Laziness is the engine of progress.

The wheel was invented by someone too lazy to carry stuff, the cooking-fire by someone too idle to chew, and every labour-saving device by someone who had a strong aversion to labouring. Laziness is only a sin for donkeys and you peasants; for the flower of civilisation like myself it is high art.

What does 'simply' mean here? One might substitute 'just'.

Therefore justice is simplicity.

Or possibly the unit of meaning is not the word, but the phrase, which would explain why Shakespeare is full of cliches.

https://twitter.com/therealholli/status/1149046964715057152?s=12&fbclid=IwAR2rCbWvxbkkDKH6IudRFhGUY6gUFIzBOyelhQQjnsYjbswILaYHUoU4oQo

I wonder if any one here knows anything about this. Conspiracy theory, political smear, or something more?

I gather this Epstein bloke is notorious already and being indicted with new charges, meanwhile this Trump related story is also coming back, and Acosta is still working for Trump?

Here's Snopes from the previous 2016 story: https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/06/23/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit/

Edit. And now this...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/09/labor-secretary-alexander-acosta-sex-trafficking-budget-cut?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0QNjmRS4Wb1gy6wBS3UzyKOerM3JRq-dOKg8MoPitOOTsFEMH0EA3C-D4#Echobox=1562770204

This is just the beginning. Liberals, internationalists, and Christians are going to be sorely tested as political and economic based migration is dwarfed by climate based migration. As equatorial and tropical regions along with low-lying areas generally become uninhabitable, expect armed militias in your region setting up roadblocks to prevent the hordes of dreadful lowlanders retreating to our sacred hills and mountains. Nationalism will fragment into parochialism. Meanwhile...

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/11/too-many-africans/?fbclid=IwAR2cioCg5SfpuoPJcS6sYsdWS_RYJJ2y9s1Rn5rRJF2-0zpgCKrhK2z2PLE

Thought cannot produce the new, because it is reflective. I'll try a personal anecdote.
— unenlightened

There are new reflections. Things like learning. — creativesoul

Nice to have you aboard!

I'm going to play hardball about this; it's a question of time. Something is new at time t, and thereafter it is not strictly new, though we may go on referring to it as new for convenience for any length of time eg. any number of towns called Newtown, Newquay, Newcastle.

It follows that new something n, at time t, is unknown. Not that one doesn't plan Newtown before building it, but the plans are imaginary, and however detailed and closely followed they are, the built town will be capable of surprising the builders because the real is more than the imagined. (It might fall down in the first storm)
Likewise, something m, new to me at time t, I can only reflect upon later when i have already learned from the new experience.

This is the distinction I want to make, the temporal one, between the present, experiential, learning process, and the accumulating, learned, reflective thought process, Not that they do not influence each other of course, not that both are not happening all the time.
This feeds into Hume's distinction, and the whole thing becomes an important tool for understanding trauma.

At which point I must turn to my other friends, @Baden, @csalisbury, @fdrake to ask if they can offer a handy crib sheet for Lacan novices, because ahem, he is new to me, so I cannot reflect on anything other than an imagined freudian philosophy, or my own understandings of trauma from elsewhere.

Thought alone can't, but it was never thought alone to begin with! Reflection isn't some isolated medium, as it can appear from the image of the armchair in our minds, it's part of every effective psychological/psychoanalytic/cultural intervention. I wonder how we would integrate our feelings with this new society, or void of one, if not relying upon our reasoning to do justice to the new concern for humanity (or for humanity + its context) you wish to cultivate. — fdrake

Thought was never alone, but tends to think it is. I want to dethrone thought, not annihilate it. Rather as technique in art is the servant of a creativity that is beyond thought. Mindfulness is not mindlessness.

Thread theme tune. Let us speak of freedom...

I agree with that, but I think you're being a hypocrite a bit in the thread. I suppose a more polite way to put it is that you're suffering from a methodological oversight. You're trying to frame reason as a ritual among others, which it is, but it's also a ritual of domain non-specific criticism. This capability to transform our rituals is already built into our rituals, when viewing custom from such a zoomed out perspective that it also contains practices of reason. — fdrake

Guilty as charged, your honour.

In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats, mutinied from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. — His Bobness

Where do I stand to deny myself a place to stand?

To build something new we'll need to think critically. — fdrake

But this I dispute. This is the path we have been pursuing, and it can only lead to more of the same. Thought cannot produce the new, because it is reflective. I'll try a personal anecdote.

I have been a smoker since I was 11. That's about 55 years of daily, hourly almost, ritual, just like a Muslim call to prayer. It's one of the most consistent things in my life. I've tried to give up a couple of times and gone back like an alcoholic falling off the wagon.

If you think about the idea of 'giving up' it is a sacrifice. And that's how it always was - denying myself with gritted teeth, the thing that made me comfortably myself. And this was the course dictated by thought, with homilies 'it's bad for you to smoke', 'you ought to stop', etc. So when I stopped like that, I suffered from symptoms, nervous agitation, irritability. I was the same person, a smoker, not smoking and having symptoms, and wanting to smoke.

But then something happened, such that something new was built. The might or must have been some provocation, but to me it is a mystery, that I will call a realisation of ... Well it occurred to me that I did not need to smoke or want to smoke; that I never had, but had been imagining I wanted to all this time.

So I stopped. And I was anxious and agitated and irritable, not because I was not smoking, but because I had always been anxious and agitated and irritable. And there was no sacrifice, and nothing to give up, it was as straightforward as turning left at the crossroads. I don't smoke any more.

But to be clear, I am describing in words something not thought but felt.

Even if the real is that in which the social and symbolic is suspended, it doesn't follow that the only access to it is trangressive violence to the social and symbolic. — csalisbury

Well that is not at all the implication I want you to draw. The social and symbolic is already real and cannot be suspended. There is no person absent the social and symbolic to transgress or not transgress and whether or not you can sip lemonade during chess is entirely a matter of the conduct of the chess ritual itself - which may be more or less formal.

There is a lack of respect for emotion, that culminates precisely in the denial of its reality, that has devastating consequences both for the individual and for society. Matter and energy are fine notions and very useful at times, but reality is made of giving a fuck.

History never ends and Nobody is at the wheel. — Baden

Nobody? Who is Nobody? You might as well use the old fashioned term "God" -- The Abyss that Looks Back - old Gives a Fuck Himself. There are traditions that Nobody can be realised as Jesus or Buddha, but otherwise, it is Little-old Ritual Me running the show and making history.


Ritual is the science, and icon the technology, of emotion. It's called an iPhone for a reason.

Only attempted to answer your question. — Moliere

Yeah, that's probably where you went wrong. :wink: One says things like 'I am a graduate', 'I am a philosopher', 'I am married', as if one is the ritual.

Identity 'undergraduate' undergoes ritual 'graduation' and becomes identity 'graduate'.
Identity 'misfit' undergoes ritual 'diagnosis' and becomes identity 'schizophrenic'.
Identity 'learner' undergoes ritual 'driving test' and becomes identity 'driver' (or not if 'fails')
Identity 'sinner' undergoes ritual 'communion' and becomes identity 'saved'.

Not every ritual changes identity some are voluntary, some are imposed - some are transforming, some merely confirming... but I think the general shape is this. The same thing happens to objects too: a church is consecrated, a contract signed, an old master authenticated, and so on.

So the question is exposed - people and things are transformed by ritual - how is ritual transformed? But we cannot even account for how ritual transforms...

That is, we cannot give a rational, scientific account of our non-rational unscientific nature.

I don't know what else to do, but to try and conduct folks to this same spot, this dead end of thought. One arrives, but somehow one does not stop, but diverts or jumps away to an unscientific narrative of our scientific nature, an irrational claim of rationality. Perhaps one time one person might just see that this contradiction cannot be maintained as one's identity - the contradiction kills it.

I'm just going to put this here as well.

https://neurosciencenews.com/meaningless-psychiatric-diagnosis-14434/?fbclid=IwAR2rie8n4NjQxVZax21o6XMQ_e2pKGPK6mq8zuB-_Nlp7OUOrzI0vm7wrmY

I had to laugh. This is neuro-babble declaring psycho-medico-babble to be - to use my words and relate it to the topic - prejudicial ritual.

I'd say that new rituals arise just by doing them -- at least that's what I was trying to get at. It's as simple as finding meaning in the world and doing something to bring oneself closer to it. — Moliere

Given that ritual is something that is done, it kind of follows that a new ritual arises by just doing something. Have you really said anything? Look at that last link. I'm trying to get folks to notice that reasons and causes are inadequate to our lives; that the impossible and unreasonable are commonplace. In this sense 'just doing' for no reason is perhaps as good as it gets ...

The gods just showed me this, so I'm showing you:

If changing your mind about who you really are means getting your internal narrator to tell a story that matches the facts better, presumably we need to find the evidence that will let us access that new story. The problem here is that the only tool we have for doing this investigation is the very thing that stands to be imperilled by the results of that investigation: the so-called “narrator” at the centre of our lives.
Who does the displacing? Is our “true” self somehow able to narrate itself into existing? On top of this existential magic, we’d need a way to work out which of the available evidence really matters, and which way it plays. We need to distinguish between the actions and thoughts and habits that reveal something deeply true about ourselves, and those that we can dismiss as the old internal narrative. Sometimes the old story is just the exact opposite of the new story. But as a general principle there’s no guarantee that things will work like this. Evidence against something is not evidence for something else, and falsifying one story doesn’t always make another truthful.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/jul/06/are-you-really-the-real-you-and-how-can-we-best-become-our-true-selves?fbclid=IwAR12geasNm_oFujgducni3Y95hwZ1GwWgNZMW020RgllpYNlDo9-ZxMSyHw

Note how 'true' and 'false' become as unreliable as 'narrator' and 'narrative' ... If I were you, I wouldn't start from here.

We have sensorimotor constraints that embed us in the world in ways we cannot change with ritual or custom, only mitigate their effects through it. — fdrake

P K Dick, Castenada and Leary would disagree, but I won't for the moment, beyond noting that for them, it is ritual that breaks those constraints and ritual that maintains them.

There must be ways of thinking and acting which attend to the nature of what they are concerned with. — fdrake

Doesn't ritual do that? Red wine for the blood of Christ, obviously.

A change of subjectivity like that is something like a choice of clothing, — fdrake

That seems like an unnecessary controversy at this point. If I asked who chooses their subjectivity, a rabbit hole of infinite depth seems to open up, as if the clothing might equally be choosing a body, within the same constraints of 'fitting', of course.

So there is a division, or we imagine for the purposes of discussion a division, between the weirdness of this thread and the normality of other threads, or between the subject and their clothes, or whatever and out of that or into that we find we have to pour a limit and a relatedness such that I am embedded in the world and the world is embedded in me and this is the necessary condition of the separation.

At which point I could in all truth recite "All is one... ommmm." but choose not to. So instead I choose one side or the other and talk about the world in me OR me in the world, and keep the two separate for the sake of argument.

So this is me in the world talking and noticing:

Identity is invariably ritualised and symbolic, and I hope no-one is going to attempt to claim a position of externality - as if they had a certificate of rationality or something. Much of life is conducted through the forms of ritual and icon - hands up if you wear a badge.

And noticing too, that there is an idea in some circles that we are making progress towards something that is called 'understanding reality' which is taken by me to equate to something like rationality and sanity. But I notice that this is not in fact happening. Rationality and sanity are in retreat. The enlightenment project has so far failed that the scientific endeavours have reached the point of foreseeing the collapse of the species and the end of civilisation.

So the whole enlightenment project, the whole rational scientific endeavour is demonstrably, by its own criteria, in just that position of over-reaching the constraints that you point out as embedding us in the world. It cannot be made to work any more. All that has become dogma and ritual of the most pernicious sort that imprisons us in helplessness.

I don't think that pouring a bowl of raisin bran every morning would quite count all by itself -- it would have to have some kind of meaning attached to it as well. Like a morning cup of coffee to take in the simple pleasures of life, or a prayer at night to feel grateful. — Moliere

Yes, the question makes one look at what a ritual is. Consider OCD, not stepping on the cracks... One view, commonplace, is that it is a failed manipulation of reality. Doing things with words of which the marriage ceremony is the exemplar, is taken, on this view, to work by a sort of collective irrationality. The classic social construct.

This is a view that 'accounts for' subjectivity by objectifying it as 'social fact'. This is a ritual of self immolation. " I am rational." Idiocy!

Why do we need new rituals? — frank

Because that is a ritualised obstructive response. Suppose you came back with something more interesting than 'why'. Suppose you cooperated with the project of supposing instead? Why? because it is more interesting than the triumph of rationality fully realised in the extinction of the species.

many people need an escape from the cold hard truths of reality. — Harry Hindu

Thus spake the hard-man of philosophy, prepared to face any truth except his own inadequacy. No, exactly not so. Many people need to escape to the cold hard fabrications of their rigid, ritualised identity. "And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing."

I don't understand what you are talking about - but I wish I did. It sounds interesting — Evil

You have it exactly! Wishes and interest have priority over understanding. How hurt I would be if you were to say, "I understand what you are talking about, but I don't wish to. It is uninteresting."

So I want to start with what is interesting and what hurts and make that the object of enquiry, not knowledge, information, understanding...

we swim through a sea of norms in our expectations (futurity/anticipatory response), reflection used well marks out parts of the map that emerges from the practices reflected upon. But it cannot record every detail. — fdrake

"Reflection used well"? Is this not the sea of norms swimming through itself?

We typically make little islands of marmite in the sea of marmite that we can go to for reference, sufficiently stable transmissible habits, like our uses of words, or the characters in our myths. They are still malleable, but try to shrink back to the shape tradition affords them. — fdrake

I think it is we who shrink back; we are the islands - or think we are, and the ritual confers stabliity of identity 'I love marmite', or 'I hate marmite'. I am married, or I am single. A convict is created by the rituals of a justice system, but if I become convicted or if I become married, it is as though a marmite lover became a marmite hater.

I am flailing incoherently in an attempt to switch views from one that has dominated the civilised world, and there is a chaos of old meaning clashing with new meaning, of ritual being undone or repurposed.
_______________________________________________-

Try and bite this bullet; folks: suppose we need new rituals; it is surely conceivable at least? How, for fucks sake, can a ritual be new?

I would have tended to think of language and ritual as being co-evolutionary. — Baden

What I should better have said is that they are the same thing - as in there is a ritual of desensitising and disembodiment prevalent and resisted that is academic rigour (mortis). Recognisably Nietzsche's void looking back.

Whenever you have a goal, you can consult Harry's encyclopaedia, and the goal is nothing less than to replace the world with the encyclopaedia, and live entirely in rational thought. This 'fact' explains why the world itself is going to hell in a handcart.

Poetry re-embodies language, and puts us back into the world. Plato hated it and his footnotes still do. But the good is without form and rather constitutes the substance of being; physicality as in accumulations of stones or whatever, is the mere abstraction of the encyclopaedia.

One does not build meaning inside one's head and then transmit it. Building meaning is part of the complex interaction one has with the world. — Banno

This not radical enough. Meaning is the world one is embedded in; everything is marmite.

The facts are relevant to some goal or purpose in mind. — Harry Hindu

Marmite.

Hmm, I was hoping for some help to reach clarity...

So my best understanding is that to the extent that information is ordered, it is compressible, and to the extent that it is un-compressible it is maximally disordered. The difference between one string of random information and another is random, and thus 'meaningless' - it is a difference that makes no difference.

Which means that the difference between maximally compressed meaningful information and meaningless 'noise' is discerned through some form of 'interpretation'. Call this interpretation 'ritual'.

Ritual is what one has to do to find out if there is even something there to be understood. It is the medium of fuck-giving.

Don't expect proof or evidence. The demand for such is simply the denial of this particular ritual in favour of some ritual of scepticism which is of course an unjustifiable nativity itself. Play or don't play therefore, bring forth, not the weirdness of the Greeks or the lunacy of the religious, but the mundanity of everyday life - the buttering of always and only one side of the toast.

Motion carried ... out?

Cue Marx; "the point is..."

Hume was right that reason serves the passions, but to believe it wholly distinct might be an error. — fdrake

Hume is the man. But left and right are distinct enough, but not independent. Does one say that the architect is the slave of the builder? It is the other way round according to our social conventions - the builder does what the architect says - yet the architect without builders is a mere fantasist the master is dependent on his slaves for everything, but especially for his mastery.

I was expecting Nietzsche to turn up about now. His view on the master/slave relationship seems relevant, and he is the official philosopher of passion. And he takes us again to the Greek gods - this time Apollo and Dionysus. And perhaps the previous paragraph will indicate where I think he went wrong in his diagnosis of Christianity.

This is so, because that's all words can do. The depths are at best, show, and more often, beyond expression. — Banno

Well indeed. But although pencils can only make marks on paper, they are not confined to depicting pencils. Words can inform deeds, and deeds are motivated by passions. I think we could talk less about words and more about deeds. And perhaps, with great caution, we might sometimes enact our words. It does seem to me that such notions are not even mentioned very much in philosophy of late.

Is there any other way? — Evil

Other fictions are available.

But I'm pointing towards a loss of meaning that results from the philosophical project of rationality. The objectivity addict produces a world of meaningless facts - because facts are only meaningful if someone gives a damn; that's what it means to be meaningful.

Whereas meaningful fictions operate 'through the agency of mind' as social constructs. 'Faith' is called in economics 'confidence' and in other social settings 'social cohesion' or 'solidarity' or 'love'.

These are givings of damns that populate and imbue material with meaning. So to say that meaning is essentially emotional has implications for language, as per ...

It's doing things with words. — Banno

One can dance or fight or inform or explore or confuse - with words. But always it is interpersonal, relational. But more broadly, the ever-failing attempt to derive ethics from the material fails because it works the other way about: definition - materiality is what one cannot escape caring about. And what one gives not a fig for is immaterial.

Yet most societies in our world are organized around an abstraction: money. — frank

Indeed. Just where we tend to think we are most certain, most pragmatic, most rational. there is not even an abstraction, but a complete fiction by which we rule our lives and deaths. One tends to think of the hedge-fund manager as somehow different from the shaman, but they are functionally identical, and just as in 'primitive society' if the money man curses you, you will die.

Winners and losers here are not necessarily against other people, but against the fulfilling their own capacities. — schopenhauer1

So I am a loser if I am not as big as a whale, or cannot fly faster than a speeding bullet? Where is the line between capacities that I don't have the opportunity to fulfil, and capacities I just don't have? There seems to be a difference between complaining that I have been born without wings, and complaining that I have been born without arms, but the difference seems to depend on comparing myself with other humans and not other birds. Expound a little, and put me right.

A pint glass has a capacity to be used for various amounts of time, but some will be dropped right away and break. — schopenhauer1

Sure, and a broken glass has no capacity. Glad we agree.

No, that is not what I said. Rather, what is a response in a world where there are losers and winners when it comes to actualizing capacities? — schopenhauer1

What is what? I'm really struggling to make any sense of this at all. There are winners and losers when there is competition and comparison, and otherwise not. Is that much agreed, or do you can something else?

Also, a capacity that is invariably actualised is not a capacity. Whales do not have the capacity to be big, they just are big. A pint glass has a capacity of one pint whether it is full or empty.

Not sure what you are trying to argue here. I am arguing that if this specific morality of opportunities of capacities is never actually achieved by a certain percentage, then what does that say of that moral system? — schopenhauer1

Right, you weren't addressing my point at all which was about capacities being grounded in physics, the way potential energy is. Instead you seem to be suggesting that if anyone fails to realise some potential it isn't valuable. The world is not kind or fair, therefore kindness and fairness have no value. *shrugs*. The whack with which you whack is such a moralistic whack.

Hell, let's take something as simple as sleep. — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure how one might compete over sleep. Trying to Imagine 'America's got Shuteye' or 'The Great British Sleepover'. I suppose we could cooperate a little - I could read you a bedtime story and kiss you goodnight and tuck you in. But in the end, sleep is a solitary affair to the extent that neither competition nor cooperation can be a feature beyond not waking someone up.

Architects, though, never get anything much done without cooperating with builders, town-planners and financiers.

I think I'm missing your point. Or you mine.

It is nice and dandy to list a bunch of values, but if in actuality they cannot be actualized, then what does it matter? — schopenhauer1

Matter? why would it matter? What's the value of a value? You keep asking, and asking again of every answer. It's a silly play of words. Let's bite the bullet - nothing matters at all. Nothing has any value at all in actual actualisation of actuality. Not suffering not joy. Your problem is you give value to the negative. so here is a valueless argument that will not convince you that your arguments are valueless and unconvincing. Enjoy.

I gave ten plastic cups to each of a group of five year olds, and asked what they could build. After half an hour of trying this and that, they cooperated to build pyramids taller than themselves. — Banno

So there is a fact 'the state of nature'- cooperation can do more (is better?) than competition. Which is why cats make poor architects.

Take a 1906 cartoon from Punch, the satirical British weekly magazine. A young man and young woman are sitting under a tree, with ticker-tape boxes in their laps. The caption reads: “These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady receives an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results.” The development of the “wireless telegraph” is portrayed as an overwhelmingly isolating technology.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/technophobia-victorian-style-a7097761.html

Let's not get too paranoid about them noo-fangled de-vices. I'm actually old enough to remember how that teevee was ruining the youth, and that was when there were only two channels and they shut down at 10.30 at night.

Still, internet has some problems and harms some people. Mainly in the same ways people have always been harmed. The bubble of like-minded internet associates not different in kind from the bubble of rural life in the 18th century, for example. The commodification is no worse than that of slavery, serfdom or industrial exploitation etc.

I am purely decorative.

Nice paper.

The idea is that a minimally just society is one that secures to all citizens a threshold level of a list of key entitlements, on the grounds that such entitlements are requisite of a life worthy of human dignity. (There is also an account of the entitlements of other animal species, and here reference is made to the dignity appropriate to the species in question.) The notion of dignity is an intuitive notion that is by no means utterly clear. If it is used in isolation, as if it is utterly self-evident, it can be used capriciously and inconsistently.

It's nice that a multivalent approach like this looks like the complex system we actually have as a legal system, where one thing has to be weighed against another, and then their lengths and widths and colours compared too and taken into account. It's not going to satisfy anyone looking for easy absolute black and white systems though. One can see how the shortage of human carers for the aged could become a factor to consider in the abortion calculus, or even, a la Handmaid's Tale, how widespread infertility could make reproduction a vital social good.

There's a similar moral conflict over vaccination, with moves to make it compulsory, and one can see the conflict between the health protection afforded by herd immunity having to be weighed against the loss of autonomy to the individual.

A life with human dignity requires protection of all the Central Capabilities up to a minimum threshold level: but all are conceived as opportunities for choice, and thus none has been secured unless the person has the opportunity to exercise choice in matters of actual functioning.

So wrt the foetus, one of the first choices it can exercise beyond waving a limb or sucking a thumb, is to initiate the birth process. Should we ban induced labour and Cesareans?

For Rawls setting up a just society involved setting the rules up before one knows what role one will play in that society. — Banno

If one seriously considered playing the role of the ball, or the grass, the rules of football would be very different.

The capabilities approach seeks to leave this behind and instead to promote the potential of each individual. — Banno

Does it not fall into the same/equivalent problem of deciding criteria of individuality? On the face of it, it would lead to a hard line against abortion...

Seems to me that a functional moral map depends on two supplementary things (apart from the territory), a moral compass, and a legend.

Capacities for murder and cruelty, my compass tells me are not to be promoted, and so the map can be oriented. Legends of dignity and rights, or of good Samaritans, give scale and meaning to the map.

The Stoics thought of it as madness — Wallows

When someone has wronged you, then, I suggest that the appropriate response is to be angry — Wallows

But, don't emotions contain their own set of logic? — Wallows

Let me try this out and see if it floats anyone's boat. Let's say that emotions are the substance of subjectivity. So if someone steals your rattle or whatever insult is substantial to your subjectivity, then you are going to be angry. Angry as a matter of fact, before any question of sanity or madness of virtue or vice.

I'm having a lot of feels recently. — Wallows

Shit happens, and one gives a damn; this is called 'being alive'.

Elsewhere, I have claimed that anger is secondary; that is it is a response to a previous feeling. Someone steals my rattle and my first feeling is of loss - I am bereft, I am indeed diminished because I identify with my rattle. You have deprived me of the fullness of my being and hurt me by amputating my rattle and my anger is an attempt to escape that hurt, and motivates me to try and get the rattle back from you. Thus you will have the feeling of deprivation that I find hurtful, and i will have the fullness of my enrattled being again.

So them stoics, they were just like this in their youth, but they noticed that as long as everyone is angry about their rattle, and fighting each other, everyone is spreading misery and things go from bad to worse. And a few other folks noticed too, and so they all started to make judgements about their own feelings, and wonder whether their feelings were good feelings or bad feelings, and then they wondered who to blame for the bad feelings, and how to have good feelings all the time.

Which leads to - 'I Must not feel how I feel.'

And that is madness, because it is a denial of internal reality.

Did you see any of Game of Thrones? — frank

That, nor The Sound of Music.

I originally thought it was about controlling immigration — Baden

a righteously principled stance, the consequences be damned, because the principles of democracy trump everything else. — Benkei

I reject both of these as being far too pragmatic, too realistic, too thoughtful.

English Nationalism? — frank

That has the ring of true fakery to it. Like the terrible plight of the white race, the poor English are under siege from all quarters, but this hard done by, once proud region that includes the capital of the Union the way the Conservative party is actually called 'The Conservative and Unionist Party', resents those other regions with their separate identities, and has to invent its own identity in the Sainted Nigel, slaying the EU dragon, and King Boris and his knights of the round table returned in Albion's hour of need.

I think it has to be down to an awakened archetype of war and destruction, of sacrifice to the vengeful gods in atonement for the sin of giving up the Empire without a fight.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/06/18/most-conservative-members-would-see-party-destroye

So dedicated to accomplishing Brexit are Tory members that a majority (54%) would be willing to countenance the destruction of their own party if necessary. Only a third (36%) put the party’s preservation above steering Britain out of the EU.

Party members are also willing to sacrifice another fundamental tenant of Conservative belief in order to bring about Brexit: unionism.* Asked whether they would rather avert Brexit if it would lead to Scotland or Northern Ireland breaking away from the UK, respectively 63% and 59% of party members would be willing to pay for Brexit with the breakup of the United Kingdom.

It really is rather difficult for me at least, to understand what is happening. It is as if we are fighting on the beaches, and on the landing grounds, and in the fields... At any cost, it seems. What has the EU done to warrant preferring the breakup of the country and your own political party?

Your insightful explanations are solicited.

'Can't take a joke' is the eternal cry of the bully.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1139855/Jo-brand-bbc-radio-4-brexit-news-milkshake-battery-acid-Nigel-Farage

And here is a 'joke' that I find unfunny and tending to incite one of the worst forms of personal violence. As it goes it is a joke by someone I quite like against someone I despise, but nevertheless I find it unacceptable.