Sofa is back on the Nut

The Sofa is back on the Inter Nut.

Joining you again all on the blogging and internut community *big hugs* - feels more real than any other community I am supposed to be in.
Though of course it is not.

Anyway, after having tried some other options I am back on here laying down the blogs. After trying some other options and realizing that they aren't options - and nor is blogging - I am back.

Hardcore and harsh ranting certainly will not. And after about 7 goes at "Twitter" there will be no return to the rollercoaster of bullshit.

Citizen Sofa.

29/05/12

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I have now returned to the rollercoaster of bullshit. If only just to keep an eye on it.

@citizen_sofa

June 2017.

For 99.99% per cent of human existence cars did not exist!

I was thinking the other day of how much I hate cars - depending on the definition. In fact I think all the time about how much I hate cars. Because I do. I fucking hate them basically.
Well I often feel bad about it for a few moments because our domination by these accurse`d objects seems to be to some extent inevitable.
And then I remember a fact that even seems forgotten by the most ardent opponents of these evil lumps of shit. For 99.99% of human history they simply did not exist at all.

Charter for Compassion - a great idea!

http://charterforcompassion.org/

Beginnings of a post on Spinoza

Spinoza was very influenced by Descartes.... who was also of course a mathematician - Cartesian Co-ordinates......

He set himself the bold task of working everything out - as many philosophers do..... And as most prominently his recent predecessor Descartes did.

He used geometry and geometric principles.........
.... to create an entire system of The Universe and Humanity and Human Emotions.....

Surprisingly successful he was too....

A Fascinating Encounter

I am reading snatches of "A History of the Modern World" by the English historian Paul Johnson.

An excellent and well-argued book by a truly excellent historian.

Another excellent book by him is "The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People." But a discussion of that is for another post.

One thing I can't keep myself from splurting out a post on is this.

Joyce and Proust actually met.

Yes these two archetypal modernist writers actually briefly met.

Yes. These two wordy, long-winded generators of hefty rambling tomes - the two writers that you are supposed to have read but that maybe you haven't really - the foremost French one and the foremost one in English - actually met!

This event is related by Johnson. It took place in Paris on May 18th 1922.

It sounds almost like a fantasy but apparently something like the following happened.

Joyce blandly proclaimed that he hadn't read a single word of Proust's voluminous work and that - to put it mildly - this did not concern him in the slightest.

Proust was very offended by this. He didn't know what to say. So he shot back that neither had he read a single word of Joyce's work.

LOL!!! - as they say.

In another work Joyce dismisses Proust's work - which is supposed to be quite philosophical - with the (German) pun "Prost bitte".

Well I am rejoicing at not having either Joyce or Proust on my reading list.
.........

In the interests of balance the event is recounted somewhat differently here:

http://westrow.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/proust-and-joyce-meet/

What I am Reading

Just a note to say I am reading "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (c.1950) by Hannah Arendt. A very clever lady.

Very readable and lucid prose. Excellent, excellent stuff.
She argues a point at the start that I had never really encountered. That is - systematised and ideological "anti-Semitism" is mainly originated in political nationalism and in the development of the Nation State of the Europe of the 1800s. Before this it did not really exist. I have never really heard that before.

Took a peak at the final chapter where she discusses the idea of loneliness and/or isolation. The point is made that it is possible to be lonely in company - in the sense that people feel lonely when they have the feeling of a lack of relatedness to others, inability to relate to others; and a feeling of superfluousness. The opposite of feeling respected or esteemed by oneself or others to some degree - things that are quite needed for a happy life.

Arendt points out that this loneliness of the individual was fostered under totalitarian regimes - the main ones for her here are Nazism and Bolshevism. Yet she speaks of it at the time that she is writing - 1950.

I can't help thinking it's not always a coincidence that people today feel a lack of rootedness and a superfluousness. The type of totalitarianism we seem to live under today is capitalism. And its ideology is the utter dogshit that is contemporary "economics".

An amazing quote from the beginning of Chapter 8:
"Nazism and Bolshevism owe more to Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism (respectively) than to any other ideology or political movement."
Hannah Arendt.

Just want to say that Hannah Arendt was a wonderful and very clever lady and had some of her origins in Hannover - a wonderful town with a wonderful town hall that looks like a massive birthday cake.

I am a philosopher - not a poet.

I am a philosopher - not a poet.

I don't even know if I believe in poetry.

Or at least I certainly don't believe in poetry without philosophy.

........

I am a philosopher - a lover of wisdom.

I am not sure if poetry always leads to wisdom.


I am not sure if poetry even exists. It is hard to define.

"Word Art" is one poetic way of defining it.

I have written quite a lot of what could be called poetry.

I have lost most of it.

T.S.Eliot described poetry as a "raid upon the inarticulate".

I find it hard to believe that he really believed that when one reads his own poetry.

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2018.

I am starting to believe in poetry again.

......

Get with the Programme!

The Senility of our Intellectual Culture.

On some emission entitled "The One Show" on EBC1 Einstein was described as having "autism". Yeah Right! And so does everyone. Einstein had NOTHING of the kind. Nor does anyone.
It does not exist.

Also the phenomenon of intellectual summary books - such as the "For Beginners" series - which I think on balance are an excellent thing - if only because they get people interested in ideas - were condemned in an English Sunday "news" paper recently.

They should be encouraged.

FURTHERMORE - the phenomenon of these books once again seemed to be the fault somehow of one Albert Einstein. WHO HAD NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THEM.

Vilified while alive, he is now vilified when dead by an intellectual culture of seemingly infinite senility.
One of the cleverest people who ever lived - who explained himself quite clearly.

More Lies About Our History

St. Mary of Bethlehem Hospital was a monastic establishment that existed near Bishopsgate and near what became Liverpool Street Station - for at least two hundred years from before the 1300s to the 1500s.

It was recently extensively dug up in excavations being made for the creation of "Crossrail".

Many many bodies seem to have been found - of what were probably nuns.

No mention of the FACT of the rapid and violent suppression of the monasteries in the 1530s. A disgrace to England's history.

When this was reported on London News with Rizla - all that was mentioned was that this establishment was a forerunner of what became "Bedlam".

The irony is that mental illness DOES NOT EXIST. And that monastic establishments were more humane in their treatment of people having problems in life than those with this task in later centuries up until now.

Furthermore, St.Mary's probably never closed due to "cuts" or "recessions".

Monasticism as a general concept PRE-DATES and in my opinion is superior to "economics" and "psychiatry" and their attendant lies.

To my more modern way of thinking:-

POVERTY means simple living. NOT lack of money PER SE, nor privation, nor not working..... "Live simply so that others may simply live" Gandhi.
CHASTITY means appropriate use of sexuality. NOT it's extinction - which is impossible really....
and
OBEDIENCE means to the "UBI CARITAS ET AMOR IBI DEUS EST" type of principle....

T.B.C...

Finally

The respect, courtesy and mere politeness that some people are starting to show me - is the RESPECT and COURTESY that I should have been shown FROM THE START - because I AM A HUMAN BEING!