• Super heroes
    -deleted-
  • Super heroes
    They’re anti-superhero heroes, essentially.praxis

    Ha!

    This inversion is interesting. The superheros as loved by the public are deeply corrupt figures who have a public persona (celebrity) geared toward manipulation in service of their private lives. The outward persona is the public superhero which belies what they actually are, supervillans.

    The same relationship is at play. The heros are mortals with exceptional qualities (perseverance, skill, moral sense) who seek to eliminate the unjust tyranny of gods. The Boys (the group) have all been deeply harmed by the powers that be and this motivates their collaboration toward acts of justice.
  • Super heroes


    Maybe your bugaboo is to be made by a parallel of social justice aspect of superheros and this somehow translates to a "dangerous" or misguided activism of a social justice movement now. Superheros might satisfy a power fantasy of those who have little agency. Though one could just as well be anesthetized by the consumer products of television (or any media art) in which the fantasy of superheros (or Fred and Barney) is just escapist entertainment.

    Even the North Koreans risk watching Western media via thumb drives. Not sure any amount of superhero movies is gonna make them risk their lives for social change.
  • Super heroes
    I've gone down the Captain Planet rabbit hole because of this thread. Damn 90s cartoons. They got me!

    I might now be further corrupted if I read/listen to Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology propaganda. :monkey: Close your eyes, stopper your ears. Too many voices/channels exchanging ideas.

  • Super heroes
    Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory (wikipedia)

    Even if the Frankfurt school could be blamed for whatever historical change one dislikes, there are many other contributory forces. Maybe Capitalism itself, insofar as it must forever appeal to consumer demand in an ever increasing turn of cultural innovation, exploits human desire for profits to the point of undermining the authority of religious institutions. Things change in time even though we might love to complain about it.

    Any church/government/culture (what/which?) could have outlawed television, radio and internet. Why didn't they. The Amish still don't use these things...(?)

    Existential Comics: The Frankfurt Four
  • Super heroes
    A belief is too strong a word to use and can be used to pigeon hole someone. When in discussion with the fundamentalists, rather than those paying lip service to their religion, there seems to be a belief that this life is a spring board to the next.david plumb

    Is it wrong to ask you whether or not you believe in an afterlife given the statements you made in this thread and further that you'd characterize yourself as a man/woman of Christian faith? Perhaps the afterlife is really just what you'll leave behind for your sons and daughters and your neighbor's sons and daughters and your enemy's sons and daughters. In other words, the afterlife is about the lives after (or beside) yours, tribal religious identity notwithstanding.
  • Dungeons and Lounges
    Bimble dreamnt again, of the shadow that was the anathema of his waking life, and driving him toward a mythic dissolution. It took the form of a raven with a feather beard and purple-tinted eyes, watching from a mossy boulder.

    There were two other monstrous agents in this illusion, one red and one blue. The red creature, what came to mind as a proper anthropoid thrull, had immense muscular shoulders joined to a hunched backed spine, its toothy head curving down toward the earth, its body studded with boney protuberances. Its feet were anchored in the earth. Bimble's feet were clasped in the vice grip of its red hands.

    The blue agent was ethereal and buoyant, suspended in the sky, very humanoid except for its well proportioned size and stature. It might have well been the combined volume of 10 Bimbles. Its body was emblazoned with a myriad of brands and runes. It held on to a physical chain which was wrapped around Bimble's wrists. It too had an ethereal chain but wrapped around its neck, tensed and terminating in the direction of the noonday sun.

    The raven squawked, "Pull!"

    Both agents pulled toward their respective poles, blue towards the sky and red downward along the gradients of earth.

    Bimble was caught in the middle, tensed as the rope, in a cosmic tug of war.
  • Super heroes
    They decided that the Church ( religion per se ) had control over the masses and set about dismantling the authority of the Church.david plumb

    This sounds conspiratorial as if it was a project of planned intent rather than a historical accident of the spread of ideas. The complexity of factors governing historical change makes this theory sound silly. Maybe if the public didn't know how to read at all the authority of religions (Christianity/Islam?) would still properly mediate moral behavior toward a reward in an afterlife.

    Equality doesn't matter in this life as your reward is in the next.david plumb

    For the purpose of trying to make sense of this thread can you say that this quotation is a statement of your own belief? It's somewhat dumbfounding.
  • Super heroes
    So is this thread really about advocating for belief in the monotheistic God of Roman Catholicism, or any comparable Christian faith?

    Maybe Christian intolerance/corruption ironically lead to the loss of the Church's (what Church?) cultural/political authority.
  • Recommended Documentaries
    There are way too many documentaries to watch. :meh: Just as there are way too many KitKats to eat. Ignorance is still bliss.

    The Rotten series on Netflix is incredible though there are controversies as to whether some industries are fairly portrayed.



    Next time you eat a KitKat bar, remember these folks in Ivory Coast. "The Ivory Coast and Ghana are by far the two largest producers of cocoa, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world´s cocoa.Apr 23, 2020" https://www.statista.com/statistics/263855/cocoa-bean-production-worldwide-by-region/

  • Midgley vs Dawkins, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Mackie, Rand, Singer...
    The male peacock tail was selected because it pleased the ladies of the species. It's no adaptation to nothing out there. At best a beautiful tail implies the male can feed itself decently enough to maintain the huge piece, and may perhaps become a better provider for its female... but it'd be an even better provider without this huge tail slowing it down...Olivier5

    What about the eyes in the peacocks tail? You don't think they use the tail to scare away predators. And do male peacocks sit on eggs? How much "providing" are they doing outside of shooting sperm?
  • Word of the day - Not to be mistaken for "Word de jour."
    Another word from Herbert's Dune, suborn, means to induce or bribe someone to commit an unlawful act . A more legal definition: suborn means to bribe or induce a witness in the court of law to give false testimony.

    The tyrant hold-fast had no need to suborn witnesses against his own blatant depravity and corruption. They served as loyal figures in a mock play of justice, theatrical pawns of a kangaroo court, held in check by an atmosphere of absolute terror.
  • What are you listening to right now?


    Live as you like
    Everybody dies
    Pray if you must
    But try to love the ones who loved us

    No lies
    No blood
    We've worried long enough
    No lies
    No ghosts
    The dirt will call us home
    x2

    Live as you like
    It's hard to know what's right
    Pray if you want
    But try to love the ones who don't
  • Penrose Tiling the Plane.
    Seems like Penrose has contributed, via studying these patterns, to further discovery (et al like Steinhardt and Levine) of the unique properties of quasicrystals. So there is a practical yield to the wrongness (absurdity) of this kind of rigorous study of science/mathematics.

    The concept of quasicrystals — along with the term — was first introduced in 1984 by Steinhardt and Dov Levine, both then at the University of Pennsylvania. — Wikipedia: Icosahedrite

    Quasicrystals: The Thrill of the Chase

    They realized that by drawing parallel lines on a Penrose tiling, they could prove that the tiles are arranged quasiperiodically, producing five-fold symmetry. This was the breakthrough they needed. The leap to three dimensions produced Steinhardt’s long-imagined icosahedral quasicrystal. — Quasicrystals: The Thrill of the Chase
  • Get Creative!
    Yes, please, Longjing or Russian Caravan tea in either the conservatory or in the dinning room.

    How does the water get routed/directed from the side of the conservatory against the building? Is it through that grate aside the gutter in the picture with the roof detritus? How do you clean out that side? There MUST be a window nearby for ease of maintenance.
  • Is Buddhism A Philosophy Or A Religion?
    Humans suffer from a negativity bias which helps organisms to survive in nature by paying attention to threats. This is a considerable source of ruminative suffering (eg. what if the economy collapses and my savings is wiped out and my Christian neighbor pulls a gun on me and my parents die of covid and everybody tells me to fuck off and die)

    Mindfulness helps people to diminish the suffering caused by their negativity bias and their automatic rumination. A lot of well adjusted folks might have no need to structure their lives by a ritualistic/secular mindfulness practice but at least they may be aware, via the memes of Buddhism, that there are great tools for the amelioration of mental suffering. Mindfulness works if you can make it work for you. Thank you Buddha!

    :flower:
  • Word of the day - Not to be mistaken for "Word de jour."
    Has Noble Dust finally left the thread(?)... I regret posting here to the diminishment of anyone's pleasure. :cry: It's therapeutic if also self-indulgent.

    I venture an alternative to "dick waving" in the spirit of British humor. This is a knob turning event... not unlike wine tasting and nothing as uncouth as an American circle jerk.

    Two words that I've noticed in my first reading of Frank Herbert's Dune that were unfamiliar: covey (n. a group of birds/people/things) and cozen (v. to trick or deceive).

    Once you're addicted to the spice melange (French for mixture/medley) in the Dune universe you're in a bit of a pickle. Withdrawal is fatal.
  • How is a raven like the idea of a writing desk?
    Accordingly, take note that a self- interested person is not necessarily self-conserving, and vice versa.unenlightened

    The basic fact though is organisms use up scarce resources to sustain themselves and that this adaptive functionality is mediated by genes through natural selection. All creatures are self-conserving insofar as they are living things. How long does one need to live in order to be called "self-interested"? Do we require theory of mind? To be interested in others is to be self-interested insofar as one depends on others to survive or not.

    If you were a three headed person and I was one of the heads we might need to coordinate ourselves to go buy a KitKat. It would depend on who controls what and the consequence of a distribution of other traits. Would I have the freedom to eat as many KitKats as I wanted?

    If you were a sheep farmer and wolves were eating your sheep you'd shoot the wolves, law permitting. This is not a morally circumscribed action until it becomes one by an outside concern. The interest of other selves come to bear on your lifestyle and you may not take kindly to the hardship it imposes on you.

    I responded with a jokular joke to another previous joke.god must be atheist

    Yes. Just seemed kind of irreverent, mocking and superfluous.
  • The quality of discussions have improved TREMENDOUSLY in the last little while on this forum.
    What's PUI?god must be atheist

    Posting under the influence of alcohol or some other mood altering substance.
  • The quality of discussions have improved TREMENDOUSLY in the last little while on this forum.
    But you still are trashing threads no doubt due to your anger. Are you PUI?
  • How is a raven like the idea of a writing desk?
    The notion that genes are selfish is an analogy.unenlightened

    Genes are selfish like dogs are selfish. To call a dog selfish is an analogy because a dog has no self to conserve. :sad:
  • How is a raven like the idea of a writing desk?
    But look at nature and see if you can find a rule. The only one I can think of is 'don't destroy the environment you depend on.'unenlightened

    The problem with a collection of self-interested persons or self-conserving structures is that they always seek to conserve their local environments and autonomy (power) at someone/thing else's expense. This works as much in a symbiotic relationship as a parasitic one.

    I bite into a KitKat bar with no knowledge of the physical/social monstrosity behind it because to some extent it is irrational to think about with regard to the priorities of self-interest. It is not in my interest to justify what I do. I want a KitKat bar. I want a job at the KitKat bar factory... in the white collar part... so I can buy more KitKat bars.
  • Is Christianity really Satanic?
    Pope Francis, in the new Catechism's teaching that capital punishment is evil, has done what he has to do to curb the violence of Christians. Christians are always whinning that they are persecuted, but they are persecuted because they are trolls.Gregory

    They were persecuted but then it appears with this Edict of Thessonalike, that the state began persecuting in the name of Christianity. This violence is just as much "human" violence as it is "Christian".

    Have you surveyed the work/thesis of Rene Girard at all? If he becomes a new Church father for any Christian faith in the future, then Jesus is to be interpreted as the Last Sacrifice (the last scapegoat), which amounts to a repudiation by Christians of all violence, the same kind that turned Jesus into a sacrifice. Christians today need to become conscious of what they are doing and not blindly flow in the currents of past dogma or batshit insane political ideology, which is rife with scapegoating ('the devil casting out the devil').

    "If it weren't for Christians, I'd be Christian." Ghandi

    "Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love... Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding." Martin Luther King Jr.

    There will never be a last sacrifice because human beings are competing for power and resources by leveraging belief in the exercise of control (all kinds of subtle violence/violations). How could the meek possibly inherit the Earth? Maybe by the power of someone else's violence visited upon them.
  • Word of the day - Not to be mistaken for "Word de jour."
    I should never had revived this thread.Noble Dust

    What are you worried about and why are you voicing your disgust? What word ought one to post? Teach your readers a new word. Noblisse oblige.

    If pedia is child and encyclius is circularity then the meaning is a child going is circles, as though lost in the woods of knowledge.praxis

    No argument here. Borges motif is as much about being in prison (of infinite space) as it is wandering a labyrinth (library/encyclopedia). We should do/use the word praxis since it has quite the philosophical history. Maybe Noble Dust would like that.

    In Ancient Greek the word praxis (πρᾶξις) referred to activity engaged in by free people. — Wikipedia: Praxis
  • Bannings
    Jerzey Flight wasn't a drama lama. He was a drama unicorn fighting on behalf of us invertebrates and lesser mammals. He luckily escaped God's chosen menagerie on the ark.

    Now that he is free from the prison (zoo) that is the PF, he can work on changing the world for the better, by using his magic horn rhetoric to fix human misery by activating philosophers to move. The masses should rise up and take to the streets on the backs of courageous beasts like Jerzey, who are more than just internet writers.

    From one cell to the next, pry the locks open with force and let the animals free to scare their masters.
  • Word of the day - Not to be mistaken for "Word de jour."
    The inveterate masturbations of a pseudo philosopher are still pleasurable even though they might impede growth and development conferred by pursuing more social or practical unions. An orgy of one is quite dull.

    The false article in the encyclopedia* of J.L. Borges short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is a cause for nightmares (eg. see power of the spreading meme "fake news" by a nation's figurehead). We are contaminated (or changed) by everything we are exposed to. The fiction we read helps us to read/(mis)interpet the world.

    Footnote: * I was so hoping the suffix of pedia related to feet rather than the ancient greek word for child. I was imagining an encyclopedia in line with Borges projection of the world as a library, such that one could wander the realm of knowledge (the encyclopedia) by foot as one can perambulate the actual landscape of the world.
  • The Necrology Exercise
    An obituary for the archetype of philosophical Cynicism, Diogenes of Sinope, might be quite fun. But that would take a bit of research.

    There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them.[8] — Wikipedia: Cynicism (philosophy)

    I'd like to live like a dog for a while, if I could muster the courage to lose my job and learn how to sleep anywhere and eat anything. Sounds like a good skill to have as we face economic insecurity and increasing poverty in the U.S. Street jars (homes) and dogs (friends) for everyone.
  • The Necrology Exercise
    Of course it will be like this, nobody wants a life that does not have a perennial meaning, therefore that it is meaningless.bcccampello

    Is a perennial meaning that which is intelligible (or valuable or good) by virtue of participation in perennial forms? Mircea Eliade had this notion of eternity as perennial acts. The past happens again because of practical reenactments. Here the religion would be a reenactment of desired and good as it pertains to philosophical modes or analyses/criticism. Meaning is derived from your participation with your fellow people.


    To have perennial meaning is to be perceived as having desirable (or meaningful) meaning in this game of life. Or as the maligned Jordan Peterson would say, to play well in as many "dominance hierarchies" as you can.
  • The Necrology Exercise
    Jersey Flight was considered as a contemporary, liberal version of Nietzsche. He was an iconoclast against all forms of cultural superstition, including elitism and academia. His intellectual interests included, defining and expanding the psychological qualities that account for advanced thinking, as well as collaborating a method for its culturation. He had repeatedly challenged intellectuals to transcend theory and fulfill their social responsibility to engage culture through polemics. His writing style was consciously concise; an anti-scholastic, he tried to communicate complex ideas in simple prose. He had written multiple volumes of philosophy that are yet been released to the public. He is was one of the founders of The New School of Polemics. — Jersey Flight from a Third Person Point of View

    May God and other inherited stupidities cease to contaminate impressionable young minds. Amen.

    Now that "God" has been swept away as irrelevant, folks can continue critiquing/commenting on the exercise.
  • Dungeons and Lounges
    Lamarch and JF are impressive, eloquent, and dramatic characters. Egoists or polemicists for good or ill. Worthy of an epic adventure.

    The metaphysics of Plotinus is either an influence or an influencer of Gnostic mythos. Why is the the shaft of primordial light being split such a strong and pervasive, popular mythic divine conception. Newton is pictured with a crystal refractor. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has it as album art. Noble Dust used it in his poem as naming it a godhead.

    The light of the sun illuminates and drives life itself in all its grand plurality. We should just call the Sun our god, or curse it because it generated this horror show, along with the darkness.

    _________

    "When the One is refracted through the prism of deficiency, this coruscating dream of the Demiurge, then there is just refracted light of this One great deficiency: the rainbow of duality. The colors of worldly things in the field stand opposed to or aside one another in their reflections of the beatific veils of Maya."

    From the Book of the Well of Mirrors by Daimon Kalkan

    "The tea is usually black or green or white, aside a little piece of spiced or fruited cake."

    From the Book of Tea by Camilla Sen

    ______

    God damnit.... how does Bimble get to his end. By the burden of the work of focusing on Bimble.
  • How can I get more engagement with my comments on other peoples posts?
    ①, ②, ③.... TPF coins. The wretched of the wretched are still captivated with the joy of finding pennies on the title page. Someone must've seen a ㊿.

    Start with explaining why pragmatism is digging the grave of Capitalism. How am I to understand that cartoon? Sorry I forgot to give you a penny.
  • The "One" and "God"
    "Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul. To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One."Gus Lamarch's Plotinus

    At this point there is no longer any need of discussion (a deficiency). Sounds like a version of union with the universal soul in stillness, as in line with the pursuit of Advaita Vedanta ("nonduality").
  • Knowledge of Good and Evil
    Does it have a male or female presence. Would theists be open to the idea that God is entirely female?Gregory

    The consort of the precursor of Yahweh in the Caananite pantheon was Asherah. Guess he couldn't deal with her cramping his style.

    Despite her association with Yahweh in extra-biblical sources[citation needed], Deuteronomy 12 has Yahweh commanding the destruction of her shrines so as to maintain purity of his worship. — Wikipedia:Asherah

    Not that this answers any questions. Religion evolves like everything else in time.
  • Dungeons and Lounges
    I think JerzeyFlight ought to be a character in this world but only if he could do the meaningless, inane, work of writing himself into it. He ought to be himself, swift and exacting in judgment concerning worthy intellects and prolific with language. Maybe he could war against religious cults in order to save the world from a return to a prophesied dark age. A war of the rationalistas against the irrationalistas. Hopefully there will be a lot of blood because humans cannot get enough of it.

    He ought to have an opinion about the existence of the unicorn, a strange and exotic horse-like creature from distant lands, which carries a spiral sword on its head for competitive sexual selection.

    JerzeyFlight! bearing on his head the swift piercing screw-needle of a preternatural kind of horse sense. That knobby knife of power! The cutting agent of just good rational sense that puts any house or stable in proper order.


    :monkey:
  • Why was my post removed?
    What is your central paragraph saying? As far as my reading of it, if you omitted it, nothing would be lost.

    One can guess why Anton Levay decided to make solipsism a cardinal sin but it's still just a guess, unless he wrote the reasons down somewhere.

    What is solipsism?
  • It is more reasonable to believe in the resurrection of Christ than to not.
    Don't discount the mythical (and or ritualistic) component of the story of a dying and resurrecting god. The gospels are stories and not primary sources. I wouldn't literalize the resurrection. It is a metaphor of transition, like the turning of one thing to another by a ritual mechanism (a sacrifice/martyrdom).

    What if Jesus had not been martyred?
  • Risk Assessment: The Ladder is too High


    The basic problem was that there was a water tapping noise within one of the gutters. So there maybe some debris inside the vertical gutter I can't access without dissembling.

    I put my cell phone on a poll and took video of the gutters which looked pristine. I ran some water down but couldn't fix the tapping noise.

    I ended up applying force to the metal where the water hits the metal to muffle the sound by means of a zip tie and some rubber. A temporary fix for an annoying noise (chinese water torture).

    I will try running the hose on a pole when I get a second man to help me.

    So temporarily fixed. Ideally I'd just get gutter cleaners. The roof is way to high. My boss is secretly trying to kill me. :sweat:
  • Is Christianity really Satanic?


    Suppose you had to go to a "Christian" church, to be a part of any fold (community) per se. Which denomination would you choose? Suppose you had to be the leader of a new denomination, the Church of Gregory... and you had to convert other Christians who were discouraged with their faith... what would you do?
  • Is Christianity really Satanic?
    The word "Satanism" was adopted into English from the French satanisme.[14] The terms "Satanism" and "Satanist" are first recorded as appearing in the English and French languages during the sixteenth century, when they were used by Christian groups to attack other, rival Christian groups.[15] In a Roman Catholic tract of 1565, the author condemns the "heresies, blasphemies, and sathanismes [sic]" of the Protestants.[14] In an Anglican work of 1559, Anabaptists and other Protestant sects are condemned as "swarmes of Satanistes [sic]".[14] As used in this manner, the term "Satanism" was not used to claim that people literally worshipped Satan, but rather presented the view that through deviating from what the speaker or writer regarded as the true variant of Christianity, they were regarded as being essentially in league with the devil. — Wikipedia: Satanism
  • Changing colors
    Smithsonian Magazine: True Colors, by Matthew Gurewitsch

    Teeth are important these days for the sake of making an impression. Show up to class with a mouth full of char-coaled teeth, red teeth, yellow teeth, blue teeth, green teeth. Folks might take a guess as to what you've been eating... Or just how sane you might be.