"When it is dark enough, men see the stars."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"As if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger..."

-Nietzsche's assessment of humanity.

"The only excuse for God is that He does not exist." ~Stendhal

The question why Al-Qaeda bombed the Pentagon and the World Trade Center has a relatively clear answer: “They say they did it because of U.S. support for the corrupt Saudi monarchy and the garrisoning of American troops in Saudi Arabia." — StreetlightX

Seems like an over-simplification:

"In Osama Bin Laden's November 2002 "Letter to America",[3][4] he explicitly stated that al-Qaeda's motives for their attacks include: Western support for attacking Muslims in Somalia, supporting Russian atrocities against Muslims in Chechnya, supporting the Indian oppression against Muslims in Kashmir, the Jewish aggression against Muslims in Lebanon, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia,[4][5][6] US support of Israel,[7][8] and sanctions against Iraq.[9]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks

"Science is the record of dead religions."
~Oscar Wilde

"Sniffles."⁠

⁠—Slavoj Žižek

Though I'm something of groupie, I accept that the "Elvis of philosophy" really deserved this savage take-down excerpted here from a 2012 review of his books Less Than Nothing & Living In The End Times:

Žižek’s vision . . . is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. 

[ ... ]

In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing. — John Gray

:death: :flower:


NB: Also, grudgingly, usually a fan of Mr. Gray ...

Clever.

"He was not a seducer, he was a seductive man, which is not the same thing at all."
~Catherine Sellers, actress, one of Camus' lovers

Most of what passes for philosophy is best described as BS.

Most of what passes for philosophy is best described as BS. — A Seagull

Who said that? :chin:

“I think that most of these movements, which often flow from the irrational part of the human … mind, that there’s very little you can do to control them, unless of course you can make social and political arrangements which minimize the mean and maximized the generous; and I see very little in the way things are at the moment which encourages me to believe that we will do very much to maximize the generous and a great deal to look as if we’re maximizing the mean and the wretched and the horrible.”

~Jonathan Miller 1934-2019

(JM was so much more than a "disbeliever in god", as we all are, of course; I revere him for his irreverently comic & artistic accomplishments, yet even more I remember his intellectually scrupulous commitment to freethought. Even though for generations JM had lit countless other candles with his own flame before it went out, today the world's a slightly darker ruin ...)

EDIT 1.7.2020

Jonathan Miller as Bertrand Russell :rofl:

Along with Jonathan Miller, Clive James and Gary Rhodes died yesterday as well. Rhodes, being a chef and not a writer, wasn't known for his words, but James wrote a lot of good stuff:

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.

Personally, I liked his criticism:

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. — Clive James on Brezhnev: A Short Biography

:up:

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
~Toni Morrison

"Socialism is the people! If you afraid of socialism, you afraid of yourself." - Fred Hampton

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

-- forgot to record the source.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

(12.8.80)

"The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" ~Friedrich Nietzsche

☆Reason's Greetings☆

:death: :flower:

"Here - right is supposed to matter; it's what's made us the greatest nation on Earth. No constitution can protect us [ ... ] right doesn't matter anymore. And you know: you can't trust this president to do what's right for this country! You can trust that he will do what's right for Donald Trump." ~Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) Impeachment Manager, 1.23.2020

"You keep hiding from shit in the world, and eventually the world comes to your front door."

- Terry Hoitz, The Other Guys

"Here then, is the basic difference between all pre-capitalist societies and capitalism. It has nothing to do with whether production is urban or rural and everything to do with the particular property relations between producers and appropriators, whether in industry or agriculture. Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on the complete dispossession of direct producers, who (unlike chattel slaves) are legally free and whose surplus labour is appropriated by purely 'economic' means. Because direct producers in fully developed capitalism are propertyless, and because their only access to the means of production, to the requirements of their own reproduction, even to the means of their own labour, is the sale of their labour-power in exchange for a wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers' surplus labour without direct coercion.

This unique relation between producers and appropriators is, of course, mediated by the 'market'. Markets of various kind have existed throughout history and no doubt before, as people have exchanged and sold their surpluses in many different ways and for many different purposes. But the market in capitalism has a distinctive, unprecedented function. Virtually everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market. And even more fundamentally, both capital and labour are utterly dependent on the market for the most basic conditions of their own reproduction. ... This market dependence gives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societies, as not only a simple mechanism of exchange or distribution, but the principle determinant and regulator of social reproduction."

- Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism

George Steiner 1929-2020

adieu, rabbi ...

[T]he calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.

All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

:death: :flower:

Ellen Meiksins Wood on why capitalist democracy is a bit shit:

"In capitalist democracy, the separation between civic status and class position operates in both directions: socio-economic position does not determine the right to citizenship - and that is what is democractic in capitalist democracy - but, since the power of the capitalist to appropriate the surplus labour of workers is not dependant on a privileged juridical or civic status, civic equality does not directly affect or significantly modify class inequality - and that is what limits democracy in capitalism. Class relations between capital and labour can survive even with juridical equality and universal suffrage. In that sense, political equality in capitalist democracy not only coexists with socio-economic inequality but leaves it fundamentally intact".

--

On why the American idea of democracy is particularly shit:

"We have become so accustomed to the formula, 'representative democracy', that we have tended to forget the novelty of the American idea. In its Federalist form, at any rate, it meant that something hirthrto perceived as the antithesis of democratic self-government was now nbot only compatible with but constitutive of democracy: not the excercise political power but its relinquishment, its transfer to others, its alienation.

The alienation of political power was so foreign to the Greek conception of democracy that even election could be regarded a an oligarchic practice, which democracies might adopt for certain specific purposes but which did not belong to the essence of the democratic constitution. Thus Aristotle, outlining how a 'mixes' constitution might be constructed out of the elements from the main constitutional types, such as oligarchy and democracy, suggests the inclusion of election as an oligarchic feature. It was oligarchic because it tended to favour the gnorimoi, the notables, the rich and well born who were less likely to be sympathetic to democracy. ... Not only did the 'Founding Fathers' conceive representation as a means of distancing the people from politics, but they advocated it for the same reason that Athenian democracts were suspicious of election: that it favoured the propertied classes".

via Democracy Against Capitalism

"So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths —
But is that an answer?"

~Heinrich Heine

Goddammit, Scott Aaronson, the computer scientist, gave a better defence of philosophy than most philosophers I've known, and it's wonderful. Asked why anyone in CS should care about philosophy, he replies:

"I would reframe the question a little bit. Philosophy, almost by definition, is the subject concerned with the biggest questions you could possibly ask. Like the ones you mentioned: Are we living in a simulation? Are we alone in the universe? Should we even think about such questions? Is the future determined? What do we even mean by it being determined? Why are we alive at this time are and not some other time? And when you contemplate the enormity of those questions, I think you could ask: 'Why be concerned with anything else? Why not spend your whole life on those questions?'. And I think that is the right way to phrase the question."

*swoon*

:up:

"But to get the skills to make something that is beautiful, you need to train your ass off, not just train your thinky little brainpan." - @Coben

"Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about." ~Harry G. Frankfurt

Most of what passes for philosophy is best described as BS. — A Seagull
Who said that? :chin: — Sir2u

I did. :)

I did. :) — A Seagull

So what do you base your statement on? Usually on is expected to provide some sort of evidence. :cool: