Same, girl, same.
Archive for the ‘Really Awesome Insults’ Category
My Favorite Comment As of Late
July 30, 2026Yup
August 9, 2023“The anti-capitalist scholar Joel Kovel has gone as far as saying that the US mental health industry has proliferated and grown exponentially because the diagnoses of individual disorders and their treatments are part of the same social process. Writing before the mindfulness boom, Kovel observed that the mental health industry had been handsomely rewarded because of its institutional role in smoothing over and masking the growing contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. This took place despite the lack of much conclusive evidence for treatments, scientific progress or mastery over mental illness and psychological disorders. As Kovel puts it: ‘A purely psychologic view of human difficulties is a handy way of mystifying social reality, and it requires no feat of imagination to comprehend capitalist society would come to reward the psychiatric profession for promoting a special kind of psychological illusion.’
“… Back on the MBSR [Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction] course, the next exercise was ‘mindful movement,’ or basic yoga. Being more of a Tai Chi practitioner, I sat this one out until they got to the end, a supine posture on the floor. Relaxing, I couldn’t help but think about how mindfulness interventions have a Puritan obsession with controlling emotions, especially anger that is cloaked in new psychological and neuroscientific garb. The labels for dysfunction change over time––immaturity, hysteria, neurasthenia, nervous breakdowns, lack of emotional intelligence, problems of emotional self-regulation, mindlessness––but the fundamental model stays constant, based on a cult of subjectivity.”
Ronald E. Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
“Turgenev, can-can. Sad.”
October 20, 2022In the spring of 1878, Turgenev in Paris and been pleased, but warily surprised, by a penitent letter which he received from Tolstoy: “Forgive me if I have been at fault in any way with regard to you.” Tolstoy begged his fellow novelist to forget all their previous quarrels and to remember only the good things which they had enjoyed together. It was the sort of letter which a postulant nun might have written to a schoolfriend before going into the cloister.
When the opportunity arose, later that summer, Turgenev visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Pollyanna. He found that a tremendous change had overtaken Tolstoy. Turgenev’s novels reveal the liberal humanist’s ability to recognize life’s master for what it is, and not to worry at it. He was no metaphysician. For Tolstoy, such questions as Why are we here? What is the point of living? Is there a God? What is the Good? were of consuming importance. He had, during this summer, become obsessed by them. Turgenev discovered that there was little meeting ground between the two of them. After this particular visit, he wrote to Tolstoy, “I am glad that your physical health is good and I trust that your intellectual malady… has passed.” He went on to say that he had often experienced such moods of depression himself. To others, he expressed the fear that Tolstoy was going mad. For Tolstoy’s part, Turgenev’s urbanity and good humor were, in such circumstances, intolerable. On a rather later visit, Turgenev, carried away with high spirits, demonstrated a can-can to the children Yasnaya Pollyanna. “Turgenev, can-can. Sad,” was the priggish comment Tolstoy noted down afterwards.
A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy
Really?
June 7, 2020Is “maga” slang in Nigeria for moron? How has this not come up before?
“The more he talks, the more I realize that I am a maga––a fool who has been taken advantage of.”
~ My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
Well, He’s Not Wrong About Portnoy
January 5, 2020Those who enjoyed Nabokov’s high-literary trolling the first time around can rest assured that the fresh opinions expressed herein are just as strong. In the line of fire are William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (all “second-rate”), Samuel Richardson (“third-rate”), Fyodor Dostoevsky (“a journalist”), Maxim Gorky (“a bad writer”), Andre Gide (“boring”), Thomas Wolfe (“mediocrity”), Ernest Hemingway (“a writer for boys”), Thomas Mann (“a small writer who did big stories badly”), Rousseau (“mediocre”), Cervantes (“mediocre and tedious”), Stendhal (also “mediocre and tedious”), Friedrich Schiller (“nothing”), Joseph Conrad (“swarms with clichés”), Herbert Marcuse (“intolerably trivial”), Andre Malraux (“execrable”), Samuel Beckett’s poems (“banal and false”), Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (“a mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies”), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (“a ridiculous book”), and, of course, Freud (“charlatan”).
From a review of Nabokov’s essays in The Telegraph
Funny? Please Vote
November 25, 2019I’m thinking of starting a funny Twitter dedicated solely to calling myself out for my (occasionally!) terrible taste in music. So sample tweets would be like, “Just a thirty-something white woman walking around streaming Lil Peep, nothing to see here, folks!” or “Wearing my baby in a Bjorn and listening to ‘Timber’ by Pitbull (featuring Ke$ha).” Thoughts?
Relate?
April 4, 2019“If I had a dollar for every time I wish someone I loved dead, I’d be the richest woman in the world.” ~Big Love
Yeesh
July 18, 2017While looking up something about The Glass Menagerie, I found this scathing review of the recent New York production directed by Sam Gold. Hilton Als, tell us how you really feel!
The despair and disgust I felt after seeing the director Sam Gold’s rendition of Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play, “The Glass Menagerie” (at the Belasco), was so debilitating that I couldn’t tell if my confused, hurt fury was caused by the pretentious and callous staging I had just witnessed or if my anger was a result of feeling robbed of the beauty of Williams’s script.
Jacques Lacan Being a Dick
May 3, 2017Interviewer: In your philosophy…
Lacan: I am not a philosopher, not in the least.
An ontological, metaphysical notion of the real…
It is not at all ontological.
You borrow a Kantian notion of the real.
It is not even remotely Kantian. I make that quite clear.
***
“The Triumph of Religion” comes from a press conference held in Rome on October 29, 1974, at the French Cultural Center. Lacan was interviewed by Italian journalists.
Women Are Better Than Men, Part A Million and One
December 14, 2015“The language of conversion can be abrupt.” With these words Karl F. Morrison approaches an account by Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241) of the Christian king of Norway, Olav Tryggvason (969-1000) and the non-Christian Queen Sigrid of Sweden, whom the king wished to marry. “Marriage negotiations progressed well until the queen refused to abandon the religion that she held, as her kinsmen before her had done. Olav, she said, could, without hindrance or reproach, worship whatever god pleased him.
“King Olav was very wroth and answered hastily, ‘Why should I wed you, you heathen bitch?’, and he struck her in the face with the glove he was holding in his hand.” This was no way to win the heart of Queen Sigrid the Strong-minded. Her response was instant: “This may be your death,” she said. Turned into Olav’s staunchest enemy, she married the king of Denmark, whom she incited to the battle in which Olav died.
Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, from the chapter “Gender and Conversion in the Merovingian Era” by Cordula Nolte
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