Steven Pinker gives talks, graces panels, and writes popular intellctual tomes peppered with statistical graphs devoted to arguing how the Age of Reason, despite illusory appearances, is right on track ushering us forwards to the least dangerous, most progressive, and objectively flourishing period in human history. What a clueless prick.
Not a bad idea to reconsider what ‘Reality’ signifies, after a century or more of bonafide Krapola…
_______RS
Notes: A tanka in 5-7-5-7-7. When I felt the inner stirrings to commit to a renaissance of my writing, maybe a dozen years ago, I glanced around and noticed that Charles Bukowsky was receiving considerable acclaim en ce moment. So I figured I should do some selective reading of his stuff. Yuk! It’s not that his observational talents weren’t praiseworthy; it was a matter of what obsessed his attentions. And in the end sculpted his being. The strange thing was what qualified for the laudatory label “realism” then — as now, even moreso. What you see: you become. I knew I would be nothing like this… a kind of anti-Bukowski. One could argue, I suppose, that directly staring into the grunge without sunglasses is a necessary ‘Swedish Bitters’ for the social indigestion that is widespread. But if so, you then need to be able swivel your glance away, else you fall into the Medusa condition. Word!
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mission sustains us
even just imagined ones
purpose within trumps without
_______RS
Notes: I twisted this ‘haiku’ in that it goes 5-7-7 rather than 5-7-5, just because I liked the rhythm of it better. The image is from a distinctly B-movie called “The Girl On The Train” from 2014. But those are the coolest, right? Those films with nothing to lose… And in fact, the inspiration was triggered while watching the early few moments. I really liked the contrast between the Nazi concentration camp survivor’s monologue in the protagonist’s documentary footage and the train girl thinking out her window, luring the protagonist into her own ‘documentary’ script.
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Where did IT (Information Technology) come from? And what is it’s underlying premise? The factually inclined rush to their Wikipedias and mime out the history. But suppose you wished to distract two or three generations of logically oriented analytically talented folk away from reality? Could you do any better than to ‘invent’ IT and foist it upon humanity?
Some esoteric truths are hidden, for good reason; others are concealed in plain sight demanding only earnest and interested looking….
Our intrepid Seeker, who feels entirely justified in wondering why there’s Anything, continues his discussion with the Ghost of Stephen Hawking, who is not quite sure it merits any thinking time. But before things can wrap up, the situation is complicated by the sudden arrival of yet another spirit entity! Part 1 of this dialogue happened here.
Physicist, or perhaps more aptly ex-Physicist gadfly(?) Lawrence Krauss released what some tried to promote as a groundbreaking book in 2012 called “A Universe From Nothing”. It purported to clear up, once and for all, why there is Something rather than Nothing. It failed to make a dent in this age-old riddle, despite Richard Dawkins‘ (who isn’t even an ex-Physicist) half-cocked back cover blurb review declaring the now certain and indisputable removal of deities, religions, Creation, or Theism of any sort from any future human contemplation. Krauss’ main rhetorical maneuvers in his argument involved monkeying around with the definition of ‘nothing’ while relying upon Physics man-splaining to obfuscate the obvious. This story happens a few years later…
||skirmishes|| ||with|| ||reality|| 