Comments

  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    I think you (as well as frank) and others have a weird obsession that we owe you something. A false belief that you are protecting us pro bono. I don't even understand your position since you are Canadian, not American.

    NATO and other Western-like and American-ish institutions, like the International Monetary Fund or United Nations, were made to orbit to the side of American interests. It is even funny since the US was the only country in recent history to drop nuclear bombs on another sovereign nation. Hence, I think American foreign policy should have never been entitled to build 'institutions' of the free world. But I understand the context, and Europe was helpless and divided, so we were basically forced to accept the rules of your world.

    What you can't do now is destroy what you imposed on us after decades. Dissolving NATO and trying to build an EU military organisation seems the most rational thing to me.

    Alas, you guys will always be there. You don't trust the elites of Brussels unless your friends (AfD, for instance) are the ones in charge. It is sad how we always misunderstood Russia. Weren't they the evil here? Because now your 'elected' and 'democratic' politicians are the ones who are threatening. We did a damn effort dispensing Russian natural resources because they were the threat, and look how many economic sanctions our institution put on their shoulders.

    Why haven't we done the same when you nuked Japan? Ah, got ya. Because the 'good' ones were acting in that case.

    Decades of being a pain in the ass imposing how the world should act: McDonald's everywhere, Hollywood films and flawed Apple devices too. Now, you don't want the rest of the world as your favourite toy because most of us don't buy the paranoia of your convicted felon in charge. :groan:

    "Why are we in NATO?" is a question Europeans should ask not you, mates.
  • What Are You Watching Right Now?
    One of my favourite authors was interviewed by an editorial of my country in Barcelona. Very cool.

  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Well said, Tobias. :clap:

    EU countries were terrible vassals. They never paid any tribute. :grin:frank

    You guys are always obsessed with the same thing. :roll: What do you really expect? To just cut spending on social welfare to feed your paranoia of not trusting the rest of the world?

    If your president even has the guts to threaten Denmark, one of NATO's founding states, what advantage is it to keep paying the tributes?
  • Should I become a professional roller skater?
    Now that a year has gone by, could you tell us if you finally got to be a professional roller skater? :eyes:

    How much have you skated since then? The council of my town built a skate park, and a lot of folks do skate every hour there. But they are not pros, I guess...
  • What Are You Watching Right Now?
    Yes, but Sir algorithm also can show very poor and mediocre films. That's why I cheered when such a piece of art popped up.

    Excellent! Glad to know that Criterion Channel has it on its watchlist. :up:
  • What Are You Watching Right Now?
    Hello Clarky, @T Clark

    I was watching Asian films again, and I discovered a very good one: Majestic, aesthetic, and enigmatic. It gave me an inexplicable sensation of melancholy.

    It is a 2000 Chinese film called Suzhou River.

    It popped up on my screen randomly. One special section of Filmin (the platform I use to watch TV) is dedicated to commemorating films that turn 25 years old in 2025, so they were filmed in 2000. Suzhou River was one of them, and I applaud how randomness can lead us to art sometimes.

    If you ever watch it, I would like to hear your thoughts on whether you think Meimei and Moudan are the same girl.

  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    Mates, this has to be a farewell to fdrake; not your personal notebook where you write all the things you didn't like in the past. What is the point of being a killjoy? :roll:
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    Understood, frank.

    I will not defend abusive people; so did fdrake I am sure. 
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    Sorry to step in. As I discussed before with being a moderator is not easy. I respect that you perhaps experienced things you did not like, yet it is not the time to exploit the situation. We can't just reduce fdrake's commitment to your negative experience with Mikie. We all deserve a broadly based assessment. It is not fair to point out one thing you disliked when his compromise lasted nearly ten years.
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    I'm not sure why, but I'm afraid now. See? Moderation is riskier than we imagined.

    Trust Me Bro.Arcane Sandwich

    I wholeheartedly trust you, mate.
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    It's not polite to ask people to work for free.Arcane Sandwich

    True, but that must not surprise anyone since volunteering is already a free task. So, I don't see why it would not be polite to ask for doing it for free. We are talking about volunteers, not bankers. :rofl:
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    I have never thought of being a moderator on anything.

    Philosophy of Religion? An interesting topic, indeed. But my knowledge doesn't go beyond Kierkegaard or Hegel. Very basic. That's why I appreciate the guts of those who volunteer to moderate!
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    Well, I'd say that you're my friend, if there's such a thing as Internet friendships. So, I have already given you the right to moderate me, informally at least.Arcane Sandwich

    I consider you as my friend too. But I don't want to act like I am a shepherd and you my loyal mastiff.

    So is everyone, arguably.Arcane Sandwich

    Not really. I have seen some folks who control themselves and know to ensure eclectic positions in different topics. @Count Timothy von Icarus is a good example, and his appointment as moderator was a very good decision by the forum.

    Not every moderator has to moderate every single topic of discussion. Maybe your talents and knowledge are better suited to moderate topics in Philosophy of Art, for example. You don't have to moderate political topics if you don't want to.Arcane Sandwich

    That's interesting.

    I don't know if you already notice that there is a short story contest once a year. The previous contests were based on a system of poll voting, but readers were not forced to read and leave feedback. Thus, explaining why they gave a 2 instead of 5, for example. I disagreed with this, and I remember putting a lot of effort into supervising that each author had the feedback they deserved, but I ended up mentally exhausted. My aim was just to keep the contest up on an optimal level. I care a lot about the contest, but caring is not the only important feature. If I take personally the way some folks treat the short stories or the contest itself, I couldn't be a good mod because my attitude is obviously biased.
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    But first I should ask myself: who am I to moderate you?

    I admit that I lose my control often, and I am biased on explicit topics. For example: I can't see myself as a good mod in Gaza thread because I root for Palestinian people, and I am not very fond of Israel.

    A mod should act as we expect from judges: objectively.
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    I didn't know that. Perhaps someone who wants to help with moderating should ask the admins. But I can't see myself in such a plight. It is just that Javi is made for writing nursery rhymes, not moderating discussions. :sweat:
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    The job is time-consuming and messy. It takes a certain kind of person to do it well.
    Sometimes, we get to see timely interventions. Other times, not so much. Work is behind the scenes, not recognised and not given enough appreciation.
    Amity

    I agree Amity.

    It is true that a mod's job is behind the scenes, and it is not always recognised. I even remember some bleak members who tried to make the ambience even worse, and they confronted the mods.

    I will be honest: I also did one or a few tantrums. I didn't like when some threads were put in The Lounge, my endless discussions with universeness, or how I personally take the short story contest. I know I am not an easy fella. I appreciate the generous behaviour they always had, and I am aware that banning a member is not easy.
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    Honestly, being a mod in TPF could be one of the hardest tasks to do. It is not always easy to track the endless chat in each thread; furthermore, regarding those threads that are mainly political, it is complex to find out a balance on both sides of the debate. I was never asked to be a mod, and I am lucky because I think I will not be up to the required standards. So, I appreciate the job done by fdrake and the current mod job by the rest of the team.
  • fdrake stepping down as a mod this weekend
    Your commendable job on moderating will never be forgotten. Thanks! An era comes to an end.
  • 10k Philosophy challenge
    Wouldn't it be more appealing to know who the ghostwriter is who received @Dan's 5% fee? :smirk:
  • What Are You Watching Right Now?
    I have been watching Coronation Street for the last couple of days. It inspired me to write the small play that I posted in The Shoutbox.

    I think I always watched soap operas without realising they were soap operas. Since the plot is not very deep and the characters simply represent ordinary families facing platitudes, I mostly hooked on to this famous British TV show because the accents of the actors are unique. I thought it was recorded in London, but it turned out to be in Manchester, which means that they are Mancs as the English say.

    Who knows if the ITV franchisee will like to hire me as a screenwriter in the future?



  • Ontology of Time
    You see the sun rise in the morning, and impose an idea that time has passed. Nothing has passed. It was the earth which rotated itself by 1 turn since yesterday morning.Corvus

    Well, I think something has happened. The sunrise is like an alarm, and it tells me that the day just started and I have a lot of things to do: take a shower, have breakfast, go to work, pay things, take care of my relatives, and a lot of things that I can't experience when I am in the night. When night comes, I feel the day is ended, and I have to wait until tomorrow to do new or the same trifling things. Therefore, yes since the sun rises there are a lot of things that happened.

    Dogs don't care about time or numbers. Maybe they would do, if they had the concept of time and numbers.Corvus

    True, good point. But the fact that dogs don't have the concept of time doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We can flip it and see the coin of the reverse side: dogs bark yet we don't understand bark language. Does the message in the dog's bark exist even though we can't understand it?
  • Ontology of Time
    Time doesn't exist.Corvus

    And yet you posted that 19 hrs ago.Banno

    And yet Banno posted that 40 minutes ago.

    And yet there will be more replies to this thread after mine in the next minutes or hours, making the thread longer. Therefore, time affects space.

    Etc...
  • What are your plans for the 10th anniversary of TPF?
    I agree that a celebration is in order.Jamal

    ¡Viva! :party: :party: :grin:
  • What are your plans for the 10th anniversary of TPF?
    All of us meet in Times Square in New York City. We can borrow that ball they use at New Years.T Clark

    Great! New York City is a lovely city. :smile:

    Depose the moderators and watch the forum quickly descend into chaos.T Clark

    The Shoutbox is already chaotic. We can go there just in case we don't depose the mods!

    Nothing.T Clark

    Oh, nada. My favourite.

    Double Jamal's salary.T Clark

    I agree. Jamal deserves it; either with British pounds or Russian rubles.

    Put Hanover on double-secret probation.T Clark

    I don't know what double-secret probation is but I think @Hanover will be one of the special guests in the 10th anniversary ceremony.
  • Ontology of Time


    I agree, and I understand that time, as an entity, is complex to understand. Why does this happen? Why does something intangible, such as time, exist?

    Well, we give relevance to something that, although it is not purely perceived by our senses, enters into our understanding of the world. I bet my dog is not aware of time, but I do, and when my dog was just months old, I called her a "puppy," but now that she is 6 years old, I consider her nearly "senior," yet she doesn't care about these facts.

    On the other hand, I believe that most of us got used to living with 'illusions' or abstract features. Dreams, hallucinations, nightmares, etc. When we were kids, our parents used to say, Don't worry, they are just dreams. Like if a dream is not existing, while I disagree obviously.

    Another point: time zone is very important, and its existence affects our online communication. We have to wait until our friends from America or Australia wake up to see your thread, and this is due to the solar system.
  • Ontology of Time
    We say those things exist because they benefit us in different ways. What would be the point of getting rid of time? Space and objects are affected by the flow of time, for instance.
  • Ontology of Time
    Years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds are just the social contracts on the intervals of rise and setting Sun on our horizon. Without the solar system operation i.e. the Earth rotating around the Sun in a regular manner, which the current calendar system is based on, there wouldn't be such a thing as a timing system as we know it.Corvus

    Well, think of the positive benefits of the time system. Everything would be a mess otherwise. Furthermore, thanks to the time system, your thread is at the top of the first page. If you think it is actually pointless, we can ask to put it on page 26 and consider your recent thread as if it were an old one.

    Does magenta colour exist? Yet you need it to print things that exist.

    Do "stop" signals exist, or is it just a code of conduct? Yet you need it to put order in trafficking.

    Do civil laws exist? Yet you need them to put order in marriages or wills, for instance.

    Etc.
  • Silence is from which sound emerges
    this comment is attempting to suggest silence may be more than not sound.kazan

    Silence is a sound. It is proven that it is perceived by our senses.

    A group of interdisciplinary researchers at Johns Hopkins University set up an experiment that shows that, indeed, our brain actively perceives silence in the same way it hears sound:

  • Australian politics
    Honestly, I thought Australian politics had a different distinct perspective on China, but...

    Australia bans DeepSeek from government devices citing national security.

    Why doesn't any government trust Chinese AI? :chin:
  • What are your plans for the 10th anniversary of TPF?
    What date in October? I'll put in my diary.Amity

    I could be mistaken because my guesses are based on pure investigation. I think it is on October 20th. Jamal started a thread about testing the site on that date. If not, I believe it is closer to the end of October.

    Erm...I celebrate each and every day. With a big YAY!Amity

    I really like your attitude towards life, Amity. Always seeing the positive part! :sparkle:
  • The Head
    I thought what @DreamCatcher wrote was a poem. A weird chivalrous poem, but still an interesting post. It would be nice if he logged in again and told more about what he had in his head when he wrote it.
  • The Real Tautology
    What Is - by EricH

    Truth is the sky is blue
    Truth is my love for you
    Truth is not a miss
    Truth is what simply is.

    Not a particularly good poem - pretty pathetic actually.
    EricH

    Pathetic your poem? No way. It is actually good if we interpret truth through a poetic context. I see the point you raised there; philosophy is very important, but we can gaze at the world with different perspectives. I know I could look a bit intrusive here, but since you felt you did something flat in your poem, I just wanted to let you know that you showed creative and artistic vibes in your post. Don't ever say again your poems are pathetic! :up:
  • Currently Reading
    Boyhood Island. My Struggle 3, by Karl Ove Knausgård.

    I started to read Knausgård's series two months ago; I remember and me sharing a common thought on the deep narrative of his novels. These are not easy to read because they are laden with much pain and drama, but I started to get engaged with this Norwegian author for a lot of reasons.

    Since Knausgård himself said that we are free in order to read his series, I decided to skip the second part (it is about divorce and love failures and I am not ready to jump on it yet), and then start reading the third part. It is about when the author was just eight years old in his mother's family home, in a random small Norwegian fjord.
    Memories, nostalgia, unanswered questions, childhood friends, etc.

    I remember missing more presence by the mother in the first part, and I guess this third part will lead to what I was looking for a few months ago.
  • What Are You Watching Right Now?
    Back to my hobby of watching black and white films.

    I was busy the past weekends, but I was free this Saturday. I chose 'How Green Was My Valley' this time. The reviews I read on the Internet were quite good, so it encouraged me to watch the film.

    The plot, actors, and dialogues were outstanding. I now understand why this film was the one that won Oscars and not 'Citizen Kane.'

    I would recommend you watch it, but I guess most of you have already watched it since it is one of the top British films of all time.

  • Australian politics
    Yes, it is an old prejudice that public servants are lazy. I also met hard workers in the public administration. I don't know how it works in Australia, but here you need to pass different exams to get the vacancy. I know we (I work in public administration) are not perfect, but I have never understood why some folks think it would be better if I (like other mates) were replaced by AI or we reduced processes to non-existent public intervention.
    After Valencia's floods, the funds for reconstruction come from basically the state because insurance companies are putting a lot of obstacles. Now, who is the inefficient one here?

    I remember watching a TV program from Australia. It was about lorry drivers going to and fro. It comes to my mind the vast desert, reefs, and highways of Australia where those workers were driving by. I hope those public interest services and goods are managed by the AU government with competent public servants.

    We also do a similar management here. Our Constitution even states that the surface, coast, beaches, and economic platform belong to the state. In my humble opinion, a state loses sovereignty if their politicians decide to lead the administration of key goods and services to companies. I can't even imagine what would happen if those firms have foreign shareholders. Like our forests and shores have a price? No way. That would mean our countries would have a price too.
  • Bidzina Ivanishvili
    Interesting. Ivanishvili pulling the strings in the field of culture. https://eadaily.com/en/news/2025/01/29/parasites-bregvadze-and-kikabidze-ivanishvili-pays-those-who-are-against-him

    3,350 is the number of people working in the field of culture and sports, to whom the founder of the Georgian Dream, entrepreneur Bidzina Ivanishvili, has been paying monthly salaries out of his own pocket for many years.

    :rofl:

    If you consider Bidzina Ivanishvili a traitor, a dictator, dear ladies and gentlemen, please count how much money you received from this "traitor", "dictator" and "russoblud" as creative help, and return it back to him in full or at least in parts, monthly, exactly as he paid them to you. And then I may believe that you are real patriots and know how to be principled in deeds, and not just in words.

    Oh, and his son: a successful musician who was born albino. :cool:

  • Australian politics
    I can't see it, and I don't get why politicians are obsessed with Musk-wannabe reduction of bureaucracy. Every developed nation needs bureaucracy because it is the duct where the citizens can interact with the administration. This was one of the main pillars of the establishment of each modern society. If I need to pay taxes, where do I go? If I want to build a house in the middle of nowhere, where do I apply to get my license? Etc.

    I believe that it would be a complete mistake to absorb Musk's principle of reducing bureaucracy to near zero. I guess he doesn't need it because he is the richest man in the world, but when the rest of us demand to get drinking water out of a creek, where can I demand it? On "X" insulting woke posters?

    If Americans voted to get rid of a government, it would be fine, but I only hope that this wave doesn't spread to the rest of modern nations like ours. That's the paradox. Some nations wish to have a bureaucracy (Pakistan or Iraq), and others want to get rid of it. Weird.
  • Bidzina Ivanishvili
    At most I suggested people in this thread were absorbing this information uncritically, exhibiting the reflexive, emotional response this type of media is meant to get out of them.Tzeentch

    Yes, I agree. That's what this thread is about: following the current situation of Ivanishvili. You might have missed some critical points from my side, and I understand it would be another good feature on this thread. Yet my aim was just informative, not reviewing anything. We were expecting if he would have a trial, and the London court is already processing him. I thought it was interesting to post here as well as the rest of the following news about Ivanishvili in the future.

    On the other hand, I am sorry for calling you a 'conspiracy nut.' I admit I was way out of line. My apologies.
  • Bidzina Ivanishvili
    Did you take your time to read the two paragraphs I wrote after that introduction?

    You claimed that I am brainwashed by the Western media and that's a fallacy. Then I answered that this thread is about Ivanishvili and that I don't even consume media at all. Yet you decided to play me. I don't want to jump into that rabbit hole.

    Anyway, I will keep interested in sharing posts about Ivanshivili. It is obvious that everyone is welcome to share their opinions here too. But, please, don't derail the thread with conspiracy theories, the manipulating media and whataboutism. These belong to Donald Trump and Ukraine Crisis threads, for example.

    Everything I wrote in the previous paragraph is implicitly consented by his author, @Banno. Otherwise, he can flag it if he thinks that's not the way we should approach this thread.