Just living, working, playing games, learning to paint. Over the last 6 years I’ve hit my lowest lows and my highest highs - my lows were pretty fucking low, and my highs were … adequate. Lucky enough to find a wonderful love that I live with now.
I’m in England now, btw, don’t know if you knew that. Hi neighbor!
How have you been?
I watch it, because of the points I made in reply to Maia’s inquiry… a lot of the content is based on unfounded assumptions, but… like I said, I find the socio-anthropological content most interesting.
Do you not find anything about the series the least bit interesting or intriguing?
I didn’t, no… well hello, neighbour. 
I hope us Brits are treating you well, and not making you regret your move? A cool reason to have come to England over, I must say. 
I had a major crash a few years back, from a vax injury, and it’s been the slowest crawl ever back to rebuilding my health and energy-levels… there was no time for a wonderful love, but there is now. : )
I’m having a good time here now. Got some good mates, and none of them like David Icke which I’m pleased about.
I love the Tate museum btw - I don’t live anywhere near, but I’d visit it every week if I could!
Sculptors are all fake.
Lol
The Tate is awesome… all the museums and galleries are awesome.
Have you visited any of the royal parks and/or London Zoo? I haven’t been since first lockdown, but I’m starting to get my enthusiasm back…
I had a major crash a few years back, from a vax injury, and it’s been the slowest crawl ever back to rebuilding my health and energy-levels… there was no time for a wonderful love, but there is now. : )
Your excerpts from Icke remind me of Ecmandu here. And sometimes Meno and Adam.
Seriously though, back to the gap between what some claim to believe and what they are actually able to demonstrate is true. And especially [for me] even to themselves. What in their lives brought them to believe this and not something else. And how, had their lives been different, might they perhaps have found such beliefs ridiculous. Only in considering this can we then shift the focus to what those like scientists and philosophers can establish as either more or less reasonable to believe.
As for monarchies [constitutional or otherwise], I am more inclined myself to shrink them down to being pretty much out of the picture altogether. I simply associate them historically with everything that is undemocratic. And to the extent citizens can become preoccupied with them doesn’t seem [to me] all that far removed from citizens being preoccupied with Gods.
But that no doubt is derived existentially from my own many experiences as a political activist drawn to the political philosophy of those like Marx.
And I would never argue that those who support the existence of a constitutional monarchy in their own country are wrong to do so. In fact, I can’t even argue that those who want to bring back the monarchies of old are wrong.
But that’s “me”.
conspiracy types make stupid people feel smart
Really? Iambiguous? You slander a person you won’t debate because you’re “too nice”
You’re a psychopath.
Actually, join an official debate with me on that.
5 posts each.
Topic: iambiguous is a clinical psychopath
Did I or did I not say “seriously though” after noting your name?
It was all said in jest my friend!! 
I’m not used to jest. I’ve lived in and been to hell realms you can’t imagine. I survived them by always being the smartest person. I was nice to you.
If you talk to me like a hell being, expect a little pushback … if you keep doing it, expect to be sent there.
Yeah I’ve done a zoo in London, was pretty great! I’ve got a walk-with-the-wolves experience coming up soon on the west coast near the lake District.
What’s a Vax injury? I read that as “vaccination injury” but… that can’t be right, can it? Whatever it was, it sounds brutal 
Are you recovered now?
Well, I gave Mr Icke a chance, as I do with everyone, but I’m not going to torture my brain any further with his ramblings. Incidentally, his name rhymes with “pike”, and not “sick”, despite what my screenreader keeps wanting to tell me.
I don’t think there’s any fundamental meaning to existence that’s the same for everyone, so trying to demonstrate such a thing is probably futile. Just as life is what we choose to make it, so is its meaning. That’s my opinion, anyway, based on my experiences. I have taken meaning from nature around me, but this is because I happen to have an affinity with it, and always have had. As I’ve said often, I truly feel I’ve been very lucky in life, and this is exactly why.
As for monarchy, I suppose it depends on the monarchy. In England monarchs were never absolute, and always had to rely on their council, or what later became known as parliament, to govern. And since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 monarchs have reigned at the invitation of parliament, not the other way round.
Yes, monarchs have always cloaked themselves in the aura of religion in order to sanctify their person, and this is exactly why they can be above politics, and why they can be impartial in law. I think this would only work though in a country that already had a very well established monarchy.
Just out of curiosity, who decides what screen readers want to tell those who use them? I Googled “screen readers for the blind” and came up with this: wired.com/story/web-accessi … s-dominos/
Are there any controversaries you are aware of in regard to them. Aside from technical issues like pronunciation.
Yes, I basically think and feel the same way about an essential meaning and purpose to our existence. On the other hand, I am also willing to acknolwedge that there may well be one. Rooted either in religion or ideology or nature. Instead, in focusing in on existential meaning, I keep coming back to dasein. Noting how I understand that to others in my signature threads and hoping for feedback regarding why others either share or do not share my conclusions.
And, no doubt about it: luck is no small thing in anyone’s life.
It’s just that, given how my own conclusions about all this have resulted in a “fractured and fragmented” sense of self/reality, I don’t come across many who are really willing to grapple with the possibility it might be true for them as well. In fact, the main reason my own life is now “imploded” into basically a solitary existence, is that one by one all of the many friends I had from my days as a political activist pulled away from me. And, sure, given how “I” construe myself in the world around me “here and now”, I really can’t blame them. I really want nothing more than to yank myself up out of the hole I’ve dug myself into philosophically.
I think of monarchies as rooted by in large in the organic, historical evolution of political economy. Which means that the fundamental meaning behind human interactions must revolve first and foremost in any community’s capacity to feed themselves, to clothe and shelter themselves, to defend themselves, to create an environment conducive to the reproduction of the community.
And that revolves by and large around the economic means of production and who owns and operate them. In the West, very nearly close to absolute monarchies existed by and large in Feudal times. But as merchants and trade burgeoned throughout Europe and beyond, the Feudal order gave way to mercantilism which, over time, gave way to capitalism. And there was no room for monarchies in the world where “the market” ruled.
And to the extent those like Icke and others fail to take that into consideration, they can think and believe almost anything.
Ultimately, the designers of the software, but I can switch to individual letter mode if I want. I suppose the main controversy with JAWS is its price. Luckily I have a job, but it can be prohibitive for those not in paid employment.
I think that luck, or fate, is the guiding force of the universe. Not in a negative sense, but rather, in the interconnectedness of all things. Or nature, in other words. You can change your own luck very easily by changing your frame of mind, at least in my experience, and that’s all anyone needs to do to drag themselves up out of any hole they might have dug themselves into. That’s the absolute best advice I can give on that, though I fully realise it may sound simplistic or trite. Sometimes, the simple things happen to be the true ones.
I imagine Icke would like to overthrow the monarchy and set himself up instead. But yes, monarchies have to adapt to the times in order to survive, and those that don’t, which is basically almost all of them, end up on the scrap heap of history. The Windsors are famous, however, for bending with the wind. No one likes or trusts politicians, or anyone who seeks power, but the monarch remains aloof from all that. Or should do, at any rate.
I am open to the possibility of such innovations being the ingenuity of aliens… what could possibly have happened to the previous civilisations that might have come before us? There is evidence of cities, but not of bodies.
Regardless of that, I too find it all very interesting…
I recently read that the EU has been trying to renaturalise the UK with bear and wolf populations for years now, but I think the UK went with containing them in our National Parks… the safest option.
It was… I’ve been out of action for over 3 years… just getting over it now, with help from my GP and specialist clinics. It’s identical to Long Covid, so researchers are doing comparative studies on both illnesses, to identify triggers and best remedial cures.
I’ve got so much/adventures to catch up on, so no time to dwell but to do…
Wow, sounds like you’ve been through it. I’m sorry to hear that, glad to see you’re coming out the other side now though. Hope you’re catching up goes well though!
I find stories of Atlantis and similar sunken lands particuilarly interesting, not least because there are so many of them. Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Thule, Ys, Lyonesse (that last one being off the coast of Cornwall), and so on, the list is almost endless. In these cases, where there’s usually a flood involved, maybe the bodies were just washed away and lost.
Well, I have to try one more time.
Then, seemingly, it can only come down to teleology:
PHILOSOPHY: the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.
THEOLOGY: the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world.
Now, philosophically, luck and fate would seem to revolve around the extent to which human beings are in possession of free will. Is David Icke able to opt of his own volition to express the opinions he chooses, or is his brain, as matter wholly in sync with nature’s material laws, able only to opine as nature – the universe – compels him?
Same with you and I.
If so, then luck and fate are in turn entirely intertwined in the only possible reality. And, as for the “purpose” and the “meaning” behind them, well, would that not be as well inherently/necessarily subsumed in this only possible world?
From my frame of mind, given some measure of free will, in the absence of God or the Pagan equivalent, what possibly can be the source of a teleologically purpose and meaning? Other than what any particular individual happens to think is true given the life that they’ve lived. The part I root in dasein, the embodiment of an essentially meaningless and purposeless world. The part you root in the Goddess/Nature, that mysterious [to me] font able to guide your own behaviors.
Now, with theology on the other hand, the “doctrine” that governs luck and fate would seem to be embedded in one or another rendition of God or a religious path. Here then faith often comes into play and it is not necessary go much beyond it. If I am lucky or unlucky, fated or not fated, it’s all ultimately subsumed in my beliefs. People then sustain them, from my point of view, because the alternative is just too disturbing. The loss of the comfort and the consolation they sustain in anchoring their Self to God or the Goddess or to one of hundreds of other spiritual fonts/paths they might have ended up believing instead had their lives been different.
Again, how “I” have come to think human about identity here in a way others do not.
Here, however, in my view, given free will, your understanding of the hole that I am in can only be understood given the assumption you make about “I” in the world around us, given the hole that you are not in yourself. We can only take out of each other what we first put into each other: our own “selves”. Your Self is not fractured and fragmented. Still, the only way I can come to grapple with that is by way of your own more in depth reaction to the arguments I make in the OPs here:
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
In other words, given particular sets of circumstance that unfold in your life, how do you not construe your own identity as “I” do here. Given the assumptions I make about the “fabricated” self at the existential juncture of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. What different assumptions do you [and others] make who are not drawn and quartered out in the is/ought world?
Well, the crucial point for me is that monarchies, as they once were historically, have ended up on the scrap heap of history. And, given my own political prejudices “here and now”, that’s a good thing. No more divine right of kings or anything else that might upend what many construe to be the best of all possible world: democracy and the rule of law. Instead, what threatens to take their place today is a world ruled by political ideology, dogmas, and authoritarian “populism”. That and the fact that much of the world today still revolves around those who swear only by this: “Show me the money”. Whether they reside in Washington D.C., London, Moscow or Beijing.