Quote Only Thread

[DrEvil]

“Whatever that symbol means, it doesn’t reflect the Coast Guard and our core values. It won’t be tolerated.”

J B Zorn, US Coast Guard

[Cordelia]

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Pied Piper of Hamelin

[seemslikeadream]

There’s nothing more maddening than debating someone who doesn’t know history, doesn’t read books, and frames their myopia as virtue. The level of unapologetic conjecture I’ve encountered lately isn’t just frustrating, it’s retrogressive, unprecedented and absolutely terrifying.

--- Chris Evans


There is a cult of ignorance in the United States,
and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism
has been a constant thread winding its way through our
political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

---- Isaac Asimov

[Cordelia]

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

~ Margaret Atwood ~

[thrulookingglass]

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - MLK Jr.

[DrEvil]

"When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everybody laughed. They're not laughing now."

- Bob Monkhouse

[hanshan]

...


tx to Mac


https://janeclarejones.com/2018/10/12/i ... arcissism/

The aim of early deconstructive analysis is to show –
by examining, and examining, and then examining again –
that this idea that the being of things is just
an internal ideal self-sameness is bullshit, and
that the being of all things relies on a relation
between sameness and difference, and between
the inside and the outside (which is the same idea,
because in the Platonic schema, the inside is sameness
and the outside is difference (that is, foreign, other,
and probably scary)). The reason, fundamentally,
why people ended up thinking that deconstruction
is a complete destruction of meaning is because almost
everyone, whether they know it or not, is basically a Platonist.
People assume that meaning must work by internal essence,
and so, when you tell them it doesn’t work by internal essence,
what they hear is ‘there is no meaning.’ That is, the whole
clusterfuck of the butchered dissemination of deconstruction –
and why I maintain that the philosophical and political importance
of deconstruction has still not been heard – is because it is a
critique of Plato that was interpreted inside a thoroughgoing Platonism.
That is, as I keep saying to these fools turning up on my
blog with their fancy arguments about why women don’t
exist because – the horror! – there’s some variation, or
non-self-sameness, in the category ‘woman’, this is all
just reverse-Platonic idiocy…That is, the point of deconstruction
is not to negate Plato while still assuming that Plato was correct,
and to leave us all floating around in a pile of meaningless grey-goo
in which anything is just what we say it is, the point of
deconstruction is to grasp the philosophical and political
importance of understanding that meaning, and the being
of things, is always, necessarily, a function of relationality.
Or, to put it in philosophese – the identity of something is a
function of the relation between identity (sameness)
and non-identity (difference). Which is kind of a paradox.
Hello Taoism.

...

[brainpanhandler]

We too, rightly, want to know. But if that's all we want we'll slip into error ourselves, amassing data which won't change a thing but will leave us alternately thrilled and depressed. Knowledge must be the servant of justice, or we're just more clients for the devil. - Jeff Wells

[hanshan]

...

tx to conniption
from the off guardian article

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 81#p664781

What all this should teach us is the need to stop
assuming even the most basic connection
between “the news” and veridical reality.
Because no such connection exists in the minds
of those who control the media and those who
work for it. We need to grasp that they no longer
even consider fact-checking in any sense we
would understand it. You can’t meaningfully
fact-check a worldview that has escaped so far
from all verifiable fact. All you can do is find
endorsement in repetition

...

[chump]

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 67#p568667

[…]

Lisa Pease wrote: One of the first questions people raise when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is this: if any of the evidence for conspiracy is valid, why haven’t the major media organizations told us? Wouldn’t breaking the story about a conspiracy be a career-maker for an investigative reporter?

On the surface of it, the question appears to be legitimate. We assume that the purpose of the news media is to give us facts about newsworthy events to help us interpret life in our time. But is that a legitimate assumption?

Thomas Jefferson used to hold the opinion that the purpose of the media was to tell us the truth. His opinion changed radically once he knew more about the events being (mis)represented. Jefferson realized the importance of the press and the threat a less-than-honest press presents to a nation. In 1787, Jefferson said, “the basis of our government is the opinion of the people,” and given a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without government,” he would choose the latter. In 1799, having learned a bit more, he wrote, “Our citizens may be deceived for a while and have been deceived; but as long as the press can be protected, we may trust to them for light.” But by 1807, the veil of idealism had completely fallen from Jefferson’s eyes:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior ... but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors…

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some way such as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; third, Possibilities; fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

One might be tempted to dismiss Jefferson’s comments as overly cynical and not applicable to our time. But our situation is very similar.

[…]

[Elvis]

"The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock."

— Vladislav Surkov

[chump]

[chump]

[chump]

(song)

[conniption]