>There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.
Oops! It appears OP made a URL hygiene faux pas. To those lurking Yea Forums and unaware, the best thing to do in such a gaffe is to post an archived version of OP's link. Anything less is unseemly. Thank you for your time. >unv.is/newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
Franzen's always been the poor man's David Foster Wallace but with this article he seems to be trying to secure his place in literary history as the Brett Easton Ellis without balls.
Easton Myers
Wow, he must be really smart about everything because he writes books. We should listen to celebrities who tell us the world is going to end because they know so much more than the rest of us.
Don't you have a 500 page boring novel about life in the suburbs to be writing Jonathan?
Jaxson King
A well crafted post
Bentley Collins
>When a scientist predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. >She
Zachary Wilson
Yeah, dead giveaway this guy is an ideologically driven faggot and should be disregarded
James Rogers
how do you mean?
David Clark
>eco acceleration NOW >we must plant trees and then cut them down at a faster rate while harvesting glitter rocks from the farthest corners of the earth and then shipping them back and forth to 100 different corporations which will each assemble parts of an ecologically sustainable flux capacitor
>There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” >the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us retard take on climate change; life will outlive any of its particular manifestations including us. The quote unaltered is superior.
William Peterson
Read it. I have mixed feelings for it. Give up and do little charity works and hope government gets its act together, but accept doom. Fucking NPC liberal stoogery
And what would Walrus have said, you think?
Imbecile. Now we know what you look like
There’s a lot of scientists working on this. Lots of women too. Take a cold shower, kid.
Mason Parker
Is Franzen a Redditor?
Jonathan Barnes
Is your hymen still intact?
Thomas Sullivan
based!
Adam Kelly
“Virginity” is a myth
Parker Harris
But is your hymen intact or not? I assume you've been a lesbian your whole life, so I just wonder how that works
Nathan Parker
the person you're talking to wasn't born with a hymen
Camden Jackson
I’ve never taken a dick, but no. Go read up on it.
Matthew Wilson
seems like a bunch of samsara. wgaf
Daniel Perez
So how did you pop your cherry? Horse back riding? Accidentally sit on a zucchini?
Easton Barnes
Fake+gay
Nathan Jones
Trannies don’t have hymens
Ryan Long
No
Nathan Rogers
>community gardens what a fucking joke
Connor Collins
Why must all the eschatology condense and titrate into some slipper-shod doofus hoeing away gravel on an overgrown parking lot? Why is that the universal image of virtue? Franzen is an intelligent man. Can he not fathom how silly and impotent his vision? God forbid a modern man like him would ever prescribe action. No no, nothing so obvious or impelling as that, no, besides the financial structures of the new green deal system we must adhere to for reasons Mr. Franzen leaves to the well meaning boffins of his society, that is to say the reasons are left unexplored, assumed and unchallenged, because they're never firmly stated. I have a theory that DFW, Hunter S. Thompson and even Justice Scalia were each presented with the Malochian needs of Mammon and told the yas kweening blue checks to go fuck themselves, because they alone would. And that was that. Disappeared from our shared map like nosy Turkish journalists who just had to pursue their curiosity about illicit oil supply chains in western and southern Asia and Northern Africa. And I used to think it was our own security apparati run amok, filing orders and shuffling papers that, oops, killed Americans innocent of treason but challenging to the Plutonomy's margins. Mind you, no one challenges the money making contraptions. Those are never touched. But if there's something fungible in your town, perhaps a resource in reserve, or something cultivated over many generations of input, well then, that ought to be overseen by the private interests that ensure those margins stay at their maximum, no matter what some obstinate Supreme Court Justice, gonzo journalist or athletic scholar have to say about it. So grim and sad is this day before Franzen thought he could heap his, whatever, upon us. There's no illusions anymore that America's ruling classes, indeed all states, capriciously murder innocent people just to keep portfolios, vacation homes, extra marital infrastructure smoothly running. Indeed, it seems that America's true self is quite worse than the foreign propagandists could have ever hoped to describe: over confident, arrogant, delusional slaves who cannot even keep their 737s airborne. Making nothing but appetites for drugs, having turned their food into drugs, their sex into drugs, sewing so much war that you brace yourself for the inevitable countervailing, these are the people who will tell us how to fix the global "climate?" Who will somehow persuade Chinese and Indian titans and technocrats who will not halt their ascent for a bunch of western queers but as the setup to a hilarious joke, the essence of which tarnishes Franzen's whole piece, the pity, the pissing and moaning, the doom and gloom, and then the weak, anemic response. "Smile!" "Dig a hole!" It's just sad learning that there's another one who doesnt get it.
Jose Lewis
Put that in your New Yorker!
Joseph Davis
Climate change is the Holocaust 2.0
An event of such awfulness it must be made central to everything.
Questioning it's validity is such a heinous crime those guilty of it must be labelled deniers, stigmatised and legislated against.
The only way to keep this terrible event at bay is to pay Jews, forever