u/Money_Visual_3829

I thought about posting this in r/moralityscaling, but they have a rule against posting real people, and maybe this sub is more familiar with Wodehouse, anyway.

So after Paris fell during World War II Wodehouse - British humorist and author of the Jeeves stories - and other British men in France at the time, were imprisoned as enemy aliens. After a period of being schlepped around to various internment camps Wodehouse was offered, and accepted, the deal that Louis Zamperini turns down in Unbroken; he was put up in a Berlin hotel and made radio broadcasts at the behest of the Germans.

He did not praise or defend Hitler or Germany; he made light jokes about his circumstances and assured people he was alright. However, when you get right down to it, the broadcasts wouldn't have happened if the nazis didn't feel they were helping their cause in some way or another. The response in Britain was explosive; his career there was damaged irrevocably for the rest of his life.

What do we make of this, today? Undeniably Wodehouse was given a chance to do something heroic and did not take it. Did he have an obligation to? Wodehouse is my "desert island" author but as I reflect on his writings I can't help but think how spectacularly, ehm, "not-'bout-that-life" he seems to me. He wasn't built for those circumstances.

I guess the reason this story is on my mind is that I fear the choice he made was deeply immoral, and that I would make the same choice in his place, lol

I read this book in Elementary school. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure book but unlike every other example of the medium I've seen since, it only had one ending, and you had to make the correct choices to get to it. Wrong decisions would loop you back around to earlier plot points - for example, you begin the story escaping forced labor in a mine, mess up and you are captured and sent back to that page to escape again. Kid me was amused at the idea of a book you could read forever, if you just kept making wrong choices.

The setting was science-fiction, it begins as I said with aliens forcing you to work in a mine, at some point you encounter friendly bird people aliens, and the ending has you reaching a space-ship and escaping the planet. I know that's not much to go on, I hope the only one ending thing will jog someone's memory though.

When I watched Cowboy Bebop as a teenager over 15 years ago, Hard Luck Woman absolutely destroyed me. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. It bothered me so much that I was honestly too distracted to appreciate the show's actual finale. Space Yakuza violence and Spike marching to his fate couldn't compete with the absolute disaster of Ed leaving.

Roll your eyes if you must, I know there's always been a portion of the fandom that regarded her as an annoying aberration - comic relief for children and people who couldn't handle Bebop at its heaviest. But I was like fifteen, and in my mind Ed was me.

Her choosing to abandon space adventure to follow her neglectful father on his manifestly pointless job felt - I swear I am not exaggerating - like the victory of all that was gray in the world over everything that had color and light. It was Ferris Bueller buckling down and deciding to become an insurance agent. It was George Bailey going to prison for fraud. It fucking sucked. And what was worse, you'd see a lot of people online saying that of course they had to get rid of Ed (and Ein) before the finale, of course they'd be in the way while all the Serious Plot was wrapping up. I believed that take at the time, and I hated it. It made the whole thing, the story I'd invested in so heavily, feel so artificial.

But I rewatched Cowboy Bebop for the first time as an adult recently, and I think I learned something that I haven't seen other people say. Ed was not just comic relief and her exiting the show wasn't convenience. Her story was essential to the show's main theme.

Cowboy Bebop is a show about not being able to escape your past. Its genius is that it couches this message in the genre most famous for escapism, sci-fi adventure. This is the meaning, I think, of Spike's second eye, and of "You're gonna carry that weight." Eventually the illusion of a world where you can be someone else fades. Eventually you find yourself waiting for you. That is its message to the characters, and to the viewers.

Spike's past kills him. Jet and Faye have had so many doors shut on them that they may never be able to untangle themselves satisfactorily. When we first meet Ed she seems to have no past, but in Hard Luck Woman we learn that isn't true. Ed decides to leave the Bebop not after her first meeting with her terrible dad, but after hearing Faye talk about the importance of finding somewhere you can belong.

Of all the cast Ed is the only one to confront her past head on while she still has time to make something of it. Her father abandoned her, but she decides for herself that she wont abandon him. I don't know what we're meant to think happens to her next - does she help her father, does she confront him, some mixture of the two? But she doesn't run away from reality. She faces up to an unkind truth about her life, and there is something noble and triumphant in that - a message I wasn't ready for at 15.

I was listening to some kind of Hee-Haw type program on the radio, with fiddles and cornpone humor (it was on a public radio affiliate and I have no further information).

At some point the following exchange occured:

Man 1: I sure wish I could make some money before the Christmas season!

Man 2: You need some money? What you ought to do is go down to the racetrack, and bet on the horse named striptease.

Man 1: Horse named Striptease?! Why, is he going to win?

Man 2: Nope, but he sure will-

My radio: KSSSSSSHHHHHH

Studio Audience: *laughter*

I was only half listening to this damn thing but now it’s driving me nuts: what does the horse named Striptease do that makes you want to bet on him?

Google says “He’ll take your shirt off” but that makes no DAMN sense.

Help.

EDIT: Answer almost certainly has been given, it was "show", Striptease will show, my lack of familiarity with horse racing was my undoing, Google is a dumb fuck.

I have no idea what inspired me to pick up this title, a 1922 polemic by a famous theologian and mystery writer, written when the science of Eugenics was at its peak in popularity among intellectuals left and right. It has become one of the most legendary blind pulls of my life. It is stunningly intelligent and moving, and ranges from it's main subject to discuss the economics and politics of them time in a succinct way; but I didn't come here to sum up its argument. I came here to say that it repeatedly made me laugh out loud; Chesterton is devastating to his enemies.

>Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising.

>The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste and fancy, he would (intellectually) unhang the first man, though the first man might not think so.

(about incest)

>Dr. S.R. Steinmetz, with that creepy simplicity of mind with which the Eugenists chill the blood, remarks that "we do not yet know quite certainly" what were "the motives for the horror of" that horrible thing which is the agony of Œdipus. With entirely amiable intention, I ask Dr. S.R. Steinmetz to speak for himself. I know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as separate from other women; nor have I reached them by any curious researches.

(about the feeble-minded bill)

>Indeed, the first definition of "feeble-minded" in the Bill was much looser and vaguer than the phrase "feeble-minded" itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about "persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable circumstances" (as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances were directly unfavourable to his doing so), are nevertheless "incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence"; which is exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their neighbours all over this planet.

(more about the feeble-minded bill)

>Then there are others whom I may call the Precedenters; who flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill, as it only extended the principles of the old Lunacy Laws. To which again one can only answer "Quite so. It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy." This lucid politician finds an old law, let us say, about keeping lepers in quarantine. He simply alters the word "lepers" to "long-nosed people," and says blandly that the principle is the same.

(contrasting the treatment of serfs under feudalism with contemporary treatment of the homeless)

>If it be answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the gibbet was free to find peace in the grave. Many of the poor greatly prefer the grave to the workhouse, but that is not at all my argument here. The point is this: that it could not have been the general policy of a lord towards serfs to kill them all like wasps. It could not have been his standing "Advice to Serfs" to say, "Get hanged." It cannot be the standing advice of magistrates to citizens to go to prison. And, precisely as plainly, it cannot be the standing advice of rich men to very poor men to go to the workhouses. For that would mean the rich raising their own poor rates enormously to keep a vast and expensive establishment of slaves. Now it may come to this, as Mr. Belloc maintains, but it is not the theory on which what we call the workhouse does in fact rest. The very shape (and even the very size) of a workhouse express the fact that it was founded for certain quite exceptional human failures—like the lunatic asylum. Say to a man, "Go to the madhouse," and he will say, "Wherein am I mad?" Say to a tramp under a hedge, "Go to the house of exceptional failures," and he will say with equal reason, "I travel because I have no house; I walk because I have no horse; I sleep out because I have no bed. Wherein have I failed?" And he may have the intelligence to add, "Indeed, your worship, if somebody has failed, I think it is not I." I concede, with all due haste, that he might perhaps say "me."

The whole book is like this, though some of the quotes are sort of long and some of them require too much context so I don't want to post the whole thing. But still. Disarmingly clever and easy to read when I was expecting something dry and didactic. Has anyone else read this book, or other of Chesterton's writings?

I woke up this morning and in a moment of transcendence I suddenly understood about the banana that got taped to the wall. You guys remember that right? The banana? Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan? Clickbait headline from a few years ago? I finally figured it out! I didn't even have to think about it, I like figured it out in my sleep.

See when you tape the banana to the wall, it becomes a commentary on modern art - a joke, about how Dada accepts anything as art and how that makes it impossible to tell real artists with unconventional ideas from frauds. This is not a new conversation, I would say it is today as hoary a chestnut as the conventions Dada was originally meant to expose. But the banana's ability to function as a commentary, however prosaic, on this issue - here is the genius - relies on it being only a banana, a meaningless and vaguely funny object. In other words the moment you invest the banana with meaning of any kind, it loses the ability to carry that meaning. Because a banana that is mocking modern art is not just a banana.

So the banana hangs there, a kind of artistic steady-state machine, imbuing itself with meaning and then releasing it in cycles as the very meaning it holds renders it meaningless, a taxing existence for any ordinary object, must less one that will rot, which is probably why someone ate it.

I hope this is the right subreddit to post this in and that I have flared it correctly. I just had to share it with someone and the people in my life were unreceptive, staring blankly and asking personal questions about my medication.

I ask because I have a dark horse candidate, the bastard from King John

>
CONSTANCE.
War! war! no peace! Peace is to me a war.
O Limoges, O Austria, thou dost shame
That bloody spoil. Thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward!
Thou little valiant, great in villainy!
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side!
Thou Fortune’s champion that dost never fight
But when her humorous ladyship is by
To teach thee safety! Thou art perjur’d too,
And sooth’st up greatness. What a fool art thou,
A ramping fool, to brag, and stamp, and swear
Upon my party! Thou cold-blooded slave,
Hast thou not spoke like thunder on my side?
Been sworn my soldier, bidding me depend
Upon thy stars, thy fortune, and thy strength?
And dost thou now fall over to my foes?
Thou wear a lion’s hide! Doff it for shame,
And hang a calf’s-skin on those recreant limbs.

>AUSTRIA.
O that a man should speak those words to me!

>BASTARD.
And hang a calf’s-skin on those recreant limbs.

>AUSTRIA.
Thou dar’st not say so, villain, for thy life.

>BASTARD.
And hang a calf’s-skin on those recreant limbs.