Philosophy Now Forum

Darwin, Charles wrote:To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new
truth or fact.

Darwin, Charles wrote:I am inclined to give up the attempt as hopeless. Those who do not understand, it seems cannot be
made to understand.

Darwin, Charles wrote:Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote: Progress, that great heresy of degenerates.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote:This is what a girl really is. A little fool, a little slut; the greatest idiocy united with the greatest
depravity.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote:Women do not know how to separate the soul from the body.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote:To love intelligent women is the pleasure of a pederast.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote: I can scarcely conceive (would my brain be a spellbound mirror?) a type of beauty without unhappiness.
Supported by — others would say, obsessed by — these notions, one may conceive it would be difficult for
me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, — as rendered by Milton.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote:There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To
handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Pistolero wrote: ↑Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:50 pm

Darwin, Charles wrote:To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new
truth or fact.

In an age of lies, killing errors is an endless war against stupidity.

Pistolero wrote: ↑Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:50 pm

Darwin, Charles wrote:I am inclined to give up the attempt as hopeless. Those who do not understand, it seems cannot be
made to understand.

Philosophers are rare because few men have the constitution to endure objective reality.

Pistolero wrote: ↑Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:50 pm

Darwin, Charles wrote:Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

Adversity creates superiority.

Pistolero wrote: ↑Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:50 pm Comfort and sheltering atrophies and regresses.

Pistolero wrote: ↑Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:50 pm All human disparities are born out of great of suffering; all racial and species disparities are born out of great struggles, over long periods of time.
We call this process "natural selection."

Pistolero wrote: ↑Tue Apr 22, 2025 8:50 pm Human societies, of the last few centuries have managed to replace natural with ideological selection, but this does not make them immune to nature.
Genes to Memes

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager
faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent
reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced.
The hyper real.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote: What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this
fictive basis that it dominates the world.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his
transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits
according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in
response to opinion polls.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America
ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding
truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of
myths of origin and of signs of reality – a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:All societies end up wearing masks.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is
Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is
carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact
all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and
the simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the
fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. The Disneyland imaginary is
neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the
real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It is meant to be an infantile world,
in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that
real childishness is everywhere, particularly amongst those adults who go there to act the child in order to
foster illusions as to their real childishness.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is
no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth,
it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULACRUM – it is the map that engenders
the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly
rotting across the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the
Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:We live by the mode of referendum precisely because there is no longer any referential. Every
sign, every message (objects of “functional” use as well as any item of fashion or televised news, poll or electoral consultation)
is presented to us as a question/answer. The entire system of communication has passed from that of a
syntactically complex language structure to a binary sign system of question/answer–of perpetual test. Now
tests and referenda are, we know, perfect forms of simulation: the answer is called forth by the question, it
is designated in advance. The referendum is always an ultimatum: the unilateral nature of the question that
is no longer exactly an interrogation but the immediate imposition of a sense whereby the cycle is suddenly
completed. Every message is a verdict, just like the one that comes from polling statistics.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:The “advanced democratic” systems are stabilized on the formula of bipartite alternation. The
monopoly in fact remains that of a homogenous political class, from left to right, but it must be exercised as
such. The one-party totalitarian regime is an unstable form – it defuses the political scene, it no longer
assures the feed-back of public opinion, the minimal flux in the integrated circuit which constitutes the
transitory political machine.

Kant, Immanuel wrote:One may prove that Americans and Negroes are races which have sunk below the level of other members of the species in terms of intellectual abilities – or alternatively, on the evidence of no less plausible accounts, that they should be regarded as equal in natural ability to all the other inhabitants of the world. Thus, the philosopher is at liberty to choose whether he wishes to assume natural differences or to judge everything by the principle tout comme chez nous, with the result that all the systems he constructs on such unstable foundation must take on the appearance of ramshackle hypotheses.

Kant, Immanuel wrote:n fusing different races, nature aims at assimilation [Verähnlichung]; but here [with varieties and variations] it has made the exact opposite its law: that is, nature’s law regarding a people of the same race (for example, the white race) is not to let their characters constantly and progressively approach one another in likeness – in which case there would finally appear only one portrait, as in prints taken from the same engraving – but instead to diversify to infinity the members of the same stock and even of the same clan in both their bodily and spiritual tracts.

Lasch, Christopher wrote:Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality. Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality.

Lasch, Christopher wrote:In the name of egalitarianism, they preserve the most insidious form of elitism, which in one guise or another holds the masses incapable of intellectual exertion. The whole problem of American education comes down to this: in American society, almost everyone identifies intellectual excellence with elitism. This attitude not only guarantees the monopolization of educational advantages by the few; it lowers the quality of elite education itself and threatens to bring about a reign of universal ignorance.

Lasch, Christopher wrote: The demystification of womanhood goes hand in hand with the desublimation of sexuality.

Osho wrote:Democracy basically means: Government by the people, of the people, for the people.... but the people are retarded.

Mencken, H.L. wrote:[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power – which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters – which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

Mencken, H.L. wrote:Last Words: I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a
harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system.
The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters — which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.
All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion — so beautifully Christian! — that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in
the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfillment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretences! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a
psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other — more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy. I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself — its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national
safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity.
Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon thething itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a
believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us — but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws — but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state — but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious. I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself — that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

Orwell, George wrote:Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Impenitent wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 3:03 pm "Yo quiero taco bell" - Gidget

-Imp

Orwell, George wrote:Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only
the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Orwell, George wrote:Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously,
and accepting both of them.

Orwell, George wrote:During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Orwell, George wrote:Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Orwell, George wrote:]Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Orwell, George wrote:Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Orwell, George wrote:The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

Orwell, George wrote:We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent
men.

Orwell, George wrote:Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Paglia, Camille wrote:It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have
women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

Paglia, Camille wrote:For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer
from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and
can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties
experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment
industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits.

Paglia, Camille wrote:Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed'
by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is
greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to
accept.

Paglia, Camille wrote:Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the
French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling
Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teenyweeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, including Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of
people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they’re like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus
one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism.
Derrida’s method: masturbating without pleasure. It’s a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. NeoFoucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knocking down the
pins.

Paglia, Camille wrote:Hormones are our link to pagan nature.

Paglia, Camille wrote:Every gay man pursuing another man is recapitulating that civilization-forging movement away
from the mother. Lesbians, in contrast, refuse to leave the mother. Gay men may seek sex without emotion;
lesbians often end up in emotion without sex. Male homosexuality, pushing outward into risky, alien
territory, is progressive and, overall, intellectually stimulating. Lesbianism, seeking a lost state of blissful
union with the mother, is cozy, regressive, and, I’m sorry to say, too often intellectually enervating, tending
toward the inert.

Paglia, Camille wrote:The date-rape controversy shows feminism hitting the wall of its own broken promises. The
women of my Sixties generation were the first respectable girls in history to swear like sailors, get drunk,
stay out all night—in short, to act like men. We sought total sexual freedom and equality. But as time
passed, we woke up to cold reality. The old double standard protected women. When anything goes, its
women who lose.