“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Bene Gesserit, Litany Against Fear

What philosophical implications does this pose for the people living in the year 2118 in terms of people’s perceptions of time, society and place? — Time

Between now and 2118 our period will be evaluated and re-evaluated numerous times, just as the period between 1900 and 2018 has been evaluated and re-evaluated. For instance, World War I was said to be "a war to end all wars". Not quite. What WWI did, we discovered in 1939, was lay the groundwork for World War II, a much worse war.

Just as researchers investigating WWI snoop into the backstory of who-knew-what-when about the 1914 assassination In Sarajevo of the heir presumptive to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria Hapsburg (his friends just called him Frank), researchers will be snooping into the back story of how, in the end, the world's nations failed to take the neessary steps to reduce CO2 and methane emissions after the relationship between global warming and these green house gasses became apparent.

Some of the back story will be appealing and some of it will be disgraceful. There will be wars between 2018 and 2118, and the outcomes might be quite important to the people of 100 years hence -- assuming there are any. Some of the historians will, over the decades. paint their history (our lives) favorably and some will paint it as one damn bad decision after another.

We can send them a message here, since some historian will certainly be combing through The Philosophy Forum archive: what message should we send? "Oops!" "Sorry." "I recycled faithfully." "The world is going to end soon, anyway, get over it." "Blame George Bush, Dick Chaney, Donald Trump, Exxon, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Old King Coal".

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum.

Studying history is actually a pretty good way to make the people and societies of the past, even 100 years ago, (understandable and "alive".

The people and society of 1900 are accessible, "relatable", and understandable, provided one makes a little effort. After all, 1900 isn't ancient history. Yes, society has changed--it's always changing--but there are many constants which haven't changed.

Your assumption that people in 2118 will have a clear picture of 2018 because of the internet, recordings, films, videos, photographs, and so forth is not altogether well founded. We do not know how much of current communication technology will be operable, accessible, or even in existence in 100 years. Already, technology of the 1960s, like 2" wide video tape is largely lost because the technology was abandoned. The internet will be as enduring as all the big server farms scattered around the world. Do you think the millions of digital machines sitting in the big windowless buildings are still going to be working in 100 years? 25 years? It isn't certain whether CDs will still be playable in 50 years, assuming one still has a CD player.

The media that are most enduring are physical media: film, vinyl disks, print on paper. Virtual or digital media depends entirely on technical continuity over multiple decades of time, something we haven't seen so far.

If libraries keep collections of books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, vinyl recordings, or somehow maintain stocks of machines and servers to preserve digital information, then a record of today's society will be available in 2118 and 2018 will be understandable and accessible. Some libraries have already dumped their newspaper collections -- not because they were unusable, but because the librarians decided the future was in microfilm and digital storage.

Is the society of 1903 Boston in this silent film of 1903 so strange? Electric street cars, crowds, bad traffic...

White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate. — Cavacava

Is this a virtue or a fault? Do you really want white people to be white conscious?

Mass population collapse. — Uneducated Pleb

As the population grows this century and as temperatures, humidity, disruptive storms, droughts, floods, and other disasters become more intolerable, we will reach a crunch where a lot of people are going to die off.

Predictions are that the lands adjacent to the equator will become too hot to maintain normal habitation. It will be too hot to work outside in the daytime, and perhaps too hot to work for long periods at night. Much of Africa, South America, and S and SE Asia would be most adversely affected. Areas as far north as the Southern US would be affected.

Unpleasant Questions: Is a massive die-off among the poorer populations (who simply can not keep body and soul together under the stresses of population and climate change) part of the solution? Should we let this happen or not? Is there anything we might do to stop it, once it began? What if there are, simply, too many people?

not only the oil, also food, water, metals, etc. — René Descartes

Particularly fresh water for drinking and agricultural needs. Peak oil, peak water, peak metal, peal lots-of-stuff probably has already passed.

When I think about the likely rather dystopian future coming down the pike, I am glad that I am 71 and not 21 years old. I expect to be dead of natural causes in 10 years, give or take a few.

* 75-90% of which live in medium to large, polluted urban conglomerates and centers.
* Technology and automation (and potentially A.I.) remove "work" for the bulk of the population.
* Cooperation on climate change, per the usual Prisoner's Dilemma outcome, is rendered ineffectual.
* Scientific advancement to mitigate negative factros is curtailed by social and economic upheaval.
* Social upheaval and climate change create mass migrations.
* Mass migrations create and exacerbate existing social and economic upheaval.
* Mass population collapse. Even survivors of city and urban areas are so psychologically damaged they don't survive and don't reproduce. — Uneducated Pleb

We don't know how certainly inevitable all this is. It is conceivable that wise, thoughtful, scientific and socially enlightened solutions could be devised which would render these calamities moot. What is much, much less conceivable is that "wise, thoughtful, scientific and socially enlightened solutions" will ever see the light of day, much less be implemented.

Still, some progress is being made. Population has stabilized (not shrinking, though) in much of the world. Some areas are still growing way too fast. The means of generating fairly clean energy from nuclear, solar, and wind are available. Having people clustered in cities is more efficient than having them spread out across the countryside, ruining essential farm land.

The cities can be cleaned up; they don't have to be smoky, filthy, garbage-strewn shit holes, to use a famous phrase. A major piece of that is not using cars to move people around. Do it with mass transit, foot traffic, and bicycles.

The dystopian stuff is mostly going to be the result of climate change, and we just aren't doing nearly enough for carbon dioxide and methane abatement. We have probably passed the point at which we can do some things easily. For some time, ever solution has been getting more difficult, and they will keep getting more difficult.

Human responses to stresses aren't quite the same as they are for rat populations; we (presumably) have more flexible response capability that rats. But yes, there is no doubt that after a certain amount of environmental degradation and crowding, people's behavior tends to become more disorganized.

Project Implicit (the implicit bias measurement test site) is a good example of the problem of social science as a whole. Thinking and behavior are difficult to precisely measure and connect.

No one doubts that prejudicial thinking and behavior exists; no one doubts that people are biased; we can observe biased behavior. Still, we can and do sometimes misattribute a given bias to behavior. When examined very closely, thinking and behavior have a not altogether straightforward relationship. We can misinterpret observed behavior.

Tests (like Project Implicit's) attempt to get closer to the truth of the matter by measuring behaviors in an artificial, controlled setting. The tests employ interesting and possibly valid strategies, but the results may or may not seem individually congruent with one's own self-knowledge. Drawing a strong relationship between these kinds of tests and results on the one hand, and real-world behaviors is difficult at best.

I think conspiracy theories are healthy - thinking of possible alternatives is a sign of intelligence. Of course everything has limits; at least they're supposed to be within the bounds of reason. — TheMadFool

Good point.

I don't mean to pick on just you here with my rambling, Crankus, but what bothers me the most about the idea of white privilege, and indeed privilege in itself, is the tendency of those who believe in it to focus almost entirely on macro examples. — Buxtebuddha

I'm too armored in white male privilege to fell any slings and arrows from your response. Just kidding.

It is not possible to address macro and micro aspects of society at the same time. Thank you for your helpful personal anecdote.

Privilege comes as a package. Those who really have a lot of privilege have it because of their wealth, education, social connections, physical appearance, personality, heritage, and race and sex. When I was last in Chicago (before the 2016 election) I stopped in to survey Trump Tower. I wandered around looking for whatever there was, and quickly noticed that I was being followed. I clearly didn't belong there, despite being white and male.

The school I attended was 100% white, and there was a hierarchy of white males. The "privileged" white males were on the basketball or football teams, had lots of friends, (got good grades, I guess; don't know for sure), were good looking, and so on. There was also a hierarchy of white females. Most of the students were excluded from the higher reaches of the hierarchy. It was simply not open.

I'm well aware that many blacks are systematically excluded from... all sorts of things. It isn't just that they are black. They often present as poorly educated, not well versed in standard English (which is spoken by all races in English speaking countries), not dressed in standard business attire, and so on. Their deficiencies may not be their fault; their language usage and attire may be culturally inflected. None the less, they will get the brushoff if they are too far from the mean -- and so will whites, asians, hispanics, and native americans.

It is always a question for the excluded whether, and in what, they really want to be included. Being an outlier has its advantages. By being excluded in the past, gay men were able to put together community for themselves. I've been excluded and I've been accepted; acceptance feels better. But exclusion is one of the possible things that can happen.

I used to think JFK conspiracy theories were baloney, but after 55 years of deep denial, I'm now willing to entertain the notion that perhaps, possibly, potentially, there could have been others involved. It isn't necessary, however.

The 9/11 conspiracies all seem extremely far-fetched and implausible.

On the other hand, it is in some ways surprising that there are not more conspiracies being floated. Maybe the Lockerbie bombing in 1988--surely a tin-pot dictator wouldn't be able to pull off a proper bombing. The British must have had something to do with it. Or maybe an unknown Nazi cell did it. Why wasn't the Ebola or Zika virus blamed on the U. S. Government? AIDS, after all, was the subject of such a conspiracy (CIA plot).

Conspiracy theorists seem to be a lazy lot; they are overlooking a lot of possibilities.

so you will have a new body when you die. — bahman

Good to know. Looking forward to it. Is there an option package?

It doesn't matter to me that reason tends to be a slave of our passions — Sam26

You may be giving the "passions" too negative a spin; they are not the 7 deadly sins. After all, your desire to pursue logic above all else, is a passion. The satisfaction of achieving logical argument, and the pleasure you take in doing logic, thinking about logic, are passions.

Of course, the passions can lead one astray; logic isn't fool proof either. But both passion and logical reasoning can lead us along the right paths.

racist, misogynistic, and repeatedly failed businessman — Maw

Fire and Fury the book about Trump's campaign and arrival in the White House, elaborated on 3 characteristics which are alarming:

1. Trump doesn't, and apparently hasn't, read much.
2. He watches a lot of television.
3. He has a short attention span.

Thee are worrisome flaws; in my mind they are worse than being racist, misogynistic, and failed in business (that last? don't know. ) Watching a lot of television (particularly, commercial cable shows) and not reading widely leaves one's knowledge about many national and world issues either impoverished or invisible.

He doesn't seem to have surrounded himself by people who can step in as competent content providers when content is needed.

Having a short attention span is obviously troubling, because there are so many problems which any national executive has to deal with which require sustained thought.

Trump isn't uneducated. but he wasn't recently educated. Maintaining intellectual vigor requires ongoing wide study, reading, engagement, and so on. He doesn't seem to have done that. Now, a lot of people fail to remain intellectually vigorous, but they aren't The President, either. Ronald Reagan suffered from this condition as well, in addition to sliding into dementia.

His abrupt withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and withdrawal from some important trade negotiations suggest the sort of thing that happens when "uninformed impatience" guides the ship of state.

if a white man leverages his identity to connect with people of his own skin color and gender in order to get voted into office, can you imagine what the left would say? Oh, Neo-nazi! White Supremacist! Patriarchy! — Agustino

There is a difference between being a white male, and putting that status forward in terms of blood, virility, fatherland, and all that. As Peterson pointed out, white people and male people have certain advantages (and disadvantages). A minority of white people hold a good share of the power in society, so being white is an indication that one will have enough power to carry out at least some parts of one's political platform.

Barack Obama's single greatest liability was that he was a successful black man, something that conservatives found terminally irksome. The conservatives probably would have liked him better if he used poor grammar, mumbled, and had a couple of drug convictions and a robbery or two on his record. That he was a lawyer, college professor, crisp English speaker, cool calm and collected, crime record free, and more cultured than them was just... intolerable.

Rightly or wrongly, men have occupied a lot of leadership positions, and seeing a male in a leadership role is comforting to many people, in a way that seeing a woman in the same position is not. One doesn't have to "leverage" white, male; it's already been done.

The white supremacists, on the other hand, explicitly put forward their race, gender, heterosexuality, uncircumcised dick, and so forth, against blacks, gays, Jews, and whoever is on their list of unwanted. They don't attempt to appeal to a broad spectrum of society -- anything but.

Hear hear. aka (Y)

Uncultured barbarians who have the means generally want entre to the class with matching amounts of money. The Cultured barbarians who got there first generally want to fence in their estates to keep new money out. Yes, it is snobbism, of course. This is an old problem for new money. As you become a wildly successful uncultured barbarian, rolling in cash from your various entrepreneurial activities, you will want to join the cocktail party / dinner party / dance party / board room circuit along with the other successful people.

How do you do that? You probably don't have a pedigree which would win you admission (no recent tzars, dukes, or earls in your family tree). Being white isn't privilege enough. Academic degrees definitely won't cut it. What you will do is fake a background. There are standardized methods of doing this. You live in the right kind of mansion, wear the right kind of clothes, go to the right church, give generously to the right charities, volunteer your services on the right committees, and in 30 years you might be accepted, grudgingly. Then your sons and daughters will reap the reward. They will be accepted as scions of money old enough not to still stink.

And per George Bernard Shaw, you also talk the right way. Very important to get the accent and idiom down cold.

Agustino Jr. can then marry the daughter (or son, if they turns out gay) of the leading family. It's a long range project. Good luck.

all emotion does is cloud the issue — Sam26

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. David Hume

The mainspring that runs our brain is the limbic system (the emotions) not the pre-frontal cortex (our center of reasoning). Moral education is more the instruction of the passions than the instruction of reason.

Imagination would be decidedly helpful in getting through the 1000 year stretch, but imagination has to have something to work on. Think about how you would imagine the pleasures of sex if you had never had sex, or never seen or heard a depiction of sex. One's fantasy would be kind of impoverished.

So. therefore, get as many experiences as you can of all kinds, real, read, or heard about. Then you will have more raw material for the reactors of your imagination.

So, Agustino, a lot of the stuff that gets batted around these days from the left and the right both is like fako interior decorations. It just isn't real.

Paul Fussell wrote a book a few decades back, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, that explains all this. There are certain features of the would-be old-money upper class look. even though one is, like yourself. a nouvelle arrivee. For instance, the wood floor should be dark wood -- as if it had been walked on for at least 200 years. There are products available to achieve the desired darkness.

One should buy real oriental rugs of course, made by suffering children under horrible working conditions, but they need to be old oriental rugs, slightly threadbare. After all, they were bought when Wilson was president. And so on.

If he wasn't POTUS, would that not be disturbing? — Agustino

No. Then God would be in his heaven where he belongs and all would be right with the world, sort of.

Yes, decoration is supposed to look nice. It aimed high but missed. You can't "legitimately" glue some veneer onto wallboard and call the job done.

Part of the problem was that the camera angle was too wide. Had it narrowed in on Peterson, the podium, and the fako backdrop, it would have come off better. As Oscar Wilde put it, "Only shallow people do not judge by appearances".

I thought the setting looked quite nice and fancy, though I don't know the place. — Agustino

Oh dear... So now we know what your mansion will look like. Hint: if you're going to go for the ruling class look in decor, go all the way: fako wood paneling, fako styrofoam beams in the ceiling, fako oriental-type carpets, fako leather/oak/horsehair-stuffed chairs, etc. No visible florescent lighting, use period colors, no anachronistic brand names on anything.

The fake decoration wasn't hideous, certainly, but it was the wrong fake decoration for the space. A modern hotel conference room isn't entitled to (possible, but probably not) marble statuary (too white, bright for one thing), books that look leather bound (either fake or bought by the ton by interior decoration supply companies) and fako 18th-19th century woodwork. There were too many other signals that this was merely a conference room in a hotel -- the chairs, lighting, walls, paint, etc.

The decor has nothing to do with what Peterson said or didn't say -- it was just off-putting on its own.

Oh dear, what's wrong with the TRUMP brand now? — Agustino

As a hotel brand, nothing I suppose. It's just that the eponymous developer of the brand happens to be POTUS, and as such is disturbing in ever so many ways.

PS It doesn't help his case at all that the lectern he's at has a big sign saying 'TRUMP Hotels'. It's not his fault, just bad luck, but it reduces his chances of changing anybody's mind to just about zero. — andrewk

I had the same distraction factor of seeing the TRUMP brand. Plus the fake decor behind the lectern.

Peterson is a good talker, have to hand that to him. He does a good job of supporting his points, pretty much.

I do have difficulty connecting Karl Marx, the man of the 19th century, to spawning post-modernism, or that Karl Marx is responsible for Lenin's, Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, or the North Korean's horrible acts. In his name, yes, really really bad things were done. But other people managed to do very, very bad things without Marx -- like slavery and genocide in the western hemisphere before Marx was even born.

Also, the US led the way in nuclear terrorism. Given the relatively loose control that was actually exercised over the many thousands of atomic and thermonuclear bombs (never mind the alleged sole authority of the POTUS to use them) it is miraculous that a totally ruinous nuclear war didn't happen by accident. Of course, it's not too late to have that war, since we have enough atomic weapons ready to launch (but far fewer than before the nuclear reduction treaties) to bring about a nuclear winter. Can't blame that on Marx.

I could use more knowledge on just how POMO did come about. The topic is about as attractive as figuring out exactly how a fat berg stuffed up the London sewers, but if anybody has a suggestion for a BRIEF discussion of POMO's history, please post it.

Without eyes to see or ears to hear, how would you even know you were in a women's locker room? For all you would know, you might be hovering in a diesel engine repair shop or in a swamp or in the middle of a black hole (wouldn't affect you since you would be entirely incorporeal).

It isn't the case that Marx focussed on conflict between haves and have nots: He focussed on the conflict between producers and owners -- the working class and the bourgeoisie. The WRONG that Marx identified wasn't that some people had more than others, it was that those who produce all wealth (the workers) do not benefit proportionately, and that those who benefit DISPROPORTIONATELY (the bourgeoisie) do no work at all. EDIT: They perform work putting things together, but once assembled, they hire people to make sure it stays put together.

Another thing we have to take into account about Peterson is his milieu: Peterson is a college professor. College campus are exactly the kind of place where one would expect ideological excess because on campus are thousands of students (well... hundreds, anyway) who are anxious to try on radical new theories in a relatively safe environment (they are, after all, paying customers).

The wannabe radicals may be right, wrong, or not even wrong, but they can't, don't, and won't affect society very much. Once they get out of college and get hired to work in a large corporation, they will find they are not allowed anywhere close to the levers of power. If they attempt college stunts at work they are likely to get fired.

Peterson has perhaps been overly influenced by what happens on his (and other) campuses. It's a very lively but unrepresentative school playground.

EDIT: I should not minimize the spread of POMO-type thinking. The Obama administration issued a directive to schools which bent over backwards to kiss the ground beneath its feet that trans students could use whichever toilet they identified with, whichever locker room they identified with, and that to protect their privacy, parents should not be notified of the decision in a given school. The Trump administration withdrew the directive. So, I approve of at least one act of the Trump administration.

Didn't Marx hold that advances in production, technology, and so on would result in new kinds of thinking? That seems to have been, and is the case. Birth control, gay liberation, women's liberation, black power, chicano power, white power, disability liberation, trans-sexual therapy, ACT UP, Black Lives Matter, pro-life, Antifacissimo, and so on and so forth, are the result of those advances. Better communication technology, new medicines (birth control pills, morning after pills), surgical procedures, a de-industrializing economy, global trade, scientific advances, and plain old political organizing made all kinds of changes possible--and they happened.

Can some vague "Left" claim credit for all of this? No. The suffrage movement is about as old as Marxism. The women's movement never needed leftist guidance. They had their own thought-leaders. The modern gay rights movement started partly as a result of large number of gay men and women being evicted from the armed forces at 3 different port bases during and after WWII: L.A., San Francisco, and New York. The navy created the concentrations of gay people who starting developing a gay culture.

Racial Minorities didn't need the left to tell them they were oppressed, either. They learned that directly from life. I don't think disability activists were ever characterized as leftists: they were just tired of not being able to live in a society which made zero accommodations for the large number of disabled people.

It isn't clear to me exactly where transsexualism came from. You know, the first one (on record anyway) was Christine Jorgensen who had sex remodeling surgery in 1951 in Denmark. CJ grew up in the Bronx in New York--not a hotbed of radical ideology at the time.

The left didn't invent all the trans nonsense. It bubbled up among transsexuals, and the POMO left found it particularly attractive. given their own weird posturing.

Somehow, I don't think most members of "the left" who you consider to be behind all these identity schemes would recognize a communist or a socialist if their lives depended on it. It's a strange kind of Marxism, if you ask me -- perverse.

Indubitably.

One probably wouldn't become an atheist in order to overcome nihilism; indeed, having an anchor in a faith tradition helps one deal with nihilism more effectively. Yes, reason can lead to nihilism -- it's one of the possible positions, and a questing mind is likely to discover it sooner or later -- though most people get a whiff of it and keep moving.

There are more advantages to being anchored in a faith tradition than there are disadvantages. And being "anchored" leaves plenty of room for interpreting, reinterpreting the tradition as changing circumstances arise. "Time makes ancient good uncouth." A faith that worked as a child cease working later in life, but the "tradition" remains, and with it one's social guides, morals, ethics, liturgies, and so forth.

But... I'm glad you overcame your brief encounter with nihilism.

Here's Wikipedia's definition of existential nihilism:

Existential nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. The meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism.

I suppose somebody might think I was a nihilist because I have, on a number of occasions, said that "the universe is meaningless and does not provide us with meaning". The universe is meaningless, it can't give us meaning. We can impose meaning on our world, in our lives -- or on the entire universe for that matter. We are meaning makers. We are where meaning comes from. A theistic believer holds that God provides meaning, but if one is not a theist, and not a nihilist, one has to provide meaning.

We have gone so far as to actually create God, and describe God as the Creator of the Universe and all things in it. This isn't merely colossal chutzpah on our part; it's our greatest task -- to find ways of imposing meaning on the cosmos, on down to our own lives.

So, I don't think that life is meaningless. A consequence of failing to maintain meaning is anomie: "Anomie is a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals". It is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, e.g., under unruly scenarios resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. It was popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim."

I suppose many people feel nihilistic at times: Life just seems bleak, meaningless, flat, uninhabited. It's a bad feeling. No, I don't think it's a mental illness, though depressed people feel pretty bleak at times. It's a philosophical illness, something that decreases one's fitness to live in this world. I understand that people become deeply disenchanted with life, and then it looks like ashes. It's always in our best interest to resist nihilism, and the anomie that it can engender.

Nihilism is tiresome. What makes you think I am not against nihilism?

If you had no more memories there would be nothing to regret. — René Descartes

True, of course. Nothing to regret, nothing to be happy about. And that is my belief: death is nothingness.

Babies, especially lobotomized babies, would have a rather nebbishy time of it, but by another sign of God's skimpy mercy, infants would only spend a year in this limbo. Nothing to think about, and nothing to think with.

The greatest sign of God's larger mercy is that non-human animals are spared all this rococo rigamarole. they just drop dead and that is that. Which, btw, is what I believe happens to our animal species: We just cease and desist and that's it. There are no second acts in America or in eternity.

allegorically — Michael Ossipoff

I've never committed allegory -- I swear!

It doesn't need "to sense a future". All that needs to happen is arousal, insertion, ejaculation, sperm meets egg, egg turns into offspring, voila: reproduction. A sense of some future is irrelevant. Egg hatches, pup is born, mama and papa feed it, it gets big, arousal, insertion, ejaculation, sperm meets egg, egg turns into offspring, rinse and repeat.

Is the 17 year old girl getting screwed silly by the idiot bastard's son§ thinking about the future? Not at the moment. Not until she's unmistakably pregnant. Then what? Dither dither, hither thither, can't afford an abortion; morning after pill is 4 months too late. Looks like reproduction is sliding down the chute.

Future? What future?
Ob-la di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra
La-la, la-la life goes on.

No need for future sense.

§ Frank Zappa lyrics proceed along the lines of...

The idiot bastard son:

BTW, it's "dead ringer" not "dead wringer". What is a dead ringer?

A ringer is a horse substituted for another of similar appearance in order to defraud the bookies. This word originated in the US horse-racing fraternity at the end of the 19th century. The word is defined for us in a copy of the Manitoba Free Press from October 1882:

The "dead" part means exact. Don't ask me way, but like "dead center" -- or precisely in the center. On the other hand, "dead line" has always had more ambiguous and ominous meanings, as in "if your toes aren't on the line by 5:00 pm, you'll be dead". In other words, late = dead. But that isn't what it means in dead ringer. It intensifies "ringer" which is a duplicate; in other words, an exact duplicate, even though that is redundant, because a duplicate is presumably exact, or we would call it similar. If one horse was all white and its ringer had a black star on it's forehead, or a short black ankle, that would not be a very exact duplicate.

I will be spending a lot of time during my 1000 year stint mulling over matters like these.

This title is great, lmao — MindForged

Glad you liked it.



Oh definitely, you are a dead wringer / dead ringer for the 1000 year post-mortem meditation milieu. You're well read, you know programming languages (you can code for a couple of centuries), you have lots of opinions to sharpen, and so on. You are somewhat deficient in sexual experiences, however. At some point before the flying fickle finger of fate finds you, and while you are still able, you should spend a couple of weeks in a non-stop orgy. You should also come to the United States for a couple of years so that you can be totally appalled and amazed by American culture. That will give you a lot to chew on, too.

Christ, it was a joke! How much more vacuous did you want it?

Baloney is what I call the idea of disembodied minds floating around like brains in a swimming pool.

Bad memories are not good to have. Mistakes will happen; avoid the ones that you can. Politeness will produce more good memories than bad ones. If you spurn the day-old discount store cake, the purchaser might shove it in your face--literally -- might be a bad memory.

You won't have 1000 years of boredom if you stock up on things to think about, rethink, mull over, remember fondly, recite, etc.

You understand, I hope, that this thread IS a joke. It was posted in The Lounge.

But the bit about non-physically anchored minds plugs into the joke. There are all kinds of serious threads speculating about God, the soul, life after death, other universes... all topics about which we know nothing and about which we probably should not be chattering away about as if they were certainties.

But it is also true, and in line with having a good life that is worth living, that we should seek out good, rich experiences. Of course: sometimes we have to clean the oven, rake up all the leaves in the yard, mow the grass, do laundry, and other such boring jobs--never mind the brightly lit hells of the modern office park. But when we can, we should opt for better.

A lot of the time when I was working and dealing with life as we know it, I had neither the time nor the energy to opt for much of anything. Then when I retired, I found I finally had the time to read more books, listen to more music, enjoy time passing.

Happy Birthday. Which number was it? Chocolate cake?