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Category: Social Medea
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#TBT – True Detective Season 1
That time a TV show led us to believe it was actually going somewhere with an antinatalist hero. 2014.
But at least we got a cool song out of it.
#TBT – Can we bring the Greek Gods back, Please?
That time Rob Bricken wanted to bring back the gods as if they ever left. 2013.
“Has anyone else noticed modern organized religion is kind of a bummer? Even if your divine belief system isn’t violently persecuting another, it seems like you’re still trapped in a church singing dirges all Sunday. Modern religion doesn’t have any flair. This is why I’d like to offer a modest proposal: Let’s bring back the ancient Greek gods. Yes, I mean Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, the whole shebang — and here’s why I think they’d make a significant improvement over our current options.
…
Greek gods will have sex with you. That’s pretty awesome. Just knowing you have a chance to score with a god or goddess adds a certain zest to life. Now admittedly, some time the Greek gods got a little… er, rape-y, and that’s not cool. On the other hand, Law & Order: SVU would become super exciting.
They make at least as much sense as the other guys. One of the biggest problems with the Judeo-Christian God that Christian scholars have tried to rationalize over the centuries is how a good and loving god could allow evil to exist; while they’ve come up with plenty of answer, none of them are particularly satisfying. This isn’t an issue for the Greek gods, because they aren’t pretending to be omnipotent and loving. Like humans, they can be good and evil themselves. You don’t have to wonder why the Greek gods let bad things happen to good people, because the Greek gods can simply be assholes. They care about you as long as you’re caring/genuflecting/sacrificing bulls to them. Tit for tat. Honestly, just take a look around. Does it seem like the universe is currently being run by one omniscient guy who completely loves everybody or by a bunch of over-emotional, self-centered jerks? I rest my case.
They’re so much more fun. Here’s a short list of things we could do if we brought back the Greek gods:
• Go to oracles.
• Go on quests.
• Fight monsters.
• Challenge gods to contests.
• Go to Hades and try to rescue dead loved ones.
• Dip babies in magic rivers, making them invulnerable.
Now, not all of those are good ideas — most of them are insanely dangerous — but man, they’re still a hell of a lot more exciting than sitting in church for an hour every Sunday.”
[Via]
Ghostwriter for “Art of the Deal” on Why Donald Trump should not be president:
‘”One of the chief things I’m concerned about is the limits of his attention span, which are as severe as any person I think I’ve ever met,” Schwartz says. “No matter what question I asked, he would become impatient with it pretty quickly, and literally, from the very first time I sat down to start interviewing him, after about 10 or 15 minutes, he said, ‘You know, I don’t really wanna talk about this stuff, I’m not interested in it, I mean it’s over, it’s the past, I’m done with it, what else have you got?’ ”
The idea of a president in an “incredibly complex and threatening world who can’t pay attention is itself frightening,” Schwartz says.
Add to that the fact that Trump is so easily provoked, that what Schwartz calls Trump’s insecurity “makes him incredibly reactive whenever he feels threatened, which is very, very often.”
As an example, Schwartz says, his interview in The New Yorker came out on Monday. On Tuesday, he received “a long and threatening letter from his lawyer designed, I think, to muzzle me.”
“For 25 years, I think Trump has done a very, very effective job of muzzling anyone who has worked for him or with him by signing very, very strict nondisclosure agreements before they start working with him,” Schwartz says. “It just turns out that I started with him so early that he hadn’t thought of it yet.”
“The reason I’m stepping up is because no one else seems to be free or willing to do so,” Schwartz says. “Believe me, it is not fun.”‘
[Via]
See also: Why Literature Is No Longer Art.