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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4108 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading? (There was another book thread in the Fun Thread here)

Still on Human Action. Also going through Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute, an early and very unusual warning shot against the dangers of the internet. It is a bit haphazard, but also a bit profound, and I wonder why I have never heard of this book before.

To run on automatic is, for the human being, to sink toward instinct, unfreedom, and statistical predictability. It is to give up what sets us most vitally apart from our material environment and our tools. It is to remain asleep in our highest capacities.

Whether our ideals can survive depends- beyond all pessimism and optimism vested in automatic processes- on whether we can consciously take hold of the mechanisms around us and within us, and raise them into the service of what is most fully human because most fully awake. The first prerequisite is to recognize the severity of the challenge.

Still plowing through Errol Flynn's autobiography. It's good, even gripping, I juat don't have a lot of time lately.

Since I last wrote of it he has :

  1. frolicked with a farmers"s daughter and gotten chased off the land. That was probably good though because it was a sheep farmer and Flynn's job involved "dagging the hogget." Actually he didn't dag the hogget (I'll let you look that up), he was the next guy, meaning he took the sheep and bit off its testicles. Yes you read that correctly. Makes me sentimental for the pre -title reel of that Indian video linked by Kulak. Anyway look up dagging the hogget. It's a crazy world, folks. Nuts, really, and then you must apparently bite them off.

  2. continued running with the stolen jewels he stole, only to be himself relieved of them while in an unsuspecting drunken stupor.

  3. been involved in cockfights where he and his coeval poisoned the bird's beak so it would autowin. Got caught. Had to haul ass. Yes there is a pattern here.

  4. made it with a Japanese wife of a Swedish man on a boat while at sea, who eventually catches them. Running occurs At least one shot is fired, though where .the bullet ended up is anybody's guess.

  5. been eviscerated, almost, by an angry untipped rickshaw driver. I think this was India.

  6. been to many a whorehouse. Brothel, if you prefer. He speaks highly of brothels and the women who work in them.

I am now up to the chapter where I think he is about to start acting.

Will post again next week.

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