Dclcq - Dclcq

I think, today's irony ends up saying: 'How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.' Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.

David Foster Wallace

btw, the molotov cocktail got named that by Finns who used them when fighting back against the Soviet Union’s imperialist invasion of their country, as a mocking reference to Vyacheslav Molotov’s propaganda about said invasion (“we’re not bombing them, we’re just flying in food deliveries because they’re starving!”)

so i’m not gonna stop y'all from making molotov cocktail jokes, but you’d better not turn around and post soviet apologia afterwards. respect the cocktail’s history

https://xkcd.com/1704/

friendship with russians is when they conquer your land through a genocide and then say: “we can live in peace, but acting like your culture is equal with mine is russophobic. speak russian, please”

Glengarry Glen Ross is on Netflix, you should watch it a lot.  The easy "critique of capitalism" is that "second prize is a set of steak knives" because that's how little it costs to motivate you to work harder for them, and if that doesn't work there's always "third prize is you're fired."   But the real wisdom which is not about capitalism but which is about narcissism comes from understanding that first prize isn't a Cadillac Eldorado, you think Alec Baldwin needs a car?   There is no first prize.  Real closers don't want the prize, they want to be the best, that's why they will practice practice practice and don't play the lottery.  The car is a temptation only for people who do not know their own value, the value of their own work, who won't lift a finger to advance themselves, who are motivated only by threats or by rewards, who would rather have the appearance of success than actual success. "I got an article in the Times!"  celebrates the person whose brain is broken.  "Alec Baldwin's character is a raging narcissist!" Jesus are you stupid, Alec's name is MacGuffin, that's why he's in Act I and never again yet propels the story forward.  It is irrelevant whether Alec Baldwin has metal testicles or pathological grandiosity, what matters is that after years of C minus work, what finally gets those dummies fired up is First Prize or Third Prize, left to themselves they meander in mediocrity while deluding themselves that they are more than what they do. "I was number one in '87!"  So was Alf.

The Last Psychiatrist

Fascism is psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

George Orwell Cited in The Atlantic's 'What ISIS Really Wants?'

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Ernest Hemingway (via scribnerbooks)

Meursault does not find–as a humanitarian would–that other people's lives are as important as his own, but, on the contrary, that his life is as unimportant as that of anyone else's. He thus reaches the state of self-detachment, coupled with love of life, advocated in Sisyphus, and becomes a true hero of the absurd, conscious of being an outsider, the hate-free target of everybody's cries of hate. ... "the only Christ we deserve."

Lev Braun Witness of Decline