I too had hoped we could find some common ground on this matter, on which we could grow our relationship until it blossomed with passion and beauty. But I'm not going to compromise on this TL, not even for you. The trouble with Worf is that he was always, at least from the Klingon perspective, a pussy. He didn't make sense. And the episodes that focused on him and the Klingons in general were always the worst, don't you think?

Don't get me started. I don't give a shit about the Klingons. They should have got rid of them a long time ago. They always inevitably drag things down into cliché, all stemming from the fact that they are an ill-conceived species characterized merely by one human personality trait among others.

He probably deserves all that, yes, but on the other hand...

...Hefner, above all, was committed to the liberties of all; not just the lifestyle of would-be playboys, but also those fighting for civil rights, those who were still falling foul of repressive laws, those who desired liberty but found it being shamefully restricted. So at his Playboy clubs during the 1960s, you could hear black comedians perform when most other comedy clubs were still segregated. (Indeed, he even gave $25,000 to one of those comedians, Dick Gregory, to use as a reward for information regarding the murder of three young civil-rights activists in Mississippi, as a result of which convictions were successfully brought against several KKK members.) You could find Hefner in the 1970s, his hands deep in his pockets, funding Jesse Jackson’s civil-rights group, the Rainbow PUSH coalition; and you could find him supporting the comedian Lenny Bruce when many others had abandoned him because of his obscenity convictions. In the words of Hefner’s daughter, Christie, he couldn’t bear to see anyone ‘persecuted or prosecuted for his words and his ideas’.

In the 1980s, he enshrined his commitment to freedom of expression by founding the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Awards. The diversity of the recipients testifies to Hefner’s awareness that fundamental freedoms have to be universal. The list includes women and men, right-wingers and left wingers, Muslims and atheists, and even a pair of magicians in Penn and Teller. It shows that Hefner was willing to support anyone who made the case for greater freedom of thought and speech, from campaigners against government spying in the name of counterterrorism to those who sought to end blacklisting in the television industry. — Tim Black

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/lets-hear-it-for-the-hef/#.WdIAWk2CzCI

I don't think Cartesian or substance dualists hold that the mind and body are unrelated. If I'm right then I think your argument fails.

Yep, just done it. Thanks :)

But under this way of looking at it, none of that would be an acceptable account of existence. To exist, logically speaking, is generally just to be the subject of a predicate.

Sometimes, and mostly partly.

Gold is pretty soft, as metals go.

I'd expect to set up an account or "store" with some existing platform to make that stuff easier. Amazon or Ebay or whatever. Don't know how that would work though.

I think drinking is a form of self-medication; nothing more nor less. — John

Nothing is nothing more. Even if drinking is a form of self-medication, it has its own qualities, is used in particular ways, represents particular ways of being both individual and social, and thus can be explored in many ways.

I changed it back to "Favourite". I was too eager to please Hanover.

So I went through a period where I consistently pushed myself past the boundaries of social discomfort. A big part of this involved eliminating self-judgment and judgment of others. With judgment removed, I felt that I could be myself - I could say and do the things I would when I was feeling a good alcohol buzz. — CasKev

You've convinced me. And I must admit to being impressed. But if I'm interpreting your story correctly, alcohol for you was a risk too big to take, or continue taking. I think for many people it doesn't carry the same risk, so here I come back to my scepticism about the distinction between a real and and an artificial opening up to the world. But sure, to be authentic all the time is appealing.

I know. I think I'll leave it like that because the inconsistency is a bit annoying, like a grain of sand in an oyster.

You're too fast. See my edit.

No. But I've left "Favourite quotations" in the interests of fairness.

Done.

(Y)

Certainly one has to be careful over the long term.

Because it's not real. We're relying on artificially altering your experience, because we can't face it straight up. Surely The Lady Sophia would say that we need to learn to value ordinary experience, to see what is valuable in it, without artificial stimuli. — Wayfarer

Inebriation is real. Anything we do "by a special method" (to quote myself) is artificial, and to be artificial is not to be unreal. It is artificial to live in a city, to ride a bike, to read books. I don't think we reach some privileged natural state when we avoid chemicals. Playing an instrument no doubt alters our brain chemistry. And I think that drinking is part of ordinary experience.

Otherwise, good for you (not sarcastic). I've cut down too, though I can't see myself giving up completely.

No point at all, Gus! :)

Well it's not bad faith if one is being authentic: they are opposites. On Sartre's model, it is the waiter more so that he finds to be in bad faith. — unenlightened

Although drinking may not involve acting, like the waiter play-acting the role of waiter, it could be seen to involve the avoidance of freedom and responsibility. In ceasing to worry, we cease to face up to the need to take up a stance on a life that has no transcendent meaning. At least, that's the way that drinking might be thought to be inauthentic: when we drink, we deceive ourselves for a while, and the mind-altering effects stand in for the taking on of a role. Even when thus inebriated, we know and can talk about our life projects, the problem of freedom, and so on, and yet it's as if we're talking about them as observers, unwilling for a time to grapple with them directly.

But it's this wry, sceptical, removed stance on our anxious selves that I like about drinking. Although @Moliere is surely right to point out that not everyone is like this with alcohol.

Getting inebriated is not comparable to playing a musical instrument or other cultural pursuits. Sure, anything can be 'escapism' but alcohol changes your perception by altering your body chemistry. — Wayfarer

I'm aware that the experiences are different, but they are comparable, in exactly the way I compared them. You suggested that becoming temporarily at ease with life is foolish. Or did you mean that doing so only under the influence of alcohol is foolish? If so, why?

But what occurs to me is that if you want to have a drink, don't try and rationalise it as some life-altering event, because I'm sure that will only have one outcome, and it won't be a good one. — Wayfarer

>:O Thanks, but I'm fine. I drink less than I used to and expect to drink even less in the future.

I expected the charge of attempting to dignify drinking more than it is due, and maybe I am, but really I think I'm just trying to look at it differently. And note that I'm not trying to justify my affection for drink. In English-speaking cultures drinking is often regarded as something shameful, or naughty (at least in middle-class circles), and I want to see past that, because I don't think there's anything to justify. I want to say that it's not a case of slipping weakly back to a habit or escaping into oblivion like a coward, as TimeLine believes. No: it's a way of life!

(This is TPF so I have to point out: the last sentence is not quite serious)

I think alcohol is a temporary shortcut to removing inhibitions. If you work on your inhibitions by addressing the reasons they exist, you shouldn't need alcohol to open up and 'be yourself'. — CasKev

Why do that if I can just have a bottle of wine? I regard the anxiety we are able to leave behind when drinking to be part of the human condition, or part of the condition of alienation that everyone experiences. That is, it's a society-wide phenomenon that is not amenable to self-help. Anyway, I don't think it's as simple as you make out, though I realize your description is the common sense one. As I've been trying to say, drinking is not merely the negative act of removing inhibitions, but is, or can be, a positive one: a choice to take up a different stance on life and the world.

Plus alcohol brings with it the risk of hangover, drunken mistakes, not to mention anger and depression in some people. — CasKev

And who wants to take risks, right?

As a soft ball Methodist faggot... — Bitter Crank

Contender for the first clause of the first line of your autobiography?

I commonly experience both, and no I don't consider them to be the same experience. That would be foolish. As I said in the OP, I consider them both to provide a way of keying in to the world, of finding a home in it. This is the feeling of losing oneself and becoming oneself at the same time that I was talking about.

I've only gotten sick (really horrible hang overs) from wine. Some of it was good, some of it was rotgut. Didn't seem to make much difference. Never gotten sick from beer, gin, whiskey, rye... — Bitter Crank

Everyone says this kind of thing, including me. Whisky makes me depressed for days, wine is fine, and so on. But they say (and they would know) that the kind of alcohol you drink doesn't make any difference, that the difference is how much you drink, which is what varies when drinking different kinds of alcohol.

You had made yourself fully present to life and fully at ease within it. You weren’t oppressed by the past and you weren’t worried about the future. — Edmundson

A fool's paradise. — Wayfarer

No more than, say, playing a musical instrument in a band. Do you think it's always foolish to, by a special method, become temporarily at ease with life?

But if it is obvious that everything is great and will only get better, why write long books about it?

Like Berman said, if it's something that is obvious then writing a book about it is like writing an 800+-page book saying that the Pope is Catholic. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is not obvious. That is precisely why the books are being written. It takes an effort to look beyond the doxa, which has it that things are getting worse, to see what is really the case.

(Note, I'm not saying everything is great and that everything has been getting better)

I don't know, what do you think?

Not my thoughts at all. It's not contemptible that drinking puts you in such a state, but enlightening. I always wondered what the allure to drinking really was. I didn't fully appreciate it's effect on other people. I mostly just get tired, and if diligent enough, nauseous. I always felt my limited response was a strength, but, with what you say, I'm not entirely sure. I am sure that my condition is safer than yours. — Hanover

A hearteningly non-boring, non-judgmental response. I award you the title of honorary drunkard.

it provides them with a scapegoat or excuse to justify their own bad behaviour. There is an inherent weakness in this where people delude themselves into thinking that their choices are no longer theirs and thus they are morally safe; hey, it wasn't really 'them' just like how people blame others for their own misdeeds or even play social games to sneakily avoid responsibility for what is essentially their wrong decisions. — TimeLine

I guess it can be like that, but mostly what I observe in myself and others is (and the article goes into this) shame the following day, the shame of having revealed oneself too openly or of having transgressed boundaries. The quintessential shame of the hangover represents an inability to avoid personal responsibility, and those who feel the most shame are very often let off the hook, not by themselves, but by others. (I must stress that I'm talking about what I regard as the normal experience of drinking, not the violence and destructiveness that alcohol abuse can produce).

I don't like that. It lacks existential adventure because to me, I find it thrilling facing my fears and being brutally honest. The alcohol in the above-mentioned is not revealing anything but your cowardly escapism from the sensation of social anxiety that you may feel, but for me coming face-to-face with that feeling and defeating it is so exiting. You expose your vulnerability, your need to feel belonging by doing the same thing for the same reason that others are, a need for love and a fear for rejection. You are escaping from your reality rather than changing it and making it what you really want, which is just a shame really. — TimeLine

Certainly drink can be cowardly escapism, but this is such a pedestrian point that I feel there must be something deeply wrong with it. First note that by "anxiety" I mean it more in the general existential or Heideggerian sense than simply "social anxiety", although that may be an expression of it. I mean that in drinking we choose to drop this basic anxiety for a while and forget the paraphernalia of who we are, that we might have larger projects in life, that we will one day die and what are we going to do about it? It's easy to regard this as escapism, but I've tried to suggest a different way of looking at it. In the same way as "don't take yourself too seriously" is sometimes good advice (advice that bores and snobs and fanatics never learn to take), "get drunk once in a while" might be similarly good advice. In fact, getting drunk once in a while is a good way to stop taking oneself too seriously. It's a way of taking up an essentially humorous or playful stance on the world.

I don't drink because the social anxiety builds up until, on Friday evening, it all gets too much and I retreat into a warm loving wine. That is your caricature, and it doesn't fit many of the drinkers I know (except for a couple of alcoholics, who don't wait till Friday, or evening for that matter). It's a definite decision, a decision to have fun. You may choose to regard it as mindless fun, inconsequential fun, irresponsible fun, and no doubt many other bad things, but to me it is not like that. And I don't especially want to either escape from or change my reality. I want to take up a different stance on it, or get inside it in a different way.

Drink is not without its downsides, of course, and the very fact that we must mourn for that sense of wholeness in the morning suggests it's no more than a small glimpse into a kind of life we might be able to achieve some other way. But at the very least, given the kind of society we live in it seems rather too earnest and proper to turn down, based on some inflated sense of one's bravery in the face of the unintelligible universe, the chance of improved social interaction.

A lot is not so good here, but anything is better than nothing.

1. Citations should be in grey body to distinguish them better from the answer.
2. We should get a set of basic logical and mathematical symbols, and some more smilies.
3. We should be able to mark words ot sentences and color them differently. — Pippen

1. Quotations are indented and surrounded by big quotation marks and are sufficiently distinguishable from the rest of a post, at least to me and I suspect most others.
2. As Michael said, we have MathJax.
3. I don't see at all how colours would help, and I don't know what you mean by "mark words or sentences".

So your three complaints--two of which are eccentric and one of which is already a feature--don't seem to add up to "a lot is not so good here".

Make sure you're not on the roof when you feel like being authentically you! — Evol Sonic Goo

Okay Evol, at the risk of being too serious: I'm sure there's an endless supply of videos of drunk people that we can watch at our leisure on YouTube, but as I said in the OP, I'm not really talking about getting totally wasted.

It might be instructive (though not creative) to list which aspects of cognition/reasoning are impaired/improved at full tipsy and score them for tendency to creativity. — Jake Tarragon

Off the top of my head: inventiveness and originality, and a willingness to transgress boundaries (obviously important for creativity); a willingness to engage with people you'd otherwise be too inhibited to strike up a conversation with (material and avenues for further creativity); openness to different ideas thanks to one's openness to different people.

The creativity I'm talking about is that of making new kinds of conversations, new ways of making collective decisions, new ways of behaving in public, of experimenting beyond the mores of propriety. I wouldn't say that alcohol works well as fuel for other creative activities like writing or making music (up to a certain point it can occasionally work, but generally anything that requires sustained concentration only suffers).

Does "creativity" result from being simply absorbed or is a cognitive element necessary I wonder? — Jake Tarragon

Well, I don't think we can oppose them, because being absorbed always involves cognition, though maybe not reasoning.

If it is so obvious that everything is going so great in contemporary times, why all these books about it? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Because the idea that everything is getting worse is so widespread, not because everything is getting worse.

A back pocket seems like a reckless place to keep a miniature Englishman.

Many people on this forum quote long-dead philosophers as if they were prophets - as if what these long-dead philosophers wrote or said is above criticism (set in stone) — Harry Hindu

But do they really? Don't they usually quote canonical texts because they're especially insightful, original, and thought-provoking? For me, words that invite criticism may still be worth quoting, precisely because they are so provocative.

Yes. Or, the annoyance could be at the tendency of those who do philosophy to lose sight of common sense and overlook conventional wisdom, evidenced by, for example, asking ill-considered questions or feigning ignorance. — Sapientia

But questions that ignore common sense and conventional wisdom are not necessarily ill-considered. You can't be philosophical without asking such questions. To those who regard common sense and conventional wisdom as beyond question, philosophy will always appear ill-considered. Note that you cannot decide ahead of time which examples of common sense are questionable and which are not, without, of course, going beyond it.

There's this typical approach to philosophy which has quite a lot in common with the ways in which children think and behave, and that's not necessarily a good thing or something to be proud of. It's one thing to be open-minded, but another thing to lack a good mental filter to separate the wheat from the chaff, and sometimes I think that the two get confused.

It's not necessarily a bad thing or something to be ashamed of either. And separating the wheat from the chaff is an exercise of rationality and good judgment that may not require an anchor in common sense or "grown-up" thinking. On the contrary.

Conventional wisdom has told us that God created Man and the universe, and now tells us that the brain is a computer (at least to me, it seems that among the scientifically but non-philosophically literate this has become something close to common sense, but you could think of other examples). It's surely the job of a philosopher to question such thoughtless prejudices.

What I find stupid about philosophy is what is revealed when a philosopher is asked about some topical social or political issues, whereupon they invariably spout the dullest platitudes. Perhaps the Continentals are less guilty of this, working in more of a self-aware and historically-aware mode than the Anglos. In any case, all it means is that most philosophers are not philosophical enough.

>:O