Katt williams quotes pimp chronicles
Modern Verse
2024.05.17 00:02 adulting4kids Modern Verse
Here's a list of different forms of modern poetry, along with the title, poet, and a quote from a work that made the genre popular:
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- Spoken Word Poetry:
- Title: "Holler If You Hear Me"
- Poet: Saul Williams
- Quote: "I exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias."
- Instagram Poetry:
- Title: "Milk and Honey"
- Poet: Rupi Kaur
- Quote: "you tell me to quiet down cause my opinions make me less beautiful but I was not made with a fire in my belly so I could be put out."
- Hip-Hop Lyrics:
- Title: "The Message"
- Artist: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
- Quote: "Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge. I'm trying not to lose my head."
- Spine Poetry:
- Title: "A Hummingbird in My House"
- Poet: S.C. Wilson
- Quote: "In my house, the air is filled with a hummingbird's song, sweet and gentle."
- Lyrical Essays:
- Title: "Citizen: An American Lyric"
- Poet: Claudia Rankine
- Quote: "Because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying."
- Instapoetry:
- Title: "The Sun and Her Flowers"
- Poet: Rupi Kaur
- Quote: "how you love yourself is how you teach others to love you."
- Twitter Poetry:
- Title: Twitter poetry often exists as micro-poetry or haikus within the platform.
- Poet: Various Twitter poets
- Quote: "City lights whisper, hearts embrace the night, love blooms in shadows."
- Song Lyrics (Rock):
- Title: "Bohemian Rhapsody"
- Artist: Queen
- Quote: "Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango!"
- Song Lyrics (Rap):
- Title: "Lose Yourself"
- Artist: Eminem
- Quote: "You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime."
- Free Verse Poetry:
- Title: "Leaves of Grass"
- Poet: Walt Whitman
- Quote: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself."
- Ecopoetry
- Title: "The Wild Iris"
- Poet: Louise Glück
- Quote: "You who do not remember / passage from the other world / I tell you I could speak again: whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice..."
- Afrofuturist Poetry
- Title: "Space is the Place"
- Poet: Sun Ra (also a jazz musician)
- Quote: "Space is the place of the mind; space is the place of the thoughts that are positive."
- Pop Culture Poetry
- Title: "The Princess Saves Herself in This One"
- Poet: Amanda Lovelace
- Quote: "but if you only shine light / on your flaws, all your perfects / will dim."
- Transgressive Poetry
- Title: "Hustle"
- Poet: David Lerner
- Quote: "Life's a fast car on a wet road, with no brakes and bald tires."
- Multimedia Poetry
- Title: "Inanimate Alice"
- Poet: Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph
- Quote: "Inanimate Alice, Episode 4: 'Hometown' is a work that appeals not only to readers and writers but also to gamers and cinephiles."
- Instapoetry
- Title: "Salt."
- Poet: Nayyirah Waheed
- Quote: "if the ocean can calm itself, so can you. we are both salt water mixed with air."
- Digital Minimalist Poetry
- Title: "The New Census: An Anthology of Digital Poetry"
- Poet: Stephane Mallarmé (the digital interpretation)
- Quote: "Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book."
- Concrete Poetry
- Title: "Easter Wings"
- Poet: George Herbert
- Quote: "With thee / O let me rise / As larks, harmoniously, / And sing this day thy victories."
- Postcolonial Poetry
- Title: "The God of Small Things"
- Poet: Arundhati Roy
- Quote: "Things can change in a day. All it takes is for something to happen that's not supposed to happen, and it sets off a chain of events that alters the course of everything."
- Twitterature (Twitter Poetry)
- Title: Various Tweets
- Poet: Contemporary poets like Rupi Kaur, Warsan Shire, and others
- Quote: "In the quietest hours of the night, I find solace in the echoes of your laughter. #moonlightwhispers"
- Multimedia Poetry:
- Title: "Hypertext Hotel"
- Poet: Jodi Ann Stevenson
- Quote: "In the digital corridors, every hyperlink is a door to a new verse."
- Meme Poetry:
- Title: "Internet Memes"
- Poet: Various Internet Users
- Quote: "Impact font wisdom, a generation's humor encapsulated in a single image."
- Neo-Surrealist Poetry:
- Title: "The Persistence of Memory"
- Poet: Salvador Dalí (Visual Art)
- Quote: "The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."
- Afrofuturist Poetry:
- Title: "Parable of the Sower"
- Poet: Octavia E. Butler
- Quote: "All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you."
- Virtual Reality Poetry:
- Title: "VR Dreamscape"
- Poet: VR Experience Designers
- Quote: "In pixelated realms, dreams dance in virtual echoes."
- Magnetic Poetry (Magnetic Words):
- Title: Various Magnetic Poetry Kits
- Poet: Various Magnetic Poets
- Quote: "On fridges and desks, words collide to birth serendipitous verses."
- Post-Internet Poetry:
- Title: "Being and Time in the Internet Age"
- Poet: Kenneth Goldsmith
- Quote: "In the age of information, poetry is reclaimed from the detritus of the digital landscape."
- Transcendentalist Poetry:
- Title: "Walden"
- Poet: Henry David Thoreau
- Quote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately."
- Quantum Poetry:
- Title: "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"
- Poet: Gary Zukav (Science and Philosophy)
- Quote: "The fact is, if you see it correctly, everything is dancing."
- Asemic Writing Poetry:
- Title: "The Asemic Poems"
- Poet: Various Asemic Writers
- Quote: "In the absence of recognizable text, the pen dances freely, creating abstract visual poetry."
2024.05.16 21:28 TayTayGang11 Katt Williams was right.
Can we just admit, Katt Williams predicted that all of this will come out to the light.
2024 is the year of the truth.
Once he did that interview, tons of truths and secrets have came out. He deserves some credit.
submitted by TayTayGang11 to DarkKenny [link] [comments]
2024 is the year of the truth.
Once he did that interview, tons of truths and secrets have came out. He deserves some credit.
2024.05.16 21:19 Rsbbit060404 Grandmother asked how I was so okay with it, the answer is, I just wrote.
I am very sad to announce Emmy did not make it into the top three, but I'm also extremely excited to announce my first spoken word poem about being EverKid will be out very soon. I wrote it the night she got eliminated. It will be voiced by one of our good friends, Cory, and their system. I've had these feelings for over a year and it is extremely nice to actually turn them into art. The piece is called Dear Phoenix sister. I will leave you the hint I've been leaving everyone, which is a quote.
"I no longer feared the darkness once I knew the Phoenix in me would rise from the ashes."
A quote by William C Hannan
submitted by Rsbbit060404 to nevergrewup [link] [comments]
"I no longer feared the darkness once I knew the Phoenix in me would rise from the ashes."
A quote by William C Hannan
2024.05.16 18:57 Weary-Tie-1798 Katt Williams Reveals Shocking Truth About Thoth!
 | submitted by Weary-Tie-1798 to u/Weary-Tie-1798 [link] [comments] |
2024.05.16 18:00 chanma50 'The Strangers: Chapter 1' Review Thread
I will continue to update this post as reviews come in.
Rotten Tomatoes: Rotten
Critics Consensus: N/A
Metacritic: 43 (16 Reviews)
Sample Reviews:
Time will tell, but for now there’s enough reason for devotees of the series to be cautiously optimistic — and even a little curious — about the next two chapters. - Michael Nordine, Variety
It’s a pat retread of all the violence from the original film, with no emotional investment and no creativity in the mayhem department. - William Bibbiani, TheWrap
The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series... - Erik Piepenburg, New York Times
The original “Strangers” made the walk to the parking lot after feel weird, or inspired some securing of doors and windows at home. Not so with the rote stylings of the new film. - Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times
For what it is, “The Strangers: Chapter 1” isn’t bad. What’s bad is what it is. 2/4 - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
“The Strangers: Chapter 1” is a well-paced, 91-minute thrill ride that provides a steady helping of jump scares while ending on a note that has us eagerly anticipating the next chapters in the saga. 3.5/4 - Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
The charms and limitations of “The Strangers: Chapter 1” are proportionate to pretty much cancelling the movie out entirely. 2.5/4 - Adam Nayman, Toronto Star
While definitely an easy watch, Harlin’s film will leave fans of the original wanting more than Chapter 1′s somewhat uninspired and par-for-the-course delivery. - Sarah-Tai Black, Globe and Mail
There’s something almost contemptuous about it all, a “this will do, right?” shrug of a thing that audiences should instantly reject with a loud “no, it won’t”. 2/5 - Benjamin Lee, Guardian
Whereas Bertino’s original was sleek, sinister and deft, this do-over is noisy, dull and dumb as a bag of rocks. - Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Yes, the masks are great. And yes, home invasions will aways be scary. But when it comes to messing with genre classics, your answer to “Why remake a near-perfect film?” can’t be “It was here.” C+ - Alison Foreman, indieWire
Harlin’s film thinks it's "improving" on the original by filling in blanks that are blank for a reason, scrubbing away what The Strangers fans hold dear about Bertino’s remarkably revolting mirror to humanity. 2.5/5 - Matt Donato, Inverse
This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu. 1.5/4 - Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine
Chapter 1 doesn’t establish enough of its own identity to make it memorable or set it apart, but it’s just functional enough to raise curiosity for where we’re headed next. 2.5/5 - Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting
SYNOPSIS:
After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) are forced to spend the night in a remote cabin.
Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive in THE STRANGERS ― CHAPTER 1, the chilling first entry of this upcoming horror feature film series.
CAST:
SCREENPLAY BY: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland
STORY BY: Bryan Bertino
BASED ON THE STRANGERS WRITTEN BY: Bryan Bertino
PRODUCED BY: Alastair Burlingham, Charlie Dombek, Gary Raskin, Christopher Milburn, Mark Canton, Courtney Solomon
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Dennis Pelino, Renée Willett, Paul Weinberg, Roy Lee, Kia Jam, Andrei Boncea, Dorothy Canton, Alan Freedland, Alan R. Cohen, Madelaine Petsch
CO-PRODUCERS: Mark Frazier, Johanna Harlin, Rafaella Biscayn
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: José David Montero
EDITED BY: Michelle Harrison
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Adrian Curelea
COSTUME DESIGNER: Oana Draghici
MUSIC BY: Justin Burnett, Òscar Senén
US CASTING BY: Mary Vernieu, Sydney Shircliff
UK CASTING BY: Alex Johnson
RUNTIME: 91 Minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2024
submitted by chanma50 to boxoffice [link] [comments]
Rotten Tomatoes: Rotten
Critics Consensus: N/A
| Score | Number of Reviews | Average Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Critics | 25% | 24 | 5.00/10 |
| Top Critics | 14% | 14 | 5.30/10 |
Sample Reviews:
Time will tell, but for now there’s enough reason for devotees of the series to be cautiously optimistic — and even a little curious — about the next two chapters. - Michael Nordine, Variety
It’s a pat retread of all the violence from the original film, with no emotional investment and no creativity in the mayhem department. - William Bibbiani, TheWrap
The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series... - Erik Piepenburg, New York Times
The original “Strangers” made the walk to the parking lot after feel weird, or inspired some securing of doors and windows at home. Not so with the rote stylings of the new film. - Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times
For what it is, “The Strangers: Chapter 1” isn’t bad. What’s bad is what it is. 2/4 - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
“The Strangers: Chapter 1” is a well-paced, 91-minute thrill ride that provides a steady helping of jump scares while ending on a note that has us eagerly anticipating the next chapters in the saga. 3.5/4 - Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
The charms and limitations of “The Strangers: Chapter 1” are proportionate to pretty much cancelling the movie out entirely. 2.5/4 - Adam Nayman, Toronto Star
While definitely an easy watch, Harlin’s film will leave fans of the original wanting more than Chapter 1′s somewhat uninspired and par-for-the-course delivery. - Sarah-Tai Black, Globe and Mail
There’s something almost contemptuous about it all, a “this will do, right?” shrug of a thing that audiences should instantly reject with a loud “no, it won’t”. 2/5 - Benjamin Lee, Guardian
Whereas Bertino’s original was sleek, sinister and deft, this do-over is noisy, dull and dumb as a bag of rocks. - Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Yes, the masks are great. And yes, home invasions will aways be scary. But when it comes to messing with genre classics, your answer to “Why remake a near-perfect film?” can’t be “It was here.” C+ - Alison Foreman, indieWire
Harlin’s film thinks it's "improving" on the original by filling in blanks that are blank for a reason, scrubbing away what The Strangers fans hold dear about Bertino’s remarkably revolting mirror to humanity. 2.5/5 - Matt Donato, Inverse
This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu. 1.5/4 - Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine
Chapter 1 doesn’t establish enough of its own identity to make it memorable or set it apart, but it’s just functional enough to raise curiosity for where we’re headed next. 2.5/5 - Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting
SYNOPSIS:
After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) are forced to spend the night in a remote cabin.
Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive in THE STRANGERS ― CHAPTER 1, the chilling first entry of this upcoming horror feature film series.
CAST:
- Madelaine Petsch as Maya
- Froy Gutierrez as Ryan
- Gabriel Basso as Gregory
- Ema Horvath as Shelly
SCREENPLAY BY: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland
STORY BY: Bryan Bertino
BASED ON THE STRANGERS WRITTEN BY: Bryan Bertino
PRODUCED BY: Alastair Burlingham, Charlie Dombek, Gary Raskin, Christopher Milburn, Mark Canton, Courtney Solomon
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Dennis Pelino, Renée Willett, Paul Weinberg, Roy Lee, Kia Jam, Andrei Boncea, Dorothy Canton, Alan Freedland, Alan R. Cohen, Madelaine Petsch
CO-PRODUCERS: Mark Frazier, Johanna Harlin, Rafaella Biscayn
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: José David Montero
EDITED BY: Michelle Harrison
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Adrian Curelea
COSTUME DESIGNER: Oana Draghici
MUSIC BY: Justin Burnett, Òscar Senén
US CASTING BY: Mary Vernieu, Sydney Shircliff
UK CASTING BY: Alex Johnson
RUNTIME: 91 Minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2024
2024.05.16 17:47 sfldg Katt Williams explains golf
 | submitted by sfldg to golf [link] [comments] |
2024.05.16 16:57 SkankHont HELP "You shouldn't let people get to you like that" or similar.
I've been thinking about this damn line for 3 days. Tried to search it 10 different ways on the quote website but nothing. I'm about 99% sure it's from a movie.
It's going to be like the title or let them get to you, let them get you down.
At first I was thinking maybe it's a wes anderson, life aquatic. Then idiocracy, Next I'll have to skim through soylent green.
Actors I'm picturing a Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, or Robin Williams.
Hopefully someone can piece together my half baked memories!
submitted by SkankHont to MovieQuotes [link] [comments]
It's going to be like the title or let them get to you, let them get you down.
At first I was thinking maybe it's a wes anderson, life aquatic. Then idiocracy, Next I'll have to skim through soylent green.
Actors I'm picturing a Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, or Robin Williams.
Hopefully someone can piece together my half baked memories!
2024.05.16 11:25 bendyiloveegg phone guy woman theory
(Note: The spelling is a little strange because the translation is posted using machine translation.)
What I mean by that is that in the VHS video that appeared in the movie, there was a female character who quoted the lines from FNAF1's Phone Guy. I'm wondering if that female character is from a phone guy. Well, then the theory that William Afton is the phone guy also holds true. Then the name Phone Guy will no longer be Phone Guy, but maybe that's just what she wants you to call her.(We all have times like that, right? There is, right?)
Any other ideas?
submitted by bendyiloveegg to fivenightsatfreddys [link] [comments]
What I mean by that is that in the VHS video that appeared in the movie, there was a female character who quoted the lines from FNAF1's Phone Guy. I'm wondering if that female character is from a phone guy. Well, then the theory that William Afton is the phone guy also holds true. Then the name Phone Guy will no longer be Phone Guy, but maybe that's just what she wants you to call her.(We all have times like that, right? There is, right?)
Any other ideas?
2024.05.16 08:10 AliyyahArte ASMR Handwriting William Camden Quote
 | submitted by AliyyahArte to u/AliyyahArte [link] [comments] |
2024.05.16 05:06 MirkWorks Excerpt from The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker)
III. Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker
…
From “Self-Culture” to Self-Promotion through “Winning Images”
In the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-improvement degenerated into a cult of compulsive industry. P.T. Barnum, who made a fortune in a calling the very nature of which the Puritans would have condemned (“Every calling, whereby God will be Dishonored; every Calling whereby none but the Lusts of men are Nourished: …every such Calling is to be Rejected”), delivered many times a lecture frankly entitled “The Art of Money-Getting,” which epitomized the nineteenth-century conception of worldly success. Barnum quoted freely from Franklin but without Franklin’s concern for the attainment of wisdom or the promotion of useful knowledge. “Information” interested Barnum merely as a means of mastering the market. Thus he condemned the “false economy” of the farm wife who douses her candle at dusk rather than lighting another for reading, not realizing that the “information” gained through reading is worth far more than the price of the candles. “Always take a trustworthy newspaper,” Barnum advised young men on the make, “and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.”
Barnum valued the good opinion of others not as a sign of one’s usefulness but as a means of getting credit. “Uncompromising integrity of character is invaluable.” The nineteenth century attempted to express all values in monetary terms. Everything had its price. Charity was a moral duty because “the liberal man will command patronage, which the sordid, uncharitable miser will be avoided.” The sin of pride was not that it offended God but that it led to extravagant expenditures. “A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying cankerworm which gnaws the very vitals of a man’s worldly possessions.”
The eighteenth century made a virtue of temperance but did not condemn moderate indulgence in the service of sociability. “Rational conversation,” on the contrary, appeared to Franklin and his contemporaries to represent an important value in its own right. The nineteenth century condemned sociability itself, on the grounds that it might interfere with business. “How many good opportunities have passed, never to return, while a man was sipping a ‘social glass’ with his friends!” Preachments on self-help now breathed the spirit of compulsive enterprise. Henry Ward Beecher defined “the beau ideal of happiness” as a state of mind in which “a man [is] so busy that he does not know whether he is or is not happy.” Russell Sage remarked that “work has been the chied, and you might say, the only source of pleasure in my life.”
Even at the height of the Gilded Age, however, the Protestant ethic did not completely lose its original meaning. In the success manuals, the McGuffey readers, the Peter Parley Books, and the hortatory writings of the great capitalists themselves, the Protestant virtues - industry, thrift, temperance - still appeared not merely as stepping-stones to success but as their own reward.
The spirit of self-improvement lived on, in debased form, in the cult of “self-culture” - proper care and training of mind and body, nurture of the mind through “great books,” development of “character.” The social contribution of individual accumulation still survived as an undercurrent in the celebration of success, and the social conditions of early industrial capitalism, in which the pursuit of wealth undeniably increased the supply of useful objects, gave some substance to the claim that “accumulated capital means progress.” In condemning speculation and extravagance, in upholding the importance of patient industry, in urging young men to start at the bottom and submit to “the discipline of daily life,” even the most unabashed exponents of self-enrichment clung to the notion that wealth derives its value from its contribution to the general good and to the happiness of future generations.
The nineteenth-century cult of success placed surprisingly little emphasis on competition. It measured achievement not against the achievements of others but against an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial. At the turn of the century, however, preachments on success began to stress the will to win. The bureaucratization of the corporate career changed the conditions of self-advancement; ambitious young men now had to compete with their peers for the attention and approval of their superiors. The struggle to surpass the previous generation and to provide for the next gave way to a form of sibling rivalry, in which men of approximately equal abilities jostled against each other in competition for a limited number of places. Advancement now depended on “will-power, self-confidence, energy, and initiative” - the qualities celebrated in such exemplary writings as George Lorimer’s Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. ” By the end of the nineteenth century,” writes John Cawelti in his study of the success myth, “self-help books were dominated by the ethos of sales-manship and boosterism. Personal magnetism, a quality which supposedly enabled a man to influence and dominate others, became one of the major keys to success.” In 1907, both Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post and Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine inaugurated departments of instruction in the “art of conversation,” fashion, and “culture.” The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed.
At first, self-testing through competition remained almost in-distinguishable from moral self-discipline and self-culture, but the difference became unmistakable when Dale Carnegie and then Norman Vincent Peale restated and transformed the tradition of Mather, Franklin, Barnum, and Lorimer. As a formula for success, winning friends and influencing people had little in common with industry and thrift. The prophets of positive thinking disparaged “the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires.” They praised the love of money, officially condemned even by the crudest of Gilded Age materialists, as a useful incentive. “You can never have riches in great quantities,” wrote Napoleon Hill in this Think and Grow Rich,” unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money.” The pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it. Formerly the Protestant virtues appeared to have an independent value of their own. Even when they became purely instrumental, in the second half of the nineteenth century, success itself retained moral and social overtones, by virtue of its contribution to the sum of human comfort and progress. Now success appeared as an end in its own right, the victory over your competitors that alone retained the capacity to instill a sense of self-approval. The latest success manuals differ from earlier ones - even surpassing the cynicism of Dale Carnegie and Peale - in their frank acceptance of the need to exploit and intimidate others, in their lack of interest in the substance of success, and in the candor with which they insist that appearances - “winning images - count for more than performance, ascription for more than achievement. One author seems to imply that the self consists of little more than its “image” reflected in others’ eyes. “Although I’m not being original when I say it, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way you see yourself will reflect the image you portray to others.” Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
<The American Religion by Harold Bloom (California Orphism)>
The Apotheosis of Individualism
The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of the fifties - that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and “love-pressure sociability” - appears in retrospect to have been premature. In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had much social “presence,” their education having provided them not with “a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, adaptable one, suitable to the losing organizations of an affluent society.” It is true that “a present-oriented hedonism,” as Riseman went on the argue, has replaced the work ethic “among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification.” But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of other-direction and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit. Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in. It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. Verbs associated with sexual pleasure have acquired more than the usual overtones of violence and psychic exploitation. In the violent world of the ghetto, the language of which now pervades American society as a whole, the violence associated with sexual intercourse is directed with special intensity by men against women, specifically against their mothers. The language of ritualized aggression and abuse reminds those who use it that exploitation is the general rule and some form of dependence the common fate, that “the individual,” in Lee Rainwater’s words, “is not strong enough or adult enough to achieve his goal in a legitimate way, but is rather like a child, dependent on others who tolerate his childish maneuvers”; accordingly males, even adult males, often depend on women for support and nurture. Many of them have to pimp for a living, ingratiating themselves with a woman in order to pry money from her; sexual relations thus become manipulative and predatory. Satisfaction depends on taking what you want instead of waiting for what is rightfully yours to receive. All this enters everyday speech in language that connects sex with aggression and sexual aggression with highly ambivalent feelings about mothers.
In some ways middle-class society has become a pale copy of the black ghetto, as the appropriation of its language would lead us to believe. We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition, the most important feature of which is a widespread loss of confidence in the future. The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. Today almost everyone lives in a dangerous world from which there is little escape. International terrorism and blackmail, bombings, and hijackings arbitrarily affect the rich and poor alike. Crime, violence, and gang wars make cities unsafe and threaten to spread to the suburbs. Racial violence on the streets and in the schools creates an atmosphere of chronic tension and threatens to erupt at any time into full-scale racial conflict. Unemployment spreads from the poor the white-collar class, while inflation eats away the savings of those who hoped to retire in comfort. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security. The propaganda of death and destruction, emanating ceaselessly from the mass media, adds to the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity. Far-flung famines, earthquakes in remote regions, distant wars and uprisings attract the same attention as events closer to home. The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today’s crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity - the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.
Older conceptions of success presupposed a world in rapid motion, in which fortunes were rapidly won and lost and new opportunities unfolded every day. Yet they also presupposed a certain stability, a future that bore some recognizable resemblance to the present and the past. The growth of bureaucracy, the cult of consumption with its immediate gratifications, but above all the severance of the sense of historical continuity have transformed the Protestant ethic while carrying the underlying principles of capitalist society to their logical conclusion. The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival. Social conditions now approximate the vision of republican society conceived by the Marquis de Sade at the very outset of the republican epoch. In many ways the most farsighted and certainly the most disturbing of the prophets of revolutionary individualism, Sade defended unlimited self-indulgence as the logical culmination of the revolution in property relations - the only way to attain revolutionary brotherhood in its purest form. By regressing in his writings to the most primitive level of fantasy, Sade uncannily glimpsed the whole subsequent development of personal life under capitalism, ending not in revolutionary brotherhood but in a society of siblings that has outlived and repudiated its revolutionary origins.
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. It also incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and the mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business - pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure - on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications; and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production. In his misogyny, Sade perceived that bourgeois enlightenment, carried to its logical conclusions, condemned even the sentimental cult of womanhood and the family, which the bourgeoisie itself had carried to unprecedented extremes.
At the same time, he saw that condemnation of “woman-worship” had to go hand in hand with a defense of woman’s sexual rights - their right to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today. If the exercise of that right in Sade’s utopia boils down to the duty to become an instrument of someone else’s pleasure, it was not so much because Sade hated women as because he hated humanity. He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed. In the same breath, and without violating his own logic, Sade demanded for women the right “fully to satisfy all their desires” and “all parts of their bodies” and categorically stated that “all women must submit to our pleasure.” Pure individualism thus issued in the most radical repudiation of individuality. “All men, all women resemble each other,” according to Sade; and to those of his countrymen who would become republicans he adds this ominous warning: “Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolated in their families the children who should belong to the republic alone.” The bourgeois defense of privacy culminates - not just in Sade’s thought but in the history to come, so accurately foreshadowed in the very excess, madness, infantilism of his ideas - in the most thoroughgoing attack on privacy; the glorification of the individual, in his annihilation.
<…>
Standing-Reserve.
Note a lack of the “Greek” in Lasch.
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 by Georges Bataille, Edited by A. Stoekl, Translated by A. Stoekl, C.R. Lovitt, and D.M. Leslie Jr.
<…>
submitted by MirkWorks to u/MirkWorks [link] [comments]
…
From “Self-Culture” to Self-Promotion through “Winning Images”
In the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-improvement degenerated into a cult of compulsive industry. P.T. Barnum, who made a fortune in a calling the very nature of which the Puritans would have condemned (“Every calling, whereby God will be Dishonored; every Calling whereby none but the Lusts of men are Nourished: …every such Calling is to be Rejected”), delivered many times a lecture frankly entitled “The Art of Money-Getting,” which epitomized the nineteenth-century conception of worldly success. Barnum quoted freely from Franklin but without Franklin’s concern for the attainment of wisdom or the promotion of useful knowledge. “Information” interested Barnum merely as a means of mastering the market. Thus he condemned the “false economy” of the farm wife who douses her candle at dusk rather than lighting another for reading, not realizing that the “information” gained through reading is worth far more than the price of the candles. “Always take a trustworthy newspaper,” Barnum advised young men on the make, “and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.”
Barnum valued the good opinion of others not as a sign of one’s usefulness but as a means of getting credit. “Uncompromising integrity of character is invaluable.” The nineteenth century attempted to express all values in monetary terms. Everything had its price. Charity was a moral duty because “the liberal man will command patronage, which the sordid, uncharitable miser will be avoided.” The sin of pride was not that it offended God but that it led to extravagant expenditures. “A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying cankerworm which gnaws the very vitals of a man’s worldly possessions.”
The eighteenth century made a virtue of temperance but did not condemn moderate indulgence in the service of sociability. “Rational conversation,” on the contrary, appeared to Franklin and his contemporaries to represent an important value in its own right. The nineteenth century condemned sociability itself, on the grounds that it might interfere with business. “How many good opportunities have passed, never to return, while a man was sipping a ‘social glass’ with his friends!” Preachments on self-help now breathed the spirit of compulsive enterprise. Henry Ward Beecher defined “the beau ideal of happiness” as a state of mind in which “a man [is] so busy that he does not know whether he is or is not happy.” Russell Sage remarked that “work has been the chied, and you might say, the only source of pleasure in my life.”
Even at the height of the Gilded Age, however, the Protestant ethic did not completely lose its original meaning. In the success manuals, the McGuffey readers, the Peter Parley Books, and the hortatory writings of the great capitalists themselves, the Protestant virtues - industry, thrift, temperance - still appeared not merely as stepping-stones to success but as their own reward.
The spirit of self-improvement lived on, in debased form, in the cult of “self-culture” - proper care and training of mind and body, nurture of the mind through “great books,” development of “character.” The social contribution of individual accumulation still survived as an undercurrent in the celebration of success, and the social conditions of early industrial capitalism, in which the pursuit of wealth undeniably increased the supply of useful objects, gave some substance to the claim that “accumulated capital means progress.” In condemning speculation and extravagance, in upholding the importance of patient industry, in urging young men to start at the bottom and submit to “the discipline of daily life,” even the most unabashed exponents of self-enrichment clung to the notion that wealth derives its value from its contribution to the general good and to the happiness of future generations.
The nineteenth-century cult of success placed surprisingly little emphasis on competition. It measured achievement not against the achievements of others but against an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial. At the turn of the century, however, preachments on success began to stress the will to win. The bureaucratization of the corporate career changed the conditions of self-advancement; ambitious young men now had to compete with their peers for the attention and approval of their superiors. The struggle to surpass the previous generation and to provide for the next gave way to a form of sibling rivalry, in which men of approximately equal abilities jostled against each other in competition for a limited number of places. Advancement now depended on “will-power, self-confidence, energy, and initiative” - the qualities celebrated in such exemplary writings as George Lorimer’s Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. ” By the end of the nineteenth century,” writes John Cawelti in his study of the success myth, “self-help books were dominated by the ethos of sales-manship and boosterism. Personal magnetism, a quality which supposedly enabled a man to influence and dominate others, became one of the major keys to success.” In 1907, both Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post and Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine inaugurated departments of instruction in the “art of conversation,” fashion, and “culture.” The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed.
At first, self-testing through competition remained almost in-distinguishable from moral self-discipline and self-culture, but the difference became unmistakable when Dale Carnegie and then Norman Vincent Peale restated and transformed the tradition of Mather, Franklin, Barnum, and Lorimer. As a formula for success, winning friends and influencing people had little in common with industry and thrift. The prophets of positive thinking disparaged “the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires.” They praised the love of money, officially condemned even by the crudest of Gilded Age materialists, as a useful incentive. “You can never have riches in great quantities,” wrote Napoleon Hill in this Think and Grow Rich,” unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money.” The pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it. Formerly the Protestant virtues appeared to have an independent value of their own. Even when they became purely instrumental, in the second half of the nineteenth century, success itself retained moral and social overtones, by virtue of its contribution to the sum of human comfort and progress. Now success appeared as an end in its own right, the victory over your competitors that alone retained the capacity to instill a sense of self-approval. The latest success manuals differ from earlier ones - even surpassing the cynicism of Dale Carnegie and Peale - in their frank acceptance of the need to exploit and intimidate others, in their lack of interest in the substance of success, and in the candor with which they insist that appearances - “winning images - count for more than performance, ascription for more than achievement. One author seems to imply that the self consists of little more than its “image” reflected in others’ eyes. “Although I’m not being original when I say it, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way you see yourself will reflect the image you portray to others.” Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
<The American Religion by Harold Bloom (California Orphism)>
The Apotheosis of Individualism
The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of the fifties - that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and “love-pressure sociability” - appears in retrospect to have been premature. In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had much social “presence,” their education having provided them not with “a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, adaptable one, suitable to the losing organizations of an affluent society.” It is true that “a present-oriented hedonism,” as Riseman went on the argue, has replaced the work ethic “among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification.” But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of other-direction and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit. Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in. It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. Verbs associated with sexual pleasure have acquired more than the usual overtones of violence and psychic exploitation. In the violent world of the ghetto, the language of which now pervades American society as a whole, the violence associated with sexual intercourse is directed with special intensity by men against women, specifically against their mothers. The language of ritualized aggression and abuse reminds those who use it that exploitation is the general rule and some form of dependence the common fate, that “the individual,” in Lee Rainwater’s words, “is not strong enough or adult enough to achieve his goal in a legitimate way, but is rather like a child, dependent on others who tolerate his childish maneuvers”; accordingly males, even adult males, often depend on women for support and nurture. Many of them have to pimp for a living, ingratiating themselves with a woman in order to pry money from her; sexual relations thus become manipulative and predatory. Satisfaction depends on taking what you want instead of waiting for what is rightfully yours to receive. All this enters everyday speech in language that connects sex with aggression and sexual aggression with highly ambivalent feelings about mothers.
In some ways middle-class society has become a pale copy of the black ghetto, as the appropriation of its language would lead us to believe. We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition, the most important feature of which is a widespread loss of confidence in the future. The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. Today almost everyone lives in a dangerous world from which there is little escape. International terrorism and blackmail, bombings, and hijackings arbitrarily affect the rich and poor alike. Crime, violence, and gang wars make cities unsafe and threaten to spread to the suburbs. Racial violence on the streets and in the schools creates an atmosphere of chronic tension and threatens to erupt at any time into full-scale racial conflict. Unemployment spreads from the poor the white-collar class, while inflation eats away the savings of those who hoped to retire in comfort. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security. The propaganda of death and destruction, emanating ceaselessly from the mass media, adds to the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity. Far-flung famines, earthquakes in remote regions, distant wars and uprisings attract the same attention as events closer to home. The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today’s crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity - the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.
Older conceptions of success presupposed a world in rapid motion, in which fortunes were rapidly won and lost and new opportunities unfolded every day. Yet they also presupposed a certain stability, a future that bore some recognizable resemblance to the present and the past. The growth of bureaucracy, the cult of consumption with its immediate gratifications, but above all the severance of the sense of historical continuity have transformed the Protestant ethic while carrying the underlying principles of capitalist society to their logical conclusion
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. It also incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and the mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business - pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure - on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications; and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production. In his misogyny, Sade perceived that bourgeois enlightenment, carried to its logical conclusions, condemned even the sentimental cult of womanhood and the family, which the bourgeoisie itself had carried to unprecedented extremes.
At the same time, he saw that condemnation of “woman-worship” had to go hand in hand with a defense of woman’s sexual rights - their right to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today. If the exercise of that right in Sade’s utopia boils down to the duty to become an instrument of someone else’s pleasure, it was not so much because Sade hated women as because he hated humanity. He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed. In the same breath, and without violating his own logic, Sade demanded for women the right “fully to satisfy all their desires” and “all parts of their bodies” and categorically stated that “all women must submit to our pleasure.” Pure individualism thus issued in the most radical repudiation of individuality. “All men, all women resemble each other,” according to Sade; and to those of his countrymen who would become republicans he adds this ominous warning: “Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolated in their families the children who should belong to the republic alone.” The bourgeois defense of privacy culminates - not just in Sade’s thought but in the history to come, so accurately foreshadowed in the very excess, madness, infantilism of his ideas - in the most thoroughgoing attack on privacy; the glorification of the individual, in his annihilation.
<…>
Standing-Reserve.
Note a lack of the “Greek” in Lasch.
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 by Georges Bataille, Edited by A. Stoekl, Translated by A. Stoekl, C.R. Lovitt, and D.M. Leslie Jr.
<…>
2024.05.16 03:02 Jawa999 Real AF? Katt Williams Made Golf Sound WAY Deep While Breaking It Down.. Cookling With This One!
 | submitted by Jawa999 to worldstartalk [link] [comments] |
2024.05.16 00:47 lazylittlelady Poetry Corner: May 15 "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley
Dear Poetry Fanciers,
Welcome back for a special Victorian edition of Poetry Corner, brought to you by u/NightAngelRogue and a splendid accompaniment for our upcoming read of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Just a reminder, if there is a special poem you would like to feature in Poetry Corner, just send me a message and we'll get it the schedule!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Joke:
Q: Nelson Mandela, Tuberculosis and Long John Silver walk in a bar. Who are they talking about as they go in?
A: Probably William Ernest Henley (1849-1903).
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Poet, journalist, literary critic, editor, publisher, translator and Victorian-extraordinaire, Henley, was a good friend to Robert Louis Stevenson, who he inspired to write the character "Long John Silver" in Treasure Island. Stevenson, writing to Henley-" I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver ... the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you". The friendship was a tumultuous and long one.
Henley's sickly daughter, Margaret, was the inspiration of "Wendy" in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. She would not live long past her 5th birthday, the only child Henley had with his wife, Hannah "Anna" Johnston Boyle. Tragedy had long painted his life even before this sad event. He was diagnosed with a rare form of tuberculosis at age 12, that affected his bones. His left leg had to be amputated below the knee when Henley was a young man, and he was often in the hospital with various abscesses that need to be drained. Frequent illness kept him out of school and interrupted his professional work. Henley eventually sought out the advice of Joseph Lister, who was pioneering new techniques, including antiseptic operating conditions and doing groundbreaking research on wounds, when his right foot become affected by the tuberculosis. Still, his ill-health did not keep him from practicing his art. While Lister kept him under observation at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, from 1873-75, Henly wrote and published a collection of poems, which includes today's selection, In Hospital (1903). This collection of poems is notable also because it was one of the earliest examples of free verse in English poetry. Henley and others in his group became known as the "Henley Regatta" for their championing of realism, such as the poor working conditions in the Victorian underbelly, in opposition to the Decadent movement in France and the Aesthetic movement closer to home. This would be the last collection of poetry and the most impactful of his work; his death would follow later that year. Unfortunately, a fall from a carriage reawakened the latent tuberculosis hiding inside him, which carried him off age 53. He was buried next to his daughter, in Cockaney Hatley, Bedfordshire. His wife would later also be buried alongside her family.
His legacy is one that is both inspiring and rather dispiriting. His poetry was used for jingoistic and imperialist causes, and to champion war, though much of it was about personal striving and inner resolve-the mythical "Stiff Upper Lip" of the Victorian era. This led to push back in the literary world, as D.H. Lawrence's short story, "England, My England and Other Stories" took flight from one of the lines from "Pro Rege Nostro", which is more patriotic than his usual work. Admittedly, he counted himself as a conservative and supported the imperial effort, as much of Victorian society did at this time. Still, his work fell into obscurity, with the main exception of "Invictus"-Latin for "unconquered". It is well known that Nelson Mandela recited this poem to his fellow inmates in Robben Island as a reminder to stay strong and keep one's dignity. There are also, of course, the Invictus Games, which are held for injured and sick service men and women and veterans in the UK.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Winston Churchill to the House of Commons, September 9, 1941:
"“The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this—a year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate, to all eyes but our own. Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world, ‘We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls.'” (link)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sidney Low, in "Some Memories and Impressions – William Ernest Henley". The Living Age (1897–1941) describing his friend:
"... to me he was the startling image of Pan come to Earth and clothed—the great god Pan...with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening, like those of some Faun or Satyr of the ancient woods, and the brow and eyes of the Olympians." (link)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Andrzej Diniejko on Henley as "poet as a patient" and his work predating modern forms of poetry "not only in form, as experiments in free verse containing abrasive narrative shifts and internal monologue, but also in subject matter". (link)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Invictus"
by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
This poem is in the public domain.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Some things to discuss might be the title. How does the defiant spirit of this "Unconquered" opening play throughout the lines of the poem? There is also a reference to the Bible Verse Matthew 7:14 in the poem, "Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it". Why do you think this is included? What lines stand out to you? How do you see him fit into the Victorian literary furniture, if you will? Have you heard this poem before? How does this fit in with the melancholy feel of the Bonus Poem, if you read it? What other poets do you enjoy from this era of literature?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Bonus Poem: We'll Go No More a-Roving
Bonus Link #1: "Love Blows As the Wind Blows" (1911) song-cycle by George Butterworth, with Henley's poetry put to music and song.
Bonus Link #2: A literary review of the Victorian Era.
Bonus Link #3: Read the other poems included in the collection, In Hospital.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
If you missed last's month poem, you can find it here.
submitted by lazylittlelady to bookclub [link] [comments]
Welcome back for a special Victorian edition of Poetry Corner, brought to you by u/NightAngelRogue and a splendid accompaniment for our upcoming read of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Just a reminder, if there is a special poem you would like to feature in Poetry Corner, just send me a message and we'll get it the schedule!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Joke:
Q: Nelson Mandela, Tuberculosis and Long John Silver walk in a bar. Who are they talking about as they go in?
A: Probably William Ernest Henley (1849-1903).
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Poet, journalist, literary critic, editor, publisher, translator and Victorian-extraordinaire, Henley, was a good friend to Robert Louis Stevenson, who he inspired to write the character "Long John Silver" in Treasure Island. Stevenson, writing to Henley-" I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver ... the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you". The friendship was a tumultuous and long one.
Henley's sickly daughter, Margaret, was the inspiration of "Wendy" in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. She would not live long past her 5th birthday, the only child Henley had with his wife, Hannah "Anna" Johnston Boyle. Tragedy had long painted his life even before this sad event. He was diagnosed with a rare form of tuberculosis at age 12, that affected his bones. His left leg had to be amputated below the knee when Henley was a young man, and he was often in the hospital with various abscesses that need to be drained. Frequent illness kept him out of school and interrupted his professional work. Henley eventually sought out the advice of Joseph Lister, who was pioneering new techniques, including antiseptic operating conditions and doing groundbreaking research on wounds, when his right foot become affected by the tuberculosis. Still, his ill-health did not keep him from practicing his art. While Lister kept him under observation at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, from 1873-75, Henly wrote and published a collection of poems, which includes today's selection, In Hospital (1903). This collection of poems is notable also because it was one of the earliest examples of free verse in English poetry. Henley and others in his group became known as the "Henley Regatta" for their championing of realism, such as the poor working conditions in the Victorian underbelly, in opposition to the Decadent movement in France and the Aesthetic movement closer to home. This would be the last collection of poetry and the most impactful of his work; his death would follow later that year. Unfortunately, a fall from a carriage reawakened the latent tuberculosis hiding inside him, which carried him off age 53. He was buried next to his daughter, in Cockaney Hatley, Bedfordshire. His wife would later also be buried alongside her family.
His legacy is one that is both inspiring and rather dispiriting. His poetry was used for jingoistic and imperialist causes, and to champion war, though much of it was about personal striving and inner resolve-the mythical "Stiff Upper Lip" of the Victorian era. This led to push back in the literary world, as D.H. Lawrence's short story, "England, My England and Other Stories" took flight from one of the lines from "Pro Rege Nostro", which is more patriotic than his usual work. Admittedly, he counted himself as a conservative and supported the imperial effort, as much of Victorian society did at this time. Still, his work fell into obscurity, with the main exception of "Invictus"-Latin for "unconquered". It is well known that Nelson Mandela recited this poem to his fellow inmates in Robben Island as a reminder to stay strong and keep one's dignity. There are also, of course, the Invictus Games, which are held for injured and sick service men and women and veterans in the UK.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Winston Churchill to the House of Commons, September 9, 1941:
"“The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this—a year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate, to all eyes but our own. Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world, ‘We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls.'” (link)
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Sidney Low, in "Some Memories and Impressions – William Ernest Henley". The Living Age (1897–1941) describing his friend:
"... to me he was the startling image of Pan come to Earth and clothed—the great god Pan...with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening, like those of some Faun or Satyr of the ancient woods, and the brow and eyes of the Olympians." (link)
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Andrzej Diniejko on Henley as "poet as a patient" and his work predating modern forms of poetry "not only in form, as experiments in free verse containing abrasive narrative shifts and internal monologue, but also in subject matter". (link)
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"Invictus"
by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
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This poem is in the public domain.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Some things to discuss might be the title. How does the defiant spirit of this "Unconquered" opening play throughout the lines of the poem? There is also a reference to the Bible Verse Matthew 7:14 in the poem, "Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it". Why do you think this is included? What lines stand out to you? How do you see him fit into the Victorian literary furniture, if you will? Have you heard this poem before? How does this fit in with the melancholy feel of the Bonus Poem, if you read it? What other poets do you enjoy from this era of literature?
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Bonus Poem: We'll Go No More a-Roving
Bonus Link #1: "Love Blows As the Wind Blows" (1911) song-cycle by George Butterworth, with Henley's poetry put to music and song.
Bonus Link #2: A literary review of the Victorian Era.
Bonus Link #3: Read the other poems included in the collection, In Hospital.
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If you missed last's month poem, you can find it here.
2024.05.15 22:56 swan0 What did Anglo-Saxon naval warfare look like in the 11th Century?
In 'The Norman Conquest', Marc Morris quotes William of Poitiers as saying Harold Godwinson "had numerous ships in his fleet, and skilled sailors, hardened in many dangers and sea-battles". Morris goes on to say that "in the 1040s, Edward had repeatedly commanded fleets for defence against Viking attack, and instituted a naval blockade of Flanders at the instance of the German emperor".
Do we have a clear idea of what this sort of naval warfare looked like? How did ships 'fight' each other at sea in the 11th Century? And how would common were naval blockades at this time?
submitted by swan0 to AskHistorians [link] [comments]
Do we have a clear idea of what this sort of naval warfare looked like? How did ships 'fight' each other at sea in the 11th Century? And how would common were naval blockades at this time?
2024.05.15 22:09 lefthandconcerto My Review of The Pinhoe Egg (Spoilers Within!)
About six months ago, in November, I started my journey through the "Chronicles of Chrestomanci," which of course are not really a series as much as a collection of books which all take place in the same set of universes. I read everything in order of publication, posting my thoughts here each time, and with the completion of this book I am now all the way through these wonderful novels. Please forgive my lack of direct quotes this time--having read nothing else for fun besides these books for six months, I found my note-taking capacity to be somewhat diminished. Maybe in the future I'll write a more detailed review.
The Pinhoe Egg is the final Chrestomanci book, whether you're reading them in order of publication or chronologically. I have no doubt Diana Wynne Jones did not intend this to be a "series" with a beginning and end; rather, I assume she simply got several book ideas that took place in this world, and this happened to be the last time before she died. It is sheer luck, then, that this last book is a sort of grand culmination of them both thematically and narratively, and possibly the best of the lot.
We start, typically, with a new protagonist, Marianne Pinhoe, and a new locale, the small rural village of Ulverscote, located a stone's throw from Chrestomanci Castle and Helm St. Mary. I liked that we got a little more background about this area throughout the book. When I go back to reread Charmed Life, I'm looking forward to putting it all into this new context.
Marianne became a favorite character almost instantly, and I was hooked on her storyline right from the beginning. Jones has a typically virtuosic opening sequence, wasting no time in establishing the key characters and launching into a dreadfully funny episode telling of Marianne's grandmother (who is also a kind of matriarch or "Gammer" over all the Pinhoes) apparently abruptly developing dementia and being forcibly removed from her home. There is black comedy galore here, all painfully adjacent to the real experience of making arrangements for a feeble or senile parent, as when Gammer is so averse to leaving her home that she roots herself in the bed, complete with actual roots. Meanwhile, Gammer's brothers and many children squabble over who gets to live in her house and where her belongings will go.
I mentioned before how Jones is always surprising me with the variety of formal structures and writing styles she employs. I thought I had figured out her game here, and was sure it was going to be similar to Conrad's Fate, where a new protagonist gradually makes their way into meeting familiar characters. But of course, Jones neatly sidesteps all reader expectation and switches tracks suddenly a few chapters in, focusing on Cat Chant as a second, equal protagonist, and revealing this book to be, among other things, the true sequel to Charmed Life--published 29 real-life years later. Jones then begins alternating between Cat and Marianne unevenly, and sometimes even from sentence to sentence, as in Witch Week. Her sleight of hand is sly and clever, and the craftsmanship is remarkable. Hats off--each of the seven books in this series reads totally differently. Jack of all trades, master of all, our Diana.
Jones stacks on the themes this time. We of course get some of her usual preoccupations, particularly with that of unreliable families. The Pinhoes may be the worst of the lot, or at least the most upsetting, because while in most of the other books the dysfunction is obvious, things are more insidious here. The reader is actually led (through Marianne's obedient, rule-following perspective) to see Harry, Cecily, Gammer, and most of the uncles and aunts as well-meaning individuals who care for one another. However, as in Charmed Life (and Cat himself draws the comparison), as the book goes on and Marianne becomes more independent, it becomes increasingly difficult for her, and for us, to justify their cruel behavior. It is genuinely devastating when Marianne figures out what's going on halfway through the book, decides to approach the adults in her life about it, and is laughed off or outright punished by all of them. There is a familiar scene at the end of the book: Marianne's and Joe's talents are vindicated by Chrestomanci and they are given the opportunity to nurture their skills in an education apart from parents who hold them back by refusing to understand or accept them. Replace the current Chrestomanci with the previous acting Chrestomanci, Gabriel de Witt, and you have the same scene as the end of Conrad's Fate. The detail that Marianne and Joe still go home and see their parents regularly is brutally realistic, Marianne able to convince her mother to soften on some issues, but ultimately failing to truly connect with her father. This seems to me the ultimate conclusion of the obsession with family dynamics in the Chronicles of Chrestomanci--that your family will always be there, like them or not, whether or not a true understanding can ever be reached. I'm not ashamed to say I cried through the last couple chapters of the book, and found the first line Jones has written that made me audibly sob. This was a feeling from childhood I didn't even know I had forgotten:
Jones has always been steadfastly protective of those who cannot speak up for themselves, as with the character of Cat who finds it difficult to recognize and verbalize his feelings. This time, borrowing from a kind of Shinto animism, Jones includes the concept of Dwimmer, a magic that is focused on the life force within all creatures and plants. There is no debate where Jones stands on this--her deepest and most profound sympathies lie with Cat, who can't bear to imagine his horse Syracuse chopped into dog meat, who frets over Klartch's wellbeing when out of his sight, and who firmly refuses to apologize for releasing all the goblinlike fairy folk from their bindings. There is no direct intimation of endangered species, global warming, or human-caused environmental destruction in this book, as you might expect in this kind of setup (I suspect Jones was too clever to resort to trite metaphors). However, in a fascinating twist, a plot detail revolves around the Pinhoes and Farleighs erecting a barrier in the forest to contain the magical creatures, making the forest feel empty and incomplete in the process--a magical, but also literal, instance of deforestation. Motives of plants, herbs, and trees, both good and evil, carry through the book as well. Jason and Gaffer Elijah Pinhoe, as well as Cecily, are handy with plants and tend large gardens. The Farleighs' and Pinhoes' spells tend to take the form of small bags of weeds and branches as well. Interestingly, and insightfully, the natural world is portrayed as difficult as well: Gammer grows roots to impede her family's mission, and the vile Gaffer Farleigh morphs into a stubborn, gnarled, immovable petrified oak when Cat works a spell forcing him to assume his true form.
This was one of the most enjoyable books in the Chrestomanci series, and it was bittersweet to close the door on the Pinhoes. I like that the continuity between these books is vague and tenuous, so I'm free to imagine all sort of side goings-on, like what might happen to Marianne and Cat later in life, or whether Conrad and Christopher remained friends, or what Roger and Julia thought when their dad told them all about the events at the academy in Witch Week. Howl's Moving Castle is still the book closest to my heart, and will forever be the Diana Wynne Jones I read over and over, recommending to anyone unfortunate enough to strike up a conversation about books with me, but I am so glad that I found the time to welcome Chrestomanci and all his strange acquaintances into my heart, too.
Here's my personal ranking of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, but please note I love all of these books and a low ranking does not mean I don't like the book. I have to put that there because there's always someone who doesn't understand that last place doesn't mean bad or worst. I'm not including the short stories individually because it's impossible for me to weigh a short story against a novel, whereas a large collection seems to make sense to me. I also must admit that the top three, especially the top two, were really difficult to place and I more or less love them equally.
Oh, and finally... ALL SPOILERS ALLOWED!
submitted by lefthandconcerto to dianawynnejones [link] [comments]
The Pinhoe Egg is the final Chrestomanci book, whether you're reading them in order of publication or chronologically. I have no doubt Diana Wynne Jones did not intend this to be a "series" with a beginning and end; rather, I assume she simply got several book ideas that took place in this world, and this happened to be the last time before she died. It is sheer luck, then, that this last book is a sort of grand culmination of them both thematically and narratively, and possibly the best of the lot.
We start, typically, with a new protagonist, Marianne Pinhoe, and a new locale, the small rural village of Ulverscote, located a stone's throw from Chrestomanci Castle and Helm St. Mary. I liked that we got a little more background about this area throughout the book. When I go back to reread Charmed Life, I'm looking forward to putting it all into this new context.
Marianne became a favorite character almost instantly, and I was hooked on her storyline right from the beginning. Jones has a typically virtuosic opening sequence, wasting no time in establishing the key characters and launching into a dreadfully funny episode telling of Marianne's grandmother (who is also a kind of matriarch or "Gammer" over all the Pinhoes) apparently abruptly developing dementia and being forcibly removed from her home. There is black comedy galore here, all painfully adjacent to the real experience of making arrangements for a feeble or senile parent, as when Gammer is so averse to leaving her home that she roots herself in the bed, complete with actual roots. Meanwhile, Gammer's brothers and many children squabble over who gets to live in her house and where her belongings will go.
I mentioned before how Jones is always surprising me with the variety of formal structures and writing styles she employs. I thought I had figured out her game here, and was sure it was going to be similar to Conrad's Fate, where a new protagonist gradually makes their way into meeting familiar characters. But of course, Jones neatly sidesteps all reader expectation and switches tracks suddenly a few chapters in, focusing on Cat Chant as a second, equal protagonist, and revealing this book to be, among other things, the true sequel to Charmed Life--published 29 real-life years later. Jones then begins alternating between Cat and Marianne unevenly, and sometimes even from sentence to sentence, as in Witch Week. Her sleight of hand is sly and clever, and the craftsmanship is remarkable. Hats off--each of the seven books in this series reads totally differently. Jack of all trades, master of all, our Diana.
Jones stacks on the themes this time. We of course get some of her usual preoccupations, particularly with that of unreliable families. The Pinhoes may be the worst of the lot, or at least the most upsetting, because while in most of the other books the dysfunction is obvious, things are more insidious here. The reader is actually led (through Marianne's obedient, rule-following perspective) to see Harry, Cecily, Gammer, and most of the uncles and aunts as well-meaning individuals who care for one another. However, as in Charmed Life (and Cat himself draws the comparison), as the book goes on and Marianne becomes more independent, it becomes increasingly difficult for her, and for us, to justify their cruel behavior. It is genuinely devastating when Marianne figures out what's going on halfway through the book, decides to approach the adults in her life about it, and is laughed off or outright punished by all of them. There is a familiar scene at the end of the book: Marianne's and Joe's talents are vindicated by Chrestomanci and they are given the opportunity to nurture their skills in an education apart from parents who hold them back by refusing to understand or accept them. Replace the current Chrestomanci with the previous acting Chrestomanci, Gabriel de Witt, and you have the same scene as the end of Conrad's Fate. The detail that Marianne and Joe still go home and see their parents regularly is brutally realistic, Marianne able to convince her mother to soften on some issues, but ultimately failing to truly connect with her father. This seems to me the ultimate conclusion of the obsession with family dynamics in the Chronicles of Chrestomanci--that your family will always be there, like them or not, whether or not a true understanding can ever be reached. I'm not ashamed to say I cried through the last couple chapters of the book, and found the first line Jones has written that made me audibly sob. This was a feeling from childhood I didn't even know I had forgotten:
[Marianne] was depressed and worried. Dad was never going to understand and never going to forgive her. And Gaffer had still not turned up. On top of that, school started on Monday week. Though look on the bright side, she thought. It'll keep me away from my family, during the daytime at least.As in Conrad's Fate, the potential toxicity of religion crops up here, in a bigger way than ever. The last act of the book is barely disguised by its magical trappings: what we have here is a group of devout, religious conservatives, being shown the harmful effects of their actions, and blindly rejecting all of the proof and logic in front of them in favor of enforcing rules and laws that keep them comfortable. There is no doubt that the next generation of Pinhoes will be just as subject to the old traditions, in spite of Marianne and Joe breaking free. That the Reverend Pinhoe is portrayed as a hapless and kind man, ignorant to most of the wrongdoing in the village, does little to soften the point of Jones's pencil here. As I said, I was startled by how moved and devastated I was by this final section, recognizing all of the real-world pain in this fantastical setting.
Jones has always been steadfastly protective of those who cannot speak up for themselves, as with the character of Cat who finds it difficult to recognize and verbalize his feelings. This time, borrowing from a kind of Shinto animism, Jones includes the concept of Dwimmer, a magic that is focused on the life force within all creatures and plants. There is no debate where Jones stands on this--her deepest and most profound sympathies lie with Cat, who can't bear to imagine his horse Syracuse chopped into dog meat, who frets over Klartch's wellbeing when out of his sight, and who firmly refuses to apologize for releasing all the goblinlike fairy folk from their bindings. There is no direct intimation of endangered species, global warming, or human-caused environmental destruction in this book, as you might expect in this kind of setup (I suspect Jones was too clever to resort to trite metaphors). However, in a fascinating twist, a plot detail revolves around the Pinhoes and Farleighs erecting a barrier in the forest to contain the magical creatures, making the forest feel empty and incomplete in the process--a magical, but also literal, instance of deforestation. Motives of plants, herbs, and trees, both good and evil, carry through the book as well. Jason and Gaffer Elijah Pinhoe, as well as Cecily, are handy with plants and tend large gardens. The Farleighs' and Pinhoes' spells tend to take the form of small bags of weeds and branches as well. Interestingly, and insightfully, the natural world is portrayed as difficult as well: Gammer grows roots to impede her family's mission, and the vile Gaffer Farleigh morphs into a stubborn, gnarled, immovable petrified oak when Cat works a spell forcing him to assume his true form.
This was one of the most enjoyable books in the Chrestomanci series, and it was bittersweet to close the door on the Pinhoes. I like that the continuity between these books is vague and tenuous, so I'm free to imagine all sort of side goings-on, like what might happen to Marianne and Cat later in life, or whether Conrad and Christopher remained friends, or what Roger and Julia thought when their dad told them all about the events at the academy in Witch Week. Howl's Moving Castle is still the book closest to my heart, and will forever be the Diana Wynne Jones I read over and over, recommending to anyone unfortunate enough to strike up a conversation about books with me, but I am so glad that I found the time to welcome Chrestomanci and all his strange acquaintances into my heart, too.
Here's my personal ranking of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, but please note I love all of these books and a low ranking does not mean I don't like the book. I have to put that there because there's always someone who doesn't understand that last place doesn't mean bad or worst. I'm not including the short stories individually because it's impossible for me to weigh a short story against a novel, whereas a large collection seems to make sense to me. I also must admit that the top three, especially the top two, were really difficult to place and I more or less love them equally.
- Conrad's Fate
- The Pinhoe Egg
- Charmed Life
- Mixed Magics
- The Magicians of Caprona
- Witch Week
- The Lives of Christopher Chant
Oh, and finally... ALL SPOILERS ALLOWED!
2024.05.15 21:46 enoumen A Daily chronicle of AI Innovations May 15 2024: 🤖Google unveiled the future of AI @ I/O event 🧪OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving ✨Google announced a wide array of updates across its AI ecosystem 🧠Google’s Gemini updates and Sora competitor 🔎Google’s AI agent & AI search upgrades
 | A Daily chronicle of AI Innovations May 15th 2024:🤖Google unveiled the 'future of AI' at I/O event 🧪OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving 🚗Former Cruise CEO starts robotics firm with ex-Tesla AI manager ✨Google announced a wide array of updates across its AI ecosystem 🧠Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, has left the company 🏖️Expedia is launching AI features, including a bot named Romi 🧬NVIDIA and Recursion have collaborated to build BioHive-2, an AI supercomputer for drug discovery 🚀NASA appoints David Salvagnini, its first chief AI officer 💰SoftBank plans to invest $75-$150 million in Indian data center and industrial robotics 💶Microsoft announces €4 billion investment in France to accelerate AI adoption 🎥Google’s Gemini updates and Sora competitor 🔎Google’s AI agents and AI search upgrades Enjoying these daily updates, subscribe below for more: Read Aloud For Me - Recommend AI Tools For Me🤖 Google’s Gemini updates and Sora competitorhttps://preview.redd.it/hmvhj50n7n0d1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=95e525360dc83026e594c079fa1972dc88efeaf0 Google just kicked off its I/O Developer’s Conference, announcing a wide array of updates across its AI ecosystem — including enhancements across its flagship Gemini model family and a new video generation model to rival OpenAI’s Sora. https://youtu.be/o6ne_YJXl0A?si=A2TcqT_mmGuWssaV Gemini model updates:
🔎Google’s AI agents and AI search upgradeshttps://preview.redd.it/os2ctrpt7n0d1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=03d997eb0c87b391cc786467bacb09ed8138dd68 Google just showcased its new AI agent project ‘Project Astra’, alongside a slew of updates to infuse AI across search and enable Gemini to reason and take more advanced actions for users. Progress on AI agents:
🚗Former Cruise CEO starts robotics firm with ex-Tesla AI manager
✨Google announced a wide array of updates across its AI ecosystemMajor headlines were Project Astra, an AI agent that can see and hear users in real time, and AI teammates that can answer questions and organize data within Workspace.Google also introduced Veo, a high-quality video generation model, and significant updates to Google Search, including expanded AI Overviews, advanced planning capabilities, and AI-organized search results. The company launched Gemini 1.5 Pro, boasting a massive 2M context window extension, and Imagen 3, the next version of its text-to-image model. Other notable announcements included:
Source 🧠Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, has left the companyIlya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and longtime chief scientist, has left the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the news on X, expressing his sadness and gratitude for Sutskever's contributions. Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's research director, will step up as a chief scientist.Sutskever's departure comes amidst reports of disagreements with Altman over OpenAI's direction, mainly concerns about rushing AI-powered product launches at the expense of safety. The situation escalated last November when Sutskever and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati approached the company's previous board to express their concerns, leading to a brief attempt to fire Altman. However, Altman was swiftly reinstated, and much of the old board resigned. Why does it matter? As one of the most accomplished minds in AI, Sutskever's departure raises questions about the future of OpenAI's approach to AI development and safety. The incident also highlights the growing tensions within the AI industry between rapidly commercializing AI technologies and the need for responsible development and deployment practices. Source What Else Is Happening in AI on May 15th 2024 ❗🏖️ Expedia is launching AI features, including a bot named RomiIt helps users search for hotels, build itineraries, and make changes via iMessage and WhatsApp. The company also introduces smart search, allowing travelers to find hotels based on desired features. Expedia pulls data from AccuWeather and Yelp to tailor search results and provide real-time updates. (Link) 🧬 NVIDIA and Recursion have collaborated to build BioHive-2, an AI supercomputer for drug discovery BioHive-2 features 504 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, delivering 2 exaflops of AI performance, nearly 5 times faster than its predecessor. Powered by Recursion's massive 50-petabyte dataset and AI models like Phenom, these companies aim to simulate biology and fast-track the identification of promising drug candidates. (Link) 🚀 NASA appoints David Salvagnini, its first chief AI officer The move aims to ensure NASA stays ahead in AI advancement and responsible use. Salvagnini will lead NASA's efforts in guiding the responsible use of AI and collaborating with other agencies, academia, and industry partners. (Link) 💰 SoftBank plans to invest $75-$150 million in Indian data center and industrial robotics The move aligns with the Japanese tech giant's global strategy to capitalize on the power of artificial intelligence as it shifts focus from e-commerce and fintech to high-growth industries like logistics and robotics. The potential investments mark the end of a two-year hiatus in SoftBank's deal-making activities in India. (Link) 💶 Microsoft announces €4 billion investment in France to accelerate AI adoption The tech giant will expand its cloud and AI infrastructure, launch skilling programs, and accelerate French startups through its new Microsoft GenAI Studio, positioning France as a leader in the AI revolution. It aims to train 1 million people and support 2,500 startups by 2027. (Link) AI TRAINING: Use ChatGPT's highlighting for contexthttps://preview.redd.it/0x0mass98n0d1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=21874e43b54d2ed14331b8d9a3298ce72adcb548 ChatGPT now allows you to highlight parts of its responses for quick follow-up questions, partial response rewrites, reusing old context, and more. Step-by-step:
New AI Job Opportunities on May 15th 2024
🤖 Google unveiled the 'future of AI' at I/O event
🧠 OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving
Enjoying these daily updates, subscribe below for more: Read Aloud For Me - Recommend AI Tools For Mehttps://preview.redd.it/uemja7lc9n0d1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=af7a652710adc30cf1a9195f22e6e13143993805 |
2024.05.15 21:12 nosigoat EP2K24 Theory - Nov 9
Purely an opinion/theory post, no facts backing any thing, just shooting ideas out there.
Just looking at his profile, and the connection to this movie poster that states: “2024: The Year of Truth Telling Major Questions Will be Answered This Night!!!!” a date of “November 9th, 2024”, on that poster,
and then post that states
“all items for sale November 9, 2024 Bring your bags Big ones”
While I do think the original intention was to auction and sell these items I’m wondering by the cryptic way things are worded If this all is more to draw attention to the date Nov 9th, and something that will be taking place on that date. “All items”, might possibly be meaning all the “left behind dirty laundry” from the industry as a whole, not just in relation to Dr.ake.
2024: The Year of Truth Telling just feels like a reference to Katt Williams interview where he states that too.
Would love to hear more opinions, maybe more connections I’m missing?
The tweet saying
“Doing shit like "be there in 10" than show up in "2" Than wanna complain about preparation.”
Why’s the 2 in quotes? Seems to have significance.
Edited to add:
I don’t think the poster or the “auction” on November 9 are what they’re presented to look like. Trying to scour that poster for anything else that hints towards things.
Someone already made a connection with one of the numbers, yachts, and MBB with Drake on a yacht in Sydney when she was 13 (I think?)
So maybe there’s more to find from the poster
submitted by nosigoat to DarkKenny [link] [comments]
Just looking at his profile, and the connection to this movie poster that states: “2024: The Year of Truth Telling Major Questions Will be Answered This Night!!!!” a date of “November 9th, 2024”, on that poster,
and then post that states
“all items for sale November 9, 2024 Bring your bags Big ones”
While I do think the original intention was to auction and sell these items I’m wondering by the cryptic way things are worded If this all is more to draw attention to the date Nov 9th, and something that will be taking place on that date. “All items”, might possibly be meaning all the “left behind dirty laundry” from the industry as a whole, not just in relation to Dr.ake.
2024: The Year of Truth Telling just feels like a reference to Katt Williams interview where he states that too.
Would love to hear more opinions, maybe more connections I’m missing?
The tweet saying
“Doing shit like "be there in 10" than show up in "2" Than wanna complain about preparation.”
Why’s the 2 in quotes? Seems to have significance.
Edited to add:
I don’t think the poster or the “auction” on November 9 are what they’re presented to look like. Trying to scour that poster for anything else that hints towards things.
Someone already made a connection with one of the numbers, yachts, and MBB with Drake on a yacht in Sydney when she was 13 (I think?)
So maybe there’s more to find from the poster
2024.05.15 20:03 GovernmentOk5279 NHI, UAP, Anomaly: The Problem is the problem
Forgive me for the initial ambiguity. I am not certain how to proceed, I just know that I have been given the green light to share this initial post. Take it for what it is:
Far too many are spending too much time and energy trying to solve a problem they don’t even have the right set of integers. It is quite literally impossible. Have you not ever wondered why great researchers who spend thousands of hours cannot land on anything concrete ?
Men and women have dedicated their life to figuring out the connections between the anomalous, to ultimately give up, or they ran out of time on this mortal coil. God forbid someone stumble onto the truth, and then conveniently get suicided. All of this connected, and really that is the point: Connection.
Currently, our government has spent trillions to solve this problem and to figure out who they are in bed with, and still they are in the dark. But many of them are okay with that as long as their pockets keep filling. See, for the Problem, existing in the shadows is their identity. The Problem excels in confusion and chaos. In drawing someone in just enough to keep them digging, but then driving them mad by having them feel around in the dark.
It is like Humanity is in a dark room. A big room, like a warehouse. And we are in the pitch black trying to find the light switch. Only, when someone gets too close, they either get turned the other direction, get tripped up, get locked up, or get gone. All the while, a few have on night vision goggles and orchestrate all the aimless wondering. Every once in a while, the searcher will stumble across a technology that pushes them towards the light switch, to then be thrown off course and continue to walk around aimlessly. In the pitch black, when someone “discovers” something, the others wondering around will begin to flock to that glimmer, to then be sidelined once again because the Problem loves to move large numbers of people towards an objective. It is a frustrating process and one that will continue until the lights are turned on.
However, many of our best and brightest have been co-opted to keep anyone and everyone from knowing the truth. They have falsely believed that those who desire to bring them to ruin are their allies. Over the years, many have woken up to the idea that maybe these NHI ‘friendlies’ aren’t friendly after all. Others have been so enthralled with the ‘gifts’ given to humanity, that they dismiss the possibility of these NHI’s are anything but benevolent.
Many of these “gifts” are found. In fact, all of the originals were found. How does that make sense? Pretend you are having an Easter egg hunt (not religiously speaking), and it is a grand ole time. Fast forward 5 days and you are out in the yard cutting the grass and you see a glimmer in the grass. Turns out, even though 5 days have passed, that egg is sitting where you left it. This is a very simple way of looking at it, but this is how the retrieval process began.
Many days (or ages) ago, objects were lost. Today, because of they know where the eggs are hidden, they can lead people to discover. Once discovered, the craft were studied and used to further our existence. Nowadays, the craft could be old that we discover, or it could be craft that are actually man-made, under the tutelage of NHI. The NHI can not easily manufacture in our dimension, so they tap the humans that best serve their purpose.
This can happen within an entity like the Armed Forces or a part of the Military Industrial Complex. This can also be done through organizations that we don’t readily know the name of, for example, have you ever heard of the Sonora Aero Club? Most have not, however, in the United States, this group was one of the first to be co-opted for a mission that they had no clue they were on. It makes me nervous to even write this, but we must try to find some semblance of light if we are going to make it out of this warehouse in one piece.
Men like David Grusch are diligent in their search, however, they will never be able to put the pieces together until they back up enough to see the Problem. Until it is diagnosed, we will look at pieces of a puzzle without having the box as a reference picture. The pieces of the puzzle: UAP, NHI, cattle mutilations, paranormal, etc etc, can’t be looked at as different problems—— they are the Problem.
There are entirely too many components for us to break down each in one post, but please just suspend skepticism for a minute and read this last part as if it were true:
There is an underlying glue to all things. A thread that ties us all together. In other dimensions (for lack of a better word), this thread can be woven together by groups of people having a similar idea, ideology intention, hope, fear, or sadness. Each individual thread, being part of the whole, is assembled into whatever dominates that person’s mind at that juncture. I know this sounds wild, but just imagine. Therefore, a group can be woven into a blanket that provides warmth and safety, or into a noose which could spell the end to all things. The Problem’s agenda is the latter. However, the people that are part of the Problem believe that they are making a blanket. This is why it is so hard to get people to see it for what it is: because it would mean humbling yourself and realizing that you have actually been working in the noose factory. Few people can admit their folly. Even fewer people can see they are part of the Problem because their pockets are stuffed or their power is enormous. The Problem is not stupid nor lazy, it will give you anything and everything it can to reel you in, because when the day comes, you will be tapped to do something you don’t want to do, but you must. That is part of being in bed with them, they control you.
That is all I have in me currently to share. I know that people will roll eyes, scratch heads, or dismiss completely. I am okay with that. I am not trying to sell you anything, just report on what I know to be true. I may share again, but I will answer questions best I know how. I leave you with 2 quotes:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false” -CIA Director, William J Casey, 1981
“The last card is the alien card. They will build space-based weapons against aliens, and it is all a lie.” -Werner Von Braun, 1974-1977
PS- if you ask about specific anomalies, ie. crop circles, I may only have a theory as to "why" because I don't have information on everything. But it is ALL part of ONE problem.
submitted by GovernmentOk5279 to conspiracy [link] [comments]
Far too many are spending too much time and energy trying to solve a problem they don’t even have the right set of integers. It is quite literally impossible. Have you not ever wondered why great researchers who spend thousands of hours cannot land on anything concrete ?
Men and women have dedicated their life to figuring out the connections between the anomalous, to ultimately give up, or they ran out of time on this mortal coil. God forbid someone stumble onto the truth, and then conveniently get suicided. All of this connected, and really that is the point: Connection.
Currently, our government has spent trillions to solve this problem and to figure out who they are in bed with, and still they are in the dark. But many of them are okay with that as long as their pockets keep filling. See, for the Problem, existing in the shadows is their identity. The Problem excels in confusion and chaos. In drawing someone in just enough to keep them digging, but then driving them mad by having them feel around in the dark.
It is like Humanity is in a dark room. A big room, like a warehouse. And we are in the pitch black trying to find the light switch. Only, when someone gets too close, they either get turned the other direction, get tripped up, get locked up, or get gone. All the while, a few have on night vision goggles and orchestrate all the aimless wondering. Every once in a while, the searcher will stumble across a technology that pushes them towards the light switch, to then be thrown off course and continue to walk around aimlessly. In the pitch black, when someone “discovers” something, the others wondering around will begin to flock to that glimmer, to then be sidelined once again because the Problem loves to move large numbers of people towards an objective. It is a frustrating process and one that will continue until the lights are turned on.
However, many of our best and brightest have been co-opted to keep anyone and everyone from knowing the truth. They have falsely believed that those who desire to bring them to ruin are their allies. Over the years, many have woken up to the idea that maybe these NHI ‘friendlies’ aren’t friendly after all. Others have been so enthralled with the ‘gifts’ given to humanity, that they dismiss the possibility of these NHI’s are anything but benevolent.
Many of these “gifts” are found. In fact, all of the originals were found. How does that make sense? Pretend you are having an Easter egg hunt (not religiously speaking), and it is a grand ole time. Fast forward 5 days and you are out in the yard cutting the grass and you see a glimmer in the grass. Turns out, even though 5 days have passed, that egg is sitting where you left it. This is a very simple way of looking at it, but this is how the retrieval process began.
Many days (or ages) ago, objects were lost. Today, because of they know where the eggs are hidden, they can lead people to discover. Once discovered, the craft were studied and used to further our existence. Nowadays, the craft could be old that we discover, or it could be craft that are actually man-made, under the tutelage of NHI. The NHI can not easily manufacture in our dimension, so they tap the humans that best serve their purpose.
This can happen within an entity like the Armed Forces or a part of the Military Industrial Complex. This can also be done through organizations that we don’t readily know the name of, for example, have you ever heard of the Sonora Aero Club? Most have not, however, in the United States, this group was one of the first to be co-opted for a mission that they had no clue they were on. It makes me nervous to even write this, but we must try to find some semblance of light if we are going to make it out of this warehouse in one piece.
Men like David Grusch are diligent in their search, however, they will never be able to put the pieces together until they back up enough to see the Problem. Until it is diagnosed, we will look at pieces of a puzzle without having the box as a reference picture. The pieces of the puzzle: UAP, NHI, cattle mutilations, paranormal, etc etc, can’t be looked at as different problems—— they are the Problem.
There are entirely too many components for us to break down each in one post, but please just suspend skepticism for a minute and read this last part as if it were true:
There is an underlying glue to all things. A thread that ties us all together. In other dimensions (for lack of a better word), this thread can be woven together by groups of people having a similar idea, ideology intention, hope, fear, or sadness. Each individual thread, being part of the whole, is assembled into whatever dominates that person’s mind at that juncture. I know this sounds wild, but just imagine. Therefore, a group can be woven into a blanket that provides warmth and safety, or into a noose which could spell the end to all things. The Problem’s agenda is the latter. However, the people that are part of the Problem believe that they are making a blanket. This is why it is so hard to get people to see it for what it is: because it would mean humbling yourself and realizing that you have actually been working in the noose factory. Few people can admit their folly. Even fewer people can see they are part of the Problem because their pockets are stuffed or their power is enormous. The Problem is not stupid nor lazy, it will give you anything and everything it can to reel you in, because when the day comes, you will be tapped to do something you don’t want to do, but you must. That is part of being in bed with them, they control you.
That is all I have in me currently to share. I know that people will roll eyes, scratch heads, or dismiss completely. I am okay with that. I am not trying to sell you anything, just report on what I know to be true. I may share again, but I will answer questions best I know how. I leave you with 2 quotes:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false” -CIA Director, William J Casey, 1981
“The last card is the alien card. They will build space-based weapons against aliens, and it is all a lie.” -Werner Von Braun, 1974-1977
PS- if you ask about specific anomalies, ie. crop circles, I may only have a theory as to "why" because I don't have information on everything. But it is ALL part of ONE problem.
2024.05.15 19:17 lambchopsuey The SGI-USA's generational bottleneck
One of the fascinating aspects of outsider reports and analysis is what they see. Given that at this point (1992) the internet was not yet widely available/accessible, this sort of thing would have been difficult to find. And of course SGI wasn't ever going to tell us the truth!
This will show you that SGI-USA (then called "NSA") was failing in recruiting far earlier than perhaps most of us in the US realized. SGI in the USA was basically a flash in the pan; it fizzled fast; and now it's just that rank stale smoke smell that lingers long after the fire's been put out.
This comes from Cults and Nonconventional Religious Groups: A Collection of Outstanding Dissertations and Monographs, "Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism and the Soka Gakkai in America: The Ethos of a New Religious Movement", Jane Hurst, 1992, pp. 150-151. Jane Hurst has some interesting research out there; while she tends toward being uncritically supportive of SGI, anyone who is making statistics available is a big help.
This youthfulness is largely reflected in the early organization's origins in the American servicemen who returned from being stationed in Japan with their Japanese war-brides - those servicemen tended to be young and from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds, as the draft was still in effect during that time period (ended March 1975). In addition, the first General Director of the US organization, Masayasu Sadanaga, initially targeted college campuses for recruitment by offering lectures on Buddhism. Sadanaga changed his name to George M. Williams in 1972, in obedience to the (short-lived) direction back then of Japanese leaders adopting American-sounding names (first AND last) in order to appeal more broadly to non-Japanese Americans.
Figure 10 (I'll get to that line in another post.)
Ewps - Here's the REAL Figure 10.
Most of the original "Oriental members" were those Japanese war-brides, whose first efforts to recruit new SGI members were directed toward other Japanese individuals.
Ego Era" and "50K Liars of Just-Us" (everybody wants to forget the epic fail that was the "Gandhi, King, Ikeda" exhibit), has made the slightest difference in this demographic disaster. In fact, preparing for the 2018 "50K" event, SGI-USA likely had only 2,451 members in the 12-35 (or perhaps 11-39) age group, just 9% of the most generous SGI-USA active membership total (~30,000).
submitted by lambchopsuey to sgiwhistleblowers [link] [comments]
This will show you that SGI-USA (then called "NSA") was failing in recruiting far earlier than perhaps most of us in the US realized. SGI in the USA was basically a flash in the pan; it fizzled fast; and now it's just that rank stale smoke smell that lingers long after the fire's been put out.
This comes from Cults and Nonconventional Religious Groups: A Collection of Outstanding Dissertations and Monographs, "Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism and the Soka Gakkai in America: The Ethos of a New Religious Movement", Jane Hurst, 1992, pp. 150-151. Jane Hurst has some interesting research out there; while she tends toward being uncritically supportive of SGI, anyone who is making statistics available is a big help.
NSA members in the 1960s and 1970s were young (52% below age 30), more than half female (59%), and from a variety of occupations and social classes.The Baby Boom generation were at most age 19 in, say, 1965 and at most age 24 in 1970.
This youthfulness is largely reflected in the early organization's origins in the American servicemen who returned from being stationed in Japan with their Japanese war-brides - those servicemen tended to be young and from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds, as the draft was still in effect during that time period (ended March 1975). In addition, the first General Director of the US organization, Masayasu Sadanaga, initially targeted college campuses for recruitment by offering lectures on Buddhism. Sadanaga changed his name to George M. Williams in 1972, in obedience to the (short-lived) direction back then of Japanese leaders adopting American-sounding names (first AND last) in order to appeal more broadly to non-Japanese Americans.
The percentage of Oriental members steadily decreased as more and more white and black Americans joined NSA as seen in Figure 10, above.
Ewps - Here's the REAL Figure 10.
Most of the original "Oriental members" were those Japanese war-brides, whose first efforts to recruit new SGI members were directed toward other Japanese individuals.
NSA members came from the major religious traditions of Protestantism (30%), Catholicism (30%), and Judaism (6%). At the time these 1971 statistics were compiled, all areas of American society. By 1983, the age span was even more broad, with 11% of the members age 50 and above, 62% ages 30-49, 24% ages 20-29, and 3% below age 19.For reference, here are the age ranges for the existing generations in 1983:
- Greatest: Ages 59-82
- Silent: Ages 38-58
- Baby Boomers: Ages 19-37
- Generation X: Ages 4-18
- Generation Y (Millennials): Age 3 or younger.
- 11% of the SGI-USA membership was MUCH OLDER than Baby Boomers
- 62% was either Baby Boom generation or older (though younger than that oldest group)
- 24% was Baby Boomers
- 3% was younger than Baby Boomers.
IN 1983!!
Notice how this affirms the demographic estimate from this other research: "Soka Gakkai in America": Little appeal/interest outside of Baby Boom generationTake a look at Table 4.It's the same problem happening in Japan within the Soka Gakkai:
Specifically, the Age cohort (%) category.
For the Converts, 26% are older than Baby Boomers; 61% are Baby Boomers. That makes 87% Boomer and older. Only 14% are younger than Boomers.
No wonder SGI-USA is aging and dying, with these kinds of numbers!
We are seeing, like, 90% Baby Boomers in the group photos we've looked at.
The pictures back this up.
Also, this comment by an SGI-USA leader a few years ago during Minoru Harada's visit (anyone know what year that was?):
They [top SGI-USA leaders] then went off on how when we create these big-ass meetings, we shouldn't have to look into the crowd and see, and I quote, "A bunch of old-ass motherfuckers" The words of my "superiors", not mine. I think this is when they brought up the idea of 50K to my co-leaders and me. Source"Old-ass motherfuckers" is all they have. How 'bout showing a little of that appreciation and gratitude SGI bangs on about??
Worse, "old-ass motherfuckers" is all SGI-USA can get.
Further, again referring to Table 4, SGI-USA's membership is solidly 2/3 women. That means it's going to be very difficult for women in SGI-USA to find mates to marry, which means childlessness will be more of a norm than an exception. Child-free is a valid and respect-worthy decision, don't get me wrong, but a religion's most reliable source of younger members is its own membership's children. Since SGI-USA's female members don't feel any responsibility or obligation to bear multiple children (like those poor, stupid Mormon sheepwomen do), there won't be any next generation to take over.
There's a reason so many religions have traditionally exhorted their membership to have lots of babies, why they condemn birth control and abortion. A big part of it is to keep their own numbers up! Source
On the other hand, aging is relentless. In terms of the Soka Gakkai's membership demographics, the "volume zone" where most members fall is the baby boomer generation who joined by the 1960s. They are now late elderly. In the past, the management of centers in various places was handled by the "Gajokai" consisting of Young Men's Division members, but it is no longer possible to secure personnel. Instead, in 2009, the Soka Gakkai launched the "Ojokai'' consisting of "middle-aged divisions,'' scolding them as "young people in their 50s'' and rushing to mobilize them. SourceGOOD LUCK!
For perspective, note that SGI-USA was managing to recruit just "1,000 per YEAR" - including all ages - between 1991 and 1999. Eight years of only 1,000 members added per year, with no accounting for the deaths or defections. Were the years after that more successful, recruiting-wise? I doubt it.From 2018:
[Then-SGI-USA's public-relations director for the East Coast Bill] Aiken says SGI-USA has attracted about 1000 new members per year for the past eight years. - from 1999. Only 1,000 new members - across the ENTIRE 360+ million-person strong USA - in an ENTIRE year. And this extremely low level of success for EIGHT YEARS IN A ROW!! Source
In recent years, the number of young Soka Gakkai members has been decreasing rapidly . Looking at the participants in the simultaneous broadcasts and roundtable discussions, the majority are of the grandparents' generation, with only a small number of young people in their 20s and 30s, and the number of teenage boys and girls is almost an endangered species .And "Soka Gakkai is like an old people's club":
Therefore, what I am interested in is the population of Soka Gakkai by age group. This time, I would like to estimate the current population of Soka Gakkai by age , based on information I have personally seen and heard and verification from others . Please note that this estimate is very rough.
First, the largest number of Soka Gakkai members are baby boomers (born between 1947 and 1949 [Japan's Baby Boom]). This seems almost certain considering the history of the development of Soka Gakkai .
Also, the total number of members has already been verified by many people, and is estimated to be around 3 to 5 million people. This time we assume about 4 million people .
And this is what I heard directly from a staff member at headquarters last year, who said , `` The number of activists decreases by about 1/3 with each generation.'' I think this is a reasonable rate of decline that can be felt by looking at participants in simultaneous broadcasts and roundtable discussions. It seems that members who have stopped being activists are less likely to have their children join, so this time we will use a value of 1/3 per generation as the member decline rate .
Also, regarding the number of years it takes for generational change, the average age for men and women to give birth to their first child is currently 30 years old. Considering that the average age of childbearing for both men and women when the baby boomer generation was born was 24 years old, and that there are cases where not only the first child but also the second and third children are born, the generational shift will take 30 years. Let's calculate it as if it would take a year . In that case, the annual membership attrition rate would be (1/3)1/30 = 0.964, or 3.6% .
It is unclear when this trend of declining membership started, but this time we will assume that it started in the year following the baby boom generation (1950). Source
Regarding the problem of a decline in Komeito votes, or in other words, a decline in active Soka Gakkai members, many people concerned point out that the primary cause is the aging of Soka Gakkai members. The enthusiastic members of the generation who supported the growth of the society along with charismatic Honorary President Daisaku Ikeda are now elderly across the board. Most of the current new members are second- or third-generation members who join because their parents are members of Soka Gakkai, and they are not very enthusiastic about Soka Gakkai's activities. Today, many of Soka Gakkai's daily events are even derided by insiders as "like an old people's party."And a more recent report (this year):
Back about 20 years ago a good friend and good guy, now deceased, from ChiTown, was commissioned by SGI Central Command to survey every contactable member of SGI in every district in America. The number he came up with was 5% of the number of Gohonzon passed out since, I guess whenever Gohonzon started to be passed out. The total number was about a million give or take, 20 years ago. These were contactable people, not practicing members. I remember going through lists of people we had on the books and trying to see if they could be reached. So the number we came up with was reported. Hearing nothing about it, I happened to run into my friend at some event at Soka U. He mentioned that he did the survey, and gave me the results. I believe he told me the facts. (Not everyone who practiced was a lying asshole.) So about 20 years ago SGI had about 50,000 “contactable“ people who had received Gohonzon. My estimate that about half of that number had zero interest in SGI. Thus 20 years ago, SGI had about 25,000 members still interested in SGI in some capacity. I think it’s the same number today. (2500 districts x 10=25,000.) Like I said before I went to FNCC twice last year, and everyone, including me, were old zany seniors. Neither conference was for old people. Conclusion: SGI is a senior citizen support group. When I joined in1969, we were all hippie ish, rejecting all the old shit, looking for something new and hip. Now SGI looks like old shit. SourceAnd another (this year or last):
When I joined 50+ years ago the ratio of youth to MD and WD was about 80:20. Now it's the reverse. Our goal is to move steadily back to a youth focus again. SourceExcept it's obvious that SGI-USA doesn't HAVE "20% youth":
Youth? They've got to be fooling themselves!!! When I was still with the SGI last February (2023), I went to the kosen-rufu gongyo meeting at the center in my area. Mind you, the state I live in closed its center in 2021 for undisclosed reasons. That aside, the one I went to was in another state, and at that meeting, they had no byakuren, Gajokai, or Soka Group in attendance. Additionally, the only youth at the meeting were a few small children. SourceThe PROBLEM was already evident in 1983 - and none of the SGI-USA's big "Recruit-Youth-A-Thons", like "Victory over Violence" and "Rock The
I feel that SGI is out of touch with anyone who’s younger than 60. The leaders are retired, have a lot of time on their hands and completely disregard the fact that people may work or have families. For young people it’s the old people taking nonsense. Source
Ikeda could have preserved a "youthful" Soka Gakkai by passing the Presidency to a younger candidate, but Ikeda refused, because Ikeda was too focused on and obsessed with HIMSELF - his power, his prestige, his wealth, his status, his fame, his renown, HIM becoming leader of the world, his PERMANENCY, and his legacy. He refused to let anyone else come anywhere CLOSE to the power and control - he greedily, selfishly clutched it all tightly to himself and refused to share.SGI-USA has never managed to recover from that demographic bottleneck that happened no later than 1983.
THAT is why the Ikeda cult Soka Gakkai/SGI is aging and dying. It's ALL Ikeda's fault, Ikeda's responsibility. IKEDA DID THAT.
Some "mentor". Source
2024.05.15 17:10 Chen_Geller Tolkien Begginings: the antecedents of Peter Jackson's (and others) Middle-earth
 | I still sit sometimes and chuckle, thinking "When Ralph Bakshi started animating The Lord of the Rings in 1976, did he know what he was going to unleash on the world?" There was also the Rankin/Bass TV special, being developed concurrently, but its the Bakshi film that, in 1979, Peter Jackson saw, and this young Photoengraver would later direct six (!) live-action Tolkien films and, between himself and co-producer Philippa Boyens, are hard to work producing three more such films. Other adaptations since - namely, The Rings of Power (especially Season One) but also games from The Shadow of Mordor to Return to Moria - have at the very least taken cues from Jackson's films. All because a Kiwi photoengraver saw a cartoon.... submitted by Chen_Geller to lotr [link] [comments] But the relationship between these properties is not so clear-cut as it may seem. I ednumbered the similarities and dissimilarities between Jacksons' films and The Rings of Power elsewhere. Now I want to delve deeper into the similarities and dissimilarities between Jackson and previous adaptations of Tolkien. The Rankin/Bass TV SpecialsSide-by-side video comparisons between Jackson's films and the two Rankin/Bass TV Specials do not reveal any similarities that don't come from the fact that they're adapting the same books. This is an important point: Jackson is NOT trying to make some post-modern "collage" Hollywood film. He's only tipping his hat to those adaptations of Tolkien that he had seen growing up and that influenced him personally.1Due to copyright, the Rankin/Bass specials probably didn't air in New Zealand at all, and although it seems Jackson got a hold of the Rankin/Bass The Hobbit before embarking on The Lord of the Rings, he had not seen their Return of the King, certainly before 1999, and neither he nor his close collaborators have made comments about either of the two Specials. By contrast, the (American!) showrunners of The Rings of Power had referenced the Rankin/Bass Specials, and seemingly tipped their hat to it in a set design for season two.2 The Ralph Bakshi filmAs I said, Jackson went to see the Bakshi film. He had enjoyed some of Bakshi's previous film, including the Tolkien-esque Wizards, released the previous year, and went to see his latest. At the time he hadn't read the books, making Bakshi's film his first exposure to Tolkien, but he does admit he "heard the name" of the book beforehand. His biography suggests he saw it in late 1978, when it first premiered, but surely it would have arrived at New Zealand in early 1979.3The connection between the two films had been played up, unsurprisingly, by Ralph Bakshi himself. A leonine, grandiose man, Bakshi is anything but a reliable narrator. His own suggestion that he hadn't actually seen the films - only trailers, he claims - sounds believable enough and certainy understandable.4 But, then, if he didn't watch them, it makes his critique of them as deriviative of his films all the more dubious, even without actually looking at the specifics of what he said: Look at his Lothlorien. Look at my backgrounds of Lothlorien. Take a look! He had much more to see than I did, and if you don't think he lifted it over and over again, you're wrong. I mean, how did he design a knife in Lord of the Rings? How did he design a sword? How did he design the dwarf with his axe? How did he design the fur around him? Why did Peter Jackson put fur around the dwarf? Because I put fur around the dwarf! Why would the dwarf have fur naturally? You see, I could give you a billion little things. I wish I had a movie to look at.5These are truly some confused claims, for the most part. The most credible part here is the Hobbits hiding under the branch from the Ringwraiths, a shot composition later to also be replicated in season one of the Rings of Power, and which we'll get to later. Another claim of Bakshi's that cannot be dismissed out of hand is that, however big or small a debt Jackson owes to his film, he said that Jackson didn't publically acknowledge the influence and felt that it was only appropriate to have welcomed him to visit the set or something: by comparison, Jackson invited Rick Baker, who played King Kong in the 1978 version, to cameo in his King Kong.6 Jackson actually did mention the Bakshi filming in passing in the making-ofs. Then again, he entirely fails to mention the radio serial, either. Ultimately, Jackson possibly in cahoots with New Line Cinema, must have felt it unwise to point to a previous adaptation that had only achieved mixed success, at the outset of his own enterprise. He did talk more about the Bakshi film, and more fondly, in the director's commentary to The Fellowship of the Ring and in a couple of later interviews, which are significant gestures, but he clearly wasn't going to trumpet the influence Bakshi's film had on him off of every rooftop.7 In his 2006 biography, Jackson actually briefly reviews the Bakshi film: I liked the early part – it had some quaint sequences in Hobbiton, a creepy encounter with the Black Rider on the road, and a few quite good battle scenes – but then, about half way through, the storytelling became very disjointed and disorientating and I really didn’t understand what was going on. However, what it did do was to make me want to read the book – if only to find out what happened!8This is a complementary but admittedly mixed review, and Jackson had made similar comments since, calling it "brave and ambitious" but consistently decrying the hokum of the film's second half.9 Now, it is true that artists can be influenced by a work of art in spite of themselves, but lets see if we can try and quantify the influence. From the outset, in the audio commentary, Jackson remarks that "our film stylistically is very different and the design is different," which is apposite: Bakshi swore a debt to Howard Pyle, which certainly leaves its mark of the gorgeous natural bakcdrops, but a source closer at hand (especially considering his follow-up fantasy film, Fire and Ice) is the most popular fantasy illustrator of his day, Frank Frazetta: Bakshi's Witch King is practically ripped from Frazetta's famous "Dark Rider" illustration.10 Jackson's approach, however, was steeped in a kind of romantic realism that by and large eschewed the heightened work of Frazetta, opening a yawning stylistic gulf between his film and Bakshi's on a general level. Bakshi's Hobbit-holes have overhanging roofs that give the impression of fairies living under mushrooms (which they in fact had in his previous film, Wizards) and the interiors of Bag End are earthen, more of a rabbit-hole than Jackson's English countryside villa. There are some similarities, like the Hobbits having similarly-clipped pants, but its hard to say costume designer Ngilla Dickson had Bakshi in mind for that look. There's the basic structure of the narrative: both films leave some of the same plot beats out - Tom Bombadil, most notably - both intercut the Frodo and Aragorn storylines throughout (as per the appendices rather than the body of the text), and both open with a prologue. However, many of these are common-sense approaches that, if one were to put 100 screenwriters in a room, a good 90 of which would choose to pursue: in fact, Sir John Boorman's earlier Lord of the Rings script had likewise intercut the stories and redacted many of the same episodes as both Bakshi and Jackson, and similar approaches were taken in the 1958 Morton Zimmerman treatment. Certainly, in the case of the choice to pursue a prologue, a precedent closer at hand exists in the form in the 1981 radio serial, a point made all the stronger by the fact that when Jackson first concieved of and sketched the prologue, he hadn't seen Bakshi's film in 20 years.11 Bakshi did claim that New Line were screening his film repeatedly, but author Ian Nathan says that was never the case. Miramax did screen the film for Jackson in 1997, after he'd written the treatment. Jackson's treatment included Glorfindel and Erkenbrand, who in subsequent drafts are replaced by Arwen (Legolas in Bakshi's film) and Eomer, but still I find that it falls more into the realm of common-sense screenwriting decisions than anything that could be tied to Bakshi in a clear way, especially the latter which happens at the end of Bakshi film, a part of the film Jackson admits to have found incoherent.12 Rather, the place to look for similarities between the two projects is in the opening leg of The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson actually, in the director's commentary, points out the shot of Odo Proudfoot calling "Proudfeet!" as a deliberate homage to Bakshi's shot, "which I thought was great." He doesn't acknowledge a couple - only a couple - of other shots that are quite similar: one is the evocative shot of the Ring tumbling over the rocks in Gollum's cave just before Bilbo finds it. Another still is an entire sequence of shots which misdirect us into thinking the Ringwraiths killed the Hobbits in their beds. Both are a little TOO similar to be waved away as coincidental.13 The Ringwraith shot is a more special case: It was nominally based off of a John Howe illustration, ostensibly of the Bakshi scene. But Jackson - who's quoted review of the Bakshi film mentions this scene - could hardly not notice the similarity to the Bakshi scene, especially since the scene doesn't at all play like this in the novel. What's more, the scene was first storyboared only shortly after Jackson say Bakshi's film for the second time, and shot not too long after that being that it was the first scene filmed. So its only fair to cite Bakshi as an influence on that shot.14 https://preview.redd.it/9mbqqm4zul0d1.png?width=550&format=png&auto=webp&s=a45cdd06543d70200e3eacf150f14d03d222203b There are other bits and pieces: did Jackson have Bakshi in mind when he added a scene of Saruman rallying up the Uruk-hai before the siege of Helm's Deep? Its hard to say. An even more elusive case is made by Bakshi: "I'm glad Peter Jackson had a movie to look at—I never did. And certainly there's a lot to learn from watching any movie, both its mistakes and when it works." In other words, Bakshi here suggests his film influenced Jackson in terms of what NOT to do. To his credit, Jackson does remember that the design process for Treebeard was in part motivated by trying to divorce him from the Bakshi version, which both him and Dame Fran Walsh remember as being "like a walking carrot." But when we start getting into that level, it all becomes very tenuous. There were a lot of things about the fantasy genre in general - Conan the Barbarian and Willow are oft-cited by Jackson - that he tried to avoid.15 Ultimately, I have to judge that the similarities between the two versions amount to a handful of rather insignificant beats, all in the first hour of Fellowship of the Ring. To hyperbolically play up the similarities between the two projects is to give in to Bakshi's hyperbolic rhetoric. Tolkien illustrationsJackson's first and, at the time, only copy of The Lord of the Rings was a tie-in to the Bakshi film. This would mean he hadn't gotten into the world of Tolkien illustrations until developing his own films, when he suggests he went on a detail-exhaustive search for Tolkien art. He had seen Tolkien's own illustrations, but decided that they're "not very helpful in terms of the lighting and the mood."16The most acclaimed illustrators of the previous era of Tolkien were Pauline Bayens (whose Minas Tirith is reproduced in the Rankin/Bass Return of the King) and the Brothers Hildebrandt, whose bestial Balrog presents a precursor both to Bakshi's but also to the Minotaur-like Balrog of John Howe.17 Howe was one of a trifecta of Tolkien illustrators, along with Ted Nasmith and Alan Lee, to enjoy great vogue at the time when Jackson was developing his films. Of the three, Lee is often deemed the most celebrated and certainly made the biggest impact on Jackson, whose next copy of the book was to be an Alan Lee illustrated edition. But he also noticed Howe through is work on Tolkien calendars, and later also purchased some originals of Ted Nasmith. All three were approached to participate in concept design for the films, although Nasmith sadly had to decline.18 In many places, Jackson precisely copied designs of Lee's and Howe's existing paintings, and in some places carbon copied their lighting and composition for shots, as well as grading the films (before the advent of the latest remaster) somewhat along the lines established in their paintings. But the majority of Lee and Howe's work for Jackson was in producing NEW concept art to his specifications, and so its wrong to look at Jackson's films as being a part of the Lee-Howe ouevure, as such. The 1981 Radio SerialA less touted influence on Jackson's film is the superlative 1981 BBC radio serial. Where Jackson hadn't reread the book nor revisited Bakshi's film between 1979 and 1997, he had spent much of the that time listening on-and-off to a tape of the radio serial, usually while working in his garage on special effects.19The most obvious similarity is the casting of Sir Ian Holm, who had voiced Frodo in the radio serial, as Bilbo. Holm was apparently at the top of Jackson's casting wishlist, partially for this reason. A particularly striking moment occurs when Holm's Frodo quotes Bilbo's "Its a dangerous business Frodo, going out your door: you step on to the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to", a line again given to Holm - now as Bilbo - in voiceover at the same spot in Jackson's film.20 Again, many of the similar structural choices here are similar to Jackson, adding a prologue, contracting the early stages of Frodo's quest and intercutting the Aragorn and Frodo's stories throughout. Brian Sibley admits to have modelled his prologue on Bakshi's own, but Jackson is unlikely to have known it at the time, and when we start thinking in terms of second-hand influences we're again into very tenuous territory. Otherwise, the influence doesn't seem all too great, although Sibley remembers that Walsh, perhaps half-jokingly, told him "we stole your ending" in the way that they did the Grey Havens and then a quick segue to Sam's return home, basically along the lines of the book.21 A young, and already Tolkien-devotee, Sir Ian Holm recording Bilbo Sibley had recruited his cast from the BBC's company of actors, which is also the troupe Bakshi turned to, meaning that Sibley ended-up with Bakshi's Boromir (Michael Graham Cox) and, notably, his Gollum (Peter Woodthorpe). In spite of Woodthorpe's evocative performance of Gollum's voice in both the Bakshi and Sibley versions, its influence on Andrew Serkis' performance of Gollum is nonexistent, as Serkis had developed the voice before having heard Woodthorpe rendition, having only read The Hobbit prior to being cast.22 Other fantasy filmsJackson had seen pretty much all the fantasy films of the 1980s, and while they were important in terms of establishing the genre, they hadn't left much of an impression on Jackson. The most succesful - George Lucas' Star Wars - was more space-fantasy, undoubtedly impressed Jackson but didn't much influence his films: to this day, he professes to not be a huge Star Wars fan, in spite of the amiacable manner he and Lucas took with each other in later years, and admits that he sees the influence of Lucas more "in what he did for the industry, not in terms of the actual films that he made."23The first major high-fantasy film, Sir John Boorman's Excalibur, was a little closer to Jackson's heart, but isn't much of an influence on his films either. Its true that Jackson's films feature a lot of plate armour, but that's indebted primarily to John Howe's abiding love of late Medieval armour, and at any rate is quite different to the Enlightement-era suits of armour one finds in Boorman's film. Willow, produced by George Lucas, was a big shot to the arm of New Zealand's fledgling film industry, and like Star Wars is much indebted to The Hobbit, but left a bad impression on Jackson.24 The Clockmaker's Cottage in Sir Ridley Scott's Legend Two exceptions are to be cited; Ray Harryhousen's stop-motion fantasy films from the 1950s were huge favourites of Jackson's, although their more Graeco-Roman subject matters were a genre apart from Jackson's films. He is also a big fan of Sir Ridley Scott, and while he joins the consensus of deriding William Hjortsberg notorious screenplay, had taken some cues from his Legend (1986): there's something of the Clockmaker's cottage in Rhosgobel, and Jackson referenced some of the features of Tim Curry's devilish "Lord of Darkness" for the Wargs sinewy faces.25 Other filmsJackson took influence from paintings of old battles and landscapes, but surely his biggest influences are other films: Zulu and Saving Private Ryan had been referenced for Helm's Deep, and there's a touch of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, which Jackson had watched before principal photography, to the atmospheric shots that close the Fellowship prologue. Jackson admitted to rewatching mostly Scorsese films while shooting, and certainly the energy of his moving cameras find a closer kin in Scorsese's films than in anyone else's. There's something of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia to Jackson's intention to make living, breathing people out of his fantasy characters.26Surely the inspiration for the shot of Aragorn arriving at Helm's Deep But there's one film that looms largest in Jackson's films, overshadowing any influence we're looked at so far: Mel Gibson's latest spectacular, Braveheart. Along with other films of this kind like Dances with Wolves and Rob Roy (Gladiator came too late to much influence Jackson's films) it is of crucial importance to the overall cinematic style of Jackson's films, having come out just as Jackson first started thinking of making an original fantasy film, and winning the academy award for Best Picture before any sustained work was done to develop The Lord of the Rings.27 Footnotes
ConclusionsAny notion that Jackson's films are derivative of previous Tolkien adaptations - namely, Bakshi's - are very much hyperbolic, and stem more from adopting an inflated rhetoric taken by the likes of Bakshi. As an adaptation, Jackson's works are based soley on Tolkien's books, and merely tip their hat occasionally to previous adaptations - and not all previous adaptations, either. Cinematically, they draw rather from other sources: less from other adaptations of Tolkien or other fantasy film (Tolkien-esque or not) and more from historical epics, both from the 1960s but also and especially from the time in which Jackson first started developing his films. |
2024.05.15 15:44 Saspurillah Non-religious talking to a Catholic Professor about his faith.
Hi all,
First, this is a long post, and for that I apologize. I have a lot on my mind I’m trying to process right now. I’m also a creative writing minor, so I realize this will come across as a story.
I attend a fairly conservative college where most of the students being Christian. I myself am not religious, and due to the environment I try to keep that fact to myself so as not to be rude or disruptive. Some people do know about my lack of belief, and I’ve had mixed responses from them when they learn. Some want to convert me, others are rather nonchalant about it.
The reason I am writing is because I recently had a conversation with one of my literature professors that has left me wondering how I should respond. The conversation started after I asked him a follow up question to something he mentioned about the Bible: “That it’s the greatest story about the human condition humanity ever told.” For context, he’s been a Catholic his entire life.
My follow up question to him after class was this: “But if it’s just a story, why should we believe it, especially when there seem to be so many contradictions within it?” This tends to be my first question when someone makes a claim about the Bible, and it is born partly out of curiosity (I genuinely want to know why, as no Christian I’ve talked with has given me a good answer to it) and partly as a challenge, as I don’t want to see him wasting his life worshipping something that isn’t true. Perhaps this is not the best motivation, but it is what sparked my question.
He didn’t answer right away, but when he did this is (roughly) what he said: “My favorite story is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I think it, while being fictitious, presents a deep understanding of human nature. I read it to understand the characters, and, by understanding them, hopefully learn a little bit more about myself and others in the process. Does it matter if it is true? Depends on what you mean by true. If you mean it in the sense of “this actually happened,” then you will be disappointed by a lot of literature. But if you mean it as “this reveals an important quality of human condition,” then I think it is very true.” He then chuckled and added, “Your question reminds me of a quote one of my professors told me when I was a student: ‘Everything in the Bible is true; some of it actually happened.”
This surprised me, as this is the first time I had really talked with someone who didn’t take the Bible (specifically the creation story) literally. I clarified with him to make sure I understood him correctly, and he affirmed what I said.
I probed him a bit more about that, asking if the fact that it was written by humans makes it less trustworthy. Why should we place so much faith in something that was written by mere men? I figured he would say something like “God wrote the Bible,” as that is what people I know have said.
He paused again and thought. His eventual response was this (if I recall correctly): “I have two reasons for why I believe in the Bible, one reason for believing in God, and one additional reason for why I am Catholic. The first reason for why I believe in the word of the Bible is because I think it is written by God. Unfortunately, that isn’t the most convincing reason even for myself, as why should I believe it is written by God? This leads to my second reason, which is that I simply find the story of the Bible presents to be the most beautiful and brilliant work to ever exist. I have spent years studying the intricacies of the Bible simply because I find its underlying themes and its story of human failure and promise for redemption to be gripping and compelling. Shakespeare doesn’t even come close, in my opinion. If it’s not written by God with human hands, then I don’t know what is. But this still is built upon believing that God exists, so let’s go to why I think that.
"The way I see it, faith is a natural part of human life. It is impossible to find a functional person who doesn’t trust something, and trust is one of the pillars of faith, so similar in fact that I view it as faith. If everything in the world is man-made and artificial, without divine influence, I think at the very least I would still choose to believe in the word of the Bible because I find it the most beautiful thing in the world. A large part of the reason I believe in God is because I think it is natural to have faith in something. If I am going to have faith in something no matter what, I want my faith to be in something beautiful, intellectually rigorous, and good for humanity.
“This leads into my reason for being Catholic, which is in large part it is because I think it presents the most holistic, beautiful, and practical theory for human success. Everything it teaches is geared toward human success, both individually and socially. People might disagree with what the Catholic Church defines as “human success,” but I think the Catholic Church is onto something.”
I asked him to elaborate, and he explained how the Catholic Church (if I understand correctly) places great emphasis on God’s first two commands to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.” “Multiply,” he explains, “sounds like what it says: make more humans.” This is not to say every male and female should hook up, but rather that we as a society should be concerned about the “continuation of our species.”
This command is to be taken hand in hand with the next one: “Be fruitful.” Making lots of babies isn’t the point--the point is to make lots of “good” humans. What does he mean by ‘good?’ “That,” he shrugs, “is where a lot of people disagree. I myself am not entirely sure how to describe ‘good’ humans, but I’ll try. I could say ‘love’ is the measure of a 'good' human, but even there people disagree with what ‘love’ is. I think love, however, is fundamentally about willing the best for the other, to the point of being willing to lay down your life for that person. An enduring society that produces those types of people is one that I would say is a good society, and I think people who take the ideals of Catholicism seriously and live them out as intended are the most likely to do that.”
I asked him about the abuse that the LGBTQ community has had to endure at the hands of Christians, and how the Catholic Church does not recognize same-sex marriage and calls those people sinners. I also asked about how denying abortion access to women is loving to them. He winces at this, and says this in reply: “A lot of people say and do terrible things in the name of Jesus and 'love.' The Catholic Church’s official teachings do not say we should be cruel to LGBTQ members or to women who have had or want an abortion. Unfortunately, people are people and people are often hypocrites, many without realizing it. When it comes to the LGBTQ community, the Catholic Church does not say ‘being homosexual is a sin,’ it says that homosexuality is a disordered desire. The ‘sin’ comes from acting on that desire, as the Catholic Church holds that all sexual acts should be reserved for the opposite sex as a unitive and potentially procreative act within the security of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. This goes back to “be fruitful and multiply:” Sex is so very pleasurable because it is extremely important for reproduction, which is what all life, in general, tries to do. Since the sexual act has been shown scientifically to significantly rewire the human brain, shouldn’t we try to be as careful as we possibly can be with it and make sure it is used for its intended purpose: to make babies? That is part of the Church’s practical reasoning for why homosexual acts (and extramarital and non-unitive sex) are not to be encouraged or endorsed by the Catholic Church.
"Many Christians, unfortunately, forget the lessons of the Gospel stories of the woman about to stoned and the woman at the well: those two woman were isolated and outcast from their homes for their sexual acts; one of them was about to be killed it. What happens to these women is intended to be viewed as unloving. Jesus, however, befriends them despite them ‘objectively’ sinning. He never endorsed their behavior, but he still treated them with respect and love. Even if people today might argue those women did nothing wrong, the point of those stories is that Jesus considered them ‘sinners’ and yet he loved and befriended them anyway. That is literally what Jesus was doing in every city he went to: Spending time with the people who were considered terrible sinners, not because he agreed with their actions but because they are human and thus deserve to be loved. I think Christians today too often forget that is the core message of the Jesus' teachings: to love one another.
“As for abortion, the Catholic Church’s position on that rests upon our emphasis on the inherent dignity of human life. The Catholic Church believes human life begins at conception. Operating under that view, abortion is murder and should thus be strongly discouraged and/or condemned. Personally, I think it should still remain a decision between a woman and her doctor, as the doctor is the only one with the medical expertise necessary to accurately say when an abortion is actually necessary to save the woman’s life. That, however, is a tragedy, and it is one the Catholic Church acknowledges is an unfortunate situation of ‘abortion is necessary to save a life that would be otherwise lost.’ Doctors need the confidence and ability to make difficult decisions without fear of being punished for it. That means there is a risk of abuse and malpractice, but that is the nature of trust.”
We were running out of time before he had to get to his next class, so I asked him one last question that was on my mind: “Can the existence of God be proved?”
He chuckled at this. “Some of my colleagues will likely disagree with me on this, but I personally don’t put a lot of stock in ‘proofs for God.’ I haven’t found one that convinces me, and I believe in God. I think they do a good job of suggesting God exists, but proving He exists? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s possible to prove God’s existence to someone who doesn’t already believe in God. I think the most we can do is show is why belief in God is not illogical—that’s the role of apologetics. But I can’t say, with absolute certainty, that I am right. That’s part of why it is faith: We might be wrong. If we are wrong, then ‘we are of all people the most pitiable.’” (I had to look this up afterward, as he made it sound like a quote. He was quoting Paul’s letter (1 Cor:15-19) talking about what it means if Christians are wrong about their faith. It seems he was applying this quote to all people of faith who are wrong.)
He gave me an example of what he means by ‘impossible to prove:’ “Think of your paper for this class. You, hopefully, are writing about something that you think is true. You are speculating at what the author meant, at how the author thought, why the author wrote the book or scene the way he or she did, or any works or events that likely influenced the work you are studying. Can you know for certain that you are correct?”
My answer: “No. But I can find evidence for it that shows I probably am.”
His reply: “Exactly. It is the same way with God. I don’t think we can prove God definitely exists the same way you can’t prove, with 100% confidence, that your paper’s thesis is correct. I think there is a lot of evidence that suggests God does exist, but I can’t prove it. Belief in God is inductive, and therefore inherently uncertain. This is how the Catholic Church also understands “Natural Law” and “Moral Law.” We can’t really prove either of them exist, we just have a lot of evidence gathered from observing the world and humanity that we think strongly suggests a natural and moral law. Apologists are the ones in charge of showing how our teachings and beliefs on these subjects are not inconsistent and intellectually bankrupt to hold.
“One last thing, to explain what I mean by ‘lots of evidence for God’s existence.’ Imagine we were to find Van Gogh’s The Starry Night out in the woods. I can’t prove that someone painted it, but I think a strong case can be made that someone did paint it. I might go so far as to argue it is obvious. That’s how I tend to view the world and the universe: one giant painting made by God by means of scientific laws and evolution.”
At this point he had to leave for his next class. He thanked me for the conversation and asked if I was still able to make it to cigars this Friday to celebrate the end of the term. I told him yes, and that I will probably have more questions and that I hope he didn’t mind if I asked him. He said he did not mind.
So that leads me to here: I have never had a conversation with a person of faith like this before. Almost every response he had appealed to an intuition that he seemed fine with not everyone sharing. He's also the first Christian I've met who says he doesn't think God can be proved and doesn't seem bothered by that. I suppose my question for you is: What should I ask him? What should he clarify?
submitted by Saspurillah to atheism [link] [comments]
First, this is a long post, and for that I apologize. I have a lot on my mind I’m trying to process right now. I’m also a creative writing minor, so I realize this will come across as a story.
I attend a fairly conservative college where most of the students being Christian. I myself am not religious, and due to the environment I try to keep that fact to myself so as not to be rude or disruptive. Some people do know about my lack of belief, and I’ve had mixed responses from them when they learn. Some want to convert me, others are rather nonchalant about it.
The reason I am writing is because I recently had a conversation with one of my literature professors that has left me wondering how I should respond. The conversation started after I asked him a follow up question to something he mentioned about the Bible: “That it’s the greatest story about the human condition humanity ever told.” For context, he’s been a Catholic his entire life.
My follow up question to him after class was this: “But if it’s just a story, why should we believe it, especially when there seem to be so many contradictions within it?” This tends to be my first question when someone makes a claim about the Bible, and it is born partly out of curiosity (I genuinely want to know why, as no Christian I’ve talked with has given me a good answer to it) and partly as a challenge, as I don’t want to see him wasting his life worshipping something that isn’t true. Perhaps this is not the best motivation, but it is what sparked my question.
He didn’t answer right away, but when he did this is (roughly) what he said: “My favorite story is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I think it, while being fictitious, presents a deep understanding of human nature. I read it to understand the characters, and, by understanding them, hopefully learn a little bit more about myself and others in the process. Does it matter if it is true? Depends on what you mean by true. If you mean it in the sense of “this actually happened,” then you will be disappointed by a lot of literature. But if you mean it as “this reveals an important quality of human condition,” then I think it is very true.” He then chuckled and added, “Your question reminds me of a quote one of my professors told me when I was a student: ‘Everything in the Bible is true; some of it actually happened.”
This surprised me, as this is the first time I had really talked with someone who didn’t take the Bible (specifically the creation story) literally. I clarified with him to make sure I understood him correctly, and he affirmed what I said.
I probed him a bit more about that, asking if the fact that it was written by humans makes it less trustworthy. Why should we place so much faith in something that was written by mere men? I figured he would say something like “God wrote the Bible,” as that is what people I know have said.
He paused again and thought. His eventual response was this (if I recall correctly): “I have two reasons for why I believe in the Bible, one reason for believing in God, and one additional reason for why I am Catholic. The first reason for why I believe in the word of the Bible is because I think it is written by God. Unfortunately, that isn’t the most convincing reason even for myself, as why should I believe it is written by God? This leads to my second reason, which is that I simply find the story of the Bible presents to be the most beautiful and brilliant work to ever exist. I have spent years studying the intricacies of the Bible simply because I find its underlying themes and its story of human failure and promise for redemption to be gripping and compelling. Shakespeare doesn’t even come close, in my opinion. If it’s not written by God with human hands, then I don’t know what is. But this still is built upon believing that God exists, so let’s go to why I think that.
"The way I see it, faith is a natural part of human life. It is impossible to find a functional person who doesn’t trust something, and trust is one of the pillars of faith, so similar in fact that I view it as faith. If everything in the world is man-made and artificial, without divine influence, I think at the very least I would still choose to believe in the word of the Bible because I find it the most beautiful thing in the world. A large part of the reason I believe in God is because I think it is natural to have faith in something. If I am going to have faith in something no matter what, I want my faith to be in something beautiful, intellectually rigorous, and good for humanity.
“This leads into my reason for being Catholic, which is in large part it is because I think it presents the most holistic, beautiful, and practical theory for human success. Everything it teaches is geared toward human success, both individually and socially. People might disagree with what the Catholic Church defines as “human success,” but I think the Catholic Church is onto something.”
I asked him to elaborate, and he explained how the Catholic Church (if I understand correctly) places great emphasis on God’s first two commands to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.” “Multiply,” he explains, “sounds like what it says: make more humans.” This is not to say every male and female should hook up, but rather that we as a society should be concerned about the “continuation of our species.”
This command is to be taken hand in hand with the next one: “Be fruitful.” Making lots of babies isn’t the point--the point is to make lots of “good” humans. What does he mean by ‘good?’ “That,” he shrugs, “is where a lot of people disagree. I myself am not entirely sure how to describe ‘good’ humans, but I’ll try. I could say ‘love’ is the measure of a 'good' human, but even there people disagree with what ‘love’ is. I think love, however, is fundamentally about willing the best for the other, to the point of being willing to lay down your life for that person. An enduring society that produces those types of people is one that I would say is a good society, and I think people who take the ideals of Catholicism seriously and live them out as intended are the most likely to do that.”
I asked him about the abuse that the LGBTQ community has had to endure at the hands of Christians, and how the Catholic Church does not recognize same-sex marriage and calls those people sinners. I also asked about how denying abortion access to women is loving to them. He winces at this, and says this in reply: “A lot of people say and do terrible things in the name of Jesus and 'love.' The Catholic Church’s official teachings do not say we should be cruel to LGBTQ members or to women who have had or want an abortion. Unfortunately, people are people and people are often hypocrites, many without realizing it. When it comes to the LGBTQ community, the Catholic Church does not say ‘being homosexual is a sin,’ it says that homosexuality is a disordered desire. The ‘sin’ comes from acting on that desire, as the Catholic Church holds that all sexual acts should be reserved for the opposite sex as a unitive and potentially procreative act within the security of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. This goes back to “be fruitful and multiply:” Sex is so very pleasurable because it is extremely important for reproduction, which is what all life, in general, tries to do. Since the sexual act has been shown scientifically to significantly rewire the human brain, shouldn’t we try to be as careful as we possibly can be with it and make sure it is used for its intended purpose: to make babies? That is part of the Church’s practical reasoning for why homosexual acts (and extramarital and non-unitive sex) are not to be encouraged or endorsed by the Catholic Church.
"Many Christians, unfortunately, forget the lessons of the Gospel stories of the woman about to stoned and the woman at the well: those two woman were isolated and outcast from their homes for their sexual acts; one of them was about to be killed it. What happens to these women is intended to be viewed as unloving. Jesus, however, befriends them despite them ‘objectively’ sinning. He never endorsed their behavior, but he still treated them with respect and love. Even if people today might argue those women did nothing wrong, the point of those stories is that Jesus considered them ‘sinners’ and yet he loved and befriended them anyway. That is literally what Jesus was doing in every city he went to: Spending time with the people who were considered terrible sinners, not because he agreed with their actions but because they are human and thus deserve to be loved. I think Christians today too often forget that is the core message of the Jesus' teachings: to love one another.
“As for abortion, the Catholic Church’s position on that rests upon our emphasis on the inherent dignity of human life. The Catholic Church believes human life begins at conception. Operating under that view, abortion is murder and should thus be strongly discouraged and/or condemned. Personally, I think it should still remain a decision between a woman and her doctor, as the doctor is the only one with the medical expertise necessary to accurately say when an abortion is actually necessary to save the woman’s life. That, however, is a tragedy, and it is one the Catholic Church acknowledges is an unfortunate situation of ‘abortion is necessary to save a life that would be otherwise lost.’ Doctors need the confidence and ability to make difficult decisions without fear of being punished for it. That means there is a risk of abuse and malpractice, but that is the nature of trust.”
We were running out of time before he had to get to his next class, so I asked him one last question that was on my mind: “Can the existence of God be proved?”
He chuckled at this. “Some of my colleagues will likely disagree with me on this, but I personally don’t put a lot of stock in ‘proofs for God.’ I haven’t found one that convinces me, and I believe in God. I think they do a good job of suggesting God exists, but proving He exists? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s possible to prove God’s existence to someone who doesn’t already believe in God. I think the most we can do is show is why belief in God is not illogical—that’s the role of apologetics. But I can’t say, with absolute certainty, that I am right. That’s part of why it is faith: We might be wrong. If we are wrong, then ‘we are of all people the most pitiable.’” (I had to look this up afterward, as he made it sound like a quote. He was quoting Paul’s letter (1 Cor:15-19) talking about what it means if Christians are wrong about their faith. It seems he was applying this quote to all people of faith who are wrong.)
He gave me an example of what he means by ‘impossible to prove:’ “Think of your paper for this class. You, hopefully, are writing about something that you think is true. You are speculating at what the author meant, at how the author thought, why the author wrote the book or scene the way he or she did, or any works or events that likely influenced the work you are studying. Can you know for certain that you are correct?”
My answer: “No. But I can find evidence for it that shows I probably am.”
His reply: “Exactly. It is the same way with God. I don’t think we can prove God definitely exists the same way you can’t prove, with 100% confidence, that your paper’s thesis is correct. I think there is a lot of evidence that suggests God does exist, but I can’t prove it. Belief in God is inductive, and therefore inherently uncertain. This is how the Catholic Church also understands “Natural Law” and “Moral Law.” We can’t really prove either of them exist, we just have a lot of evidence gathered from observing the world and humanity that we think strongly suggests a natural and moral law. Apologists are the ones in charge of showing how our teachings and beliefs on these subjects are not inconsistent and intellectually bankrupt to hold.
“One last thing, to explain what I mean by ‘lots of evidence for God’s existence.’ Imagine we were to find Van Gogh’s The Starry Night out in the woods. I can’t prove that someone painted it, but I think a strong case can be made that someone did paint it. I might go so far as to argue it is obvious. That’s how I tend to view the world and the universe: one giant painting made by God by means of scientific laws and evolution.”
At this point he had to leave for his next class. He thanked me for the conversation and asked if I was still able to make it to cigars this Friday to celebrate the end of the term. I told him yes, and that I will probably have more questions and that I hope he didn’t mind if I asked him. He said he did not mind.
So that leads me to here: I have never had a conversation with a person of faith like this before. Almost every response he had appealed to an intuition that he seemed fine with not everyone sharing. He's also the first Christian I've met who says he doesn't think God can be proved and doesn't seem bothered by that. I suppose my question for you is: What should I ask him? What should he clarify?
2024.05.15 15:23 free_domHD Could you imagine the roast of Kim Kardashian ?!?!
Along with the best comedians like Chris Rock or katt Williams That would honestly be the best thing to watch
submitted by free_domHD to KUWTKsnark [link] [comments]
2024.05.15 15:09 chanma50 'IF' Review Thread
I will continue to update this post as reviews come in.
Rotten Tomatoes: Rotten
Critics Consensus: A sweet ode to rediscovering one's inner child, IF largely works as old-fashioned family entertainment despite an occasionally unfocused and unnecessarily complicated plot.
Metacritic: 48 (25 Reviews)
Sample Reviews:
IF may be guilty of trying too hard, but it’s a refreshing change from so many family movies that barely seem to be trying at all. - Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
IF wasn’t enough to keep my attention, how will it keep the attention of a child for 104 minutes?? - Valerie Complex, Deadline Hollywood Daily
It’s tonally discombobulated and nowhere near as enchanting as Michael Giacchino’s score seems to think it is. - William Bibbiani, TheWrap
When “IF” reaches its cathartic finale, some kiddos might be wondering why their parents are sniffling and tearing up – if they're still paying attention and not off playing with their own imaginary friend by then. 2.5/4 - Brian Truitt, USA Today
“IF” is largely a bust — a family film in search of an audience that it never convincingly finds. 2/4 - Ty Burr, Washington Post
The movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus. 1/4 - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
... The dialogue between Bea and other real-world characters tends toward the obvious. But among the IFs the movie slants toward something fresher — if not absolute originality, then at least a dash of imagination. 2.5/5 - Natalia Winkelman, Boston Globe
What is supposed to be a comedy develops into an honest film about coping with loss. 4/5 - Dina Kaur, Arizona Republic
Bells and whistles and imaginary friends aside, it’s that message of the inner child that’s ultimately essential – and If channels just enough of it for this viewer to, at least for a few moments, remember hers. 3/5 - Adrian Horton, Guardian
A children’s fantasy of wistful wonder and another satisfying chapter in the career of the actofilm-maker John Krasinski. 4/5 - Ed Potton, Times (UK)
It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are. 4/5 - Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK)
[It] isn’t so much a film but a series of emotional cues. It’s the same experience, really, as sitting down to watch an hour-and-a-half video loop of dogs being adopted. 2/5 - Clarisse Loughrey, Independent (UK)
Krasinski has invested a lot into a film of hardworking charm and loving human detail. All it needs now is some children to see it. 3/5 - Danny Leigh, Financial Times
IF does make the case for finding the fun in life, but in a movie that needs to be more fun than it is. - Brian Lowry, CNN.com
Far from perfect in its execution, but once IF hits its stride, Reynolds and Fleming keep this emotional adventure entertaining enough. 3/5 - Kelechi Ehenulo, Empire Magazine
We don’t know what’s happening most of the time, and worst yet, we don’t know how to feel about it, no matter our age. That’s much more than a failure of just imagination. C- - Kate Erbland, indieWire
What IF lacks is what it champions: the magical imagination of childhood. 4/10 - A.A. Dowd, IGN Movies
A movie that loudly yells at audiences they need to have some fun, while not actually providing any fun itself. 3/10 - Matt Singer, ScreenCrush
Krasinski's paper-thin script [...] gestures broadly at a kind of mechanical worldbuilding but soon throws its hands up in the air and greedily chases one heartstring after another. 1.5/4 - Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com
A heartfelt hit from Krasinski, with some carefully constructed chaos and a fine cast. Despite the occasional meandering, this is a fun family film that deserves to be a huge hit. 4/5 - Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
It is a smudgy valentine, all heart, whimsy, and charm. If the message is a bit messy and the logic not quite sound, for me that was more than made up for by the tenderness. B+ - Nell Minow, Movie Mom
SYNOPSIS:
From writer and director John Krasinski, IF is about a girl who discovers that she can see everyone’s imaginary friends — and what she does with that superpower — as she embarks on a magical adventure to reconnect forgotten IFs with their kids. IF stars Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Fiona Shaw, and the voices of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr. and Steve Carell alongside many more as the wonderfully unique characters that reflect the incredible power of a child’s imagination.
CAST:
WRITTEN BY: John Krasinski
PRODUCED BY: Allyson Seeger, Andrew Form, Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: John J. Kelly, George Dewey
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Janusz Kaminski
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Jess Gonchor
EDITED BY: Andy Canny, Christopher Rouse
MUSIC BY: Michael Giacchino
COSTUME DESIGNER: Jenny Eagan
RUNTIME: 104 Minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2024
submitted by chanma50 to boxoffice [link] [comments]
Rotten Tomatoes: Rotten
Critics Consensus: A sweet ode to rediscovering one's inner child, IF largely works as old-fashioned family entertainment despite an occasionally unfocused and unnecessarily complicated plot.
| Score | Number of Reviews | Average Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Critics | 56% | 80 | 5.90/10 |
| Top Critics | 52% | 21 | 5.60/10 |
Sample Reviews:
IF may be guilty of trying too hard, but it’s a refreshing change from so many family movies that barely seem to be trying at all. - Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
IF wasn’t enough to keep my attention, how will it keep the attention of a child for 104 minutes?? - Valerie Complex, Deadline Hollywood Daily
It’s tonally discombobulated and nowhere near as enchanting as Michael Giacchino’s score seems to think it is. - William Bibbiani, TheWrap
When “IF” reaches its cathartic finale, some kiddos might be wondering why their parents are sniffling and tearing up – if they're still paying attention and not off playing with their own imaginary friend by then. 2.5/4 - Brian Truitt, USA Today
“IF” is largely a bust — a family film in search of an audience that it never convincingly finds. 2/4 - Ty Burr, Washington Post
The movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus. 1/4 - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
... The dialogue between Bea and other real-world characters tends toward the obvious. But among the IFs the movie slants toward something fresher — if not absolute originality, then at least a dash of imagination. 2.5/5 - Natalia Winkelman, Boston Globe
What is supposed to be a comedy develops into an honest film about coping with loss. 4/5 - Dina Kaur, Arizona Republic
Bells and whistles and imaginary friends aside, it’s that message of the inner child that’s ultimately essential – and If channels just enough of it for this viewer to, at least for a few moments, remember hers. 3/5 - Adrian Horton, Guardian
A children’s fantasy of wistful wonder and another satisfying chapter in the career of the actofilm-maker John Krasinski. 4/5 - Ed Potton, Times (UK)
It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are. 4/5 - Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK)
[It] isn’t so much a film but a series of emotional cues. It’s the same experience, really, as sitting down to watch an hour-and-a-half video loop of dogs being adopted. 2/5 - Clarisse Loughrey, Independent (UK)
Krasinski has invested a lot into a film of hardworking charm and loving human detail. All it needs now is some children to see it. 3/5 - Danny Leigh, Financial Times
IF does make the case for finding the fun in life, but in a movie that needs to be more fun than it is. - Brian Lowry, CNN.com
Far from perfect in its execution, but once IF hits its stride, Reynolds and Fleming keep this emotional adventure entertaining enough. 3/5 - Kelechi Ehenulo, Empire Magazine
We don’t know what’s happening most of the time, and worst yet, we don’t know how to feel about it, no matter our age. That’s much more than a failure of just imagination. C- - Kate Erbland, indieWire
What IF lacks is what it champions: the magical imagination of childhood. 4/10 - A.A. Dowd, IGN Movies
A movie that loudly yells at audiences they need to have some fun, while not actually providing any fun itself. 3/10 - Matt Singer, ScreenCrush
Krasinski's paper-thin script [...] gestures broadly at a kind of mechanical worldbuilding but soon throws its hands up in the air and greedily chases one heartstring after another. 1.5/4 - Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com
A heartfelt hit from Krasinski, with some carefully constructed chaos and a fine cast. Despite the occasional meandering, this is a fun family film that deserves to be a huge hit. 4/5 - Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
It is a smudgy valentine, all heart, whimsy, and charm. If the message is a bit messy and the logic not quite sound, for me that was more than made up for by the tenderness. B+ - Nell Minow, Movie Mom
SYNOPSIS:
From writer and director John Krasinski, IF is about a girl who discovers that she can see everyone’s imaginary friends — and what she does with that superpower — as she embarks on a magical adventure to reconnect forgotten IFs with their kids. IF stars Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Fiona Shaw, and the voices of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr. and Steve Carell alongside many more as the wonderfully unique characters that reflect the incredible power of a child’s imagination.
CAST:
- Cailey Fleming as Bea
- Ryan Reynolds as Cal
- John Krasinski as Bea's Father / Marshmellow
- Fiona Shaw as Bea's Grandmother
- Alan Kim as Benjamin
- Liza Colón-Zayas as Janet
- Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Blossom
- Louis Gossett Jr. as Lewis
- Steve Carell as Blue
WRITTEN BY: John Krasinski
PRODUCED BY: Allyson Seeger, Andrew Form, Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: John J. Kelly, George Dewey
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Janusz Kaminski
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Jess Gonchor
EDITED BY: Andy Canny, Christopher Rouse
MUSIC BY: Michael Giacchino
COSTUME DESIGNER: Jenny Eagan
RUNTIME: 104 Minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2024