Aphorisms April 2022: Truth Absolutism, Pain, Difference, Ukraine, etc.

Truth Uber Alles:

Human interactions, be they with people or objects, vary. Considerably. Reasons vary. Considerably. However, we will get a better society when we get better minds… from the habit of telling the truth no matter what… except in truly exceptional circumstances, such as reassuring someone who is dying.

In particular, all and any political or war leaders, at some points, tell some truth(s). I know of no exception Yes even Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Biden, Xi and Putin. They even may tell the truth, while telling lies.

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Thus Free Speech Absolutism:

So that all potential truths can be expressed. Otherwise no verified new truths could ever occur. 

Elon Musk, a “truth absolutist“, bought for a few billion $ nearly 10% of Twitter. Musk also gave Starlink, satellite internet capacity to Ukraine, a safety mechanism to provide internet communications while Putin pursues his genocide. Not only is there no contradiction between being for democracy and for truth… but to optimize the genesis of the latter, the former is best. Reciprocally democracy without truth, thus transparency and significance, is impossible. This is why, under the insignificant Obama, neither truth nor democracy progressed: only Putin progressed, who is the opposite of all that. Putin had correctly observed Obama was insignificant. He assumed that it was the same for the fungible, and purchased, Biden, forgetting that plutocrats follow the battlefield like vultures carrion, and for the same reason: easy pickings…

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Yet the Duty To Censor Genocide, Born From Genocidal Propaganda:

Some may object that I approve of censoring Russia Today, Sputnik, and other Putin propagandist media. Well, that’s different: we are in a war, even a world war and genocidal situation. Just like Hitler said, and actually repeated an old Christian idea, that Jews did not have a right to exist in Germany… or Christendom… Putin said that Ukraine, hence Ukrainian did not have a right to exist, except perhaps as full subjects of the Kremlin, hence Putin.  

As I could see in many personal communications I received, many repeated word for word Putin propaganda. That was quite similar to those who repeated, or espoused Hitler’s views in the 1930s… for example that the Versailles Treaty was a horrendous attack against Germany (in truth it freed Poland, and Eastern European countries). Similarly, Putin collaborators believe that NATO, a treaty of collective defense, was not something free countries had a right to sign, because only the Kremlin, or more specifically mass murdering tyrant Putin, can decide what countries do.  

I read Putin propaganda a lot… But just as in the case of my familiarity with Nazism, I do not believe it. Normal people, though, do not have in their moral genetic an obsession with truth. Instead they grab the first thing that comes to them, if it’s well packaged, and believe it. We saw this happen in the 1930s with fascism, be it Italian, Stalinian, or Hitlerian. They each had their unquestioning followers…

Such divided opinion, with some espousing fascism emotionally speaking is not innocuous. The French chief of staff took a whole flurry of disastrous decisions in the first days of May 1940, enough to lose the Battle of France irreversibly in 5 days (May 10 to May 15, day when he was fired). How did that happen, aside from sheer stupidity and hubris? (His second in command had warned him of what exactly happened!) Well, Gamelin admitted that, starting in 1936, he, and his colleagues, were more preoccupied by the French Popular Front (then elected in power in France), than by Hitler… 

This had direct consequences, such as not arming state of the art French fighter planes…

None of this would have happened if the Jewish PM Blum, heading the French Popular Front had overruled Anglo-Saxon opposition, and attacked Hitler’s Germany in 1936… At least in Spain… The french military could then have focused where it needed to focus…

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True Hedonists Search For Pain

Why would a perfect world come with a heavy price? If a world is perfect, it is very worthy, thus pricey…

Human beings need contrast to distinguish, we expect pain, we need pain to help to distinguish strongly between alternatives. Rampaging against pain, per se, is not wise. Let alone making religions about pain avoidance (Buddhism avoiding pain now, Christianism, or Islamism avoiding pain in the after world…)

Verily, true hedonists search for pain… It is the price of the worthy world.

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Vive La Difference!

In emotional discourse, passions themselves are words. And common words cannot replace emotional words.

Thinking discriminates. Being attracted to some forms of inequality is intrinsic to higher mental pursuits.

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Time Is Local, Objects Are Nonlocal. So Says The Quantum:

Time, as measured by light, is local (relative to place and speed)… whereas objectivity, the very existence of objects, is nonlocal (yet not absolute, being consciousness dependent). Thus speaks the Quantum. This is what studying Physis shows (aka Physics, Nature in Greek). More exactly, what studying light shows… Let the sparks fly…

Indeed what does that mean, philosophically? When on a planet, time runs slower by one’s feet… And one’s mind may activate from nonlocal influences in a non neglectable way… 

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I try to suffer to make myself better (but not too much). I think that makes me morally superior (to what I would be otherwise). Leveraging the enlightenment brings pain , elaborating a morality impervious to pain.

Don’t laugh… Serious sport and serious thinking always require pain.

“Analyze” means total destruction. Wisdom harbors mayhem.

Not kidding… From Etymological dictionary:

analysis (n.) 1580s, “resolution of anything complex into simple elements” (opposite of synthesis), from Greek analysis literally “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing,” noun of action from analyein “unloose, release, set free; to loose a ship from its moorings,” in Aristotle, “to analyze,” from ana “up, back, throughout” (see ana-) + lysis “a loosening,” from lyein “to unfasten” (from PIE root *leu- “to loosen, divide, cut apart”).

So why did Derida and company invent “deconstruction”. Just to “faire son faiseur de malin” (deliberately infantile semantics to describe the infantile behavior of pretending to have created a concept which is at least three millennia old).

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Heavens And Hell Make The Human Mind:

All over we see people trying to show that they are better than children, and that’s infantile. Childhood is made to be overcome. Children overcome their own childhood, every day.

The Pope pointed this out: “some potentate” unleashed the threat of nuclear war on the world in an “infantile and destructive aggression” under the guise of “anachronist claims of nationalistic interests.”

“We had thought that invasions of other countries, savage street fighting and atomic threats were grim memories of a distant past,” said an outraged pope. “Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interest, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that will either be shared or not be at all,” he said.

Yes, indeed.

Vlad the Impaler did what he had to do, give back to the Ottomans, some of their own medicine. Russia, the country which is, by far, the largest in the world, wants to gain even more territory. As the Ottoman did, for many centuries (and got it: the two states which expanded the most between 1350 and 1650 were Russia and the Ottomans). It’s high time to give back some of its own medicine to Vlad the Mad…

Patrice Ayme

The attack on Ukraine is a bigger threat on humanity than any prior threat ever, because, for the first time, tyranny attacks democracy while threatening to use nuclear weapons. This tsunami of hatred needs to utterly fail, if humanity is to survive. Hopefully young people will understand this, and put a stop to it, as many of the old, aside of course from Ukrainians, still do not understand what happened in Munich in 1938…

Tags: Aphorisms, Truth