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961

No, it’s more the fact that those assholes imposed themselves on me and pushed me to be what they expected me to be and now that I do the same in return, see fit to whine and cry as much as they claimed me to be doing all those years.

And there is a limit to the freedom that is given to people. The balance you say we should strive for is a balance I can agree on, yet you and so many others fight me way too much on it to sit there and cry about how nobody is letting you be you. All I see is people being themselves and whining that nobody is letting them be themselves. It’s asinine, and if you’re going to sit there and expect them to let you, in a world where freedom is earned and fought for and every right that you want to claim is only a claim until you earn it… toughen up and nut up or shut up. In fact, change that ‘or’ to an ‘and’. Nut up AND shut up. Unless you have something of actual value to say that isn’t a repeat of mindless bullshit that you have never given thought about to the validity of the statement that popped out of your mouth like your boyfriends cock.

962

Then you want to be an asshole just like “those assholes”. And you consider that “good”.

The rest of your post is an emotional rant so I won’t respond to it. It deserves a warning but I won’t bother reporting it. Have a nice day. :smiley:

963

No, actually, it’s the fact that if Good doesn’t push back, then Evil wins. If Good refuses to step to the plate for fear of being labeled a hypocrite, then it loses to the worst. If Peace is unwilling to dominate all over war, war will always exist and nobody will have or enjoy a sustainable, lasting peace. And that is just something I can not abide by.

A nice day I WILL have, taken at the end of my metaphorical sword that is positioned at your throat. :sunglasses:

964

metaphorical treat duly noted.

965

Note that I’m not being too metaphorical. I’m not talking about a metaphorical flesh sword IN your throat, but a metaphorical sword-sword AT your throat.

a sword like:

I mean, hate to burst your gay bubble, but given your taste for trying to misconstrue what I say, I might be well within my means and right to assume an innuendo was made out of what I said.

966

K: what I want is irrelevant… philosophical arguments are not about me as a person, but
to make clear a position and why that position is a better one then any other one…in a society
where too many people are “brutish thugs” and too many people engage in the pursuit
of material goods, then that society will fail… we are engage in a larger idea then just ourselves…
we are part of a larger thing which is society and a civilization… what must we do in that
society/civilization that allows it to succeed? being a “brutish thug” or engage in material
pursuit doesn’t benefit that society/civilization… people might engage in being a “brutish thug”
or pursue material goods if… IF, they don’t believe themselves to be a part of something bigger and
they are right… if they weren’t a part of something bigger, but they are… everyone is part of
society/civilization. The problem is people don’t always understand their connection or
place within society/civilization… we are connected and interconnected to everyone
and everything… we don’t exist alone or apart or separate… we are society/civilization.
if there is a failure of education… it is this… it doesn’t put enough emphasis
on the connection of everyone and everything… we are one… I would make that
part of education… first, last and everything in between…the connection of everyone to
everyone and everything…to choose to be a “brutish thug” in the light of everyone
being connected to everyone else makes no choice… but if you exist alone… yes, it does
make sense…we don’t act or exist in isolation… and thus we must choose…
what do you choose?

Kropotkin

967

K: free to pursue one’s own end?.. and that would presume that we exist alone and separate/apart from everyone else… we don’t… we are part of a larger society/civilization and we must act in terms of being part of that society/civilization…we exist in the bounds of a larger set of rules… think of this thing we call life as a game… now every game has it rules…
why those rules? because it allows the game to go on in a orderly manner… what about
those who violate the rules in a game? say, basketball… you violate the rules in basketball
and you get a penalty, a foul… enough fouls and you are ejected from the game… the same thing exists in life… if you violate the rules enough or have a flagrant foul, you are ejected from the game… sent to jail… until it is deemed that you will play by the rules and you are released…if you are enough of a problem to the playing of the game that you must be removed permanently, you are…gone in both the game and life…
you cannot pursue you own goal to the point of becoming a problem to the other players
of the game and if you do? you will get a penalty of some sort…
think of life as a game and the rules become much easier to understand…

Kropotkin

968

It presumes that we are not merely slaves to everyone else … it presumes that we have our own lives to live.

The rules of basketball are static.
The rules of life are changing and flexible. They have to be in order to adapt to changing environments.

The rules that we do adopt ought to make life better. If one loves freedom, then a “better life” consists of the ability to act independently and freely. That includes as much freedom from rules as possible. Of course, there has to be a rule which enshrines that freedom.

969

It is about you. You described your ideal society. You described your ideal human and your ideal human pursuits.

Quite a few people would disagree with that ideal.

As for the ideas of “know thyself” and “become who you are” :

Knowing yourself means recognizing your own character whatever it may be.

“Become who you are” means that you accept your own character and act accordingly.

That character may be violent, insensitive, callous, controlling, etc. It’s what we commonly call “good” and “bad” and “evil”.

But “becoming who you are” is expressly forbidden in your ideal world. Even “knowing who you are” is only a first step to changing to what “you ought to be”.

970

as I have been on my quest through philosophy, I have been
reading many books… at present I am reading two books…
just started both…one is the “Career of philosophy” by Randall
and the other is volume 4 of the Routledge history of philosophy…
“the Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism” as I read them I
am reminded that the quality of a good book to me, leaves me with
far more questions then the book answers…
it is not through certainty we learn, but in doubt and uncertainty
we learn…success teaches us nothing, but failure, oh failure is the
great teacher…my failure is my inability to properly
grasp the great question of our age… I must be able to ask the
question before I can answer it… and I don’t, as yet, understand
what is the great question of our age… every age, every philosopher
has been faced with a question and that age/philosopher has spent their
career trying to find an answer for that momentous question of the age…
Descartes question was, “how can we find certainty”?
upon which rock can we be certain… the rock of religion?
the rock of science? the rock of philosophy?

what is the basis for our having certainty in the universe…
that was Descartes question…
todays question is really about the fact we have no real basis for
certainty in our world given what science has told us about
the nature of reality… we live in a chaotic, unpredictable,
random universe and how do we create a philosophy that answer this
question…human beings have a need for certainty and in this day and age
certainty is the one thing you won’t find…we know that there is no
one “TRUTH” but we have many personal truths and how can we turn that
into a philosophy? perhaps that is the answer… we don’t have one big
overarching “TRUTH” but we have billions of personal truths and we act,
believe, function and die for our own small personal truths…because
that is all we have…philosophy that functions like atoms…millions,
even billions of philosophies spinning alone in space… trying to find a
universal connection… that will allow all those philosophies a chance to
unite into one… a reverse big bang theory if you will…we have atoms,
as we have philosophies waiting to combine into one theory, one structure…
and we have forces in the universe waiting to act upon those philosophies just
as we have forces waiting to act upon atoms… we have gravity for atoms and
culture and society for philosophies…society cannot exist with the crush
of millions of philosophies upon it, so philosophy/society tries to reduce all those
philosophies into several big philosophies called ideologies and ism’s…
this is far more manageable then dealing with millions or billions of
philosophies…and society is nothing more than an attempt
to bring order and structure into that system called life…
ever wonder why the U.S doesn’t have a multi party system?
having a two party system is far more manageable and easier to
control then a system that allows a multitude of different
thoughts and philosophies…

what is a sign of a mature thinking mind? it is one that can
hold two contrary thoughts at the same time…
we still hold to having one coherent, logically consistent thought
but the reality is we need to learn to adapt and be able to
hold two contrary thought and even have logically inconsistent
thoughts in our mind… the path to wisdom is not necessarily
through logical consistency and devotion to the “TRUTH” but in
how we think, not necessarily in what we think…

Kropotkin

971

came across this line in the career of philosophy…

“Intellectually, all the problems of medieval and modern
philosophy have arisen from the conflict of new experiences
and new knowledge with traditional thoughts and attitudes”

so how does that quote illuminate my prior post…
what is the question of our time?

we have yet to fully incorporate the new science findings
of chaos and randomness and unpredictability of our world,
into a coherent philosophy… we cannot reconcile the new findings
of chaos and randomness into traditional thoughts and attitudes…
thus exist the flux we live in… we are trying to cope with new idea’s
and experiences with the traditional thoughts and attitudes…

thus the failure of those who propose religion or god into
our society because our new experiences and knowledge deny
the existence of god and thus deny the fruitfulness of religion…
when cannot proclaim that god is the answer when science
has shown us that in the new world vision, we can have
either science or we can have god, we cannot have both and
since science has shown us that god as we traditional known it
cannot exist, we must either abandon god or science and sooooo,
this split has divided conservatives and liberals… conservatives
has abandon science and liberals have abandon god…and as
we all know… reality has a liberal bias :-$

so how do we reconcile the new experiences of our times with
the traditional thought and attitudes…this is the question of
our time…

Kropotkin

972

ancient philosophy got its start with Socrates and his motto,
know thyself… this self examination was the beginning of
philosophy as we know it…

Descartes began with his self examination and discovered humans to be
thinking beings…I think therefor I am…

and so began the modern world of philosophy… both the ancient
world and the modern world begin with the same action…
self examination…perhaps it is time for the next great
epoch of philosophy… not by self examination by going from
outside in and not like before which was inside out… from inside us
to the outside world like Descartes and Socrates… perhaps we
can begin with understanding our place in the world and work in to
an understanding of who we are…

Kropotkin

973

as stated before…

“intellectually, all the problems of Medieval and modern philosophy have
arisen from the conflict of new experiences and new knowledge with
traditional thoughts and attitudes” …

so we haven’t reconcile the new experiences and new knowledge
of the modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes…

I am a child born in the fifties went to school in the 60’s and
I recall as a child in Illinois doing drills like if a nuclear weapon hits,
to go under the desk and cover your eyes. Being a child, it seem
reasonable that a desk would protect you from a nuclear weapon…
nowadays, I have my doubts a desk would survive a nuclear weapon…
but hay, I could be wrong…

those experiences (in part) made me who I am today as they made
all those children from that era partly who they are and those experiences
are different from any other children experiences in human history because
never before has humanity been so close to total extinction and we knew it…

how do we reconcile my experiences has a baby boomer with traditional thoughts
and attitudes? how do I reconcile modern physics with its random and chaotic
evidence of the world with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how do I reconcile quantum physics with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how do I reconcile the history of the 20th century with its wars and a depression
with traditional thought and attitudes?

how do we reconcile modern technology with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
the pace and speed of our world is unprecedented… we hear of news from, say china,
in a matter of minutes on CNN… in the past, it would have taken months for
news to travel from China to Europe…now, minutes…I can, potentially,
communicate with every single person on earth with computers and phones…
that has never happened before…

traditional thoughts and attitudes come from the world traveling at a
pace of no faster then a horse, nowadays you have to travel very far to even
see a horse… you have cars, planes, trains, rocket ships, all moving people
and goods around… you have communication around the world taking seconds…
you have the knowledge of the potential of death of the human race
coming from a number of different sources… the sky in the form of rocks from the
sky and death from nuclear weapons and death from diseases that we haven’t
heard of today and death from manmade weapons of diseases to various forms
of WMD’s… how do we reconcile all this with traditional thoughts and attitudes?

how to turn all this into a coherent philosophy that we can reconcile with
traditional thoughts and attitudes? if you look at the 20th century philosophy
with 20th century history, you see philosophy response to the history of the 20th
century with escape into logic and word philosophy and a side trip into despair
which is the existentialism philosophy…
philosophy response to the horror and despair of the 20th century by
hiding its head in the sand and spend its time on the meaning of being…
or what Augustine meant by time and other useless crap…
that is in part why philosophy has lost its place with the public because
philosophy refused to face up to the challenges of the 20th century
by engaging with the 20th century… philosophy ran away from the
challenges of the 20th century like the coward it is and hid in the
minutiae of the difference between Aristotle categories and Kant’s
categories! philosophy deserved to lose the respect of the public
given its shameful retreat from the tough questions of our time…
philosophy has become irrelevant because it hid from
tackling the serious and difficult questions of our times…
what does it mean to be human in the modern age?
how do we reconcile the horrors of the concentration camps
and the war to end all wars and the fight to save democracy from
Fascism and the cold war that lasted 40 years…
with traditional thoughts and attitudes?

philosophy may have hid because the task is daunting but
it is not impossible… we have so much to reconcile with
traditional thoughts and attitudes, how do we begin?

we can just jettison the entire idea of traditional thoughts
and attitudes and begin anew? begin with the modern world
and just pretend the world began in 2000 AD…

or we can accept the past and begin the serious task of
understanding the last 117 years of history and science into
some context that allows us to begin to formulate
a philosophy of what it means to be human in 2017…
because to be human in 2017 means something different then
it did in 1900 because of all the changes and history that has
passed in the last 117 years…what does it mean to be human
when artificial intelligence is possible or what does it mean to be
human when we have the human body being “fixed” with modern
technology and replacing body parts… I had spinal surgery many
years ago and they replaced two of my vertebra with cadaver vertebra…
and I am not alone in this… does this change my “humanness”?

so how do we reconcile our modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes?

Kropotkin

974

Nietzsche very famously wrote that “god is dead and we have killed him”
the problem is most people take that statement as is and out of context…
the reality is you have to take his statement into context…
“god is dead and we have killed him” is an understanding that
in our modern age with its science and politics and economics
and technology, our new experiences and new thoughts are in
conflict with traditional thoughts and attitudes and so to reconcile
our new modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes,
we conclude that “god is dead and we have killed him”
god is the old traditional thought and attitude and our modern age
is full of new experiences and knowledge that conflicted with the
old notion of god…one of them had to go, either we remain with our
old traditional thoughts and attitudes and keep god or we remain with
our new experiences and new knowledge and lose our religion, kill god…
as god can only exists by faith because god doesn’t exist in any other way…
god is a product of faith and remains because of faith and once faith is gone,
so is god…so to what do we remain faithful to… god or our new experiences
and our new knowledge? this is why conservatives reject science and our new
knowledge and experiences… to keep god because it is one or the other in
our modern world, god or the new knowledge…as a modern man, I accept
the new experiences and the new knowledge and so I must reject god…
and thus continue the death spiral of god…

Kropotkin

975

Science says that only a foot of concrete and a years supply of tacos will stop a nuclear blast from killing you.

976

Here’s the thing about concentration camps. Hitler killed 6 million jews but what about the humans like you who kill 6 billion animals and put them in concentration camps every day? Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian who tried to pass animal rights?

977

so anyway, back to actual philosophy…

in this conflict between traditional thoughts and attitudes
and new experiences and new knowledge, what else happened?

some of our responses to the new idea’s and experiences was
democracy and capitalism and communism, nationalism…
and ism’s and ideologies that didn’t survive the new experiences and new
knowledge were religion, monarchy, imperialism… all were destroyed by the new
experiences and idea’s…

this idea of equality is a modern one and comes from our new experiences
and idea’s/knowledge… the thing about the medieval world was its
devotion to inequality, both economic and political…
the modern world’s response has been the rising approval of equality
as an answer to the traditional thoughts and attitudes…equality
both in the political and the economic sense…events that
show us the modern response to the traditional thoughts and attitudes
are the French Revolution, the American revolution, the Russian revolution
the entirety of the 20 century with its wars and concentration camps and
cold war are all response of sorts of the conflict between new experiences
and new ideas and the old traditions and attitudes…the conflict
between the left and right lies in this conflict between the old traditions
and attitudes and the new experiences and new idea’s… the left wants to
follow the path of the new experiences, new idea’s and the right wants
a return to the old traditions and old attitudes…the right is wrong for the
very simple reason that you can’t engage in the modern world with its new
experiences and new idea’s and new technologies with old idea’s and old
ism’s and ideologies and old attitudes… the right is trying to preserve
a way of life that is already gone… lost in this new world of science and
technology… the battle in the schools to prevent trans kids from
using bathrooms is just a symptom of this battle to preserve the old
traditional thoughts and attitudes against the new idea’s and new
experiences…the right will fail because if they cannot overcome
the new experiences and the new knowledge with old and failed
traditional thoughts and attitudes…that don’t cover the new
experiences and new idea’s…we must have new thinking about
what it means to be human in light of the new experiences and the
new ideas/knowledge…the old ways of thinking about human beings
no longer applies anymore…for example, you cannot think about human
beings like the Medieval times thought about human beings… we are not
in the medieval times, we are in a new and modern world that requires
new idea’s in response to the new experiences…to those who defend
the old way, the conservatives for example… you are simply preventing
people from achieving a new equilibrium with the modern age by your
holding the past up as a model for the future… this new equilibrium
is the balance achieved once the new thoughts and new experiences are
processed and understood and placed into the already existing system…
and this is what is really desired, a balance between what is and what is
possible… the road into the future is not a path into the past like
conservatives want, the road into the future requires new experiences
and new knowledge being put into action politically, economically,
socially, scientifically and culturally… the basis of action in the
modern world must be modern thoughts and attitudes, not old
traditional thoughts and attitudes because they are from another age
that had different experiences and different knowledge… we cannot use
their experiences and knowledge to chart our course into the future
because their experiences and knowledge is geared toward their
conflict between new experiences and new knowledge and the old
traditional thoughts and attitudes that was prevalent in their time…
that is their response to the conflict, it cannot be our response because
we have new experiences and new knowledge that only makes sense
in our times and our age… we must respond with the appropriate
ideas that work in our age, not theirs…

Kropotkin

978

ok, in terms of the new experiences and new knowledge, we
have gone from taking different “moral” positions…
We have gone from gays being criminals to the legal approval
of gay marriage… we have gone from a society that doesn’t
tolerate gays, drugs, whites and blacks marriage to one that does
approve all of these things and this is the result of conclusion
of the conflict between the old traditional thoughts and attitudes to
the new experiences and new knowledge… we have overcome those
ways with a thesis, antithesis and synthesis… the thesis was we
don’t tolerate gays, drugs, interracial marriage, the anti-thesis was
the new ideas and new knowledge that these things aren’t bad
and the synthesis was an acceptance of these new idea’s…
these shifts in morality and culture and idea’s have come from this
conflict between the old and the new… but the difference today is the
speed of the shifts… as our society moves faster due to technology,
our shifts in the acceptance of new idea’s and new experiences also
move faster… what used to take decades, can now take years, even
months… those who try to hang on to the eternal fail because there is
no eternal to hang on to… there is no absolute eternal vision or action one
can hang on to… one must shift with the winds in the new world and that
is how it should be as science has shown us that the universe is chaotic,
random, unpredictable and we must have a philosophy that responds to the
new knowledge and new experiences… and the new idea’s tell us we have
no permanent, fixed place upon which to base our idea’s upon because any
place we may find is chaos, random, unpredictable… we must build our new
foundations upon the new finding of science which shows us the “real”
world, universe we live in…
how do you find philosophy in a random, chaotic, unpredictable world?

Kropotkin

979

We should only tolerate some gays and some drugs, like some, gay crackheads are fuggin’ annoying.

980

Delusional man thinks his shitlib philosophy is superior to the philosophy of the Holy Trixie.