musings

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I remember the lightly-accented words of my word-loving cosmopolitan immigrant father, telling me this joke in the early 50's when the words were still current:

FATHER: There are two words I want you to promise never to use: One is "swell" and the other is "lousy."
SON: Okay-Doke, Pop, what are they?

(His mispronunciation partly missed -- and so unwittingly made -- the point.)

He also asked me to promise never to play jazz on my horn.

(My grandmother asked me to promise never to marry a gentile girl.)

I kept both promises, unwittingly, one by giving up the horn altogether, the other by never marrying at all.

Licit for gods


Illicit for clods

I take refuge in one dreaded chore to escape another, more dreaded chore...

When I was taught introductory philosophy by Rafael Demos, and he explained that philosophy was invented to wean Greeks from irrationality and teach them to think rationally, I thought (stupidly): How silly and anachronistic to still be teaching philosophy today! After all, humankind outgrew irrationality long since the Greeks…

By the same token, after the fall of colonialism, and then of the Iron Curtain, when some argued that it will take generations for the newly liberated peoples to understand and practice democracy, I thought (stupidly) How silly! Democracy is as self-evident as rationality…

Googled it. No one seems to have coined it yet. So laying claim on it.

I have only read the summaries of Steve Pinker's new book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," but I wonder about the demographics on which it is based:

As the centuries go by, is violence declining proportionally or absolutely? I suspect it's the former. The population grows Malthusianly, but as civilization progresses, the proportion of violence "tolerated" goes down. Yet at our exponential population growth rate, that still leaves it open that the absolute amount of human/human violence is still growing, daily, relentlessly -- just not as fast as the human population is growing.

So, yes, it's nice that the relative proportion of violence is not growing as fast as the population, but that's just a statistic. The number of sparrows (human) felled daily is still monstrous: bigger than it ever was, and growing. Taking solace from the fall in proportion is akin to tobacco-company thinking, it seems to me: Is Steve Pinker unwittingly falling into apologetics for the inexcusable, whether then, since, or now?

(And let's not forget that -- though it's well-hidden and sanitized -- the absolute amount of violence we are wantonly inflicting daily on the hapless feeling creatures that we breed -- both needlessly and wastefully, and for savour, not survival -- is growing just as exponentially as our own numbers...)

Cryptography's
poetastery.

Art should make
you feel
not reel.

Re: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/91-to-live-at-all-is-miracle-enough

Can't quite agree with Dawkins.

Feeling lucky, like feeling happy, is a mental state. Nonexistent entities (and indeed existent but nonliving entities, like teapots) are neither lucky nor unlucky, nor happy nor unhappy. So how can an existent, living entity be luckier than they? It's like saying I'm greener than F# Major, or that smells are more concave (sic) than abstract...

And, setting aside the euphoria, the lucky ones are the ones who didn't end up in Auschwitz (except if their loved ones ended up in Auschwitz).

Lucky to be alive? If I take an average over all the sentient creatures alive on the planet today, I'd say most of them are not so lucky; the lucky ones are maybe the ones that eat rather than get eaten, but then the numbers are beginning to dwindle for Dawkins's ecstatic numerology...

What's left that can be said and makes any sense is just a rather banal tautology: When you're having a good day, you're having a good day... Enjoy it while it lasts (and don't think too hard!).

As for Dawkins's hopes of posthumous pleasure from the people who are still partaking of his prose in 2111 -- ask him again how he's feeling about that in 2111...

---

PS and whether you prefer sci or sci-fi is really down to a matter of taste...

Mit van mit kivánni még
Ily áldott időben? -
Adjon Isten, ami nincs,
Ez uj esztendőben...

What's there,
This blessèd time,
To want?
May God
What's not
This year ordain...

Arany János (1853)

Who's there,
This blessèd time,
No more?

May God
(Who's not)
His "gifts" retain...

How foolish,
those who imagine
that the death to dread
is their own,
that the life whose eternal loss
is unthinkable, unbearable,
is theirs.

It's one thing for the fate of elected officials to be decided by vote counts, quite another for matters of fact to be decided the same way.

No, what's true is not determined by how many people believe it is true. And if some people believe of something true that it is false, that does not make it partly false. When it comes to facts, opinion is just opinion, no matter how widely or strongly held.

Maybe the reason the two are getting conflated in the media-magnified opinocracy that seems destined to become the successor of democracy is that the fate of elected officials depends on voters' opinions on facts.

What is surprising is that in a world now equipped to be incomparably better informed than ever before, it is the weight of opinion, not evidence and reason, that is calling the cards.

Sigmund Freud, a brilliant and creative thinker who could have been a historian, a biographer, perhaps even a novelist, but instead fancied himself a physician and scientist, and managed to persuade most of the world to share his fantasy. As a result, he was merely a hermeneut. (Much the same could be said of Karl Marx.)

Raffiniert ist der Herrgott
aber boshaft ist er nicht

If the old bearded one
ever appeared to me and said:

"It's all true,
what you've heard about me,
here, let me show you..."

I'd say:
All of it? I've heard
everything and its opposite!
When will this absurd
hallucination end?

And don't you feel
any remorse at all
for the Shoah
and all the rest?

And then I'd ask
to see M, D, N, Sz, L, ...

There are probably neither gods nor tooth fairies.

So stop worrying, enjoy life, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- not because it is Writ, but because it is right.