philosophy

[shereads]

It's Zoot speaking from a male perspective. He and I do that.

I knew I was a reason i re-read this post. You and Zoot do, indeed, speak from a male perspective.



Is it warm in here again?

 

[shereads]

Suspend your disbelief and watch a film called "Billy Elliott".

Don't know whether to get misty-eyed remembering that extraordinary film, or to grin as I imagine this advice being taken to heart. Wouldn't that be something? Woudn't it be heartening if amicus decided to give us a little of whatever it is that drove him to read and think to begin with, and came down to earth for two hours to watch a movie recommended to him by someone from an alien world, and then we'd all discuss his views on the movie.

Like a bunch of people who share a common language and are talking about a movie.

Amicus. You don't have to be the enemy of the room forever, not on every topic. You could start a thread about things you've enjoyed and seen in life that you might have in common with everyone here.

Unless you're enjoying this. Then I will too. Just thought I'd ask.

I'd forgotten all about your revolution. I'll answer that with a fanciful quote from a once popular beat combo of my day. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

And speaking of "slave economies"...

Gauche

Applause from the cheap seats.

 

[shereads]

But then he figured out that drinking boiled water was. Go figure.

I personally give my kudos to the people who found out what was edible and under what bizarre circumstances they are. Brave or stupid or desperate or dared men and women they were and are.

I've always suspected that it was someone's job. Either that, or the most ancient form of fraternity hazing.

"This called 'oyster.' You eat."

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Don't know whether to get misty-eyed remembering that extraordinary film, or to grin as I imagine this advice being taken to heart. Wouldn't that be something? Woudn't it be heartening if amicus decided to give us a little of whatever it is that drove him to read and think to begin with, and came down to earth for two hours to watch a movie recommended to him by someone from an alien world, and then we'd all discuss his views on the movie.

Like a bunch of people who share a common language and are talking about a movie.

Amicus. You don't have to be the enemy of the room forever, not on every topic. You could start a thread about things you've enjoyed and seen in life that you might have in common with everyone here.

Unless you're enjoying this. Then I will too. Just thought I'd ask.

Applause from the cheap seats.

He likes Rand and Heinlein. Which is a'ight. I like some of Heinlein's stuff (couldn't get into Stranger in a Strange Land but I've promised myself to give it another shot one of these days) and none of Rand's stuff (hey, it's cool, I dislike almost all non-fiction short of science textbooks, books, and journals and bizarre shit such as Hippocrates, Crowley, or American Medical Association and a few random works mostly by ancient Greeks). He's been sharing his views on those and it's our own damn fault if we don't worship their themes with his utter faith.

Personally, I'd like to see what his opinion on Phillip K. Dick and Voltaire is, given his views on the likelihood of utopia over dystopia. Also, I wouldn't mind a friendly discussion on recurring dystopian and utopian lands in science fiction novels and how many dystopias are shown as the result of utopian policies.

 

[shereads]

He likes Rand and Heinlein. Which is a'ight. I like some of Heinlein's stuff (couldn't get into Stranger in a Strange Land but I've promised myself to give it another shot one of these days) and none of Rand's stuff (hey, it's cool, I dislike almost all non-fiction short of science textbooks, books, and journals and bizarre shit such as Hippocrates, Crowley, or American Medical Association and a few random works mostly by ancient Greeks). He's been sharing his views on those and it's our own damn fault if we don't worship their themes with his utter faith.

Personally, I'd like to see what his opinion on Phillip K. Dick and Voltaire is, given his views on the likelihood of utopia over dystopia. Also, I wouldn't mind a friendly discussion on recurring dystopian and utopian lands in science fiction novels and how many dystopias are shown as the result of utopian policies.

I was kind of hoping for something about his pets, or how much he likes "I Love Lucy." After we'd all bonded a little, we could take on a controversy: Which Darren was better on "Bewitched?" Why does Goofy wear clothes and walk upright, when Pluto is naked, walks on all fours and can't talk? Aren't they both dogs?

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I was kind of hoping for something about his pets, or how much he likes "I Love Lucy." After we'd all bonded a little, we could take on a controversy: Which Darren was better on "Bewitched?" Why does Goofy wear clothes and walk upright, when Pluto is naked, walks on all fours and can't talk? Aren't they both dogs?

It's because Pluto is a hellbound hedonistic sinner with no respect for decent values and Goofy is an upstanding representative of proper conservative thought.

I liked the Darren who was a bulldyke in the very very special episode of Bewitched.

 

[shereads]

It's because Pluto is a hellbound hedonistic sinner with no respect for decent values and Goofy is an upstanding representative of proper conservative thought.

I liked the Darren who was a bulldyke in the very very special episode of Bewitched.

Honey, you're confused again. That wasn't "Bewitched," it was "Boys Don't Cry." And that wasn't Darren, it was Larry King.

 

[cantdog]

It wasn't Cosmo Topper?

 

[oggbashan]

It wasn't Cosmo Topper?

I'd have to look through my collection of Thorne Smith.

Was he wearing 'The Bishop's Jaegers'?

Og

 

[shereads]

What is the best moral philosophy to live your life by?

"Simplify, simplify."

~ Thoreau

"Why two 'simplifies?'"

~ Woody on Cheers

 

[dr_mabeuse]

accept the part about 'after the girls go home' -because what if you are a girl? I know I'm being oversensitive, but that statement seems to divide the world into 'people' and 'girls'

Oh, SnP, that's not what I meant. I meant "when the opposite sex goes home", that's all.

It goes with the observation that there are very few contented philosophers. (Just like there are very few unhappy people making love.)

---Zoots

 

[shereads]

Oh, SnP, that's not what I meant. I meant "when the opposite sex goes home", that's all.

Then you're intentionally excluding same-sex couples?

 

[Pure]

A relevant anecdote:

A popular philosophy prof told me this. In a bar, someone would say to him, "What are you? What do you do?"
"I'm a philosopher."
"Well, what is your philosophy?"

At that point, he used to say something about empiricism, how we come to know things, and some other topics like 'what is mind?' as well as logic. The person would sit patiently through the long explanation.

Then s/he would say, "But, what is your philosophy?"

So he learned to do the following:
"What is your philosophy?" says the questioner.
"Live and let live."
"Oh, OK, thanks."

 

[sweetnpetite]

Then you're intentionally excluding same-sex couples?

Poor doc- can't win for loosin!

 

[sweetnpetite]

...is the talk on a cerial box...

 

[Guest]

This is my own personal thing but I must say I hate that the serious posts here seem to be outnumbered by the silly. I had given more thought to the role of philosophy in modern life but forget it, not worth my time to write up now.

Yeah, this is a whinge. Deal with it. Perdita

 

[cantdog]

shereads:t's also significant (though not to everyone, of course) that those at the top tax bracket have sufficient wealth that their lifestyles are not affected by the loss of the money they pay in taxes. Example, our VP takes home an extra $360,000 a year since the recent tax cuts, and has a net worth in the tens of millions. Someone making $30,000/year faces serious life choices when faced with the loss of a few thousand dollars. A millionaire faces none.

As author Molly Ivans put it, "Bill Gates and a nun walk into a soup kitchen occupied by 30 homeless people. The average income of all the people in the room is now in excess of $6 million a year. But 30 of them are still homeless."

This is the blowjob limit. There exists an amount of money which no one can possibly even squander fast enough to reduce it. Collecting Van Goghs, even. There's nothing you can possibly do with it that would make a difference in your life any more.

Money in excess of the blowjob limit is accrued for nothing. Nothing but greed and power.

This is the fruit of the invisible hand. It was this and the squalor of the left behind which caused the revolutions of 1848, the political will to curb the Robber Barons, and other such upheavals, greater and smaller, violent and less so, every time laissez-faire capitalism achieves again the upper hand. The conditions are now becoming as they were then. America is being third-world-ized.

 

[sweetnpetite]

This is my own personal thing but I must say I hate that the serious posts here seem to be outnumbered by the silly. I had given more thought to the role of philosophy in modern life but forget it, not worth my time to write up now.

Yeah, this is a whinge. Deal with it. Perdita

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but it seems rather ballanced to me. Even suprisingly on topic for such a heavy subject on this board.

Everytime I open this thread, I get this old song in my head and I was curious if anyone else would get the reference. I think that even in the light and silly answers, there is something to learn. (There's always something, if you look, esp. on this topic.) I think some people's phylosophy really *is* silly. Everybody has one even if they don't know it. Sometimes it's really deep, sometimes it's hokey like "don't worry be happy" or "everybody hurts" or whatever.

Anyway, I hope that nothing I said put you off. Hugs to perdita.

Sweet.

 

[cantdog]

America third-world-ized

And Ayn Rand would dig it. That's why she's piffle. The goal of societies is greatness, true, but greatness is an elastic term. I mean areté, excellence, by greatness. A society is great insofar as it has found the way to live.

A few thousand people owning nearly everything is not excellence. It is not the way to live.

And the victims of this system bear watching when the victors are succeeding. This is why the secret police, the detention without trial or at a tribunal concerned with washing their hands of you, the surveillance-- fear!

They are afraid of us, and with better and better reason all the time. it is fear that our so-called representatives might actually represent us that makes them beggar the government and buy the politicians.

It is fear of rebellion even without the political system, directly, at their mills, at their very doors, in the face of the guns, the tanks, and the steel; the chemical weapons and all the rest.

Nor is that fear ooverblown. People do that periodically in the most hopeless poverty in the most wretched repression by the most abandoned and cynical murdering torturing goons in the world. The risks, so far, are less here.

Less than in Haiti when Lavalas rose out of the countryside. Less than in Timor, less than in occupied Iraq, less than in hundreds of other places. Perhaps, in fact, we will suffer them to take from us and take from us until we have finally so little to lose that even chaos and death will be preferable.

But I would suggest that we head these dickheads off before we have been ground down that low, for the sake of our children.

 

[shereads]

This is the blowjob limit. There exists an amount of money which no one can possibly even squander fast enough to reduce it. Collecting Van Goghs, even. There's nothing you can possibly do with it that would make a difference in your life any more.

Money in excess of the blowjob limit is accrued for nothing. Nothing but greed and power.

This is the fruit of the invisible hand. It was this and the squalor of the left behind which caused the revolutions of 1848, the political will to curb the Robber Barons, and other such upheavals, greater and smaller, violent and less so, every time laissez-faire capitalism achieves again the upper hand. The conditions are now becoming as they were then. America is being third-world-ized.

Bumping this while I ponder how you named the phenomenon.

 

[cantdog]

Well, I'm afraid sweetnpetite would object to the process. It grew out of a rant/ conversation in my Sunday-night group. We had defined the problem not as "No one can comprehend that much money," which is a side issue of little importance, but as "How many boats, jets, houses, and blowjobs can you possibly buy?" meaning, as I say above, things which actually cause a lifestyle change or impact quality of life. New window treatments every five minutes?

So we shorthand it now, to refer to it in a succinct way, as the blowjob limit.


More firemanly perspective, probably.

 

[shereads]

Re: America third-world-ized

And Ayn Rand would dig it. That's why she's piffle. The goal of societies is greatness, true, but greatness is an elastic term. I mean areté, excellence, by greatness. A society is great insofar as it has found the way to live.

A few thousand people owning nearly everything is not excellence. It is not the way to live.

And the victims of this system bear watching when the victors are succeeding. This is why the secret police, the detention without trial or at a tribunal concerned with washing their hands of you, the surveillance-- fear!

They are afraid of us, and with better and better reason all the time. it is fear that our so-called representatives might actually represent us that makes them beggar the government and buy the politicians.

It is fear of rebellion even without the political system, directly, at their mills, at their very doors, in the face of the guns, the tanks, and the steel; the chemical weapons and all the rest.

Nor is that fear ooverblown. People do that periodically in the most hopeless poverty in the most wretched repression by the most abandoned and cynical murdering torturing goons in the world. The risks, so far, are less here.

Less than in Haiti when Lavalas rose out of the countryside. Less than in Timor, less than in occupied Iraq, less than in hundreds of other places. Perhaps, in fact, we will suffer them to take from us and take from us until we have finally so little to lose that even chaos and death will be preferable.

But I would suggest that we head these dickheads off before we have been ground down that low, for the sake of our children.

Here's a silly thought:

Is philosphy just a brain-exercise that has no practical application, in that life must always find a balance by whatever means it can? I mean, it seems clear enough that there are these cycles like the ones you describe. Even over the short term, we see political cycles in this country, as the mood of voters swings from left to right over the course of a few presidential elections - with habitual "corrections" if the party in power in congress is the same as the party of a second-term president. It's as if the mood of the country is water seeking its level.

Both capitalism and communism face the same dilemma: human nature. Sooner or later, greed and envy are bound to collide.

To believe in communism as a solution, you have to believe that industrious individuals won't mind sharing equally with lazy individuals, and that the lazy won't take advantage.

To remain a stalwart proponent of pure, unrestricted capitalism, you have to ignore the question I've put to our neocon friends in this forum more than once: If I live upstream from you, why should I not dump toxic waste into the river that runs through my property? Is your resistance to regulating my damage to your environment, based upon the hope that my better nature will prevail when I learn that my use of my property is making your property downstream unlivable?

Is there a political or religious philosophy that has proven to be practical over centuries, remaining unweakened by power plays and human frailty?

 

[amicus]

There are no doubt a few of the nouveau riche, and second and third generation wealthy such as the Kennedy clan and many of the Hollywood liberal crowd, that spend money to acquire status.

But the really big money is and always has been reinvested in society and you know it.

The Rockefeller Foundation, The Carnegie Mellon enterprises, Standard Oil, Railroad magnates...all invest and reinvest capital for profit of course but in doing so, to 'grow' the economy and the country.

Robber Barons...eh? The result of yellow journalism. I suggest you actually name those you call Robber Barons, then I suggest you go the the library and read a biography and a history of their achievements and their lasting endowments.

European statists, which still occupy our Universities, were hell bent for leather to criticize the 'upstart' young nation that from 1850 on, began to out produce the rest of the world and lure those from the still medieval environment of old Europe.

It does not surprise me that so many of this generation have been mislead into criticizing the system that gave them the best standard of living in all of history.

It does not surprise me that those ungrateful sons and daughters of immigrants, who wrested a livelihood from a raw continent, should now turn and bit the hands that fed them.

Thats what kids are for, right?

amicus the unwashed...

 

[amicus]

Shereads...


To equate Communism and Captialism as just two systems of government/economics is not acceptable to any rational person.

Communism and it sister Nazism, all forms of 'collectivism' have one thing in common that the liberal left continues to ignore.

Those 'command' systems deny that man has any 'individual' rights, that all rights reside in the 'collective'; that the individual is sacrificed for the 'greater good' at the whim of a Czar or a Feurer(SP)

The entire history of mankind has been a struggle to establish that each individual human alive, even you, has the 'innate' right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Your life, your Liberty, your Pursuit.

You have that right to live for yourself, not to sacrifice your life or even a moment of it to succor others unless you choose to do so.

When any one advocates that they 'the' majority has a right to 'use' my life, liberty or pursuit for 'their' reasons, I pick up a weapon of mass destruction as lethal a one as I can lift.

Tell me in plain words that you really do not advocate sacrificing a human life or any part of it to justify your political ambitions. Please.

amicus the aborigine

 

[shereads]

Robber Barons...eh? The result of yellow journalism. I suggest you actually name those you call Robber Barons, then I suggest you go the the library and read a biography and a history of their achievements and their lasting endowments.

We've been up this trail before, and as soon as I posted some examples from history, you disappeared. I'll try once more:

Johnstown Flood, 1889. 2200 citizens of a Pennsylvania mill town died after repeated complaints from townspeople about an unsafe dam were ignored by its owners, the South Fork Fishing Club, whose members included Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, Andrew Mellon. The club held an emergency meeting after the disaster and made two key decisions: to donate blankets to a relief effort, and to disband the club and destroy records that showed individual ownership of camp property.

"At 4:07 p.m. on the chilly, wet afternoon of May 31, 1889 the inhabitants heard a low rumble that grew to a "roar like thunder." Some knew immediately what had happened: after a night of heavy rains, the South Fork Dam had finally broken, sending 20 million tons of water crashing down the narrow valley. Boiling with huge chunks of debris, the wall of flood water grew at times to 60 feet high, tearing downhill at 40 miles per hour, leveling everything in its path.

"Thousands of people desperately tried to escape the wave...Many became helplessly entangled in miles of barbed wire from the destroyed wire works. It was over in 10 minutes, but for some the worst was still yet to come...Many more had been swept downstream to the old Stone Bridge at the junction of the rivers. Piled up against the arches, the debris caught fire, entrapping 80 people who had survived the initial flood wave.

"Many bodies were never identified, hundreds of the missing never found...The cleanup operation took years, with bodies being found months later in a few cases, years after the flood...In the aftermath, most survivors laid the blame for the dam's failure squarely at the feet of the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. They had bought the abandoned reservoir, then repaired the old dam, raised the lake level, and built cottages and a clubhouse in their secretive retreat in the mountains. Members were wealthy Pittsburgh steel and coal industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, who had hired B. Ruff to oversee the repairs to the dam. There is no question about the shoddy condition of the dam, but no successful lawsuits were ever brought against club members for its failure and the resulting deaths downstream."

Accounts of the attempted legal actions against the club site the lack of surviving records of the club's legal ownership.

Those clever captains of industry! Spunky, too. They managed to survive the temporary shortage of living steel workers and had the Johnstown mill up and running again in 5 years.

http://www.johnstownpa.com/History/hist30.html

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. 1911. A fire on the 8th floor of a buiiding in the Garment District killed 146 employees, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, who had been locked in to prevent them from taking breaks without permission. Most of the dead jumped to their deaths as a crowd watched below, rather than die in the flames.

"The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory became a national symbol of business neglect and abuse. Although hazardous working conditions in the garment industry had been the focus of numerous investigations, labor strikes, and public demonstrations throughout the late 19th century, it took the fire to galvanize public resolve for workplace regulation and ongoing vigilance."

http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/history/trifire.htm