Philosophers, janitors, city planners, auto mechanics -- everybody--ought always and everywhere to include humanity's animal nature in their thinking,...
Welcome to the philosophy forum. I have not studied comparative moral systems, so I'm speaking without any authority of knowledge here, but I am guess...
As Jesus said, "You'll always have poor people." Even successful societies have beggars. In the normal distribution, most people will be at least some...
Were you aiming for "bourgeois" or "bourgeoisie". That a moderator would misspell such an important term--scandalous. But yes, bourgeois escapism--and...
I think 'depression' is an overworked concept. Does it exist? Absolutely. Is the claimed depression real? Sometimes it is something else: anger, resen...
If someone appears to prefer being helpless and prefers suffering, it is likely that the appearances are misleading. Quite possibly there are some adv...
Impasses might happen between two wishy-washy people, but it's more likely to happen between people with very strong beliefs and opinions. In any case...
I've had noisy neighbors upstairs and downstairs. (It doesn't matter a lot which). I, sad to say, have also been the noisy neighbor upstairs. When peo...
https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/5af62e8652bc692d8918c453/master/w_600,c_limit/180521_a21790_rd.jpg THEIR RUT LOOKS LIKE A LOT MORE FUN THAN OUR R...
Dearly belovéd, you are a broken record. Well, not broken--you have something stuck in a groove that causes the needle to jump back in the groove it j...
I'm relying on Value, Price, and Profit (K. Marx). It doesn't seem false to me. Granted, production has changed since Marx's work was written. Automat...
Why should there be any way out of an impasse? If two people fundamentally disagree, then they disagree and there probably won't be any change in eith...
O'Connor was a faithful pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. She saw people unavoidably falling into sin; we can't avoid it. On the other side of falling in...
That's a very good question. She was dead by 1964 (age 39). As far as I know, O'Connor wasn't a civil rights campaigner. Her world was fairly small, I...
We don't talk about it much, on TPF or in real life, but as some people say, "The only war is the class war." Most people don't see class as a problem...
Propositions beginning with 'all' and 'never' are always suspect because nothing is ever true in all circumstances. However... Luck certainly plays a ...
Two things... #1, we aren't very good at predicting the next economic crisis. Only in retrospect have we seen crisis coming. #2, somewhere down the li...
Maybe a thread, yes. You should start it. I don't subscribe to the "great man" theory of history. There are great men and women, yes, but as you said,...
That may be true. But maybe this famous quip is more appropriate for artists. Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow,...
People have difficulty adapting to change, true enough. But which changes were going on in the south in the late 50s, early 60s, that an author might ...
I don't think what Europe went through in the 20th century was "mass sociopathy". Certainly there was some substantial mass sociopathy going on in Ger...
This reminds me of the apocryphal story about Chou En Lai, Premier of the PRC between 1949 and 1975. Asked whether he thought the French Revolution wa...
You are probably aware that European culture was driving people insane in the 20th century -- WWI, WWII... Europe's craziness doesn't make anybody els...
Not too lucky: The United States and Russia still have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out civilization. (Plus what the UK, France, China, India, Pakis...
Well said. I don't know at this point whether you agree or not with the points Uber made above. Another significant thing: Marx identified class confl...
When we read a published story that has become 'accepted' as a good piece of literature (or history, science, psychology...) we are generally inclined...
The short story as Rorschach Test. One can read all sorts of things into the story. Everybody does this; #metoo. I tend to prefer stories that clearly...
This sounds reasonable in theory. Any reasonably intelligent, slightly psychopathic person could learn how to inflict the requisite blows (and they ar...
Alarm bells ring. I will admit to not being fond of complexly deconstructing things, metafiction, fabulism, and such. This isn't the first piece of fi...
This is off topic, but this is the way I think we are: Layered. READ FROM THE BOTTOM UP Adults are biologically complete, have more and less mastered ...
I read somewhere that Robert Coover is a convicted fabulist. He's also been apprehended while writing metafiction. A teenager shows up for a babysitti...
I don't find a difference in these two formulations. What I do find is that the first statement is passive and the second statement is active. Active ...
Women are deluded about all sorts of things. For example, women are deluded about what men think they owe women. (Hint: Not-too-much to as-little-as-p...
In your extensive self-lauded experiences, professional and otherwise, you might have perhaps, possibly, noticed that men and women are different. Whe...
Real class. No, because the problem of establishing relationships is the same among gay people as it is among straight people. Gay men may have a more...
Here is a video which vividly displays the danger in becoming overly interested in comic books, super heroes, and Hollywood. Or Ballywood, or wood in ...
How about the positive emotions of joy, excitement, curiosity, etc.? If you are experiencing a flat affect across the emotional range, then I would ag...
So, what has been going on in your life over the last couple of years? Does this trend of less labile emotions cover the last few days, weeks, months ...
Casual sex is a good thing but the methods for obtaining it are not the basis for long-term relationships, except that sometimes a casual sex partner ...
Bitter Crank thinks that CSalisbury's phrase "manic-pixie quirk well" will come in handy for some devious purpose, as yet unknown. Other than that, Ca...
Flannery O'Connor wrote another short story that, at least used to be in freshman lit anthologies: Everything That Rises Must Converge. It takes place...
The view of the pathetic male has been worked over in various ways in other threads, and there will be disagreement about how pathetic our villain (if...
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