/lit/ - Literature

>>4190604
>>4190607
These to gents are correct. Rationality has no place on /lit/. Common sense is for fools and plebeians.

>>4190589
I'm conflicted about this.

On the one hand I dislike homosexuals very much. What they practice is sinful behavior.

But on the other hand, when in comes to younger gentlemen, I don't see how giving them the hairy banana is bad.

>>4190570
>Gilles Des Rais

Was he the guy who had a 'thing' for little boys? Sounds like my kind of guy :)

>>4190586
But that's untrue. Philosophy of religion is just as valid if not more so than science. Spaceships and technology don't exist, because the mathematics which is needed to construct them is based on axioms which cannot be proven.

But here's why religion is a more accurate interpretation of the world: religion sets the bar very low, all you need is faith; therefore it is better; science on the other hand, because we can't meet its demands, fails as an explicator of the world.

Source: Rigorous training in logic and an IQ of 204.05
Any questions?

>>4016073
>>4016063

Read the Nabokov-Wilson correspondence, wherein he justifies in detail his detestation of Faulkner's work. Actually,

>I have carefully read Faulkner's Light in August, which you so kindly sent me, and it has in no way altered the low (to put it mildly) opinion I have of his work and other (innumerable) books in the same strain. I detest these puffs of stale romanticism, coming all the way up from Marlinksy and V. Hugo - you remember the latter’s horrible combination of starkness and hyperbole - l’homme regardait le giblet, le giblet regardait l’homme.

Faulkner’s beloved romanticism and quite impossible biblical rumblings and “starkness” (which is not starkness at all but skeletonized triteness), and all the rest of the bombast seem to me so offensive that I can only explain his popularity in France by the fact that all her own popular writers (Malraux included) of recent years have also had their fling at l’homme marchait, la nuit etait sombre. The book you sent me is one of the tritest and most tedious examples of a trite and tedious genre. The plot and those extravagant “deep” conversations affect me as bad movies do, or the worst plays and stories of Lenid Adreyev, with whom Faulkner has a kind of fatal affinity.

I imagine that this kind of thing (white trash, velvety Negroes, those bloodhounds out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin melodramas, steadily baying through thousands of swampy books) may be necessary in a social sense, but it is not literature, just as the thousands of stories and novels about downtrodden peasants and fierce ispravniki in Russia, or mystical adventures with the narod (1850-1880), although socially effective and ethically admirable, were not literature. I simply cannot believe that you, with all your knowledge and taste, are not made to squirm by such things as the dialogues between the “positive” characters in Faulkner (and especially those absolutely ghastly italics). Do you not see that despite the difference in landscape, etc., it is essentially Jean Valjean stealing the candlesticks from the good man of God all over again? The villain is definitely Byronic. The book’s pseudo-religious rhythm I simply cannot stand - a phoney gloom which also spoils Mauriac’s work. Has la grace descended upon Faulkner too? Maybe you are just pulling my leg when you advise me to read him, or impotent Henry James or Rev. Eliot?

Also, T.S. Eliot anagrams to toilets

>>4012193
Harris can actually stir one's intellectual waters pretty well. Plus, he can effortlessly piss off mussulmans. Krauss, though an accomplished physicist, is a terrible debater. Hitchens is still the best way to go if the whole atheist thing inflames your loins.

>>4012092
HAHAHAHA
By ignoring the Word of the One True God you are partaking of mental masochism. God is the filter through which Truth is glimpsed.

>>4012095
Don't be so angry. That you can't comprehend the beauty and thus the truth of the One True Church is your problem. I'll pray for you to find your way.

>>4012137
I will. Enjoy getting crunched between Satan's sooty buttocks.

>>4012086
Just stick the D in the V, that's all there is to it. Remember to get married first, though. O to drown one's P in the wet of the V! About a notch below experiencing Heaven.

>>4012017
You haven't read Winnipeg Lake? While it's definitely a weaker exhibition of Joyce's genius, it is nevertheless one of the gems of Western literature. Read, read, redread the tread of the Irish titan in Finnegans Wake, for the Sake of the omnilingual Puns at Stake.

>>4012020
You're an anti-intellectual. The Word of God is imperishable; it will withstand all the verbal arrows you shoot at it because, unlike science, it is made true by the salubrious juices of faith.

>>4012059
God is perfectly benevolent.

>>4012040
All agnostics are just atheists without cojones.

>>4012066
Mine, but you'll never read it.

>>4006381
A superbly accomplished sophist who asked all the right questions and provided all the wrong answers.

>>4006298
You nasty Freudian goblins will never scratch, let alone pierce, my luminous armor of adamant faith. I roll with the force of an insoluble problem.

>>4006299
It depends what kind of prayer you mean.

If you mean the various kinds of devotional prayers, such as the Ave Maria, then yes. But that's because they are uttered not as a vulgar request for God to aid you in your search for your car keys etc. but in order to affirm your devotion to The Father.

I do not presume for myself the boundless imagination necessary to understand the mind of God, but I do know that he listens. What must be understood, however, is that a prayer is a gesture, noble though it may be. You can pray for strength and aid, but ultimately, if the creature of Earth doesn't act in the matters of Earth (saving someone, giving aid, etc.), but instead asks God to perform his good deeds for him, then it's a hollow act, made all the more gross by the idleness of the praying one (the prayerer, if you will).

>>4006247
What? I've never done such a thing. I'm unique like a Buckley-shaped cloud formation. If free will didn't exist, then the choice to accept God's warm and infinite love would be meaningless.

>Wallace is greatly gifted, but he has a curious kind of autism.

-James Wood on DFW

>>4006198
Yes, but it's implied heavily.

>>4006155
>>4006157
I tip my 5 dollar replica miter to both of you for destroying this pig-faced atheist piece of moose shit.

Emerging from his black pit, his sooty buttocks tightened, he took a mastodonic shit. Though most of the turd had come out properly and now lay on the ground steaming, his ass, as always, felt wet and uncomfortable with excremental debris. He slid two of his fingers through his asscrack, and then smelt them. He didn't like it. He farted in disgust.

Failing to locate any toilet paper, he scooped up a handful of sinners from one of the thousands of bubbling cauldrons, all red and fury. He wedged the sinners between his buttocks, and then smacked them together. ''Eat it!'' he commanded. He felt the wretched little creatures burrow in his ass, sucking his asshairs dry of shit. The buttocks, gleaming like fine metal in the glow of the sputtering fires, rhythmically slapped together; he heard the puny skulls crack. One maggot popped out, its face grotesque and collapsed. ''Thank you, Master,'' he said. ''Thank you for feeding me.''

When he felt his ass to be sufficiently clean, he ingested them. Then Satan resumed his gloomy song, dancing triumphantly across the wasteland of Hell in a spray of gray dust. ''Dinner time!'' He ejected all the sinners inside of him from his penis onto a large frying pan, where they would sizzle and moan for eternity (for Satan was never hungry, thus making it, in effect, a ruse, giving the sinners hope that they would one day be cooked enough to escape the pan). And Satan would rise from his lair every day, exclaiming jubilantly: ''Another day, another shit!''

>>3948078
My God, truly these dwellings have been built by the Lord himself.

>>3948027
He was right about the Iraq War, though wrong about religion. hrhrhrhr

>>3948014
>Is it good now that the glorious crusaders of Western Freedom have "liberated" Iraq...

Well, it's certainly an upgrade. And not many are saying that war has solved all problems in Iraq; they simply recognize that it was a necessary step towards beginning the process of amelioration there. What you're saying is that because Iraq still has problems (largely caused by Islamic fundamentalists who wish to emancipate Iraq from the oh so oppressive shackles of democracy) therefore a reversion back to Saddam's regime or an equally terrible rule would be better. Why not keep moving forward? (Which is the only direction that can be taken anyway.)

Have some faith in the secular forces of Iraq, man. Be sanguine, believe.

>>3947716
Bravo, you managed to string a whole sentence together! Love you too, btw.

>>3947820
>Actually yes...

Invoking an ominous 'business elite' doesn't automatically validate your argument. You're going to need to show some proof that the 'Businessmen' were ventriloquizing Truman.
''Dictate their terms''? The Yalta agreement remained in force. The country which most trampled the Yalta agreement was the Soviet Union, who, for example, promised to allow free elections in Poland but never made good on this promise. If you wanna see Imperialism in action, look at the countries annexed by the Soviet Union and the state of affairs in their portion of Germany. Your fairytales about US imperialism would immediately gain the status of nonfiction if you were to apply them to the Soviet Union.

>Like all Capitalist nations they are motivated by the same reasons.

Human nature? Greed, the hunger for power, etc.? And in what way are these constants of humanity suspended in the case of your favorite countries, presumably the Empire of the Soviet Union being one of them since they hated us? The difference is, in the West these malevolent impulses seem to be more balanced out and tempered by benevolent impulses.

>the US controls most of the world

If by 'controls' you mean influences then sure. I mean: 'Golly gee! one of the superpowers of the world has more power than the rest of the world! I am le shocked!' And thank God it does, at least it has sounder principles than, say, Russia, which simply can't abstain from buggering the peaceful countries next to it. Or do you operate on the idiotic and masochistic principle that anything is better than the West?

>Yes.

Well, at least you're consistent in your hatred of the West to the point that you're willing to let thousands of people get butchered.

>The US caused more suffering and death in the region than Saddam ever could have achieved...

Saddam attempted genocide several times on the Kurdish people; he set afire many acres of ground with oil, an act which UNESCO called one of the worst catastrophes for a long time; Iraq was Saddam's personal abattoir and torture-chamber. The gory reign of Saddam would have extended to his psychopathic sons and continued for a longer time still. The US and many other aiding countries emancipated it (which is at least something). And I'm gonna take the words and deeds of the Iraqi people, especially the finally somewhat safer Kurds, over yours any day, thank you.


>As Chomsky says...democracy means "Country ruled by Business elite friendly to the United States"
>The only reason the Iraq isn't a complete puppet state is that they threw the US to the curb and sided with Iran.

But Iraq is a democracy. So Chomsky's jejune definition of democracy is wrong. And the USA along with other democratic nations seems to be doing much better than farcical dictatorships like North Korea, which I assume isn't molested by the business elite.

>>3947559
>You can trace all US actions to that of the businessmen behind the Senators

So the bombing of Dresden was motivated by the desires of businessmen, for example? And how exactly are the motivations of the USA any more black, or, put another way, what makes you think that the EU, not to mention Saudi-Arabia or Iran and such countries, is animated by more noble and pure reasons? Do you also think the non-intervention in Rwanda was a wise decision because to have done so would've meant imposing our supposed colonialism upon them?

And as regards your point about neo-colonialism: I'm sorry, but the US hasn't erected an extension of its own government in Iraq, for example. It gave the people of Iraq the possibility of a free democratic election, which yielded a Kurdish president. Now if you consider this to be more imperialistic than islamic extremists striving to create a new caliphate, then I leave you with that fantasy.

>What the US does is not for "peace", the US indiscriminately murders for neo-colonial reasons. That is it.

I suppose you could say that Iraq was peaceful until the US disrupted its stability. But oh what a grim and gory stability it was!

If you wish to quarrel with the war tactics of the US, then do so by invoking specific examples, rather than denouncing all things USA and the advertised goals of its wars. Don't confuse deviations from a principle for the principle itself.

>>3942651
Jesus loves you and I do too. I pray that one day you'll get over your irrational anger.

>>3942666
Nice devil trips.

>>3942618
>>3942594
Oh look the crybaby squad has arrived.

>>3941129
Hans Todtspärm.

>>3940532
I know I'm late, but still.

>And a lot of good that does. Pic related.

The supreme court has ruled these requirements null and void.

>Freedom of Speech. Purely in theory.

No, you are not living in a theocracy because Bush gave up booze for Jesus, le edgeman, nor are you a brave freedom fighter because you defy your mother's admonition to speak with more sophistication. The only damnation received for the ventilation of unpopular opinions is from other people, i.e. social condemnation, not from the law. The tyranny of the majority can suffocate the impulse to exercise freedom of speech but not it cannot do so legally. Put differently, in America you have only the opinions and rare illegal violent acts of other civilians to worry about in response to your opinions, not the vicious mace of the government.

>the 2nd amendment

Scared child detected. Go cry yourself to sleep in your pajamas.

>Consuming fast food, materialism, and celebrity worship. America has some of the worst ideals in the world.

Oh for God's sake, man! That you haven't acquainted yourself with the cultural gems and vibrant history of America isn't my problem. You're a myopic little goblin who probably thinks France is composed of baguette-gobbling cowards who have sex with each other 24/7 and Germany of sexually aberrant Nazis who prefer cucumbers over phalli. Someone should've told you this long ago, but Team America wasn't a documentary movie and caricatures aren't accurate representations of whole nations. But please, remain ignorant.

>Second only to the majority of European countries.

You would've had a better case if you had tried India, one of the other nominees for a truly multicultural society, though as of now still suffering much more acutely from it than America.

>>3940606
Try me. I was born ready, degenerate.

>>3942498
He's a homosexual, otherwise he's okay. He was breddy gud in the Jeeves and Wooster series.

>>3942510
Thread quality does tend to diminish dramatically whenever you enter them.

>>3942342
Science is the maturation of Natural Philosophy into a more confident method of comprehending the physical world and its phenomena. The mutation of a particular branch of philosophy into science can be compared to the growth of chemistry from alchemy, where there also occurred a gradual abandonment of superstitions.

Science is different from, say, metaphysics which deals necessarily only in abstract theories; these may clash, but they resolve on a purely abstract level, whereas scientific theories get shattered or validated empirically.