Khari > Recent Status Updates

"Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be one of unbroken success."

I think that's the scariest thought I've gotten from this book to this point. The expectation of unbroken success is from hell, not heaven.

Dang it. Why do you have to go and be all predictable?!

She's pregnant, obviously, and way too early. How come her parents never had kids until they decided to? No accidental issues there, but now, she does. Gah. I'm still not okay with this love triangle anyway, and now pregnancy?! Gah.

"Despair...would show that he had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy's forgiveness of his other sins only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness-that in respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of dishonor he cannot seek, nor credit the Mercy...Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it."

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky."

"In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but NOT sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness."

Oof. This one is rampant in our society.

"The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth....We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a 'normal life' is the exception. Apparently He wants some-but only a very few-of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years."

"So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or 'science' or psychology, or what not."

"Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it', while really it is finding its place in him."

"It is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and...hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it-all this [wears] out a soul by attrition."

Why is this book even rated as nonfiction?

Because it's what she thinks? Are our thoughts now marketed as truth?

Is there no genre for unmitigated opinion?

I don't know anything about him, he made facebook. The end. I have no judgments about his morality nor his personality because I don't know anything about them.

When did that admittance of ignorance become immoral? That the moral thing to do is to accuse people about whom you know nothing of every character flaw you can come up with?

I really don't like this book.

How is it that someone can read this many books and still be absolutely so certain in themselves?

How can she be so content with just calling people names?

Has she ever met zuckerberg? No. Then how can she be content with calling him 'personality-less'? How does she know? She doesn't. She just wants to demean him.

I had to go up to 1.5 speed, I just want to get this over as soon as possible. ...I may move up to 2x...

But, then I saw that the table of contents misspelled the title of this chapter and suddenly my amusement knows no bounds.

It wasn't just me that hates this book. I think the editors did too!!!!

"Houstonians gravitate to megachurches because by some metrics it makes them feel like they are in a small town."

....

I am flabbergasted by that statement.

I...don't think she's ever lived in a small town....

Because megachurches aren't anything like a small town.

Again. Go read a book written by an Asian in a primarily Asian culture. It's amazing. Things are completely switched! It's almost as if the majority culture rules who shows up in art! Wow. Mind blown.

"Most contemporary novels women who look like me would only pop up occasionally as a piece of set decoration on the subway or at a dinner party as a character whose asian ethnicity would be noted by the white author as diligently as the whiteness of their other characters were not."

So. You don't want there to be no Asian characters. And you don't want asian characters to have their ethnicity pointed out.

Don't conflate your own lack of expanding your horizons with the belief that those horizons do not exist.

Let me give you the entire canon of Manga! It's amazing. You won't find ANY white characters! Who would have thought?!?!!? Same for Manhwa! Wow.

Or a Chinese cultivation novel. Or a Chinese classic a la 3 kingdoms. Or a Japanese classic like Genji Monogatari. Or you could explode your mind and read Yakumo Koizumi, an Irish Greek guy who wrote Japanese horror stories so authentic he dominates the genre to this day.

This woman frustrates me to no end.

'Most characters are white and straight.'

No duh. Most people are straight. 99.999999% of them. Imagine. What is most statistically likely will also be represented in art. Amazing.

And, again, no duh. You speak English. Only English. Why are you surprised that most of the characters represent phenotypes of people who speak English?

You don't like it? Go learn another language!

"... And whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there, which will be soon, let us hope and trust."

I don't think he pulled his punches. I don't think he suffered from any moral relativism here. He clearly had the ability and the moral strength to speak out against what he thought was wrong.

"...of this planet for the past 1000 years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster, whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere..."

"...poor natives in the Congo every year, and does it by the silent consent of all the christian powers except England, none of them lifting a hand or a voice to stop these atrocities, although thirteen of them are by solemn treaty pledged to the protecting and uplifting of those wretched natives. In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields...

People seem to think that only modern day people understand how bad things were historically, they're wrong.

This is Mark Twain speaking contemporaneously about king Leopold of Belgium and what he did in the Congo.
"The royal palace of Belgium is still what has been for 14 years.The den of a wild beast, king Leopold II, who for money's sake, mutilates, murders and starves half a million of friendless and helpless...

You may try a dozen wrong forms, but in each case you will not get very far before you discover that you have not found the right one -then that story will always stop and decline to go any further.

This one's gonna be a long one:

"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand the ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written-it is only because the right form for the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself....

We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that the standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities which we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are the men who do things which we recognize with regret and sometimes with a secret shame that we cannot do.

"Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another."

"To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded."

Wow, this has become even truer. How many times have you heard an author completely dismissed because they are an old dead white man?