Phillip Farruggio Op-Ed

[RE]

Two articles by Philip now UP on the Diner Blog!

Phil is "Old School" and does not have his own Blog.  His Insights and Activism are good Diner Stuff though, so I am happy to provide the platform for his writings hee.

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[Surly1]

An excellent add. Up on the DD Facepalm page.

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[Karpatok]

 Whether you're a neocon, a neoliberal,  a libertarian, a fat ass dumbkopf moron, or a hated iconoclastic, dreambusting, enraged formerly romantic dreamer like me, you,ve got to come to the conclusion, if you have one iota of brain left, that saving society or civilization just 25% at a time is a total load of horse manure. If you have swallowed the post modern poison of the prostitute academic pseudo social scientists that human and and animal behavior is Darwinianly hard wired to self interest and survival of the strongest, then no Judaic Christian turn the other cheek is going to fill the bill. If, OTOH, you just can't  give up those baby dreams of what if we only believed this, and Big Daddy said to do that or we're all going to Hell and burn forever Baby, then yes you are totally screwed. Because here's what everybody with an IQ above 40 ALREADY KNOWS. We are all totally screwed. We are DOOMED! Get used to it. Whether this was a planned and contrived experiment or an accident that randomly happened, it was not a good construction and IT CAN NOT BE FIXED! Now do I get a silver star yet, GODFATHER?

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[Karpatok]

YEAH!  Anybody?

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[Karpatok]

Excuse me. I forgot Joe6pack loving believer in being a hard working progressive. Have I left anybody out?

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[Tao Jonesing]

Excuse me. I forgot Joe6pack loving believer in being a hard working progressive. Have I left anybody out?

You left me out, but even I don't know how to label me.

We are not DOOMED.  There is still hope.  You just won't find it in Platonic or Aristotlean conceptions of virtue, which were designed to misdirect and enslave the masses.  Nor will you find it in any "Abrahamic" religion, which were first and foremost conceived as STATES based on Platonic/Aristotlean misdirection (yes, "monotheistic" Judaism came after Plato).

The fictions to which we cling (e.g., money) may be doomed, but our reality need not blink out of existence when our fictions are revealed as fictitious.  The collapse of the fictitious exponential financial system does not change the fact that the underlying real economy does not grow exponentially.  In fact, it is the fictitious exponents that kill real people, and once they go away, more people ought to survive.

Our "society" is ruled by financial elite who for millenia have put the "lie" in CiviLIEzation."  Some folks label these uber-elite as Illuminati or Reptillians, but they're just human beings who, like honey badger, just don't give a fuck.  If you believe that the collapse of the uber-elites' lie means we are doomed-- and I am not saying you do, Karpatok, I don't know -- then you are unwittingly arguing that the uber-elites are right to prey upon us.

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[Karpatok]

Tao,TAO,Tao. Where you been Man? We need to hear more from you. You stayed away so long I thought maybe all the Ponerologists had died and gone to heaven.Now. What did you say? That if I believe the death of the Uber Elites lie,ie financialization, means we are doomed, then I am arguing that the elites have a right to prey upon us. That is not my point at all. I tried to say that we are between two forks. If we believe that Men and animals are constructed in such a way that they cannot escape their hard wiring to dominate and seek gratification in preying on others even with a full stomach, then we cannot accept the assertion that behavior and morality as taught by religion is connected to reality. If, OTOH, we believe anydamn thing that appeals to us, such as life everlasting if we stop behaving in our hard wired manner, or that we don't have to follow the dictates of our biology,( Why haven't you been around to witness the defense of glorious sexual manhood) and can modify our self destructive and totally off the wall suicidal behavior, there is no way to verify that belief, clarify that belief or even come to consensus on that belief as the mere fact of lovely cultural diversity will show you. Combine the hardwiring with the undemonstrability of religion and what do you have? Total conflagration, Apocolypse, therefore DOOM. Don't tell me "He said, SHE said, yadda yadda." Tell me what is. Don't tell me what some pieces of papyrus, or sheepskin or stone pronounced thousands of years ago. And please don't tell me that you have your vacuum cleaner hose to your ear and its telling you something through your own special pipeline to God.

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[Golden Oxen]

"I love the public library system, always have. From my earliest remembrances as an eight or nine year old, the local library was sacred to me. Each Friday afternoon after grade school, I would walk to the library and immerse myself inside the aisles of dreams. All kinds of wonderful books were there for my enjoyment. That little card with my name, address and signature was a passport to adventure. Walking home with an armful of new books, I was on cloud nine."

I'LL be darned, never thought someone else could describe what the local library has meant to my life and still does so eloquently.

Started going with my mother when I was five and never stopped.

Sounds exaggerated perhaps, but in all honesty my fondest place in this world is my local library, feel totally at peace with myself and the world there, and have never lost that wonder of what is going to be in the next book or periodical.
Library people are the greatest also, the super polite librarians with that always helpful interested attitude, the regulars who come in daily, many with those thick glasses and owl like faces, the smart young kids whose mother's foster their reading habits and attend the workshops for kids.

Always made me proud to be an American and thankful and respectful of government.

The Library is still there, I make it my business to go at least twice a week.
It is full of DVDs and Audio Books now. The reading tables all have computers and the kids come in to get WI fi access and log on to Facebook. The few of us old timers that come in sit around the magazine section and glance at one another now and then with that 'What Happened' look on our faces.  Sadder than sad.
 
Those lost feelings of respect, pride and thankfullness are just as painful.

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[Karpatok]

Not the old timers at my public library. When I have tried to talk about what is happening or has happened they just say it will all work itself out and go back to what they were doing. And gee whiz, if you can believe it, they were all middle class. Oh well.

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[RE]

The Library is still there, I make it my business to go at least twice a week.
It is full of DVDs and Audio Books now. The reading tables all have computers and the kids come in to get WI fi access and log on to Facebook. The few of us old timers that come in sit around the magazine section and glance at one another now and then with that 'What Happened' look on our faces.  Sadder than sad.
 
Those lost feelings of respect, pride and thankfullness are just as painful.

The lament over the Collapsing Public Library System is sad of course, but the demise results from many more factors than PF covers here.

The Internet is primarily responsible, especially now with books being published Digitally for Kindle.  Dead Tree Readers are becoming Dinosaurs.  Why have shelves and shelves of Books and Magazines can all be packaged onto one computer really.  If you just talk text, you could pack the entire Library of Congress onto a Thumb Drive.

When I was a kid I would go to the Library to use the Encyclopedias to do my Reports for school.  Brittanica was fabulously expensive, a couple of thousand 1970s dollars as I recall.  So I didn't have my own copy of Brittanica in my room.

Even before the Internet though, Grolier's and Microsoft put out Encyclopedia's on CD-ROM you could use for researching a Report right up through basic college courses.  Now with Wikipedia and Google, you can pretty much research the store of Human Knowledge right from the comfort of your living room.  At least that knowledge which Da Goobermint ALLOWS you to research anyhow.

Sadly, when the Internet Goes Dark and the Electrons stop flowing freely around across the wires to power all this stuff, nobody will be able to access it all anymore.  Sort of like the Burning of the  Great Library of Alexandria, it will all be lost.

The Dead Tree Books will persist somewhat longer, but many books are likely to be Burned for Cooking Fuel.  The few that are stored in Libraries will eventually turn to Dust, like in the movie Zardoz.

Anyhow GO, you got to live through the expansion of Paper Libraries and then the advent of the Internet as well.  Consider yourself fortunate to have been born when you were, because for an Information Junkie, it was the greatest time to be alive ever in the History of Homo Sapiens.  It will all fade into the myst of stories told around campfires in due time.

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[Golden Oxen]

Not the old timers at my public library. When I have tried to talk about what is happening or has happened they just say it will all work itself out and go back to what they were doing. And gee whiz, if you can believe it, they were all middle class. Oh well.

While certainly believing what you say it certainly seems strange. You would think at that stage in their life a senior would really welcome some good conversation and companyy. You know what I mean, lets go back to my place, boil a nice pot of tea and talk, it is such a pleasure to run into someone concerned about all this and trying to understand it sort of thing.

Reminds me of an interview of Tennessee Williams  I listened to way back where he said something to the effect,
"We are all locked up inside our own skins hiding, hiding from each other, hiding from death, alone and hiding". Always remembered it; seems to fit in with your comment somehow.

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[Karpatok]

That ain't me.

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[Golden Oxen]

Quote RE "Anyhow GO, you got to live through the expansion of Paper Libraries and then the advent of the Internet as well.  Consider yourself fortunate to have been born when you were, because for an Information Junkie, it was the greatest time to be alive ever in the History of Homo Sapiens.  It will all fade into the myst of stories told around campfires in due time."

RE

How true RE, how True,  It was a buried headline but in keeping with the sadness of the moment Britannica announced last year that there will no longer be a print edition, it went through me like a knife, and I mentioned it to people and got the SO What answer. It came to me rather quickly that I was one the last of the print editions myself.   Growing old sucks Big Time
 

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[Tao Jonesing]

Tao,TAO,Tao. Where you been Man? We need to hear more from you. You stayed away so long I thought maybe all the Ponerologists had died and gone to heaven.Now. What did you say? That if I believe the death of the Uber Elites lie,ie financialization, means we are doomed, then I am arguing that the elites have a right to prey upon us. That is not my point at all. I tried to say that we are between two forks. If we believe that Men and animals are constructed in such a way that they cannot escape their hard wiring to dominate and seek gratification in preying on others even with a full stomach, then we cannot accept the assertion that behavior and morality as taught by religion is connected to reality. If, OTOH, we believe anydamn thing that appeals to us, such as life everlasting if we stop behaving in our hard wired manner, or that we don't have to follow the dictates of our biology,( Why haven't you been around to witness the defense of glorious sexual manhood) and can modify our self destructive and totally off the wall suicidal behavior, there is no way to verify that belief, clarify that belief or even come to consensus on that belief as the mere fact of lovely cultural diversity will show you. Combine the hardwiring with the undemonstrability of religion and what do you have? Total conflagration, Apocolypse, therefore DOOM. Don't tell me "He said, SHE said, yadda yadda." Tell me what is. Don't tell me what some pieces of papyrus, or sheepskin or stone pronounced thousands of years ago. And please don't tell me that you have your vacuum cleaner hose to your ear and its telling you something through your own special pipeline to God.

Nice try.  On all levels.

Here is the deal.

First, I can no longer accept anybody accusing me of accusing them of anything.  I was clear as day that I was not putting words in your mouth or beliefs in your head.  I was making a larger point that was intended to be divorced from your ego.

Second, we are not between two forks.  We ALWAYS have more than two choices.  We human beings are predisposed to boil everything down to two choices, ignoring everything else.  But whether we ignore other choices or not, they are still there.

Third, even if there are only two choices, they are not order and chaos, they are order rev. 1 and order rev. 2.  Why?  Because the sociopaths insist upon order.  Without it, they can't control us.  If you want to throw off their control of us, you need to find a way to hold them accountable for making the "truth" true.

There is no such thing as a static, immutable truth.  The belief in such a thing is what makes us subservient and vulnerable to those who would subjugate us.

The reason you foresee DOOM is because you believe that if we leave the fiction that we currently live behind, we are doomed.  Why?  Are we too stupid to make up a new fiction to sustain us?  Are we too jaded to accept reality for what it is?  Why can't we make up our own fiction that cuts out the predators and maintains our "wealth"?  I just don't get it. 

As to where have I been, the answer is real life.  I have not had a lot of time for the intertubes.

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[RE]

Quote RE "Anyhow GO, you got to live through the expansion of Paper Libraries and then the advent of the Internet as well.  Consider yourself fortunate to have been born when you were, because for an Information Junkie, it was the greatest time to be alive ever in the History of Homo Sapiens.  It will all fade into the myst of stories told around campfires in due time."

RE

How true RE, how True,  It was a buried headline but in keeping with the sadness of the moment Britannica announced last year that there will no longer be a print edition, it went through me like a knife, and I mentioned it to people and got the SO What answer. It came to me rather quickly that I was one the last of the print editions myself.   Growing old sucks Big Time

I also read about the Last of Brittanica Print, I think I posted on it here in the Diner.  That's How it Goes.  Everybody Knows.

RE

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