was a liberal. He was head of the Ford Foundation. And as Secretary of State during the Vietnam war, he killed over a hundred thousand people in a useless, wasteful, unnecessary, stupid war.” Brad Blanton
Start here [some will insist]: The Best and the Brightest: Halberstam, David: 9780449908709: Amazon.com: Books
“It doesn’t take much intelligence to understand that obedience to greed can make us a slave to stupidity. Yet, I think that the power of greed is amply illustrated by simply taking note of how many intelligent people have chosen slavery.” Craig D. Lounsbrough
Start here [some will insist] https://youtu.be/OHnZi87272U?si=jcLGfRjB-8mJUBhA
“Some people don’t need the others’ approval. They build themselves a pedestal and they climb it. One stupid person is enough to admire them, and you cannot escape their greatness.” Natașa Alina Culea
If the shoe fits let’s say.
“Individually, a human being is the smartest creature on earth. Collectively, we are the stupidest.” Prashant Bhushan Tyagi
Let’s explain this. If only philosophically.
“Meanwhile, the net celebrates kids whose antics are the most sensationalist and, as a result, often reckless and self-destructive. An entire genre of YouTube video known as Epic Fail features amateur footage of wipeouts and other, well, epic failures. ‘FAIL Blog’, part of The Daily What media empire, solicits fail videos from users and features both extreme sports stunts gone awry along with more random humiliations—like the guy who tried to shoplift an electric guitar by shoving it down his pants. Extreme sports clips are competing on the same sensationalist scale and result in popular classics such as ‘tire off the roof nut shot’ and ‘insane bike crash into sign.’ Daring quickly overtakes what used to be skill. In ‘planking’ photos and videos, participants seek to stay frozen in a horizontal plank position as they balance on a flagpole, over a cliff, or on top of a sleeping tiger. For ‘choking’ videos, young people strangle one another to the point of collapse and, sometimes, death.” Douglas Rushkoff
And, of course, what we do here.
“Trust was for the stupid.” Sherrilyn Kenyon
Trust what?
Communism
“Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great." Slavoj Žižek
Objectivism, let’s call it.
Or else?
“Are you a Communist?"
“No, I am an anti-fascist”
“For a long time?”
"Since I have understood fascism.” Ernest Hemingway
Of course, for others:
“Are you a fascist?"
“No, I am an anti-Communist.”
“For a long time?”
"Since I have understood Communism.”
“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.” H.L. Mencken
I suspect it actually goes deeper.
“It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.” P.J. O’Rourke
More Libertarian bullshit. If you get his drift.
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.” Hannah Arendt
Ironically enough, however, well, you know.
“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” Vladimir Lenin
Let’s run this by these guys: https://themilitant.com/#front-page
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Revenge
“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book." Mary Higgins Clark
Or, here, our next post?
"‘Tell me, tutor,’ I said. ‘Is revenge a science, or an art?’” Mark Lawrence
You better believe it!
“God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.” Walt Whitman
Not much that doesn’t explain.
“I’m a fighter. I believe in the eye-for-an-eye business. I’m no cheek turner. I got no respect for a man who won’t hit back. You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.” Muhammad Ali
Rope that dope!
"The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.” Laura Hillenbrand
That often worked for me however.
“…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Herman Melville
Of course, your own thee might be different.
Determinism
“Belief in hard determinism is the most effective enslavement.” Sebastián Wortys
Feel free to believe, however.
“No one denies that we are influenced by genes and environment. What is denied is that we are determined by our genes and/or environment, that we are literally puppets that cannot act differently, that we have no moral agency, no personal accountability, that we are mere machines.” Mike Hockney
Let’s run this by Mother Nature. Then by God.
“God is concerned with, and active in, current world events, but these events are not so ‘set in stone’ that there is nothing we as human beings can do to change the future.” Curtis Ferrell
Spiritually, as it were.
“Could you do things out of order and end up at the same place?” Liane Moriarty
What place might that be?
“It was a random meeting that changed all that, although for a Surrealist like Prim, as I later discovered, nothing in the world is ever truly random. She believed the events that seemed to be chance are actually preordained by the subconscious [mind]; the people and objects we encounter are embodiment of our inner desires, waiting to be discovered.” Joanna Moorhead
Let’s run this by the unconscious mind. You know, if that’s even possible.
“What is life but a confusing algorithm when you are aware, or a controlled simulation when you are not?” F.C. Quiles
And that’s before the part where we tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion.
Hypocrisy
“Even as social justice ideology elevates ‘micro’ injustices beyond all sense of proportion, it ignores or downplays major injustices. Abortion, the most serious injustice of our generation, has legally eliminated more than 60 million unborn human beings since 1973. Yet it is widely held to be a positive moral good.” Scott David Allen
No more so than the widely held belief it is a moral abomination.
“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students ‘free to engage one another as human beings.’ ‘I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,’ another said. ‘This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.’ The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.” Helen Andrews
Same here?
“Another confusing thing about Protestants: they ask ‘What would Jesus do?’ then they give themselves Lego man haircuts and vote Republican and avoid the wrong side of town. Jesus was a bearded, long-haired socialist who hung out with lepers; someone those prigs would call a wild man.” A.D. Aliwat
Yeah, what about that?
“The first problem the corporate culture of customer service creates is humans who are like time bombs ready to explode at any moment. It creates people with double or multiple standards, who say what they do not mean and mean what they do not say. People who hate having to act ‘nice’ eight hours a day, when they really do not want to.” Louis Yako
Just don’t call it capitalism.
“There are two sides to every story — especially if you’re a hypocrite.” Frank Sonnenberg
Or even more.
“In a way, this is the best time to live for a seeker. If you remain honest with yourself, you can’t take sides in any ideology. Everything has become so twisted. This is the best time to discover nothingness.” Shunya
The abyss, some call it.
Quantum Physics
“The schism between science and spirituality is not real—it is a wound born of misunderstanding, fear, and imbalance.” Gary Schnell
Bring this down to Earth for us, okay?
“The distinction between the unverifiable and the unknowable became blurred with the advent of the subatomic world of quantum physics, which dwells in the non-perceptible world of math and probabilities." Ken Elmgren
Right, like the universe itself is any less mysterious.
“In fact, it could be said that our language evolved for the express purpose of allowing us to participate in that interaction with others. That would explain why it is so hard to talk about whatever it is that might lie beyond or behind the description of the world: our language evolved to represent the description, and not the world itself.” Larry Gottlieb
Next up: prescriptions and proscriptions.
“We depend on our description of the world for everything we perceive. As a result, nothing new can be allowed to threaten that description; we hold onto it with all our might. So, what happens when we encounter new events and new people, and we form new memories?” Larry Gottlieb
Would you like me to explain this to you?
“The structures of the multiverse are hidden by the reality principles of complex numbers in quantum physics. This is why the parallel universes that make up the multiverse can’t be seen by each other.” Amit Ray
I knew it!
“He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition…Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us." Matt Haig
I knew it!
Chaos
“Complexity is increasing.
Entropy is increasing.
Chaos is increasing.” Daniel Wieser
And not just here, he suspected.
“Hermit crabs can, if they must, make their home almost anywhere. They have been found in tin cans, in coconut halves. The Pylochelidae family evolved to make their homes not in shells but in sea sponges, stones, driftwood, and pieces of bamboo. More and more, in these darker days, I admire resourcefulness. I love their tenacity; forging lives from the shells of the dead, making homes from the debris that the world, in its chaos, has left out for them.” Katherine Rundell
Do they know that?
“While the universe seems to hold its breath, my consciousness is thrust into an abyss, caught in the gravitational pull of unfolding chaos. It’s as if the very fabric of existence has reached out, unleashing a cosmic tremor—the kind that reshapes galaxies and rewrites the laws of physics and fate on a whim—then leaned in and whispered, ‘Bet you didn’t see that coming.’” Aura Biru
Not much we haven’t seen coming here.
“Embroidery is beautiful not only for what you see, but for all you don’t. From the back, it’s a messy map—absolute chaos, all switchbacks and starts. Knots upon knots, pulled with teeth and pricked fingers. Each one a prayer, on a string.” Robin Brown
From the back here.
“In the chaotic rage that fuels my soul, there is a relaxing calm that rises without warning.” Dark Night Beacon
Still waiting for mine as you might imagine.
“Chaos eventually coagulates into some form of order, which people overwork in their hands like clay until it devolves back into utter unmanageable chaos, and somehow they still think they’ve got it under control.” Kaylin R. Boyd
Got it?
Suicide
“What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.” Stephen King
Or, perhaps, posting here?
“And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.” Angela Carter
To wit, say: https://youtu.be/LvShI_cyjJo?si=YEI5dwp1sZpK0Dwf
“In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.” Albert Camus
And no, not just philosophically.
“Who hasn’t wanted to die at one time or another?” Ryū Murakami
How about not going there…again.
“Did you see her again in France?" I asked him.”
“No. When I got to France, she was already dead. She committed suicide …”
“Why?”
“She often told me she was frightened of getting old…” Patrick Modiano
This is actually a real condition.
“Every suicide is a solution to a problem.” Jean Baechler
The part they leave out.
Butterfly Effect
“The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to.” Stephen King
Pick two:
1] philosophically up in the clouds
2] existentially down here
[though not necessarily in that order]
“Every decision or non-decision shifts the Universe in a whole new direction.” Ray A. Davis
Except yours?
“Certain trivial moments in our lives create ripples that have a lasting effect all our lives, leave marks on our character, change our behaviour, create new ambitions, and set us on a path to success or sometimes to certain doom.” Udayakumar
Click, of course.
“Imagine the butterfly effect applied to your actions. A small act of kindness in your neighborhood or city gaining strength and spreading to benefit the many.” Michael Marcel
On the other hand, not all behaviors revolve around kindness.
“There are moments in life when reason fails, when even the greatest genius is worth nothing. All the years studying, learning, training obscure the brutal fact that there are things we cannot know. A woman could pace out the distance between Dombâng and Rassambur, but the world is filled with spaces we can never measure, effects forever severed from their causes, furious motion for which the prime mover has been lost.” Brian Staveley
Unless, of course, you’ve found it.
“If a single flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, so all the previous and subsequent flaps of its wings, as can the flaps of the wings of the millions of other butterflies, not to mention the activities of innumerable more powerful creatures, including our own species.” Edward N Lorenz
So much for objectivism, he snorted.
Imagine down is up & up is down, man.
Or imagine you’re in space pointing your finger straight ahead. Which way are you pointing?
Infinity
“What could stand opposite that which has no boundary?” Alyssa Skyes
Pick two:
1] the universe
2] the multiverse
“What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us – and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod on which you creep.” Marcus Aurelius
Then all the folks who insist their own dogmatic assessment of, say, everything under the Sun, is the whole objective truth. Or else?
“True. And there are an infinite number of universes, of course, in which we don’t exist at all - that is, no creatures similar to us exist at all. In which the human race doesn’t exist at all. There are an infinite number of universes, for instance, in which flowers are the predominant form of life—or in which no form of life has ever developed or will develop.” Fredric Brown
And he knows this is true…how?
“The whole of Evolution is an evolution from unconscious divinity to conscious divinity, in which God Himself, assumes an infinite variety of forms, enjoys an infinite variety of experiences and transcends an infinite variety of self-imposed limitations.” Meher Baba
And he knows this is true…how?
“You see an Apple – I see the Vector Equilibrium in Infinity.” Sino Melo
Next up: you see an orange.
“I live life knowing that what I see is defined by the far greater portion that I cannot.” Craig D. Lounsbrough
If only going back to the Big Bang. Or, sure, to a God, the God, your God.
Stupidity
“Fools are in the majority, and they never lack confidence because a fool believes that being in the majority is proof that one is right.” James Rozoff
Let’s run this by the fools here.
Again, in other words.
“There comes a point in some conversations where I simply quit and let reality do my talking for me.” Dave Pryor
Hell, I’ve been doing that for years now. In other words, to no avail.
“Risking your own life in order to entertain others is the height of stupidity.” Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Or thereabouts.
“I’ve always been a great advocate of free speech. I think the more perspectives we hear, the better we’ll understand how stupid we are.” Thor Benson
Or thereabouts.
“A person who questions the value of living has endured a worthless life committed to trivial pursuits. A disoriented person constantly asks who they are and where must they go. A stupid person fails to realize basic truths and flees from reality.” Kilroy J. Oldster
Split the difference?
“İt is a great honour for me to teach an intelligent person. However, it becomes a waste of energy and time to teach something to a stupid fool, when under some efforts…you realize the stupidity of this person. For that reason, the appreciation of the teaching as a whole is determined by the social environment – this can be a very honourable or meaningless job, depending on the level of intelligence of the audience to which it refers.” Elmar Hussein
Though some here just keep plugging away at it.