Things that are self-evidently truthfully false
They say you can't prove a negative and that nothing is self evident, but, as is often the case, "they" are wrong. There IS a degree of absurdity that DOES prove an absurd assertion to be self-evidently false.
For instance, I can claim that a green spotted pink elephant in a control room at the Earth's center full of hay and a maxi-computer, when he isn't eating the hay and notices the computer, ignorantly mauls the keyboard and thus blindly toys with and clumsily supervises history; and you may - you SHOULD - dismiss my claim as too contemptibly frivolous to acknowledge. It's too obviously nonsense (i.e. untrue) - too absurd to be admitted to a serious debate.
Of course it is. But so is the Christian creation myth. It's an obviously absurd fantasy. And so is ANY god myth.
So I don't need to chalk up any supposedly linked series of supposedly mathematical symbol formulas on a blackboard; or analyze any chemical or light phenomena; or even cite any sources to prove my point. All I have to do is set forth in perfect English (actually the highest form of math) the following sarcastically negative but obviously (i.e. self-evidently) true assertion.
The idea that a single sentient being (or "host of angels" or "higher power" or any other wispy equivocation) created and continues every minute forever to supervise the lives and after-lives and moral and gravitational rises and falls of every living thing including sparrows; and to judge, reward, punish and even bless the sneezes and free throws and every thought, speech and act and /or every failure to act, speak or think of all the zillions of sentient "mortals" in every corner of the infinite and eternal universe is too absurd to talk about, let alone waste time disproving, but its self-evident absurdity proves it IS self-evidently true that it's self-evidently NOT true, anyway.
Period.
-Glen Roberts
Life is NOT a Dream
The illusion that life is an illusion is itself an illusion. It's probably also always an intentionally faked illusion. People hear someone say, "Life is but a dream!" and think that if they could believe that, then life would feel better. So they try to believe it and sometimes ridiculously succeed. Or maybe it's automatic. It's a perfect example, after all, of the kind of trick a normal person's denial bump is supposed to play on him.
Anyway, that way out isn't available to a realist. Life is not a dream. And that's good, because the feelings we have in dreams are only wispy fakes, and they don't go on for long, either. Real life, which, for better or worse, we feel intensely and second by second, is too short, but it goes on for a lot more seconds than any dream - including any ironically brief dream of immortality. And it actually does include all the real pleasure that it actually does include.
It's because life is short that it is compared to a dream, but the difference is clear enough when the 6 a.m. alarm rings. That we must drag ourselves from the stupid comfort of sleep and dreams to resume a struggle that goes nowhere seems unacceptable because we don't want to accept it. Real life seems unbelievable only because we don't want to believe it. But it's not a necessary characteristic of reality that humans like it, accept it, or believe it. Whether we like it or not, life is real, the world is real, real things and beings are solid, and they really hurt or fall apart when they collide or wear out. It doesn't make sense to us? So what? It doesn't have to.
That we should be alive at all and then die and be completely gone doesn't make sense to us, because we don't like the idea and we don't want it to make sense, but also because we actually don't have the mental capacity to SEE the sense in it. Neither do carrots, and that carrots don't have the perceptive capacity or analytical capability to see the sense in it doesn't help them, either. They come and go more quickly than we do.
Unfortunately, unlike carrots, we can fret about death, but our thinking is not multi-linear enough - our brains can't grasp and stay focused on enough material at one time, even if we had all the facts we need, to see the sense of it. The construct we're part of is too big to fit on our screens and most of it is beyond our view or the view of our best instruments. We see better and we're better thinkers than carrots but not enough better to clearly see and understand the whole physical construct we're part of.
Also we're biased and, to protect our biases, we force assumptions we want to be valid into the equation and we leave things out we don't like and thus further confuse the enigma that confounds and offends us. It's no wonder we don't see any sense in our mortality, but it doesn't prove anything that we don't.
Each of us feels like the center of the universe and assumes that he therefore IS the center of the universe. But if the universe had a center, one of its characteristics wouldn't be that it feels like the center. Each of us also thinks he is the center of time. But, to think that, we conveniently forget that we weren't here before our individual births, that all of human history lies at the tip end of the line of a lot of time that has already passed, and that our "now" is only at the tip end of that.
Each of us thinks the real universe is at his service and obligated to eventually reveal its plan and its punchline to him. There is no sense in that at all, since the universe has no agenda except to go on endlessly fulfilling the laws of physics and no law of physics requires a punchline or a conclusion or a regular report to be filed with each human blip.
Some people actually become atheists on the grounds that their god's behavior doesn't please them. But that's clearly absurd. There are no gods, but if there were, their existence would not depend on our approval of them. Feeling intensely our importance to ourselves, we subconsciously invent a principle that such an important being's understanding and approval is a requisite characteristic of any sensible universe; thus, we put our thinking into a trap which leaves us no solution but metaphysical fantasy such as that: "There is no reality except my mind, which is dreaming everything else."
Bullshit like that, however, won't prevent our actual deaths and our subsequent nonexistence, or the horrible facts that a lot of carrot-like things will survive us for awhile and that a lot of rocks and hot and cold substances will go on existing and moving and interacting forever without us.
On the other hand, that dumb stuff won't know a damned thing about it, while we DO KNOW every second of our lives intensely, and Epicurus was certainly right that, because only one second exists at a time and can't be added to the previous second or the next second, because only one second can be experienced at a time so that when the next second begins the previous second disappears, talking only about intensity of life-feeling and the absolute emotional value of that feeling, there is NO difference between one second and eternity!
The universe is real, and we are real, and we are really temporary, and if we don't like it - even if we can't stand it - that's tough shit, but it's not bullshit.
However, it's not bullshit, either, that, unlike in dreams, we can taste real wine, and we can like each second fine if we want to and try to, and that, since seconds can't be accumulated and all the seconds in eternity exist only one second at a time, we are just as good as immortal - one second at a time. That's true, even if it won't matter later. Later, after all, we won't care.
-Glen Roberts
There's NO Nice Capitalism
Liberals who call themselves progressives (though they absolutely are not) suffer from biological, political, and philosophical myopia. The politically correct pseudo progressive way to point out an ethical atrocity committed by Washington or a failure of American democracy has always been to pretend it is an aberration. But it's not. There was no good old time when capitalism and democracy worked as they should, there is NO "good" alternative model of capitalism floating beyond the looking glass, and democracy very seldom works as expected and that's always been true.
The U.S. government is, wall-to-wall, one of the most unscrupulous governments on Earth and always has been, or at least it has been since Jefferson stepped aside, BECAUSE its declared democratic goal, if it weren't a cynical lie, would contradict and get in the way of its real goal. It doesn't matter who's in the White House. A purely rhetorical commitment to guarantee equal or near equal or not equal but better (maybe) access to some of the essential elements of a good life to all people of all colors and philosophies can NOT co-exist with Washington's much higher-priority commitment to facilitate business.
A guarantee of equality necessarily requires a very extensive, very pervasive social and economic system of subsidy i.e. socialism. To blabber vaguely about an imaginary, unnatural pairing of some unexplainable unprofitable subsidy with a competitive business model is now politically correct, but it won't work - except as a smoke screen to cover the continuation of the same-old real agenda that sacrifices majority needs to meet the needs of a rich minority.
Competition requires losers. Capitalism has to be "free" and pervasive, and it has to be "freely" and pervasively unfair. To pin every typical example of this on one or more individuals involved TODAY, THIS YEAR, as if it weren't systemic, amounts to a cover-up of the system's natural, inevitable over-all ugliness.
It has become the politically pious norm for liberals who falsely call themselves progressives to do exactly that. So their political piousness is actually a sell-out.
And, like-to-hear-it or not, their dreamy eyed adoration of democracy is in the same boat. Democracy is and always has been demonstrably a scam.
-Glen Roberts
Metaphysics
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