I was saddened to learn of my friend Carmella’s passing. She had a meticulous and deep aesthetic eye but moreover she was an incredibly generous and funny spirit and rather down to earth. See the obit in SFGate. (BTW, that’s Carmella’s hand on Boz’ classic Silk Degrees album cover).
Nice analytical piece by Helen Pluckrose. Consider the incoherent fuckwittery of, for example, “queers for Palestine” and the recent unholy alliance of feminism with Sharia law (I refer of course to Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of the recent Women’s March blindly followed by white middle class pseudo-intellectuals giving new meaning to Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons). The permutations of idiocy are quite considerable.
Intersectionality, by undervaluing shared human experience and rights — universality — and personal autonomy and distinctiveness — individuality — and focusing intensely on group identity and intersectional ideology, places individuals in a very restricted “collectivist” position previously only found in very conservative cultures.
According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.
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The first question is: Why is it that both descriptions seem to fit you—or, for that matter, why do you seem to recognize yourself in the self-analysis of all twelve astrological signs? Or, to put it another way, why is it that you can recognize and identify the planets Jupiter and Venus so readily after reading a bit and taking one look, yet have so much trouble identifying yourself from twelve descriptions when, presumably, you know yourself much better than you know Jupiter and Venus?
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Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other—while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If you answer that the human psyche is more complicated than the pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or the galaxies or Einstein’s general theory of relativity, keep in mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don’t seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.)
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You have seen yourself a thousand times in the mirror, face to face. No sight is more familiar. Yet why is it that the first time you see yourself in a clothier’s triple mirror—from the side, so to speak—it comes as a shock? Or the first time you saw yourself in a home movie: were you embarrassed? What about the first time you heard your recorded voice—did you recognize it? Clearly, you should, since you’ve been hearing it all your life.
Why is it that, when you are shown a group photograph in which you are present, you always (and probably covertly) seek yourself out? To see what you look like? Don’t you know what you look like?
Forty years ago this masterpiece was released. See Turn Up The Volume and Observer (I do wish they’d stop using the term “punk” for these guys).
We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves … Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, “Each is the farthest away from himself”—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.
— Nietzsche
O God, I pray you to let me know my self.
— St. Augustine
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How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians
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Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes—you are beyond doubt the strangest
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Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life
I had the honour to meet the very excellent Paul Cantor recently. Check out his freely available book here.
Still on a Percy theme, the Walker Percy Weekend organizers have announced that tickets go on sale today.
I experience the sensation that the world really ended in 1916 and that we’ve been living in a dream ever since. These good fellows have spent their entire lives working, raising families, fighting Nazis, worrying about Communism, yet they’ve really been zapped by something else. We haven’t been zapped by the Nazis and the Communists. On the contrary. It is a pleasure to fight one, worry about the other, and talk about both.
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“We were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other’s defect.”
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“The only difference between us is that you’re the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I’m the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don’t know but what you and I know is that we’re both after the same thing—such as reducing the suffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here’s the thing, old buddy”—he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow—“and you know it and I know it: You can’t give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you’re in good taste and I’m not. ”
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Catholics have become a remnant of a remnant. Louisiana, however, is more Christian than ever, not Catholic Christian, but Texas Christian. Even most Cajuns have been converted, first by Texas oil bucks, then by Texas evangelists. The shrimp fleet, mostly born again, that is, for the third time, is no longer blessed and sprinkled by a priest.
Why don’t I like these new Christians better? They’re sober, dependable, industrious, helpful. They praise God frequently, call you brother, and punctuate ordinary conversation with exclamations like Glory! Praise God! Hallelujah! I’ve nothing against them, but they give me the creeps.
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“One are decent, tenderhearted, unbelieving, philanthropic people.
“The other are some preachers who tell the truth about the Lord but are themselves often rascals if not thieves.”
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“What a generation! Believing thieves and decent unbelievers!”
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“Don’t you know where tenderness leads?” Silence. “To the gas chambers.
“Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century.
“Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.
“More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together.”
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The Pentecostals are decent folk, honest and forthright, no crazier than liberal unbelievers and a good deal less neurotic, but perhaps a bit paranoid, given to suspecting godless conspiracies under every sofa. But if I keep them off the couch, don’t mention sex, wear a white coat like a TV doctor, speak to them face to face, take their blood pressure—they tend to hypertension—examine their eyegrounds, they’ll tell me their troubles.
