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June 3rd, 2013 | #1 |
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Interesting Bits of Text
This thread is for SHORT passages, of no more than a few pages, maximum. If you have more than that, link to it. This is meant for a few sentences, paragraphs, or pages. Just stuff you run across in things you read. Either interesting verbal formulations or facts, historical sequences, semi-random stuff that is worth knowing. Again, this is not for treatises, chapters, whole essays. It is for chunks. "I DID not know that" is for facts; this thread is for chunks or passages. That's how to think of it.
Last edited by Alex Linder; June 3rd, 2013 at 08:19 AM. |
June 3rd, 2013 | #2 |
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"But you said you weren't a Croat."
"I am not. I am a Serb. From the Vojvodina." "But you can translate their language?" Tezich chuckled. It is the same language, Mr. Karp. We are the same people, divided by a common language, as I believe Mr. George Bernard Shaw said about the Americans and British. This is why it is called Serbo-Croatian." "Huh!" Karp said. "Then what's Yugoslavian?" The associate professor chucled again. "Well, this is difficult to explain in one breath. There is a joke in Yugoslavia that we have two alphabets, three religions, four languages, five nationalities, and six republics. But Serbo-Croatian is one of the languages and two of the alphabets. You see, we southern Slavs became literate rather late in history. The Church gave us our writing, and those who were converted by Catholic missionaries took up the Latin script, and those who were converted by Orthodox missionaries took up the Cyrilic script." "Like Russian?" "Very like Russian. The Catholic south Slavs became Croats; their Orthodox cousins, you might say, became Serbs. Since then, of course, the history of the two peoples has been very different. Which causes many problems. And one of them has come to rest on your doorstop, I think." "The case, you mean?" "Yes. You could say that this case began in 1389. That was when the Turks crushed the Serbian empire at the Battle of Kossovo. Thus began five hundred years of appalling slavery for the Serbs, and centuries of nearly unending combat for the Croats, who found themselves on the front line of European resistance to the Turks. As a result of this . . ." Terzich stopped abruptly and smiled a sheepish smile. "Forgive me, Mr. Karp, I am carried away by my subject. The occupational disease of all professors is to lecture at the slightest provocation." "No, that's OK," Karp said. "It's just hard to believe you would think that the motives for a crime could be traced back to things that happened so long ago." "Yes, this is what Americans believe generally. You have abolished history, have you not? Your Henry Ford says, 'History is bunk,' and you nod, yes, the past is dead, only the future is real, and we can change this as we like. Perhaps this is true for you, though I doubt it. But in Yugoslavia we breathe history like the air. We cannot escape it, even when it carries, you might say, traces of poison. "And so must you, because, believe me, there is no way to keep this history bottled up inside Yugoslavia. You are surprised it escapes and kills one policeman? Sixty years ago, it started a war that killed ten million people and changed the world. Perhaps even your life was changed by this little event, Mr. Karp. The First World War? Perhaps someone got shot instead of married. Perhaps someone decided that Europe was no longer healthy and made the voyage to America. So it is possible that you owe your existence to something that began inside my country." Terzich paused and nodded his head in the direction of the Croatians. "These people are living out a kind of historical dream. The defendants you are prosecuting they consider heroes. They were all raised on tales of dashing Croat warriors in red cloaks, killing Turks, killing Austrians, killing Serbs, all for the freedom of Croatia and the glory of its holy church." Karp shook his head. "But it wasn't any blow for freedom. They failed. It was a screwup from the start. They killed an innocent man for nothing." "An innocent man. In a five-hundred-year war, Mr. Karp, believe me, the notion of innocence does not survive. In Yugoslavia we have a monument honoring the man who started the First World War, the greatest slaughter of innocents that history records. And failure does not matter, either. The Serbs failed for nearly five hundred years and won in the end. At what cost you can have no idea. You have an expression in this country for someone who habitually uses foul language: 'He curses like a priest's son?' That cannot be right--" "Curses like a preacher's kid," Karp volunteered. "Just so! Very colorful and very American. He curses like a preacher's kid. In Yugoslavia we say instead: 'He curses like a Serb on a stake.' This is from the Turkish practice of impaling rebels on stakes. The sharpened pole is inserted between the victim's legs, up through the body cavity, and out just under the shoulder, the skilled impaler being careful not to hit any organs or blood vessels that would cause a quick death. Then the butt of the stake is stuck in the ground, and the condemned man is left to die in sight of all his friends and relatives, who, of course, are prohibited from helping him, on pain of suffering the same fate. Such a death can last for days. The expression I referred to tells enough about how our heroes of that time responded: they did not pray, or beg for mercy. "But still, failure upon failure, the revolts did not stop. At Nis, south of Belgrade, the Turks built a tower ten meters high out of the heads of Serbian rebels. How many heads is that, I wonder? It would be an interesting calculation. And why did they rebel? So that they could have a flag and king of their own? Not at all. Mr. Karp, do you know what a janissary is?" "Some kind of soldiers, weren't they?" "Not exactly. Imagine this, Mr. Karp. Imagine that you have a son, a beautiful, strong son. You nurture him, you teach him all you know, you love him more than your own life. At the age of nine, he is the strongest and bravest and most intelligent boy in the village, the natural leader. "Then one day, the thing happens that you always knew would happen but are powerless to prevent. A squadron of Osmanli cavalry rides into the village. The spahis dismount and race through the houses, driving all before them with their whips. Holding back the villagers, they line up the boys of nine and ten. Their beg walks down the line, inspecting them like cattle. Of course, he picks your son, puts a collar around his neck, and drags him off to become a janissary, to be circumcised and converted to Islam, to fight for the sultan, to rule over provinces. A brilliant idea, actually. To strip the conquered people of their best stock and use these men as soldiers to keep the subjects pacified. Perhaps you will see your son again, as a proud man in a green turban, ordering your friends and relatives to be impaled. Can you imagine it? And this went on for five centuries. "So when the Serbs finally got their own nation, they fought for it like demons. Serbia lost a higher proportion of its sons in the First World War than any other nation. In that war and in the two Balkan wars before it a third of the population perished." "And what about the Croats?" Karp asked. "Ah, the Croats, our cousins. They were heroes, too, but of a different kind. They became cannon fodder for the Austrian empire in its great struggle against the Ottomans. Perhaps we would be wearing turbans and speaking Turkish right now, Mr. Karp, had it not been for the brave Croats. The Germans kept them on a tight leash nevertheless. There is a monument in Zagreb that commemorates the execution, in 1573, of the Croat peasant rebel Matija Gubec. The Germans seated him on a red-hot crown. A typically witty German response to the Croat desire for independence. "And after the danger from the Turks was past, they remained useful to the Germans. Croat troops crushed the revolution of 1848 in Vienna. As a reward, the Germans gave their country to Hungary. Another witty comment. The Croats fought the Hungarians, though, and later they fought the Serbs for the Austrian empire during the First World War. Why not? Fighting was all they knew. "And when at last, after so many centuries, the Slavs in the Balkans had a nation they could call their own, the Croats kept fighting against Yugoslavia. They did not want to share a nation with ignorant Serbians and dirty Bosnians. Perhaps they had learned too much about a certain kind of pride from living so long on the German leash. And perhaps they learned too much treachery from their German masters. So that they welcomed these masters when they returned in 1940 and crushed Yugoslavia. And then they had their precious Croatia, a fascist puppet state that the Nazis set up for them. And all the good Croat nationalists put on black uniforms and became ustashi, little Slav brothers of the S.S., and went out to massacre the Serbs, Jews, Moslems, and anyone else who polluted the precious soil of Croatia." [From Depraved Indifference (1990), by Lawrence Tenenbaum, pp. 178-183.] Last edited by Alex Linder; June 3rd, 2013 at 09:39 AM. |
June 4th, 2013 | #3 |
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A News Paper that printed All Letter's Recieved
About The Maui sun. (Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii) 1973-1981
Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii (1973-1981) About | Libraries that Have It | MARC Record Title: The Maui sun. : (Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii) 1973-1981 Place of publication:Wailuku, Maui, HawaiiGeographic coverage:Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii | View more titles from this: City County, State Publisher:Yellow Submarine PressDates of publication:1973-1981Description:Year 3, issue 44 (Sept. 5, 1973)-year 12, issue 9 (Dec. 23, 1981). Frequency:Weekly Language:English Subjects:Maui (Hawaii)--Newspapers. Notes:Available on microfilm from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Includes entertainment guide: Maui now. Publisher varies. LCCN:sn 85047073OCLC:7052784 Preceding Titles:The Lahaina sun. (Lahaina, Maui [Hawaii]) 1970-1973 Holdings: View complete holdings information ======================================== The Maui News is the official news paper of Maui Hawaii or was, but it was not worthy a paper. The Krishna's whole food store sold the Maui Sun, and these Krishna's were a break away sect too. Good people for business at least at the time. The Maui Sun was the real news back in the 1970's and exposed the steaming violent news of the Island against naïve White women and men, and short of murder the police were worse than messycan police. Many a pretty naïve young White woman wrote a tearful or raging letter the Maui Sun, about their being assaulted, and how they were not afraid to write this letter now etc. as they were home in CO., OR, or TN. etc. The 1970 -1977 time periods was a high water for mixed blood savages openly warring on Whites in broad day light. As for the tourist, 90% had a good time and never suspected the dangers of savages seething with hatred for YT. The mega wealthy had security and gates. As for the self segregated Japanese they openly hated White's and used that hate for bonding. Now Hawaii, after White and Japanese governors has a jooish one. In 1980 or 81 Canada threatened to ban all Canadian's from visiting unless the criminals that hurt Canadian's were sent to prison, as I remember from NPR news of the time.
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June 4th, 2013 | #4 |
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on memory
...Then I asked Mr Kahne if he could explain the method by which he has trained his memory. "Well, in the first place, most people have a wrong idea of the faculty commonly called memory. Some regard it as a sort of adhesive jelly upon which facts will stick and remain until called for. Others look upon it as sort of card index where thoughts are sorted, to be retrieved at will by pulling a sort of mental ‘tag’ --- the ‘tag’ being what is commonly called ‘the association of ideas’. But such methods of memorizing are automatic rather than systematic."
"Then what is the secret of remembering several things at a time?" I asked. "Focus", replied Mr Kahne promptly. "If you take a camera with a new roll of film and expose it five times at random, you get five blurred images. But if you focus the camera carefully upon a given object and then make the sixth exposure, you get a distinct image. So it is with the brain. "It is often said that half of us go about with our eyes shut. It would be more correct to say ‘with our eyes unfocused’. And the same applies to our ears. We see without observing and we hear without listening. Most people could, if they tried, train their brains to hold five times as many impressions as they do at present. When they are forced to focus their senses, they do so with the greatest ease. For example, of you carry on a conversation in a crowded room there may be several people talking at the same time, yet you will have no difficulty in fixing your attention upon the words of the one person who is talking to you. That is what is generally called concentration." http://www.rexresearch.com/kahne/kahne.htm
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June 13th, 2013 | #5 | |
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[significance: the ultimate contrast with our no-fault divorce culture in USA 2013] Last edited by Alex Linder; June 13th, 2013 at 11:23 AM. |
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June 13th, 2013 | #6 | |
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[significance: in the US citizens are brainwashed that religion is an entirely private matter, like nose-picking. This hides the fact that 1) 'public schools' always promulgate an orthodoxy that might as well be a religion, since it sets up self-worship of itself as an institution (government is always right, always the answer, always needed by everybody to solve every human problem, just like the - yeah). But average people cannot perceive governmemt-as-church because the government promotes its coercion-funded indoctrination-camp philosophy not as philosophy-even-dubiouser-than-religion but as good solid (socialist) secular science. In fact, what 'public schools' always offer is state worship and attendant indoctrination masquerading as education. Remember that all education is self-education. Others can guide and help you, but you must do it to yourself. The only technical tool you need is the ability to read. Recall that learning the three Rs, reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic, is estimated by homeschoolers to require merely 100 hours. The sixteen years of 'public-school' 'education' are indoctrination - they teach/adjust attitudes, with genuine learning, genuine intellectual education a deep-distant second. This is not speculation on my part, or malicious smearing or imputing bad motives, this is directly stated by the progressives, from John Dewey on down. They disparage reading! That is the mindset of the man more than any other responsible for teaching the teachers. Reading and genuine thought and independence and critical thinking - these are bad things. We want conformity. We want uniformity. We want not organic, free-thinking humans, but processed corporate/state cogs, fit for our military and giant industrial concerns. I agree with the religious man that you can't trust politicians to run schools or hospitals. I disagree with him that you can trust the church to run schools, at least. But the church's record is better than the state's I'll acknowledge.] Last edited by Alex Linder; June 13th, 2013 at 12:05 PM. |
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December 14th, 2013 | #7 |
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Think how utterly, evilly selfish it is to have a child. Think of it! "Oh, honey, wouldn't a baby just be splendid? With its little hands, and its little feet and its little arms and legs and face and smile. Oh, we have to have one."
Great, and once it's done, here is another little human to have to grow and learn what a sick collection of animals it is into which he's been born; who has to learn the pointlessness of the asinine cycle of human life; the pain and unhappiness that accompany; the stupidity of the majority; the outrage of old age and death; the unfair circumstances of competition amongst organisms; the injustice of suffering, the absurdity of doctrines and ideologies; the cold blade of war; the inner demons of hunger, desire, self-loathing; who will be taught to hate and feel shame and fear and remorse, regret, guilt; who will one day suck from nonexistence another little conscious body to continue the hideous lineage of incessant dark-humor; and who will one day die, wrapped in a urine-stained, hospital-issued death-shroud, plugged into beeping, blipping machines, fed through dripping bags armed with needles and at the mercy of smart-ass little nurses, who know not yet that they, too, will be faced with this end. What more horrific and vile an act than that of having a child? There can be none. Torture is not worse, murder is not worse, nor rape or anything else, because it is birth that precludes them all. Were it not for birth, none of these other atrocities would have even a chance to be performed. It is the miracle of birth and life that drowns the light of the world, and it is that selfish obeyance of desire that is hung over the heads of all parents in the look of disgust on their disaffected teenager's face. How can one repay an infinite offense? -- Shane Smith |
December 15th, 2013 | #8 | |
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beats me. i'm at a loss.
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December 15th, 2013 | #9 |
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Life presents itself first and foremost as a task: the task of maintaining itself... If this task is accomplished, what has been gained is a burden, and there then appears a second task: that of doing something with it so as to ward off boredom, which hovers over every secure life like a bird of prey.
Thus the first task is to gain something and the second to become unconscious of what has been gained, which is otherwise a burden. That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the hollowness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, then would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfill and satisfy us. As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something - in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it)- or when engaged in purely intellectual activity, in which case we are really stepping out of life so as to regard it from outside, like spectators at a play. Even sensual pleasure itself consists in a continual striving and ceases as soon as its goal is reached. Whenever we are not involved in one or other of these things but directed back to existence itself we are overtaken by its worthlessness and vanity and this is the sensation called boredom. -- Arthur Schopenhauer |
December 16th, 2013 | #10 |
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Quite often on the Internet and in writing we encounter the thoughts of someone speaking his mind about dualism in philosophy. Usually he finds the idea ultimately somehow distasteful. He looks for a deep unity to Being. In science he wants to overcome the mind-body dualism. He may look forward to a time when there is a physical explanation of consciousness. He feels that he wants that. It seems to me though that this particular dualism has become so turbid and riled up in our philosophical history that we can hardly think it clearly. So I propose a slightly different version of the same thing. Let us consider the everyday phenomena of water and H2O. Consider the simple wetness of water, its crystalline brilliance, its smooth flow, its refreshing touch, its sweet taste, its gurgling sound and on and on. Now consider the physical "explanation" of that.
We have long ago gone past atoms and molecules; we are now as far as the 12-diminsional banes of string theory. Let's just imagine that such a theory turns out to be pretty much true and that it is offered to us as an explanation of what water, with all the qualities mentioned above, actually is. After a moment's reflection and gathering up courage we will tell the "explainer" that he is a fucking idiot. Water most certainly is not a 12-D bane structure. Water is water and if it is sometimes associated with such a space-time geometrical structure then that association is only a mere association; it is most emphatically not what water is. Those who are afraid of offending the religion of science will stare in amazement that you could utter such heresy. So be it. Now there is a dualism for you. And explaining one part of it by means of the other is utter nonsense! -- Gary Smith |
December 18th, 2013 | #11 |
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“One consequence of the Occidental obsession with transcendence… is a physics that is forever pompously asserting that it is on the verge of completion. The contempt for reality manifested by such pronouncements is unfathomable. What kind of libidinal catastrophe must have occurred in order for a physicist to smile when he says that nature’s secrets are almost exhausted? If these comments were not such obvious examples of megalomaniac derangement, and thus themselves laughable, it would be impossible to imagine a more gruesome vision than that of the cosmos stretched out beneath the impertinently probing fingers of grinning apes. Yet if one looks for superficiality with sufficient brutal passion, when one is prepared to pay enough to systematically isolate it, it is scarcely surprising that one will find a little. This is certainly an achievement of sorts; one has found a region of stupidity, one has manipulated it, but this is all. Unfortunately, the delicacy to acknowledge this – as Newton so eloquently did when he famously compared science to beach-combing on the shore of an immeasurable ocean requires a certain minimum of taste, of noblesse.”
-- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (34) “Academic prose has the remarkable capacity to plunge one into a sublime dystopian nightmare: is anything this appalling really possible? one asks. What happened to these people? Is it part of some elaborate joke perhaps? Or do they just hate books? … One only has to read genuine scholarship to be wracked by ardent dreams of incinerated cities.” -- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (110) |
December 19th, 2013 | #12 |
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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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December 25th, 2013 | #13 |
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The truth is that the common man's love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes a reality, the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honor. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it -- and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies. The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
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January 26th, 2014 | #14 | |
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January 27th, 2014 | #15 | |
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Very interesting indeed.
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February 14th, 2014 | #16 | |
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[from Wyoming Wildlife, November 1998, p. 10]
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February 14th, 2014 | #17 | |
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February 15th, 2014 | #18 | |
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February 15th, 2014 | #19 | |
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Reading thru some college papers from an international economics course...
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