Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emily St. John Mandel

I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped...


Been there, done that.

What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

Definitely been there and done that.

You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curbside, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth.

You know, on the right side of the tracks.

There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.

Not unlike we are here.

The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It's possible that no one who didn't grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.

Not unlike the anonymity of the internet.

Time had been reset by catastrophe.

Now or the one that's coming.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Vaclav Smil

Life’s great dichotomy is between autotrophs, organisms that can nourish themselves, and heterotrophs, or life forms that must feed on other organisms.


Which one are you? And prove it.

China’s ruling party, as firmly in control of the government as ever, attracts foreign companies and enormous direct investment by guaranteeing the stability of a police state and by supplying a docile workforce that labors with minimum rights, commonly for extended hours under severe discipline, and is housed in substandard conditions

That sound you hear is Donald Trump drooling.

For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.

The Great Hoax lives on!!

Unfortunately, motor vehicles are also responsible for 1.25 million accidental deaths every year...and more than ten times as many serious injuries.

Yawn.
Right?


A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

Just for the record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_la ... modynamics
Next up: what is a calorie?

...despite the decline in consumer spending brought on by the greatest economic downturn since World War II, the difference between jobs in manufacturing and in retail had reached nearly three million workers, a depressing reality of a failing economy where most new opportunities were low-paid, part-time positions to sell Chinese apparel and electronics bought on credit.

At least until they invade Taiwan.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Joe Abercrombie

A man sleeps through most of his life, even when awake.


Talk about "human all too human".

Killing a man by accident had made her a villain. Killing another on purpose had made her a hero. But all she could do was frown at the body as they dragged it out, and feel there was something very odd in all this.

Odd is a good place to start.

Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.

Next up: Monza's ass.

“A man who gives all his thought to doing good, but no thought to the consequences …” Father Yarvi lifted his withered hand and pressed its one crooked finger into Brand’s chest. “That is a dangerous man.”

And, no, not just the pinheads.

'In the valleys where I was born they say it is God’s sword, dropped from the heavens.’
‘Don’t you?’ asked Flood.
Whirrun rubbed some dirt from the crosspiece with his thumb. ‘I used too.’
‘Now?’
‘God makes things, no? God is a farmer. A craftsman. A midwife. God gives things life.’ He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky. ‘What would God want with a sword'?


The New Testament God in other words.

The Inquisitor waited for silence. Do you believe in anything?
Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.


Well, not counting the Christian God of course.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Thomas Ligotti

...this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day and night, this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.


Yes, that's still going around.

At times I have been rendered breathless by the impeccable chaoticism, the absolutely perfect nonsense of some spectacle taking place outside myself, or, on the other hand, some spectacle of equally senseless outrageousness taking place within me.

18 dead children in the latest "spectacle".

Lucifer’s last words in heaven may have been “Non serviam,” but none has served the Almighty so dutifully, since His sideshow in the clouds would never draw any customers if it were not for the main attraction of the devil’s hell on earth.

Yeah, what's about that?

Hearken well: “None of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you.”

Anyone here not hearkening well?

The dismembered limbs of dolls and puppets are strewn about everywhere. Posters, signs, billboards, and leaflets of various sorts are scattered around like playing cards, their bright words disarranged into nonsense. Countless other objects, devices, and leftover goods stock the room, more than one could possibly take notice of. But they are all, in some way, like those which have been described. One wonders, then, how they could add up to such an atmosphere of…isn’t repose the word? Yes, but a certain kind of repose: the repose of ruin.

The repose of ruin. Feel free to use it yourself.

Since Buddhism’s only objective is attaining enlightenment, that high road to nirvana (see below), it is at one with other religions in pitching a brighter future for believers in deliverance from the woes of this world. One problem: Human beings are rarely so sensitive to the woes of this world that they feel a pressing need to reject all cravings for the pleasures of this world, as Buddhism would have them do. And it seems that any amount of pleasure is pleasure enough to get us to keep the faith that being alive is all right for everyone, or almost everyone, and will certainly be all right for any children we cause to be delivered into this world.

Lesson learned?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Bart D. Ehrman

The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife.


Hmm, is this something we should worry about?

In the American South, where I live, Christianity is very much about the Bible. Most Christians come from churches that preach the Bible, teach the Bible, adhere (they claim) to the Bible. It is almost “common sense” among many Christians in this part of the world that if you don’t believe in the Bible you cannot be a Christian. Most Christians in other parts of the world—in fact, the vast majority of Christians throughout the history of the church—would find that common sense to be nonsense.

On the other hand, it is the word of God some insist.

Only in the latest of our Gospels, John, a Gospel that shows considerably more theological sophistication than the others, does Jesus indicate that he is divine. I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part? I had come to realize that Jesus’ divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’ own teaching.

Yeah, what about that?

All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that’s one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.

Well, that and them being pinheads.

What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

You could always think like I do.

I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say.

I'll bet she knows.
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Walker »

"The truth is self-protected."
- a reliable source
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Walker »

iambiguous wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 4:24 pm
What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

You could always think like I do.
In your sentence, does "like," mean the same as "how and what"?

If this is like you think, wouldn't that be a coincidence.

Truth constantly transmits within the context of any situation, however truth is self-protected by a frequency governor on the receiver. How to remove the governor without alerting the authorities is pragmatic knowledge, and more worthwhile than why, given any particular finite, and rather minuscule, ration of time lived as a complex life form. As with a governor on a vehicle, the purpose of the truth frequency governor on the receiver (TFG) is to slow down the operation and not blow a fuse, or engine, or catch fire in the case of electric engines getting charged up too quickly, or in the case of universal energy connecting to kundalini and blowing out a back made soft by couch dwelling.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Just for the record...

I have brought these quotes [and my at times tongue in cheek reaction to them] over from ILP: https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p ... tart=10250

"a thread for mundane ironists"

So, when I noted "you could always think like I do", I was being ironic. After all, who would want to think like I do?!!

I believe that human existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless. That our moral and political value judgments are but subjective/intersubjective fabrications rooted existentially in dasein out in a particular world historically and culturally. And that in the end we all die and tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion.
Bart D. Ehrman wrote:What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?
You could always think like I do.
Walker wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:01 pmIn your sentence, does "like," mean the same as "how and what"?

If this is like you think, wouldn't that be a coincidence.

Truth constantly transmits within the context of any situation, however truth is self-protected by a frequency governor on the receiver. How to remove the governor without alerting the authorities is pragmatic knowledge, and more worthwhile than why, given any particular finite, and rather minuscule, ration of time lived as a complex life form. As with a governor on a vehicle, the purpose of the truth frequency governor on the receiver (TFG) is to slow down the operation and not blow a fuse, or engine, or catch fire in the case of electric engines getting charged up too quickly, or in the case of universal energy connecting to kundalini and blowing out a back made soft by couch dwelling.
This is what I call a "general description intellectual contraption".

I ask myself, "what on earth does it have to do with the lives that we actually live"?

Maybe a lot.

So, let's zero on a context involving a set of circumstances in which human beings interact. Especially one in which conflicts erupt over contradictory moral and political and spiritual assessments of the truth.

Or is your post itself just "tongue in cheek"?
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Walker »

Every word is truth, governor.

Do share the results of the zeroing if it involves no more questions.

It would be interesting to hear "like" you think.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Walker wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:34 pm Every word is truth, governor.

Do share the results of the zeroing if it involves no more questions.

It would be interesting to hear "like" you think.
Sigh...just another general description intellectual contraption.

Back again to this:

"In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company...he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist." Will Durant

Look, for those who choose to pursue philosophy by exchanging basically abstract technical posts in which the whole point seems to be about words defining and defending other words epistemologically, fine, go in that direction.

Me, I'm only interested in taking those technical conclusions down out of the didactic clouds and inserting them into discussions that revolve around this:

"How ought one to behave in a world awash, inundated, bursting at the seams with both conflicting moral and political value judgments and in contingency, chance and change?"

Not interested in going there? Okay, that works for me. Move on to others who are more interested in your own philosophical interests.
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Walker »

Nothing much happens by way of dialogue, anyway. Assumptions are just too precious. Often, correcting old assumptions isn’t enough to change persistent, fortified conclusions. So, don't sweat it. No need for that question crutch.
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by attofishpi »

If you're not sure whether or not to do something, especially if it's naughty, stop and ask yourself "Would Basil Brush do it?"

(Obviously this does not apply to Muslims, in fact we would definitely encourage Muslims NOT to do as Basil Brush would).

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Laurie Anderson

I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.


Right, whatever that means.

It's good to take a longer view and think, what would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?

You know, "in your head".

Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work.

About what you'd expect from her kind, right? Though, by all means, point taken.

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

Mein Kampf?

The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist - that it's a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.

Hey, whatever works I always say. However silly it might actually be.

Freedon is a scary thing. Most people don't want it.

Cue the objectivists. Where "freedom" is reduced down to "my way or the highway".
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Walker »

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Commentary: Awareness of existing self-hatred is not required to love thy neighbor likewise.

“Be the change you wish to see.”
Commentary: Changing into the real wish is as natural and choiceless as being born. Everyone does it all the time.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Steven Pinker

Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?


Among other things, nope.

Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were “liberating” rather than conquering their opponents’ territories.

Word games let's call it.

We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.

Wow, even here?

As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functioning illiterates. English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.

Idiocracy!!! https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA

James Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today’s Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.

Progress!

Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.

Tell that to the Ukrainians.
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