Say no more, or you'll summon the Trekkie beast within me.

"'It's okay because some people have it worse!' I believe Benatar argued against this line of thought, if I remember correctly, he said it goes to show how bad life is to have to take comfort in the fact that some people have worse lives."

copy-pasted without permission from some Reddit board

"Come now let us reason together
Says the lord
Though your sins are like scarlet
They shall be as white as snow
Though they are crimson
They will become like wool." Isaiah 1:18

Who will forgive the sins of God?

"Time, time: the step not beyond that is not accomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this "outside of time in time" towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear."

"Why these names so heavy, too charged with themselves, as charged with all the surcharge of language, over which they are called to stand? God is thus a name, pure materiality, naming nothing, not even himself. Whence the perversion, magical, mystical, literal, of the name, the opacity of God to any idea of God. And still, like fear, like madness, it disappears, if only as a messenger of another language, of which such a disappearance could not take the place of a beginning. The "death of God" is perhaps only the help that historical language vainly brings to allow a word to fall outside of language without another announcing itself there: absolute slip".

"Friendship: fraternity without law".

"To die: as if we only died in the infinitive".

- Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond.

I could read this book forever.

Dude, have you seen Star Trek Discovery? What the hell have they done to the Klingons? Otherwise, I am growing kind of fond of it, despite the whole series change to make it JJ Abrams style. But, man, the Klingons! They look like orcs.

Don't get me started. I don't give a shit about the Klingons. They should have got rid of them a long time ago. They always inevitably drag things down into cliché, all stemming from the fact that they are an ill-conceived species characterized merely by one human personality trait among others.

This puts me in a rather awkward position as I had hoped our opinions aligned in some way. I agree that using Klingons in Discovery was the most idiotic thing to do, no less the way that they look and speak, but Klingons as a whole? Man, I could not imagine enterprise without Worf.

You're crazy.

I too had hoped we could find some common ground on this matter, on which we could grow our relationship until it blossomed with passion and beauty. But I'm not going to compromise on this TL, not even for you. The trouble with Worf is that he was always, at least from the Klingon perspective, a pussy. He didn't make sense. And the episodes that focused on him and the Klingons in general were always the worst, don't you think?

Worf was just hilarious. He was raised by earthlings, and living a caricature. He was always like "Klingons do this, Klingons don't do that" and being totally wrong, all the time. He was like a dude raised by a planet of women that only had legends and myths to go on about what men were like.

I too had hoped we could find some common ground on this matter, on which we could grow our relationship until it blossomed with passion and beauty. But I'm not going to compromise on this TL, not even for you. The trouble with Worf is that he was always, at least from the Klingon perspective, a pussy. He didn't make sense. And the episodes that focused on him and the Klingons in general were always the worst, don't you think? — jamalrob

What can I do to convince you otherwise? If you were I would make a video stripping my socks off to Beyoncé's Partition, but I gather feet are not your thing, you hopeless romantic you.

And no, Worf is a real Klingon, he chose his battles wisely. He is Klingon enough to drink prune juice and be proud.

I would make a video stripping my socks off to Beyoncé's Partition — TimeLine

Where's the egg-plant emoji when you need it? But no: ironically I respond more positively to something akin to the Klingon mating ritual, in which we sniff each other's hands and squeeze them till they bleed.

And no, Worf is a real Klingon, he chose his battles wisely. He is Klingon enough to drink prune juice and be proud. — TimeLine

I'm convinced.

Urgh, how easy it is to give up on your principles, hence my favourite quote...

I see your love of all things Klingon has its limits. Well, I'm versatile, and I don't want to rush things if you're not comfortable with that.

EDIT: I now see that you were repulsed by my all-too-easy and entirely false capitulation, rather than by the thought of Klingon-style mating.

On the contrary, Klingons desire honour, and they only hand-bite or nga'chuq one mate alone.

You are unworthy.

But as a human male, and not a Klingon, I have a three-dimensional, fully realized personality, and can therefore maintain my honour and manliness even while I scheme deviously.

You scheme in vain, for no human male has ever been successful to match my sophistication in j'accepte la grande aventure d'etre moi.

And yet I am not deterred.

"The injunction, everywhere, to "be someone" maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even love. All those "How's it goings?" that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other's temperature. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it's always better than the bitter cold outside."

"I AM WHAT I AM." Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility".

"It's dizzying to see Reebok's "I AM WHAT I AM" enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them".

"I AM WHAT I AM," then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn't everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities."

- Quotes from The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee.

My kind of self-help.

“A learned society of our day, no doubt with the loftiest of intentions, has proposed the question, “Which people, in history, might have been the happiest?” If I properly understand the question, and if it is not altogether beyond the scope of a human answer, I can think of nothing to say except that at a certain time and under certain circumstances every people must have experienced such a moment or else it never was [a people]. Then again, human nature is no vessel for an absolute, independent, immutable happiness, as defined by the philosopher; rather, she everywhere draws as much happiness towards herself as she can: a supple clay that will conform to the most different situations, needs, and depressions. Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and location (for what is it ever but the sum of “the satisfaction of desire, the fulfillment of purpose, and the gentle overcoming of needs,” all of which are shaped by land, time, and place?). Basically, then, all comparison becomes futile. As soon as the inner meaning of happiness, the inclination has changed; as soon as external opportunities and needs develop and solidify the other meaning—who could compare the different satisfaction of different meanings in different worlds? Who could compare the shepherd and father of the Orient, the ploughman and the artisan, the seaman, runner, conqueror of the world? It is not the laurel wreath that matters, nor the sight of the blessed flock, neither the merchant vessels nor the conquered armies’ standards—but the soul that needed this, strove for it, finally attained it and wanted to attain nothing else. Every nation has its center of happiness within itself, as every ball has its center of gravity!”

― Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings

You're all positively barbearic — StreetlightX

Was that a barb, Eric? Or a narrow drawn?

(Y)

"That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad."

--Wallace Stevens

You remain underterred?

Yes, I'm biding my time.

"How, then, may we know this [eternal] Life, this creative and original soul of things, in which we are bathed; in which, as in a river, swept along? Not, says Bergson bluntly, by any intellectual means. The mind which thinks it knows Reality because it has made a diagram of Reality, is merely the dupe of it's own categories. The intellect is a specialized aspect of the self, a form of consciousness: but specialized for very different purposes than those of metaphysical speculation. Life has evolved it in the interests of life; has made it capable of dealing with "solids", with concrete things...outside of them it becomes dazed, uncertain of itself; for it is no longer doing it's natural work, which is to /help/ life, not to /know/ it. In the interests of experience, and in order to grasp perceptions, the intellect breaks up experience, which is in reality a continuous stream, an incessant process of change and response with no separate parts, into purely conventional "moments", "periods", or psychic "states". It picks out from the flow of reality those bits which are significant for human life; which "interest" it, catch it's attention. From these it makes up a mechanical world in which it dwells, and which seems quite real until it is subjected to criticism. It does, says Bergson, the work of a cinematograph: takes snapshots of something which is always moving, and by means of these successive static representations - none of which are real, because Life, the object photographed, never was at rest - it recreates a picture of life, of motion. This rather jerky representation of divine harmony, from which innumerable moments are left out, is useful for practical purposes: but it is not reality, because it is not alive." Evelyn Underhill - Mysticism

(Y)

Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sac­rificed—even in part—the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.

An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection auto­matically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating "blah." It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denuncia­tion is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action. — Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

"Looking at molecular machines has made me realize that evolution is the only way these machines could have come to exist. As we have seen, life exploits all aspects of the physical world to the fullest: time and space, random thermal motion, the chemistry of carbon, chemical bonding, the properties of water. Designed machines are different. they are often based on a limited set of physical properties and are designed to resist any extraneous influences. the tendency of molecular machines to use chaos rather than resist it, provides a strong case for evolution ... The ability of life to somehow incorporate thermal randomness as an integral part of how it works - as opposed to giving in to the chaos - shows that life is a bottom-up process. It is not designed from the top down."

Peter Hoffman, Life's Ratchet

<3

"Thought is like a mirror. One looking at it sees his image inside and thinks that there are two images, but the two are really one." - Perush ha-Aggadot, Azriel of Gerona