To use the technical term for it, thinking that poetry can't be measured, guiding the creativity, gives a shape to creativity, etc. is bullshit.

Look, poetry isn't mystic mastication. It's a form of composition which requires sticking to rules and regulations--even in free verse.

Haiku, for instance, involves 3 lines of five syllables, 7syllables, and 5 again. They could rhyme or not. What haiku is like in Japanese, I don't know. But those are the simple rules in English haiku. If you don't follow those rules, then it isn't haiku.

If you are writing a poem in heroic couplets, it must be in iambic pentamer, and the couplets have to rhyme. Those are the rules for that style.

Of course you don't have to write that way. You could write like Bob Dylan -- I certainly would if I were very, very talented.

Subterranean Homesick Blues
Bob Dylan

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off

and so on. There is a meter and a rhyme scheme. The grammar is pretty straightforward.

My guess is that Dylan didn't just dash those lines off, stand up, and sing them. The stuff of his that I am familiar with look polished--meaning, worked on a lot.

If you want to write poetry, start with straightforward grammar. Learn how to maintain a beat of emphasized syllables, and how to rhyme. Try, at least. Go on from there. Learn something about the basic forms.

I don't know whether you have a creative bone in your body or not. There is nothing about poetry (or anything else) that makes one creative. Creativity is mostly the result of striving to achieve beauty, and is mostly hard work.

Here's a sample of heroic couplet verse by Alexander Pope:

Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;
But vindicate the ways of God to man.

The impression I had of Sapientia (AKA "S") was that he was a prodigious producer of proper and prudent prose. So... what happened?

I don't know, Ilya; do you some screws loose?

Look: About those criminals who founded Australia: "Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain to various penal colonies in Australia. The British Government began transporting convicts overseas to American colonies in the early 17th century."

The 17th-19th century British were not averse to using capitol punishment for crimes (like stealing) which they thought deserved death. If one could get hanged for stealing bread, then there probably weren't a lot of violent felons left to deport to Australia. So, who were they deporting to America and Australia?

They were mostly deporting poor people, whom they classified as white trash, deplorables (term from Hilary Clinton's campaign), riff raff, useless, and so forth. The ruling-class Brits hated the poor. Poverty was criminalized. Criminals were deported.

Why is this so? Most likely because the first white people in Australia were violent criminals, and violent criminals aren't known for being gentlemen. And what Australian men need to be told is this: — Ilya B Shambat

Most likely you are out in left field on the topic. Are you supposing that in the intervening centuries, the poor people who were used to stock the future working class of Australia did not change at all from their uncouth ancestors? Or maybe you don't like the Working Class either?

there are any number of Australian men howling for my blood and that of the Australian woman who married me. — Ilya B Shambat

This sounds more like an exaggerated self-aggrandizing persecution complex than anything else. How close on your trail is the mob that wants to lynch you?

In Australia, where I presently live, the biggest problem is how men treat women. There are many good things about Australia, but this is a national disgrace. The Australian men have an international reputation for abusive treatment of women; and that makes Australian men look like creeps. — Ilya B Shambat

I always thought Australian guys looked hot, rather than looking like creeps, but that was probably a small sample I was looking at. Is it really the case that male-female interaction is the worst problem Australia faces?

Are Australian men worse really worse than African men, North American men, European men, South American men, Asian men, Arab men, Pakistani men, etc.?

When my former wife left me to be with another man, I did not threaten to kill her — Ilya B Shambat

That's good. It's a positive sign.

which country, in other respects, is one of the best places in the world — Ilya B Shambat

If it is one of the best places in the world, in other respects, then I would have to assume that women are receiving less than than the usual and customary level of abuse.

Disclaimer: The following is written with the intent of making vague, positive-sounding non-inferential remarks about a topic of which 9/10ths is floating on the surface as foam. I wish to figuratively dump a couple bucketloads of warm slop on you, in the event that your wallowing hole is cooling off. I don't want you to get a chill.

Communication between people (don't know about other species) has always been difficult because...

Sometimes people have mixed motives. Sometimes people are not clear about their own intent. Other people can be difficult to interpret. The signs and signals of language are not always clear -- even face to face. Sometimes we are not clear receivers of messages. We sometimes harbor suspicions, hopes, fears, doubts, erroneous thinking, and so on, which can make it difficult for us to gauge the intent of an innocuous "Good morning."

Certainly, some people in internet chat or lengthier discussion formats intend to irritate others, write abusive, dismissive, crude comments, and so forth. Stupid people are able to use the internet, their stupidity notwithstanding. Some people are short-fused and explode with little provocation.

Despite all that, most of the time people in a Internet format like TPF manage to communicate in two directions successfully, with a minimum of friction. [The minimum of friction still involves at least some friction.] One of the ways we achieve this smooth, low-friction mode of interaction is through the good offices of our own little gestapito which liquidates offenders swiftly, if sometimes arbitrarily. We have to assume that our gain is other fora's loss. Those expelled from Paradise no doubt migrate to other sites of philosophical interaction where they spray their hot bile all over unsuspecting (but perhaps deserving) subjects.

My question is this: Should such a large part of the economy really rely on military technology production and maintenance. — christian2017

No.

The military doesn't submit bids for products from reluctant manufacturers. Companies are anxious to participate in military production because it has traditionally been quite profitable. And the manufacturers are not silent partners. Building the technological capacity for modern war is a very cooperative effort between the military and industry.

The logic of having weapons, and getting paid to make more weapons, is a strong inducement to eventually use those weapons on an old or new enemy. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were / are our new-enemy wars. Other countries have done the same thing elsewhere. A tremendous amount of product was used in these three wars, to no particular good effect. In a way, results don't matter. The important thing is to drop the bombs, launch the missiles, fire the bullets, etc.

There is a revolving door relationship among corporations, the military, and lobbyists. The result is more spending on arms.

I'm not claiming that our military is useless or harmful to the US (that's another argument altogether). What are harmful are the vested interests of arms manufacturing corporations steering national policy. This is largely (but not entirely) a post WW-II phenomena.

everyone else should be taken out back and shot — S

As the saying goes, "spare the bullet and then you have to put up with dipshits that much longer."

By the Power Invested in me by the Supreme Being, I hereby grant you the authority to speculate and expound, declaim, state, write about, or otherwise express you views and opinions about what you think constitutes human nature.

If I like the drift of somebody's psychologizing, then it is OK. If I don't like what I'm hearing, they'll have to be taken out back and be given a good beating.

Maureen: the truth of the matter is that life sucks. It is for a very large number of people one damned thing after another. Billions feel like they are stuck on a treadmill of demands they can not satisfy. That's just life.

Do you have a job? Jobs are like an 8 hour appointment that you are required to make 5 times a week.

You feel like your life is overwhelming, but it probably isn't all that bad.

Make a list of the things you have to do in tomorrow. Now, organize them in a list from VERY IMPORTANT on down to DON'T MATTER (because you don't really have to worry about them).

Cross out the things that don't matter. How many things do you have left to do?

Going to an appointment 6 times a month leaves 24 days free of appointments. Resenting the 6 appointments is not something you have to do. Looking for a job is a problem. Worrying about looking for a job is not a problem.

Simplify, simplify.

Hey good luck, and welcome to the club of the overwhelmed.

Americans aren't morally superior, obviously. They are morally equivalent to a lot of other people. Our elites seem kind of depraved. They should probably br rounded up and stored in gulags somewhere -- maybe the Aleutian Islands? Alaska? North Dakota?

— praxis

• The other nations do not have people electing an overweight sociopathic narcissist man-child with orange skin and strange hair as their leader.
• The other nations do not have such poor freely chosen lifestyles that life expectancy is decreasing.
• The other nations do not have the highest incarceration rate. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.

I loathe Trump, but he's no more of a sociopath than many of the political elite in Washington. (I realize this is damnation by faint praise.) Strange hair? He's clearly too old for such nonsense. I hear he uses spray on tan. It tends to turn a body orange.

Life expectancy is not dropping across the board. It's an average, and the group that is dragging it down the most are disadvantaged middle aged white folk who for various reasons have been left in the economic lurch by the elites. They are killing themselves (deliberately and accidentally). Now, many of our health indicators are below a number of other countries--and we can and should do better. But again, this is somewhat localized. People who live in what's called the "fried fish belt" of the se United States, have a number of dietary habits (lots of fried fish, barbecue, sweet tea, side pork, and such) that contribute to an earlier demise than might otherwise be the case. Make them eat kale.

We have the highest incarceration rate because it's elite policy to have a high incarceration rate. It isn't just any old random person that tends to be arrested and convicted. It tends to be black males who get arrested. I don't know whether they are disproportionately more criminally inclined than your average white guy, but the elites prefer to stock prisons with black men.

Finally, I propose we do away with psychologizing altogether. It's a honey pot that trolls and the like use or weaponizes for their satisfaction. — Wallows

That's an odd opinion, given that Psychology (granted, that's not the same as psychologizing, but still...) is one of Philosophy's children.

In Freud's (simplified) three-layer cake of the mind there is the Superego, the Ego, and the Id. The Superego is the embodiment of society: we should do this, we should do that; You'd better, you'd better not, just do what you're told, OBEY, and so on. Social Rules and Regs. The Id is, in sum, our most basic desires and needs; It's sex, status, gratification, love, all that stuff. All very powerful.

What's left for the Ego? The task of the Ego is to mediate between the imperatives of society and the imperatives of the body (the Id). This is where reality testing comes in: what priorities of the Superego can be ignored; what demands of the Id can be set aside. How do I (the sentient subject) get through this situation? What can not be ignored; what has to be sacrificed?

So, if one had never heard of Sigmund Freud, had he been run over by a train when he was five years old, we wouldn't use these terms. If you were a Skinnerian behaviorist, you'd just dismiss all that ego business as pure bunk anyway. You'd use the tools of philosophy and science to come up with some other way of explain behavior.

BUT: Explaining human behavior, human thinking, human personality, and so on is not outside of philosophy's purview. It's right down its alley.

Frank: Moderators, whatever icon they use, have a little circle-image in the upper left hand corner of their square image -- it's the Roman bathhouse goddess Hygenia. She protects bathers from communicable diseases. Back in the day it was an unfortunately common occurrence, and occurs in some bathhouses today, as well. So, should you frolic in a bathhouse, be sure to offer something to Hygenia.

Moderators can not infect you with diseases on line. In person might be another story.

Hygenia has not been approved by the FDA.

Is a Job Interview a Good Example of Healthy Human Relationship?

No, definitely not. Job interviews are more typical of deranged relationships. Very bad.

I say that West is morally superior to Islam, period. — Ilya B Shambat

"The West" and "Islam" belong to different categories. Christianity and Islam are in the same category--world religions--and the West and the East are in the same categories--regions of particular culture. The categories of religion and the category of cultural regions are both rather large. Within either one there are many subsets that may be quite dissimilar to the larger whole.

So, are you claiming that Christianity is superior to Islam, or that the West is superior to the Middle East?

My cultural bias is heavily on the side of The West, Christianity, and to the republic for which it stands... etc. Your cultural bias seems to be about the same. Which religion, culture, landscape, language, food ways, etc. are equivalent, inferior, or superior is difficult to determine, because none of us can be very objective about any of this stuff. 99.99% of people have a vested interest in their own cultures, religions, homelands, and so on.

Most (not all) of the participants on this site are either somewhat disinvested in religion (if they aren't atheists), and many of the people here also eschew strong national affinities to boot. Race, ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and so on are all hot button issues. So, you aren't going to get a very sympathetic hearing for your OP.

It might (or might not) help to detail your claims about superiority and inferiority. Much of the middle east maintains tribal honor systems. Honor systems (whether in the American South or Pakistan) cause a lot of trouble. When severe punishments are applied in Islamic cultures, they tend to be crudely corporal -- severing the hands of thieves, stoning adulteresses or homosexuals, and so on. We can and should condemn this kind of justice. The most conservative of Islamic countries (like Saudi Arabia) offend against western values in numerous ways. There's a lot there we can disapprove of.

On the other hand, The West has had its fingers in Middle Eastern affairs for a while and we haven't accomplished a lot of good there. As dyspeptic as the Saud family might make us feel, they have kept the oil flowing. Oil counts for a lot. If the Middle East's main exports were dates and camel cheese, we'd have no interest in them, and they'd be too poor to annoy us.

perdurance — SophistiCat

There has been a slight up-tick in the use of perdure in various forms. Keep up the good work!

Guns, Germs & Steel does cover some very useful material. I read the book and didn't see the program. The BBC and PBS have done some interesting programs on various ancient history matters. The series "Connections" with James Burke is on YouTube (but then, what isn't on YouTube). This series was done in the 1970s or 80s... it's good stuff.

. In ancient times traveling by sea or boat was almost always faster than traveling by land. I think you are wrong on this post. — christian2017

Yes and no. It depends... If you have 100 tons of grain in Egypt that you want to get to Rome, boats are the way to go. If you have good roads on land (the Romans did) marching the legions for relatively short distances (like from Italy to Britain) land worked just as well. And it was worthwhile to cart silk from China to the western empires on the backs of camels.

I wouldn't be surprised if they used copper — christian2017

Amerindian people, like people elsewhere, used copper when it was available on the surface in malleable form. For instance, Isle Royale in Lake Superior was a source of comparatively ready-to-use copper for Indians which they used in small amounts.

Why they never used these metals for killing and plowing — christian2017

They are too soft. Gold has to be alloyed to be strong; pure gold in dental work, for instance, would deform pretty quickly. Silver is fairly soft in pure form too. They didn't have any traction animals (horse, oxen) to pull a plough for one thing, so they used stone choppers (hoes, picks) to break up the soil -- which worked just fine.

All right, if using stone tools makes one stone age, OK. But the stone age people of Eurasia (up to about 10,000 years ago) didn't domesticate plants or build cities while they were using their stone tools. They remained hunter gatherers until... 8,000 BCE. Then they started getting more complicated.

Domesticating the horse, and making metal tools was a big deal -- no doubt about that. The guy who was found in the Swiss glacier who died 5,000 years earlier had a copper knife on him -- but his bows were, I believe, stone tipped. If I remember, he was killed by a stone tipped arrow. (There's nothing primitive about stone arrow heads that can kill you.)

In many ways we're all troglodytes; we just have fancier tools.

The Americas were populated later than the old world as far as i know. — christian2017

Well, sure -- the old world was populated first. But it wasn't stably populated. There was quite a bit of turbulence in Eurasian population movements--maybe in Africa too, but I'm less familiar with Africa.

The first people arrived in northern North America around 13,000 - 14,000 years ago. They were as "developed" as the rest of the world's peoples -- in other words, ready, willing, and able to explore, innovate, and invent.

They didn't develop the wheel because they didn't have a traction animal to pull carts. Cart pulling is something that buffalo would not put up with. Not having wheeled carts was something of a limitation when it came to moving stuff around. On the other hand, it limited warfare to what one could do on foot.

Perhaps that fact that these civilizations were effectively stone age civilizations played a part too — I like sushi

They weren't stone age civilizations. While it is true that most of their tools were stone, or other hard materials...

a) they built large cities
b) they built large temples (the better to cut hearts out with)
c) they used astronomy (in the sense of observing the skies, and calculating time)
d) they developed several crops from primitive plants: corn, peanuts, pineapple, potatoes, chocolate, tomatoes, avocado, amaranth, papaya, several beans, quinoa, squash sun flowers, sweet potato, and tomatillo.
e. Some indigenous people had writing systems (sort of like hieroglyphics)
f. They used irrigation systems

All of this exceeds what one thinks of as "stone age people".

But there has to be a reason to build large boats. England, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Italian city states didn't build large boats and then look for a purpose. They had been trading and fighting around their coasts and in the Mediterranean for a long time, and as trade grew, their boats got bigger, and they developed sea-faring skills. So did the Vikings. So did the Chinese.

Indigenous Americans traded with each other, but mostly within a few hundred miles. For inland trade, small boats are the way to go. (But canoes were built that could carry quite a bit of stuff.)

Europe and Asian traders had a different mind-set than western hemispheric peoples -- not better or worse, just different. Their economies were different.

Not having traction animals was a limitation, but it doesn't seem to have been a huge limitation. Had Indians along the future New England or Washington/Oregon shore wanted to build big boats, there were big trees right handy. But again, one has to have a reason to build a big boat.

And here is the same box on the 20th of March, a fortnight before the picture above. Doesn't seem to have the tacky white contact material attached which P.M. May had tried to remove,



Compare:



No wonder they can't get Brexit straightened out.

Maybe you have some insight into the box?

Tell me how I can identify truth, subjective truth, and objective truth.

Thank you,

I'm not sure one can make one's self be happy. (I'm not saying one can not.) It might be like grace -- unearned, undeserved, "unmakable". Many people are happy even though their lives have been at least somewhat unpleasant. And, conversely, some people are unhappy who have little reason to be miserable (apparent to an outside observer).

I didn't used to be happy, I'm happy now. Did I achieve or engineer this state of happiness? No. It happened. Is it permanent? Probably not.

Is it making you happy?

Get happy, Wallows, or else.

I've been in trouble for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. In the back of my mind, I fear that I might get in huge trouble and live a lesser life as a result. — TogetherTurtle

Just don't waste saying the wrong thing about the wrong thing. There's no point in shooting one's self in the foot.

The 1977 Mel Brooks comedy "High Anxiety" is probably condemned these days. It's a satire on Alfred Hitchcock's movies. One of the scenes shows a hired serial murderer assuring Nurse Diesel that he very much wants to kill Dr. Thorndyke. Later he attempts to strangle Thorndyke (Mell Brooks) in a phone booth and dies trying. The woman on the other end of the phone call (Madeleine Kahn) mistakes the sounds of choking as an obscene call and becomes aroused. And so on.

It has some great comic scenes, but it isn't one of Mel Brooks' best movies, because (as the critics said) Alfred Hitchcock's movies are hard to parody. They aren't loaded with the 'self importance' that makes a delicious target for satire. (Donald Trump, on the other hand...)

is funniness not also a feature of a joke? — TogetherTurtle

I don't know; "funniness" per se is hard to pin down. It takes other rhetorical devices to make us laugh at a joke (and a joke itself fits into several rhetorical structures--"knock, knock" being one). As Mel Brooks said on a late night show, "My getting a paper cut is a tragedy; your falling into a sewer and dying is funny." On the face of it, the Mel Brooks quote isn't funny at all. What makes it funny is the wild absurdity, or the ridiculous self-absorption of the speaker. And the delivery, of course.

"Funniness" also depends on the receiver of a joke. There are some humorless, literal-minded people who don't get a lot of jokes.

I was called on the carpet once for saying "Whoever set this mail system up ought to be taken out and shot." I was reported for making violent threats. This was like... 2002 or 2003. The person to whom I was reported dismissed it, saying she said that all the time. I should have reported her, I guess.

In my opinion, Libertarians are full of shit. — Frank Apisa

This demonstrates an admirable economy of expression.

What are some features that make a joke funny? Is "funniness" one of them? Or is "funniness" derived from other features? It seems like the humor or comedy of a joke derives from other elements, not "funniness" in itself.

Absurdity; cruelty; surprise; wordplay (puns); cleverness; bad manners, inappropriateness or mild insult; caricature; satire, slapstick, or travesty; and so on. In other words, a great joke is not altogether "nice".

Here is an old joke that just popped into my head: "Why do they call it "pre-menstrual syndrome?" "Because 'mad cow disease' was already taken.")†

A lightbulb joke is a joke that asks how many people of a certain group are needed to change, replace, or screw in a light bulb. Generally, the punch line answer highlights a stereotype of the target group. There are numerous versions of the lightbulb joke satirizing a wide range of cultures, beliefs and occupations. Wikipedia

"How many Mexicans does it take to change a lightbulb?" "Juan."
"How many Germans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "One. They're efficient and not very funny."

"German humour! It's no laughing matter."

"How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb?"
"Oy, don't mind me...I'll just sit here and suffer in the dark."

†"mad cow disease" = bovine spongiform encephalopathy; it emerged as a public health issue in the mid 1990s.

This is a good one — TogetherTurtle

The sponge joke was moderately funny. I thought the Julius Caesar joke was not funny. Not offensive, just not funny.

I prefer things like The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. Or, The Dingo Ate Yo Baby.

Are you bipolar?

It seems to me that the best thing for bipolar people (and lots of others, as a matter of fact) is to do what you are doing: take your medication consistently, make your appointments, and monitor yourself so that you can access emergency intervention before your stability deteriorates too far.

I've experienced depression, but nothing worth a journal write-up. Pedestrian, ho hum. My partner was bi-polar, and managed it for a good 40 years. He did have some hospitalizations along the way after going into pretty severe mania. He found support groups (not therapy groups) helpful -- he learned about manic depression/bipolar disease, made some good friends, and a couple of times got some very good leads on better psychiatrists. (He died of cancer a few years back.)

So, good luck in your care. Mental illness is a tough challenge.

But neither do I want to see these people force wrongful and abusive attitudes on the civilization. — Ilya B Shambat

Oh, don't worry about that, dear. The American Ruling Class has more wrongful and abusive actions up its sleeve than you can shake a stick at.

BTW, you seem to be big on physical fitness. You mention physical fitness or athleticism quite often.

"Redneck" and "Hippie" became important cultural terms at about the same time -- the 1960s.

"Redneck" has been used and misused into oblivion. The classic redneck is a southern white farmer whose neck is red because he works in the fields. The classic term may have been coined after the Civil War ended. But there are cultural traits of the "redneck" that have nothing to do with farming.

Southern whites came from 17th century northern England and Southern Scotland, for the most part. They brought with them an honor code culture, meaning you wear your sensitivities on your sleeve where they can most easily be offended (there is a note of sarcasm in my definition). The southerner prefers minimal government, and especially any activity of government which might inconvenience him. They generally practiced do-it-yourself justice where they could get away with it. They tend to apply the "shoot first and ask questions later" approach.

The southern redneck culture resides in southern whites and blacks, though it might be located as far north as Duluth. It is primarily a working class culture.

Farmers and working class people across the northern tier of states are not rednecks for the most part. The social culture in this part of the country is much like that of Puritan New England and Scandinavia. In this system the state is a central institution, and values are more communitarian rather than individualistic.

Hippies: In fact, there never were very many genuine, registered hippies. There were, however, a lot of college aged people and college students or grads not otherwise employed in the U.S. Army or Corporate establishments who wished to be hippie-ish. People like me and my friends, for instance.

We found jobs that allowed for flexibility--some days working very hard, some days not--and spent a lot of time discussing the war, the riots, famous communists (Trotsky, Mao, etc.) and enjoying urban life (this was in Boston). It was all pretty much good.

Soon enough, though, we shelved our sandals and bell bottoms, got some standard threads, applied for real jobs, and took jobs with the assumption we would be inside agitators and continue the revolution from within. We were not very successful, of course. The corporation and the republic for which it stands are all doing fine.

As for the real hippies, the hippest hippies were beatniks (beat was a shortening of "beatitude"). The beats were hard core to the hippie soft core. What the hippies wished to do had been already been done by the Beats and other decadents.

All this was not my view at the time. (I was buried in the darkest corner of the upper midwest at the time, and the hippies seemed like avatars of the New Age.) It's only recently that it has become clearer to me that hippies were just strung out beatniks. Or visa versa -- hard to tell at this distance.

At any rate few hippies founded anything or caused any sort of boom. Real beatniks and real hippies were alienated people, and alienated people usually aren't on the cutting edge -- why would they be?

As for rednecks, they too were, are alienated. They find an acceptable society among themselves (in their millions), but by preference, I think, they prefer to be outsiders to the larger community. Outsidership is the cost of rigid individualism.

We must rely on the young to think crazy and the old to think sane, no? — TogetherTurtle

No -- let's all try think sane. What young people ought to do (because if they don't do it when they are young, they never will) is follow their dreams. At least for a while--sometimes our dreams turn into nightmares, or at least headaches, and then it's time to try something else. And, just for your information, not all old people are thinking sanely. Some of us are stark raving mad. Crazy young people and insane old people are an unhealthy combo.

Anyway, that's probably what you meant by thinking crazy -- following your dreams.

But is it maybe crazy to think sane and sane to think crazy? — TogetherTurtle

Erich Fromm (one of Freud's students) wrote a book about that: The Sane Society. In crazy societies people who are INSANE are deemed to be quite normal, and in sane societies, crazy people are thought to be crazy. I think he concluded that a lot of contemporary societies are insane.

You have a positive, upbeat view of the future. Hang on to that.

It seems the only alternative to death is reaching for greatness, even if you may die in the process. — TogetherTurtle

There is no alternative to eventual death. You are a young man and you are thinking about what great accomplishments you can achieve. That is the way you should be now. Soon enough life grinds down our idealism, our aspirations, our hopes and dreams. Don't despair -- that is how we get from rough to smooth and polished. With any luck, you will become a brilliant gem before you exit.

If evolution (biologically and sociologically speaking) doesn’t correct, then what does it do? — TogetherTurtle

Evolution isn't directed towards any end. It is visible only in retrospect. The renaissance view (in Hamlet, WS) was

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! ...

These days we are less likely to think of ourselves as "the paragon of animals". Evolution wasn't striving to produce our agile bodies and big brains. We just happened the same way squirrels happened, and whether we are going to be successful in the long run isn't at all clear yet. We have gotten ourselves into a tight corner (global warming) that we might not get out of.

I don't know whether we are in charge of our own society or not. We might not be, because "society" is an emergent property of many individuals. No one individual can guide all the other individuals; we aren't a hive species ruled by a queen. Someone has a new idea; the idea is bounced around from person to person and develops (changes, gets better or worse...) and begins to affect behavior in unpredictable ways.

Take the idea of the Internet, invented in 1982-1983, and then the WWW in 1990. Who knew what would be the result back then? Netscape. AOL. Porn galore and facts on tap. Amazon and Google. Bing. Facebook. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Philosophy Forum. Deviant Art. 4Chan...

A nice, succinct summary of boomer/millennial differences.

Yes: Clinton and Obama would be better company for a figurative (or literal) night on the town than Sanders and Warren, and that is not an altogether trivial difference.

Angelfire... Lycos... Tripod... You landed on Angelfire some years back and stayed there, I suppose. I thought those old sites had turned to dust but apparently not. I'm always surprised to find some old website like Dogpile metasearch still in business.

I gather you are in academia. Your list on your Angelfire page doesn't look like the work of a hobbyist, and you have apparently been at it awhile.

Perhaps evolution constantly corrects, but the standards we hold ourselves to constantly change? After all, our social evolution is driven by us, but our aspirations also set by us. — TogetherTurtle

If I understand you, you are not speaking of biological evolution when you say "constantly corrects". For one, it doesn't "correct", and for two, it's much, much too slow for us to observe in ourselves. What does change is custom, social practice, "the standards we hold", and that sort of thing.

Whether "our social evolution is driven by us" is a very interesting question. Resolving the issue is too big a topic for here and now.

If we can know what we truly want, and know what we need to get what we want, I think that would be an ideal world reminiscent of what people think back on. If we want the world that we truly desire, we have to adapt fast enough to keep up with our desires. — TogetherTurtle

Knowing "what we truly want" is one big problem, and knowing how to get what we want is another big problem. Keeping up with our desires is a race we have never won, because "our reach exceeds our grasp" as the saying goes. Unfettered desires are a voracious malignancy which can kill us off before we come close to satisfaction. In practical, everyday terms, we need to keep our desires under control if we want to be happy.

Our desires have been an asset and a liability for as long as the species has been in business, I suspect.

Naturally, they would be anti-marxist (not that they would know Karl from Groucho) after being drenched in anti-communist, anti-working class, anti-marxist, anti-union propaganda for the last 75 years, published in the interests NOT of the working class, but the Bourgeoisie.

How many, how privileged, and how precisely defined were all these Marxists you allegedly know?

When a proper Marxist explains to a member of the bourgeoisie that Marxists plan on taking all their wealth away from them (we'll haul it away by the billions, Warren, Mark, Jeff, and Bill) they become quite vigorously antimarxist. And well they should.

Have you, like your many redneck friends, also been duped by Bourgeoisie lies?