Philosophy is Dead

Hi Fido, I am about a quarter white south african, and my wife and step-daughter are pure Kenyan. I hope that clears up the misunderstanding. Thanks.

I don't think coming to America improved black folks much... Maybe we set a bad example... Or perhaps no slave can be moral because slavery is so immoral... They had to learn it some where...

Are you trying to provoke? This is pretty tasteless.

A
R
T

Since private messaging is disabled, I'm regretably forced to write it here in public.

My good failures art, Fido does not have any rationallity, he's a talkative rain man that can't really put things into it's right context. Fido hit my ignore list over a year ago.

Not really... It is just that I know some Black people from Africa and they seem normal, like white black people maybe.... They don't have chip on their shoulders, or anything to prove, and they can even have a heated descussion without getting all loud and in your face; but I can neither judge all black people in America from the few I know, nor judge all African Blacks from the very few I have known from that distant land... I know that in revolt or war they can tear each other up... The land must have no mercy to teach them to be so merciless... Yet, who have blacks to blame except whites for their more outrageous behavior... They had to have learned it from us, and I trust they mirror the behavior they experience from us, though I cannot say it is not idiomatic...

wowza fido. you coulda knocked me on the floor with a feather when I read that.

If you want to ignore me ignore me... Don't snipe and call it ignorance... We both know what it is, though... You do not know what I know, you have not read what I have read, you have not had near the color and intensity of my life experience, and so you do not know...

You do not understand my reasing because you do not question the basis of your own reasoning... I have some knowledge of every subject I can find, and yet there are huge gaps in my knowledge as in everyone's knowledge... My reasoning is not as simple a 1 and 1 make two... I know better, because most of the time I am down in the nitty gritty world of finding what that ONE, as an identity actually is... The definition of reality is the object of philosophy, but of human experience so much of what we are and feel and think with are nebulous moral forms... Read some philosophy, Plato perhaps, and you see him struggling to treat moral forms as physical forms, and without success...

You cannot do what I do... First of all, I am playing for keeps... My life and happiness are on the line, and yours is too, but ignorance blinds you to that fact... The game I play is very like a chess game with two elements, the board and the object, visible... On that board are played pieces entirely insubstancial, immaterial, made only out of imagination, yours as well as mine, but as perverse as it sounds, I must find some point of agreement with you to arrive at the object... So let us say I move my pawn here, and you move your queeen there, and we keep it all in our heads as simulacrum... If you can't do it, you lose... If you cannot reason as if we have a true definition of truth and good and justice and etc. and recognize the weakness at the same time of such reasoning then you are lost... I don't think you have the mind for it... I am not certain you have a mind...

I know I am using normal in a pejoritive fashion, calling from my personal experience what is normative behavior... At 57 I am old enough to remember black people who were bourgeois, who had crossed the color barrior and were doing well... Integration hurt a lot of people who had their own class of customers all looking to work themselves into a better existence, who talked like us, walked like us, dressed like us... I knew a ironworker who was black when no white ironworker would work with a black man, who was called a black foot...He was not there because of a law, but for ability... Yes.. And the first man to ever cut my hair was black man because those barriors meant nothing to my father... He took me to the same place he went for a hair cut, but to say I am not prejudiced in some respects is not fair either... Veblin noted the signs sent by the rich in his Theory of the Leisure class, of wearing white gloves and carrying a walking stick... It meant do not expect any work from that man... Holding up your britches with one hand while you text with the other hand says the same thing: No work will be forthcoming... Sorry... As hard as the struggle against inequality was, it created a better man of the blacks who succeeded...

Your post reveals a lot. I think it's interesting that you believe that the way for black people to be successful and happy is to simply adopt the patterns of white people. This model-minority thinking is used to demonstrate Asians all the time in our "success." However, what the bitter truth is about model minority life is that it is marginalizing and simply another form of bondage. It's built on the idea that minorities should envy whites, but never excel beyond them.

A
R
T

What exactly is the difference for them... When they had no help their success was worked for, deserved, and remarkable... And we will never know how many people descrimination destroyed.... With integration the whole bunch of black people are abused and not just the lower classes... No black man can land a job with his own merits who is not thought the recipient of federal help, and as this is seen as injustice and benefit from injustice, all are maligned... There ought to be a law, any number of laws, if you believe in human equality, not to give anyone anything, but to penalize discrimination in hiring, or injurious treatment in any fashion... If a person is qualified and they are the first to ask, then they get the job, period... I understand black people not wanting to work for slave wages, but the answer is to make it worth their whiles, rather than importing Mexicans who will work for slave wages...Moses led the Hebrews around in the desert for forty years to get the stink of slavery blowed off of them... Our freeing the black from slavery technically and then forcing them for a hundred years into servitude did nothing for their slave mentality...Segragation did not work, and integration has not worked, but we could put some teeth in our laws to give all Americans the protection of our rights instead of what we now have, of the government supporting the erosion of our rights...

Hi Fido, thanks for your long and intelligent posts. For want of sounding racist I will agree with you that SOME black people are at it like rabbits. That's my experience of it anyway for when I went to see my missus at the end of 2008. But I still love her dearly and would be lost without them and so that is why I stand by them. Because that's just it isn't it. When you are in a loving relationship, you need to stand by your loved one through thick and thin. The wedding vows are supposed to be for life right? Are you married Fido? Well I guess you know what I mean. I hope you are ok now, bye.

You can't say that I know nothing about God/the bible, after these lengthy and at times articulate discussions I have been having on here about the evidence in His existence. To do that would indicate either that a, you have not been paying full attention to what was being said or b, you didn;t understand it. Whereas I suspect that the truth would probably be closer to the both. You would most likely be closer to the truth in saying that I don't know how to fight (given that this surely must be the given application of learning a MA). As on the limited duration in my studies of such you would surely be closer to the truth in saying this. Whereas infact you say that my presumed ignorance of the MAs, as if I might somehow know more then I am letting on? Well I think that is pretty cool. Seeing as given by the scraps of lessons I have had from the teachers of black belt grade, over the years, as being few and far between, I am sure that most of you do far out-rank me in this forte.

What you may not know is that I am an author. All be it a self published one, and there is probably no future in my writings, I have written three books to this date, and the fact remains nonetheless. So there we have it. A little person trying, and failing to a large extent, to do great things. But trying none-the-less.

Hi Fido, can I also plug my latest book here for you people.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blackbelt-Jopo-John-Robinson/dp/1426914369/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284408563&sr=8-1
This is my latest crack of the creative whip and I don't know if any of you here will like it, but you might. Thanks. John.

Thanks... Will try to get a look at it...

Cheers Fido. I will be getting some free copies to give away if you'd like one to do some hobby reading?

Sure; all I have to figure is what I want the world to know less: My Address or My E-mail...

We are coming to get you Fido! LOL But yes I do feel the same way!

Hi Fido, if it would make you feel any better you can email me first..... [email protected]

the books aren't ready yet, but give it some time and they will be thanks.

John

Would viewers consider this to constitute philosophy and thus prove by its presence that philosophy is not dead.

I am taking issue with Dr Samuel Johnson LL.D.

James Boswell reports that he asked Johnson, in a conversation about candles and artificial light generally, whether it would be better to follow nature and go to bed and rise as nature provides or withholds her light.

Johnson replied "No, Sir; but then we should have no kind of equality in the partition of our time between sleeping and waking. It would be very different in different seasons and in different places. In some of the northern parts of Scotland, how little light there is in the depth of winter!"

What a load of rubbish. A gross non sequitur. One might easily stay in bed as long as one wishes no matter what the season or the latitude. And Johnson did. Noon was his getting up time usually. A crofter in the north of Scotland could set his habits to the shortest day and then just draw the curtains as the days drew out.

Is it propaganda? Was Johnson in favour of artificial light because he had investments in candle and oil-lamp firms having the astuteness to perceive that more could be got out of the workers with artificial light and that the class of persons he represented, and he was on a state grant by order of the King, needed more to be got out of the workers in order to assuage the ennui of yesterday's novelty, and that class made the rules.

Have I caught that great sage and source of wisdom out in a devious, underhanded verbal trick to get us worker's noses more firmly to the grindstone so that he could doss in his pit till dinner-time, chomp his victuals and saunter off to The Mitre, tossing coins to the ragamuffins, for a liesurely night of chat and a fondle or two of self-improving ladies who had made a pilgrimage to sit at his feet? As some did for A.J. "Freddy" Ayer.

I like Johnson... The fact that he got some things wrong does not mean much given his great ability so far above the mean...