Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Yuval Noah Harari

Today, the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion.


Ah, of course, the best of all possible worlds.

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big incomprehensible words. Be particularly careful about the following four words: sacrifice, eternity, purity, redemption.

Though, sure, your four words might be different.

If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences.

Nope, no getting around that. At least not for the overwhelming preponderance of us.

They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

Your context or mine?

It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

What, even here?

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

Then there's my take on that.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Philosophy Tweets

"If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry." Anton Chekhov


Discuss.

“However stupid a fools words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.” Nikolai Gogol

With or without a "condition".

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.” Haruki Murakami

If not a tome.

"To disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity." Oscar Wilde

It's over 90% here in America.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Gandhi

Trust me: not all the time.

"Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever." Aristophanes

Tell us about it!!!
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

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“Everyone makes their own pictures now.”

Commentary:
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emile M. Cioran

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.


You know, among other things.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

Got at least one of them here.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time.

Or, for some here, anything but unconscious.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

Me? That one too.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Other worlds too no doubt.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

My guess: they can't both be right.
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

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Summarizing the Brave New Age Philosophy Lovers:

How someone else spent their summer holiday, and what it means to me.

:lol:
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emily St. John Mandel

Everything ends. I am not afraid.


Can you say that?

You can't argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.

Aside from being pinheads.

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

She means quite likely to of course.

No, Dahlia said, because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah....I really, really, really do.

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.

And ever and ever and ever and ever.

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.

Unless, of course, as the pinheads insist, it's just a liberal hoax pandemic.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Edward Abbey

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.


Not to mention the other way around.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Thank God?

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Or here the pinheads.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

That's probably true, right?

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Ah, the best of all possible "isms".

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

Yep, people actually figure out a way to think like this. Still in fact.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Joe Abercrombie

Tomorrow came, and it was much like yesterday. Just more so.


What's that make today then?

Strange how, as long as the hardship lasts, we can stand it. As soon as the crisis is over, the strength all leeches away in an instant.

In other words, we're just waiting for the next one.

Why? she hissed. Why indeed? I give you orders, he barked, not fucking reasons!

Worse, he's a pinhead.

They say the seed you scatter will be the seed you harvest.

A bumper crop, alas.

A cynic might observe that the scriptures can be used to support both sides of every argument.

On the other hand, not just your scripture.

He had learned long ago that life became much easier if you ignored what was not right before you.

In other words, just stick with what you believe "in your head".
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Thomas Ligotti

Fear, when blended with failure, distills into a deadly brew.


And, for a few of us, then some.

From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

Not to worry, you'll never understand it, Mr. Objectivist.

While being alive is all right for the world’s general population, some of us need to get it in writing that this is so.

And then, say, post it here?

Some critics of the pessimist often think they have his back to the wall when they blithely jeer, "If that is how this fellow feels, he should either kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite." That the pessimist should kill himself in order to live up to his ideas may be counterattacked as betraying such a crass intellect that it does not deserve a response. Yet is it not much of a chore to produce one. Simply because someone has reached the conclusion that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born does not mean that by force of logic or sincerity he must kill himself. It only means that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born.

Of course he's only paraphrasing, among others, Camus. And Bartleby?

There is nothing more futile than to consciously look for something to save you.

Not counting philosophy of course.

In its quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it.

Posed by who you might ask.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Bart D. Ehrman

Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead. That was not what the messiah was supposed to do. Whatever specific idea any Jew had about the messiah (as cosmic judge, mighty priest, powerful warrior), what they all thought was that he would be a figure of grandeur and power who would be a mighty ruler of Israel. And Jesus was certainly not that. Rather than destroying the enemy, Jesus was destroyed by the enemy—arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans. Jesus, in short, was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be.


Flip a coin?

One of my favorite apparent discrepancies—I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is—comes in Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.

Flip a coin?

Whether you are a believer—fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal—or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon.

True all the more if He actually does exist.

Paul, by the way, never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine.

On the other hand, did he ever ask Him?

Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we’ll continue to call him John, though we don’t know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language—Greek rather than Aramaic—and with a completely different level of education ... The author of John is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips.

Wow, like Socrates and Plato!

"...non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—“ I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.

Deconstruct that!
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Laurie Anderson

They say that Heaven is like TV... a perfect little world, that doesn't really need you.


Not unlike here. If we were perfect.

When you follow your thoughts and watch them attach to certain things, it makes certain things real and other things unreal, and you realize that this is all created by your mind.

Kind of let's say.

I think illusion is one of the most interesting things that I've found to think about. Just look at yesterday, and what you were doing, and how important it was, and how nonexistent it is now! How dreamlike it is! Same thing with tomorrow. So where are we living?

Anyone here actually know?

Books are the way the dead talk to the living.

More to the point however do they know that?

Paradise Is exactly like where you are right now only much much better.

Among other things, by definition?

You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.

You do the math.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Philosophy Tweets

“Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.” Plotinus


Next up: what Trump knew.

"The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." Edgar Allan Poe

Any beautiful women left here?

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt

https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 2&t=197986

“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” Cervantes

Just out of curiosity, has anyone here ever attained the impossible?

"The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech." Voltaire

Heil Hitler?

"The academic journals are full of nonsense that not even the author believes but that is necessary for his career. None of these journals pays a red cent; very few of them are read." Hannah Arendt

Of course: Will Durant's "epistemologists".
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Steven Pinker

A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.


And America fits into that...how?

In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.

Tell that to the folks in Iraq.

But our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an infinitesimal instant. Instead it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous "now" but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.

That weird brain matter again.

It’s no coincidence that haunting means “haunting” and tart means “tart,” rather than the other way around; just listen to your voice and sense your muscles as you articulate them. Voluptuous has a voluptuous give-and-take between the lips and the tongue, and titillating also gives the tongue a workout while titillating the ear with a coincidental but unignorable overlap with a naughty word.

Then these things: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/10-verbs ... %20context.

Today I take it for granted that if I want some milk, I can walk into a convenience store and a quart will be on the shelves, the milk won’t be diluted or tainted, it will be for sale at a price I can afford, and the owner will let me walk out with it after a swipe of a card, even though we have never met, may never see each other again, and have no friends in common who can testify to our bona fides. A few doors down and I could do the same with a pair of jeans, a power drill, a computer, or a car.

Wow, I take that for granted too.

Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as “reductionist” or “determinist.” The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.

You know, like objectivist.
You know, if that were true.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Yuval Noah Harari

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.


Some more than others. That never changes of course.

Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.

Yes, that can get tricky, can't it?

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

Not my story of course.

Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.

Social logic. Our own, for example.

The universe just does not work like a story.

At least not until God creates it.

Nothing is inherently beautiful, sacred, or sexy; human feelings make it so.

Among other things, that explains everything, right?
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emile M. Cioran

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.


Yo, Olivia!!

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

Gasp! Even here?!

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Ouch?

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

The delicacy of a pinhead, for example

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

Next up: by the time he is sixty.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

In the interim, however...
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