In Zen practice, a koan is a puzzling question or comment that a student is given to meditate upon, usually intended to help them break out of dualist-mode thinking.
When I was in college, I was a big fan of Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones [wc] – it was the 70s and Zen was in the air, along with a lot of cheap patchouli oil. But, I thought about koans, and decided that one of them was mine, spending several decades thinking about it. It’s got a lot to do with my linguistic nihilism – a lot of koans appear to be language-games (like some of Heraclitus’ observations about stepping in rivers) dependent on how we use words, not how we understand them. For example:
- Breadcrumbs are better than nothing
- Nothing is better than sushi
- Therefore, breadcrumbs are better than sushi
That’s not really an example of a koan, so much as it’s an illustration of how word-games can drive a person toward rejecting language as a tool for communication. But that’s another posting [stderr] – lately, I have been thinking up another koan. To be honest, it started as a “blonde joke” and I began deconstructing and reconstructing it to remove one of its central features: the idea that this particular person is stupid, for some reason. Obviously, that needs to be changed. Yet, making bad decisions in spite of their obviousness is an important human feature that we should all contemplate.
With apologies, for illustration’s sake, this is the original version:
A blonde is walking down the sidewalk and sees a banana peel in front of them. “Oh, no, I’m going to fall down again!” she says.
I simply pared it down to:
A person is walking down the sidewalk and sees a banana peel in front of them. “Oh, no, I’m going to fall down again!” they exclaim.
That captures it, I’d say: the inevitability of our bad decisions in spite of the obviousness of the situation. It seems that humans not only play on the railroad tracks, they like to stare in hypnotized stupefaction at the totality of the train that is bearing down on them. I live in deer country, and deer do the same thing; I saw one watch a UPS van bear down on it, then finally it jumped into the opposite lane and was hit by an oncoming car from the other direction. That’s also something worth thinking about – the old “out of the frying pan, into the fire” – sometimes our attempts to evade situations result in something much worse.
So: [bbc]
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is predicting a major surge in CO2 emissions from energy this year, as the world rebounds from the pandemic.
Total energy emissions for 2021 will still be slightly lower than in 2019, the agency says.
But CO2 will rise by the second largest annual amount on record.
The use of coal in Asia is expected to be key: the IEA says it will push global demand up by 4.5%, taking it close to the global peak seen in 2014.
Good god, what is wrong with the stupid fucking humans? We are already on track (as I predicted 2 years ago, but now scientists are confirming it) for more than a +2C temperature rise – which is going to have absolutely horrible consequences. My fear (or should I say: prediction) is we’re looking at more like +4C or even +5C, which is going to be a nightmare scenario, similar to the Permian/Triassic extinction event.
Floating solar farm in China. Probably powering bitcoin mining.
I guess it won’t matter, but (as you know) I’m not a nationalist, so I don’t care to play favorites in the coming disaster. But, meanwhile, the United States is demonstrating conclusively that it has no secret grand strategy for world domination: it’s subsidizing its dying fossil fuel industry and trying to keep coal mining alive, while allowing China to continue improving its production of solar panels, windmills, and batteries. It’s as if the leaders of the US managed to learn absolutely nothing from establishing its dependency on petro-states, it’s going to allow itself to get on the back foot regarding green energy. If the US is going to survive as a political entity, it’s going to have to develop a domestic strategy for green energy, and stop spending its money on political junk-food like F-35s – and it’s going to have to do that, hmmmm, maybe 20 years ago, at the latest.
Our leaders, pushed by growth-hungry people desiring to become part of the luxury class, will not take their foot off the gas until it’s completely too late. That’s one problem with having leaders that are all gerontocrats: they’re going to die off and, as they do, they’ll shrug, “not my problem anymore.” Good luck, future generations, enjoy your extinction event.
Picture our character walking quickly down the sidewalk, their foot raised above the banana peel, thinking “oh, no, I’m going to fall down again!” Their foot is already coming down, their weight shifting forward – there is absolutely nothing they could do to avoid a fall, even if they tried. But they aren’t trying.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, pick up the banana peel in front of him. Then kill him.
Damn, that’s good!
Your original version isn’t quite the original original, though, is it? Surely it was originally “… in front of her.”
The “pared down” version is somewhat longer than the original. (Unless you mean pared down of very problematic specificity. “Upcycled”?)
What about
Indeed.
To me it seems fairly obvious we need to reduce global GHG emissions from power to net 0 by 2030, and from other sectors to net 0 by 2050 – at the absolute latest. Despite being an optimist by nature, to me it also seems pretty likely that humanity will blow past these targets so far and so fast they will be little more than a speck in the metaphorical rear view mirror.
Given this, the “green new deal” being proposed is, as far as I can tell, both absurdly ambitious given the US´s political realities (actual USians can correct me if I am wrong on this point), and entirely insufficient given the physio-chemical realities of anthropogenic global warming. This isn´t to pick on the US – AFAICT pretty much everyone is not investing the resources needed to address a problem of this magnitude.
I remember a comedian once made this joke: “An Englishman, Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar – and the whole thing proceeds with a tedious inevitability!” – I think that for me the phrase “the whole thing proceeds with a tedious inevitability” captures the situation all fairly well. It is less that humanity is collectively playing with matches, and more that we are playing with lit matches after covering ourselves in petrol – and we´re doing this inside a fireworks factory.
So there’s a lag in the system, didn’t we know that? Publicise that figure too widely and dumbasses will start saying “oh look, we dropped emissions and CO2 still went up, we’re wasting our time”.
@Cutty Snark: I’m reminded of the Bernard Righton joke from the mid-90s: “There’s a black fella, a Pakistani and Jew in a nightclub. What a fine example of an integrated community.”
I like short jokes. For a long time the shortest one I’d heard was by Alexei Sayle. Agoraphobic skinhead: “Oi! Inside!”. Four words is pretty good. More recently, one-liner machine Jimmy Carr observed “Venison’s dear”. Doesn’t work in print, but man, TWO words, and usable basically any time you go to a half-decent restaurant or supermarket. I’d love to hear any others as short. Is it possible to do a one-liner that’s one word? I can’t see how, but then I didn’t think even two was possible.
@ sonofrojblake
Humour is quite subjective, of course :-) I used to live in a small university town where there was research office space located above a commercial property with separate entrances. The net result of this was for about 4 years there were two doors next to each other – one with a plaque saying “Fluid Dynamics Research” the other to a student dive bar. Always made me chuckle whenever I passed by…
I quite like short one liners too – there was someone who used to just rattle off “dictionary definitions”. E.g “single cobbler: sole employee”, etc. One word one liners sounds very tricky. I think if it is possible, it would have to rely on the audience filling in the blanks, a good setup, or the use of a prop. Not sure I would count those as one-liners, but perhaps it could be formulated so?
sonofrojblake@#6:
I’d love to hear any others as short. Is it possible to do a one-liner that’s one word? I can’t see how, but then I didn’t think even two was possible.
Those are really short. Maybe a one-word joke would have to take advantage of language tricks like the Germans: jam everything into one huge word, e.g.: “hottentottenpotentatenattentat”
One of the other short jokes I used to like was this:
It’s not really a riddle – you have to drop the second part before the subject gets a chance to think about it – it’s all a timing joke.
Cutty Snark@#5:
I remember a comedian once made this joke: “An Englishman, Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar – and the whole thing proceeds with a tedious inevitability!” – I think that for me the phrase “the whole thing proceeds with a tedious inevitability” captures the situation all fairly well.
I like that one!
https://www.quotes.net/mquote/978592
What the oil industry should have learned in 1973 was that petroleum is not the basket to put all your eggs in, but they were too busy protecting that day’s bottom line to notice. They probably figured the paid-for politicians would have their backs if anything went wrong. With a little foresight they would have started investing major money into alternative energy, acquiring lucrative patents along the way. Then, they could have licensed the technology to developing countries and made another fortune. But, as you say, they seem inexorably compelled to step on the banana peel. Maybe they all believe in pre-ordination.
As long as I can be Humungous, I am fine!