Hello Mr. Big, longest time not hear. Just a question , on passing, I worry what could happen if AI includingvStarlink was somehow interrupted or shut down, by locals or aliens, would we loose all data, or would some future/futuristic cloud retain it somewhere , sometime in eternal space/time?
A public ILP announcement. I just received an offer for financial assistance from a member, which i must decline out of principle. To accept would be to deny the privilege i have to suffer as much as possible from this, to let its effects have real consequences, to go experimentally where my instincts may lead me as a result. One should never be desensitized of their suffering.
I mean, yeah, if i had a flat tire and you gave me a lift. But who needs to suffer flat tires to be a philosopher? Philosophy is like a game of chess with everything on the other side of your skin being a possible enemy. To understand this, one has to suffer sophisticatedly and fester in it to draw the heavist truths and answers about the big questions. ‘Going down’, as N put it. Offering oneself to the gaping jaws. One sacrifices himself to get at the greatest truths, bruh.
“The labor cost to install interior prehung doors typically ranges from $100 to $300 per door. Therefore, for 20 doors, you can expect labor costs to be between $2,000 and $6,000”
Search assistant quote.
Recall the size of the house (i deleted the vid, dammit). My price was $1,500 for all baseboards, windows, AND doors (about 20). He offers to give me $300 more. Lol the fuck outta here.
He’s going to find these numbers out soon when he gets new quotes holy shit is he fucked. My final renegotiated price was $2,300… he doesn’t want it. Lol n*gga is about to find out.
Watch this.
-
He has cost me an opportunity to make $2,300 for doing all the work.
-
He has cost himself the difference he will find himself having to pay when he gets a new price from a real contractor that knows how to price jobs accurately.
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He has cheated me out of compensation for nine windows (whatever that fractions to be out of the original $1,500 price) and not so much as given me a piece of mint candy for the work i did.
You must believe me when I tell you there is no design or rhyme or reason to any of it. These stackables can only be justified as blind causal forces or nefarious designs of divind intelligence. These are not lessons. You are not suffering karmic debt. This is not the work of an evil devil fuckin shit up. This is the survival of a fittest that is becoming a new evolutionary bourgeois upper middle class that may last for a millennia. A new kind of Dawkin’s Cheats in the grand ESS economy.
What strange circumstances would pit men against one another in such a way, Socrates? Even after getting outrageous quotes to get the work finished, he won’t call me back for reasons of honor… nor would i take the offer if he did for reasons of honor.
Mark my words, friend. We both get fucked but i bear the greater of the brunt.
Intellectuals
“My role-and that is too emphatic a word-is to show people that they arc much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people-that’s the role of an intellectual.” Michel Foucault
So, just out of curiosity, how many minds have I changed here?
“Intellectuals may almost be defined as people who can easily be convinced of fanciful dogmas concerning matters of which they are comprehensively ignorant.” David Ramsay Steele
That’s why so many dogmatic intellectuals stay up in the clouds, in a world of words.
“Pseudo-intellectuals don’t just mislead others. They erode the meaning of intellect itself.” Egbearor Favour
That’s why so many Pseudo-intellectuals stay up in the clouds, up in a world of words.
“We are allowed to be ‘smart’ so long as our smartness doesn’t disrupt anything that matters.” Egbearor Favour
Next up [of course]: politics.
“…perhaps, he reflected now, he’d been trying to atone somehow for what had happened at the hui, to prove to himself that he was not just yet another Marxist intellectual cliché, not just yet another armchair critic with soft hands and smug opinions, who theorised about the working class while never having done a day of drudge work in his life." Eleanor Catton
If the shoe fits, letś say.
“…the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account.
… A true intellectual, a genuine one, is always an outsider; he is a person who lives in self-imposed exile on the margins of society." Daša Drndić
Care to join them?
Ontology
“This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.” Martin Heidegger
Serious philosophy, let’s call it.
“To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will. But inasmuch as man, because of his nature as the thinking animal and by virtue of forming ideas, is related to beings in their Being, is thereby related to Being, and is thus determined by Being—therefore man’s being, in keeping with this relatedness of Being (which now means, of the will) to human nature, must emphatically appear as a willing.” Martin Heidegger
Serious philosophy, let’s call it.
“This cause, therefore, of all existing things cannot be any one of them.” Plotinus
Abracadabra?
“He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn’t—beyond a hint of skepticism—say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.” Ashim Shanker
Cue the clouds.
“Each technological and scientific turning point evolves into an ontological consideration.” Roger Spitz
Cue the clouds.
“Science and Metaphysics show us part of what ‘is’. Logic and Epistemology help us interpret this part and understand how much of it we can really know. And finally, Ethics teaches us how to embrace this knowledge and how to cherry-pick only those things that will give us endurance and contentment in the long run, avoiding those that may keep our hearts buried in the ground; how to live well and decently and how to help the society function properly.” Giannis Delimitsos
Easier said than done, he suspected.
Ruling Class
“The very concept of ‘revolutionary violence’ is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.” Michael Parenti
Been there, done that?
“History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.” Michael Parenti
Technically, let’s say
“Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.” Alice Walker
Emulating God as it were.
“Ruling classes have always sought to instill in their subordinates the capacity to experience exploitation and material deprivation as guilt, while deceiving themselves that their own material interests coincide with those of mankind as a whole.” Christopher Lasch
Cue the Ayn Randroids?
“When the mainstream media and the ruling class decide to pick on a critical issue, it is usually for two reasons: first, the issue is serious enough and is affecting their interests, and therefore the narrative must be controlled to ensure that the results are in their favor. Second, in doing the former, the ruling class gets to strictly filter and manage the narrative on what needs to be said about any given topic; which ‘experts’ are given the stage to speak; and whose voices are excluded from debates, or even defamed and slandered, if necessary.” Louis Yako
The media industrial complex. Start here: The American Ruling Class | Bullfrog Films: 1-800-543-3764: Environmental DVDs and Educational DVDs
“Don’t kid yourself, Professor. The powerful don’t think things over. They just react. It’s all they know.” Vincent H. O’Neil
Next up for the powerful here: Sieg Heil?
Tryda help the religious clowns here understand what the problem is. It’s because whether you know it or not, what you believe and support was instrumental in establishing the structures that produce such mess as i describe in society. There is a most intimate ‘ideological’ historical relationship between religion, the church, the State, and the way society, property, and government is organized.
Unbeknownst to you clowns, you are party to and willingly indulge in this nonsense day after day as the world keeps stacking its shit (it’s doing a great job right now in the middle east and at the Ukrainian/Russian border) higher and higher.
Now that you are just a fleck on a forum is your saving grace. If anything you ever thought or said here was something that could prevent a revolution, you would then no longer be an irrelevant nothing but a tangible threat.
Anyway, i just wanted to help you along in understanding your own tragic irony. You can believe me or not, but the facts of the matter won’t spare you.
Another thing the asswipe has done is make me a strong suspect if any of the material he has at that house happens to get stolen. Of course I did it… I’m the scheming contractor that tried to rip the home owner off by changing his price, etc. More harrassment that i wouldn’t deserve. First, I’m cheated almost a grand, and then the cops come and start fucking with me too.
But it’s worse. The stupid motherfucker shouldn’t have ten grand worth of flooring stacked in an open garage and waiting to be laid weeks later when the house is finally ready.
It’s incompetence all the way down for this clown, and avoiding him entirely is the best thing anyone could ever do.
Suicide
“There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.” Albert Camus
Well, if only up in the clouds.
“I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The human condition, let’s call it.
“To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.” Jean Luc Godard
Let’s make it one
“Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.” W. Somerset Maugham
Let’s explain this away.
“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.” Alison Bechdel
God willing.
“In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears.” Osamu Dazai
Tired of living. But scared of dying.
If you took one million RealUns, put them on a fuckin yuge island, built a central bank, printed some money, divied it out, gave em some tools, and then let em run with a free market of trade… in less then fifty years, half of the RealUns would be like the bolsheviks and the other half like the Rockefellers.
He doesn’t know this because he’s just a hobby philosopher, and thank goodness it could never happen for RealUn’s sake. He’d have to be embarrassed five hundred thousand times for that half of the RealUns that were painfully wrong about the reality of capitalism and had to find out the hard way.
Stupidity
“We lose the ability to be arrogant, once we reach a certain degree of intelligence.” Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Hint, hint.
“Choosing to ignore what I see to the point that I no longer see it is a formidable blindness wrought by the working of my own hand. And to be led by such a hand is to perish by the cliff that it is certain to lead me off of.” Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hint, hint.
“Genius is astute enough to understand its own depravity. Ignorance doesn’t know what depravity is. And stupidity might know what it is, but it’s convinced that it’s immune to it.” Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hint, hint.
“Probably the most promising AI Use-Case:
Fighting Natural Stupidity with Artificial Intelligence” Murat Durmus
Next up: fighting Artificial Stupidity
“Dumb people plucked the roots, then blamed each fruit for not growing..” Monaristw
Objectively as it were.
“There was something comforting in knowing that even the very strong could be stupid.” Sam Sykes
Someone run this by, well, you know.
Capitalism
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan
“The masses” some call them.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Ursula K. Le Guin
Cue the clouds?
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Edward Abbey
Does the cancer cell know that? If you get my drift.
“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” Eugene Debs
At least until Trump drains the swamp.
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” Elizabeth Warren
Let’s synchronize our suspension of disbelief.
“…vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.” Thomas Jefferson
…and with that he freed all of his slaves.
Free Will
“The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.” Sam Harris
Then, of course, my own brutal rendition.
“Man has two common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.” Criss Jami
Then, of course, my own brutal rendition.
“Free will is the cutting edge of Creation, don’t you see? The word spontaneity derives from the Latin sponte, meaning ‘of one’s free will.’ Spontaneity is the impulse, the purest expression of freedom, and the impulse wants to do whatever it wants to do. But you are afraid of what others think, others who are just as afraid of what you think, and so you pussyfoot along the perimeter of the free-will zone, wilting like a wallflower.” Tony Vigorito
To wilt or not to wilt in a world where wilting or not wilting is six of one, half a dozen of the other.
“Free Will : ‘I made you think so.’
Predestination: ‘I knew you had to.’” Toba Beta
Then it’s this all the way down.
“No, free will is not an ‘extra’; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.” Raymond Smullyan
To say the least?
“War between free-will and predestination makes the idea of time travel…too difficult to digest.” Toba Beta
Let alone reconcile.
Hypocrisy
“A lot of lip service gets paid to being honest, but no one really wants to hear it unless what’s being said is the party line.” Colin Quinn
Hear! Hear!
“The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man’s belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.” Gore Vidal
Go figure?
“You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me! What has your politics fed on since you’ve been ruling the world? On butchery and murder!” Charles de Coster
The secular equivalent of a God, the God, your God, it turned out.
“…how I despise neutrality, only countries should be neutral since they’re abstract entities, people cannot be neutral, a friend of mine cannot caress my hand and kiss my enemy, laugh when they mock me, this is my true belief, maybe I’m wrong, neutral people are the most dangerous, they sell themselves to the highest bidder, betray us for a plate of lentils.” João Reis
Some things just never change.
“…sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.” Yevgeny Zamyatin
If you get his drift.
“I predict that there will be many more like him in the future,” she sighed. “People of privilege speaking heroically on behalf of those with whom they have no intention of mixing.” Kevin Ansbro
Start here: https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA?si=2aZ8qsiwmdvu3Dhc
"So when I talk about lowering the temperature, those are the two things that we want those local authorities to do — help us find sex offenders and get them out of their community,” Vance said. “This is bonkers. Think about this. If you’ve got a neighbor who’s a sex offender and somebody wants to go and take that person away, I’m going to raise my hand and say, ‘Yes, please get that person away from my children.’ What is wrong with Minneapolis authorities?” - Vance
Because a whole five out of 100,000 illegal immigrants are sex offenders. But Vance knows this… he’s just trying to dial up support from folks in Minneapolis.
But the irony. They want to get all of the five sex offenders out of their communities but will arrest me if i try to leave, which i would love nothing more than to do. And I’m not even a sex offender, just technically called one so rising opportunistic law students can earn conviction rating points (SOs are trophy kills) and disgusting cops can sit around sex offender division department offices all day and draw money from taxes and federal aid to fund perfectly ineffective SORNA programs and destroy people’s lives.
Chaos
“Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.” Audrey Niffenegger
Want to borrow what’s left of mine?
“Everything you see is in the process of making or unmaking or dying or living. Everything is in a state of change.” Kelly Barnhill
Let’s change that.
“Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos were lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting ‘All Gods are bastards’.” Terry Pratchett
You know, philosophically.
“I thrive in structure. I drown in chaos.” Anna Kendrick
Not to mention the other way around. And then some.
“Magnus began to be truly alarmed. Will’s voice would have shaken, betraying that his cruelty had been part of his playacting, but his son’s laugh was that of someone genuinely delighted by the chaos erupting all around him” Cassandra Clare
Playacting here. Philosophy, let’s call it.
“Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more than the chaos without.” Erin Morgenstern
No shit?
Ontology
“What exists mathematically has the potentiality of existence.” Radoslav Rochallyi
Explaining what in particular?
“Being (in the sense of “God is Being, from whom all creation takes its being”) is an auto-kenetic crystalline active power unfolding within itself unceasingly. The key concept is that of intrinsic cyclic motion, power to act. Existence is a verb, an action, a doing. “Action springs forth” (from “to be”) as the "Word leapt.” Michel René Barnes
Explaining what in particular?
“The ultimate form of dehumanization is not to reduce humans to the rank of animals, but to elevate animals to the rank of humans; the ultimate form of depersonalization is not to take away the personhood of subjects, but to give personhood to objects; and the ultimate form of demoralization is not to lower morality to the level of caprice, but to raise caprice to the level of morality.” Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Bummer.
“Where is my world? He was wanting to know, and where the hell am I if I can’t locate it?” Ken Kesey
And then, for some, fractured and fragmented to boot.
“People believe in miracles, precisely because they don’t believe in miracles.” Syed Buali Gillani
You first.
“Ontology, as a science of substances and causes, is impossible; We know beings only by their relations: however, as it is necessary, for the needs of science, to distinguish in each of its aspects this great whole that we call the UNIVERSE, we have given special names to things known and unknown, to the visible and invisible, to those that we know and that we believe.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Going all the way back to the Big Bang.
And/or God.
Dogma
“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.” Robert Anton Wilson
See, I told you. Over and over and over and over again if you recall.
“Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without…I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.” Nikola Tesla
Click, of course. And then some.
“If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "‘there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught’” Hermann Hesse
And fuck dasein, right?
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.” Hypatia of Alexandria
Starting…soon?
“Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you’ll turn it into something absurd." Milan Kundera
God or No God as it were.
“Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, “My current model” – or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel – “contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.” In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.” Robert Anton Wilson
Objectivism some call it.