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Thread: great paragraphs from what you're reading

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    Spinoza is a very hard read.


    “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

    Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

    Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

    No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”


    Steve Jobs



    "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

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    Quote Originally Posted by Subteigh View Post
    .
    Bruce Lee said something similar about martial arts. Why do so many exist and how do you know yours is the right one?

    To me totality is very important in sparring. Many styles claim this totality. They say that they can cope with all types of attacks; that their structures cover all the possible lines and angles, and are capable of retaliation from all angles and lines. If this is true, then how did all the different styles come about? If they are in totality, why do some use only the straight lines, others the round lines, some only kicks, and why do still others who want to be different just flap and flick their hands? To me a system that clings to one small aspect of combat is actually in bondage.

    -Bruce Lee
    "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

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    Title: Meteorite Sparks A Cult
    Authors: Bellemare, P. M.
    Journal: Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 90, p.287

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    If the causa-sui project is a lie that is too hard to admit because it plunges one back to the cradle, it is a lie that must take its toll as one tries to avoid reality. This brings us to the very heart of our discussion of Freud’s character. Now we can talk pointedly about his engineering of his causa-sui project, and we can connect it with his absolute denial of threatening reality. I am referring, of course, to the two occasions on which Freud fainted. Fainting represents, as we know, the most massive denial, the refusal or inability to remain conscious in the face of a threat. The two occasions on which a great man loses complete control of himself must contain some vital intelligence about the very heart of his life-problem. Fortunately we have Jung’s first-hand reports of both incidents, and I would like to quote him in full.

    The first fainting took place in Bremen in 1909, while Freud and Jung were on their way to the United States to lecture about their work. Jung says that this incident was provoked—indirectly—by his interest in the “peat-bog corpses”:

    I knew that in certain districts of Northern Germany these so-called bog corpses were to be found. They are the bodies of prehistoric men who either drowned in the marshes or were buried there. The bog water in which the bodies lie contains humic acid, which consumes the bones and simultaneously tans the skin, so that it and the hair are perfectly preserved….

    Having read about these peat-bog corpses, I recalled them when we were in Bremen, but, being a bit muddled, confused them with the mummies in the lead cellars of the city. This interest of mine got on Freud’s nerves. “Why are you so concerned with these corpses?” he asked me several times. He was inordinately vexed by the whole thing and during one such conversation, while we were having dinner together, he suddenly fainted. Afterward he said to me that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant that I had death-wishes toward him.
    The second fainting incident occurred in 1912 at the time of a special strategy meeting that brought Freud and some of his followers together in Munich. Here is Jung’s intimate report of the incident:

    Someone had turned the conversation to Amenophis IV (Ikhnaton). The point was made that as a result of his negative attitude toward his father he had destroyed his father’s cartouches on the steles, and that at the back of his great creation of a monotheistic religion there lurked a father complex. This sort of thing irritated me, and I attempted to argue that Amenophis had been a creative and profoundly religious person whose acts could not be explained by personal resistances toward his father. On the contrary, I said, he had held the memory of his father in honor, and his zeal for destruction had been directed only against the name of the god Amon, which he had everywhere annihilated; it was also chiseled out of the cartouches of his father Amon-hotep. Moreover, other pharaohs had replaced the names of their actual or divine forefathers on monuments and statues by their own, feeling that they had a right to do so since they were incarnations of the same god. Yet they, I pointed out, had inaugurated neither a new style nor a new religion.

    At that moment Freud slid off his chair in a faint.
    From The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

    (I didn't think much of it).

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    Bismarck sang "La Marseillaise" when recording his voice on an Edison phonograph in 1889. A biographer stated that he did so, 19 years after the war, to mock the French.
    .

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    The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience,
    thinking that the life he's lived and the films he's seen give him something to say and the way to say it. Experience, however, is overrated. Of course we want writers who don't hide from life, who live deeply, observe closely. This is vital but never enough. For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined. Self-knowledge is the key-life plus deep reflection on our reactions to life.
    Story
    written by Robert McKee

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    I too went through the "logic is evil" stage, when I was a teenager. But it's not something that can just be blushed aside easily, and we do take it for granted that rationality is what keeps us grounded and sane.

    So it is kind of ironic, that there's great awe and emotionality in logic and rationality. There's so much that you can't know without using logic and rationality, because emotions and subjective experiences are limited to human experiences, and hence it's actually going to be a very narrow and limited worldview, if you only limit yourself to your emotions. Maybe you do need both, sure.

    So the question is, which is narrower? The trappings of your own human experiences and subjectivity, or the universality of logic and reason? The power of universality is truly amazing and a sight to behold...

    It is our reason that expands our empathy, our emotions, our experiences...

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    Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
    I too went through the "logic is evil" stage, when I was a teenager. But it's not something that can just be blushed aside easily, and we do take it for granted that rationality is what keeps us grounded and sane.

    So it is kind of ironic, that there's great awe and emotionality in logic and rationality. There's so much that you can't know without using logic and rationality, because emotions and subjective experiences are limited to human experiences, and hence it's actually going to be a very narrow and limited worldview, if you only limit yourself to your emotions. Maybe you do need both, sure.

    So the question is, which is narrower? The trappings of your own human experiences and subjectivity, or the universality of logic and reason? The power of universality is truly amazing and a sight to behold...

    It is our reason that expands our empathy, our emotions, our experiences...
    How is logic more universal besides it establishing rules and axioms that coincide with our perceptions of the world?
    How is logic not only limited to human experience? I agree that both are supportive of each other, if the distinction actually is meaningful besides reinforcing the system itself. I think that presenting logic and reason as 'universal' is a rather bold claim, if i'm understanding you right. Logic is used to systematicize our individual, particular experiences, but emotion is the birth of this understanding of experience. So i think it is wrong, even useless, to imply that emotion and subjecitivity is 'narrower' than logic. One is not without the other.

    ''He who explains a passage in an author 'more deeply' than the passage was meant has not explained the author but obscured him. This is how our metaphysicians stand in regard to the text of nature; indeed, they stand much worse. For in order to apply their deep explanations they frequently first adjust the text in a way that will facilitate it: in other words, they spoil it.''

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    There's nothing in there about logic being evil. I guess it could be read as anti logic but I thought it was about integrating objectivity into the entirety of experience. I found it personally relevant because I'm gaining objectivity as I age and its kind of clunky and I'm working out how to incorporate new ways of seeing in a way that doesn't disrupt other ways that are core to my being, trying to find a fluid nondualistic approach, which is what I thought that passage was going for. I have a ton of respect for science and aims toward objectivity (but scorn for absolute certainty and ideology predicated on these things when they dishonestly sit in their place)
    Last edited by ashlesha; 06-10-2018 at 11:09 PM.

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    "Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots; and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way." ~ Charles Dickens

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    "If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

    (I'm taking that out of context - he was only referring to English Enlightenment philosophers).

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    Quote Originally Posted by Subteigh View Post
    "Suppose that a chap tells the girl he loves that her eyes are as green as emeralds: she’ll probably take that as a compliment, not because emeralds are green but because they’re valuable. If he tells the girl that her eyes are as green as mould, he’ll get a slap; not because he’s inaccurate but because it’s always the second, implied comparison that’s important." ~ Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence
    nah, it's not about value. I'll always remember Nadja by Breton. He describes her eyes as "fern", and it's still stuck in my mind as one of the best compliment I've ever seen.

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    whether the author had written "because they're valuable" or "because they're objectively considered beautiful" the idea would've been the same, which is that emeralds and mould are both green, so she isn't reacting differently to the comparisons because of their truth value, but because of the connotations (tl;dr emerald = positive connotations, mould = negative connotations) which is what ultimately determines her reactions to the comparisons

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    yes@wasp, agreed. there's a subjectivity in the definition of value, I just got the "price value" out of that quote, but it definitely extends to other forms of values... beauty is a value too.

    it’s always the second, implied comparison that’s important.
    this is particularly true. I mean you can even compare someone's eyes to mould and explain that the properties of mould are very important and its colours are as translucent as those of a sea of emeralds, and if you use the right comparisons then even mould could become a good compliment, lol. It's all about what we mean.

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    Quote Originally Posted by ooo View Post
    yes@wasp, agreed. there's a subjectivity in the definition of value, I just got the "price value" out of that quote, but it definitely extends to other forms of values... beauty is a value too.

    this is particularly true. I mean you can even compare someone's eyes to mould and explain that the properties of mould are very important and its colours are as translucent as those of a sea of emeralds, and if you use the right comparisons then even mould could become a good compliment, lol. It's all about what we mean.
    I had that same thought earlier, it's why I liked your "fern" example because it's not as simple to figure out what he meant by the comparison as it is in the cases of "emerald" or "mould", like how there are objective connotations and subjective connotations, so if he likes ferns then it's positively skewed, and if he hates ferns then it becomes more of an insult, but if he literally just thought her eyes looked like ferns then what an interesting observation

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    ''Cruelty as ethics. So that’s it? The non-cruel ontologists may ask. Luckily, the party of cruelty not only has a dismal metaphysics at their disposal, but also a blackened ethics to propose. After all, we know how Judy/the Red Goddess/Umbra wins. Cooper, in an act of all-too-human weakness looked back. He triggered, the party says, the disappearance of Laura Palmer and the destruction of the whole universe. He looked back and undid the whole world with his own eyes. Therefore, the cruel party proposes a radical, mercyless solution: let us be as cruel as Judy, as oceanic as Umbra, let us eat cosmos and let us follow her Chtonic left-hand path of pneumas-without-accretions. Rather than surrendering to Cooper’s humanist fears and behaviors, let us join Judy/The Red Goddess/Umbra. Never look back, no matter how long Sarah will try to capture Laura’s pneuma, without being afraid of the unknown consequences of our journey. After all, no one promised us that we will have the peace we are hoping for; the only thing we really know for sure, is the (existence of an) alien world, radically disfigured by our transgression of time and space. As Negarestani wrote: «In the wake of the philosophy of cruelty, ethics can return to the mathesis of the problem once again wherein the problem is not determined by its solution or conditions but by its capacity to generate fields of the problematic» (Differential Cruelty, p. 82). Judy demands to be destroyed with her own sword and daggers, and be reborn once again in us.''

    little red riding hood:

    "In Little Red Riding Hood sometimes the wolf swallows grandma and LRRH whole. The pneuminous reading offers an alternative to Bettleheim. The wolf is the neurotic accretion, grandma and LRRH are thoughts absorbed by the neurotic accretion. LRRH is a tale of caution not for Narps but for thoughts themselves. Thoughts trying to avoid being synthesised must avoid Narps or they are in danger of being interbred inside the regional processor. They try to avoid the neurotic accretion but it is too clever for them and absorbs first grandma and then LRRH. The woodcutter frees them and the unsynthesised thoughts escape intact. The neurotic accretion having been destroyed by another pneuminous form is liberated into its original emptiness. The death of the wolf is the dissolution of the ego and the understanding of the thoughts as autonomous entities that cannot be subsumed."
    Last edited by Kalinoche buenanoche; 07-03-2018 at 01:09 PM.

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    St. Andrew the Apostle explains about Purgatory:


    Do you know people who believe that God exists but who persist in living for themselves
    and for their physical appetites? Of course you do. There are many like this. These people
    believe in God and they believe God is good. These people are not bad people. They do not
    rejoice in evil. I am referring here to a person who is on the side of goodness but who could
    not be bothered working very hard for that side. He leaves the work to others, perhaps
    even admiring and applauding their efforts. In the worst cases, he actually ridicules and
    impedes those who serve God.

    What would be just for this person? Let us consider.

    Because there is little self-sacrifice, there is little growth. Eventually, this life ends and this
    person meets Jesus. This person has more failures in love than successes. There are many
    moments of failure in this life because when the Lord needed this one to say “no” to self and
    “yes” to God, this person refused and decided for his personal enjoyment. There is time
    squandered and love squandered. In meeting Jesus and being exposed to the Lord’s pure,
    total, selfless love, how do you think this person feels? Pause for a moment and think
    about this.

    Now, my friends, I have just described purgatory for you.

    Is it just and merciful that this person be allowed to see his life and his failures, as well
    as his successes? Is it helpful to this person, in terms of healing? Will each person benefit from
    the truth? My friends, in order for this person to enjoy heaven and be comfortable in heaven,
    he must at the very least understand heaven. Unless the person examines himself honestly
    and repents, he will not be in a condition to grow. Time in purgatory allows for this
    understanding and this growth. This person will examine his failures so that he can
    understand what would have been the holy response. Then, this person will come to terms
    with the fact that he rejected God’s will and he will accept himself and forgive himself. After
    that, he will be with others who have been purified in the same way and he will experience
    fellowship, learning about tolerance and acceptance of the pain of others. Shortly after
    that, this person will be at complete peace with himself and the life he lived and he will come to
    heaven, experiencing unity with Jesus and community with the saints.

    Do not fear purgatory. It would be like fearing medicine that could immediately alleviate pain.
    You would not fear such a medicine. You would take it with the greatest eagerness and thank
    God for it. Think of purgatory in the same way.

    - from the booklet, Heaven Speaks to Those Who Fear Purgatory, found on the following linked page, among the booklets on the bottom half (also available in 16 other languages): https://www.directionforourtimes.com/library/english/
    "A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope."
    ........ G. ........... K. ............... C ........ H ........ E ...... S ........ T ...... E ........ R ........ T ........ O ........ N ........


    "Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along
    by every wind of teaching, looks like the only
    attitude acceptable to today's standards."
    - Pope Benedict the XVI, "The Dictatorship of Relativism"

    .
    .
    .


  19. #299

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    ''But you can imagine, as Patrick has said clearly, that they were quite frightened, and I know they are. Even English language is like that. All the time they’ll say, ‛I am afraid…“ ‛I am afraid I have to go.“ What is there to be afraid, if you have to go? You better go. ‛I am afraid, if I am doing.“ – they are all the time jittery like that. And so jittery and when they talk, you know, they are so frightened that sometimes you feel nervous with them, that you you do not know how to approach them, the way they are nervous. And one of the reasons why they are nervous is that, because they plan too much, think too much, analyze too much and then ego settles down into their brains, and ultimately covers the heart. Because their ego covers their heart, they get a fright. Actually it so happens that if you become ego-oriented you start seeing yourself through. Because when you are at a level, you can even see your ego very clearly, and then you get frightened of other people, because you think they too also must be having the same type of an ego, and you are really frightened of it.

    It is very common also, in the East. Now in India, I should say, that supposing you have to go to a government office, be careful. Ah, anybody, even a [SOUNDS LIKE chaprasi] can shout at you for nothing at all. They develop a system of barking all the time, just go on barking. The reason is they bark at you because they themselves are insecure. A chaprasi is insecure of his boss, his boss is insecure of his boss, his boss is insecure of his boss, ultimately the minister is afraid of the voters, and the voters are afraid of the minister. It’s such a vicious circle. So the whole system works out into such a terrible insecurity (Shri Mataji laughing) that you don’t understand what is there to bark at? What is there to shout at? And then a kind of a identification with the falsehood is built up so much that you are no more a human being; you are either a secretary or you are an under secretary or a joint secretary, I do not know who is higher who is lower. And then you have a some other secretaries and then you have clerks, and this, and that, and that. And you are that, you are nothing else but that. So because you are that, you must have these horns, and you must shout at people, otherwise nobody is going to believe that you are something.''

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    that post is the kind of cosmopolitan fingering Nietzsche was talking about... read Nietzsche or don't, but the secondary market on him via people like Mark Fisher is precisely the shit he'd hate. especially someone thinking they read some book on him and now they've understood him. this is exactly the kind of lazy historical self awareness that quits the field and prefers to talk about truths that can only be lived to be understood. it uses Nietzsche like a coffee table piece. Like it or not Nietzsche wanted people to fight, and even capitalist squabbling over money is more than the relaxed self assurance emitted by the post-scarcity wannabe, as they refuse to bother, and focus on collecting lines about philosophers like artifacts, as if the artifact didn't represent a mere worn out and thrice-copied distortion of whatever truth originally existed. That's the real last man, the person who reads Nietzsche like an indictment of capitalism, because that person is looking at it from the far side, where even fighting itself is seen as outdated and unnecessary and capitalism was just the last gasp of such a barbarous drive. the last man is beyond even that, when even our interpretations are mass produced, but it wasn't the producer who was wrong, it was the reader who mistook it for true. Nietzsche would love how capitalism seduces the weak into comfort and materialism and a false sense of sophistication, because from his point of view those people were always slaves, thus it suits them. if Mark Fisher has anything going for him it would only be in the case that he never really meant a single word of his on Nietzsche. its not the entrepreneur who Nietzsche derides, its the person at the very end of the line who thinks whatever distorted reality they've inherited calculated start to finish on the basis of the profit-motive confers a genuine take on the past, because they've lost all will to do anything but accept mass reality rather than make it themselves. they think this makes them good, and from there there is nowhere else to go
    Last edited by Bertrand; 08-18-2018 at 02:48 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by hag View Post
    @Bertrand this could be a dumb question, but do you think it's worthwhile to read Nietzsche?
    I think it would be good to read the gay science. then go live 10 more years, then read it again. also if you can get in a real fight somewhere in that gap period that would probably add a lot to the exegesis

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    Quote Originally Posted by hag View Post
    @Bertrand this could be a dumb question, but do you think it's worthwhile to read Nietzsche?
    Quote Originally Posted by Bertrand View Post
    I think it would be good to read the gay science. then go live 10 more years, then read it again. also if you can get in a real fight somewhere in that gap period that would probably add a lot to the exegesis
    I agree with this - The Gay Science is the one work of his I found particularly tolerable. I think it would be optimal to get the Walter Kaufmann translation (with his commentary).

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    Quote Originally Posted by hag View Post
    And how did you find the others?
    The Birth of Tragedy 7/10
    Human, All Too Human 7/10
    The Gay Science 8/10
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra 7/10
    Beyond Good and Evil 6/10
    On the Genealogy of Morals 6/10
    The Antichrist 7/10
    Ecce Homo not read?
    The Will to Power 7/10 (probably a questionable rating due to it not being an "official" manuscript - not sure what edition I read)

    The ones I gave 7 I generally thought had a lot of brilliant moments in them, but also a lot of terrible moments, some of which may be due to misunderstanding. It is certainly true that there will be many aspects I agree or disagree with that he later rejected.

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    Neptune was one of the first pieces of orchestral music to have a fade-out ending, although several composers (including Joseph Haydn in the finale of his Farewell Symphony) had achieved a similar effect by different means. Holst stipulates that the women's choruses are "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed", and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance". Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst's daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during Jupiter) remarked that the ending was "unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter... until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence".
    .

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    Godddddddddd!!!!!!!! I haven't actually read this bcuz dostoevsky scares me.


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    been there

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    A thickening agent commonly used in milk products, carrageenan, is a powerful allergen that can cause a “pseudo-latex allergy” (Tarlo, et al., 1995).

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    Quote Originally Posted by Subteigh View Post
    The Birth of Tragedy 7/10
    Human, All Too Human 7/10
    The Gay Science 8/10
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra 7/10
    Beyond Good and Evil 6/10
    On the Genealogy of Morals 6/10
    The Antichrist 7/10
    Ecce Homo not read?
    The Will to Power 7/10 (probably a questionable rating due to it not being an "official" manuscript - not sure what edition I read)

    The ones I gave 7 I generally thought had a lot of brilliant moments in them, but also a lot of terrible moments, some of which may be due to misunderstanding. It is certainly true that there will be many aspects I agree or disagree with that he later rejected.
    Why do you rate The Gay Science the highest?

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    Quote Originally Posted by kalinoche View Post
    A thickening agent commonly used in milk products, carrageenan, is a powerful allergen that can cause a “pseudo-latex allergy” (Tarlo, et al., 1995).
    I don’t consume anything that comes from a cow. There is some research that indicates that a protein in cow’s milk is a powerful cancer promoter.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
    I don’t consume anything that comes from a cow. There is some research that indicates that a protein in cow’s milk is a powerful cancer promoter.
    how about steak?

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    Quote Originally Posted by kalinoche View Post
    how about steak?
    I've quit steak and hamburger for the last few years in favor of salmon, but I just quit salmon, too. But AFAIK, steak isn't that great a problem.

    I've been vegan for the past two months and the changes I've seen have only been positive. (Meaning my D hasn't fallen off or anything yet. Actually, kind of the opposite.) I got into an old suit jacket for the first time in years this morning.

    I've long suspected that food is kind of a poison, but animal products seem to be worse than plant products.
    Last edited by Adam Strange; 09-26-2018 at 03:10 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by A Moderator View Post
    Why do you rate The Gay Science the highest?
    I found it less acerbic than his other works; I liked his emphasis on making your life count; I liked his rejection of superstition & the importance of faith; I liked his disparagement of those who deliberately make difficult to understand. I don't agree with his stance about trying to find an answer to everything being a foolish exercise. But it is generally a work where I found he said a lot of insightful things throughout.

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    The Voice of Aiwass came apparently from over my left shoulder, from the furthest corner of the room. It seemed to echo itself in my physical heart in a very strange manner, hard to describe. I have noticed a similar phenomenon when I have been waiting for a message fraught with great hope or dread. The voice was passionately poured, as if Aiwass were alert about the time-limit ... The voice was of deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce or aught else as suited the moods of the message. Not bass – perhaps a rich tenor or baritone. The English was free of either native or foreign accent, perfectly pure of local or caste mannerisms, thus startling and even uncanny at first hearing. I had a strong impression that the speaker was actually in the corner where he seemed to be, in a body of "fine matter," transparent as a veil of gauze, or a cloud of incense-smoke. He seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw. The dress was not Arab; it suggested Assyria or Persia, but very vaguely. I took little note of it, for to me at that time Aiwass was an "angel" such as I had often seen in visions, a being purely astral.

    Aleister Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods

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    Introduction


    Science fiction is often described, and even defind, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

    This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing."

    Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

    Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life.

    This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens.... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to shwo that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to describe reality, the present world.


    Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

    Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

    The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on - what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

    "The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

    They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that ulocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

    Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

    But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

    I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? if they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

    Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.

    But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact which is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and - ideally - quatifiable.

    Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

    I talk about he gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

    The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

    Oh, it's lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it's a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn't about the future. I don't know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

    This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it's set in the "Ekumenical Year 1490-97," but surely you don't believe that?

    Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

    In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

    The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

    The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

    Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound - a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than be the attentive intellect).

    All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great
    dominants of our contemporary life - science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of
    these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

    A metaphor for what?

    If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

    Ursula K. Le Guin

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    What can you do when they turn out all your lights? Well for my part, I learned to use the darkness.
    I joined a jiujitsu dojo a few months after the assault, and over the years learned every vicious and dirty trick I could.
    I made myself get tough. I never competed in tournaments. I just learned how to fight.

    Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory

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    Here we can compare Deleuze's concept of sublimation with the Lacanian-Zizekian theme of "Enjoy your symptom," arguably the psychoanalytic version of Stoic amor fati. Take one of Deleuze's favorite examples, a quotation from poet and writer Joe Bousquet, who was seriously wounded in the First World War: "My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it." In this poetic expression of injury, a sublime reversal takes place. Rather than the symptom (the wound, the trauma) appearing as a negation of life and an obstacle to the ego's goals and flourishing, it is the ego that becomes a mere accessory to the symptom, which is a figure of destiny that both precedes and infinitely exceeds it. The I is attached to the wound, not the other way around—and it is this autonomous partial object that gives the individual its secrete coherence and true standing in the world.
    Aaron Schuster, The Trouble With Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis
    4w3-5w6-8w7

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    We're evil because evil is powerful, we're evil because evil is delicious.
    We're evil because evil is strong, and everything else is weak.

    Hecate Jacoby, The Dragon Factory

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    At one recently discovered site in England, drawings on the ceiling of a cave show “conga lines” of female dancers, along with drawings of animals like bison and ibex, which are known to have become extinct in England ten thousand years ago.
    One of the rare academic studies of nonviolent fan behavior found Germans fairly quiet and “unimaginative” in the 1960s, except to celebrate victory with the traditional carnival song “What a Day, What a Wonderful Day Today.” By the mid-1990s, however, German fans had created and memorized thirty to fifty songs of their own devising, some blending rock and roll with familiar soccer chants—the traditional “Olé,” for example, sung to the tune of a Pet Shop Boys song.
    Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich

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    In 1607, Henri declared that work on the Pont-Neuf, the broad stone bridge across the Seine which had been planned since 1566, was finally complete. Parisians had been reluctant to fund it themselves and had tried to force Henri’s hand by refusing to pay for it unless other towns and regions in France paid their share. Henri simply levied a further and higher tax on every barrel of wine which entered Paris and the work was completed within six years of his original plan.3 As the bridge was being built, it became a popular sport for young men to show their daring by leaping across the unfinished ramparts, risking drowning in the Seine if they fell short. The king was fascinated enough by the game to leap across himself. When it was pointed out that many had drowned in this way, he replied: ‘This may be so, but none of them were kings’ – a baffling if, to most Parisians at least, impressive piece of bravado.
    Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey

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