Philosophy Now Forum

"Starbucks Unveils $7 Wake-Up Slap"

I dunno what that's from, but I do know a large Starbucks brown sugar oatmilk shaken espresso just went from $6.77 to $6.98.

Stupidity...

“Careful, Mr. Spiro, guns are dangerous. Especially the end with the hole.” Eoin Colfer

Of course, he's only paraphrasing henry.

“When a war breaks out, people say: 'It's too stupid; it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid,' that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.” Albert Camus

Not excluding the wars here, he suggested.

“Brave? Or stupid?"
Roger shrugged. "I've never been quite sure where brave stopped and stupid began, myself.” Gerald Morris

My guess: nobody does.

“The key to holding a logical argument or debate is to allow oneself to understand the other person’s argument no matter how divergent their views may seem.” Auliq Ice


Unless, of course, I'm wrong.

“Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.” Stephen Vizinczey

Defiantly for some.

“You smoke?”
“Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?” Richard K. Morgan

You know, if even that goes far enough.

J.G. Ballard from Crash

We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

Well, if the price is right, anyway.

He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels.

Dasein willing, of course.

As I sat with her by the airport fence in her darkened car, her white breast in my hand lit by the ascending airliners, the shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers.

Come again?

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind … We live inside an enormous novel … The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent reality.

Unless, of course, that's upside down.

In the screen of the rear-view mirror I watched the cars climbing the access ramp on to the motorway behind us, eager arrivals at this aerial carnival.

Go for it: https://youtu.be/UN9lpOEqg04

Already the skin picked in a palisade of notches from her lower lip marked the arithmetic of widowhood, the desperate calculation that she would never find another lover.

Enough already.

David Mitchell from Cloud Atlas

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

Go ahead, fit yourself in there somewhere.

People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.

Go ahead, fit yourself in there somewhere.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Trust me: not all of them.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

Nope, not yet. Not even close actually.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

Thank God?

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction.

Of course, he's just paraphrasing Benjamin Button.
And, yeah, me.

Jeanette Winterson from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

Don't you just hate that?

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

I have a theory that it doesn't.

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

On the other hand: https://youtu.be/YoagldK69U0

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

There's that. And then the part about what others think.

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

And now you have to.

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky.

Pick one:

1] hopelessly muddled
2] crystal clear

David James Duncan

More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less.

On the other hand, about what?

...that was the thing about nature: make one lousy rule to describe it and it'll contradict you even if it has to transmogrify and metamorphosize and bust its ass to do it. and so what? if anybody grew wise enough to grasp the real immutable laws of nature, nature'd only rear back and strike 'em dead before they got anybody to understand them.

Of course, your nature might be different.

I felt a rush of trust--felt that life might be not just tolerable but beautiful, if I could only remember to find the bare Present.

Next up: the bare Future.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

Kind of, let's say.

I'd trapped myself in a script...But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.

Kind of, let's say.

Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters . . . Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.

Let alone philosophy?

Cynicism...

“In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.” Sigmund Freud

Uh, at best?

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse." Joseph Brodsky

Being optimistic, in other words.

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” Terry Pratchett

No, really.

“Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.” Mike Royko

You? Only if the shoe fits.

“A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn't exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.” Scott Dikkers

Not counting all my true friends here of course.

“There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.” Niccolò Machiavelli

Let's explain that.

Jerzy Kosiński

Living is an arbitrary matter and I have every right to renounce it.

Let's just say that, in the end, he "walked the talk".

She protected herself by making herself believe no-one else could ever really understand her.

I certainly never did.

Of all mammals, only a human being can say 'no'.

Next up: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/no-in-different-languages/

Furthermore, the world of books, like meat in cans, was somehow richer and more flavorful than the everyday variety. In ordinary life, for example, one saw many people without really knowing them, while in books one even knew what people were thinking and planning.

But not really, right?

There was no God, no Holy Trinity, no devils, ghosts, or ghouls rising from graves; there was no Death flying everywhere in search of new sinners to snare. These were all tales for ignorant people who did not understand the natural order of the world, did not believe in their own powers, and therefore had to take refuge in their belief in some God.

Wusses he called them.

Do you realize that one out of every four Americans is unbalanced? Think of your three closest friends. If they seem normal, then you are the one.

Wow, that would include my three closest friends here then!

The Onion

God Wonders What Happens To Humans After They Die

Wow, just like we do!

Empty Inner Tube Ominously Exits Mouth Of Lazy River

Cue Keith Morrison.

Things All Cats Do That Prove They Are Psychopaths

Where to start?

Area Man Always Thought He’d Squander His Life Differently

He's posting here of course.

Deep Down, Area Man Knows He’s Not Done Vomiting

Or, here, posting.

4-Year-Old Convinced Father Is A Moron After 45th Consecutive Hide-And-Seek Victory

They mean pinhead, of course.

Eugene Thacker

There are times when I feel that the only real aptitude of our species is that we can ruin anything.

Indeed, look what happened here.

The pinnacle of humanity lies in its ability to be disgusted with itself. What really separates us from other forms of life is our ability to detest our kind, to recognize the stupidity of being human. I spite, therefore I am.

Indeed, and starting here?

A bit of philosophizing leads to a wonderment of life. A lot of philosophizing leads to a contempt of it.

Indeed, and then there's me.

Human culture: a kind of incessant ringing in the ears.

When it isn't incessant explosions.

How is it possible to feel nothing but unmitigated spite for so many different kinds of people?

More to the point, how is it possible not to?
Well, if that is the point.

There is no better occasion for pessimism than optimism.

And now proven scientifically some insist.

Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Though now more and more and more in an open society.

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

Tell that to Jack Sparrow.

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas...with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.

Fuck Las Vegas. Oh, and not just every now and then.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

See what I mean?

With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever.

One way to look at it, I suppose.

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country---but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

On the other hand, so was that Nazi from the movie.

Pessimism...

"Life is a long agonised illness only curable by death” Spike Milligan

My guess: for some more than others.

“The Buddha asks us to see things as they really are. He does not ask us to cling to optimistic views of eternity or pessimistic views of annihilation but simply to examine our experience.” Red Pine


Let's all at least agree on that.

“People doom and damn themselves with their own perverse and pessimistic beliefs about reality.” David Sinclair

Well, I know that I certainly do.

“Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply “Of course” before returning to their ecstasy.” Thomas Ligotti

Define basically?

“Fear of death is not wisdom, since no one knows whether death may not be the greater good.” Bertrand Russell

Ah, the philosopher.

“Life is not more kind, or less cruel, towards those who take it seriously.” Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Understandably?

Jerry A. Fodor

The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.

Of course, the sun doesn't really rise at all: "The sun stays in its position at the center of our solar system. It doesn't rise and set. But it appears to rise and set because of the Earth's rotation on its axis."

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with.

We'll need a context of course.

Empiricism isn't true, and it is time to put away childish things.

We'll need a context of course.

It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

Especially mine?

As Uncle Hegel used to enjoy pointing out, the trouble with perspectives is that they are, by definition, partial points of view; the real problems are appreciated only when, in the course of the development of the World Spirit, the limits of perspective come to be transcended. Or, to put it less technically, it helps to be able to see the whole elephant.

Next up: Uncle Iambiguous. Well, if only in the is/ought world.

Why isn’t every basic law a miracle by definition?

You know, given that the existence of existence itself might be one.
By definition?

Louise Erdrich from The Night Watchman

When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.

No fucking way, right?

In all, 113 tribal nations suffered the disaster of termination; 1.4 million acres of tribal land was lost. Wealth flowed to private corporations, while many people in terminated tribes died early, in poverty. Not one tribe profited. By the end, 78 tribal nations, including the Menominee, led by Ada Deer, regained federal recognition; 10 gained state but not federal recognition; 31 tribes are landless; 24 are considered extinct.

Next up: those casinos?

An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary’s different. You must outwit an adversary.

Yo, IC!

The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.

Hey, fair is fair.

You know any Mormons? asked Martin Cross
I don't think so.
They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites.
I thought that was a government job.

They take turns.

...one explanation did not rule out the other, that charged electrons could be spirits, that nothing ruled out anything else, that mathematics was a rigorous form of madness...

And so forth.

Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger

Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

On the other hand, dying...

The founders of quantum mechanics—Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg—had nothing to guide them but an intuition about how the world should be.

And how should that be?

It was the theory of the week. For about a year.

And what a year it was!

You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressing table drawer. But that's not what's at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale.

Next up: what will be.

If there was a heaven, was it not founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned?

Thy will be done.

I'm not by myself. I'm schizophrenic.

And a fractured and fragmented schizophrenic to boot.