Discussion (20)¬

1. jean-françois gauthier says:

   January 23, 2019 at 2:59 pm

   everything in the book is revealed, instantly and eternally perfect, immutable, and then it… evolves.

2. M27Holts says:

   January 23, 2019 at 6:16 pm

   I’ve read some good books in my time. The bible and the Qur’an are not in that set of books!

3. Darwin Harmless says:

   January 23, 2019 at 6:36 pm

   Good times. Yes indeed. Another perfect punchline, Author.

   If only we could get women back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. If only going into the big city to beat up queers was still socially acceptable. If only a black man still couldn’t drink from the courthouse fountain, let alone be a movie star or president. Then we’d be back in the good old days and I’d be happy again, like I was when I was a kid.
   Except I wasn’t. It was an ugly world back then. People forget.

4. HackneyMartian says:

   January 24, 2019 at 1:56 am

   Where’s the pigeon? Did it never recover from being struck down by … um … the word of Jesus back in August?
   http://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/apt/

   I think we are entitled to know whether animals have been harmed in the making of this cartoon. Especially by supernatural means.

5. Laripu says:

   January 24, 2019 at 3:31 am

   Darwin H, it’s still an ugly world. Maybe worse. People shoot up Sikh temples and Jewish synogogues. Unarmed Black people are shot by police. There are many ugly dictatorships worldwide. Central American refugees are treated like a hostile invading force. The American president is a pompous paskudny pumpkin.

   The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensify. – That’s W. B. Yeats, and still true today.

6. Darwin Harmless says:

   January 24, 2019 at 4:38 am

   Yes, Laripu. It is still ugly. But at least some of the changes have been in the right direction. I wasn’t meaning to imply total satisfaction with today’s world, merely a dislike of nostalgia about the good old days when the world was so very much better, which it certainly wasn’t.
   Same point Author is making, really. Good times. Sigh.

7. mdhughes says:

   January 24, 2019 at 7:22 am

   That’s OK, Jesus, at least Islamic countries are still medieval hellholes. Maybe you can convert.

8. Son of Glenner says:

   January 24, 2019 at 9:52 am

   Laripu: “Paskudny” – That’s a new word to me. The internet (fount of all knowledge!) reliably informs me it is Polish and gives a list of extremely insulting English equivalents.

   It is possibly a little bit too complimentary to Trump, arguably the greatest potential threat to the planet.

9. M27Holts says:

   January 24, 2019 at 12:40 pm

   I am sure that Trump would love to be the “last ever POTUS” and there is only one way he can try to bring that about. Keep the barking mad fooker away from the red launch button!

10. Someone says:

    January 24, 2019 at 1:03 pm

    As comparatively progressive to prior centuries, or even decades, as it is now, you’ll never be short any amount of contrarians, conservatives or other jerks such as our heroes who are radically nostalgic for the simpler times of wide-spread blissful ignorance.
    I don’t predict things will change very much in the near future, either.

11. pw says:

    January 24, 2019 at 1:59 pm

    Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

12. Paul Hunter says:

    January 24, 2019 at 10:00 pm

    Religion is “One step forward, three steps back”!

13. postdoggerel says:

    January 25, 2019 at 9:07 am

    Laripu, Ineradicable inarticulations, once fanned into flame on twitter, become irredactible apothegms wafting amidst the gasps.

14. HackneyMartian says:

    January 25, 2019 at 1:58 pm

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensify. – That’s W. B. Yeats, and still true today.

    umm, yes … though for Yeats the best were the Anglo-Irish aristocrats and the worst were the agitators for change. As Auden put it:

    “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all …
    …
    Time that with this strange excuse
    Pardoned Kipling and his views,
    And will pardon Paul Claudel,
    Pardons him for writing well.”

15. M27Holts says:

    January 25, 2019 at 7:43 pm

    I didn’t know who Paul Claudel was. Looked at the internet, sounds like a complete knob…

16. Paddy says:

    January 26, 2019 at 9:54 am

    Just came across a bonkers statement that might well be worthy of a comic to mock it: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/01/24/pastor-rick-wiles-if-youre-not-a-christian-then-satan-is-your-father/

17. HackneyMartian says:

    January 26, 2019 at 8:09 pm

    @M27Holts :
    I didn’t know who Paul Claudel was. Looked at the internet, sounds like a complete knob…
    Maybe Auden came to the same conclusion, because he cut that part of the poem later. I haven’t read Claudel & don’t suppose I ever will (I agree with Auden about Kipling). Looking at Yeats’s personal and political life, you could dismiss him as a wretched person too: he wrote marching songs for the Irish fascists in the 1930s, and thought women should keep out of politics and look pretty: compare his description of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz with their actual lives and careers. Claudel despite being a right-wing catholic was a vocal anti-Nazi (and a total shit to his gifted sister Camille). People are complicated and writers even more so; they are often infuriatingly unsatisfactory or weird human beings.

    @Laripu
    Getting back to despair: Yeats also, later, wrote against despair in ‘Lapis Lazuli’.
    “Yet they, should the last scene be there,
    The great stage curtain about to drop,
    If worthy their prominent part in the play,
    Do not break up their lines to weep.”

    “The Second Coming” contains magnificent imagery and rhetoric but I wouldn’t go to Yeats for my world view. (On the other hand I know Sailing to Byzantium by heart, so go figure …)

    Personally I’m deriving a little hope from Greta Thunberg and the striking schoolchildren.

18. Laripu says:

    January 27, 2019 at 4:55 am

    HackneyMartian, you’re right; poets aren’t a good source for a worldview. I love Leonard Cohen’s work, and quote him often, but he had way too much respect for religion for my taste. But the work is separate from the ideas behind them. I like the architecture and stained glass in Catholic churches, but the religion is … not my cup of hemlock.

    I’ll take Wittgenstein and Gödel for my worldview. And whoever can help me make sense of quantum mechanics.

    Lately, the lines that have been echoing around the peanut in my skull are “Round the decay if that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away”. – Trumpymandias, by Percy “Beast” Shelley. 😉

19. M27Holts says:

    January 27, 2019 at 7:13 pm

    That Pastor Rick Wiles…if only fundamental xtian lunatics like him were ridiculed and made to wear a tall conical hat with a large “D” when in public, soon respect for patently crazy bat-shit ideas would be a thing of the past…

20. Troubleshooter says:

    January 28, 2019 at 3:35 am

    Oh, look: a couple of atavists in the park! How quaint! [gag-retch!]