That Shrieking Sound is Just Me Laughing

I fuss.

[daddynietzsche]

throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up

then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’

[annabellioncourt]

there are some posts that sound utterly made up for the joke or for the notes, but this one I whole heartedly believe 

[kurloz38]

Sounds right to me…

[jadagul]

That quote is amazing to me in that it’s quoted completely accurately and yet in a way that means something completely different from what it meant in context.

(Sartre was claiming that Hell was other people. He was not claiming that other people were hell.)

[sigmaleph]

…I can’t actually tell what distinction you’re drawing there. Can you expand?

[jadagul]

The line comes from No Exit, which is set in Hell. Spoilers for No Exit follow

In particular, three people who have been condemned to hell are trapped eternally in a room together. And at first they think they got off easy without any pitchforks or fiery lakes or anything. But over the course of the play they discover that they have been chosen very specifically to have neuroses and character flaws that interact with and torment each other.

Each one needs the approval of a second in an unstable RPS cycle so that any time one of them might be satisfied by a second, the third swoops in and ruins it.

And when they figure this out, one of the characters expresses his understanding, that hell isn’t physical torture. “Hell is just—other people.”

So the point isn’t that other people, generically, are hellish; it’s rather that you can build a hell out of other people.

But when I hear people quote it, it’s usually sort of an introvert-pride thing. “Other people are hell; you should spend time alone.” And that’s not the point at all. It’s a statement about how bad unhealthy relationships can be, not a statement about how all relationships are unhealthy!

See also Sartre’s own comment here:

“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.

[diapordias-deactivated20180627]

Reblogging for the original post which was hilarious and also for that explanation which is beautiful

[montereybayaquarium]

The Pacific Ocean is wider than the Moon. Anyway how’s your day going?

[noxfauna]

dip moon like cookie

[friendly-neighborhood-patriarch]

[katsdisturbed]

Stuff like this is why I am still on this site.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 14 February 1779, British coloniser captain James Cook was killed by a Native Hawaiian by being stabbed in the neck as he tried to kidnap a local leader. Cook became famous in particular for assisting the British invasion of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia. Within two hours of his crew’s arrival in Aotearoa in 1769, they had shot and killed a Māori man called Te Maro. Over the next few days at least eight more Ngati Oneone hapu and Rongowhakaata iwi people were killed. In 1770, after Cook’s arrival in Australia, his men shot two Aboriginal Gweagal people. In Hawaii, on February 14, news of Cook and his marines killing a local chief caused an angry crowd of several hundred Indigenous people to gather. Cook was also attempting to kidnap the Hawaiian aliʻi nui (hereditary ruler), Kalaniʻōpuʻu. Some of the crowd gathered stones and spears, at which point Cook fired at the crowd, killing one. Rather than run in fear, as the colonisers anticipated, the local people began throwing stones at the marines, and a man called Kanaʻina hit Cook on the head with a club. Cook was then stabbed and killed, and which point a full-scale battle broke out, forcing the marines to retreat. By the end of the fight, several locals had been killed as well as four British soldiers. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1921076491410825/?type=3

[classically-lit-memes4u]

I hate it when I talk wistfully about the ancient world and then people are like “you wouldn’t survive back then” yeah obviously I would die immediately but do you think achilles would be able to survive in the modern world if he had to send one polite email? no

[classically-lit-memes4u]

congrats to these people on being funnier than me on my own fucking post

[liberalsarecool]

The racism of gun owners. #2A

[blue--folder]

[academic-ana]

“As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!”

— Jonathan Marks - Anthropology and the Bell Curve (via leofarto)

[lierdumoa]

I was reading an interesting article years ago about collective memory. There have been a lot of thinkpieces over the years about how humans are getting lazier and worse at remembering things thanks to technology. There’s a tendency, particularly in the western world, to behave as if memorization was all people did prior to the internet. 

But outside of artificial school test-taking environments, human beings have always relied on the collective memory of their close peers to keep track of information. Anyone who’s ever worked clothing retail knows that no single employee has the location of every item in the store memorized, but as long as you have enough people working the floor, nobody will ever have to waste time searching for an item because at least one employee is bound to remember which rack it’s on.

TL&DR - brains were never designed to function in isolation. 

Testing the intelligence of an individual in an isolation is never going to give you an accurate idea of a person’s true intellectual potential.

TL&DR TL&DR

Two (or more) heads is better than one.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

My maternal grandfather was a math professor at the City University of New York. He died before I was born, but he passed a key bit of wisdom to my mother, and she passed it on to me:

The important thing is not knowing the answer, it’s knowing how to find the answer.

It our era of text and alphabets, that’s often knowing how to look something up. But for most of human existence, there were no alphabets. So knowing how to find the answer meant finding the person who knew the answer.

All human knowledge is cooperative.

[everythingfox]

Who needs a wool bed when you have a sheep

(via)

[analytictsar]

reaching the discourse stage where people are getting performative about calling things performative

[mochisquish]

Every year, I demand to know why Groundhog Day isn’t more celebrated on the internet. It’s the perfect absurdist holiday. There’s a big, round, adorable animal. He’s a prophet. Some guy in an old-timey top hat claims to be able to speak to the groundhog. Does he understand the animal’s language? Is it through telepathy? It’s a secret we are not allowed to know. People come from miles to worship the groundhog and learn the fate of the weather, which doesn’t even matter anymore with science and weathermen. The groundhog makes his prediction. He’s wrong 70% of the time, but we keep asking him. We are not interested in learning anything from our blind trust in a giant rat.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I want slower packages delivered by transportation workers who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

[theparadigmshifts]

@mortuarybees​: #i think its deeply important for all of us to come to terms with the fact that its actually fine to be mildly inconvenienced

[lotrlocked]

Some of us are old enough to remember when literally everything took about 4 weeks to ship.

My couch is arriving in 4 weeks and company gave us a $200 gift card in apology after telling us it would take 4 weeks when we bought the thing. I-this instant gratification is really doing something to us. I know I sound like a grumpy old woman but it is ok to wait for things if it means fellow human beings are treated fairly.

[pyresrpgear]

I remember the days of “4-6 weeks for delivery”. Those were the days when, if you were ordering something like that, you could easily start xmas shopping in August just to make sure it got there in time.

[korrasera]

Also, when people talk about this, we always frame the discussion in how people need to get used to not having things instantly, that this is a problem of instant gratification.

It's not.

It's a problem of capitalism. What happened first is that someone decided to see if they could out compete the competition at delivering a package to you faster than the other guy.

People are very good at specializing to solve problems. In this case, when it became clear that delivering things faster would increase potential profits, people started specializing to deliver things instantly. And then we all got used to having things delivered all the time. Even if I don't like to do it, I'm used to the feeling of knowing I can order something to be delivered and it'll be here very quickly..

Like, no doubt it'll be a switch to change from that, because I grew up after the old ways had already long since started dying, but this is a problem that was created by our economic system and the people who really benefit from it, and that's not most of us. That's capital.

I'm with the OP. I want slower packages delivered by transportation workers who are paid more to do less. Because right now I get packages delivered instantly by transportation workers who are paid almost nothing and are expected to work so hard that they're expected to get killed making profit for someone who is already rich beyond comprehension.

[justonepurpose]

The other day, we had a tornado watch. An actual touchdown about 6 miles north of my house. It was scary. I grabbed up all the cats and put them in the basement and was listening to see when I needed to dash up to grab my leopard gecko and stuff her in my shirt. 

Before going downstairs, I stepped out onto my porch to see if I could see any concerning clouds overhead. After the watch was over and the tornado was confirmed vanished, I went to check again, about 20 minutes later.

A package had been delivered in the meantime. 

[byjove]

I, for one, do not want to stop wearing a mask. I often wander around stores slack jawed and dead eyed in amazement like a caveman who has just been released from a glacier and it’s a little less scary to the other patrons if they can’t see my mouth.

[byjove]

Under the mask I’m like:

[littlefussbudget]

I got a job that won’t require masks when this is all over and I am not sure how I feel about it

[vintagenola]

Looking down Canal Street towards the river - 1910

Photo by Alexander Allison

[queersona]

"there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" is for when you literally cannot buy your food from anywhere else but this shitty-ass company, NOT for when you want to eat a homophobia chicken sandwich

[swtorpadawan]

[left-reminders]

[amelielb]

Ok, I've seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I've been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-

Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.

Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.

Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.