I have banned @Arcane Sandwich.

19 days ago I privately asked him to reduce his posting rate and to stay on topic when he did post, as it seemed to me that he was dominating the forum too much, by posting everywhere and so often (he had posted 2000 times in two months), disrupting several discussions. I said I would implement a temporary suspension if he did not comply (this prevents someone from posting but allows them to send PMs) but he said he would just refrain from posting entirely for three months. A strange response, but I said okay. Some hours ago he started posting again and sent me a PM to admit to breaking his promise, and I suspended him. He responded to that with private insults and I banned him.

It was clear to me that while he was knowledgeable in philosophy, his attention-seeking behaviour and apparent need to be heard on every topic was not good for the forum. And if he had really wanted to stay here and cooperate he would have ridden out the suspension and refrained from sending me unpleasant messages.

I'm sorry to see @fdrake go. I've got used to his support, knowledge, and guidance. I hope he hangs around and continues to post.

This old thread is attracting stupid comments so I'm closing it.

Jamal deserves it; either with British pounds or Russian rubles. — javi2541997

2 * 0 = 0 :grin:

I agree that a celebration is in order.

October 20th, 2015: I remember it well. At my desk in the chateau perched on a mountaintop just inland from Nice, one arm broken (mountain bike accident) and struggling to type with one hand. The weather was clear and fresh.

Maybe Vancouver Island?

My favourite is a journey that goes bike -> train(s) -> ferry -> bike. But that’s a leisure thing so maybe it doesn’t count.

I like air travel when I’m taking a multi-part journey through different countries and spending a lot of time in airports. One enters a world out of time, a world parallel to the mundane, that works by different rules. It’s exotic, weird, and exciting. I enjoy the actual flights somewhat less, because the seats are uncomfortable, but sometimes you get an amazing view—not just an impressive or beautiful view, but an amazing one. Most memorably, flying over Greenland and the Northern Canadian wilderness on the way to Calgary, flying past Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, and flying over the Alps, the Swiss and Italian lakes, and the Balkans, seeing the glinting Danube snaking away to the Black Sea.

Train is generally my favourite non-self-powered mode of transport but in Scotland it can be miserable because it’s too unreliable on Sundays, too crowded, and Scottish people are very noisy in public (I only really noticed this last year, after living in Russia, where people are very quiet in public). Favourite train journeys: Glasgow to Mallaig, Edinburgh to London on the East coast main line on the old GNER with the restaurant carriage, the high speed from Valencia to Madrid, and Toronto to Quebec City then back to Montreal. The last two were great largely because of the company — they stand out as special, adventuresome moments in my life.

Ferries: the big ferry to and from Vancouver Island, and several smaller ferries between Vancouver Island’s islands (very beautiful); Nice to Corsica (saw a whale while drinking Corsican beer on the top deck); and of course the West of Scotland: I’ve been on seven ferries just since June last year (saw dolphins a couple of times).

I’m pretty anti-car but I can’t deny that I’ve enjoyed a few road trips.

Bicycle, electric scooter, and walking are my favourite ways of getting around a city.

Metro/tube/subway is fine, but it’s underground and that’s never positively fun. Trams I like.

Buses, it depends. The double decker buses in Edinburgh are the best way of getting around after walking — I enjoy riding the top deck at the front, above the driver, as much as I did when I was a kid — but buses in other places, or between cities, are no fun at all.

A very interesting and diverse selection tonight.








(listen to that one for at least 2 minutes or don't bother)

EDIT: that last track was released just a few years before Mr Bungle's first album. Was it in the air, or were Mr Bungle aware of that album? :chin:

And this is what I, personally, get out of jazz that I can't get out of other genres of music. — Arcane Sandwich

Each to their own :cool:

You seem to be speaking from the point of view of a musician. When I first heard Coltrane, my ear was also uneducated, but it didn’t matter: it hit me on a gut level. I loved the way it sounded and how it felt. It didn’t sound abstract and it wasn’t something I had to learn how to like.

So I took up the saxophone and found out how hard it was to play like Coltrane. But from the point of view of the listener, it’s not about abstraction or technicality. Or rather, it need not be (I admit that abstraction and technicality can be attractive in themselves).

Another reason that a focus on technique and theory is not appropriate is that many of the greatest jazz musicians have not been virtuoso players, i.e., they played idiomatically and they were were not necessarily able to play in other styles. Ornette Coleman and Miles could only play the way they played, stylistically and technically—they were a world away from the music school virtuosos like Branford Marsalis and Michael Brecker. And yet they were jazz giants.

Fair enough. It's hard to elucidate exactly what I meant by "intense" and "hard", etc., but it sounds more penetratingly intense to my sensibility, particularly things like this:



I agree that metal and noise might be often more brutal, though.

It's multi-dimensional, humane, all-encompassing. It's the difference between great literature and formulaic genre fiction. It's warmer, yet harder, more intense yet more relaxed. It's a whole world, not just a petulant little part of it, like heavy metal is.

It was watching that video that finally allowed me to appreciate Cecil Taylor.

Jazz is definitely more technical than metal — Arcane Sandwich

Maybe so, but that's not the essential thing, and it's not why I moved away from metal and towards jazz.

Around 1992 I migrated to jazz and classical in search of the kind of heavy I really wanted (and found Coltrane and Stravinsky), so I missed everything that happened in metal subsequently. Prior to jumping ship, I had begun with Iron Maiden, progressed to Sepultura, and eventually found myself at the more intense end of the spectrum: Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, Carcass. Very few of those albums have stood the test of time for me personally (in my case it really was mainly just angry young man's music), but I do still like World Downfall by Terrorizer (at the punk end of thrash metal ("grindcore")) and Reign in Blood by Slayer. I went to see Sepultura, Godflesh, Carcass, Slayer and others, in fairly small venues, and I'm still living with the tinnitus.

One of the more groovy (almost funky) tracks from Terrorizer:



In the 2000s I discovered Mr Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, and others in that ecosystem, and was thus awoken to the interesting influences that metal was having in the new century (EDIT: I think of Mr Bungle as a 2000s band, just because that's when I discovered them), but I never again got interested in contemporary mainline heavy metal.

I do love this one by Secret Chiefs 3, for the sheer horror (although I believe it's actually being performed by one of their satellite bands):

Nah, I think Javi overreacted.

I completely understand your reaction. I just think that Clarky is open-minded enough to revise his prejudices, in this case.

Thank you for explaining some more about Franco's legacy. I must admit that when I was living in Spain I avoided the subject completely, for fear of saying the wrong thing, so I didn't learn anything about it while I was there. I did make interesting, somewhat related discoveries, such as the fact that Denia was a shelter for a few German Nazis after the war. I put that in my micro-fiction "Moriscos" story a couple of years ago, along with the expulsion of the Moriscos. But these things stood out to me because I generally had an entirely positive conception of Spain, and I am certainly not aligned with the view of Northern European capitalists and bureaucrats—if there is a division there I'm generally on the side of Spain (and Greece).

I give up — javi2541997

Anglos aren't saying much in this discussion mainly, I think, because they feel they don't know enough. @T Clark was brave enough to raise his head above the parapet, perhaps thinking he could learn something, but you just shot him down.

That said, I have no idea why Spain strikes him as more repressive than other parts of Europe, and what he thinks the Islamic history has to do with that.

One thing in the OP that might be misleading for Anglos is your mention of the commemorations, which they might incorrectly imagine are some kind of celebration of Franco. In my experience, most Brits and Americans have no idea what the attitude is to Franco within Spain. Introducing that topic would be useful.

One-hundred Years of Solitude was absolutely spellbinding. — Pantagruel

Agreed :up:

• Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto
• Point Zero by Seichō Matsumoto

I went for a walk in Spain, starting at the beach then heading inland and up to the top of the mountain called El Montgo. Visibility was good all day. I couldn't see Ibiza from the beach but I could see it from the mountain.

I've also seen ships sinking over the horizon.

But the thing is, I knew it before these confirmations.

My favourite Russian song, once again:

There's now a non-English area on TPF. So far it's only Spanish in there but as we're allowing Spanish, we have to allow Swedish and Finnish too. So feel free. I can create the appropriate subcategory (it's one subcategory per language) if desired.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/51/non-english-discussion

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. So far: great.

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess.

A brilliant and fascinating dystopian science fiction novel, written in the same year he wrote A Clockwork Orange. The author’s homophobia, which he expects the reader to share, makes it difficult to endorse the book, but somehow Burgess’s contradictions and prejudices only make him more interesting. Not to let him off the hook, but it’s worth pointing out that while The Wanting Seed appears banally homophobic, and in an interview in the 80s he talked about the “gay mafia,” his epic Earthly Powers, with its gay main character, has been called the greatest gay novel of the twentieth century.

I decided to watch 'Brief Encounter.' — javi2541997

Classic!

I watched the David Cronenberg film “The Brood” last night, to get in the Christmas mood. Excellent and horrible.

I also watched “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. When it came out I’d probably decided I was too grown-up and edgy to watch it (I was 17), so I’d never seen it. My assessment: dumb and partly enjoyable.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by the Vandermeers. So far I've read the Algernon Blackwood ("The Willows") and the Julio Cortázar ("Axolotl"), both outstanding. It also includes Saki, M.R. James, Tagore, Kafka, Lovecraft, Borges, Peake, Buzzati, Murakami, Octavia Butler, and loads of others.

About half way through Herodotus, which in its own way is also a compendium of strange and dark stories.

Yes. But even so, there's something about getting right into it...a sense of familiarity. It doesn't have to be boring. The author can surprise by not following it up with expected horror but delight in candlelight. Or being wonderstruck by thunder and lightning...awesome nature. They stood at the window... — Amity

That's an excellent point.

mega cool and hot stuff, baby! :wink: — Amity

:cool:

Maybe "show don't tell" is more like "tell the effects, not the fact." For example, instead of saying it was a dark and stormy night you describe indistinct shadowy movements, the trees swaying, rain pounding on the conservatory roof, and a door being blown open.

EDIT: So it comes down to attention to detail, important in realism. "It was a dark and stormy night" is a shorthand and therefore a cliché; it doesn't tell us exactly what is happening.

So it's all just telling. I suppose the reason they say show, don't tell, is when it's for plays and films, where instead of exposition---particularly awkward in this case because it has to take the form of dialogue or voice-over---you can show emotions, motivations and the setting with the acting, action, cinematography and set design, etc.

This is the entire conversation — Daniel

As far as I can tell, what you've posted above was produced entirely by ChatGPT, so if there was a conversation, you haven't presented it here. Also, you didn't comment on its "understanding" of the philosophical issues discussed—which is what this thread is supposed to be about.

As for your deleted discussions, when you posted the ChatGPT output as a new discussion you did not indicate, except by the title of the discussion, that the entire content of the post was a quotation from ChatGPT. That would have been a good start (using the quote functionality), but even then, you need more than a quotation to properly initiate a discussion.

Welcome to TPF :grin:

Yes, @fdrake had a post pinned to the top of the forum for a while quite recently.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15480/site-rules-amendment-regarding-chatgpt-and-sourcing/p1

Extra stuff was added to the guidelines later.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines

It wouldn't be able to go ahead without the approval of admin Jamal @fdrake and then the support of any mods or any other volunteers. — Amity

It's a nice idea. I hope it gets plenty of interest and participation. You and, if willing, @Moliere (who is a moderator) can lead, and I'll do anything that you are unable to do yourselves, like creating categories. I suppose we need a new category; once that's created you can go ahead and post in it.

On a desktop browser you can zoom in and it'll remember the new setting. It's usually Ctrl+ (control and the plus key) to zoom in.

I have mine permanently zoomed in quite a lot.

How can 'optimism' be 'inhumane'? — Amity

One example, at the personal and interpersonal level, is toxic positivty.

Otherwise, a few times on TPF I've made use of Terry Eagleton's distinction between hope and optimism. The way I see it, optimism, particularly with respect to society and history, has a tendency to disregard or minimize bad stuff, whereas hope does not.

I have plenty of experience with toxic positivity, and I've noticed that it is humourless. So my tentative scheme is like this: on one side we have optimism, humourlessness, and inhumanity--a lack of attention to real people and real experience--and on the other side we have hope and humour, where humour is often if not always built on an attention to misfortune.