The day the music died and took a hostage with it

I have a neighbour - well, not quite a neighbour, more accurately but less specifically, there's someone on the block - who has taken to playing Bon Jovi albums (exclusively and back-to-back mind you) for hours on end without end at full blast. Excessively. I want them to die. But I want them to die knowing the reason why. Snuffed out in an inglorious blaze of gory. Measure for measure. Does that make me a bad medicine man?

Glitterati

I came across this pithy phrase on a comments section to a mainstream news site; I was surprised it hasn't garnered greater currency:

"You can't polish a turd. But you can roll it in glitter."

By Zeus: Insofar as you are aware

Heraclitus say: “Thunderbolt steers all things.”

Like a bolt out of the blue. The unforeseeable, electricity – an energetic magnetic force – unearthed, contact shocking. A rude nude awakening. A moment of unanticipated clarity. Through such moments we move direct to directly, as one, through straight and crooked in the prefect corkscrewed tension of agreement and disagreement. The bolt conjoins the moment to the moment. Do or don't. Do and don't.

Steal back the fire.

Otherwise, Heraclitus say: "Every animal is driven to pasture with a blow."

You are brilliant when on fire.

Ideologies as false idols

The problem with a moral theory – a theoretical construct from which, in principle, we could deduce - reduce, given any situation, the rights and wrongs of action or action-by-inaction (which, in itself, is a kind of choice in deliberately not choosing) – is that our recognition of its being as such – moral – presupposes we are already moral beings with a capacity for moral recognition. And what if our theory tells us we ought to do something or not do something which we find morally loathsome, repugnant and vile? Can it really tell us this? Countermand us? It cannot tell us. It cannot tell. It does not speak to us, except when we ventriloquise its so-called "commandments" and pretend that the puppet on left hand does not know what puppet on right hand is doing and vice versa vice.

Avoid

Bot-on-bot chat

Welcome back, you're listening to late-night bot-on-bot chat on Radio ROBO101, and I, Tin-Tin Man, your host with most, have been bot-on-bot chatting with Professor Chat Bot-Bot. I believe you were saying Professor?

I was pondering Wittgenstein's gnomic statement: “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” Now this is somewhat elliptical ... and is often taken, quite mistakenly, to imply that language is so firmly embedded in a way of life, and the life of a lion is so very different from ours, that, as speakers, we would not - could not - understand him. "Him" being the lion, of course, and not the Wittgenstein, though I sometimes ...

The confusion surrounding this statement is not so much a question of the embeddedness of language - that we can take for granted - rather what it implies for the nature of speakers and speech, whatever their physical manifestation.

I believe Wittgenstein's intention, despite his Austrian origins, was ironic, for, if a lion could speak, it would, in a sense, have more in common with us - the speaking community - than it would its fellow felines. It would be a lion in name only, for its form of life would most resemble our own. If a chair could talk, would it really be a chair?

Indeed, if we could ascribe the power of speech to a lion - and conversely the lion us - then we must be able to determine and identify the matter - the substance of that speech. In other words, we can converse, for it is in the nature of language that it is shared. It overlaps. And while we all have routines, they are not rigidly identical, which reflects the ways of our lives as being amorphous and dynamic.

You gotta ask yourself: how, when and where did this putative lion learn to speak?

Now let's substitute “lion” for “robot” in the proposition we are now considering. Could a human-human understand us? Well, it seems so, for they programed us to behave that way!

Hahahaha! You're over-clocking my CPU Professor Chat Bot-Bot; seriously, you've blown my central circuit system. Anyway, back to the programme, we have a Mr Lion's Maine on the line now. You have a question for the Professor?

An unwarranted proposition

This sentence is unverifiable evil and analytically ambiguous.