If you were to summarize your essay in one paragraph, what would that paragraph say?
I canāt.
Too many variables.
What is this Oprah Winfrey?
My turnā¦
Have you ever gotten laid without paying for it?
Next question.
Iāve only ever paid for sex twice, and I was 20 years old in Amsterdam. Pretty much one of those things you just do because youāre there, and because there are so many whores in the windows. The other two times were free.
If you were to list those variables in a way that you thought was most conducive to someone understanding the overall meaning of your essay, what would that list consist of?
Societyā¦Geneticsā¦Sex and the types it depends uponā¦memes and how they influence genesā¦Sheltering and its dire effectsā¦decadenceā¦
My turnā¦
How do you compensate for being so ugly and stumpy?
Is pot helpful?
I mainly compensate for those things by having a sizable income which is not contingent on the will of any one person or business, and by being very intelligent and having a girlfriend who is much younger and hotter than me. I also make it a point to do very well at lots of things so that I can show off. My life is pretty much an ongoing sequence of things like motorcycle track days, precision shooting from long distances, (400 yards is the farthest I have to shoot around here). I also have an innate business sense and an uncanny ability to make accurate judgments about people within seconds of encountering them. I could really go on and on about all the things I do to compensate, but when I do that it has a tendency to make others insecure, and the humanitarian in me just doesnāt like the way that feels.
The pot doesnāt so much help me cope w/ the ugliness and the stumpiness, it just keeps me from having to take meds for insomnia. I can literally stay awake for days and still function well enough to meet my obligations, itās just easier to maintain a schedule when you sleep regularly. Also, it assists me in preventing me from thinking about some terrible things Iāve done in the past, which can at time be a cause for stress while reflecting on myself. Also, it helps me to socialize w/ people out there in the ānormalā world. When Iām not high, most people appear to me as I appear to you. Imagine what that must feel like.
Tell me more about memes. I have a tendency to want to agree w/ you about the sheltering stuff. Contrary to what you might think, shelter has been rare in my experience, and I lean toward outright spite of those who consider it a good thing.
Somehow I doubt the part about sheltering.
You are a classic example of it.
What about memes would you like to know?
My turn, the bullshit posturing aside how smart are you?
Link me to one post of yours that represents your intelligence and that does not repeat the usual popular social and cultural positions.
As for your āuncanny judgmentā that was made evident when you thought I was a trollā¦ālike youā as you put it.
As for me, I have no uncanny anything. Iām just an old fart.
Next questionā¦
What makes you doubt that I wasnāt sheltered?
I can fax you some standardized test scores if youād like, but you as well as I know the arguments for and against them are inconclusive at best.
Iām not so sure about the whole, ālink you to a postā thing. You have to understand that for me this is a hobby. I have a feeling that youāre thinking I take this alot more seriously than I do. I love philosophy, and I have 9 people on my speed dial w/ PhDs in it, and they cover pretty much the entire spectrum of it across their areas of specialization. I read berkowitzās āethics of an immoralistā when I was 15 years old, as well as āthe princeā and several other things of that genre. You have to understand why Iām so played out on those kinds of things. 8 years later, I went to a university and completed 78 hours worth of philosophy courses, when the requirement was 30 for the degree. 6 of them they had to individually design, because I wanted more than they were offering.
The things that interest me truly have literally no place on an internet forum. If you would like to exchange papers on a particular subject Iād be more than willing to read along and Iām sure we would both benefit, but you canāt honestly expect me to be intellectually stimulated by much of anything on this forum or any other. Posting stuff online is pretty much what I do when Iām done masturbating. Itās not serious.
About memes, just give me a loose definition of how youāre using it and elucidate the connection between them and genes. Does this have to do w/ the whole āmuscle memoryā kind of thinking?
You exhibit the taunting of a child that never grew up.
So you come here to waste your timeā¦and you have plenty of time to waste.
Memes: idea(l)s passed on from mind to mind, generation to generation, like an inheritance. Idea(l)s which eventually become so ingrained in the populace that the mind considers them self-evident because it is unable to think outside their premises.
The systems becomes self-referential when the minds of the participants refer back to cultural myths and ideals to support the very premises it provided to them. The others, its peers, add to the validity of the presuppositions by repeating them back.
Like genes, memes mutate with every replication.
Memes are how the participants in a group establish their membership and test their belonging.
My turnā¦
Was your daddy absent or violent with you?
Maybe I act like a child now because I had to act like an adult when I was a child. Iām not trying to justify it, Iām just sayingā¦
No my daddy was not absent or violent, nor were my parents divorced or unfaithful to one another.
So memes are like things that are taken in as assumptions at some point in time, then relied upon for reference in the valuation of other things, then just never thrown out or overturned? Sort of like if there were no āparadigm shiftsā in science and over time everything just gets all fucked up? As in, they refuse to accept evidence that they are outdated?
I understand that one problem w/ self referential systems is that they only provide a certain kind of information, and that information is not of the most useful variety.
Could you elaborate on how they mutate w/ each replication? Is it a technicality of philosophy such as in the way that we say ātropes are repeatable, but not duplicableā, ot is there something more to it?
Also, could you give a modern day example of an outdated meme thatās still in play?
I never spoke of outdated anything.
Memes are superior or inferior in relation to each other and the common environments they coexist within.
The members exemplify the memes qualities.
In replication resistance to it is present. Especially in the beginning when the mind begins questioning itself and the world around it.
It might add its own elements to the idea(l) if it has contact with another meme or with nature directly.
Tell me about your insecurities and how you use bragging to compensate.
Still nothing on my misogyny, dude?
Itāll come.
You gotta bring that post down into something more concrete. Iām looking mainly for what the regular guy should take from this essay, and weāre veering too far into the abstract. Maybe an example of some memes I might be able to grasp and of hf how they are ranked in a hierarchy would help.
I guess when I was a teenager, I did alot of drugs and missed a bunch of opportunities in my life(i still smoke weed though). (Iām still debating w/ myself as to whether the experiences that I substituted may have been of greater value overall). I went to rehab when I was 14, and again when I was 16, both times court ordered inpatient. I had a fair criminal record by the time I was old enough to be prosecuted, (the parts before I was 18 have all since been expunged). I was eventually removed from public school, and not placed into another school at all. Iāve worked full time since I was 16, and was part time from 14-15 as per the laws of my state. On top of that, my parents dealt w/ unfortunate circumstances which led them to an economic state which prevented any kind of excess or frivolous-ness, so I would have to pay bills most of the time or have to find someplace else to live, which I did at a relatively early age. So for the most part, I felt like a poor, stupid bottom-of-the-barrel type and I had a sizable chip on my shoulder. I grasped at the idea that I should have no regard for the other, and my ethical stance was based on attaining economic means, and proving to myself that I hadnāt actually fried my brain w/ all that acid and made myself dumb.
I could not afford to go to any college, and was too young to qualify for any financial aid, so for several years I worked on building up things to brag about. I learned the principles of business by trafficking sometimes up to 20k a week in various narcotics. As a person in that trade at that level, (at least in the market I was in), this makes you big shit amongst the losers at least. I regularly traveled the US and several other countries just for the purpose of blowing cash and having a good ol time. I bought motorcycles, a car or two and generally just lots of really nice clothes, expensive meals, champagne and consumed enough drugs to have bought a house. At that point I felt like if I could get away w/ all that, then certainly I could go to college. Before that, I was of the mindset that ācollege was for rich people to stay richer and they make it unaccessible to people like me because theyāre all badā. So as I was preparing to stockpile some cash as to pay the 17k a year cost of attendance at the nearest university, I got ran over my a drunk driver who almost killed me. Couldnāt walk for a while, had to do a year of physical therapy lawsuit, (all the way to jury), the whole shit. In the meantime, by business was over, because of all the assholes following me around trying to take pics of me doing anything they could possibly construe as evidence of not being as injured as I claimed.
So I settled the lawsuit, had the cash in hand and said to myself, āwell, if I donāt go to school now, then I have to stop bitching about it foreverā, so I went. Then holy shit I actually graduated. (My uni has a 37% graduation rate) This further enhanced my ego. On top of that, I still have the easiest job of anyone I know and make pretty good money doing it, and I have several other streams of income as well. So I proved to myself that Iām smarter that 63% of the kids at my college, and that I donāt have to be poor. Iām 31 now and Iāve been living off my own means and no one elseās for probably half my life.
Now the bragging part is just the next logical step. To see me walking down the street or at a mcdonalds or something, you might not realize the extent of my greatness, so naturally I have to brag a little just so people can know where they stand. Hey, itās better than letting them go on and on not realizing that I think they are dumb or unaccomplished.
To summarize, my insecurities involve my questioning my own aptitudes at one time, and a fear that I will not have enough money for the things that I need. I brag because Iām fairly certain at this point that I shouldnāt be insecure about those things. In the time it took me to realize that, incidentally, I got really good at lots of other things, which makes me even more of a hate-able bastard.
Now come on. No more one liners. Lets get this thing fleshed out.
No free mealsā¦
Ideas are not meant to offer a direct or immediate reward, if they seek clarity and to understand reality.
Ideas offer possibilitiesā¦what one does with insights or information or knowledge or perspectives is an individual matter.
I merely describe the world around me, what you do with this information is not my concern.
If my insights are correct then they are useful, if not then they are useless.
The utility of course is also determined by the particular readers own limitations.
I, myself, have applied some my insights successfully. Others I am unable to apply due to my own limitations.
You ask I answerā¦then you reciprocate.
I will not rewrite the essay for you. It is written.
Imperfectly, incompletely with spelling and grammatical errors, but with ideas that try to explain certain phenomena around meā¦and you.
Is your self-esteem totally dependent on the recognition of the other, any other?
Not since I was a kid. I honestly donāt even bother to know what most peopleās opinions of me are. (it doesnāt hurt that most people just come right up and tell me how awesome I am)
Iām pretty disappointed that youāre not defending, or elucidating the essay though. So many times I pretended to be disappointed, this isnāt one of them.
You know itās bad here when I almost get in trouble for almost calling someone long-winded.
You challenged my essay?
Where?
Long winded?
Where?
So far my posts have been very short.
I am not allowed to say more, as the forum does not let me.
You ask, I answer.
Short and to the point.
You brag, you want to be acknowledged and then you become defensive, denying this is soā¦after months years of you taunting and bragging and posturing.
Now why do you so depend on the opinions of others to feel good about yourself?
Forget the ādefendā part and lets focus on the āelucidateā part. Iām talking about way earlier when Faust thought I was calling you long winded, but when I actually was saying that I wasnāt going to be long winded. Itās like those 2 words in the same sentence set of a big alarm at ILP world headquarters.
Iām saying it doesnāt bother me to be hated. I happen to be lucky in that most people think Iām the shit, and very few people have ever expressed contempt for me. Regardless, I pretty much feel the same all the time. Not a whole lot of ups and downs. I think that the way you view yourself should come from inside, as the world outside oneās self, in my case at least, is far less stable.
And Iāve been banned 4 times for responding in kind to those, like you, who wanted to āput me in my placeā.
You, on the other hand, have never been banned.
You want to belongā¦to be accepted or seen. Hated or not, is besides the pointā¦you want to be noticed.
Now you ask and I answer.
When did you begin feeling alone?
You think I want to āput you in your placeā? Where might that even be?
The reason why youāve been banned and I havenāt has less to do with what weād actually like to say alot of time, and more to do with whether or not we actually say it. To be honest, Iām literally shocked that Iāve not been kicked off this site. I mean, seriously.
Just because someone belongs and is accepted and seen doesnāt mean that thatās what they want or were after. Sometimes shit just goes the way it goes and you canāt bother yourself to tamper w/ the outcome. And to be quite frank, I think itās pretty clear who some people are on this site that want to be noticed, and you might not have to look far very far at all to see that.
I began feeling alone at a very early age. I had an older sister who was involved in a lawsuit relating to her birth. For the bulk of my childhood, all activities were related to her case, and I was sort of dragged along for the ride and left to sit in a chair in the hallway. That is essentially the story of my youth, up until the point at which the suit was settled, and thatās when I started getting kicked out of my parents house and would stay in peopleās basements or on couches and try to catch rides to school. I guess I sort of got into the whole drug thing as a way to network in order to secure resources to meet my needs, and it evolved into something more of an enterprise.
I donāt think that being alone is in and of itself a bad thing. Itās more a matter of perspective. I find that I get the most out of life when I am free to do as I please, I and I have very little sense of sentimentality, so all and all, I have a pretty productive existence and I always have some means at my disposal to please myself.
Time for sleepā¦no more chit-chat.
No question, no answer.
You wanted to get noticed by me, no?
Now I ask again:
When did you begin feeling aloneā¦as in even when amongst others?
Ta, taā¦
Youāre losing your edge man. I answered that. I can tell that youāre projecting a little bit there. Hopefully youāll figure out how to express those feelings soon. I hate to imagine the pain you must feel.
In Book III of The Rhetoric, Aristotle describes four ways in which language is used in ābad taste.ā
A third form [of lauguage used in bad taste] is use of long, unseasonable, or frequent epithets. It is appropriate for a poet to talk of āwhite milk,ā but in prose such epithets are sometimes lacking in appropriateness or, when spread too thickly, plainly reveal the author turning his prose into poetry. Of course we must use some epithets, since they lift our style above the usual level and give it an air of distinction. But we must aim at the due mean, or the result will be worse than if we took no trouble at all.
This fits the problem that many have alluded to when reading Satyrās prose. For Satyr, the readerās desire to dispense of frustrating bullshit is mistaken for a lack of ability. Itās all too easy to default to the position that āone is simply not intelligent enough to understand my proseā in the face of such criticisms.
If you like poetry, write a poem.