fuckphilosophy.com

of all the free online dictionaries, i don’t go to thefreedictionary.com because it is so free. somehow it is freer than the other free ones, but i can’t even conceive of how it could be. and for that reason i don’t like it. i don’t trust it because it is so free. if i’m looking to buy a bicycle and someone offers me a free one, i’d probably be suspicious at least. I’m suspicious and there are other free online dictionaries, so i use those ones.

I today realized, without ever having tried twitter, and not really understanding what it was in the first place, that I had a place in my life for twitter. Then I started reading about twitter and I read the ‘criticisms’ section of the wikipedia page, and I was struck by the inanity of these criticisms. I’m going to go through each of them and explain why they are stupid. Most are just stupid on the face. When you read these quotes, ask yourself if EVERYTHING COULD JUST AS EASILY BE SAID ABOUT ORDINARY FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATIONS COMING OUT YOUR MOUTH.

“Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad”, said tech writer Bruce Sterling.

How likely are you to stumble on “literate communication” unless you work in academia? Did you really fire up twitter for the first time expecting “literate communication”? How likely is it that the next person you walk past is doing really interesting things in their life? It is unlikely to find “literate communication” (whatever that means) on twitter, it is unlikely to hear The Iliad on CB radio, and it is unlikely that the life of the next stranger you meet will inspire you at all. Big fucking deal! You are describing the social sphere in general you douchebag!

“For many people, the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd,” hypothesized writer Clive Thompson.

OK, so fucking what? The idea of wearing jeans that hang below your knees is absurd to me. I can’t imagine myself wearing jeans like that, but SO FUCKING WHAT? Is that interesting to you? Maybe I should write a op-ed column about how I myself think those low-ass jeans look really impractical and silly? NO, YOU DON’T DO THAT. When you have thoughts like these, Clive Thompson, here is what you do instead of broadcasting them to the world: The best thing to do would be to understand that they are not interesting and the implications are actually false. The second best thing would be to just not communicate those ideas to other people. Less collateral damage that way.

Listen, Clive Thompson, I don’t doubt that many people think twitter is silly. Is that interesting? I think some things are silly too!!!!! WHO FUCKING CARES! The real problem is assholes like Clive Thompson. Holy fuck. Clive Thompson, do you ACTUALLY think that everyone should think like you? Clive Thompson, please try to imagine this world, the one where everyone thinks exactly like you. Does that sound like a better world even to you Clive Thompson? Who the fuck are you? You obviously are a significant enough figure to be quoted in the Twitter wikipedia page, and have your own page. Do you realize that by saying things like that that you are likely spreading your sentiments? You must think that you are the arbiter of morality.

I definitely think people should spread their sentiments, if they are not fucking stupid. The only way to avoid saying fucking stupid things is by censoring yourself. I VERY OFTEN have fucking stupid ideas/thoughts/reactions. Over the years to developed the skill of editing the things that I share with people. It works wonders. You can actually tell people how to think about you, what you associate you with, etc. So, I edit the thoughts that I communicate in order to create a particular desired impression in other people. If you do this, then you must want to create the impression that you are an asshole douchebag tool or something, and I don’t understand why anyone would want to do that, so I am confused by your statements. It just doesn’t make sense why anyone would say something like that (other than to be an asshole).

Does this statement sound controversial: not all of the ideas/thoughts/feelings that you have are true, not all of them are appropriate, not all of them are constructive.

I realize that I am doing the same thing that Clive Thompson is doing, I’m ranting, but the difference is that mine is constructive and not false like Clive Thompson. My reasons are thought out and and make sense at the very least. The world would be well-served if people like Clive Thompson would just keep their mouths closed.

I had a brilliant idea the other day. For some reason I was talking about libertarians the other day (I say “for some reason” because I almost never talk about politics, and I don’t talk about politics because I don’t care about politics. if we all just ignored the libertarians, the country would be so much better. I don’t really even give a shit how much it costs, I wish they would all just shut the fuck up. Not just libertarians either, most political parties, and most people in general should all shut the fuck up, or say something interesting, and give me a compelling reason to agree with you.

Here is another thing that people don’t seem to realize: there are two sense of “political” that I think are easily, if not subconsciously conflated. One is the philosopher’s definition You could say that ‘politics’, at the broadest, deals with systems of order in a society of people. The other sense of “political” is more synonymous with being factious. this first sense is the more interesting one. By “system”, I don’t think we even have to mean an established body of governors. The system can be constituted by the polis. I’m not saying it should be, and I’m saying it shouldn’t be constituted by the people at this point. But I am including form of anarchism as an example of ‘politics’ as well.

“Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.”

Who we are dealing with here is a person who cannot conceive of twitter having any use/place/importance/positive effect/etc. Maybe people who can’t understand things should stop acting like they know something about things. Just a thought.

Here’s another thing Clive Thompson, whoever you are, do you never in face-to-face conversations tell other people what you’ve been doing in the shortest amount of time possible? I bet you even report minutiae sometimes. I would certainly consider these thoughts that you expressed as minutiae. Like I said, “big deal, somebody doesn’t like twitter, big fucking deal”.

What the fuck even is this “modern narcissism” that you are throwing around as if it were a fact like the fact that Barry Bonds used steroids. We talk about how vain our modern society is, but is surely a ridiculous generalization, practically baseless. You’ve met a lot of people who you think are narcissistic? You look at people sending tweets and immediately think that they are being narcissistic? You act as if every tweet that anyone makes is about how they got their hair cut or something. What the fuck is wrong with liking your hair to look good. Clive Thompson, do you never make apparel choices because you like the way it looks? Then what the fuck are you talking about?

Another thing, when you say something, don’t you like it to be heard by someone? Does that make you narcissistic? What you are ACTUALLY saying is that you don’t like what the people are saying. It has very little to do with the medium. You just ASSUME that twitter technology is causing this. But I think you will notice that I don’t think human nature has changed as a result of twitter. This is the kind of bullshit that can pass for copy in the media, especially if you are the media.

And look fuckface, can you not conceive that not every tweet was written for you? maybe it was interesting to someone else? maybe the person is a fasion designer who is experimenting with hairstyle, or ANYBODY experimenting with hairstyle. Is there something wrong with being concerned about your appearance? WTF!

During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, Daniel Schorr noted that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin gave Schorr two examples of breaking news stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories.[81]

“Lacked rigorous fact-checking”? You shouldn’t be comparing twitter to the news media. Certainly twitter has an effect on the news media, but it isn’t a news media application/device. How often does anyone in face-to-face communication have “rigorous fact-checking”? A whole hell of a lot less than they do when they are on the Internet.

In an episode of The Daily Show on February 26, 2009, guest Brian Williams derided tweets as only referring to the condition of the author in any given instant. Williams implied that he would never use Twitter because nothing he did was interesting enough to publish in Twitter format.

Fine, and what is wrong with reporting the current condition of an individual?

In March 2009, the comic strip Doonesbury began to satirize Twitter. Many characters highlighted the triviality of tweets although one defended the need to keep up with the constant-update trend.[84] SuperNews! similarly satirized Twitter as an addiction to “constant self-affirmation” and said tweets were nothing more than “shouts into the darkness hoping someone is listening”.[85]

All of these points have been addressed above.

This is what you are saying: people shouldn’t use twitter unless they have something interesting to say. I am saying the exact same thing to you. What you are saying is not interesting. Is what you are saying more true because you have a wikipedia page, and you have been quoted? Fuck no.

All of us here at fuckphilosopy.com have been busy, and i’ve been busy raging against the people immediately around me for the last 6+ months, then i realized that the people around aren’t anywhere near as bad as most people, so i decided that i would start raging on the internet. i’m going to fuck the philosophical shit out of all y’all

It has been awhile.

I was walking past a Boys and Girls club today and I saw a bunch of large paintings in the window that were done in a very childish style, but couldn’t have been painted by a child. It made me think that it is probably adults that like childish painting more than kids actually like to paint them. Do kids actually like to do art? I know kids are forced/expected to do art from the very get go, but I suspect that kids actually don’t have any kind of desire or preference for it one way or another. We have all just been brought up to assume that that is something that kids do; when you go out, bring some crayons so that the kid can have something to do, because kids love art. Is it not that adults love kids’ art, and kids like to do things that get that kind of loving approbation?

Another thing I was thinking: I was walking down the road and I looked down and saw a kid in his yard with a baseball bat and a tennis ball, looking like he was about to toss the ball up and hit it up over the fence into the road. Then he saw me, and ran away and went inside. The kid knew that it is wrong to hit balls into the street. Sometimes people will saw that kids don’t really understand the difference between right and wrong, that kids can be so cruel, etc. Kids know that shit is wrong. I remember doing terrible things that I knew were horrible, but I did them anyways.

I have realized later in life that my father subjected me to his flatulence for decades. I smell my own mature flatulence and recognize the smell. I never knew what that smell was all that time.

This post is over a month old – something I started, but never finished, but here it is:

Take a look out the window. Doesn’t it look a little skankier than it did before? I’m talking general skankiness, and not any bullshit gender specific variety. For example, I just got home from vacation and there was a skanky blanket on my doorstep. It probably didn’t help that I got some smoked salmon for Christmas, and that was all I had to eat when I got back from the airport. But still, I’ve never gotten smoked salmon for Christmas before, so it still supports my point. Also, after I got back from vacation it was really humid and warm, so humid that it was beaded up and running down every surface around. Sweaty skank. Also, suddenly my jeans that I hadn’t washed for months since I bought them started smelling like mildew, and I can’t get rid of it.

Parallel to entropy (or perhaps identical with entropy) is an increase in skankiness. Look at movies from the 50’s or something compared to movies today.  Clearly an increase in skankiness. Actually, on second thought, there must be cycles of skankiness. Cave men were probably pretty skanky. The primordeal soup had to be pretty skanky, but before the primordeal soup, the water probably wasn’t very skanky. The heat death of the universe doesn’t sound very skanky, but some time after the Big Bang, when all kinds of shit is going down like physical laws separating out, and unfathomable forces, atomic particles fused together, etc. that all sounds pretty skanky. The weather has been doing some skanky stuff in recent years you’d have to admit, but an ice age certainly isn’t skanky.

My impression has been that 2009 is pretty skanky. I would welcome any other confimatory evidence from my readership.

This is a follow-up to a comment I made in my last post about you-know-who (we must pass over it in silence). I made a comment that there are no philosophers anymore (never was, maybe one). What I meant is just this: that there are no philosophers anymore. ‘Philosopher’ is of a kind with concepts like ‘unicorn’. I may have suggested this in an earlier post, but my suggestion is that the term be replaced by ‘philosophy people’. If that sounds boring I also came up with ‘philosophizers’. I might like that one better. Say that one a few times (out loud) and you’ll come to like it I think. ‘Philosopher’ refers to the Platonic idea of the philosophizer. ‘Philosopher’ doesn’t pick out anything in this, the actual, world. Hell, it might not even pick out anything in all possible worlds. I mean, how could there be? Now we have the strong claim that there are necessarily no philosophers.

Going against everything I just said, now that I think about it, the real problem might be in referring to oneself as a ‘philosopher’ without tongue-in-cheek. Putting these two ideas together we have ‘philosopher’ as the Platonic idea as well as being kinda alter-indexical, as in it can refer to anyone except me. As confirming evidence (even though evidence doesn’t confirm theories, we can make this exception I think) that this is correct we need only look at Socrates. Socrates is the Platonic idea of the philosopher without question, qualifications, and without any of ya’ll’s back-talk. This makes sense because Plato came up with Platonic forms, and he learned philosophy from Socrates, and his idea of what a philosopher is was based on Socrates. Therefore, Socrates is the Platonic form of the philosopher. (Starting to make some sense now, eh?) Also, Socrates claimed to have no wisdom and rather tried to extract wisdom from others (which makes sense, but a dumb idea nevertheless); therefore, he probably didn’t consider himself a philosopher. Therefore! Exactly what I said above (I don’t feel like trying to figure out what I was talking about).

THEREFORE, there are no philosophers. ESPECIALLY if you think you are one. If you think you are one then you MOST DEFINATELY are not one. See how that works? That’s like some zen shit or something. It’s that easy to do philosophy! That is our goal here at fuckphilosophy.com: to show you the folks at home that you can do philosophy too. Now you know (and knowing is half the battle).

P.S. I am aware that the above made no sense. Therefore, if you laugh at me and point out how it doesn’t make any sense, it won’t hurt my feelings because I already know that.

First off, I just want to say that Adaptation is one of my favorite movies and I’m sorry if I’m not very charitable to Charlie Kaufman the man in this post. I can identify with his characters, and I am super critical of myself, so it is easy for me to be critical of him. He makes it easy too because he doesn’t mask it at all in his movies.

Here is my very uncharitable summary Kaufman’s work:

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INT. CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S APT – DAY

Charlie Kaufman is sitting at his typewriter or computer working. We see what he is typeing: “INT. CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S APT – DAY…Charlie Kaufman is sitting at his typewriter or computer working, we see what he is typeing: “INT. CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S APT – DAY…”" And all the while there is a voice over: This is a great idea! I’ve finally found it! Wait, maybe its too self-indulgent, I’M too self-obsessed! I’m pathetic.

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I don’t want to give Synecdoche, New York away, so I won’t. I haven’t actually seen the movie, but I read the script. It was actually really good (the script). Synecdoche, New York has very similar themes to Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One reviewer described it as a summation of his other movies, and I think that is pretty accurate. It clearly reprises the roles played by the neurotic of Nicolas Cage’s two characters in Adaptation and Jim Carrey’s in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It deals a lot with these characters’ relations with women, issues of inadequacy, unfulfillment, but also on these characters’ creativity, which often borders on the megalomaniacal. I can imagine Kaufman writing his next screenplay (also on similar themes) and his girlfriend realizing that there isn’t going to be just one movie on this topic, but one after another variation on these themes. She then starts to pity and detest him. But he’s Charlie Kaufman the great screenwriter… Yeah, but what is exciting about a guy who is trapped inside himself, can’t get out of this mise en abyme, not only that, he has hollowed out a cavernous space where he can lovingly model his own self-loathing and insecurities. In this way it is also a mise en abyme of Narcissus, in love with his own reflection.

I can imagine Charlie Kaufman growing up reading superhero comics and writing his own stories about superheroes. Then later he took a few psychology classes, read some Freud or something, and the result is stories of severly insecure day dreamers frustrated with the world, and also subject to almost blinding moments of super human inspiration. I suspect Charlie Kaufman’s father was not the one wearing the pants in the house either. I’m guessing that he had a mother who thought that he could only shit Tiffany cufflinks. Hence the themes of “having good ideas” and seeking approval from women.

I picture Kaufman writing and having what seem like empyrean insights. The other side of these moments of inspiration is that they are very isolating; one must get very wrapped up in their thoughts, to an almost paranoid and solipsistic extent. This is clear in the self-reference and the almost dissociation brought about by this. Kaufman is human though; one comes back from these creative depths wanting to share what you have discovered, to be able to commune with another like one is able to do with their ideas.

I guess I don’t know that Kaufman the man is anything like these characters. I assume he is, because Adaptation is about him adapting a book and that character is very similar to these other characters. Anyways, like I said, Adaptation is a GREAT movie, and Synecdoche, New York will probably be great too. Forgive my speculations on Kaufman’s character, but his is an interesting one.

by the way, i just wanted to say fuck philosophy. fuck socrates and kant…especially kant, and whoever else, like plato for instance. fuck defining terms, fuck necessary and sufficient conditions, fuck being charitable to other philosophers, fuck having to be certain and in the right, fuck all these huge-ass dense-ass books (like kant’s ones for example), fuck having to carry them around, fuck adverbs (like ‘presumably’ for instance). that just about covers it, and you get the idea anyhow. this should always be in the background here. were there a harpsichord continuo for this site, it would have something of this tenor.

I haven’t been writing on this and part of the problem is that i have had a busy semester, and another is that after a year studying grad school philosophy has made me self-conscious. i like fuckphilosophy.com better, so i plan to continue there. maybe i’ll come back to findphilosophy.com after i have a better foothold on wisdom. i’ll probably copy some posts over to fuckphilosophy, and after that i’ll probably forward any traffic to fuckphilosophy.