Philosophy Now Forum

Sometimes I watch the series with Mr Monk investigating in San Francisco and I wonder what is wrong with him. He seems to have a special kind of intuition which helps to see through things, but on the other hand he is too much concerned with hygiene. He is certainly not a person with the Asperger sy...

Many people need some level of excitement to feel alive. Some people go to great lengths to provide this thrill. James Cameron went down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, suffered enormous hardships, risked his life, almost died, in order to get some pictures for a movie, so that millions sitting...

And the suffering and the misery do not add up to anything.

This was mentioned at the end of the discussion.

I appreciate your honest opinion and your common sense, Harbal.
You sound like a knowledgable man.

And if you write some fictitious story and incidentaly it happens to be true (but you did not know it, and could never have believed it) will you be persecuted as a whistle blower ?

If Edward Snowdon had written fiction instead of disclosing information would he have got away with it ?

Yes, I have. But it happens at the expense of a real institution and hurting the reputation of it. Perhaps MI5 does not care about its reputation though. Dan Brown wrote some negative books about the Vatican ("Da Vinci Code", which I haven´t read) and Free Masons ("The Lost Simbol&quo...

Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2022 5:34 pm
But you ask why the writers of it don't get into trouble. Well, presumably, it's because they haven't broken any rules.

I would like to figure out what these rules are.

I offered a reasonable ground for MI5 letting John Le Carré in peace: "We are not that bad, but if people think we are we don´t mind because they will not bother us. We get paid anyway, no matter what the public opinion is." The educational message behind "Our Kind of Traitor" co...

Interestingly, China and India do not have any teams at all. India is so hot that running after a ball is a torture that does not make sense.
But China has a moderate climate and a lot of potential players to choose from.

I don´t confuse reality with fiction. But fiction has to be believable in order to be good so it must contain quite a lot of reality and truth. In the novel "The Ghost" Tony Blair is depicted as a puppet in the hands of his wife working with the CIA and recruited by the CIA for this very p...

Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:39 am

duszek wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 8:08 pm
Have you made any intersting discoveries in the area of personal excitement management ?

Monks practice asceticism in order to enjoy simple things better.
Deprivation for a while makes excitement easy to achieve again.

Age Your solution makes sense: New desires arise and we can satisfy them and go on and on. That´s why so many very rich people are so unhappy, take drugs and become alcoholics (just hear-say, I don´t know them personally), because they cannot think of anything desirable any more, no more desires ari...

Bobmax

Yes, your theory makes a lot of sense.
And yet, somehow it does not work under certain circumstances. Perhaps due to mood swings or for physical reasons.

Well, at the end of "Our Kind of Traitor" the helicopter with the gangster Dima (who got promised an asylum for himself and his family in exchange for incriminating material concering some important people in Britain) and a decent secret agent Luke and two pilots (innocent family men) expl...

What has always puzzled me about his well written novels is that although he slandered the Foreign Office, the British secret service and some other powerful institutions he never got into trouble, did he ? He died a natural death and was a free agent all his life. One possible explanation could be ...