J > Recent Status Updates

Taking a lit course at the college where I teach in order to renew my high school teaching license. Can't believe I've not read this before. This Miller guy might be a big deal someday.

In Austria, during World War I, Italian macaroni was referred to as "turncoat noodles" due to Italy joining the entente. That's about as brainless as "freedom fries." I guess we don't have a monopoly on stupid. 🇺🇸

'"...the prevailing conception of morality only approves of fathers, fortuitously delivered from the random kill-ing, dragging themselves along the pavement as penniless cripples, and mothers giving birth to babies to be torn to pieces by having bombs dropped on them."

"But for me, the definition that best captures pessimism is given by the joke 'I see the glass half full, but of poison.'"

I realize people come to philosophical pessimism in two ways: philanthropy (in the literal sense) or misanthropy. My tension is that everyday is existentially painful and I live in despair yet at the same time, despite knowing that nothing ever truly gets better, I feel compelled to act.

"The most devastating thing about suffering is that it is relative. There is always someone who hurts more, someone who hurts less."

I have no patience for public performances of grief in this country. We didn't give a flying fuck about the million+ Americans who died during the pandemic. I've got nothing to give.

Sometimes I feel insane. Americans consume suffering. Americans read memoirs about the Holocaust but won't admit that Israel is carrying out a genocide. We shake our heads at the evil done by others, and then go to sleep knowing that an airstrike won't mangle the fragile bodies of our children. I truly can't bear this and I feel like I need to pull myself apart and throw the pieces back into oblivion.

"In human eyes, even in lithographic ones, there’s something terrible: the inevitable warning of consciousness, the silent shout that there’s a soul there."

Brutality in confinement never seems to change. I saw enough of it in a few months. Naeve had to witness it for years.

"Rabbit meat was no good in summer. Rabbit fur was no good in summer. Why had I killed it?"

Reminds me of coming back after the Army to the island where I grew up. As a kid, I'd been expert at casting a net. Still was. Pulled in some shrimp and went to hook one onto my fishing line. I can still hear the *crack* of it as I pushed the hook through its body. Something broke in me, or finally found expression.

"Men with thousands of millions of dollars kill the people in other countries poison the air water soil, to get more money."

9/11...Pandemic...January 6...a fascist regime.

I didn't want any of this but you gave it to me nonetheless.

My love for this stupid country will always be unrequited.

An ambitious book so far: Koreans forcibly relocated to Hiroshima, Native Americans forcibly relocated to make way for nuclear testing, Japanese Americans relocated to internment camps, WWI veterans, ranchers, former Olympic runners, etc.

The avarice and paranoia of the wealthy is just as pathetic in this book as it is with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. They should be afraid. I hope fear haunts them day and night and gives them no peace. ❤️

I've often wondered if Sinclair was naïve -- to so faithfully and energetically believe in and fight for democracy. I wonder if he would be surprised by Trumpism. Such a uniquely American fascist movement was probably within his ability to imagine but could he have anticipated the moral bankruptcy and intellectual dishonesty necessary to enable it? He loved this country. He was a better man than I.

"The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real."

That's the core of my own existential torture, especially over the last five years: suffering and human consciousness. It's not necessary but it's also not going to stop. In fact, it gets worse.

"Imagination makes people oversensitive, vulnerable and exposed. Perhaps it’s a form of degeneracy. I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them, sometimes I’ve even envied them. They had an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else."

Why though

"My lecture begins by explaining the path of conocimiento as a journey of awareness, knowledge, or consciousness. Usually a shift happens within us that causes us to look at ourselves and the world around us differently."

My conclusions about the world following the pandemic don't allow this kind of spiritual journey. Someday the sun will swallow the earth, or we'll lose all our water. Poof. The end. Finally.

Developers are much more to blame for the destruction of our countryside than newcomers. Suburban sprawl is a monster born of car culture and capitalism.

"...an identity that is threatened as agricultural land that once pro- vided the cotton for textile produc- tion is increasingly developed into housing subdivisions and shopping centers."

In the midst of a financial crisis at my non-profit, finishing a report for a grant project, and teaching stuff. I know this book is about a lady, her lady friend, and some dudes. Also, an abbey.

"When lockdown ended, Gambuto warned, corporations and governments would conspire to make us forget the possibilities we'd glimpsed, by means of shiny new products and services and distracting culture wars."

He was right. Why do you think I'm permanently shattered? Nothing gets better. 9/11. Trump. The Pandemic.

Burkeman keeps getting really close to realizing that capitalism is what keeps us going at this miserable pace.

"...he had committed acts 'for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose.'"

I keep thinking about the US program in Guatemala 1946-48. American medical professionals intentionally infected asylum patients, sex workers, and soldiers with syphilis and watched many of them die in agony. There was no concern about informed consent. Look up "First, Do No Harm" at the NIH for more.

"Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil."
- Introduction

I guess there's no better time to read this than when the state of Israel is carrying out a full-blown genocide after decades of ethnic cleansing.

Chesnut argues that slave owners are not likely to have liaisons with their slaves in the same way a barkeep is unlikely to be a drunk.

This lady is wildly obnoxious.

A well-to-do South Carolinian, Chesnut is insufferable at times in her belief that the South is somehow righteous. The introduction to the book, or at least the edition I'm reading, is nauseatingly laced with "Lost Cause" rhetorical flourishes.

"We've been trained for a narrative/of blood, which isn't untrue but isn't/complete."
- Paul Martínez Pompa

Sometimes it's easy to forget the horror of the election of Donald Trump, or at least it is for me since I was never in any true danger. I hope I never forget. I may be reminded later this year.