Drew Ninnis Quotes

Nietzsche on Vegetarians

A lesson to be learned for the many of our colleagues who are animal sympathisers. As Stephen Colbert would say “Pick a side, we’re at war.”

->145 ’ Danger for vegetarians ’ A diet that consists predominantly of rice leads to the use of opium and narcotics, just as a diet that consists predominantly of potatoes leads to the use of liquor. But it also has subtler effects that include ways of thinking and feeling that have narcotic effects. This agrees with the fact that those who promote narcotic ways of thinking and feelings, like some Indian gurus, praise a diet that is entirely vegetarian and would like to impose that as a law upon the masses. In this way they want to create and increase the need that they are in a position to satisfy.

—>- Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

Foucault on Possums

This quote comes from my beloved Michel Foucault, much despised French philosopher / historian / sociologist / something. He is often accused of getting things wrong. I usually object; but I have stumbled across incontrovertible proof that he was indeed wrong. Here it is:

This is what Rozier says about the example I have just given: “The mother of such a patient is, so to speak, like the wrapping or the shadow of her daughter. When danger threatens the young of the possum [a kind of kangaroo, I think; M.F.], the mother does not confine herself to fearing for them, she puts them in her flesh.” ->… ->Do not forget the image of the possum given by Rozier. It is a matter of constituting a kangaroo family: the child’s body as nuclear element of the family body.

Oh dear.

Freud and Masturbation

Today we draw from Freud; that endless source of unintentional humour. With all of that nasty pornography on the internet these days I think it is about time that we have a reminder of what happens if you masturbate too much - you become a neurasthenic. What’s that? Well, back in the days of Freud it was just about anything, from what we would now call chronic fatigue to laziness. A catch all category. And you thought you’d just go blind! Anyway, the amusing quote comes from a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss in 1893:

->“Neurasthenia in males is acquired at puberty and becomes manifest in the patient’s twenties. Its source is masturbation, the frequency of which runs completely parallel with the frequency of male neurasthenia. One can observe in the circle of one’s acquaintances that (at all events in urban populations) those who have been seduced by women at an early age have escaped neurasthenia. When this noxa has operated long and intensely, it turns the person concerned into a sexual neurasthenic, whose potency, too, has been impaired; the intensity of the cause is paralleled by a life-long persistence of the condition. Further evidence of the causal connection lies in the fact that a sexual neurasthenic is always a general neurasthenic at the same time.”

You have been warned!