Original RI quotes only

[Allegro]

The use of obscenities is a vocabulary crutch evidencing the absence of more articulate, literate or descriptive alternatives to convey thoughts and emotion. It is a sloppy and offensive habit that is indicative of ignorant, low-brow and unnecessarily abusive banter. It is also an unfortunate disregard of decency, propriety and politeness. It requires I edit and delete discussion viewed here by my family, including curious children researching current affairs topic discussions for educational edification and schoolwork. Consideration needs to be given to the wide and varied audience seeking more mature, sophisticated exchanges here.

[Joao]

Tom 'MIC' Hanks

[MacCruiskeen]

You are not your job. You're a spiritual being having a physical experience.

[conniption]

As a large-mass, free-floating gas giant myself, I’m also missing star power while gravitating towards the denser bodies surrounding me. There are a few here.

link

[a11235813]

*edited to add the word "fuck".

[elfismiles]

Like fucking zombies, these skeletal war criminals still shamble across the land, devouring the flesh of the living.

[brainpanhandler]

A freed eye sees the maze everywhere and the mind as a vehicle that always wants to go backward, through itself, like a filing cabinet drawer that dreams of a curious hand.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

God save the famous from their sycophants.

[MinM]

Thanks for posting this. Unfortunately, the relevance of the CIA's operational interest in the hijackers will be missed by those who believe conceding there were hijackers at all is a limited hangout. But hey, maybe Oswald didn't exist either.

Nobody is arguing that Oswald didn't exist. Many people are arguing something very different and much more rational: that he wasn't the killer, or that he wasn't the sole killer, and that a trail was laid for him by the CIA. There is plentiful evidence to support this argument.

But Oswald did make quite a convincing patsy, for anyone not paying too much attention.

Nobody is arguing that "the hijackers" didn't exist. Many people are arguing something very different and much more rational: that a trail was laid for them by the CIA, but that they haven't yet been shown to be hijackers. The same people are arguing, on the basis of plentiful evidence, that none of the 19 "hijackers' " bodies have ever been positively identified and named -- although the US Deep Or Shallow State claims to have at least 11 of those bodies (including two from the WTC, unnamed as ever), and could therefore easily identify and name them if it wished to do so.

But the Nineteen Deathloving Superstudents do make quite convincing patsies, for anyone not paying too much attention.

[MacCruiskeen]

peartreed wrote:
The use of obscenities is a vocabulary crutch evidencing the absence of more articulate, literate or descriptive alternatives to convey thoughts and emotion. It is a sloppy and offensive habit that is indicative of ignorant, low-brow and unnecessarily abusive banter. It is also an unfortunate disregard of decency, propriety and politeness. It requires I edit and delete discussion viewed here by my family, including curious children researching current affairs topic discussions for educational edification and schoolwork. Consideration needs to be given to the wide and varied audience seeking more mature, sophisticated exchanges here.

You are right that obscenity should never stand in for analysis or clear thinking. But the use of obscenities by itself it does nothing to damage children's sensibilities. That's purely a matter of reception. (I have a three year old who, due to my predilection and to the mild embarrassment of my partner and I, has quite well mastered when to use the phrase "fucking dammit!" Now I'd really rather he didn't, since it surprises his preschool teachers. But when I ask him why he said that, on multiple occasions he told me, "I'm frustrated," a word my partner had taught him).

Nor should maturity and sophistication be conflated (if you are conflating it) with absence of emotion or - more importantly - outrage. Ahab is right to quote Churchill: the Tories are a conspiracy to suck your blood dressed up in the finest haberdashery. They are a plague on the planet and a leading scourge of mankind. The proper response to them, when they have success debilitating the rest of us, is outrage. Toning down outrage suggests that their actions are not outrageous, which is the most vile and dangerous thing of all.

Your own view is unfortunately laced with particular judgments presented as natural facts. Everything is in the reception, friend. Words are nothing on their own. Of course they're never ON their own, but the milieu into which they're interjected is not fixed or even all that stable. Receiving "obscenity" as less problematic may in time make it so. Who/what is served by upholding the fiction that it's "indecent" to say "fucking damn it" when the sheer injustice of something calls for it? Obscenity is a particularly good way of punctuating outrage, and there's nothing wrong with that, kids.

I wonder if it isn't concern for order that's really your concern here, where a faulty determination is being made that because a person spouts profanity he might act violently or take revenge against the target of his profanity if he could do so with impunity. I wouldn't worry about it, if so. The great unfairness of it all is that if somehow the earth convulsed and persons like us were positioned for a moment to move the levers of power, the Tories would not have to fear for their safety or their social security in the slightest. My outrage now wouldn't blind me to their humanity then; compare that with the fact that it is their own coolness in the face of criminal expropriation that has always been the very condition of their ascendancy within their own class, and which is also the best evidence that their own vision of the humanity of others has been occluded. The real problem is - the OUTRAGEOUS problem is - we are still living in THEIR world, in which policies resulting in the murder (mostly abroad) and slow death (at home) of huge swaths of people are treated to theatrical chin-rubbing on television by a media class created just for that purpose, to give the appearance of depth and reasonableness to what is essentially a parasitic conspiracy.

[MacCruiskeen]

edited 192 times to fix typos and formatting

[MacCruiskeen]

last month i went to italy, just to look at the frescoes, and to visit the giotto chapel in padua specifically. it's one of the most charged places i've ever visited. there wasn't a negative ion in the room, and even after six hundred or so years the message these pictures communicated was clear. it was one of belief, not in god per se, but in the divinity of humanity, which after all was the fundamental message of christianity, and was an absolutely startling thing to encounter at this particular moment when things seem to be speeding towards points beyond reason. this didn't seem a transcendental idea proposed by the artist and his cohort, but rather that of the transmission of spiritual experience as deeply woven into the fabric of daily life, with the intimation of the divine grasped as material fact. i suspect this recognition will help immensely in what i understand to be, if i'm lucky, the last third of my life.

[RocketMan]

I love the invisible corrolary that believing what we're told is some brave & highly difficult intellectual exertion that forces us to grapple with the complexity of objective reality!

If only we'd read more Atlantic think pieces, we might contribute something more useful to society...

[stillrobertpaulsen]

An idea is something a person has whereas an ideology has you.

Ideas are impacted in their interaction with other ideas whereas ideology demands an idea to conform before it will be granted any validity.

[JackRiddler]

This is spectacular writing. No further comment.

I posted this on Facebook, in response to people deriding Rodman:

Dennis Rodman has done more things, met more people, and been more places than twenty or forty yous, and he has been the undisputed best human being at a skill which earned him millions and millions, and which required more wit and hustle than sheer athleticism -- probably the nearest thing to Russell, minus the IQ, that we've seen recently. Would I rather send Bill Russell himself on a diplomatic mission to North Korea? Abso-LUTE-ly. I'd also prefer it to be our premier anthropologists and statesmen. But the little dictator wants to see who he wants to see, he likes basketball, and in particular loves the 90's Bulls, just like half of that generation of the basketball-loving world. Who else are we going to send from that team? Jordan is a decrepit gambler, he might lose our launch codes in a prop bet to Kim. Steve Kerr is the son of an assassinated Middle East scholar, so probably no. Pippen is a Freemason, i.e., a weirdo. Rodman might be the most normal and trustworthy of that lineup, lol!

That's my taking-it-at-face-value take.
He might be an alien or a CIA asset, of course.
But I tend to think it's just a random opportunity for good will.

Speaking of face value, whew, did he do something wrong there. Yuck.