BS: Thread about nothing

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Dec 21 - 09:29 AM

Don't be silly Charlie, if there are no gravitons there are no antigravitons

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Mrrzy
Date: 11 Dec 21 - 09:47 AM

I like the idea of emanciparory politics, but not of radicals.

I remember free radicals from orgo...

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 09 Dec 21 - 03:47 PM

LESS THAN NOTHING:
HEGEL AND THE SHADOW OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

Slavoj Žižek
Verso Books ($69.99)

by Jim Kozubek

GWF Hegel (1770-1831), the pre-eminent German idealist, changed political discourse by staking the claim that “antimonies” or inconsistencies were persistent to any thesis, thus a system would be perpetually besieged by antithesis, and subject to transition into a synthesis. In his churning 1000-page new tome, Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek tells us that “what happened after Hegel” was that systems lost their ability to “condense” and incorporate the multiplicities of society, “so the excess became ‘unbound’, a threat to the representative system in all its guises.” In short, no power structure can contain everything. There would always be ample room for revolution.

Žižek, a self-described “communist in a qualified sense,” draws upon the legacy of Hegel, along with the work of Sigmund Freud, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Alain Badiou. His ambition is to enhance discourse on social, political, and scientific deadlocks by showing that inconsistencies are inherent in most positions. To Žižek, inconsistencies are not solely categories or arguments, but inscribed in nature (e.g. the collapse of the wave function into a particle). Žižek calls these inconsistencies a “parallax,” the “name for the most elementary split/diffraction.” His 2006 work The Parallax View (MIT Press) is an excellent exploration of this theme.

Not surprisingly, Žižek is also critical of what he calls “New Age Obscurantism,” or any system which implies a harmony or unity of opposites. “Its falsity lies in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism,” he says. “‘Postmodernism’ is rather the name for a regression, for a refusal to follow the consequences of the modernist break.” For Žižek, the inscription of the parallax and the Real implies that nature is never resolved in harmony. The wheel of life never stops, and even after we think we’ve mastered something, it can all come apart. “Eppur si muove” or “and yet it moves,” he says. The Real persists, eternally, beyond the symbolic order.

In the political sphere, Žižek argues that compromise cannot exist as “a unity of opposites” but rather implies a failure of commitments. He argues that in a deadlocked two-party system, one party is simply a “symptom” of the other’s intransigence, its effort at “specialness,” its failure at solidarity. He therefore deplores strategies via centrism (Bill Clinton’s “third way”), which obscure delusions in the current capitalist system. Instead, he argues for a radical alternative outside the current system—one which requires the current system’s complete downfall prior to renewal.

To illustrate this point, Žižek looks to recent European history. If Communism failed in its commitments, Žižek postulates, fascism failed in its revolution. Of the Holocaust, he says, the Jews, by becoming the “chosen people,” had to “suffer the reaction to the fact that they excluded themselves from organic communal life and thereby abandoned themselves to a rootless, alienated existence.” The symptoms are apparent, as “anti-Semitic discourse constructs the figure of the Jew as a phantom-like entity to be found nowhere in reality, and then uses this very gap, between the ‘conceptual Jew’ and the actually existing Jews as the ultimate argument for anti-Semitism.”

Symptoms of previously failed states, therefore, are apparent to Žižek in “late capitalism,” with its rabble of unemployed peoples and its isolated elites; these display failed integration into the organic whole and betray failed solidarity. He is concerned with the modern gap between the notional and actual (the intellectual arguments for capitalism and the endemic problems on Wall Street; the abstraction of capital, its digitalization, and its function of “money begetting more money”) as a serious threat to the social sphere. Yet he sees the Occupy Movement (which he attended last fall) as close to being a reaction to a notion of capitalism rather than a genuine third way, its own alternative stand-for-yourself organization. He urges its proponents to build an intellectual edifice to claim a moral ground.

We need each other, Žižek claims, not an enemy. He notes that Hegel’s fascination was the “primacy of self-contradiction over the eternal obstacle” such that the “struggling subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of its own consistency . . . so much so that his (eventual) victory amounts to his own defeat or disintegration.”

Indeed, Žižek has built his reputation as a confrontational intellectual and conveys violent allusions in his writing: “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was ‘not violent enough’ . . . his violence was not ‘essential’ enough . . .” Žižek gets in trouble with sentences like this because they are so easy to misinterpret, but reading through the entirety of the tome, his message is clear: a real revolution is a commitment to solidarity, not a reaction to some notion of people in your community. If the Nazis wanted change, they should have focused their libido (violence) on their own purposes, not reacted to projections like “the Jews.”

So Žižek wants Occupy Wall Street to grow up and do something of the same. Yet his direction, and this book, offers no real vision of alternatives to the current economic model in the West. He borrows a lead from Hegel and channels the “Owl of Minerva,” a mythical owl who “only takes flight at night.” In other words, philosophy is only retrospective, not prescriptive, and we can only see the errors of “late capitalism” in retrospect. Žižek doesn’t let his readers know what parts of the system he sees as functional, but rather exhorts us to engage in “radical emancipatory politics” (whatever that means).
Perhaps less than nothing. Perhaps the next American revolution.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 Dec 21 - 10:58 AM

Anton Bruckner wrote a Symphony no 0. It's true!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 Dec 21 - 03:40 AM

Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in
Nothing to say but what a day, how's your boy been
Nothing to do it's up to you,
I've got nothing to say but it's OK

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: BobL
Date: 09 Dec 21 - 02:55 AM

Nigel Parsons:Anaesthetic is a number!
You evidently do the same crosswords as I... or i

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Mrrzy
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 06:13 PM

Yay, more nothing!

Ok, then: expressions for Enough? The French say ras le bol, which kinda means bowl filled to the brim, as in one drop short of runnething over.

Cup running over is more than enough, of a good thing.
The final straw is more than enough, of a bad thing.

I've seen/heard Had it up to here with a gesture of top-of-head level.

I have seen the same gesture for Full (of food) up to here. Mom used to make that gesture at just-above-the-neck level, and then explain, if given a quizzical look, The rest is brains...

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 05:50 PM

"I have quipped, joked and interacted with you for 20 years. In all that time I
have withheld judgement."

Oh, have you now? Well that makes you sound a little like God himself. At least the Almighty doesn't lie. I've been on Mudcat for fourteen and a half years, nothing like twenty, and for a huge tract of that period I was blissfully (literally) unaware of your presence. As for "joking" with me, I've yet to read anything you've ever typed here that has raised even the faintest titter in me. Your disappointment is a pure confection. Feel free to keep digging but I'm going to preempt Jeri's upcoming advice from hereonin to ignore the troll. Bye!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 05:28 PM

What am I sure of?
You have become
irretrievably
---BORING---

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 04:58 PM

I have quipped, joked and interacted with you for 20 years. In all that time I
have withheld judgement.
Now I am sure about you.
In the scheme of all things
it is just all about nothing
if the beholders eye is blind.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 03:21 PM

Yet another idiotic, trolling, off-the-point post from you, Donuel. Get a grip.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Mrrzy
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 02:44 PM

In an enigma, quoth the Riddler.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 01:40 PM

Authoritarian Hitler wannabes exist. Do you think I am defaming them or you?
I am sure I would not offend the victims who warned of Hitler's infamy if they could come back to life.
I am really not sure about you.
-relax-
A hypothetical wrapped in a hypothetical is nothing.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 10:09 AM

You certainly have an unhealthy obsession with Hitler and Nazism in your attempts to align Trump with those concepts (and with those concepts in general). Trump is a bad man and a serial liar, but he is not a Nazi and is nothing like Hitler. Far better to set out his negative attributes, as you see them, in carefully-chosen language rather than with intellectually-lazy resorts to cliches.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 09:02 AM

I see politics here&now as the Something party vs. the Nothing party.
Its No policies gainst Some policy. The former Republican Party literally had NO platform in the last election stating what policies they stood for. The criterion for hiring the new government Republican is; No felony convictions and to declare loyalty to Donald Trump personally on bended knee. At least the UK conservatives still discuss something called policy. Lies however are almost as rampant in the UK as here. Sorry UK our liars are bigger.

Cartoonists portrayed GW Bush as a Nazi but Trump is the real deal and is comparable to a 1925 Hitler, which was quite different from the 1940 Hitler. Regarding my personal beliefs I am not the catastrophist you might think. Once you have a half century perspective or more one can see a self correcting pendulum effect, Global warming aside.
I am a declared Somethingist as opposed to a Nothingist.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 07:21 AM

BobL:
Anaesthetic is a number!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: BobL
Date: 08 Dec 21 - 03:35 AM

Ancient Greek philosophers expended much hot air on the question "is 0 a number?"

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 04:31 PM

I heard that cestaceans and dolphins may have no concept of nothing.
Everything is conceived of as a thing. Instead of "its nothing", "its clear".

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: DaveRo
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 11:08 AM

No, Jon, I didn't get your answer. Clever!

I thought it might be ray, sounds like re = about, plus yon which perhaps might mean nowt in your neck of the woods.

Ahhhh, yon's nowt!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 10:57 AM

square root of -1 may be imaginary but all things begin with imagination.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 10:46 AM

Lost me there Dave... But maybe I'm missing something I should see...

In case anyone can't see rayon btw. Anagram "yarn" (thread) with "o" (for nothing) to get this other thread.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: DaveRo
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 09:09 AM

Yon's nowt?

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 08:50 AM

rayon.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 08:41 AM

Steve's post of
Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw - PM
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 07:54 PM
: translated to Latin.


Tu, Donuel, defrica, et sanguineum fac humorem tuum. si potes. Masturbator.


nihilne est?

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: DaveRo
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 07:54 AM

dearth

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 07:17 AM

thr0ead

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 06 Dec 21 - 03:38 PM

Thats still not very good compared to Nigeltissimo.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 06 Dec 21 - 11:33 AM

Unfortunately I believe we're in different parts of the world. I'm in South Wales.
The game can be played with three. Usually with a ban on 'pungs' and addition limits on which 'special hands' can be used.

And if I was in the US I might say "I need a fifth" but that's a different matter entirely ;)

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Mrrzy
Date: 06 Dec 21 - 09:13 AM

Nigel, we need a fourth!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 07:54 PM

Piss off, Donuel, and make your own bloody humour. If you can. Tosser.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 07:37 PM

I'm saying NOTHING!!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nutin
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 05:41 PM

Those jokes about your dear old Queen aren't very good and Bobbitt isn't nutin anymore.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 04:58 PM

"Nothing really matters, Anyone can see,
Nothing really matters,
Nothing really matters to me
Any way the wind blows..."


:-(

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 03:13 PM

Damn. It's Bobbitt...

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 01:59 PM

I wonder if Mr Bobbit went around telling his friends that he had no thing?

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 01:25 PM

I know nothing about this stuff.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 01:10 PM

Mah Jong

That's a zero-sum game.
Some say that the numbers tiles (1-9 of each of 3 suits, with each tile present 4 times) represent the Nine Dozen Heroes of Liang Shan Po (as told in the stories of "The Water Margin"

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 12:06 PM

Is this thread a zero-sum game?

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 12:04 PM

"I know nothing. I come from Barcelona..."

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 11:01 AM

but that is equal to the UK controller of cricket ;)

Don't blame me, I didn't bring in the physicists.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Mr Red
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 10:32 AM

But he loses one for misspelling Bridgwater...

e for nothing

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 10:00 AM

and I don't get it.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 09:23 AM

But he loses one for misspelling Bridgwater... :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Mrrzy
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 09:07 AM

Nigel gets the points!

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 09:02 AM

Those ? are musical notes. What ever happened to the freedom to post various symbols?

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 09:01 AM

?"I've got plenty of nothing,
And nothing's plenty for me."?

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 07:42 AM

Hawking had the ability of scholorly math as well as to present complex cosmic ideas like a thriller you could buy at the airport but dumbed down enough for all to understand. Its a hard thing to do since you can dumb down too much into nonsense. He 'is' also very funny.
His math was opaque to me but 'Hawking radiation' was made possible due to Richard Feynman (Cornell) quantum insights and Stephen went on to unite 3 disparet branchs of physics with the concept of a lifetime of a black hole.

Hawking has demonstrated that the last but longest 'living/existing' things in the universe are black holes yet they too will evaporate into 'nothing'.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 06:16 AM

G&S (rather than S&G or even G O'S) have a lot to answer for, like crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle.

Just keeping one of the unnamed themes going!

And for those wondering about the initials in brackets, I could quote 'trouble over Bridgewater', but 'nothing rhymed'

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Neil D
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 03:24 AM

Mrrzy's new direction/ nude erection reminds me of when New Kids on the Block were popular and my friend told his teenage daughter he was going to start a band called Nuclear Idiots, Nuc Ids for short.

Subject: RE: BS: Thread about nothing
From: Jeri
Date: 04 Dec 21 - 08:31 PM

Somewhat of an interpretation of this.