Rwy'n rhannu rhai geiriau gyda chi, ond oni bai eich bod eisoes yn gyfarwydd â'r Gymraeg, ni fyddwch yn deall yr hyn sy'n cael ei ddweud.

As I'm sure you all agree. But perhaps you do not know that you agree?

The game has played out so that there is not time with a short extension to hold a referendum, and barely time to hold an election. I suspect there are no circumstances under which a long delay requiring UK European elections would be granted. So I think the choice has now come down to no deal brexit or revocation of article 50 withdrawal by parliament. And Politicians will be too frit for the latter.

Sorry for the bad news.

People are like cheeses; the good ones get better with age, but the bad ones get worse.

In times of stability, the wisdom of the old is a valuable resource, but in times of rapid change, the wisdom of the old is more so out of date and thus foolishness.

In times of chaos, the only wisdom is neither old nor young and is not founded on knowledge at all, but on applied ignorance.

I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. — Greta Thunberg

I don’t care if what I’m doing – what we’re doing – is hopeful. We need to do it anyway. Even if there’s no hope left and everything is hopeless, we must do what we can.

From here.

@jorndoe Being informed isn't helping anything until it informs some action. I'm not the definitive expert, but the standard list of easy stuff that us ordinary folks can do is along the lines of, insulate your home, put up solar panels if suitable or other passive heating, stop flying, eat less meat, and eat more local produce, especially fresh produce that is likely to be flown, use public transport, live near your work, recycle, reuse, and reject manufactured and false needs (eg fashion), grow something, set up some insect houses. Let's get to it!

Alarmist panic isn't helping anything/one. — jorndoe

Haven't noticed much of that, fortunately, aside from the wall building, migrant hating, xenophobia. But I suspect it will manifest right along with the food shortages. You can't panic while starving though - it will be those that still have food that will panic.

contrast: money, and its use. — W

What use is money? you can't eat it, you can't milk it, you can't wear it or warm yourself with it.

If it had any use at all, it would be less useful.

Could this thought be expressed in a perfect language so as not to be paradoxical?

Money is a bit like the standard metre - one cannot say that it is either useful or useless, it is the measure of usefulness. If it had any other use than as a measure, it would not be the medium of exchange, but another object of exchange.

But it's marginal isn't it? So slightly less than half of US voters supported a complete tosspot. Hurrah for the good sense of US voters? I'd really like if complete tosspots lost by a country mile.

Not perfect, not indubitable, but quite a nice talk about Mr W, that might be of interest.

The real threat is not climate change, but our reaction to climate change. The real threat, as usual, is us. — Jake

I agree and disagree. Immediately, for sure, as the cliche has it nowhere is more than about three meals away from chaos and insurrection. It is not hard to imagine a Syrian type disintegration in Europe, the US, etc. And then add nuclear weapons and unknown biological and chemical weapons to that, and the immediate may be all that there will be.

But supposing there are human survivors, and that life itself survives, that is when engagement with climate change really begins.

Dudes, the universe does not do what you tell it to. If the universe wants to produce a bowl of petunias from nothing or less than nothing, your arguments are not going to persuade it otherwise. Allow the universe to tell you what what to say, instead of trying to tell it what it must and mustn't do.

Divide and rule is definitely a thing, and that's what astrology is all about. Therefore do not allow folks that have a different special day to you to become your enemy. Buy them a present on their day, and hope for a present on your day.

If your sarcasm’s jab doesn’t contain hypocrisy, then you uphold that every social movement that has ever been was conducted by a bunch of cretins. Unless, that is, no risks in being humiliated by the powers that be were incurred in speaking truth to power—as though this were a realistic model of how the world is. — javra

Hmm. I was not being sarcastic, I don't think i was being hypocritical, and I don't for certain think that social movements are conducted by cretins. I'm pointing out that power generally does not like having truth spoken to it, and the archetype of the truth speaker was Jesus, a non-cretin who got crucified. I'm just reminding the world that the path of righteousness tends to be punished not rewarded. Social activists do not have a great time, they do not become wealthy, they tend to be arrested and imprisoned, they tend to be smeared and reviled, and many do not even become old. I don't wish it to be so, but so it is.

That's new to me. Thanks, a good song. Happy the son to whom it doesn't mean that much!

- whence this joy? And why the lack of it? — Wayfarer

Whence, I cannot say. It seems enfolded into the fabric of creation. The lack, I think, comes from childhood trauma, from a lack of love, from a child that has to survive without care, and then cannot care in turn. It comes from the sins of the fathers and mothers, falling on the children having to grow up and unable to grow up. It comes from the inability to cry by way of a missing shoulder.

Today, the slates were dry, the gulls gone fishing, and it was a single black crow, knocked off his arial perch by a scudding cloud, flapping like a broken umbrella in a feeble parody of grace. I laughed for joy and pity - but only for a moment.

all the use I see in prayers and theology here is to try and get at the sense of reverence we might need to cultivate towards disaster, and the problems associated with it. I may as well have used the Face of Glory Hindu myth. — fdrake

There is indeed a wonderful dark humour in the story of the Face of Glory, like a good fairytale.and yet something of me is antagonistic to making that connection. One aspect is that the universalising becomes eternal and depersonalised So the head that cannot consume itself remains, somehow forever surviving like Sisyphus. It seems extravagant - Sisyphus would roll his boulder a few times or many, and then weaken and it would roll over him like a gravestone. The severed head does not survive.

And then there is what I see as the religious danger - to overdramatise again - of devil worship. To rejoice in death and destruction is to make an inversion in the order of things. I will hold to this; that it is life that has virtue and vice, and death has nothing, it is only the edge of life, and has no meaning or power of its own. Accept, but never praise or worship.

You have it exactly, there, for me. A vastness of meaning sensed in an old man dozing in the sun. It is always the beauty of that smallness the intensity of the mundane that I seek - because there's a lot of it - let's not hurry to be dead, let's not reject sunshine on aching bones in favour of eternity.

It seems to me that the death of the nonbeliever is less relished now than it was. — fdrake

I'm glad to hear it. The current pope does not read God that way at least, and I certainly don't think He's concerned about His fanbase particularly, such that being a fan makes you non-wicked. In the light of world-wide Catholic sex scandals, that is surely untenable?

One wonders why St. Francis of Assisi would rather us not see the just hand of God in the slaughter and misery of the believer as well as the wicked. — fdrake

Can you expand on this at all? Is that really their distinction - the believer and the wicked?

Perhaps the only way to appreciate disaster is sorrow. The loving hand of God guides the rapist as well as the mother, the earthquake and the builder; for Him there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane, for nature makes no such distinction for itself. — fdrake

I have to stay in that sorrow; the loving guidance of God, is a place I cannot reach, or cannot own, or cannot acknowledge, or cannot afford to share so widely.

Is it the moderation that offends? Is the oppositional behaviour a function of moderation? Or is it just that someone who happens to be a moderator also argues with you. — tim wood

It was the latter. And I have had an apology and we are friends again. Well almost. Complaint addressed and withdrawn. Thanks everyone.

Thanks. Your offering is acceptable in the sight of the Lord. ;) I guess poetry is unavoidable anyway, and the cartwheel puts me in mind of Ecclesiates3 1-8 (turn turn turn)..

Which seems right on topic.

It's not a duty I would seek to impose on anyone. Still, having married 'til death do us part', or thereabouts, the pain of the parting is, to me at least, a measure of the value of the relationship. Not to want that pain is to want not to have cared, not to have loved.

Would you want to feel nothing at the death of a loved one? What I think I want to reconcile in a more general way, is a profound awareness of suffering, and a profound sense of the value of life. I personally, and of course intermittently, feel an obligation to savour the depth of each experience, in honour of (I'm sorry, it sounds extravagant) all those lives too hard or too short to have enough such moments.

No. You don't get my clarifications on the basis of your wilful and repetitive insults. You need to back off a long, long way.

I guess my question is what is the question we're to be answering in this thread? — Hanover

Yes. you have no idea what I am talking about, as I have already pointed out to you and yet you feel entitled to litter the thread with criticisms and cod psychoanalysis on the basis of your incomprehension, and repeating them when they have been explicitly denied.

I don't know how they could have. Their responses certainly didn't reference it, nor did they offer condolences, which would have been appropriate given what you've now said.
— Hanover

at this moment, this life, this dissatisfaction, this waiting, is joyful - I want to be here. Add this moment to the plus-side in your dismal calculation. — unenlightened

But no, you refuse. You add it to the minus side.

consider the condition of bereavement. One suffers, and to refuse the suffering is to deny the value of what has been lost. Mourning is thus a celebration. — unenlightened

What is so hard to understand? Bereavement is the loss of a loved one. I'm not interested in anyone's condolences, that is just the continuation of your ignorant insults. I speak personally to keep things close to the ground, and you use my openness as a weapon, but you miss the target, because I am not particularly self-concerned.

I had no way of knowing — Hanover

But everyone else did.

You can only tell me that my words don't accurately reflect what you're feeling, but not that I'm not listening because you don't know what I'm actually doing. It's sort of like if someone says things that sound depressing, but then they tell me they're not depressed, then I have to believe they're not depressed and not impose my interpretations on them. — Hanover

People who are listening do not talk about my feelings, but about their own.

I see the divine in the actual divine I guess as opposed to a kitty cat jumping on a child's lap, or whatever. — Hanover

That is mockery. Such disrespect is uncalled for and objectionable. I am talking about the death of my mother, my sister, my first wife, as my personal experience of bereavement, and you liken it some sentimental trash of your own imagining. You have no idea, absolutely none.

I love that frank. :heart:

A Problem might be that there is very little new to say about the problem, and a philosophy forum isn't necessarily the best place to look for expertise on how to deal with the ecological crisis. — Echarmion

Well ever since the 70's I have been exploring and advocating 'alternatives' in eduction, food production and distribution, and housing. There is no expertise, and there is no solution. It is easy enough to theorise what 'we' could do, but, 'we' are not going to do it, for reasons I already mentioned. There is something new (to me, anyway) to say, that has to come out of the shock of despair. But because I don't want to confuse this thread, or by any means discourage folks from campaigning, and changing their lifestyles as best they can, I have taken that response to a new thread.

Fine. You're jubilant. — Hanover

You're still not listening.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, and directed firmly at no one, if I ever resorted to musical flame wars, this one would be for you. Think of that special person in your life and hum along...

The last line of the song is "I guess it doesn't matter anyway."

And if you just look at the words, you might find something indicative of nihilistic lack of meaning. And how very far from the truth that would be. Listen to the passion of the music, and find the depth of significance in its not mattering.

You describe coping, not joy. — Hanover

You're not listening to me telling you you're not listening. Listen to me telling you I'm not depressed, not coping, but joyful, and stop telling me what what I say must mean I feel.

You sound depressed — Hanover

You are not listening.

Thread hymn:

I don't know if I am particularly sensitive, or particularly insensitive. Probably, I haven't conveyed anything very clearly. But consider the condition of bereavement. One suffers, and to refuse the suffering is to deny the value of what has been lost. Mourning is thus a celebration. My pain of loss honours the life that has ended.

I gladly drink the bitter cup, and in relation to other threads that are current, if it is my place to foresee and mourn the ending of civilisation, the ending of mankind, the ending of life on Earth even; to witness some, and imagine some, and experience some of the horror and pain of that multiple ending, then my duty and my joy is to embrace it all, and refuse the blindfold as our folly receives its inevitable payment.

I put it here in philosophy of religion, because it is faith beyond reason and beyond the frivolity of mere fact. 'Take, eat, this is my flesh.' Will you measure these truths with a human device? What value has that? Eat, or eat not; there is nothing to argue about.

And yet again, one cannot even wonder what to do about the various factual trends that have been observed and catalogued, because one has been diverted into a fruitless tit for tat argument about predictions. It's a lawyerly tactic of diverting attention away from the evidence that cannot be seriously questioned. And it is illegitimate and inappropriate. Objection, your honour.

Class justice. — Benkei

This is a major failing of the justice system. Perhaps we need a corollary to the principle that one be tried before a jury of one's peers, that one should not be sentenced by one's peer. It would be possible to co-opt an appropriate panel of shop-workers and taxi drivers to deal with errant bankers, politicians, and lawyers.

Wittgenstein's method for restricting doubt does not fulfil its purpose.
— Metaphysician Undercover

What method? — Luke

Now that is perhaps revealing. If we say that doubt and certainty are psychological, states of mind, and that Wittgenstein is describing, not prescribing, then perhaps it becomes clear to anyone that when Mrs un says "wait here while I go to the toilet", it is inappropriate for me to look for exactitude, and inappropriate for her to mean it. As a matter of fact, descriptively, I have no doubt she means something like 'well with eyesight and earshot'. It's not that I cannot doubt, but that I do not.

And if you want a reason, it is that doubt is expensive. If you doubt the reality of every experience, the meaning of every word, it paralyses, it prevents any understanding, any actual thinking and any reasoned action. Mrs un needs the toilet, and not a philosophical debate. There is no boundary between here and there, because we find it more useful for there not to be. Sometimes here is the whole UK, and sometimes here is this armchair. When we want a boundary, we make one just as precisely as we need it to be. we devise a method, and doubt may have a part in it - Is this tree Dutch or Belgian? And this blade of grass?

Well the good news is that Emergency triage protocols are being adjusted to grant your wish.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-deadly-choices-at-memorial-826

Might even be worth a separate thread to discuss the morality of collapse...

Very foolish in my opinion. Far better to sit in your armchair and conserve energy and not try and out live your species.