Just had to unsubscribe from a friend who was going heavy on the "Proud to be a Christian" spam. The final straw: an image of someone typing "Jesus Christ" into a search engine and getting the error message "no replacement found."
Is the same heebie Facebook friend who wrote the sky's the limit comment?
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My goodness h-g gives me an opening to troll, with total maxed out pretension, but possibly on-topic and tone, in a Bloomsday mode:
"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. ...'I will pass it time after time... It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany... Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised... After the analysis which discovers the second quality [symmetry, following wholeness] the mind makes the only possible synthesis and discovers the third quality [claritas or radiance]. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." (JAJ, Stephen Hero)ca 1910?
and
What is at stake here is the "this" in "this I" and not the consciousness, I. Therefore, instead of saying that "this I" has been omitted from the philosophical discourse, one could put it in another way"that "this thing" has been omitted from from the philosophical discourse. For instance, when I say "this dog," it does not indicate a particular one among the genus Canis (in general). The "this"-ness of this dog named Taro has nothing to do with its features and characteristics. It is simply "this dog."I will call the "this"-ness of "this I" or "this dog" singularity, to distinguish it from particularity. Singularity, as explained later, does not mean that a thing is only one. Singularity, as opposed to particularity--that is, an individuality seen from a position of generality--is an individuality no longer able to belong to the realm of generality. We must distinguish (1) "I am" from (2) "this I am": the "I" in (1) is one (a particular) of the I's in general, pertinent to any one of the I's, but the "I" in (2) is singular, irreplaceable by any other I. Of course, it does not mean in the least that "this I" is too special to be replaced. Therefore, "this I" or "this dog," even without any special characteristics, is still singular (Koji Karatani, Researches II 1989)
Happy Bloomsday
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I just saw "Oslo, August 31st," which is a great movie. (If you like movies about existential angst.) Much, much, much better than that Fassbender-as-sex-addict movie, "Shame."
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"no replacement found."
Is this some common search engine error message that I am not aware of?
Recently I've been contemplating coupling lines from Wittgenstein's Tractatus with random maudlin images and posting them to facebook.
Heraclitus might work well, too, but I've never gotten around to it.
Heh. Funny, I ended up chatting with a Mr. Trapnel for a decent amount of time last night. Especially after what we went to hear, nobody wants to talk about gluey rubber. Still, nice to find a kindred spirit of sorts.
I could go on about the economics of seats at bars and comparative advantage, but I won't work in a joke about quantitative easing. I have my standards.
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We watched the Joan Rivers documentary tonight. I love her. But holy shit is she an insecure workaholic.
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9: I saw that documentary in the theater 2 years ago. It really looked like her career was petering out. This was shortly before "Fashion Police".
As for annoying Facebook people I have one friend whose every post is about dogs. Several posts a day. Usually links to something about dogs, but also a lot of her own pictures and the occasional post. Mostly celebrating dogs or announcing that some dog needs a home. Then every day or two, a link to something about how pit bulls, or german shepherds, or dogs in general, are victims of all these negative stereotypes but are actually really nice and sweet.
Now taken independently all these messages are good but after a little while you look like a crazy person, except to your fellow dog obsessives, among whom there is bound to be someone who posts even more dog stuff than you do.
No one posts less dog stuff on Facebook than I do.
I once made a joke about the best wine to serve with pug on somebody's facebook status about supporting the humane society. She deleted my comment but didn't unfriend me. I apologized but not all that profusely.
It would be a red, certainly, but were you leaning more Burgundy than Bordeaux? Because that would totally be worth unfriending over.
2: Did you unsubscribe or unfriend? If the former, how do you do it?
I think you click on the X in the top-right corner of any given update from that person; then it gives you a menu of options.
Err, it's actually not an X, it's an upside-down ^. But otherwise, yeah.
Last mothers day, a friend posted the following: "My perspective on life for this Mother's Day has been greatly changed for the better by finding out friends from college lost their baby girl this morning. You can bet I rocked [her own infant's name] extra this evening. ;)"
Yes, that's a wink smiley on the end. I had never known her to be such a despicable person before. I unsubscribed from her immediately, but then I just quit fb altogether a few days later.
You sure it wasn't just a typo? I find it hard to believe that she's relishing someone else's pain; seems more likely that she was just trying to 'smile' about her own love for her daughter.
19: Would it really be better with a normal smiley?
I don't think she's actively relishing someone's pain. What bothered me is the solipsism. Some 'friends' of her's baby dies, the corpse isn't even in the ground yet, and she's going on fb to talk about how it's given her such a better perspective on life. Put it this way, imagine reading that as the bereaved couple...
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5,9:Movies!
Imamura's Insect Woman 1963, classic
Toyoda's Blue Spring 2001, gorgeously stylish Teenage Wasteland movie with terrific soundtrack
And Ogata's The Milkwoman 2005. Better translation Sometimes I Stay Home and Read
Titular character is 50ish, delivers milk door-to-door pre-dawn in Nagasaki, supermarket checker during the day, lives alone in an apartment with walls of books. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy type.
Meanwhile, there is a 50ish schlub who is caretaking his wife in a final stages of a terminal illness and works as a low-level bureaucrat in Child Protective Services.
These two dated in HS, but a tragedy not their fault separated them, and they have been carrying a torch for 30+ years.
What is interesting is the characters and viewers tendency to alternate foregrounding the frustrated romance and the way these two have been thanklessly watching and caregiving their community...
Oh never mind. No overeducated urban hipsters seeking hott sex or horrible racist oppression or girls shooting lasers from their eyes. Just lots of the scenes of people working that Moby hates so much.
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20: It seems like a really normal reaction to me - ie, one I see pretty much any time someone dies. Cherish the mom that you have, cherish the husband that you have, etc. I think I'm missing what makes it so horrible in your eyes - I originally thought it was the emoticon, but is it that she put it on Facebook at all? It's tacky, but I don't really see it as despicable. But anyway, I don't know the person and if it offended you, it offended you.
22: Yes, being grateful that your loved ones are still alive just after another's have died is a normal reaction. But a critical facet of this situation that I think you're missing is that one should keep those feelings to one's self, or at a bare minimum don't express them in the same community as the bereaved!
18: Is it possible that she meant her friends' girl got lost? And forgot to say she was later found or something? Otherwise, yeah, that's fucking disgusting.
I've avoided Facebook and still don't really get the appeal.
From here and elsewhere, including RL friends who are active on fb, it sounds like a big part of the Facebook experience is discovering that people who seem perfectly reasonable in face to face interactions are in fact wingnuts, fanatics or jerks somehow or other.
24: No, subsequent comments on that post made clear that the baby had died.
21.last: For the record, I'm not big on watching movies with hipsters or people being oppressed or superheros. My favorite movie is about how a small group of people coped with the potentially legal effects of a corporate food service's gross negligence.
23: What I'm missing is the sense of outrage that someone would say this. Clearly I'm wrong about the community/social norms, but it just feels like one of the stupid things people say about death (a time when people are rarely known for offering up the exact perfect sentiment). I understand that it's different coming from the bereaved, but I know I've even seen (to keep this in the same medium) Facebook updates that have said, in rough paraphrase: "For those of you who don't know, we lost my mom this week. Be sure to give your mother an extra hug for me this week."
(You know that bedbug thread from the other week? I feel like commenting on Unfogged at all for me is problematic, as perfectly illustrated by this thread. I genuinely didn't know this was a rude reaction (granted, I wouldn't post it on Facebook, but that's something different) and am now worrying that I've expressed something similar and have people who've labelled me as 'despicable' for it. (Actually, I know I've said something similar when pets have died, but pets are not people, so maybe it's less rude.))
28: fwiw, social media seems to confuse people sometimes, in that it's a place where people are sometimes simultaneously expressing private, inner thoughts, and talking to hundreds or thousands of people. So perhaps I should have chalked that status update up to this and let it slide. "Despicable" in this case was probably too strong. Rather, it was just completely thoughtless and self-absorbed.
@28
It sounds like it was the smarmy, self-congratulatory tone of the fb post that offended, rather than the sentiments themselves.
23:Me neither. Who knows what evils lurk in the hearts of superficially decent people? I sure don't, but is essential to find out! Essential!
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To manipulate the reader emotionally? And if so, isn't it somewhat suspect as a narrative tactic? In the name of recovering the agency of ordinary people, we deploy their suffering to give the Great Story more poignancy.
Comment:"Why has the journal of a young girl who died before her 16th birthday been read by so many?"
1) Anne Frank didn't fucking die for our sins, she was not a sacrifice so we can be better, and we shouldn't abuse her by making her one. The appeal of the diary is exactly its ahistoricity.
2)Scalzi? Skin of Our Teeth, The River Fuefuki, countless, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for gawd's sake. Not new.
3) Narrative objectifies and dehumanizes. See #21 above. The tendency while watching the woman making change or the guy going thru the laborious process of an intervention and removal is to be impatient for the Grand Romance to come back. The point is that the Grand Romance is not the point.
4) The Karatani book at #4 is titled Architecture as Metaphor. Fun with deconstruction. The architectonic will, poesis and techne, the will to structure build make, from Plato to Hegel & Marx and beyond is the origin of oppression, othering, and unconscienceness.
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Interacting with people through facebook can make them seem worse, but it can also make them seem better. A type I see a lot is the person who is too dorky and pretentious to deal with in real life but comes across as funny and insightful in the small doses of facebook updates.
Also, you don't have to deal with annoying personal mannerisms.
I like FB: useful to keep up with the daughter and a fairly wide circle of folks. Not sure I've been shocked by anything so much as our Flip posting a cat video. It would be easy to blame Lunchy, I suppose, but she's not taking him anywhere he doesn't already know how to go. (As the sage put it).
I dunno -- using a recently dead baby as fodder for a life lesson about how you ought to love your baby (you knew that already) in front of the parents of the dead baby is pretty thoughtless, even if the sentiment is fairly anodyne when expressed by the bereaved themselves about, say, elderly parents.
Yes, I get it now, and I always thought it was thoughtless, just not worthy of writing someone off for. And now I'll stop digging a hole that I don't want to dig.
I think a lot of people post on FB without giving much thought to the full extent of the audience, thinking of some little subset of their friends and neglecting to think of those outside the subset.
Also I completely relate to Parenthetical's 28.last
35: I wouldn't write them off either (although if I were the bereaved parents? maybe). I would be thinking, "Come on, myopic FB narcissist! Get a clue!" But I am thinking that a lot.
I decline to post on FB more often than twice a year because I'm too aware of the full extent of the audience. This may be a problem in the opposite direction.
I decline to have a FB account at all for the same reason (among others). This is probably a crazy over-reaction, as I've no reason to suppose anybody would friend me if I did - none of my real life friends have any interest in social media.
6: Nope. No it is not. Par for the course.
In a way, even more than the religiosity or the smarmy self-satisfaction, I think it's the steady accretion of such moments of cluelessness that makes this kind of Christian glurge so awful.
15: The former. There's a drop down menu on the upper right of items in the FB feed that gives you subscription options for the person in question.
Anne Frank didn't fucking die for our sins
Of course not. That was Custer.
39: Old friends and casual acquaintances come crawling out of the woodwork when you get a Facebook account, and new ones present themselves for inclusion. It's somewhat surreal, and makes posting there an entirely other enterprise from interacting with your current real life friends. It always strikes me as an exercise in never letting go, but that is quite possibly just me.
Old friends and casual acquaintances come crawling out of the woodwork
You terrify me.
In a way, even more than the religiosity or the smarmy self-satisfaction, I think it's the steady accretion of such moments of cluelessness that makes this kind of Christian glurge so awful.
Speaking of which, I watched 5 minutes of Sarah Palin's keynote address to the RightOnline gathering this week: oh wow. So demented, walking through every recent wingnut meme out there, from the notion that the mainstream media wasn't willing to properly vet Obama (nobody even bothered to read his own books, which clearly show his Kenyan anticolonialist something something, and apparently they thought it was fine to eat dogs even though they went after her for eating moose, but c'mon, do you have a pet moose? I didn't think so, and anyway, I guess they didn't have enough money to vet him since they spent it all in Wasilla checking up on what Bristol ate for lunch, haha) ... to very heavy Breitbartian themes on how there are only one or two truly honest investigative journalists out there, the brave ones like Andrew, in whose steps we will not fail to follow.
This was just the five minute section on the media, I assume; no idea what else she said. I grant, though, that in those five minutes there was no word salad, so she's upped her game.
It's somewhat surreal, and makes posting there an entirely other enterprise from interacting with your current real life friends.
I dunno. I've been told I'm the same me in cyberspace as I am in meatspace, and most of my current real-life friends are also wandering around Facebook and the rest of the net. There are no major emotions attached to any of this.
She's always been able to say sentences when they are written out for her. It's when she doesn't have a script that the idiocy manifests fully.
Somebody from my hometown was murdered a few days ago. Poor woman has three small kids. As far as I can see (I'm not friends with any immediate family), nobody has been stupid about it on Facebook unless you count the Facebook-based comments on news stories.
33: Biohazard posted that video! I just shared it with her because it reminded me of her stories about the two cats who live next door.
Don't judge me.
48: Neither I nor my cats live next door to Ms. Lunchy.
46: Yes. I think I've mentioned it here before, but one of the more surreal episodes for me during the 2008 campaign was some TV panel where the talking heads all sat around in bafflement that after the dynamite convention speech* she was so incoherent. Then they talked about how surprisingly bad Dustin Hoffman was at counting toothpicks and Daniel Day-Lewis at shooting long rifles.
*It was later reported that the speech was already almost completely written for generic VP candidate before she was chosen. A few touches got added like the mayor/community activist line.
50: The DE worked on things involving the actor who played Lel/and McK/enzie on L.A. Law. During meetings there would be pauses as the real lawyers realized yet again he hadn't understood what they were talking about.
Speaking of the Palins, this is a pretty funny review of Bristol's new reality show.
51: This makes him different from a typical senior partner how?
It's really amazing that anyone is interested enough in that young woman that people would invest real money in a show.
Then again, we've started watching the Borgias -- or were watching until we started housesitting where there's no internet -- so I guess you can get people to watch just about anything.
Richly deserved cat noises. I can think of very few senior partners that would actually have been true of. Not none, but few.
"Hell of an act you got there, what do you call yourselves?"
"The Senior Partners."
I wouldn't be surprised if Daniel Day-Lewis had worked hard enough to become a pretty fair shot with a flintlock rifle.
I have a 4th cousin who teaches neolithic camping, and took DDL and Wes Studi out for a bit before LOTM. North Alabama. I don't know if they used flintlocks, but I think they killed a squirrel with a blowgun and cooked it up seasoned with local leaves.
My principal thought after seeing the five minutes of Palin's speech to RightOnline was: really? is the entirety of the right blogosphere on board with this stuff?
I know there's Breitbart 2.0, and there's RedState and the other ones (PowerLine? never looked at it) ... but aren't there all sorts of other, less batty rightwing blogs filled with halfway decent writers with half a brain? Even National Review isn't quite that nuts, though I suppose NRO is.
I guess I was surprised that she was so Breitbart.
58: Sure, but if I need to be shot from a distance with one because I'm about to be burned alive, I'll go with someone a bit more accomplished.
60: RedState is the less batty option.
My favorite movie is about how a small group of people coped with the potentially legal effects of a corporate food service's gross negligence.
"Soylent Green", right?
63: You know, you're right. (I'd wanted to avoid being glib, but managed to be so anyway.) People make fun of Erick Erickson, but in fact the handful of his posts I've seen excerpted aren't necessarily bone-headed, and show some degree of independent thinking. I'm now wondering what the RedState reviews of Palin's speech -- if any -- might be. I may even follow up on that passing curiosity: the future of the rightwing blogosphere is at stake!
66: I first read your comment out of context, Parsi, without having read 63, and thought "What does she have against psychoanalysis?"
Further to 66: I actually looked, at RedState, for any mention of the recent RightOnline confab or Palin's keynote address. I find nada. Maybe it's there and I didn't see it. Erickson does announce with some enthusiasm one "FreedomFest 2012", also happening in Las Vegas, but that's in July. I'm a little puzzled, actually: did the RedState people not go, or not report on it? Was it a seekrit, the kind of thing you keep under your belt? Yet there are mentions of the 2011 and 2010 RightOnline gatherings.
(/end ineffectual spying mission)