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There is an essential similarity between addiction (esp. quitting) and sorites paradoxes: What difference does one more cigarette/margarita/pebble/hair/etc. make?

First of all: sorites paradoxes (or ‘the paradox of the heap’). 1,000 pebbles together certainly constitutes a heap. 3 pebbles certainly doesn’t. What about 999 pebbles? Yes. 998? Yes. The question is: Where is the line? Is there a line where the collection of pebbles is no longer a heap? It seems not.

The same pattern is found in the reasoning of the addict who wants to quit: I’ll buy one more pack…What difference will one more day of smoking make? (I’ll quit tomorrow.)

The pattern should be clear, but what does it say? I’m not sure yet, but it says a lot.

The answer is to come.

I think we should try to cover up events like mall stampedes and shootings, brawls, etc. We can’t let the rest of the world know this shit happens. We Americans like to hear about it, but people in other countries would get the wrong idea if they caught word of it. Newspapers shouldn’t carry the stories, people shouldn’t talk about it, malls should be cloaked in a surveilance and media-free zone. Maybe malls should be granted autonomous status, enter at your own risk, so America can wash their hands of mall stampedes and shit. They should be granted some kind of fronteir wild west trading post status. People should know that if there is a really big sale, then the employees and the customers need to come armed.  Damn that sounds American! Back to the cloaking idea. There needs to be a kind of cloaking bubble, the malls shouldn’t have windows either, maybe underground would be better, underground with nightvision goggles, except there would probably be way more deadly stampedes if the malls were underground. There should be no windows and lots of blind corners with those globe mirrors to see around the corners. There would probably be a crowds of vigilante/mercenaries standing at the edge of the cloaked shopping zone that will go shopping for you. It will need to just become silently understood that if someone went shopping and didn’t come back, then you don’t talk about it, the coronar understands, etc. (Americans, y’all understand this I know.)

Here is another idea: maybe they could create a kind of Everquest or what the hell ever other reality-usurping online games people play, an online game that is combined with online shopping, but not just a game – you actually buy stuff this way. Now we can put the malls underground, and you have to buy nightvision goggles and shit if you really want the good deals. There will still be mercenaries too. They are the people who make a living off this online shopping world. I like that idea, and I bet other Americans will like it too.

Afterthought: this second idea should be incorported into the Tron sequel that is coming (see my tronsequel.com blog). Getting sucked into some kind of second life/Everquest whatever shopping world, and then there would be all these stampedes in the dark, and a cloaked black market that is underneath the underground mall, where the really big deals go down.

I just realized that the English name for our planet is really weird: Earth. I’ve been reading a paper that uses this name over-and-over again. At some point I looked at the word and didn’t recognize it. It made me think of elephant ears, shaggy turf hanging over a drop-off out of a Loony Toons cartoon, like Bugs Bunny’s burrow. Like Dr. Seuss goofy looking elephants with shaggy tufts of hair. ‘Earth’ sounds like the name of the planet where all these tufty goofy creatures burrow in the shaggy turf, and have crooked bucked teeth and are named Earl and they can’t even pronounce ‘Earth’ because of their teeth, sounds more like “Earf”.

Remember the good ol’ days, back before when train conductors starting sending text messages? What a bunch of little girls those train conductors have become. Am I right? I’m preaching to the chorus, I know. Next thing ya know  they’ll be dressing their online pony friends, and hanging out in chat rooms for ponies. But this post isn’t really about what a bunch of sissies these train conductors have become. No, this is fuckphilosophy.com, and here we are concerned with the principles behind the matter. While I’m happy that there will be no more train wrecks because of text messaging, I think there were some other options that may not have been considered apart from just banning train conductors from text messaging.  Here are some: they could’ve just put a cell phone scrambling device in the conductor’s lair. Whatever, that one was stupid, but there are tons of possibilities. The most compassionate and all-around win-win of all the possibilities was that they could require that train conductors get certified to send text messages with their eyes closed. Or some other incentives like for every text message they don’t send on their shift, maybe they get an extra five dollars or something. That might not work, because you could just make up some number of text messages that you really wanted to send, but refrained from. You could also reward train conductors who catch other train conductors who are about to send text messages. That might work. Or they could just hire someone to stand there and watch to make sure no one sends text messages. Anyways, you see that there are lots of great options out there besides just banning train conductors from texting.

I saw this article today. Who cares about how many, what gender and what nationality the people are. Doesn’t the world have enough problems without oral sex competitions? That is the take home message here today. It’s like: things are getting bad, people are losing jobs, all kinds of wars and hatred going around, everyone is on drugs, everyone has uploaded their life onto the internet, etc. and then someone says “I know, let’s have an oral sex competition!” Who the hell knows; maybe that is what the world needs. Another thing: you know it wasn’t a cunnilingus competition. Just great…a fellatio competition. A fucking fellatio competition folks. Yep, that is what it has come to. Just think about that. Pretty soon your kids will be watching fellatio competitions on the internet and text voting for their favorite. Just a thought.

(this one dates back about a month or so)

Why is a flattened bird funny? Imagine that: a flattened dried out bird on the side of the road, like a piece of jerky with feathers sticking out of it. Isn’t that funny? Or a squirrel. Funny, eh? It isn’t funny when they are still bloody and covered with flies, but when they are flat and dried out it is pretty funny, don’t you agree?  Well, if you don’t see how that is funny, then I will try to explain what is funny about it and then you can think it is funny too.

I don’t know if the following is actually why it is that a flattened dried dead bird is funny, all I know is that it has happened on occasion that I have walked past one and thought it was funny. It was just an intuition that there was something funny in there, but I haven’t tried to put my finger on what it is until now. I know why it is funny. It is funny for the same reason that ‘Bambi vs. Godzilla’ might be funny, or those stupid flash games where you see how many cute little bunny rabbits you can pick off. It is kinda like that. What is funny about that? I guess it has to do with cute things being subjected to savagery. Why is it funny to see cute things subjected to savagery? It wouldn’t be so funny to watch a bunny rabbit struggle while it is being attacked by a large snake. It might be kinda funny to just see a still photo of the bunny’s face sticking out of the snakes mouth though…right? It also wouldn’t be so funny to see a dried up flattened cat. But a tiny bird, like the the size of a parakeet or smaller? Now that is funny. I guess I still haven’t explained what is funny about that. In cute things, we possibly see this cute face as somehow disingenuous, or belying some sinister marketing ploy or something, and therefore one might get some pleasure seeing this revealed. But, like I said earlier, it isn’t just a will to deface cute things, but particularly small things I think. A panda bear can be cute, but a flattened dried panda bear, rigid like a table-top with black and white fur sticking out of it, that isn’t funny. My theory is that a little bird seems less real; it is just like a little wind-up toy. They are like little disposable pockets of meat, and getting run over is like popping individual bubbles of bubble wrap. We have this heavenly sunrise morning image where Edvard Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’ is playing in the background and the little tweety birds are chirping outside the window. Play that youtube link, but now imagine all those birds as dried up and flattened on the side of the road. I don’t think I can explain it any better than that. If you don’t see that as funny, then I don’t know how I can help you.

UPDATE: I saw a flattened chipmunk today and it was at least as funny as one of those dried flattened generic birds (like the brown ones, or the ones with the white chest) with the non-distinct tweet.

I just realized something the other day: eggs are alive. Chicken eggs. The chicken eggs that you buy at the store. They are living things. This struck me. Maybe this is common knowledge and I just never cared enough to remember that bit of info. But I suspect that that isn’t the case. Rather, I’m guessing that either people don’t usually think about eggs in this way, or that they just don’t care and it is completely uninteresting information. My point isn’t an ethical point; I eat eggs all the time – I cooked and ate eggs as I was thinking about this. Like I said, this struck me as strange. Here is why: an egg is a single cell. One of those old dead healed zits that you pick off your face, that little packet of dead skin probably contains hundreds of cells at least. A chicken egg: ONE SINGLE CELL. In other words: it isn’t composed of smaller cells. It is composed of filmy stuff, different kinds of plasms n shit, some DNA and whatever else. And cells are alive right? Cells are the least unit of life, no? So it is a cell, like a big ‘ol metroid n’shit. And they are all lined up and lookin all identical n’shit sitting in the carton. Them cute little metroids. Anyways…

When I told people of my realization, a common response was, “No they’re not. They’re not fertilized.” To these people I’d like to say the following: get over your father, he didn’t create the universe. No, I’m not finished. You think that it is because a spermatozoon broke through that life was created? Is there something magical about sperm? Sperm is alive, right? Exactly. Ya’ll will agree that sperm is alive, but not eggs? That is some sexist bullshit. Now you know.

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.

This is going to be the second and last post about Keira Knightley. These posts are only nominally about Keira Knightley. She isn’t what we are really talking about here. It is the principle of Keira Knightley that we are really talking about. Now you may ask yourself, “what on Earth is he talking about? ‘The principle of Keira Knightley’?” Even though we say ‘fuck philosophy’ here at fuckphilosophy.com, we are still philosophers here. (When I say “we…here at fuckphilosophy.com” you can feel free to envision me as one of a staff of philosophers…and by the way, there are no philosophers anymore, and if I ever refer to myself as a philosopher you can take it as a joke, ok? Because that is what we do here at fuckphilosophy.com: we put the ‘fuck’ in ‘philosophy’. Yes, I bet you didn’t know that there is ‘fuck’ in ‘philosophy’. It’s in there, even if you can’t see it. That is philosophy right there, just think about that one. Philosophy is f-ing easy!) Philosophers talk about principles, and not the bag of bones that is Keira Knightley’s person. Philosopher’s talk about the principle of the matter, we are philosophers here, and yet we say “fuck philosophy”? So what is the principle of saying ‘fuck’ to philosophy? That will have to be addressed at a later date. Back to the matter at hand.

So, if we’re not talking about the bag of bones, that bag of protein water and bones, then what are we talking about? What I want to know is: how does Keira Knightley know how to do that? What is it that Keira Knightley does so well? One could say that she is sexy. It doesn’t quite describe it to just say that Keira Knightley is sexy, or really sexy or really really sexy. Saying she is “sexy” sounds so dumbed down, reduced to a quantity of some standardized common denominator stuff. I think there is a technical term in Hollywood for what we are talking about: “it”, as in “she’s got it”. You could call it ’star power’, but again with this dumbed down industrial strength nonsense. (”Dumbed down” is a dumb-ass term too. I feel dumb just saying it. I wish I could think of another. ‘Deflationary’, that is the word I was looking for.) It would be incorrect to say that Keira Knightley is just a human being like you or I. Sure we are all just bags of bones, but that isn’t what I mean. To say that she is a really hot one also doesn’t seem to do it justice. All these stupid words. Deflationary rough approximations of ineffable fucking nonsense. That is why I rather like the term “it”. Don’t ask what it is. You know what it is. And if you don’t, then I guess we can’t talk about it. And if you do, then we don’t have to talk about it, because you already know what I’m talking about. Fuck it.

In summary, the principle of Keira Knightley is not found within the bag of bones herself. The principle of Keira Knightley is different in kind from the principle of this staff philosopher here at fuckphilosophy.com. And finally, that famous quote from Wittgenstein: “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence”.