Think or Else...

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Individual Liberty is Absolute?

Insofar as they can be coherently summarized, Sade’s monstrous antiheroes’ ideas—constantly restated—are of a piece with such horrific broadsides. If one laid them side by side, their message would amount to this: individual liberty and autonomy are absolute; anything that interferes with the use of an object (including another human being) to satisfy one’s caprices, whatever they might be, is immoral; human impulses of all kinds, including theft, rape, and murder are the dictates of “nature,” and hence no law should forbid them; private property is an intolerable evil as it deprives others of that property’s use, thwarting their “natural inclinations”; religions, especially Christianity, are monstrous evils designed to justify the repression of individuals’ “natural rights”; atheism of the most iconoclastic variety is, therefore, the only defensible religious attitude; and the accumulation of power by elites should be constantly and violently resisted by bloodthirsty and “immoral” citizens eager to defend their individual prerogatives by smashing any social or political institution that might restrain them.

I couldn't stop laughing at this...

“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

Camus on Realism....

“Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.”
Albert Camus quotes (French Novelist, Essayist and Playwright, 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1913-1960)

The "Black Swan Robust" Society

Taleb advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events.

He proposes "antifragility" in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means option-like experimentation outperforms directed research.

Are They Deformed?

“And they are deformed though it does not show on the outside. I live only my dwarf life. I never go around tall and smooth-featured. I am ever myself, always the same, I live one life alone. I have no other being inside me. And I recognize everything within me, nothing ever comes up from my inner depths, nothing there is shrouded in mystery. Therefore I do not fear the things which frighten them, the incoherent, the unknown, the mysterious. Such things do not exist for me. There is nothing "different" about me.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Dwarf

Hell of a Party

Enter again Kirkegaard,Nietzsche,the staggering Rothko,well supported by one Rauschenberg ,ripe,ripped coloring through the in the door,mistook the watercloset for a ball room;which amused all but host.

Ardent wiggled in,escorted by Marx...the some drunken quips harled out by the Irish bards bounced tightly around the salon walls...what's a party without the lubricated Hibernian spouting off about wakes,and swimming birds.

Hell of a party tho.....

Malcolm Mclaren Tacoma Artist