As You Like It

Take it as you like it.

[asyoulikeitnow]

To err is human. To moo, bovine. To arr, buccanine. To bray, asinine.

[asyoulikeitnow]

Ask yourselves. What is it that corrupts the milk of human kindness? Turns the just and tender-hearted into vile, rapacious brutes? It is the single-minded pursuit of profit.

Kitty Despard in Poldark (S05E01)

[asyoulikeitnow]

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

[asyoulikeitnow]

Why Trump won

I’ve seldom seen anyone so succinctly identify what Trump’s appeal is to so many Americans. His niece summed up the fact that the Incontinent Autocrat hasn’t a single redeeming human value. Here Robert Lee White nails the fact that this is precisely why he won two elections and, the worse his rule the more his appeal to millions of Americans.

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and this second time in 2024 given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.

I no longer do. I actually think he won, for that precise reason. Because he had at least one f*cked-up part to mirror the f*cked-up parts of millions.

If you are a racist, you found your guy. If you are a misogynist, you found your guy. If all you care about is money, you found your guy. If you have an emotionally armored heart, you found your guy. If you make fun of disabled people, you found your guy. If you hate intelligent people, you found your guy. If you are a rapist, you found your guy. If you like golden showers with Russian sex-workers, you found your guy. If you have not done a stitch of work on your emotional issues, you found your guy. If you are a serial cheater, you found your guy. If you are a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy. If you don’t pay people for their honest work, you found your guy. If you are a hustler and a conman, you found your guy. If you mock people’s physical appearances, you found your guy. If you long for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy. If you are dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy. If you are unconscionable in all your economic dealings, you found your guy. If you lie day and night, you found your guy. If you have never eaten green vegetables, you found your guy. If you are a white supremacist, you found your guy. If you have a hole in your ego so big that not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy. If you are a sociopath, and care not one iota about other humans, you found your guy. If you...

If he only had two of these issues, he never would have won. It was the fact that he had hundreds of them, that made him the winner. Because millions of humans are toxic. So they could relate to him, in one form or another.

It's never been about trump. It's always been about the people who finally have their twisted feelings about others validated. Trump has given "those people" permission to disparage and hate their fellow human beings.

Trump is only symptomatic of a much larger issue of a collective toxicity. If there is a single sentence that characterizes trump it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”

That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?

Who knew that tens of millions men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power?

Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise.

Now we aren’t.

— Paul Eisenstein (Professor of English, Otterbein University)

[asyoulikeitnow]

"What are you bringing to the table?" I AM the table!

Leslie Jones on the Kelly Clarkson Show (YouTube short)

[asyoulikeitnow]

Women are like tea bags — they don’t know how strong they are until they’re in hot water.

Dr. Virginia Apgar, American physician and inventor of the Apgar score

[asyoulikeitnow]

Is AI art?

"Duchamp’s Fountain is not a urinal that functions as a urinal; it is art because it became an object of contemplation instead. Van der Velden wants to have her cake and eat it too: to claim that Tilly Norwood is a work of art while simultaneously marketing her/it as a tool." "To accept a claim about whether a particular kind of object counts as art is to accept an understanding of what the aims and purposes of art are or ought to be in our society. At a practical level, it is to suggest that public funds should support it, that scholarship should be written about it and, most importantly, that it should be made available to the public for contemplation. Artworks are simply those things that we, as a society, deem worthy of study and attention. Debates over whether an object counts as a work of art are really debates over what sorts of things are worthy of contemplation."

"The function of art in society should be to expose us to ourselves, to confront us, to reveal our depths. Things that are worth contemplating are things that help us do this work. Typically, the things that help us confront ourselves and that reveal our depths, as humans, are other humans’ expressions of their specific visions, thoughts and emotions. An artist makes art by expressing her or his specific interiority in some way, and encountering those expressions of interiority is how we see our own. As Paul Fleming, secretary of the UK actors and performers union Equity, has put it, Tilly Norwood is “fundamentally disconnected from the work of acting, the craft of acting, but also the soul of a human being”." "Evidence suggests that AI has already begun homogenising knowledge, and there is no indication that we shouldn’t expect it to have the same effect on creativity. Tilly Norwood is not a sign of the “democratisation of art” but of its homogenisation. The skills and techniques that AI makes superfluous are what shape the idiosyncrasies of each artist’s practice, and that idiosyncrasy is key to the strange specificity that gives artworks their force. Artists achieve the uniqueness of their visions through wrestling with the resistance they encounter from their materials and from their own limitations." "We do not believe Van der Velden appeals to “art” in her response because she really believes Tilly Norwood to be a work of art. If she did, she would have presented her as a unique artefact for contemplation rather than as the first in a new workforce for purposes of commerce. Rather, it seems her objective is not to defend the creation of synthetic performers as expressions of specific thoughts or emotions, but to bypass the moral responsibility demanded by critiques of her work."

Fantastic analysis by Lexi Eikelboom and Benjamin DeSpain in 'Why calling Tilly Norwood ‘a piece of art’ spectacularly misses the point' for ABC Religion & Ethics

[asyoulikeitnow]

Let's Dance Let’s dance to the music here playing, let go of the noise in our heads. For there’s nothing more worthy of dancing than our love of the dance itself. While we still have partners in waiting a heart that knows how to be led, let’s step out the steps that want stepping and warm to the heat of their tread. Wherever there’s no place for dancing life’s only a lockdown of dread it’s time to skip out of our sitting twist a shimmy, flip heel over head. Oh, let’s dance to the music here playing Let go of the noise in our heads. For there’s nothing more worthy of dancing than the dance of life dancing itself.

Orna Ross, Irish author

[asyoulikeitnow]

You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money Love like you’ll never get hurt You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watchin’ It’s gotta come from the heart if you want it to work.

“Come from the Heart” (1987), composed by the songwriters Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh

[asyoulikeitnow]

Ithell Colquhoun - Alcove I (1946)

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

[asyoulikeitnow]

We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect: it shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it.

Jackson Katz, Ph.D., from his TED Talk “Violence Against Women: It’s a Men’s Issue”

[asyoulikeitnow]

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (26 Mar 1905-1997)

Source: Wordsmith

[itscolossal]

Technology and Nature Merge in Zachary Corzine’s Otherworldly ‘Faux Flora’

[asyoulikeitnow]

Businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

[asyoulikeitnow]

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. The hand that whirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime. The lips of time leech to the fountain head; Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars. And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

[asyoulikeitnow]

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference/relations between things. (Je ne peins pas les choses, je ne peins que les rapports entre les choses.)

Henri Matisse