What's Everyone Reading At The Moment?

I'm not reading a book. I'm reading in Medium the interesting discussion some people is involved with about the TV show Dear White People.

Just an example of a conversation

A worte this:
Here’s the thing, Black people can’t ever be accused of racism because the very idea that a community that is continuously submerged under the filth of a mired past and problematic future, can somehow reclaim the disposition of entitlement against a system that was created for their dismemberment — is ludicrous.

B replyed:
The day I know the black man is free, is when we can write and speak for ourselves without inciting unnecessary hate or love for that matter, for whiteness. The day we feel our words hold power all on their own without a single reference, positive or negative, about whiteness.

A said:
I was going to give a full on response to this, but after carefully reading it again I have concluded that it would be best to keep it short and sweet.
My advice would be for you to continue to dwell in your bubble of contentment and leave reality to the rest of us to tackle.

B said:
I live in Lagos, Nigeria. In the same country you come from incidentally. I’m replying this from my computer powered by a small Chinese made generator that will be on all night because there is no electricity. There hasn’t been all day and there wasn’t yesterday too. The current Naira to dollar rate is N506. A bare five/six months ago it was N125 and we thought it was too damn much then. The Nigerian president has gone AWOL for the last 3–4 months. Presumable somewhere in America or the UK. The common consensus being that he’s sick and there is no hospital in Africa good enough he can check into. What are my chances. Only you can manage the mental gymnastics required to think I live in a bubble at all, talk less of a contented bubble. It must be the same way you manage to make Beyonce look like a suffering saint for losing an award to Adele that will be up for grabs again in roughly 10–12 months.
I won't give my opinion, just say that my position in life is closer to B, the man from Nigeria, than to Beyonce's. I'm not blaming anyone, because I'm my own master and I hate victim's mentality and chains, even the golden ones. From my humble point of view this discussion about blackness and whiteness is pointless and dangerous. I'm sorry for the ones who (maybe) with good intentions contribute to fuel the fire of social division. Empires are destroyed in this way, from inside. I can imagine the faces of satisfation of Putin and the Chinese guys witnessing this. Let's someone investigate who put the money, who pay propaganda, and we will find the ones who expect to receive benefits from U S social division. The same strategy was used with other big country during the last century and nobody seems to remember it.
Various races have always had their time in the limelight. What divides blacks now is if they are muslim or not. Tomorrow we will focus on another race and find new problems that are not there.

I'll have a mocca latte to go, please.
 

The sentence that caught my eye was this:
Postman was a postmodernist (sic) who was uniquely suspicious of postmodern thoughts. Eh?
Do you really have to be a postmodernist, (whatever it means, anyway) to be suspicious of postmodern thoughts? And, uniquely?
For who did he think he was sharing his wisdom?
A bunch of 5 year olds?
He could have provided his not uninteresting insights without the lecturing.
 
The sentence that caught my eye was this:
Postman was a postmodernist (sic) who was uniquely suspicious of postmodern thoughts. Eh?
Do you really have to be a postmodernist, (whatever it means, anyway) to be suspicious of postmodern thoughts? And, uniquely?
For who did he think he was sharing his wisdom?
A bunch of 5 year olds?
He could have provided his not uninteresting insights without the lecturing.
The more people have studied the less sense they make. The view from their umbilical only makes sense to them.
 
The sentence that caught my eye was this:
Postman was a postmodernist (sic) who was uniquely suspicious of postmodern thoughts. Eh?
Do you really have to be a postmodernist, (whatever it means, anyway) to be suspicious of postmodern thoughts? And, uniquely?
For who did he think he was sharing his wisdom?
A bunch of 5 year olds?
He could have provided his not uninteresting insights without the lecturing.

I read this the other day and found it to be very annoying bough I generally like the magazine. It's one that I subscribe to
 

25u63jr.jpg


Requiescat

~Oscar Wilde~

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.​

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.​

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.​

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone
She is at rest.​

Peace, peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.​
 
25u63jr.jpg


Requiescat

~Oscar Wilde~

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.​

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.​

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.​

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone
She is at rest.​

Peace, peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.​
aw i love that one so much! as well as 'to my wife'
 
I'm reading "Sounds From The Bell Jar : Ten Psychotic Authors" by Gordon Claridge , Ruth Pryor and Gwen Watkins.


An unhappy but informative read about numerous authors and their dreadful battles with mental illness. Interestingly , avoids the obvious suspects ( apart from Plath) and focuses instead on the 18/19th century. Cowper , Ruskin , Benson , etc. If anything , makes me glad we live in the 21st century and not in a time where mental illness was attributed to a lack of moral fibre , etc.
 
Rereading The Clash of Civilizations.
(Culture and Conflict in the twenty first century)
By Samuel Huntington.
In 1997 the first translation in Dutch was published.

A thorough and statistically very detailed insight into future global developments.
Not that easy to read cause it was a scientific and academic study.
Every statement was supported by statistical evidence.
Only the last chapter dealt with future developments that might happen.

Now looking back it was an amazing insight in what could happen.
And so much was hitting the nail on the head.
You almost start to wonder if anyone of the world leaders in politics ever read it or just pushed it a side cause it told them something they didn't want to read, and didn't want to know.

I was very much surprised it had been critisised as being biased,
and already then accusations of racism or at least xenophobia and islamophobia were being made.
I didn't understand and still don't. I didn't see it.
Mind you, this was not from some f***ing alt-right, delirious nazi-website.
The only website I knew in that time when internet just started was Morrissey-Solo. :)

A big part of what's happening with regards to religiously or ideologically based terrorism now has, according to the author, demographic reasons. Demographic developments in western civilizations and other civilizations, and the statistical different trends in countries.
Very insightful and predictive and taking into account the global population and it's growth as a whole but also pointing to the areas where there is a decrease.
Immigration was unavoidable but would cause many big problems, due to the very big differences between civilizations.
Recommended.
 
holy shit, quando, i was thinking of huntington's thesis of a "clash of civilisations" today. we are paranormally connected. i jotted down some notes, let me find them quickly...

I usually don't believe in the paranormal cause it is only a description for something I can't understand or explain. But there is something.
Like I suspect Morrissey is some kind of medium. Maybe not to his delight or wishes.
That a lot of what we think of as autobiographical in his songs, his music and lyrics is in fact not.

I think he is, as an artist, empty inside and the songs are from another spirit, deceased people, strong entities that get inside his mind cause he is extremely sensitive to that.
As he is too cats! :)

When he says something like all the people I like are those who are dead it has an extra meaning, I think.
It's not like he started counting all the people he liked and then found out they were all dead.
I know this will sound weird, but he is an artist and magic is part of his life as an artist and as a person and he has stated that they are the both thing to him.
You can't separate them.

So, in fact I do believe it is possible for people to be more or less on the same wavelength and it is possible that when you started to think about that book, I got, unconsciously the message and started to read the book again.
Or the other way around.
Love you lanterns :p
Give your black kitty something to nibble on. Say it is from me.
She's a beauty and those eyes are seeing right through me!
 
well, the first thing of course is the title. why wasnt it entitled "clash of religions" because thats what he is talking about. so its kind of a frauduling labeling. it is misleading to use civilization and religion synonymously. the german title is even worse, literally translated "battle of the cultures", polarizing in order to please the taste of popular media

it seems that with regard to the phrase "clash of civilizations" there is a republican and a democratic variety. bernard lewis used this idea first in a speech in 1990. he was advisor of the bush administration and was highly influential in us-foreign policies, especially with regard to the 2002 bush doctrine which led to a preemptive war in irak as, so it was said, there were weapons of mass destruction in this area. nowadays we know that this was all "fake news" or disinformation in order to be able to start a war. it was part of an affective war preparation. lewis marked a change in the us foreign political strategy.

huntington, a democrat, used this formula again. he had opposed the irak war and said that the clashes of ideology of the 20th century would be superseded by clashes of civilizations (means: religions) in the 21st century. he was criticized for generalizing the islam and neither offering a differentiated analysis of this religion nor of the us culture which is indeed highly influenced by christian fundamentalism. also his understanding of what makes up an identity was rather old-fashioned as it is generally understood that human beings are part of many different cultures at the same time and can change between them. it's not always religion which is most important, often social differences within a religious group are more determining than those between religions. it is generally accepted that religious fundamentalism is a reaction to social dislocation caused by european colonialism.

now you

But lanterns, I didn't say he was right or wrong.
Or pointed out the all time solution for any problem.
The point of demographic reasons for many of worldwide events, like for instance, global terrorism, still stands.
I think the title is right and should not be about clash of religions.
Religions are part of civilizations not the other way around.
And if it was only about religions he had to leave out 2 very big civilizations like the Russian and the Chinese.
They are based on ideology but that doesn't make a difference to me.
The subtitle transfered from Dutch says: Culture and Conflict in the twenty-first century.

There is nobody in the world able to take a distance from the Earth and review all to make clear what is really happening, civilization wise, politically wise and have the solution at hand.
Satellites can provide useful data regarding our environment and the available statistics point to a disaster.

One of the reasons, which no country or powerful nation or politician likes to discuss, is overpopulation.
If you even mention it you are gonna be called racist and trying to preserve the privilege of western countries above other countries.

Instead of discussing overpopulation everything is done to set up a green industry (not against that) as a factor to minimize global warning at great costs for taxpayers in the so-called rich, western countries, while at the same time the countries not taking part in the process produce even more of the pollution.

Those taxpayers won't understand why only they, in the western countries have to pay so much money while at the same time, not so far away over their borders the pollution becomes even worse.
They are being deceived and they know it.

In Holland there was a tax measure for a couple of years to promote the sale of more environmental friendly cars, electric and hybrid.
At first a good deal for lease-car drivers only but they broadened the tax measure for privately owned cars too.
For that couple of years now that measure was so successful and so many electric and hybrid cars were sold the politicians decided to stop with it due to fact the tax incoming money was reduced by it.
So now more cars are being sold that are far more polluting the environment again.

People feel mislead and are more and more distrusting their government.
 
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read this interesting review in the nyrob today. a multi-faceted comparison of trump and hitler. compares many aspects from their penis size to their alliance with the old elites. bottom line: "if we can still effectively protect american democracy from dictatorship, then certainly one lesson from the study of the demise of weimar and the ascent of hitler is how important it is to do it early".
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Considering the enormous personal disgust that Trump's personae wakes on people, I don't think he is the Hitler of our times. He despises some women and adores one of his daughters, he hates people from some countries and with some physical features, he uses "loser" as an insult when he refers to people who refuse to live for making money. But he is not the real threath of our times at a global scale. He is just a domestic and temporary inconvenience for some people, opportunity for others. There are much bigger threats that should have been stopped earlier, but they were supported and encouraged with the sole aim of making big earnings. Now they are a huge problem, just like Hitler was 60 years ago when they noticed the inconveniences of his rise were much bigger than the benefits. As the Pope said, WW3 is here. In our faces.
 
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"What does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes' brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research. Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetesia, from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire. What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense, a way to think visually, a key to our own sensitivity."
 
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books wit no pitchers but not much more just fuck off literary ponces long live books more to life than books nerds n squares obscurer and obscurer shakespeare is smart
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