Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Another example of why I'm less and less ashamed to be a misanthrope

I just watched a video of a track by Mum on Youtube. I don't mean by my mother, I mean the Icelandic electronic band on the Fatcat label. Now, one thing you should never do, if you don't want to suddenly get a yen for the destruction of the entire human species, is to read the comments on Youtube. Just don't do it. It's not worth it. In fact, the same can be said about most Internet forums that are not focused on a specialised interest, but where any idiot can just come along and sound off. And, of course, any idiot does come along. If the percentage of idiots who leave comments on Youtube is in any way representative of the percentage of idiots in the human race, then we're doomed. And, of course, we are.

The track in question is called, "They Made Frogs Smoke Till They Exploded". Here it is:



And now...

Here are two of the comments that I read, fairly mild in their levels of idiocy compared with much of what goes on on the Internet. I refrained from replying to their comments. I didn't want to get dragged into anything. But I shall reproduce them here:

wtf this vid sucks.
and wtf is with all those blood.

stupid shit.

what kind of a retard made this video!? wtf! its bullshit whats up with the blood, the barf eating, its not nice its horrifying, btw what the mother fuck does the title have to do with the video i mean theres no frogs smoking or exploding, retard

Hmmm. It seems like these idiots are clones of each other. Their use of 'wtf' makes it sound as if they are going round in a constant state of bewilderment, which they probably are. I'm not even going to comment on the level of literacy. It's actually refreshing these days to discover someone capable of writing a sentence, since that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. "All those blood"? It's funny how both of them are fixated on the blood. Apparently, "its not nice its horrifying". Riiiiggght. Okay, so they should have cut the blood out? But I think my favourite part of this penetrating critique is this bit:

btw what the mother fuck does the title have to do with the video i mean theres no frogs smoking or exploding, retard

This reminds me of the fact that many of the amateur videos posted on Youtube are slavishly literal. I saw a couple of attempts people had made of videos for Mammal, by They Might be Giants, and the basic mentality was that, if the lyrics mentioned whale, you should show a picture of a whale, if they mentioned monkey, you should show a picture of a monkey. No, that is exactly how not to make a video. What you should really do is try to use your imagination.

At least there's one advantage to reading this kind of thing. It makes me feel better about the fact that I'm not a best-selling author.

But maybe, even with this advantage, it's just not worth it. "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" WTF! Shakespeare certainly could not have written that after reading the comments on Youtube.

Incidentally, I do think that there's a connection between the title and the content of the video. My interpretation is that the title refers to the cruelty that children have in experimenting on animals, a cruelty that pervades human society generally. I that that is "what's up" with the blood. I was interested to see the attitude that Mum would take to this theme, as most popular culture, no, let me rephrase that, most culture these days seems to take the Beavis and Butt-head-type attitude that human cruelty is cool. I thought that the video might be an attempt in some way to appropriate this cruelty as part of a cool, I'm-detached-and-wearing-shades type image, but they don't. Notice how the cruelty is reversed at the end, with the kitten's head sewn back on, and the butterflies released into the wild.

PS. Come to think of it, most Youtube comments read as if they're written by Beavis and Butt-head.

PPS. Someone recently told me that Gurdjieff said most people are manure. Then he learnt the word "shit", and said that this was a much better word to describe people.

Are we the baddies?

There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch in which one Nazi officer says to another, "Have you noticed that our caps actually have little pictures of skulls on them?" He is leading tentatively to a dark revelation, "Hans, are we the baddies?"



It seems that the Yangtze river dolphin was declared extinct today, to quote from the article in The Independent, "driven from this planet by human activity".

I wonder how long these skulls of extinction and destruction have to keep appearing around us before we begin, tentatively, to wonder, "Are we the baddies?"

If a single person acted always and only for his own personal gain, taking no account of the pain and injury he caused others, he would be considered sociopathic, or morally bankrupt. And yet, as a collective, that is how the human race acts - taking no account of anything but human gain, and, it has to be said, even doing this badly, on account of chronic myopia. If egoism is apparently scorned in individuals, it seems as if the collective ego of the species remains undimmed.

It takes a certain level of sophistication and self-awareness to step back from oneself and progress from seeing oneself as right by definition 'because I'm me', to considering things from the point of view of those on the receiving end of one's actions. For the moment, it seems, we continue to wear out skull-badged caps - a badge signifying the underlying morbidity of a locked arrogance that mistakes itself for righteousness.

Are we the baddies?

There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch in which one Nazi officer says to another, "Have you noticed that our caps actually have little pictures of skulls on them?" He is leading tentatively to a dark revelation, "Hans, are we the baddies?"



It seems that the Yangtze river dolphin was declared extinct today, to quote from the article in The Independent, "driven from this planet by human activity".

I wonder how long these skulls of extinction and destruction have to keep appearing around us before we begin, tentatively, to wonder, "Are we the baddies?"

If a single person acted always and only for his own personal gain, taking no account of the pain and injury he caused others, he would be considered sociopathic, or morally bankrupt. And yet, as a collective, that is how the human race acts - taking no account of anything but human gain, and, it has to be said, even doing this badly, on account of chronic myopia. If egoism is apparently scorned in individuals, it seems as if the collective ego of the species remains undimmed.

It takes a certain level of sophistication and self-awareness to step back from oneself and progress from seeing oneself as right by definition 'because I'm me', to considering things from the point of view of those on the receiving end of one's actions. For the moment, it seems, we continue to wear out skull-badged caps - a badge signifying the underlying morbidity of a locked arrogance that mistakes itself for righteousness.

Black Rain

Today is the 62nd anniversary of the first use of atomic weaponery on humans; the bomb known as 'Little Boy' was dropped on Hiroshima at 8.15 AM.



Japan has the second largest economy in the world, but no nuclear weapons. Japan maintains a threefold non-nuclear policy against the possession, production and import of nuclear weaponry. This is self-imposed. The American-drafted constitution of Japan, in its Article Nine, also forbids Japan from unprovoked military intervention. Article Nine was compromised recently when the Japanese were persuaded to send forces to Iraq to aid the American invasion.

If you would like to learn more about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you could do worse than to start with Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain