Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thread™

[Alex]

which philosopher best embodies the "umma do me" ethos to which you wholeheartedly subscribe, burf?

[Mickey]

I'd say Derrida.

[Alex]

he must be dismayed at the insinuation.

[BurtReynolds]

which philosopher best embodies the "umma do me" ethos to which you wholeheartedly subscribe, burf?

Thoreau is really speaking to me lately. And Nietzsche of course. Basically any existentialist.

Sadly, I think I fall short of most of my heroes. I'm riddled with ressentiment.

[BurtReynolds]

quick question after reading Thus Spake Zarathustra again: Is it possible to buy a whole mountain? I really need a mountain.

[Bi_3]

For Burt:

NIHILIST DAD JOKES, PART 2
by ALEX BAIA


What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Every bite is a flavorless and hollow lie. Every meal gives me less pleasure with each passing day.

- - -
“Dad, can you put my shoes on?”

“No, they won’t fit me. I have outgrown small shoes, just as I have outgrown feeling awe at the sun’s rise, joy at your mother’s smile, and belief in a just and loving God.”

- - -
I’d tell you a chemistry joke… but I doubt I’d get a reaction! Laughter is worthless. It is a servile submission reflex to avoid being singled out and crushed by the group alpha.

- - -
“Dad, I’m hungry”

“Hi, Hungry. I’m Dad.”

“Why’d you name me ‘Hungry,’ Dad?”

“Because every day you will consume food and entertainment until you are sick, yet every night you will fall asleep empty inside.”

- - -
Have you tried eating a clock? It’s time-consuming! Soon I will stand on the precipice of eternal sleep, and the tides of time will sweep away everything I have ever known. So I’m not feeling motivated to perform kitchen renovations right now.

- - -
What did one snowman say to the other one?

“Do you smell carrots?”

The second snowman stood silent.

“I asked you a question!” shouted the first snowman. “Say something! Anything! My god, man, speak!”

But the second snowman said nothing, because he was dead.

- - -
“Dad, do you know where my sunglasses are?”

“No, do you know where my dad glasses are? If you find them, give them to someone whose eyes have not yet forsaken the noxious tedium that surrounds us all.”

- - -
How many apples grow on a tree? All of them!

Deer, raccoons, and greedy children will devour the apples, thoughtlessly, for years. One day our poisoned climate will collect its debts and choke all life. Tsunamis will flood the lands, trees and fruit will wither in a miasma, and the remaining scavengers will scream in the face of extinction. Mother Nature’s last word will be blind, despotic, and final.

That’s the deal with the apples.

- - -
“Dad, did you get a haircut?”

“No, I got them all cut! Hair is dead skin, and a barber’s scissors are a sneak preview of the reaper’s scythe.”

- - -
What do you call a belt with a watch on it? A waist of time! Let this idiotic belt remind us that every human contrivance is a sad distraction from our march to nonexistence.

- - -
I bought a cheap elephant ride yesterday… I got it for peanuts!

I sat on the beast hoping to excavate some boyish excitement. Yet I felt nothing. When I was young I dreamed of changing the world with my ideas. But people care not for ideas — they value conformity, popularity, and the fantasy of having sex with someone who has never thought about them. So I gave up on philosophy. Now I spew jokes like a trained circus animal.

“What’s the leading cause of dry skin? Towels!”

“I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something!”

“Dad, I’ll call you later.” “Don’t call me later, call me Dad!”

My son stares at the television, hypnotized by a pop culture I no longer understand. I am now an obsolete machine: begging to be noticed, desperate to feel relevant, and doomed to annihilation. I run from the house trembling and screaming and throw my fist toward a darkened sky — only to find a thundercloud in the shape of an elephant. “WHY DO YOU MOCK ME LIKE THIS!? THESE ELEPHANTS DO NOTHING FOR ME!!” But this cloud, like all clouds, is meaningless: just random water droplets that will vanish like every wisp of cotton candy I’ve ever used to purchase a brief smile from a boy who once revered me.

- - -
What cheese can never be yours? Nacho cheese!

I hold a tortilla chip in my hand and notice it is like my physical self: transient, fragile, and destined to crumble.

I bite the chip, and I am gone.

[BurtReynolds]

I'm not a nihilist! Now I know what Nietzsche felt like.

[BurtReynolds]

but this is the most blackpilled, metal as fuck, truth bomb I've ever heard. Maybe I am a nihilist...

Everything of value has been built in Hell.

It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

Happy Tuesday!

[BurtReynolds]

The ancients saw the gods as like erratic, temperamental children because it reflected their reality of being at the mercy of happenstance or things they didn't understand. The world was made up of abstract essences or forms.

With the age of industrialisation and science, The universe became a great machine. God himself took on the appearance of the divine architect or clockmaker.

In the digital age, we now see the universe working according to a set of algorithms. Simulation theories make sense. God is now the divine programmer, and the universe is like The Matrix.

I forgot where I'm going with this...

[Citizen Dick]

The ancients saw the gods as like erratic, temperamental children because it reflected their reality of being at the mercy of happenstance or things they didn't understand. The world was made up of abstract essences or forms.

With the age of industrialisation and science, The universe became a great machine. God himself took on the appearance of the divine architect or clockmaker.

In the digital age, we now see the universe working according to a set of algorithms. Simulation theories make sense. God is now the divine programmer, and the universe is like The Matrix.

I forgot where I'm going with this...

Compiling error. Just debug, recompile and the algorithm will take you to the conclusion of your thought.

[BurtReynolds]

The ancients saw the gods as like erratic, temperamental children because it reflected their reality of being at the mercy of happenstance or things they didn't understand. The world was made up of abstract essences or forms.

With the age of industrialisation and science, The universe became a great machine. God himself took on the appearance of the divine architect or clockmaker.

In the digital age, we now see the universe working according to a set of algorithms. Simulation theories make sense. God is now the divine programmer, and the universe is like The Matrix.

I forgot where I'm going with this...

Compiling error. Just debug, recompile and the algorithm will take you to the conclusion of your thought.

Praise CyberJesus.

[Mickey]

You should read Jonathan Crary's 24/7. He's thinking through this issue of digital consumption and how it interfaces with older patterns of human behavior.

[BurtReynolds]

I'll throw it on the pile.

[knee tunes]

The ancients saw the gods as like erratic, temperamental children because it reflected their reality of being at the mercy of happenstance or things they didn't understand. The world was made up of abstract essences or forms.

With the age of industrialisation and science, The universe became a great machine. God himself took on the appearance of the divine architect or clockmaker.

In the digital age, we now see the universe working according to a set of algorithms. Simulation theories make sense. God is now the divine programmer, and the universe is like The Matrix.

I forgot where I'm going with this...

Compiling error. Just debug, recompile and the algorithm will take you to the conclusion of your thought.

Praise CyberJesus.

Don't forget to save

[BurtReynolds]

For Burt:

- - -
I bought a cheap elephant ride yesterday… I got it for peanuts!

I sat on the beast hoping to excavate some boyish excitement. Yet I felt nothing. When I was young I dreamed of changing the world with my ideas. But people care not for ideas — they value conformity, popularity, and the fantasy of having sex with someone who has never thought about them. So I gave up on philosophy. Now I spew jokes like a trained circus animal.

“What’s the leading cause of dry skin? Towels!”

“I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something!”

“Dad, I’ll call you later.” “Don’t call me later, call me Dad!”

My son stares at the television, hypnotized by a pop culture I no longer understand. I am now an obsolete machine: begging to be noticed, desperate to feel relevant, and doomed to annihilation. I run from the house trembling and screaming and throw my fist toward a darkened sky — only to find a thundercloud in the shape of an elephant. “WHY DO YOU MOCK ME LIKE THIS!? THESE ELEPHANTS DO NOTHING FOR ME!!” But this cloud, like all clouds, is meaningless: just random water droplets that will vanish like every wisp of cotton candy I’ve ever used to purchase a brief smile from a boy who once revered me.

- - -

Really relating to this one today.

[Kaius]

[BurtReynolds]

lot of great old interviews and talks on this channel. Not much of it is in English, because English speakers are big dummies

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_uxx ... mLgOcF7jXA

[Electromatic]

I don't know if this belongs here or not, but I was thinking about gentrification today.

Couldn't a government just limit the tax increases to new or newly purchased properties in an area in an effort to curb negative effects of Gentrification? So the people that lived in the newly gentrified area during the rough times could stand to gain from the gentrification and maybe keep them from being pushed out to a new area?

I mean I know rent control and all that, but it seems like property tax increases that jump to the new values of areas could severely effect people who aren't used to paying those amounts of money because previously no rich kids wanted to live in their area. Those people probably moved there initially because it was cheap.

[BurtReynolds]

[BurtReynolds]