The world belongs to the intelligent, the universe belongs to the wise.
~ Matshona Dhliwayo
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Yeah, I always wanted to be a well known idiot. - Niko Bellic, after not wanting to appear on camera associated with a street justice man
"Be careful what you wish for"
--Aesop--
"Don't whistle while you're pissing." ---Hagbard Celine - Illuminatus by Robert Anton Wilson
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"All I know is that I know nothing", Socrates
Took me decades to really understand what he meant.
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george lucas' greatest accomplishment is that he created an alien that accurately represented seven racial stereotypes
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Current mood is a toss up between
"I dream of a society where I would be guillotined as a conservative." - Proudhon / "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" - Marx (Groucho)
Might be stretching the bounds of this question because it's a passage from Grapes of Wrath, but it always gets me.
long
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?
And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’
From Intentions, by Oscar Wilde. It's one of my favorite books, all of the essays there are amazing, I definitely recommend anyone giving it a read.
"Time is weird. Space too. I hope ours match up again some day."
“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any” -- Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy
HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!
"Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it"
The Lady Chablis
You’ll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we’re political non-Euclideans. But even that’s not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.” Hagbard Celine
All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.
Drink 'N Thrive... /s
Even snakes are afraid of snakes
- Steven Wright
"Man was born free, but everywhere is in chains." -Rousseau
"Without challenge there is nothing, and in nothing there is only gloom. In such a state, the difference between absolute power and absolute powerlessness is undetectable."
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
-Billy Shakes