The fun read.

Wednesday, 11 March, Year 7 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

OP Fun read.
MP Make any sense ?

OP Yeah. I'm not sure allowing contributors who've actually brought work for review to vent is quite in the same bucket as blanket cattlemer service, but sure. I guess one could argue the chump paying $12.95 for some chunk of nonsense "put in his work too", at least by proxy.
MP If they are venting why is this "board" required to intervene ?

OP It doesn't say the board will intervene.
MP "please contact the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board at, or the individual members, and they will work to resolve the issue to the best of their ability."

OP Vague enough to mean nothing.
MP Vague enough to be an OCD undo of a thing that was donei. The thing that was done is a blanket statement that happens to be wrong. The correct statement is, "If you have problems we don't give a shit. Fuck you."

OP It could be. The problem with that statement is the idea that it'll turn away otherwise useful, efficient, otherwise desirable people, and that they'll be left with too few to do what they wish so either they'll fail, or they'll have to kill off the rest of the population. They vehemently want neither of these.
MP Yes, that is the problem : that they think this matters, and that they think they should careii. From there on, the whole spittoon follows.

OP Eh. I'd go for encouraging correct understanding of spheres of influence and inclusion in the unnatural context of the Internet over blanket fuck you-ing. 'Cause I mean... it's just another blanket. And yeah, you have WoT etc in there, but I wonder if it's a speck in a sea, where it oughta be the sea.
MP I think the sea should be "fuck you".

OP Who knows, words affect different idiots differently ;)
MP "We don't like you and we hope you die already".

OP Too strong for any purpose beyond destruction imo. But you know that. As long as you don't actually literally want them ALL to die already, but want them to do things for you....
MP No, not at all. The opposite, as currently practiced, is pure poison. It's like being submerged in a vat of social heroin. The constant stimulation utterly exhausts and soon destroys the brain. If people were correctly representing the world as fundamentally hostile, they would be capable of finding their way, and making friends and starting families and finding meaning. As it is, they're pretty much fucked, all by a fake pretense to "friendliness", hypocritical as much as it's insane.

OP Here's one: friendliness does exist. Why shouldn't they try? They're all going to die anyway, whether the world is fundamentally hostile or not. Maybe they find meaning out of spending their lives trying to be friendly and trying to observe it in others. Maybe some scant few succeed, just like some scant few succeed by fully embracing hostility.
MP This maybe has ruined your country. In the shortest span ever seen, to the most utter despair ever mentioned, this maybe has ruined your country.

OP Yeah well I have yet to appreciate the value, should it exist, of "country".
MP Myeah. Well, it was great once, but that was in fairness before you were born. At any rate : maybe heroin does a body good too. Who's to say. Kramer gets it just as well. "What do you want me to say? That the things haven't worked out the way that I planned? That I'm struggling, barely able to keep my head above water? That L.A. is a cold place even in the middle of the summer? That it's a lonely place even when your stuck in traffic at the Hollywood Freeway? That I'm no better than a screenwriter driving a cab, a starlet turning tricks, a producer in a house he can't afford? Is that what you want me to say?"

OP I don't really like this analogy. Being high is a physiological divorce from reality. How can we say, to the same measure, that someone's choice to "be friendly" or to "be hostile" enacts a similar divorce?
MP Point to point. Find a difference ? And no equivocation there. Strictly and only "being friendly".

OP Naturally you'll say it isn't, and i'll have no way to prove that it is. But: former's objective, latter's abstract.
MP There's nothing "objective" about either of them.

OP A body under the influence of heroin must be measurably abnormal. That's not objective?
MP That may be objective, but it's not germane.

OP Well I dunno why not.
MP Fact remains that the heroin addict and the "maybe" addict share an exactly homomorphical mental problem.

OP I thought the problem with the friendly blanket was that it's not how the world fundamentally works.
MP No, the problem with it isn't outside of the mind, it's inside of the mind. It's just recursive stupidity. Sort of slow burning autism, if you wish.iii

OP Then this'll have to be shown.
MP Ok, let's show it. Three people, of whom A is sane ; B is high ; C is maybe-sick. They all run into a scorpion. A kills it. B steps on it and gets killed. C steps on it and gets killed.

OP ...
MP Not the showing you had in mind ?

OP Nah. Problems: you changed blanket friendly people into "maybe addicts"; the maybe you reference was an idea I was postulating and wouldn't source from them. Moreover this abc is a rehash of the same premise: that maybe-sick is the same as high person. What is to be shown is that the problem is inside the mind rather than outside of it, in the maybe sick person (we can grant as is that this is the case for high people).

MP Can you construct a counter ? I like how you argue these days btw. Nicely matured.

OP Hehe yay! A counter to the idea that maybe-sick's problem is in the mind? Sure: it's outside their mind.
MP Like where ?

OP You said "if people were correctly representing the world as fundamentally hostile". I imagine this'd be the "where" of it; I'd have to say the world is fundamentally friendly. I don't actually think that's true, mind you, but I think it's equally...abstract.
MP What do you mean "equally abstract".

OP I mean that both statements (world is fundamentally hostile, world is fundamentally friendly) are equally unprovable.
MP To whom ?

OP To a thinking person. I think the best we could do is to construct a list of supports for both statements, and compare them. But how do we know our lists are complete? Could they even possibly be complete?
MP To a little girl they are unknowable, let alone provable. To an adult woman, or an adult man, they are the pinnacle of banal. The stacking of this deck being that I'm not arguing here for the benefit of tabula rasa, so that random pubescent derp may read and be better at picking up girls or w/e. I write for people who already know the world. Which is why the qualification for reading Trilema is above the PhD level.

OP You write for people who already know the world inasmuch as the world is knowable (and not even then; PhD level it may be, but perfect knowledge is unattainable nevertheless).
MP Anyway, this aside : that the world is fundamentally hostile directly flows from basic physics. The laws of thermodynamics are good enough basis to prove it.

OP The world we're talking about includes human thought, does it?
MP Depends what you mean by thought.

OP Hehe.
MP If you're willing to invent an unknowable, purely declarative thought outside of action, of the substance of "with all due respect", then no. If you see thought as the parsimonious explanation of action, then yes.

OP Alright, that seems a sufficient argument to me.
MP Ha! Discussion seems sufficient article to me!

———
  1. You know how this undoing thing works ? Pure ritual, distilled faith, the OCD guy is really just the religious believer taken to the extreme. In his case, the slow motion "you must wear this on your head lest god strike you down" sort of nonsense becomes a much more disruptive "I almost thought about nipples, I must immediately hop three times and touch my nose with my wrist or else THE WORLD FUCKING ENDS". []
  2. Causes and purposes makes for excellent companion reading here. []
  3. I carefully avoided "sluggish" in there. Could you tell ? []
Category: Trilterviuri
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7 Responses

  1. You are both wrong, the world is neither friendly or dangerous. It doesn't give a shit one way or the other, it is!

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Wednesday, 11 March 2015

    Not a matter of friendly vs dangerous, a matter of friendly vs hostile. And the world is universally hostile simply because stuff like the 2nd law.

  3. Without entropy there would not be life either (at least not something we would recognize as life) I don't see it as hostile. I don't think the 2nd law cares anymore than the trees would care if passed a law against them growing.

    The universe doesn't care.

    Now all that said non-living things do tend to last longer than living ones.

    :D

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Wednesday, 11 March 2015

    Yes, that's exactly the point : world is fundamentally hostile and alternatives are plain impossible. Pretense to contrary notwithstanding.

    Doesn't matter if you "see it" as hostile or not. All that matters is that if you act as if it weren't you'll have Obama on your hands as a necessary end result.

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