So, what has been going on in your life over the last couple of years? Does this trend of less labile emotions cover the last few days, weeks, months or years? How old are you? (age makes a difference in how we respond). So does psychological stability. If you were formerly unstable and emoting all over the place, then this trend towards less emoting is perhaps a good thing. If you are 40 years old now and comparing yourself to when you were 30, the change is probably normal.

The world is full of sorrow and at some point we have to find a way of distancing ourselves from its immediacy if we are to be of any use to anyone. "Distance" doesn't mean callousness or indifference. It just means your reactions are not so immediate.

I can't tell whether this is a negative trend. Edit: Just a guess from a non-expert, but it's probably not nirvana.

I think this only works if you are interested in casual sex only, which perhaps would suit some people, and worth following. The problem is people usually want significant others. This is where humans are utterly hopeless with poorly designed social systems to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion. Then you people simply falling back into tropes as the prisoner's dilemma sets in. Anyways, as we both agree this creates much unhappiness. Writers use this unhappiness and confusion to write mediocre short stories and soap operas. They seem to be the only ones benefiting. — schopenhauer1

Casual sex is a good thing but the methods for obtaining it are not the basis for long-term relationships, except that sometimes a casual sex partner turns out to be the love of one's life, or at least one's life long sex partner in a more or less satisfactory relationship.

Obtaining and maintaining long-term-to-life-long satisfactory relationships is difficult no matter what. For one thing, we change over time and recalibration is required. For another, we cling to delusions about what a perfect life should be like. White picket fences and roses, the little cottage, an attentive partner, and rosy cheeked children is a delusion. (There are also delusions about the perfect work place, the perfect car, the perfect neighborhood, etc.)

We have unreasonable expectations (not delusions) about a prospective mate. We have unreasonable expectations about sex. We have unreasonable expectations about life in a relationship with another adult who has ideas as unreasonable as ours.

Happy people, or happier people, or at least reasonably happy people either started with fewer delusions and lower expectations or they learned how to adjust.

The conditions people experience in 2018 are NOT exceptional. Happy marriage has always been problematic (given that people have always been problematic). Lucky children had parents who were responsible people who kept their noses to the grindstone and were reasonably kind to each other and to their children.

Getting back to Cat Person:

Who is the intended audience of the New Yorker Magazine?

About a million people bought the New Yorker in 2015, mostly by subscription. How are the subscriptions geographically distributed?

Despite its title, The New Yorker is read nationwide, with 53 percent of its circulation in the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas. According to Mediamark Research Inc., the average age of The New Yorker reader in 2009 was 47 ... The average household income of The New Yorker readers in 2009 was $109,877 ...

According to Pew Research, 77 percent The New Yorker's audience hold left-of-center political values, while 52 percent of those readers hold "consistently liberal" political values.[41] — Wikipedia

Compare that to Sports Illustrated with a circulation of 3,155,000:

Average Income: $60,913
Average Age: 37
Percent Male: 77%

Obviously a much different audience than the New Yorker.

The New Yorker is read by an aging, fairly prosperous New York dominated audience. Sports Illustrated is younger, less wealthy, geographically dispersed across the US, and (not surprising) mostly male. Suppose @Cat Person had appeared in Sports Illustrated. What kind of internet reviews and commends would the story be getting? Probably a lot different than the New Yorker generated commentary.

@Cat Person was published for a particular demographic, and reactions were typical of a narrow slice of the public as a whole.

All this adds up to more reasons why this story is unimportant. It's "chick lit" for New Yorker and L.A. types.

What does Bitter Crank think? — schopenhauer1

Bitter Crank thinks that CSalisbury's phrase "manic-pixie quirk well" will come in handy for some devious purpose, as yet unknown.

Other than that, Cat Person has absorbed more energy than its agreed-upon mediocrity merits.

Crank is reading an excellent Sci Fi piece by Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem trilogy in an English translation by Ken Liu. Much better than Cat Person. The Three Body problem belongs to the Trisolarians. Their three-sun system produces constant instability, and they -- having become aware of earth because of a foolish astronomer's actions during the Cultural Revolution, have decided that Earth would be a better place for them to live, so they are on their way to wipe us out and take over the planet. It will take them about 400 years to arrive. In the meantime they have sent entangled protons to the earth (which unfold to higher dimensions, turning them into super-smart spies with instant communication abilities).

Earth is trying to figure out how to survive, given the advanced's civilization's numerous advantages.

This stuff has been happening since the beginning of time — schopenhauer1

Probably not quite that long -- something less than 13.xx billion years. I'm guessing that the first tedious dating story happened about 324,071 years ago. And every human has added to the immense pile of tedious dating experiences.

But yes, modern dating seems to have turned into its own kind of unhappiness. That's because our routinely super-educated young folk insist on analyzing the meta aspects of rituals which lead to people getting properly laid. A metaanalysis of these rituals invariably leads to intensely unsatisfactory sexual experiences. The secret to getting properly fucked is to stop thinking about it and just do it. Of course it's an act of disgusting animality -- but that who we are, that's what we do. So get busy.

Just do it and enjoy every minute of it, and when you are all done and washed up, have had a smoke and a beer, go to sleep. In the morning think about something else. Do not engage in restaurant-review-criticism of your sexual partners. If it felt good, schedule a rematch. If it didn't, get back to the bar or go on line and find the next study partner with whom you can gain carnal knowledge.


In other news, I have come up with a new slogan for Christ Church's refugee project:

Jesus is coming: stay where you are

You don't need to flee to Europe or the United States. Salvation is en route, so stay at home where god can find you. God gets confused trying to keep track of overly mobile people, flying here, driving there, even riding donkeys. Help god, stay put.

Flannery O'Connor wrote another short story that, at least used to be in freshman lit anthologies: Everything That Rises Must Converge. It takes place on a bus on a hot summer night in the south; there are four characters: a black woman with her 4 year old child, and an older white woman with her recent college graduate son. It's a simple set up but it is loaded with years -- and generations -- worth of hatred.

The characters are presented, established efficiently, and moved into position, and the inevitable storm breaks and tragedy ensues. So much is condensed into such a short moment.

Give it a read from the link above if you like. It's from the early 60s, so it's a bit dated -- but not all that much. Women aren't wearing hats, these days. If there are criticisms of the story, they will be altogether different than those of the Cat Person.

One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic. — Baden

The view of the pathetic male has been worked over in various ways in other threads, and there will be disagreement about how pathetic our villain (if he is a villain) is supposed to be. Pathetic, ineffective, clueless men exist, of course, and so do pathetic, ineffective clueless women; neither of them are especially good characters for short stories, unless they deliver something dramatic. The villains in A Good Man Is Hard to Find by O'Connor are pathetic. But they deliver in the story -- the murders of course, but also the most important line in the story.

Similarly the grandmother is a pain; petty, domineering, etc. But she steers the story into the ditch where she meets her demise--where they all meet their demise.

As you said, short stories don't have enough space for character development, so their first appearance has to be outstanding, and their character given the necessary complexity to make them interesting in only a few paragraphs, or brush strokes, to mix metaphors.

The kind of short stories that deliver all that are the pieces you finish with great satisfaction. You just know you had a real literary experience.

So I'll lower her grade to a C, which these days is pretty bad.

I'd give it an F. It's badly-written, boring, and painfully contrived. — Baden

You are a tough grader. I didn't think it was that bad. But what I did think bad was that the New Yorker saw fit to print it. The New Yorker! Publisher of Welty, Cheever, and Nabokov; Updike, Jackson, Roth, Spark, Mary McCarthy, et al. Why bother with this piece--F or B-? The New Yorker gets enough submissions to publish only A+ stories. They published The Lottery which ends with a stoning. Maybe Cat Person would have been a better story if Robert had been a psychopath (per Timeline) and had taken her into the woods and murdered her. Or maybe she was the murderous one: The Case of the Killer Co-Ed. Hey, this is fiction -- murder is perfectly legal in a short story.

Flannery O'Conner has a wonderful story -- A Good Man is Hard to Find (I think that's its title). A family goes on a road trip and the grandmother insists on a pointless detour to look at something inconsequential. The result is, of course, that the family encounters the murderers who they have been hearing about on the car radio. Murderers murder and that's what happens to the family. At the last moment the frivolous grandmother perceives the human worth of the desperado who is about to kill her, and says so. Bang. She's dead. The murderer says "She would have been a good woman if she had a gun pointing at her all her life."

It's not a wonderful story because the old lady get's murdered along with the rest of the family. It's great because of the tightly drawn but simple plot, the banal characters in the car, the exceptionally evil murderers, and then at the end, the vision of goodness which comes too late.

The New Yorker just needs to stick to its established standards.

I don't think "wisdom" is just a pile of good advice. Take the book of Proverbs:

1 The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:
2 for gaining wisdom and instruction;
for understanding words of insight;
3 for receiving instruction in prudent behavior,
doing what is right and just and fair;
4 for giving prudence to those who are simple,[a]
knowledge and discretion to the young—
5 let the wise listen and add to their learning,
and let the discerning get guidance—
6 for understanding proverbs and parables,
the sayings and riddles of the wise.

Then follows many, many lines of "good advice", much of which seems fairly obvious, like... if a gang of crooks invite you to join a racket, don't.

There are collections of more contemporary proverbs, like "Don't plan on winning the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes." Just plain good advice or actual wisdom?

Ecclesiastes comes much closer to what I would call wisdom. The worldview of Ecclesiastes is wider than Proverbs, less pious, and not so 'cut and dried' -- admitting uncertainty. The book opens famously with the acknowledgment that there is a time for both building up and a time for tearing down, gathering in, and scattering apart, etc. -- a time for every purpose under heaven. But the crux of Ecclesiastes, at least for me, is the summation:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.

He was a sociopath. — TimeLine

Nonsense.

"Cat Person" is just not a great short story. I'd give it a B-. The New Yorker is the Big Time for short stories, and this just isn't that good.

This has been an interesting discussion. Thanks. I have to go to bed now so I can get up early to make it to a root canal appointment at 8:00. Only barbarians schedule root canals that early in the day.

One of the common memes or tropes or zeitgeisty thing you see floating around a lot (one which I think has a lot of truth to it) is that the quintessential 'nice guy', who caters to what he believes a woman wants and appeals soft and emotional and understanding - is sitting atop a volcano of misogynistic rage. The idea is that the 'nice guy' isn't really 'nice', but has this idea that if you do the right things, then you deserve sex and affection. When their routine fails, and they don't get what they think they've earned, the true self emerges. — csalisbury

Old gay men like me don't have much (any) experience dating millennial women, but It seems to me that the zeitgeistich thing of men having expectations that "a nice time" ought to be rewarded with at least some sex play, if not actual fucking, has been around for quite some time. Personally, I liked the old fashioned gay approach where one could count on sex, and the nice time was gravy.

Straight folks don't operate that way, at least not since the 1960s. Young straight folks seem to have a lot of baggage to work through. I've heard that even young gay men play dating games, these days--when they don't get it on (or off?) with the help of Grindr.

I went back and read the ending again.

The story effectively ended at the end of the first paragraph below. The second paragraph begins the redefinition of the older (32) male character in the story who had previously been only an unsuccessful date. By the end of the piece, not many words later, he has been recast as something menacing. (Of course, at one point she thought maybe he was planning on murdering her.)

Margot collapsed on the table, laying her head in her hands. She felt as though a leech, grown heavy and swollen with her blood, had at last popped off her skin, leaving a tender, bruised spot behind. But why should she feel that way? Perhaps she was being unfair to Robert, who really had done nothing wrong, except like her, and be bad in bed, and maybe lie about having cats, although probably they had just been in another room.

But then, a month later, she saw him in the bar—her bar, the one in the student ghetto, where, on their date, she’d suggested they go. He was alone, at a table in the back, and he wasn’t reading or looking at his phone; he was just sitting there silently, hunched over a beer.

And then there is the texting which ends with her being called "whore". I didn't like the way it ended, and it didn't seem consistent with the man's previous presentation. The author couldn't leave it well enough alone. She made the merely unsuccessful guy into a bad guy.

As for millennial values about dating, male/female relations, and so on -- I really don't know how they think. It's a loop I'm out of. When I read about goings on around campuses, their values sometimes strike me as just plain bizarre.

Why "Cat Person"? Odd title. It was a moderately engaging short story. Nothing that happened seemed particularly remarkable. Of course, sometimes the imagined guy is better than the actual guy. What's great is when the actual guy doesn't require any amplification. I've never actually 'dated' women, so...

I've had quite a few encounters of the sort presented in the story: barely lukewarm, slightly more exciting for one than the other, clumsy, lurching moves. I've had worse encounters too. Not dangerous encounters, but ones that were weirder than the New Yorker one. God, there are some very odd people out there.

I'd put the story in the "slice of life" category. Nothing to learn from the experience except that experiences like that happen and they aren't especially instructive.

I define wisdom as deep knowledge. "Fine" he says. "So what is "deep knowledge"?

Deep knowledge is the best of the stuff one has learned, boiled down, fermented, dried, and cut up into 1 inch cubes and carefully arranged. In the arranging connections are made, insights gained, ignorance and knowledge discovered (along with the realization that it is too late now to learn what you missed the first time around, and that you were lucky to have learned anything at all).

So what variety of knowledge should one put in the kettle as one goes along? Really, ... whatever. Whatever you learned, whatever happens to you is good enough raw material. Whether one studied philosophy or one was a butcher, a baker, or failed at the hippie candle shop business doesn't matter.

One does have to keep thinking, though. That's the boiling down part. Wild yeast will fall into your pot as it cools. This critical stage is a matter of luck. It helps if one has occasionally been inoculated by other people's wisdom about the world.

One needs to be beaten down a few times. A good beating by the world every now and then helps the kettle boil and ferment better. You do not need to go out looking for the world to beat you up; the world is looking for you, and will come to you and administer the thrashing soon enough. Be patient.

None of this can happen until one is old enough to have filled the caldron and been beaten up a few times. It takes time. I suppose there are a few 30 year olds who have filled the kettle with learning, experience, and several beatings but not many, certainly. On earth, maybe 1 30 year old a year. Most filled kettles are like 50 or 60 and up. Some people don't come to a boil until they are 70 or 80.

the youth pastor took to me the most because I was passive and hungry to learn — Noble Dust

It wasn't wisdom that attracted him. Pastors, teachers, politicians, philosophers--all us ilk--love nothing better than a receptive audience, even if it is only one pair of ears. How lovely on the mountain are the ears of they who sit still and listen to me. If a human isn't available, an adoring dog will do. I suppose a cat might suffice, though dogs do a better job of faking interest.

As for you, Noble Dust, you have had many experiences and have been interested in learning. You seem to be boiling, and my guess is that you've had a beating or two. So you are well on your way. I'd have to stir your kettle to tell you how far along you are, and most people find being stirred during a boil a horrible experience, so we'll just skip that. Time will tell, in any case. If I were you, I'd plan on achieving a jar full of wisdom cubes at some point in the future.

By the way, not everybody here shows signs of having a full kettle, coming to a boil, or having been adequately beaten up by the world. I've submitted the names of a dozen or so forum members who the world should assault and batter once or twice more. The world told me it was well aware of the deficiencies of these learned fools, and would be sending its cosmic thugs to waylay them at some unexpected moment.

Damned if I know what happened to you. Clearly your ego didn't die, dissolve, or ditch your body and depart. It sounds like a good thing, though, and I don't don't know what causes these sudden insights to appear. Such things are reported, and they don't seem to happen frequently in any person's life. It isn't abnormal; for a greater understanding you would need to search your own memories, your own history, to see what you had learned and experienced prior to this event. You MIGHT find some clues, or maybe not.

5 years ago... how has the event affected your thinking, feeling, and behavior since it happened? Do you consider the event spiritually important? If so, what guidance does it provide you?

Welcome to the Philosophy Forum!

One thing we can do is to stop opposing reason and emotion. Our senses, emotions, memory, reason, metabolism, hormones, muscles, and so on are all one system. Yes we can separate out more and more parts for examination, but elucidating parts ought not set parts in opposition. We wouldn't say that the liver operates in opposition to the stomach; let's not say emotions operate in opposition to reason. They are a reciprocal system.

You are right that our language and thinking is rife with dichotomies, but we aren't compelled to honor them every time we set pen to paper.

Think/write from the POV that beings are holistic; wholes made of integrated systems. If you stick with this idea, your thinking about thinking and being will change. A little, sure. That we are holistic isn't exactly a revolutionary idea that was not previously put forward.

So, don't put reason and emotion in opposition. Don't compare the mind to a computer (it's insulting to the mind). Don't oppose the mind and the body. Whatever is going on in one area affects the whole. A being is like an ecology - many integrated systems.

If you argue to reduce all certainty to the attitude of certitude, then you argue that "certainty" as we commonly use it doesn't refer to anything real. — Metaphysician Undercover

There are, as a great philosopher said, "known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns."

We can sort things into those three categories.

known knowns:

sun rises
ice melts at >0ºC
bolts of lightning cause thunder

known unknowns:

One of 20 horses will win the Kentucky Derby (which one?)
One fine day I will drop dead (which day?)
Frost may ruin the apple crop (where?)

Unknown unknowns:

All the things that might happen about which we have nary a clue even existing. Even though unknown unknowns make themselves altogether too well known all too often, we can't guess what future unknown unknowns will be.

We can have certainty about known knowns; there can be some doubt about known unknowns, but considerable certainty as well. We can also be fairly certain that unknown unknowns will make themselves known in the future.

Claiming that we can't be certain about the sun rising is posturing. Is anyone really uncertain that ice will melt a temperature greater than 0ºC? Does anyone actually think that all of the horses in the KY Derby will either break their legs before they reach the finish line, or that 3 to 20 will arrive at exactly the same moment? Does anybody believe that nothing totally unexpected will happen in the future? No, they don't.

Nobody thinks they are a brain in a vat. Nobody things they are actually a character in a simulation. These are interesting mind games, but games none the less.

Can anything outside of logic or math be certain? — Marchesk

Practically, yes. We can't be certain about everything, but there are many things that we are certain of--like the sun rising and that we are not brains in a barrel.

I would take the question about rising suns or barrels of brains seriously if I thought you did. Your only concern about the sun rising is coming up with a proof. The sun will rise whether you come up with a proof or not, because your proof is irrelevant. So would mine, so would everybody else.

If it makes no difference in our lives, it isn't fit material for philosophy. It's like "Can angels dance on the head of a pin, and how many?" It's utterly irrelevant.

Certainty means that your certitude is a definite fact.

I agree that

The first thing to note is that certainty is an attitude. — Banno

because a calculation that demonstrates that something is very likely or unlikely to happen provides little comfort in itself. Let's say that a stadium holding 60,000 fans will be hosting the last game of a tied World Series. You have a ticket, and you definitely plan on being there. The morning of the game a terrorist organization announces that 1 (one) person will be selected randomly and will be killed during the game--shot; instant death. No suffering.

Will you still attend?

1 out of 60,000.

Your decision to attend or not attend is a question of emotion and attitude, more than probability, because the probability of you being killed at the game is low. If you go, it will be because you FEEL confident that you won't be the one. The probability of dying at the game, you tell your self, is really, really low. If you don't go, it will be because you FEEL there is too much risk of you BEING THE ONE. One in 60,000 is just to close for comfort. (You face higher odds of dying from other things that you continue doing, because your attitude allows you to.)

The view I had of Heaven from the back patio of a ranch I was caring for this week — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Surely there are no cacti in heaven! Hell, yes.

I'm just trying to suss out what makes it fascinating to you. Because your fascination is fascinating to me. — Noble Dust

That seems like a genuinely generous attitude toward other people's interests.

Philosophy is by its nature one big hooha, when you get down to it. Whether it's necessary or not is under review. You will be notified when a decision is reached. If the decision is unfavorable, philosophy will be unplugged and all mods will cease to exist.

Wait, you can't fine a person points, can you? — TimeLine

Watch me. And pay up.

but this thread you created only undermines our capacity as moderators. — TimeLine

How on earth does it undermine your (plural) capacity as moderators?

and two we discuss with one another prior to deleting a thread to ensure a level playing field. — TimeLine

I'm fining you 50 points for misusing a cliché. Your discussion among yourselves whether to delete a thread ensures collusion, not a level playing field. In a contest between the members and the mods, or the members and the mob, there is no level field.

Is that just because I grew up in the midwest?? — Noble Dust

I live in the midwest; I have always lived within 100 miles of where I was born (except for 2 years in Boston).

I also like buildings and places with which I have a personal connection. There are barns, small houses, school buildings, streets, etc. that I grew up with that are very meaningful to me. The house I was born in is now gone; it was old and decayed; it was time for it to go. It was nothing special to look at but it is a part of me.

I love large structures too, like the bridge above, for their structural features out of which comes a beauty.

Compared to a Roman arch, this one is very recent but there are not many bridges around that are almost 150 years old (because this part of the world hasn't been building bridges that long).

architecture otherwise isn't something I'm drawn to — Noble Dust

Well, that's all right. You don't have to find architecture fascinating. It's a fairly recent interest to me. It isn't just monumental buildings I like. The Student Union building at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has a small terrace in the back overlooking Lake Mendota. It is a lovely shaded area, just outside the rathskeller where one can get a beer. (I haven't been there recently, I hope it's still the same.) My small back yard is a pleasant place, also an inelegant, weedy affair. I like it, sort of.

There are sleazy bars I liked as spaces; book stores, cafes, department stores. All personal connections.

I'm not a well educated person. True, I got a couple of degrees, but there is a hell of a lot I don't know jack shit about. I've been filling in some of the more manageable holes from my previous educational efforts. Architecture is one of the things I want to know more about.

History too. And an old bridge combines history and architecture both.

Furniture design is another one. My personal taste in furniture is extremely pedestrian or maybe proletarian. But I like looking at nicely designed objects, too.

Like this art deco Zemeth Tombstone radio


or this gorgeous art deco Conoco gas station

I thought the World Peace OP was interesting and serious. Discussable in this forum? Absolutely. I thought the discussion was perking along just fine. Jake's solution to conflict (which he thought was authored by males) was, I thought, quite mistaken, and various posters were offering reasons why his proposals were not meet, right, and salutary. A couple of posters appeared to approve of his plan, at least to some degree.

Was his post offensive? No. Was his post inflammatory? Maybe, but it wasn't without merit. Was he trying to trap people in contradictions? If he was, he has lots of company here. Philosophers seem to live for finding a contradictory statement.

Is this thread worth keeping? Absolutely.

Were the nomenclatura who patrol the thread reasonable in deleting the World Peace Thread? No, but their deleting threads hardly comes as a surprise. I'm surprised Jake wasn't banned on his way out the door.

Oh look, there's Jake being banned now.

It is undeniable that we live in a male-dominated society. Women are precluded from some roles in society altogether and do not do well in other spheres due to the 'boy's club' nature of those spheres. The majority of domestic violence overwhelmingly consist in men aggressing women, the vast majority of rapes are committed by men. Men are also the predominant oppressors of children, at least when it comes to child abuse and paedophilia. I mean, all of this is just so obvious I don't see how you can reasonably deny it. — Janus

I stated in the now-deleted thread that most men are not violent and most men do not oppress women,.

Some men do oppress women, and some men are violent toward women. In fact, a fairly small minority of men are responsible for a good deal of the violence that is committed, toward men and toward women.

Oppression is a systemic, not an individual act. As a gay man who was born and grew up in midwestern backwaters way before gay liberation arrived, I can testify that oppression takes more than one individual being shocked that gay men suck cock. Oppression of gay men involves religious narratives, family values, national values, cultural values, government policy, law, police, and so forth.

Oppression of women is also systemic, and as in the case with gay men, oppression is a package deal. Most people are systemically oppressed whether they are gay or straight, male or female, black or white. The purpose of systemic oppression is to maintain the status quo whereby a few people exploit most people for economic advantage. (That will no doubt sound familiar to some.) That kind of systemic oppression has been the dominant paradigm for a very long time -- not just since WWI, the Civil War, or QEI.

As far as the Ruling Class is concerned, we are all either house niggers or field niggers, and what we do in the slave cabins is pretty much irrelevant to the folks in the Big Housse.

This is the Eads Bridge, completed in 1874, over the Mississippi between St. Louis and East St. Louis.

It would be better to have two threads on the same topic that attracted different posters.

I found "Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body" by Neil Shubin informative and an enjoyable read. Obviously the human body hasn't been around for 3.5 billion years, but some of our genes are very ancient and ancient fishes established the vertebrate body plan which we share.

As I recollect, the Origin of the Species is a doorstop of a book, and commendations to you for planning to get through it. I haven't read anything by Darwin, but I believe every word he wrote.

Just remember, Darwin didn't know about Gregory Mendel's studies of plant inheritance, so he couldn't apply Mendel's insights.

Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. Thomas Lehrer.

I made a thread that was basically identical to this not long ago. — Thorongil

Harmonic convergence, I suppose. I said the same thing there that I said here. So will we all, I suppose.

Reproduction is the default. It isn't so much a "trap" set, as a way forward provided. Most people seem to enjoy raising children, at least in retrospect.


Should one look more for compelling reasons to have children than for compelling reasons to not have children?

I am neither a parent nor an antinatalist, but it does seem to me that the children born today, their children, and their grand children (giving a 25-30 year value for a generation) may see the world turning increasingly into a world made unlivable by global warming. It won't be unlivable everywhere in 2100-2150, but by 2100 the world will be a lot hotter with severe weather and population disruptions as billions of people who have not yet starved or died of thirst try to find inhabited places to live.

What have I been reading... The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit; Designing Detroit: Wirt Rowland the rise of Modern American Architecture; Once a Great City: A Detroit Story; Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World; Staying Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.

Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914;

Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (Kunstler); Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse and the hard future ahead (Greer);

O'Donnell's Ruin of the Roman Empire, a New History; The Romanovs: 1613-1918.

Is this a lame, polarizing caricature of the best and worst of humanity? Maybe, but that's what the human condition is; it's grand, beautiful, terrifying, horrible, disgusting, unspeakable. — Noble Dust

It is, perhaps, better to view the human condition at a middle distance, rather than up close. Animal existence (alligators, otters, wildebeests) viewed up close is a chaotic, chattering, bloody mess. In the middle distance Nature is benevolent, graceful, and lovely. Our private first person view is always up close; then we are the star in our inept little farces. Get into a Silent Night mood where all is calm, all is bright, and view the world from a middle distance. The stupid farce becomes a drama in 5 acts.

is it a fatal flaw etched in our DNA? — 0 thru 9

Pretty much.

We are inventive and adaptable, so we make new stuff and then we get used to it; then we begin to look for a new frontier of invention. Round and round it goes.

The modern market economy is based on our interest in and enthusiasm for novelty, and our rapidly developing boredom with what all we've got.

Tired of boring old on-line porn? Buy the all new and exciting Sony Orgasmitron Porn Viewer RIGHT NOW. Plug it in and turn it on. Feel every thrust and spasm of the star's 1000 orgasms. The durable probes are dishwasher and washing machine safe.

Banned in Boston, condemned in Cleveland, and banished from the Philosophy Forum for annoying the moderators or using the word m o r o n too often.

How do you think changes will occur, or what is your conception about the future as you see it? — Posty McPostface

If I discount the severe harms of global warming, over population, nuclear annihilation, and other near-terminal events, can I be up-beat about the future? Sort of.

I don't see any singularity of AI, no help from some vastly superior and benevolent aliens, no 180º turn abouts, no evolutionary leaps. Our "doom" is the capacity for considerable intelligence yoked together with ancient, dominant emotions. Our intelligence and our emotions are good things, settled on us by a more or less indifferent evolutionary process, but their interplay became a lot more problematic when we attained more technical prowess than we could manage (see The Sorcerer's Apprentice).

As long as we were dependent on horsepower and the firepower of cannons firing mere projectiles, we were protected by the limits of our grasp. As our grasp got closer to our reach in the 18th and 19th centuries, we became more dangerous to ourselves. The danger was fully revealed in the 20th century with the capacity (and the preparation) for mutually assured nuclear annihilation. That risk has quieted down (it didn't go away) only to be replaced by the realization that the Industrial Revolution had a much higher price tag than were previously aware of.

Technology is fun and profitable and we have all embraced as much of it as we can get our hands on. In that we are just doing what we do.

I see a brighter future for our species in retrograde development--rolling back, rather than rolling forward. We now have more technical complexity than we can manage. How far back would be a good idea? The Stone Age? Iron Age? Bronze Age? Roman Empire? Medieval period? Renaissance? Enlightenment? Pre-steam engine? Pre-photography? Pre-telegraph? Pre-telephone? Pre-recorded sound? Pre-radio? Pre-television?

I'd be willing to stop with radio and film and forego television, the nuclear bomb, and Facebook. Maybe even Google. Oh, that would be hard. But we all have to make sacrifices if we are going to return to the past.

People will (correctly) say that we can't go back in time. True enough. But we can't jump forward In time either, to some period when we are uploaded into the Cloud (and become the property of the then current Mark Fuckerburg). But it is easier to give up technology that we can't live with then hope for even vaster technology that we won't be able to live with.

I don't have a television anymore, and haven't replaced it with watching TV online. By and large, I am living without network and cable television. Is it painful and difficult? No, it's not. It's actually quite pleasant and productive. Giving up TV gives me time to blather on here.

Speaking of which, time to stop.

Posty McPostface and Schopenhauer1:

I owe both of you an apology. For some reason I thought this thread was started by Schop. Given his anti-natalist drive, the positive drift of the opening post suggested he had lurched to the opposite end of the spectrum and gone off the deep end.

So it's just Posty. OK. All is well.

I'm not Jesus — Posty McPostface

So no crucifixion then. Let's see, what are the current recommendations for hapless optimists?

So, what have you got against morons?