Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Thursday 31 March 2022

Some children have imaginary friends.

I never did.

My third-hand, home-made teddy with two different button-eyes
and darned dungarees called Dandy,
was good enough for me - nearly as good as a dog.

He is upstairs in my bedroom, together with Siegfried the Snake
knitted and stuffed by my aunt (as a draught-excluder).
He has resisted the moths for nearly a century, is entirely without spite,

and he has graciously permitted me to feature him in several Nature-Mortes
(this one dating from 1982, where he is on the right).



Hundreds of thousands

of children are sex-trafficked world-wide every year.
Yet you could be imprisoned in 71 countries
(plus some of the United States) just for being queer.


A four-legged robot called Spot


 


has been deployed to wander around the ruins of ancient Pompeii,
identifying structural and safety issues
while delving underground to inspect tunnels dug by relic thieves.


Wednesday 30 March 2022

We all, consumers,

are the filling in the social sandwich,
comfortably cushioned between
child-sex-traffickers and
'high-end' art-dealers.


Tuesday 29 March 2022

(photo by Angela Weiss)

(text by Wofl)



Dear Gen-Zee,

Thank you for enabling an octogenarian

to define himself (!) retrospectively
as Sapio-scolio-homo-sensual.

But for me,
the whole point of not being heterosexual
(with its misogynies, hierarchies
and competitiveness) was:
not being heterosexual.

But once the queers liberated themselves,
a lot of them abandoned the cruising-spots
(though maybe not their self-loathing)
to blend with 'normal' bigoted nasties,
like sheep in wolves' clothing.

Some even went on to become neo-nazis.


The Centre of Europe.

 


Monday 28 March 2022

A sudden headache

on entering a building
says more about the building
than the head.
Likewise the sense of gloom
on entering a village
or a neighbourhood.


'An art-work for our time.'

and for time past,
and for what little remains of our future.

Anselm Kiefer

Sunday 27 March 2022

"Machines return affection

to a degree of which
humans are not capable."

- Matthew Parris in his autobiography Chance Witness.


Saturday 26 March 2022

My happy friend Nemesis

 














says that being human is a distraction from being.



My beloved Electra
(photographed in 1969 in front of my house in Caledon)

once told me that
humans are unbalanced animals.


Friday 25 March 2022

Inside the skull.

Despite its claims to Blue Sky Thinking
human understanding is inevitably
a tightly closed system.


'Wildlife Services',

a branch of the planet-destroying
U.S. Department of Agriculture kills
over 1.75 million wild animals a year.

by traps, snares, poison, gassing,
'cyanide-bombs' and by shooting from helicopters.

Meanwhile, millions of domestic pets
are obese and suffering from inappropriate diets
of slaughtered domestic animals, toxic carbohydrates
and trawler-factory fish.


Thursday 24 March 2022

Bertolt Brecht

didn't want to be wise 
- at least not in 1940.

But he was wise enough.

Mao-Zedong
was not wrong in writing
the commonplace observation
that a change in your condition
will likely bring some change in your thinking.

He had no humility.

He even claimed to know the thought-processes of frogs.

 The frog at the bottom of the well thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well.
 If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view."
-- 
Mao Zedong.

And millions were killed and starved because of his stupidity.


Putna Monastery

 in Romania, which is receiving Ukrainian refugees.

from The Guardian


Wednesday 23 March 2022

Being 'a bit deaf ',

I can discern the difference between
Homophonic and Homophobic
only by watching your lips.

The advantage of being
'a little hard of hearing'
is that I can tell people
that I'm more than a bit deaf,
and thus avoid chit-chat
(which I find very wearing)
and being talked at
and talked at.


Italy : Bears, Truffles and Dogs.


Some bears have died after unwittingly eating poison

laid down by truffle hunters intended for their rivals’ dogs.


Tuesday 22 March 2022

Was the club fashioned before the crutch ?

Probably. It hardly matters.
There are a thousand more weapons
than crutches or false legs,
and all nation-states consider spending
on climate-change to be secondary
to the buying of arms and the upkeep
of the climate-changing military.


Monday 21 March 2022

The problem with our human vision

is that we can experience only one version of reality at a time,
and are mostly incapable even of imagining another version. 
Dogs, however (liminal and superior beings)
can experience at least two versions simultaneously —
one of them through their noses.
Compared with dogs, the greatest scientists are stupid.

 see also: https://aeon.co/essays/who-could-dogs-become-without-humans-in-their-lives


An Autumn leaf in Spring

 

by Mark Wilkins on FlickR

Sunday 20 March 2022

Place-names are fun.

Moneymore in Northern Ireland has nothing to do with money:
it means Big Bog.  But Richhill was named by Scottish
Presbyterian 'planters' who, replacing expelled Catholics,
couldn't believe their luck.  Similarly here in south-west France
there is a place called Good Fortune (Fortounas), 
and one called Paradis.  Today I passed by Camelot.
In my village  there is a Chemin de Paradis
which leads up to sweet air where the rich folk used to live,
and a Chemin de Lifernet which leads down to the bottom of the glen:
L'Infernet, or Little Hell.  I live at the top of the Rue de Lifernet,
near the defensive castle built for aggressive gentlemen.


Saturday 19 March 2022

Evolutionary check ?

The more refined and processed food we eat
the narrower our faces
and the smaller our jaws become.
Our sinuses shrink
and we breathe through our mouths
so that we're prone to more airborne pandemics 
and are even less adaptable than we think.



Civilisation

will not get rid of itself, for sure -
not even by nuclear war.
Too late to state that, as with any disease,
prevention is better than cure.


Friday 18 March 2022

There is no reason why a religion could not be rational.

For example -
crocodiles are (or have been) revered (or worshipped)
in southern Asia, west Africa, and ancient Egypt.

This animal of chthonic and æonical distinction
has inhabited our active earth for 250 million years
through serious climate changes, geological upheavals,
pole-reversal and at least two mass-extinctions.

Let us pray -
that they survive the present one contrived by Man,
who, compared with the Venerable Crocodile,
is a momentary flash (or turd) in the evolutionary pan.


Thursday 17 March 2022

Considering the myth,

the self-aggrandising and pernicious myth
of Human Adaptability, I observe that
we adapt to each other - when it suits us.

But, as for our immediate environment
and the world, we adapt them
according to our demands.
our ever-increasing desires, destroying forests,
creating deserts...polluting everything
and making millions of animals captive. 
Indeed, ours may be
the species that is least adaptive.


Today's weather in Western Europe.

A southerly air stream
stretching from Mauretania to Lapland
is warming up the Arctic.
Clear skies in Ukraine.



Wednesday 16 March 2022

First there was 'The God Delusion'.

Then there was the Truth Delusion,
each an infantile attempt at 'understanding'
(describing, categorising, controlling)
Life, The World and Everything.
Both are based on faith, each has its theology.
It's all Social Anthropology.


A Polemic from 1939.

by Gustave-Henri Jossot,
a French-Tunisian convert to Islam.

OUTSIDE THE HERD

I live outside the herd; I keep away from all of you, your shepherds and your dogs.

I have renounced everything that takes up all your attention; I have broken with your traditions; I want nothing to do with your deranged society; its lies and hypocrisy disgust me. Inside your civilisation of falsehood I isolate myself, I take refuge within myself; I find peace only in solitude.

I don't want to be around you any more; I'm avoiding you because you are all mad: you rush to live faster; you hurry, you run, you jostle each other. Your fevered existence prevents you from thinking, dreaming, feeling. And all this frenzy has no other cause than your greed for gain: making money is for you the supreme law; getting rich is your sole aim. You only know how to work, sweat and vote.

It is for Filthy Lucre, this god of our filthy age, that you declare war; it is for it that you kill or have killed. You make yourself miserable for it; you exhaust yourself, you commit suicide for it. It does not occur to you to restrict your needs, to suppress your desires, to pacify your hearts. Not one of you has the intention of breaking out of your infernal comfort.

Of course, it is all because you have been thrown into the vicious cycle since birth. Before you came into the world, your fate was already decided, your life mapped out, and as soon as you appeared, you were subjected to all sorts of influences, first Family, then Education, then Military Service, and finally Normality.

You have been taught to model your existence on that of your parents; your feelings have been reduced to culverts; your natural aspirations have been choked; you have had 'morality' pumped into you; you have been smeared with religious beliefs; you have been prescribed civic duties and mundane obligations; you have been pounded and shredded; you have been crushed by conventions and prejudices.

They have imposed rules on you; they have surrounded you with constraints; they have erected barriers before you and around you; they have put you in chains.

Your individuality has been so squashed that you have lost even your sense of self. And when a non-conformist, wiping the false values away, seeks to explain to you the sublime poem of life, to reveal the truth to you, to denounce the artificialities that distort it, the conventions that mutilate it, the lies that disfigure it, you refuse to listen. If he tries to purify your mind by raising it above the morbid materialist miasma, if he tells you about the inner life, the only one worth living, you sneer and call him crazy - you moral defectives!

Sheeple all, you all share the same herd mentality; you all bleat the same banalities. That is why I avoid you all, your shepherds and your dogs.

JOSSOT, 1939, translated by वृक

more, in the original French >


Tuesday 15 March 2022

Catastrophically-Unoriginal Sin :

the acquired obsession with labelling, dividing,
excluding, rejecting  - instead of accepting
the multi-mega-micro-muchness of everything. 


Monday 14 March 2022

On the Positive Side,

the current - sixth - mass extinction
of life upon the planet, which we
are mindlessly engineering and only
pretending to try to prevent,
is (so far) one of the lesser wipe-outs,
and it will be only a couple of hundreds
of thousands of years before animals
and plants and fungi old and new
will repopulate the world (without us)
and without too much ado.



The Annexation of National Territory

was à la mode,
almost de rigueur
until very, very recently.
Suddenly, it's impossible
to do it decently.


Sunday 13 March 2022

Dear Mr Blake,

I have never seen
a universe in a grain of sand,
but I see a desert in a piece of meat,
a holocaust in a baby's hand.


Street-art, Paris - by C215.

The writing beneath quotes Volodomyr Zelenskiy:

"I really don't want photos of me in your offices,
because I am neither a god nor an icon,
but rather a servant of the Nation.
Instead, put up pictures of your children
and look at them whenever you need to make a decision."



Deaf Pride : Deaf Liberation

from  chit-chat conversation

and its banalities

pretensions

insinuations

stupidities

denials

evasions

accusations

misinformation

and lies.


Saturday 12 March 2022

Friday 11 March 2022

Dear Mr D. Thomas,

And death has dominion!
because we who demand
and impose it are death,
entropy's impatient minion.


A Russian Joke.

 Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin:
We have introduced the death penalty
for Journalists.

 Journalist:
For what offence ?

 V.V. Putin:
The offence of Journalism, of course.

'Russia does not start wars : it ends them.'


Thursday 10 March 2022

"Hope springs eternal

in the human breast,"
wrote Alexander Pope -
thus bringing unimaginable misery.


Wednesday 9 March 2022

Sex and Sects.

Recent revelations suggest
that religions exist partly
to privilege sexual access
by a chosen priestly few
to children and young adults,

and this is perhaps the reason
why solitary, voluntary, pleasurable
masturbation has been so widely made taboo.


The Six Types of Human Being :

The Not So Bad
The Sometimes-Bad
The Bad
The Very Bad
The Evil
and The Satanic.


Tuesday 8 March 2022

The rich should love the poor

because it is the poor who make them rich
(and not just relatively) which
for sure is why the rich despise and fear the poor.


"On the Internet,

it is common to exaggerate the opponent's position
so that a comparison can be made between the opponent and Hitler."

from A List of Fallacious Arguments.


Sunday 6 March 2022

Meat will always be macho.

Neither plastic nor plutonium can be recycled into nothing.
I will probably not be abandoning electricity before I die.
I am helping in my inevitably small way 
to heat up the planet merely by writing this and breathing.


Better dead than red ?

Better the shootin'
and destruction and lootin'
and millions of refugees
than Putin ?

Unimaginable roads are paved with good and terrible intentions.


 

Friday 4 March 2022

The Internet

is just a fad.
Like civilisation,
though not as bad.


There is more

world-wide misery
than ever before.
The idea of Progress
is a splat on the floor.

 

Thursday 3 March 2022

Almost Forgotten.

Francisco Franco, the Spanish Fascist dictator,
ruled almost 3 times longer than Adolf Hitler.
But he murdered only Spaniards
(especially Catalans and Basques),
few Roma and fewer Jews.
So, after World War 2, his reign of terror
hardly featured in The News.


Ukrainian Tax-relief on Captured Matériel.

“Have you captured a Russian tank or armoured personnel carrier,

and are you worried about how to declare it ?  No need.

Keep calm and continue to defend the Motherland!” 


- Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Agency

(via Interfax news service.)


Wednesday 2 March 2022

The reason why

the patriotic myths of modern nations
are (at best) perversions of the truth
is that 'the nation state'
is itself an uncomfortable lie.


Tuesday 1 March 2022

Mathematics :

The ne plus ultra
of tunnel vision.


Clouds and Waves and War.

How to be  as Tagore says,

"at home in the everything" ?

How to be at home in anything ?

How to be at home in the pullulating
nothing ?


from 'The Internet Archive'.

 


 

It Turns Out You Can Burn a Digital Book

In Tennessee they are banning them. But there’s more than one way to censor a book. As Internet Archive librarian Chris Freeland explains, corporate publishers are suing the Internet Archive, demanding our library destroy 1.4 million digital books. "Whether through corporate bullying or government banning, digital books are not immune from censorship," explains Freeland. Many of these books don't exist anywhere else online--so we are the library of last resort.