links for 2007-09-15

12 Replies to “links for 2007-09-15”

1. What monstrous twaddle.

2. Hahahahaha! At least it’s not footling piffle.

3. Oh come on. You’re making them up now.

4. O.K. “Footling piffle” gets exactly four results on Google.

5. Ours is a big asylum, then!

6. Sigh. It’s not meant to break new philosophical ground or to be psychologically subtle, Dave. Sometimes what you need is a whop upside the head.

7. Both “footling” and “piffle” are, I’m glad to see, defined on Answers.com. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition that’s unusual.

   Dale… “you”… is that a generic “one” or a specific “Dave”?

8. Heh. These comments are much more fun than the horsefeathers, applesauce?, eyewash? (“piffle” is in thesaurus.com) above. Welcome to the loony bin.

9. Oh, it was meant to be generic, but the other meaning works as well 🙂

10. I loathe Eckhart Tolle…

11. Dale, what I object to is the trivialization of insanity, here, and its use as a scare word. Making it “criminal insanity” yet is sheer hyperbole (piffle?). In addition, I don’t think it’s really necessary to deprecate ordinary monkey-mind in order to appreciate being in the moment. I would argue that many different kinds and qualities of attention are valuable for a species that evolved as a gatherer, not just a hunter.

12. Oh, but he’s not talking about ordinary monkey mind, or I don’t take him to be doing so (I’ve read neither this nor Tolle, so I don’t know the context.) There’s a place for that, as you say; we’re opportunistic scanners and endlessly curious primates, and that’s fine. He’s talking about a particular tightly-wound compulsive repetition of thoughts — the key words to me are “torrents” and “compulsive.” I do think that’s insane, even if it doesn’t manifest in the behaviors typically identified as insane, and that it’s the state of mind in which people are most likely to injure each other.

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