That may be. I don't know what the "TRUE" method of criticizing literature would be. For me, all sorts of factors go into evaluating literature: the background of the period from which a work came, the biography of the author, his or her intent, and of course the work itself. Then there are some features of literature, like the various forms of poetry that can either be observed or ignored to good and bad results.

I always prefer simpler, more direct language over obscurantist opaque language--something that a lot of contemporary, post-modern, deconstructionist, or whatever-the-hell-it-is, is very guilty of. (Not that they invented opaque language. There are English texts from the past--way before our modernism, that are quite difficult to follow. I'm not referencing Middle English; I'm talking about some Victorians. Other writers, like Boswell (18th century) are very easy to read and comprehend. So is the 17th Samual Pepys, probably because he was just writing for himself, informally.

You have to look at the history of the countries involved. Now I don't know anything about mosque and church building in Turkey and Romania, but I am familiar enough with American history to say something about that.

First, religion is quite alive in the United States. There are many denominations (which is an interesting historical matter in itself) and congregations. "Success" is important to people, as are the major signs of success, like a congregation possessing a nice building. Many congregations get along with make-do facilities (storefronts, adapted-use buildings, etc.) but for many the 'edifice complex' is very strong.

Multiplying population, multiplying denominations and congregations, and population (and doctrinal) mobility has created a need for ever more facilities.

The way capitalism operates makes most churches with nice buildings a combo theological and real estate operation. Once you have the building to serve the church's needs, the building-itself soon enough becomes the driving force in the congregation: roof repair and replacement, plumbing repairs, HVAC costs, utilities, landscaping costs, interior painting, flooring, etc. Never mind accidents when expensive things get broken.

Fry, in his book The Great Apostolic Blunder Machine (out of print since the 1980s) differentiates the "right kind of churches" and the "wrong kind of churches". The right kind have nice buildings. The wrong kind occupy storefronts and make-do facilities. They emphasize the religious function over the real estate function. For instance, providing weekly services to the city's gay population usually began as a shoestring operation back in the 1970s or 1980s. Those early groups--very much the WRONG kind of church in ever so many ways--have now moved on from storefronts, bars, borrowed facilities, and the like to regular church buildings (usually old churches purchased by the congregation).

This isn't unique to Christians. Moslems in Minneapolis, for instance, are doing the same thing. At first they occupied sometimes very ratty facilities; as they accumulated resources, the mosques started improving a bit. Later on they rented better buildings -- still make do, but better. The more successful ones remodeled buildings, added a dome and some middle-east architectural flourishes. They "fit" the local vernacular architecture picture. I don't know of a local mosque that has built a nice centerpiece structure. It takes time to accumulate the cash and credit to build big.

Whether all this is primarily owing to capitalism or people's desires for status, belonging, comfort, and so on, I can't generalize. Certainly some congregations are obsessed with demonstrating their financial clout. They may do a good job with the religious function too (as long as one doesn't dwell on camels getting through the eyes of needles) or not.

It would be nice if someone from the Institute of Institutional Archeology would launch a major dig into the (unfortunately still damp) dung- and garbage-filled middens of Academia to determine who, what, when, where, and how post-modernism infected English Departments, American Studies, GLBTQIXXDV Studies, etc.

One of the first counter voices I came across to PM was the magazine Lingua Franca, a great little trade magazine that among other things was involved in the Sokol Hoax. If you've never heard of it, or want to revisit a dead friend, here is the link to some of its issues. archive.

Sorry about your education being derailed by a typewriter. Very weird. Why would a Dvorak be better than a qwerty layout of keys?

I just cannot touch type. I produce gibberish. — orcestra

I take it that you have no problem producing cursive or printed writing? This isn't a neurological problem in the language section of the brain? You weren't sexually abused by a typewriter when you were a child?

You can hunt and peck? Lots of people get through life without touch typing.

One writer related how his college writing teacher told him that he should "stop writing with his fingers" (meaning touch-typing); he should write with a pencil. So he did. That was Robert Caro, who is writing the final volume of his multi-volume Lyndon Johnson biography. He also wrote a bio of Robert Moses, the Czar of New York City planning fame. All written out in long hand, and revised before he typed the publisher's copy.

Before the typewriter came along, everything was hand written. Shakespeare. Dickens. Trollope. Johnson's dictionary. Scribble, scribble, scribble.

On the other hand...

You know, when you read 19th century letters and non-fictional narratives, men seem to be much more expressive than they were or were thought to be in the 1950s. They express feelings, they weep openly (sometimes, anyway). Injured Civil War soldiers were stoical, for sure, but they also seemed to be more "in touch" with the affective side of life. (I'm generalizing, of course. Some of them were also unexpressive dolts who lacked all subtlety. Some were swine.)

Guys are CONSTANTLY encouraged to share their feelings. — ZhouBoTong

There's been a sea change over the last half century and more. When I was a young boy in the 50s, I noticed that women had much different (and often more interesting) conversations than men did. When family and friends got together, men and women separated at some point, the men talking about farming, machinery, and the like. The women talked about family, individuals, cooking, etc. Maybe women didn't constantly share their feelings, but they dealt much more with affective topics than the men did.

I suppose it was in the 1960s-1970s when men started to talk about more personal topics, without giving up machinery, farming, sports, and the like. The gay circles I travelled in were more like women in conversational topics, but straight men I knew had changed (but not 180º). Straight, younger, more socially conscious men were quite ready to share personal feelings, opinions and so on.

So, 1980 - 2019, 40 years of being harangued to open up and share, god damn it, they have.

It is a good thing. Now, no one, male or female, blathering away about their feelings should be taken at face value. People are sometimes perfectly honest and accurate about what they say they feel, and sometimes they are confused, and/or misrepresent themselves, deliberately or not. So, take all that emoting with several grains of salt.

Less risk aversion and more familiarity with guns, perhaps. Or maybe they are better at engineering. They just intuit how the noose should be arranged, how high the jump has to be, what gravitation forces will do, etc. Men tend to be more successful than women when killing themselves. I don't know... maybe the women just aren't trying, but this disparity in suicide success needs to be addressed. Women will just have to get better at it.

Maybe enough women who have gone into STEM will end up competently killing themselves to equalize the success rate. Are women who served in the Israeli military better at killing themselves than your average French woman?

:up:

Testosterone. It’s biological not merely social conditioning. — I like sushi

In short, I think men and women have roughly the same cognitive abilities from the onset, but these are subjected to, and redirected by social circumstances. — NKBJ

I think you are both right, more and/or less. Male and female brains are essentially the same--have the same structure, organization, function, and so on. Testosterone makes the fetus male, and probably gives the brain a male flavor. Males and females are different, but men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus.

Genes, in concert with developmental factors, account for a lot of our behavior. I give genes the edge over experience (socialization, nurture, etc.), maybe 60% over 40%. Animal behavior, including human behavior, has a lot of similarity from individual to individual. Genes and experience, however, allow for a lot of variability from one person to another.

I would like to blame post modernism for having the most opaque, reader-unfriendly style, and maybe it does, but as I reflect on some texts I had to read in teacher training, I have to admit that they weren't the first. Some pedagogy texts were extremely opaque and obscurantist in the 1960s, and these folks were on no intellectual cutting edge.

I am grateful that the English department at the provincial state college I went to in the '60s was not afflicted by postmodernism. I took some classics courses in the early 80s at the U of MN and they were uninfected too. But by the 80s PMS (post modern syndrome) was definitely in the air, and was becoming pervasive (at least in some departments; I don't think Mechanical Engineering or Agriculture departments were much affected). The Ag people had real shit to deal with, so didn't need to cook up synthetic forms of BS.

I don't know what you were expecting, but it doesn't seem like your thread is panning out very well. This isn't owing to any fault uniquely yours. Many will react very strongly to merely seeing topics raised like "the men's movement", "feminism" (1st, 2nd, 3rd, nth wave), racism, sexism, classism, etc. Reactive statements are made, reactive responses are registered, and before long there is a raging battle. The rage registered is generally in inverse proportion to how little is at stake.

"What do you mean, you bastard, 'how little is at stake' when FEMINISM is the topic!" someone shrieks .

It's like this: Feminism is important, of course. But it's progress will have little to do with this particular discussion. The men's movement is important too -- but it will neither stand nor fall as a result of anything said here.

Then someone complains that you were US-centric. Had you extended your generalizations to include Europe, South Korea, and Japan, no doubt somebody else would have objected that you were generalizing. And so on and so forth.

Why might it be the case that Feminism tends to be an affair of white women? Might it not be the case that movements develop along the lines of personal relationships? It stands to reason that the white feminists in New England and New York who hatched a major chunk of the movement knew each other through specific class, collegiate, and social networks that were mostly white. In the same way, black civil rights advocates who propelled their interests forward in the civil rights movement knew each other through other class, collegiate, and social networks that were mostly black.

I'm not dismissing racism; I'm only noting that the centuries old pervasive segregation of the races produced white and black movements. It would be unreasonable to expect that social movements are likely to overcome the deeply seated racism of the country.

How does the mind create a voice in your head only you can hear — Freya Rose

If people didn't have such thick skulls, we would be able to hear each other's mental voice very clearly.

I'm considering paying you if you'll post about another topic for awhile. — Terrapin Station

Bribing Schopenhauer1 to post about something else would surely count as one of the spiritual works of mercy -- "comfort the afflicted". In Schopenhauer1's case, it would amount to getting the stuck out of their rut. So, how much $ do you think it would take, and how long would "a while" be?

Maybe Schopenhauer1 himself could answer this question? How much for how long? Look, it wouldn't be forever. We don't have that much money. Hell, it might not even be for a week--we all being impoverished philosophers. Perhaps during the interregnum you could find new material. You do present the case for antinatalism so well, but perhaps there is another angle that hasn't been pursued yet.

We are bodies; bodies of cells (and big batches of bacteria that are, and are not, us) functioning together: matter, body, mind, cell. We are a package deal. It is not mind vs. body. It is body producing mind.

The video is way too long to watch, and watching Zizek's continual body scratching, face touching, and hand waving for that long is just too painful. But they are probably talking past each other.

He called it Pollyannaism — schopenhauer1

There's another condition named after Pollyanna's sister--the Cassandra Syndrome -- hand wringing, doom-saying.

God, I don't know which one is worse: Pollyanna who make lemon meringue pie when pelted with lemons or Cassandra who predicts the lemon meringue pie is loaded with botulism and we'll all die.

All good points. I agree that the critical decisions that need to be made will not be made by consumers. They will be made by governments. Producers will not, by and large, volunteer. (Some companies had to be ordered to make weapons during WWII; they wanted to keep making... whatever it was they manufactured.) I can recycle plastic water bottles. That's slightly good. Far better would be to stop packaging H2O at all, because in countries such as the United States, there is almost never any reason to drink bottled water.

Electric cars? SUVs? Mini? They are all bad, both in terms of the energy consumed to manufacture them, but in the energy to run them. Stop making cars at all. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler Fiat, etc. could just as easily make large vans, buses, trolleys (that problematically run over people unless somebody is thrown off the bridge) and light rail cars. Energy utilities not moving fast enough to convert to renewables? Nationalization them.

Concerned consumers should follow the Extinction campaign and the Gilets Juanes: Riot and Resist. Bring business to a standstill--for a long time, until they get the message.

Why don't we do this? Are you ready with a program which will convince people to do this, in the face of probably vicious resistance by police, corporations, the military...? Honestly, I think this is what we should be doing -- I personally don't know how to get people out to do these kinds of things.

Us old people could follow Maggie Kuhn's (founder of the Gray Panthers) advice and demand immediate changes to reduce CO2 production, or we will show up en masse in public, and undress. The last thing people want to see is 100,000 naked old people -- acres of sagging flesh, wrinkles, knobby joints, the whole bit. Well, it's still a bit cold in Minnesota, but it will soon be warm enough here and everywhere.

If you're among the 1%, I'd say go for it, act out your power — Christoffer

And the 1% will definitely do that, as is their habit.

the 99% won't stop you and they deserve nothing more until they show a will to act against what is wrong. They deserve to be just where they are, hypnotized by daytime TV — Christoffer

Daytime TV? Really?

The control to which the 99% are subjected is far, far more pervasive than daytime TV.

As Sartre said, we are doomed to be free and people use that freedom to have a meaningless life, controlled by the 1%. — Christoffer

In a sense, people are doomed to be free, but let's not get carried away with that idea. The revolution required to throw off the power of the 1% in this, the heartland of capitalism, is perhaps beyond possibility.

Besides, people doomed to be free may choose the capitalism of the 1% over socialism. Choosing capitalism over socialism doesn't equal "meaningless life". Some people choose to exercise their freedom in ways that you and I may disapprove of, but that doesn't make their choice "meaningless".

Dissenters can get into a bind here: We say people are free to choose how to live their lives, but then we declare that 99% live meaningless lives if they do not choose to live outside the mass culture. I agree that there is a good deal that is degraded in the mass culture (and in the culture of the 1% too). Then there is the question of whether people even have a choice about living outside the mass culture.

Thinking that people can choose to live outside the mass culture is like thinking fish can choose to live on dry land. It's not a real choice.

Propaganda issued by the 1% - the super-rich - who own everything and control everything? :chin: — Pattern-chaser

And the other 99% went along with it? — Brett

Why do people allow themselves (and all around them) to be controlled by this empowered and entitled minority? :chin: I have no idea. — Pattern-chaser

Propaganda from the power elites (politics, finance, education, commerce, religion, etc.) is ubiquitous and generously distributed. The power elites naturally have their own interests in mind when they speak.

Who represents and speaks for the interests of the 99%--the people, the masses, the rank and file, the sheep?

Identifying the "vox populi" is a bit tricky because many of the sheep think the barking of the dogs is actually their own voice. A good share of the flock think the sheep dogs have their best interests in mind. The flock does not realize that the dogs are working for the rancher, and not for them. In the end, the dogs will round them up for the annual fleecing -- or worse. (all this figuratively speaking...)

To the extent that the people identify with the elite, dissenting opinions among the people tend to be viewed with suspicion. An excellent example of this is the very long discussion of how to finance and organize health care--a debate that has been going on in the United States, off and on, since the 1930s. Anyone speaking up for any sort of "socialized medicine" (which means centralized funding of medicine) is subjected to denunciation by the medical and financial elite who are deeply vested in private-for-profit-funding-of-medical-care.

Medicine and medical insurance are very profitable and the owners of the flock of gold-egg laying geese obviously do not want the geese disturbed.

If we look forward ten thousand years, it's entirely possible neuroscientists then will have the means to remodel consciousness on an anatomical level. — YuZhonglu

That might be the case. I can't imagine (literally) how consciousness might be changed.

When that happens, to what extent will any of the "eternal" philosophies of today survive? — YuZhonglu

Assuming that there is anyone around in 10,000 years...

So, given 10,000 years of more or less civilized existence, one would hope that by 12000 AD we will have laid the perennial philosophical questions to rest. Perhaps by then we will have finally accepted that questions that can not be answered (what happens to the soul after the body dies?) need not be asked.

Perhaps we can learn how to widen the gate between our consciousness and greater, not-conscious mind, and consciously think about more than one thing at a time. Again, I literally can't imagine that. Maybe we will learn to access more of the mind that isn't conscious, making it conscious. Did you read "Dune"? The Bene Gesserit (the sisterhood in the novel) had learned how to gain access to the mind/body at a very deep level. They used disciplined exercises and drugs, and all that is, of course fiction. It is suggestive, though, of untapped potential. Advanced meditation adepts can gain a significant control over their bodily processes through deep meditation.

10,000 years is the sort of time scale that Dune covered. Unless we find the planet Arrakis--complete with the sand worms--there isn't much chance of trying to accomplish what the reverend mothers of the Bene Gesserit accomplished. Alas.

I have something useful to add.

To use Donovan's phrase, there is only one "elevator in the brain hotel". IF, in the fullness of evolutionary time, we had needed a bank of elevators in our brain hotel, we would have developed them. Add more elevators? We'll have to change the whole brain around. We don't have a map of an ant's brain, let alone a human brain. Good luck on that remodeling project.

We don't even know where the conscious mind is located, let alone how to re-engineer it.

The "one track railroad" (to which the conscious mind can be compared) has been in successful use ever since the telegraph enabled train dispatchers to schedule trains and prevent collisions on the single track. Our brains are more than capable of managing the flow of information into and out of the conscious mind.

After all, you're doing it right now.

NKBJ Fine, fine. But on a physical level why is it that we can only "think" one sentence at a time? On a broader philosophical level, if our brains were a bit different and we could, for example, think 4 sentences simultaneously, wouldn't that mean all of our philosophy today be different? — YuZhonglu

It might be the case that our brains CAN think of 4 sentences at once, but only one sentence at a time can pass through the narrow aperture of consciousness. It seems to me intuitive that the 100 billion neurons between our ears are capable of doing many things at once. In fact, they do -- we just don't/can't monitor them consciously. But when it comes to bringing them into consciousness, there is only that one elevator, so we never see groups of ideas exiting the elevator at one time.

Everyone's brain composed the responses we are reading while managing breathing, heart rate, blinking, posture (you didn't fall out of your chair), listening to the radio/television/stereo -- something, smelling supper cooking (or whatever meal) and so on. While your fingers were being managed by your brain, the text your fingers were producing was being fed into a motor queue, and IF your fingers hit the wrong key, you would probably have noticed that. Had your dog walked into the room and whined, you would have heard it and continued typing (unless the dog has trained you to jump up instantly when it wants to go out side).

One of the elements of life that makes life bearable is forgetting.

Real example: A week ago we had heavy snow in Minneapolis. The local news reported that last year in the middle of April, Minneapolis received 16 inches of snow. I was here, I shoveled it, I was surprised by it, I discussed it at length with the neighbors, etc. At least, I suppose I did. In fact, I don't remember anything about a snow storm in April of 2018. Nothing. Zero. So if it imposed suffering upon me (it might have) it doesn't count now because I can't reckon it into my balance of suffering and joy. Forgetting things takes them off the balancing scale.

I am happy to report that the memory of a lot of negative experiences I have had in the past have lost substance. I know they happened, and I can remember the details. but I don't feel the negativity any more.

Now, some people seem never to forget negative experiences. Some people carry misfortunes forward into their old age from kindergarten, it seems like. They remember tons of negative things, and they are still painful. Of course I have painful memories that are still unpleasant. But they are discreet events, not an ocean of pain.

If one experienced one's assortment of painful experiences like an ocean of pain (not the mass of an ocean, just the merged droplets of the ocean) EDIT: NOT bringing into existence another person would certainly be preferable.

I am of the opinion that we can not overstate the complexity of the unfolding catastrophe of global warming, pollution (everything from oil slicks to plastic micro beads, Neonicotinoids, RoundUp, plutonium...), post-peak oil, overpopulation, etc. I think we're screwed, pretty much. We have created problems which are beyond our capacity to grasp, let alone solve.

make the energy grid more efficient, research renewable energy more, eliminate toxic waste/clean up, educate on nutrition/population increase... — Nasir Shuja

This is all stuff we should have done back in the 1970s, at the latest. 40 years worth of C02, methane, and humanoid accumulation later, it's a bit late to start doing that.

Oh, don't worry about population, by the way.

because we cant just force policy on them in the modern ideologically secular world — Nasir Shuja

Maybe we can't, but old Mother Nature has no problem forcing policy on people in the modern ideologically secular world. Her methods tend to not be very nice, but as policy goes, she's good at reducing populations--starvation and disease for starters. She can throw a population crash like nobody's business. Most likely she has some policy solutions in mind for us wealthy, industrialized nations too, especially pompous secular ones. Bad air, poisoned environments where pollinators go extinct, not enough electricity, rising ocean, not enough food (especially those out-of-season strawberries), new diseases, drug resistant bacteria and fungal diseases, running out of oil, people going crazy, formerly civilized places turning into behavior sinks...

We don't know shit from shinola when it comes to the kinds of revolutionary changes that could have saved us from the grand comeuppance we are headed for. We have all these institutions that are beyond our control, never mind changing the behavior of 300 million Americans, 500 million Europeans, 2 billion Asians, etc. For instance, we have NO IDEA what we are going to do when we run out of oil--which we will do. And so much of our civilization depends on that marvelously energy dense, portable, AND LIMITED supply of petroleum. Not just gasoline, but a vast array of chemical industries. Polyester anyone (dimethyl ester dimethyl terephthalate (DMT) and monotheluene glycol)? Nylon? Plastic plastic plastic? Where do you think this stuff comes from?

I rather suspect that Mother Nature has already set new policies into motion, most of which we're not going to enjoy very much.

Fuck all ye who dwelleth here! Banish me from this place of intellectual woe... I await in eager anticipation — praxis

And in the fullness of time it came to pass, as he desired, that he was panned, damned, canned, and banned.

Good handle there. THX1138 is a pretty good sci-fi flick about a society where there was no privacy. It had a nice ending, when THX1138 managed to escape because the budget for his capture ran out of money and was called off.

I suspect I am being consistently tracked and casually harassed. I doubt this comes as a surprise to anyone, which is fair enough. Nevertheless, I want this stance to be set aside in order to get to what I'd more to the point like to address. — THX1138

Corporations are tracking you on line, certainly. They are tracking all of us, and would like to track us much more -- not for reasons of national security, but for reasons of commerce. They want to sell us stuff; in all likelihood, they want to sell us stuff we don't need, and may not even want. They aren't interested in us as "persons" so much as potential sales. Now, this isn't exactly new. Intensive, national sales efforts have been underway in the industrial world for at least a century.

The Government has the wherewithal to track us, too. After 9/11 a massive surveillance effort was undertaken to sift internet traffic (e-mail and text messages) for signs of conspiracies. As far as I know (and why would I know anything about it?) this effort failed to find many conspirators.

People are "leaking" all sorts of information about themselves. Carrying a cell phone with you at all times allows for a trail of one's locations to exist. People blather away on Twitter, Facebook, and so forth -- providing all sorts of information about themselves. Corporations track what you buy, through the use of the check-out scanner and credit-card payment systems. Target, for instance, is able to identify when their female customers are pregnant by tracking changes in purchasing. The changes are subtle, and indirect -- but consistent enough for a pattern to be detected. Why is Target interested in pregnant women? Because they want to establish a close relationship with that pregnant woman that will last for years of purchasing. Money, money, money.

So, your fears about privacy are hardly paranoid.

For you as an agnostic leaning toward atheism... I'd suggest that all the gods were, in fact, invented. Not only 'were invented' but 'are invented' every day. People who believe in gods of some sort (and that would be the vast majority) maintain their gods with fresh investments of imagination and theology.

Gods like Zeus, Odin, Baal, and so on become static when there are no longer believers investing and reinvesting imagination in these gods. And belief, of course, is both an individual and social activity.

As for inventing a 'new god', this doesn't seem to happen, but one could certainly give it a whirl. The tricky part is convincing enough others that one's new god is interesting enough to believe in to make it sustainable.

Is “contentment” little more than a drive to self-deprecation? I curse the “contented” and “passive” - they breath empty air and gorge on tasteless viands, their gluttony is of the void in order to avoid the human condition; that is to be human trying to be more than a human! — I like sushi

Are you quoting somebody here? Nobody has "gorged on tasteless viands" for a couple of centuries, at least. In fact, you are the first person to use "viands" in The Philosophy Forum. Congrats on that.

On the other hand, what is "empty air"? No pollen? No dust? A vacuum?

Is it natural to live with religion? — Purple Pond

is it natural to live without religion? — Purple Pond

Maybe we can say that it is natural for humans to search for meaning, and the results of that search (if not the search in itself) is 'religion'. It also seems to be natural for humans to devise some organizing principles for society (do unto others...). Religion amounts to some organizing principles, among other things. It seems natural for humans to develop rituals which may have meaning only to the individual. Rituals are a piece of religion. Many people develop magical beliefs. These magical beliefs are either superstitious or religious. "Religion is magic you believe in; magic is religion you don't believe in.

All that said, it seems to be the case that it is natural to live with what are at least inchoate religious beliefs and practices.

Can a human being be 100% rational, relying on facts and facts alone? Is some sort of dry, pristine objectivity possible? No. We might wish we could, but we are not purely rational animals. We are born with emotions which are at the heart of our humanness. Eventually we will accumulate at least private beliefs and rituals, none of which may resemble any known "religion" but be, none the less, "religious". And that's OK.

And fuckyall btw — Nobody

Just fyi, "fuckyall" is spelled "fuck y'all." Otherwise it says fucky all--which might be appropriate too, but it isn't a standard curse.

Come now -- nothing of any significance has happened to you. You are by no means the first person whose post has been deleted. So, English isn't your first language. Fine -- say so up front. That will "cut some slack for you" - meaning, you won't be graded on grammar as severely as I might be. You won't be the first English is second language either.

All that Baden suggested was that you make a clearer OP. You aren't the first person to receive that suggestion.

Perhaps it was just slightly inauspicious to begin your post with "I can't deny that I suffer from sadistic compulsive thoughts." A bit of over-sharing. It isn't the ants, as far as I am concerned. I poured boiling water on some horrendously large ants that were swarming over my back step and were getting into the house at 3 in the morning. Big suckers were parboiled in a flash. I felt not a twinge of guilt; only sadness that I did't have several gallons of boiling water handy.

So why don't you stay. Just because you said you are leaving means nothing. It isn't a contractual statement. People get into snits quite often, then get over it.

It was not a superb post, true enough. But it was good enough to lead me to think about pleasure and power. Maybe Nobody could rewrite it?

I'm not a moderator. My guess is that one of the moderators thought it was too stupid to keep.

I thought your post was moderately interesting. Here's my response.

I can't deny that I suffer from sadistic compulsive thoughts. — Nobody

Go directly to your therapist. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Stepping on ants, discovering that one can kill them with the magnifying glass one is examining them with, spreading poison around their ant hills, spraying RAID on hornet nests--all that is one thing. Taking great pleasure in these acts crosses over the borderline between normal/abnormal. Healthy individuals develop altruism as they grow up, such that they might still wipe out insects out of a sense of necessity, but it isn't a pleasurable act. One might catch fish on a hook, shoot squirrels with a .22, bring down geese and ducks with a shotgun, kill a deer with a rifle, and derive pleasure from the success of the effort, but still not revel in the death of the pike, the squirrel, the duck, or deer.

See the difference?

Pleasure in power... Henry Kissinger, foreign policy advisor to President Nixon, said that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac. Let's leave god out of this. We're talking primate psychology here.

Some people do have the power of life and death over people, never mind ants, and they usually want to hold onto it. This is a feature of human personality, which manifests itself to a much greater degree in some people than others. Those 'others' aren't mysterious rarities -- they are our political, military, and corporate masters. They have power and from what I can gather, they like it.

As long as you stick to ants, you probably won't be too dangerous. Even so, just leave the ants alone.

All this is true: there is nothing good that can not be perverted into an evil. Patriotism, altruism, family, love, peace, justice, freedom, responsibility, achievement, beauty, politeness, strength -- all these things -- remain good, however. We don't need to qualify our teaching that the good attributes of life are good, and that the bad attributes of life are bad.

What we must do is always remember what is good and what is bad. If freedom of speech is a good thing, then don't complain when somebody says something you don't like. Freedom means that other people are likely to behave in ways you disapprove of. Freedom means that some people will vote for Hillary and some people will vote for Donald. You may not like it, but that's what freedom means. If you really can't tolerate people behaving in ways you disapprove of, then you need to find yourself a country run by a rigid theocracy where people are SEVERELY PUNISHED for deviating from the straight and narrow path.

Not only will other people behave in quite disreputable ways, they will also inform you that your behavior is impossibly tasteless. But that's what you get with freedom.

So, we need to learn what we ought not to do, as well as what we should do. We should not be hard hearted. We should not betray the people of our country. We should not lie, cheat, steal, and murder, and so on.

I think that properly raised people tend to understand well enough what is good and what is forbidden.

We start life with the need to continue our species existence. — hachit

Nah! We don't start thinking about the need to continue our species' existence until long after we've either done our share of reproducing (or we let somebody else do our share). What people feel is sex hunger. That takes care of continuing our species--and most other species too What keeps the species going is the "Boy, I'd like to fuck her!" reaction.

Then we move to develop them independently (divine command, unitilitarianism, and whatever else) then to form governments we use contractarianism. — hachit

Nah! This is all after the fact. Long after the fact. This is theory about what we observe or think we observed.

After these steps we try to spread our morality to others as a sense of approval, the idea being we don't want to live thinking we did something wrong (not wanting our morals challenged). Those were disagree with are our enemies and we treat them how our independent morals demand (so different for everyone). — hachit

Nah! Most of us do not have the opportunity to use morality spreaders on others. (They look just like manure spreaders. And sometimes it's the same old bullshit.)

Morality arises out of intimate human interaction. Our first intimate human interaction is child/parent. Parents all have the problem of training their children to behave the way they want them to behave. Good behavior is praised; bad behavior is punished. The child figures out what is good and bad. As the child gets older, he learns the prevailing morality that his parents follow. Later on, the child -- now a philosophy major at University -- decides to rip up everything he knows about morality and starts thinking it through. Almost always he will conclude with what he started with, but if he goes and stays very far afield in his moral thinking, he may be deemed a complete asshole. Sometimes people get lost while they are far afield and end up here.

Alas.

People love each other and love becomes a standard of morality. We want to feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves, and about a few other people. Not too many, though. We can feel warm and fuzzy about being nice to a few people; feeling warm and fuzzy about being nice to millions of people is impossible. Even Jesus felt warm and fuzzy about... oh, maybe a couple dozen. Par for the course. 11 of the 12, his mother of course; his dad; Lasarus; John, for sure. Probably not Judas, given the way things worked out.

It's a circular process. It starts in the home; society shapes behavior in various ways. People fall in love and start another round. The parents want their children to behave so it isn't quite such a nightmare having them around.

I don't know what these means when you abstract "the state" outside of the representatives who are elected who form part of it — Maw

The elected personnel of government are a small minority; granted, they are a powerful small minority. But the "Permanent Government" is huge, and by reason of its size and control of government work, is also very powerful. Everything from the CIA to the GSA (General Services Administration), the military to the National Endowment for the Arts is a piece of the Permanent Government which grinds away in the secluded cellars, tunnels, and halls beneath the bright marbled and gilded Plaza where the Body Politic dances with Policy Wonks and lobbyists in crocodile shoes, schmooze, and rub up against each other to taste the pheromones of power and influence.

The political clusterfuck is on display above ground. The permanent government cleverly avoids publicity by staying below ground and out of sight.

As I said, men and women have issues that are particular to each sex, and developing a clear understanding of those issues is worthwhile. So a 'men's movement to understand men's issues' seems reasonable to me. But for most men and women, neither a feminist nor a masculinist movement is what is needed. What men and women need much more than several more identity-oriented rights movements is more clarity of what they need as working people.

Jobs, wages, working conditions, and job security are critical issues common to all working people. So is affordable and readily available medical care for both physical and psychological (including chemical dependency) illnesses. Adequate affordable housing, and quality education are basic needs. Permanent, stable, and healthy families are of equal importance to men and women. A healthy environment in which to work, live, and play is equally important to men and women.

These may seem like stale, old, irrelevant problems, but they are at the heart of life for both men and women. There aren't significantly different feminist or masculinist interests here: Both sexes have the same interests.

Also, I appreciate you letting my generation off the hook. — Grre

You're welcome. It just isn't a generational issue. The Industrial Revolution started in the late 1700s. Everyone since then has either suffered and/or benefitted from industrialization. No one is guilty, everyone is responsible.

@Boethius is right about ecological theater. It's similar to the theater of safety performed at airports. Just because recycling one's cans and bottles isn't in itself going to save the world doesn't mean we should stop recycling. We can, we should, we must recycle. We should buy less stuff to start with. Of course, some cities have no recycling programs. Minneapolis has two recycling programs: combined stream recycling of plastic, paper, and metal (goes in one container) and kitchen and yard waste recycling (goes in a different container). These two recycling programs leave very little stuff to put into the garbage container.

Of course it will be impractical for many people to bicycle to work, because no provisions have been made to make bicycling safer, more convenient, and faster. It doesn't involve billions of dollars for cities to create bicycle lanes on streets, separate bicycle paths along disused railroads, and the like. With some adjustment, one can bicycle year round even in a city with cold weather like Minneapolis.

Look: IF we were serious about reducing our CO2 footprints, we would immediately sharply reduce the miles we drive. We would walk more, use bicycles, and take whatever public transit we could find. In the decades ahead, as oil becomes more expensive and the consequences of global warming start to bite deeper, we will have to abandon the private automobile, along with much else.

Had we taken global warming seriously in 1980, in the intervening 40 years we could have built a good deal of mass transit (rail, bus, trolley, bike ways, etc.). We didn't. So making these changes now is that much more urgent.

All that said, it is still necessary for major corporations and governments to make a 180º turn around.

How do you suggest The People hold corporate's feet to the fire? — Grre

Political campaigns are essential. "The People United are much more difficult to defeat." Who do you vote for? Are they or are they not committed to a human future? Boycott corporations who seem uninterested in change. Referenda and initiative campaigns. Support solar and wind power programs. Individuals have the responsibility of reducing their own consumption. That is and will continue to be true, no matter what else happens. Advocacy. Creating bad publicity for banks, politicians, and corporations who seem unresponsive to the threat of global warming.

Expect cooptation. Expect to see mass marketing of T-shirts with eco-slogans, buttons, all sorts of product tie-ins. Expect to see counter-campaigns by oil companies explaining how they are struggling to save the world. It's bullshit, and all that crap can be ignored.

PS. Thunberg's next planned global climate strike is planned for May 26. I'm mad that my schooling is done for the year and I'm no longer in high school, or I would have participated. — Grre

You mean, there is no way for you to plug into this action? Help is always needed to get these things off the ground, and wherever you live, there is a need for people to start organizing. Grow where you are planted.

By the way, expect to feel a sense of futility at times. Changing the direction the world is going is harder than making an aircraft carrier turn quickly. If saving the world were easy, it would have been done already.

How will it all work out? Gee, I don't know. I simultaneously harbor hope and doubt that you will be successful. (I use the plural "you" because I won't be around that much longer, given my age.) Your #1 enemy is inertia and contrary interests. A lot of wealth is tied up in coal, nuclear, and petroleum, and people (being what we are) are not just going to let their investments evaporate if they can help it.

James Howard Kunstler The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century Kunstler doesn't offer some magic solution that will enable clever people to escape the problem. As he says in another book: "Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation".

Kunstler offers good, solid, and punchy information about peak oil, CO2, methane, etc.

Men have interests unique to their sex, just as women do. Men and women have a lot of interests in common, which should at least sometimes override sex-difference-interests. If not a men's "rights' movement, a lot of men would, I think, benefit from a men's movement directed toward sex-role excellence--that is, finding better models among men to emulate.