Haven’t visited in an age. I’ve gotten reasonably middle aged, children pretty much grown up, an am about to explore the exciting world of retirement. Who’da thunk it.
Still living with my family in the sunny streets of Izmir, currently sweating all the salt out of my body in the latest heatwave.
Haven’t done much philosophising in a while, having obviously solved the universe some time ago…
Anyway, how’s life been treating you all?
You’re in Turkey? A lot of my remote co-workers are from Izmir.
Life has been pushing a boulder up a hill for me lately. But still not entirely unpleasant.
What have you been doing instead of philosophizing?
Hi Tab.
Some were asking about you when the quake struck Turkey & Syria.
This is/was She™.
Remind me about the rubber chicken.
Yeah, last year’s earthquake was far east of us, killed some of my students however, sadly. We had a seven in Izmir about 3 years ago, that was seriously scary. Even though we’re on the bottom floor, the apartment rocked badly enough to send us sprawling as we ran to the door. House and ourselves all survived thankfully.
Last five years or so I’ve just been teaching, paying bills, the usual end game capitalist bullshit. Watching the world burn etc. and at the same time keeping in shape just in case the aliens save the planet.
Hi Tab,
nice to hear that you are well and have survived the various challenges of living in Turkey.
I haven’t been around here much either, since several of us left due to the toxic atmosphere that grew.
I’m still in contact with Felix and Ier though.
Look after yourself, and should you post here, you’ll have my attention.
Regards
I moved out my shared accomidations,
and got an indie 1 bedroom apartment.
I been here for around 4 or 5 months now.
My spiritual health has been fantastic.
My physical health is average.
I miss your postings.
It was nice to have you around.
Just living the dream. Shirking as many responsibilities as possible and having a blast. Good to see you back! You’re back right??
Hi Bob, Dan, Mr. R,
Good to see you’re all still kicking around. Don’t know about back really, the only intellectual books I’ve read recently have been geopolitics, and economics - stuff like “The Divide” (J. Hickel) and “Bullshit Jobs” (D. Graeber) - trying to understand how everything got so fucked up in the last 50 years.
Don’t know if you have kids, but yeah. Would recommend you have them, for your own psychological development, then bite the bullet and have an oligarch adopt them for their own good. Or wait till you can customize them with whatever CRISPR tech you can get your hands on, and embed them with chatgp while they’re still in the womb. Bleak.
15 years ago when I was writing about critical tipping points for societies I pegged the limit at “when people cannot reasonably imagine either having children, or providing a life for those they have” before massive uprisings began to occur. And… No, I was totally wrong, seems everyone’s too busy just grumbling on tiktok. Or bugging out into the wilds with their tiny houses on their backs.
And my soldering iron isn’t soldering, which is also a kick in the teeth. Apart from that, all good.
I feel like I’ve never read an educational book in my life.
The only thing that comes close is tao te ching.
And that is ancient stuff.
I had cracker sandwiches for a little while here.
But I ran out of cucumber!
Running out of cucumber… That is my challenge in life.
I like that i have it easy.
I can handle easy, with spare energy for friends and family, too.
Lorikeet / Satyr is still around too.
I dont think that reading anything intellectual is really a requirement, or even a suggestion here anymore. Stick around just for the shit show. If you’re interested in things like how conspiracy/paranoia/etc can infect the minds of people who you might have thought were smart, this is a great place to examine that sort of thing in action.
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The same here, and the list of books I’ve read is endless, but I think that Iain McGilchrist has made a good stab at what is going wrong. His book “The Matter With Things” is a bit of a whopper though, but thoroughly worth reading.
Fortunately, my son is 41 and self-employed, and seems to have turned out okay, despite having a lot of my traits. I’m just glad that we had him then and he grew up in Germany at a time when a social market economy was a thing, today he has to come to terms with the emerging madness, but he is an adult.
Bad news, but as you imply, there is worse …
*still
*teeth?
Yeah, I was blown away that time I popped my head round the door during the pandemic and found antivaxxers and 5G believers. Wtf.
I get how suductive conspiracies are, but… Yikes.
Now we’ve got officially sanctioned aliens. I dunno. They’d have to literally appear in my front room and critique my collection of anal probes before I believed. Agent Mulder would weep.
I’ll track that down cheers, with the abundance of choice these days, actually finding something worth reading amidst the crap is a godsend.
I’m glad your son is secure. My son is 20 and at university, and my daughter is just about to finish high-school. We’re doing what we can to make sure they’ve a chance of a decent life, but it’s not easy. They’re both great kids though, heads screwed on right.
If you know any oligarchs, let me know.
Hi Ichthus77. Sorry, I totally forgot who you are/were. Blame my middle aged mind.
Hello Tab,course you wouldn’t know me, and just checking in while with family here at a lake, but say, will be in Istanbul some time in December, and if you may be a believer in the tenets that the Buddha’s conveyed, reducing uncertainty to the limits of the eternal, we porobably would meet up Istanbul .
Hmmm. Just a stab in the dark.
Opposite gotta go , the boy, that is my grandson just caught his 38 th bass.
Tab,
Praise the Lord, Everything that breathes.
Tab has returned, for as long or as short a visit as will be.
It is so very good to see you here in ILP, Tab.
It is like going back in time in a sense - to a good time or like a family member coming home after a long time away.
Warm breezes blowing.
I do hope that you are so well and taking such good care of yourself.
See you around the boards, hopefully.
God Bless you and your family, Tab.
Tab, the blame is all mine, I’m sure.
It’s gotten way out of hand. I’m not sure what to do with these people.
I’d say, don’t feed the trolls. However, my wife, who’s smarter, sometimes 
, would say one of two things - a) everyone is here to teach you something, though in my experience frequently you meet people who are only capable of teaching you of how to recognise an asshole/psychopath, and really, how many times do you need to hear that lesson? Or b) you take the good, and ignore the bad, she says it better in Turkish, but I think that’s the gist. She has friends who are good for conversation X, but not Y, and vice versa, and she’s okay with that - me not so much, but I gotta say, results-wise, she wins the number of friends contest hands down.
Thinking about it, she has a distributed friend circle, whom she apportions out her personality to, whereas I have have a habit of dumping my entirety onto one person, and expecting them to cope. So yeah, go with my wife’s strategy, lol, you’ll live longer.
I haven’t been around, so I don’t know how bad we’re talking. Some people aren’t worth engaging with full stop, who has the mental energy or health? And to what degree is it someone’s own responsibility to get all their shit together anyway…? I mean, argh.
This will sound arrogant. All my life my default position was to believe anyone I met was as smart as me. That was my baseline, my benefit of the doubt. Took me 50 years of being disappointed to revise that social strategy. Truth is, maybe a couple of people in a 100 are as smart as me, and probably you too. And the chances of meeting them post university, in the real world, are equally low. Probably better here. Or used to be anyway I guess.
Makes you feel lonely. I know I do sometimes.
People will say there are other forms of intelligence, emotional intelligence for example, social intelligence, empathy, consideration etc. Whatever the buzzwords of the day are. And it’s true, not disputing any of that, the divide however, is that a smart person, however initially awkward, self orientated and generally assholish, can learn emotional intelligence, can practice being empathic, they have feelings, a solid theory of mind, it’s just a case of accepting that other people have feelings too, that they’re important to them and to factor that into interactions. Lol, I sound like a reptilian overlord giving a seminar.
The point is, the reverse. You can’t learn to be smart if you aren’t already. And that’s something I think our lovely socially mediated society is really really trying hard to ignore. Intellectuals, the most hated demograph. According to tik tok anyway.