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One thing I noticed right away was how being smart usually meant also having a unique sense of humor. We stayed up late watching Monty Python, eating homemade ice cream,
I suspected they were getting off on my tragedy. They were elated at the opportunity to show their concern.
I began to remind them of who they really were and they started to hate me. Because it was easier to hate me, to ridicule my ‘bizarre behaviour,’ than to look into themselves and realize that they really were a bunch of fucked-up ugly bitches.
Turn off your mind, children, relax and float downstream.”
Beatles
The fact that one man had ever amassed this much wealth inconvenienced Skinner’s sense of logic.
It didn’t take long for the rats to stimulate their pleasure centers to the point of exhaustion, to the point of not eating or taking care of their other physiological needs. My argument is that in the age of Fucked Up Shit, human beings became like those rats, whacking the bars that stimulated our pleasure centers even as those very bars were what triggered our doom.
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, we started to understand the terms of our self-destruction. Our rational minds argued against using fossil fuels, against overeating and too much television, against accumulating too much wealth among too few, but a more powerful part of our brains kept pushing those bars. Push, push, push. The solutions, the ways we might avoid the FUS, were staring us right in the face.
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The sky looked like a black-and-white photograph of scrambled eggs.
His legs jerked, twitched, flopped, kicked, and propelled him across the ground. After a week of regaining his strength, the sheer oddness of his gait wasn’t going away. “What the hell,” Skinner said, shuffle-stepping then high-kicking his way across the field. “Why can’t I walk normally?” “Idiot,” 167 muttered to his clone brother. “Hey, I wasn’t the one who claimed to be a Bionet expert,” 218 said. The two snarled at each other while Skinner danced through the grass, added a pirouette, then strutted like a cowboy with saddle rash. “I hate this! I want my real legs back!”
Ministry of Silly Walks lol
They looked beaten down, these unenthused servants of humanity, as if they’d been dry-humping existence to death.
Woo-jin realized, would be the only thing telling the Last Dude that he too was loved. This distant retard’s voice recorded on brittle paper would be the only source of light in that final man’s heart. Whatever he’d done to earn this fate, this eternal hauling of rocks in a vast waste, Woo-jin would assure him that his suffering wasn’t for nothing, that as a human being he still deserved love, despite the fact that anyone who could possibly love him was long dead.
Wasn’t it interesting, he said, that humans had imperiled the planet at precisely the moment when we’d become capable of developing a technological solution to undo the damage? What held us back, he said, was our orientation to nature. We’d thoroughly externalized it instead of coming to terms with ourselves as its greatest force. We speak of “the environment” as if it’s something apart from us. We speak of protecting the environment and being environmentally friendly as if the environment exists outside our homes.
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Worse were those who wished to restore nature to some prehuman state, failing to recognize that nature is constantly changing.
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adopt an inventionist philosophy of environmental stewardship and engage in full-scale planetary reengineering, and to embrace the spirit of this project as a natural phenomenon rather than an artificial, human enterprise. The concept of artificiality was itself artificial.
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I was surrounded by a society in which people didn’t appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they’re descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they’ll reunite with all their dead relatives.
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