Come now -- nothing of any significance has happened to you. You are by no means the first person whose post has been deleted. So, English isn't your first language. Fine -- say so up front. That will "cut some slack for you" - meaning, you won't be graded on grammar as severely as I might be. You won't be the first English is second language either.

All that Baden suggested was that you make a clearer OP. You aren't the first person to receive that suggestion.

Perhaps it was just slightly inauspicious to begin your post with "I can't deny that I suffer from sadistic compulsive thoughts." A bit of over-sharing. It isn't the ants, as far as I am concerned. I poured boiling water on some horrendously large ants that were swarming over my back step and were getting into the house at 3 in the morning. Big suckers were parboiled in a flash. I felt not a twinge of guilt; only sadness that I did't have several gallons of boiling water handy.

So why don't you stay. Just because you said you are leaving means nothing. It isn't a contractual statement. People get into snits quite often, then get over it.

It was not a superb post, true enough. But it was good enough to lead me to think about pleasure and power. Maybe Nobody could rewrite it?

I'm not a moderator. My guess is that one of the moderators thought it was too stupid to keep.

I thought your post was moderately interesting. Here's my response.

I can't deny that I suffer from sadistic compulsive thoughts. — Nobody

Go directly to your therapist. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Stepping on ants, discovering that one can kill them with the magnifying glass one is examining them with, spreading poison around their ant hills, spraying RAID on hornet nests--all that is one thing. Taking great pleasure in these acts crosses over the borderline between normal/abnormal. Healthy individuals develop altruism as they grow up, such that they might still wipe out insects out of a sense of necessity, but it isn't a pleasurable act. One might catch fish on a hook, shoot squirrels with a .22, bring down geese and ducks with a shotgun, kill a deer with a rifle, and derive pleasure from the success of the effort, but still not revel in the death of the pike, the squirrel, the duck, or deer.

See the difference?

Pleasure in power... Henry Kissinger, foreign policy advisor to President Nixon, said that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac. Let's leave god out of this. We're talking primate psychology here.

Some people do have the power of life and death over people, never mind ants, and they usually want to hold onto it. This is a feature of human personality, which manifests itself to a much greater degree in some people than others. Those 'others' aren't mysterious rarities -- they are our political, military, and corporate masters. They have power and from what I can gather, they like it.

As long as you stick to ants, you probably won't be too dangerous. Even so, just leave the ants alone.

All this is true: there is nothing good that can not be perverted into an evil. Patriotism, altruism, family, love, peace, justice, freedom, responsibility, achievement, beauty, politeness, strength -- all these things -- remain good, however. We don't need to qualify our teaching that the good attributes of life are good, and that the bad attributes of life are bad.

What we must do is always remember what is good and what is bad. If freedom of speech is a good thing, then don't complain when somebody says something you don't like. Freedom means that other people are likely to behave in ways you disapprove of. Freedom means that some people will vote for Hillary and some people will vote for Donald. You may not like it, but that's what freedom means. If you really can't tolerate people behaving in ways you disapprove of, then you need to find yourself a country run by a rigid theocracy where people are SEVERELY PUNISHED for deviating from the straight and narrow path.

Not only will other people behave in quite disreputable ways, they will also inform you that your behavior is impossibly tasteless. But that's what you get with freedom.

So, we need to learn what we ought not to do, as well as what we should do. We should not be hard hearted. We should not betray the people of our country. We should not lie, cheat, steal, and murder, and so on.

I think that properly raised people tend to understand well enough what is good and what is forbidden.

We start life with the need to continue our species existence. — hachit

Nah! We don't start thinking about the need to continue our species' existence until long after we've either done our share of reproducing (or we let somebody else do our share). What people feel is sex hunger. That takes care of continuing our species--and most other species too What keeps the species going is the "Boy, I'd like to fuck her!" reaction.

Then we move to develop them independently (divine command, unitilitarianism, and whatever else) then to form governments we use contractarianism. — hachit

Nah! This is all after the fact. Long after the fact. This is theory about what we observe or think we observed.

After these steps we try to spread our morality to others as a sense of approval, the idea being we don't want to live thinking we did something wrong (not wanting our morals challenged). Those were disagree with are our enemies and we treat them how our independent morals demand (so different for everyone). — hachit

Nah! Most of us do not have the opportunity to use morality spreaders on others. (They look just like manure spreaders. And sometimes it's the same old bullshit.)

Morality arises out of intimate human interaction. Our first intimate human interaction is child/parent. Parents all have the problem of training their children to behave the way they want them to behave. Good behavior is praised; bad behavior is punished. The child figures out what is good and bad. As the child gets older, he learns the prevailing morality that his parents follow. Later on, the child -- now a philosophy major at University -- decides to rip up everything he knows about morality and starts thinking it through. Almost always he will conclude with what he started with, but if he goes and stays very far afield in his moral thinking, he may be deemed a complete asshole. Sometimes people get lost while they are far afield and end up here.

Alas.

People love each other and love becomes a standard of morality. We want to feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves, and about a few other people. Not too many, though. We can feel warm and fuzzy about being nice to a few people; feeling warm and fuzzy about being nice to millions of people is impossible. Even Jesus felt warm and fuzzy about... oh, maybe a couple dozen. Par for the course. 11 of the 12, his mother of course; his dad; Lasarus; John, for sure. Probably not Judas, given the way things worked out.

It's a circular process. It starts in the home; society shapes behavior in various ways. People fall in love and start another round. The parents want their children to behave so it isn't quite such a nightmare having them around.

I don't know what these means when you abstract "the state" outside of the representatives who are elected who form part of it — Maw

The elected personnel of government are a small minority; granted, they are a powerful small minority. But the "Permanent Government" is huge, and by reason of its size and control of government work, is also very powerful. Everything from the CIA to the GSA (General Services Administration), the military to the National Endowment for the Arts is a piece of the Permanent Government which grinds away in the secluded cellars, tunnels, and halls beneath the bright marbled and gilded Plaza where the Body Politic dances with Policy Wonks and lobbyists in crocodile shoes, schmooze, and rub up against each other to taste the pheromones of power and influence.

The political clusterfuck is on display above ground. The permanent government cleverly avoids publicity by staying below ground and out of sight.

As I said, men and women have issues that are particular to each sex, and developing a clear understanding of those issues is worthwhile. So a 'men's movement to understand men's issues' seems reasonable to me. But for most men and women, neither a feminist nor a masculinist movement is what is needed. What men and women need much more than several more identity-oriented rights movements is more clarity of what they need as working people.

Jobs, wages, working conditions, and job security are critical issues common to all working people. So is affordable and readily available medical care for both physical and psychological (including chemical dependency) illnesses. Adequate affordable housing, and quality education are basic needs. Permanent, stable, and healthy families are of equal importance to men and women. A healthy environment in which to work, live, and play is equally important to men and women.

These may seem like stale, old, irrelevant problems, but they are at the heart of life for both men and women. There aren't significantly different feminist or masculinist interests here: Both sexes have the same interests.

Also, I appreciate you letting my generation off the hook. — Grre

You're welcome. It just isn't a generational issue. The Industrial Revolution started in the late 1700s. Everyone since then has either suffered and/or benefitted from industrialization. No one is guilty, everyone is responsible.

@Boethius is right about ecological theater. It's similar to the theater of safety performed at airports. Just because recycling one's cans and bottles isn't in itself going to save the world doesn't mean we should stop recycling. We can, we should, we must recycle. We should buy less stuff to start with. Of course, some cities have no recycling programs. Minneapolis has two recycling programs: combined stream recycling of plastic, paper, and metal (goes in one container) and kitchen and yard waste recycling (goes in a different container). These two recycling programs leave very little stuff to put into the garbage container.

Of course it will be impractical for many people to bicycle to work, because no provisions have been made to make bicycling safer, more convenient, and faster. It doesn't involve billions of dollars for cities to create bicycle lanes on streets, separate bicycle paths along disused railroads, and the like. With some adjustment, one can bicycle year round even in a city with cold weather like Minneapolis.

Look: IF we were serious about reducing our CO2 footprints, we would immediately sharply reduce the miles we drive. We would walk more, use bicycles, and take whatever public transit we could find. In the decades ahead, as oil becomes more expensive and the consequences of global warming start to bite deeper, we will have to abandon the private automobile, along with much else.

Had we taken global warming seriously in 1980, in the intervening 40 years we could have built a good deal of mass transit (rail, bus, trolley, bike ways, etc.). We didn't. So making these changes now is that much more urgent.

All that said, it is still necessary for major corporations and governments to make a 180º turn around.

How do you suggest The People hold corporate's feet to the fire? — Grre

Political campaigns are essential. "The People United are much more difficult to defeat." Who do you vote for? Are they or are they not committed to a human future? Boycott corporations who seem uninterested in change. Referenda and initiative campaigns. Support solar and wind power programs. Individuals have the responsibility of reducing their own consumption. That is and will continue to be true, no matter what else happens. Advocacy. Creating bad publicity for banks, politicians, and corporations who seem unresponsive to the threat of global warming.

Expect cooptation. Expect to see mass marketing of T-shirts with eco-slogans, buttons, all sorts of product tie-ins. Expect to see counter-campaigns by oil companies explaining how they are struggling to save the world. It's bullshit, and all that crap can be ignored.

PS. Thunberg's next planned global climate strike is planned for May 26. I'm mad that my schooling is done for the year and I'm no longer in high school, or I would have participated. — Grre

You mean, there is no way for you to plug into this action? Help is always needed to get these things off the ground, and wherever you live, there is a need for people to start organizing. Grow where you are planted.

By the way, expect to feel a sense of futility at times. Changing the direction the world is going is harder than making an aircraft carrier turn quickly. If saving the world were easy, it would have been done already.

How will it all work out? Gee, I don't know. I simultaneously harbor hope and doubt that you will be successful. (I use the plural "you" because I won't be around that much longer, given my age.) Your #1 enemy is inertia and contrary interests. A lot of wealth is tied up in coal, nuclear, and petroleum, and people (being what we are) are not just going to let their investments evaporate if they can help it.

James Howard Kunstler The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century Kunstler doesn't offer some magic solution that will enable clever people to escape the problem. As he says in another book: "Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation".

Kunstler offers good, solid, and punchy information about peak oil, CO2, methane, etc.

Men have interests unique to their sex, just as women do. Men and women have a lot of interests in common, which should at least sometimes override sex-difference-interests. If not a men's "rights' movement, a lot of men would, I think, benefit from a men's movement directed toward sex-role excellence--that is, finding better models among men to emulate.

Yes. Like, if you have two feet, use them whenever possible. I realize that many people live in pedestrian no-man lands, where travel on foot is just not safe, and biking is probably even unsafer. Then too, a lot of people do not live near a bus or rapid transit line of any sort. But, many people do. A lot of people dislike riding on buses. I don't drive, I have to use buses, and I find them to be loathsome some times. So I get that. But if we want mass transit, we have to use it when feasible (else demand won't exist).

There are days when an isolated yurt sounds like just the thing.

When I am out biking around the city on weekends, I find that there are few people on the street. Few people walking, except for dog walkers, a few runners, a few other bicyclists. No adults, no children. It's just not the sign of a healthy society -- people should be more active, be able to walk a mile to the store and back. Like, actually walk 3 blocks to the drug store. Instead, they drive.

One of the consequences of past-the-peak-oil and the need to reduce CO2 emissions, is that people in cities will have to use their own internal bio-drives to do stuff. Then they won't have to drive to the gym to exercise.

Some analysts have said that the opportunity to avoid the present crisis of global warming passed sometime around 1990--30 years ago. How so?

Evidence that accumulating greenhouse gases could lead to global warming began to converge in the 1970s. Various streams of data, from satellites to cores extracted from the ocean floors and glaciers formed the basis of more specific predictions and the development of better climate models. The decade of the 1980s was THE TIME when climate change should have been taken seriously and should have been acted upon.

THEY missed the boat. By 2006 when Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was published, 26 years had passed. Since 2006, another 13 years have passed. Had THEY acted on the basis of early creditable information, we would have had 40 years in which to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

So, who are THEY? Energy corporations like Exxon, Shell, BP, etc.; auto makers; elected officials; oil and coal producers, et cetera. THEY are the people who own, manufacture, process, and sell energy, transportation, plastics, chemicals, and so forth. They, and governments, were the critical institutions that acted to continue business as usual, or failed to act to prevent ecological damage.

We the people are relevant as part of the solution, but in times of crisis (such as World War II or climate change) it is the major industrial giants that have to be mobilized first. This wasn't done; it isn't being done.

Some US states are undertaking some of the policy changes now that should have been undertaken 40 years ago. An example is "30% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030". "30% in 2030" projects are good (if they are achieved or exceeded), but they don't address transportation and heating exhaust which are huge sources of CO2 emissions.

The best role for The People is to keep the political and corporate feet to the fire -- as the expression goes. In the meantime, The People should start walking, bicycling, and using mass transit.

Educate women — frank

Yes. That has been demonstrated many times that educated women bear fewer children.

Yes; affluent people reproduce less than poor people. Why, exactly, isn't clear. Maybe affluent people are too busy earning affluent incomes to raise children. Maybe affluent people would rather be affluent than spending hundreds of thousands of euros on children. Maybe child survival rates are so high that 1 child is enough. Maybe sophisticated European metrosexuals just can't be bothered. Europe's population rate is below replacement levels which is a good thing in terms of ZPG, but is very bad for the economy. After all, somebody has to work in the factories, distribution centers, transportation, hospitals, nursing homes, farms, etc. Therefore, immigrant labor is necessary. Fortunately for affluent people in Europe, North America and parts of Asia there are plenty of inexpensive laborers available.

I'm not knocking immigration here (I do that elsewhere). I'm just pointing out that the virtue of low birth rates here and there is limited, because the population of laborers is still needed by affluent people to maintain affluence.

Projections of population growth may not be realized. Global warming is likely to have significant effects on food production, disease rates, available water for drinking and agriculture (and industry), reproduction, and so on. Worse for everyone concerned, 2070 will be another 50 years past peak oil. The whole world will be very hungry for that dense energy source. The greening of the Sahara, never mind stopping the progression of desertification on the southern edge of the Sahara, is not something we will be able to engineer.

Are you familiar with the "wet bulb" measurement? It references how fast moisture evaporates at given temperatures and humidity. Human beings can not survive outside when the wet bulb temperature is above 98. [>98º + high humidity] Why? Because our sweat doesn't evaporate, we can't cool off, and our internal temperature starts to rise, and we go into heat shock and die. A high wet bulb temperature means that much less time outdoors is available for agricultural work, hence less food production. Who will be affected? Everyone in tropical and sub-tropical areas, including the southern US.

Don't worry about population. Mother Nature has the requisite ways and means to lower the population to sustainable levels. Just hope you're not around when she does it.

Where the question of a "right to die" comes to the fore is when someone wishes to end their own life, but is not physically able to do so independently. Is it permissible to help someone die?

If one is ambulatory and isn't overly fussy about how one might die, it would seem like the "right to die" is inherent--not relying on the action of a state. If I decide to jump off a bridge, or wade into deep water, or fill the garage with carbon monoxide, or blow my brains to smithereens, what does the state have to do with it?

That said, I am in favor of discouraging people from committing suicide, rather than enthusiastically encouraging the suicidal.

I read a lot, and I can fairly report that there are many fine examples of pure, unadulterated slop out there. Awful stuff. Just wretched. And some of it sells well and receives appreciative reviews. There is also a lot of excellent work, too.

I pay little attention to literary prizes, whether it's from the Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, or What Have You Committee. When one goes back and reads prize-winning novels from 60 or 80 years ago, many of them do not seem very interesting. Music doesn't seem to suffer from this problem.

The best bet for identifying what kind of writing is really good is to take a look at what people are actually reading, looking at, watching, and listening to.

400 years later, people still read or watch Shakespeare, and still listen to Monteverdi. There are a lot of people still reading Jane Austen and George Elliot 140 years later.

How many of these best selling authors from 1933 do you recognize?

Hervey Allen, Hasty Carroll, Sinclair Lewis, Lloyd C. Douglas, John Galsworthy, Lloyd C. Douglas, Mazo e la Roche, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Louis Bromfield, Hans Fallada? Zero? One? Two?

How about these 21st Century Nobel winners?

Kazuo Ishiguro Remains of the Day was clearly recognizable as a novel.

Bob Dylan Dylan's poetry (at least from his early years) deserves some sort of prize; Nobel? Well, it's their money; they can give it to whoever they want, I suppose. They didn't give him a prize for singing, you'll notice.

Svetlana Alexievich

Patrick Modiano Started a recent novel by Modiano and dropped it. Tedious.

Alice Munro I've liked some of her writing,

Mo Yan
Tomas Tranströmer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Müller
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Doris Lessing
Orhan Pamuk
Harold Pinter
Elfriede Jelinek
John Maxwell Coetzee
Imre Kertész

Its impact on intellectual pursuits and on innovation is especially hindering. — whollyrolling

I don't know whether adhesive elites sticking together has hindered intellectual pursuit or not. I don't know how one could tell. It seems more likely that elites have not hindered practical innovation because the nuts and bolts of agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, etc. have never been of much interest to the elites.

"Engineering" wasn't respectable until relatively recently. The savants in the universities were not aware of Marx's insight that changes in the means of production (in its broadest sense) determines what is possible intellectually. That's related to Plato's concern that the wrong kind of music would disturb society's peace and progress.

War and finance, and sometimes art, have at least been dependent on "common people". — whollyrolling

Quite a lot has been dependent on us proles, when you get right down to it. The pampered elites wouldn't have been pampered if they hadn't been able to hire cheap help to make their lives comfortable.

Workers of the world, UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to gain. Karl Marx

Marx was hardly a member of the elite.

I propose that all "philosophy" has hitherto been an evolution of specialized language predicated on fortifying a master-slave relationship between the educated and the uneducated. — whollyrolling

Dear me! Whollyrolling. Sweeping up all "philosophy" into one master/slave pile calls for an extended defense. Your OP should have been much, much longer, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Try putting this into a broader context. Don't all power elites (academic, financial, military, artistic, etc.) all tend to separate themselves out from the lumpen mass, associate among themselves, and promote their particular interests?

They were all born into affluent families and received "higher education" that was expensive and unavailable to a vast majority of people at the time. — whollyrolling

You are right -- the education which famous philosophers received was a luxury service. It still is. Roughly a third of the US population has a college degree, but these are not elite degrees by any stretch of the imagination, and two thirds of the US population lacks even a pedestrian degree.

Elite fields -- literature and philosophy are similar -- are the domain of small coteries of people. Being a member of a 'coterie' usually involves being at least financially comfortable. It involves traveling in rather small circles of specialists. Some elite thinkers have managed to remain comfortable. Marx was a downward-mobility disgrace to his bourgeois forebears. He ended up on private welfare sponsored by Fred Engels. But even that is usually the luck of elites. Most people, however bright and needy they are, don't get underwriting.

Like me, for instance. Had I been underwritten by some rich fan, I might have been somewhat more intellectually productive. Or, maybe I would have spent more time drinking, screwing, and other forms of decadence. Marx seems to have done a fair amount of that sort of thing. Of course, he also managed to turn out Das Kapital and a few other items.

True enough.

Fortunately for us, none of this matters all that much.

Few, however, would seriously maintain that the universe actually revolves around them in the way that the earth revolves around the sun. — NKBJ

My guess (and hope) is that people mean "the universe seems to revolve around them", from their slightly skewed perspective.

That humans are self-centred has been demonstrated for thousands of years and i we have yet to demonstrate otherwise. — whollyrolling

It seems to me to be the case that human are self-centered. Of course, that isn't all we are all the time. But creatures with egos like their reflections. In a way, most creatures are self-centered. Their various lives are composed of efforts to survive and propagate. Survival and propagation require a narrow focus.

Philosophy, as I see it, is a bunch of brains thinking about their brains. — YuZhonglu

Maybe a bunch of brains thinking about other brains?

That is one of the basic questions: What can I know? Like... Am I real? Are you real? Are our perceptions of what we call 'reality' consistent with what 'reality' actually is? (It often is, but sometimes it is not.) How would we know, one way or the other?

Socialism requires a high degree of micromanaging of the people by a government system. Usually, this results in starvation, corruption, and brutal violence as seen throughout the world in nations that embraced actual socialism. Removing the property from the "rich" essentially takes away from the working class. — Waya

And what do you think corporations are doing if not micromanaging people in a corporate system?

Believe me, I know this. I have a jerk for a boss who is sexist against women and pays me well below the living wage for my area. — Waya

So your boss is a jerk, he doesn't pay you enough, and this is the government's fault?

Why don't you keep the blame where you laid it: on your boss's doorstep? He's the one deciding to underpay you and maybe harass you to boot.

For some odd reason unknown to me you would prefer to blame non-existent socialism for your problems instead of a harsh, capitalist system which doesn't give a shit about you.

Hey, I'm dirt poor almost to the point where I wonder if I will get another meal and still dead set against socialism and Karl Marx. He speaks for an elite class that takes from the poor and manipulates them into slaves for such a class. — Waya

You accidentally confused capitalism with socialism. It's the capitalists who are the elite class that takes from the poor.

Socialist position: No need for slaves; no room for masters.

straw men — Wallows

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. They are not entitled to their own facts."

Is "There Are No Facts. Only Opinions." a fact or an opinion?

A "fact" is information that is verified by experience; not just one person's informed experience, but everyone's informed experience. Opinions are judgements about facts.

The opinion that there are no facts, only opinions, is an invitation to chase rabbits (Alice In Wonderland) where there are no facts.

I'm glad to see this forum's owner is more balanced than that. — Judaka

The TPF owner is on a lithium drip, so he's very balanced.

Stop pretending to be a rebel. If you really were, you would have left long ago. — Baden

I'm kind of quasi I guess. On the one hand, fanning the flames of discontent; on the other hand, not blowing up the fire department.

So what part of

many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire — Maw

is antisemitic? That Jews are part of the intelligentsia, or that they form a network? That they are in Budapest? That they are associated with the "Soros Empire"? Can't Soros have an empire?

Would we say that "many of the Budapest intelligentsia are [GAY], [ENGLISH], [CHINESE], and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire" is homophobic, anglophobic, or sinophobic?

An up-vote for your post!

I've done nothing different than most here habitually do — sunknight

Sunknight: Best Practice is to proceed forward cautiously until you have established what you can get away with and what the moderators will stomp on. Like all members here, the moderators have uniquely sensitive corns on their toes which, when stepped on just so, send them into tizzies. As far as I know, the idiosyncrasies of the moderators' sensitive toes have not been mapped.

Generally 'slash and burn' approaches will get bad feedback. Try to avoid.

It is the case that if you want to disparage Islam, transgenders, gays, (anybody, basically, to whom the suffix "phobia" is regularly attached) you should do so in an unusually elegant fashion.

Calories in the form of sugars and fats have never been cheaper, and as a result obesity is a global problem. Welcome toThe Fat Earth Society.

The solution is simple. Stop eating, fast until the weight is normal. — Jonmel

Sorry, that is simply not true.

Some people get fat as an act of self harm, but this is a small minority. Most people get fat, and become obese because their calorie intake exceeds their calories expended. Age, lifestyle changes, living situations, and various other factors can affect this.

I was slim and fit till I was about 45. Then I changed from a fairly active job to a sedentary one, and started gaining weight--slowly. By the time I was 60 I was beginning to approach obesity, and since then I haven't been able to lower my weight by more than 3% to 6%. At 72, the chances of losing a significant amount of weight are about nil. What I can do, and do work towards, is a reasonable level of activity to stay reasonably flexible and strong.

Much worse than fat 50 year olds are fat 10 or 15 year olds who are clinically obese. I wouldn't blame them for being obese; I'd blame low quality food and a repellent outdoor physical and social environments.

Religious activity is strong and growing in some places, and shrinking in others. Christianity, for instance, is quite strong in China, Africa, and South America. In Europe it is quite diminished. North America is somewhere between active and shrinking; here it depends on whether one is counting mainline protestants, catholics, or evangelicals.

I would guess some kind of similar pattern prevails for Islam.

It is waaaay too early to announce the death of religion. 6 billion out of 7 billion people participate in some kind of religious activity/organization. 1 billion, at least, do not.

I am of a mixed mind as to whether or not we would be better off with a good deal less religion. If strong, positive, secular and civil values replaced religion, that would be fine. If religion is going to be replaced by fascism, or blind faith, or aggressive dehumanizing conversions, then no.

Yes, but it was people in the past like Duchamp in 1917 who made it possible for people in the internet age to call their crap "art". As William Faulkner said (in a novel I never read, and almost certainly never will) "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Now this is something that I call the critical reviewer's disease. — ssu

Yes, there are definitely people who spend a lot of time consuming voluminous quantities of cultural product, and in so doing they enter a twilight zone of hypersensitivity to stuff that actually doesn't matter much--this first novel, that rap group's greatest hit, this book of poetry, that journaling project, the latest recording of Beethoven's 9th, blah blah blah. I flee when they begin pontificating about this or that art form, art group, art event, artistic clusterfuck, etc.

Nothing new here, of course. Coteries of sophisticates have been doing this for a long time -- probably there were cultural critics who had tedious opinions about the latest cave art before the paint had dried.

Culture hasn't gotten better, I don't think -- just more of it, more specialized, more diverse, shorter shelf life -- all that -- but the media of radio, television, internet, recording devices, etc have enlarged the hose, and one can drown in the flood instead of just getting a drink (see "drinking from a fire hose").

Print isn't immune. There is more and more print available too -- not just new print, but old print served up by archival projects. I read too much which leads to too much information that other people do not want to hear about. Sigh.

People have not changed. They like to be entertained. There are more people now (three times as many in the world as when rock and roll began (1950s), and there is much more cultural activity now than 70 years ago. There is also more economic activity: more mining and manufacturing, more sex being had, more crooked deals getting done, and more rubbish -- much more.

Today ANYONE can produce art and put it into the public sphere whereas merely decades ago this wasn’t the case — I like sushi

1917 - Too far back?



Duchamp announced that if you say it is art, then it is art.

I suppose buckets of "warm slop" could be construed as sexual innuendo, though -- just personally -- it wouldn't do much to turn me on. But tastes vary. The intentionality would matter a great deal.

Mostly though, I associate "slop" with hogs wallowing. Nothing sexual, just wallowing, snorting, grunting. What hogs do in wallowing holes.

Have you observed hogs doing their wallowing thing? They take it very seriously. Usually in the summer.

"Slop" is also a verb. "To slop the hogs" is to feed them their daily ration of ground corn mixed with other feeds and water or milk and dumped into troughs, where the hogs act like the pigs swine are.

Sexual innuendos aside — Wallows

Sexual innuendos? Where! Where!

They can't be standards.
In my opinion, there are no standards for poetry. — Tarun

There are, of course, standards. One standard is how well the construction of the poem fits the topic. Another would be originality of expression. A third is how well the techniques of using language are deployed. and so on.

Another standard, the toughest one, is whether anybody remembers and re-reads or recites the poem. Most of the poetry that has been written has been buried because nobody found it particularly memorable. That has been the case for millennia.

If you don't believe there are standards, you probably need a large dose of Onomatopoeia.