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  • Word of the day - Not to be mistaken for "Word de jour."
    The inveterate masturbations of a pseudo philosopher are still pleasurable even though they might impede growth and development conferred by pursuing more social or practical unions. An orgy of one is quite dull.

    The false article in the encyclopedia* of J.L. Borges short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is a cause for nightmares (eg. see power of the spreading meme "fake news" by a nation's figurehead). We are contaminated (or changed) by everything we are exposed to. The fiction we read helps us to read/(mis)interpet the world.

    Footnote: * I was so hoping the suffix of pedia related to feet rather than the ancient greek word for child. I was imagining an encyclopedia in line with Borges projection of the world as a library, such that one could wander the realm of knowledge (the encyclopedia) by foot as one can perambulate the actual landscape of the world.
  • The Necrology Exercise
    An obituary for the archetype of philosophical Cynicism, Diogenes of Sinope, might be quite fun. But that would take a bit of research.

    There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them.[8] — Wikipedia: Cynicism (philosophy)

    I'd like to live like a dog for a while, if I could muster the courage to lose my job and learn how to sleep anywhere and eat anything. Sounds like a good skill to have as we face economic insecurity and increasing poverty in the U.S. Street jars (homes) and dogs (friends) for everyone.
  • The Necrology Exercise
    Of course it will be like this, nobody wants a life that does not have a perennial meaning, therefore that it is meaningless.bcccampello

    Is a perennial meaning that which is intelligible (or valuable or good) by virtue of participation in perennial forms? Mircea Eliade had this notion of eternity as perennial acts. The past happens again because of practical reenactments. Here the religion would be a reenactment of desired and good as it pertains to philosophical modes or analyses/criticism. Meaning is derived from your participation with your fellow people.


    To have perennial meaning is to be perceived as having desirable (or meaningful) meaning in this game of life. Or as the maligned Jordan Peterson would say, to play well in as many "dominance hierarchies" as you can.
  • The Necrology Exercise
    Jersey Flight was considered as a contemporary, liberal version of Nietzsche. He was an iconoclast against all forms of cultural superstition, including elitism and academia. His intellectual interests included, defining and expanding the psychological qualities that account for advanced thinking, as well as collaborating a method for its culturation. He had repeatedly challenged intellectuals to transcend theory and fulfill their social responsibility to engage culture through polemics. His writing style was consciously concise; an anti-scholastic, he tried to communicate complex ideas in simple prose. He had written multiple volumes of philosophy that are yet been released to the public. He is was one of the founders of The New School of Polemics. — Jersey Flight from a Third Person Point of View

    May God and other inherited stupidities cease to contaminate impressionable young minds. Amen.

    Now that "God" has been swept away as irrelevant, folks can continue critiquing/commenting on the exercise.
  • Dungeons and Lounges
    Lamarch and JF are impressive, eloquent, and dramatic characters. Egoists or polemicists for good or ill. Worthy of an epic adventure.

    The metaphysics of Plotinus is either an influence or an influencer of Gnostic mythos. Why is the the shaft of primordial light being split such a strong and pervasive, popular mythic divine conception. Newton is pictured with a crystal refractor. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has it as album art. Noble Dust used it in his poem as naming it a godhead.

    The light of the sun illuminates and drives life itself in all its grand plurality. We should just call the Sun our god, or curse it because it generated this horror show, along with the darkness.

    _________

    "When the One is refracted through the prism of deficiency, this coruscating dream of the Demiurge, then there is just refracted light of this One great deficiency: the rainbow of duality. The colors of worldly things in the field stand opposed to or aside one another in their reflections of the beatific veils of Maya."

    From the Book of the Well of Mirrors by Daimon Kalkan

    "The tea is usually black or green or white, aside a little piece of spiced or fruited cake."

    From the Book of Tea by Camilla Sen

    ______

    God damnit.... how does Bimble get to his end. By the burden of the work of focusing on Bimble.
  • How can I get more engagement with my comments on other peoples posts?
    ①, ②, ③.... TPF coins. The wretched of the wretched are still captivated with the joy of finding pennies on the title page. Someone must've seen a ㊿.

    Start with explaining why pragmatism is digging the grave of Capitalism. How am I to understand that cartoon? Sorry I forgot to give you a penny.
  • The "One" and "God"
    "Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul. To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One."Gus Lamarch's Plotinus

    At this point there is no longer any need of discussion (a deficiency). Sounds like a version of union with the universal soul in stillness, as in line with the pursuit of Advaita Vedanta ("nonduality").
  • Knowledge of Good and Evil
    Does it have a male or female presence. Would theists be open to the idea that God is entirely female?Gregory

    The consort of the precursor of Yahweh in the Caananite pantheon was Asherah. Guess he couldn't deal with her cramping his style.

    Despite her association with Yahweh in extra-biblical sources[citation needed], Deuteronomy 12 has Yahweh commanding the destruction of her shrines so as to maintain purity of his worship. — Wikipedia:Asherah

    Not that this answers any questions. Religion evolves like everything else in time.
  • Dungeons and Lounges
    I think JerzeyFlight ought to be a character in this world but only if he could do the meaningless, inane, work of writing himself into it. He ought to be himself, swift and exacting in judgment concerning worthy intellects and prolific with language. Maybe he could war against religious cults in order to save the world from a return to a prophesied dark age. A war of the rationalistas against the irrationalistas. Hopefully there will be a lot of blood because humans cannot get enough of it.

    He ought to have an opinion about the existence of the unicorn, a strange and exotic horse-like creature from distant lands, which carries a spiral sword on its head for competitive sexual selection.

    JerzeyFlight! bearing on his head the swift piercing screw-needle of a preternatural kind of horse sense. That knobby knife of power! The cutting agent of just good rational sense that puts any house or stable in proper order.


    :monkey:
  • Why was my post removed?
    What is your central paragraph saying? As far as my reading of it, if you omitted it, nothing would be lost.

    One can guess why Anton Levay decided to make solipsism a cardinal sin but it's still just a guess, unless he wrote the reasons down somewhere.

    What is solipsism?
  • It is more reasonable to believe in the resurrection of Christ than to not.
    Don't discount the mythical (and or ritualistic) component of the story of a dying and resurrecting god. The gospels are stories and not primary sources. I wouldn't literalize the resurrection. It is a metaphor of transition, like the turning of one thing to another by a ritual mechanism (a sacrifice/martyrdom).

    What if Jesus had not been martyred?
  • Risk Assessment: The Ladder is too High


    The basic problem was that there was a water tapping noise within one of the gutters. So there maybe some debris inside the vertical gutter I can't access without dissembling.

    I put my cell phone on a poll and took video of the gutters which looked pristine. I ran some water down but couldn't fix the tapping noise.

    I ended up applying force to the metal where the water hits the metal to muffle the sound by means of a zip tie and some rubber. A temporary fix for an annoying noise (chinese water torture).

    I will try running the hose on a pole when I get a second man to help me.

    So temporarily fixed. Ideally I'd just get gutter cleaners. The roof is way to high. My boss is secretly trying to kill me. :sweat:
  • Is Christianity really Satanic?


    Suppose you had to go to a "Christian" church, to be a part of any fold (community) per se. Which denomination would you choose? Suppose you had to be the leader of a new denomination, the Church of Gregory... and you had to convert other Christians who were discouraged with their faith... what would you do?
  • Is Christianity really Satanic?
    The word "Satanism" was adopted into English from the French satanisme.[14] The terms "Satanism" and "Satanist" are first recorded as appearing in the English and French languages during the sixteenth century, when they were used by Christian groups to attack other, rival Christian groups.[15] In a Roman Catholic tract of 1565, the author condemns the "heresies, blasphemies, and sathanismes [sic]" of the Protestants.[14] In an Anglican work of 1559, Anabaptists and other Protestant sects are condemned as "swarmes of Satanistes [sic]".[14] As used in this manner, the term "Satanism" was not used to claim that people literally worshipped Satan, but rather presented the view that through deviating from what the speaker or writer regarded as the true variant of Christianity, they were regarded as being essentially in league with the devil. — Wikipedia: Satanism
  • Changing colors
    Smithsonian Magazine: True Colors, by Matthew Gurewitsch

    Teeth are important these days for the sake of making an impression. Show up to class with a mouth full of char-coaled teeth, red teeth, yellow teeth, blue teeth, green teeth. Folks might take a guess as to what you've been eating... Or just how sane you might be.
  • Self sacrifice in the military or just to save the life of one other.
    I can see it being a rational choice (but by no means an obligatory one) to pick option 2.Pfhorrest

    It's hard to rationalize those choices in your scenario, especially if we multiplied actual life- scenarios . One might see the future unchangeable due to massive historical forces. How much does one person's voice/actions/vote count in the course of this flow. This would help one to choose life over the unknowable effects of sacrifice. But there are folks who know how powerful one vote/action/choice is in the course of saving lives but I can't imagine there is much vacillation about it. One takes action and that is just an expression of one's moral character. Or one is conscripted (or follows the order in the chain of command) at the cost of being made a coward by one's peers.
  • Self sacrifice in the military or just to save the life of one other.
    If one believes there is no actual life after death, and everyone dies eventually, then all that survives anyone is their legacy, so dying sooner rather than later in exchange for a greater rather than lesser legacy makes a kind of rational sense.Pfhorrest

    How to you explain greater legacy as a consequence of dying sooner? How would the length of one's life have anything to do with "legacy?" Does it relate to a culture of honoring those who sacrifice their lives to their country? Why should anyone care about legacy?
  • Risk Assessment: The Ladder is too High


    :strong: :cool:

    We'll see what I can whip up.
  • What am I now? - I can't even pigeon-hole myself anymore . .


    Too bad for the robots then. Those dummies, whoever they are.
  • What am I now? - I can't even pigeon-hole myself anymore . .


    Ironic coming from an entity with the name RogueAI.
  • Get Creative!
    That's dark and elegant Noble Dust. A shot in the dark. Who is that standing in the Dust, that guy from the Tarkovsky film Stalker, or the Writer, and where is the Cat?

    Post-industrial haiku sues you. Lawyer up.

    ___________

    That beach reminds me of a the only French beach I ever went to, somewhere by Guingamp in Brittany.

    I wish I had the courage to paint in public if I ever took up paint. Every now and again I glimpse an artist painting in plain air. I'd like to see also a tight rope walker and a jugglar in plain air.

    On me P and M's mantle piece sits a hand-me-down in a hideously thick frame of the view from the sea point a walk away from their home. It might be a plain air painting. It's quite thick oil with nice textured effects in a light impressionistic style (though I don't know my art terms). I'll try to discern the name if I can remember.
  • I Ching and DNA
    The West dismisses its own adage, "As above, so below." as mere superstition, but the self-sameness at different levels of fractals falls out of the mathematics of self- referential definition and reiteration (change).unenlightened

    Curious axiom. Why not, "As Westward, so Eastward." The polarity of up and down was pretty straightforward because when you look down you see your feet (if one can discern feet) and when you look upwards you see the heavens (if one sees the heavens). But who looked upwards and downwards and made a habit of it and what were they seeing?

    There are comparisons structure/geometry between domains. There are bewildering tiny spheres and there are bewildering large spheres. Who imagined scaling phenomena except with relation to distance from an object. As one walks forward it grows but nothing is seen as one walks backwards, unless one walks backwards and sees things recede into distance.

    Why would any ancient ever want to draw a triangle if such an algorithm is novel. What functions have triangles played in the course of humanity's scientific progress and was there ever magic associated with them as opposed to what isn't categorically magical(?).

    Did the (night sky) have color for really ancient peoples? One can discern color in mars with naked eyes. What else is red on Earth may belong the to category Mars, which is just to presume a connection based on likeness (sympathetic magic).

    The annual and monthly motions of the sky structured by incidents and accidents of coincidence (becoming dogmas and institutions) affairs on Earth. But cosmologists/astronomers are still looking at stuff because of the necessary connection. We must know something worth knowing... but what is worth knowing?

    How does one impose meaning on a meaningless object? Or do meaningless objects impose meaning on themselves? Are there any meaningless objects? Or are there necessary connections to be made for the sake of living like a person lives.
  • Two Ways of Putting On Socks
    Donning hose or doffing hose?
  • Case against Christianity
    As to Hanover's "brand of" that he found, what difference does it make to be punished for one's own sin versus the sin of one's parents? Who is deciding what 'sin' but with whatever group you are subject to, protected and or threatened by. One concedes with respect to the fear of death, or even worse torture.

    There is a hellish aspect to double-binds. Conditions where one is absolutely damned by the vision of his/her course of action. Somewhere a person has been told to choose between the life and death of a loved one by perceived coercion but the choice is false insofar as the outcome is unchanged (the choice is and or is not a choice). Crimes are committed.

    I think God's condition is one that resembles a double-bind of either perpetrator or victim. As is the case with sin, we are potentially all victim-perpetrators unaware, or aware insofar as we have the capacity to be aware. Maybe the trolley problem is lurking and the trolley is moving way too fast. Whatever happens, happens.

    St Paul clearly teaches that each Christian is the bride of Jesus. He can't marry a group as a group, so the meaning of the Church as the bride of Christ is clearly that each Christian marries Jesus when he becomes a ChristianGregory

    Which groups do you feel need to be "arranged" in matrimony?
  • Case against Christianity


    Crazy but the world is insane now, so I wouldn't knock him for it. Too much Augustinian splooge to clean up to worry much I guess.
  • Case against Christianity
    Their theology and ethics involve our being forgiven for something we didn't do.Banno

    It refers to the sin you inherit from your father and mother, which is the condition of being someone distinct rather than no one distinct.
  • Religion as an evolutionary stable strategy and its implications on the universal truths
    I'd like to know what J. Peterson thinks about the works of Rene Girard, another thinker that intellectual conservatives/Christians love.

    Girard attributes the beginnings of gods to spontaneous lynching of vulnerable individuals as a means to dissipate the conflict in community and that this motif/dynamic is universal(?). The harmonizing effect of the lynching solves a greater immediate problem at the expense of the low-status or out-group individuals, but also that the victim is deified as someone who has contributed to the good. The idea of the scapegoat, a sacrifice by proxy grows out of this. Think of Abraham replacing his son on the altar with a ram.


  • Case against Christianity
    A somewhat Darwinian approach to the Christ Myth. It maybe a "just so" theory from a French intellectual but it packs a compelling punch.

  • The Secret Of The Universe Has Been Revealed
    Now I remember why.Sir2u

    I don't think you ever forgot.
  • The Secret Of The Universe Has Been Revealed


    He did once say he was fond of Emil Cioran. The morbid poetic aphorisms crack me up and the're pithy.

    There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

    ________

    To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.
    — Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Dispair

    A love of uselessness that simulates an illusion of life -- sounds like magic to me. They make me actually laugh and smile.
  • Knowledge is a Privileged Enterprise
    Religion has been on earth for thousands and thousands of years and it never figured out, and does not know how to produce healthy humans.JerseyFlight

    I've seen some quite healthy and happy Mormons.Even Jehova's Witnesses, in between statements of "there is only one true God," seemed happy. I guess it's all an illusion. Of course there is always collateral damage of some sort... those who can never belong to the group and suffer for it.
  • The Secret Of The Universe Has Been Revealed


    Would love to read a novel written by 180 Proof in ordinary language. Hope no ones ears are burning.
  • Dungeons and Lounges
    But there was something else... the booming voice of Captain Luda.

    "All hands!"

    Bimble looked down at his hands as the jeering motley crowd of weathered sailors broke away and began to assemble port side in a straight queue.

    "And you, tea imps, to the patron's deck. U're not my crew." Or anyone else's for that matter. Luda whispered the latter to himself, waited for the dark children to leave then addressed everyone in his captain's voice. "As you well ken, the rats arr worst as ever. Man's affliction the father would say, that one's home is another's food, always til the end of days. But fret not about the rum, costly as it is. We will gain new fortunes in the weeks ahead." Luda locked eyes on the rat-catcher. "This lucky git is not our curse but a means for hope. Look favorable on those who would fix what we cannot. For we have tried, a dozen dozen days and more to wipe the vermin out. So give um the benefit of your doubts before tossing licks. Besides, he is a jugglar. Better than ol Limon, whose tricks are as common as gullshit. Show us jugglar, Bimmy or.. is it Bamble, a bit of fun. "

    "It's Bimble, like 'Thimble' but with a 'bee'." Bimble reached into his rucksack to reveal two spheres, one red and one blue and began to juggle. The sailors queue relaxed into idle crowd of onlookers.

    "One falls, blue balls
    "Red rose, round."

    Bimble repeated the words. He heard laughs, snorts and snickers.

    "One rose, red rod
    Blue falls, down."

    Suddenly the spheres seem to defy the motions of Bimble's hands, as if they were levitating on their own, and multiplying. The speed of the spheres were lost in multiplicity and a continuous magentic circle of flame. The purple light dazzled in the sailors eyes between utterances of awe.

    "That is almost as good as the dancing Sheilas." said Limon.
  • Dungeons and Lounges


    I would cut it at "But there was something else." Holding to the possibility that the rogue wave is the expedient we need to further the story along to its end, if it could ever get there. After that I feel like the tempo accelerated and I felt impatience.

    The same impatience that caused the those things we fucking hate, non-deterministic space-time anomalies.
  • Dungeons and Lounges


    The true name of [unknown] if he exists, is Michael Mod. But for the purposes of this story no one ought to know that the name of [unknown] is Michael Mod. His caretaker, Yahad, an exceedingly beautiful young man, speaks for him.

    He is from Devon, where the stony outcrops of Dartmoor, the tors, hide archaic secrets. But all readers must disregard this information.