How is the squirrel penni? I was a bit dubious about "throwing" an injured squirrel into a tree, but thought probably it was a gentle toss. Since Christine once made an obscure reference in a post and I let it go as probably inconsequential, but it turned out to be the crux, I try to keep an eye on these little tidbits. So I had slotted that guy Zeno and his mates the Stoics along with the ataraxic state into my memory as things to check out - see if you have gone off the rails into depravity or something; practising ataraxia..
So today I had a little read!!! OH nice surprise, stoicism means more than just being tough!! In fact, I'm now a novice fan club member of Stoicism. Gee, you really have to turn these pebbles over to find the wonderful worlds beneath. And fancy that, Zeno seems to have been from Cyprus, part of Turkey - there are nice people in Turkey, like a heroic "Superman" cartoon character [actually more like "Tarzan" as not such supernatural powers], called Tarkan. A horse-mounted fighter against evil, created by Sezgin Burak, who we happened to meet on travels there in 1974; speak of the devil! He named his son Tarkan. Proud father that he was.
At that time, tanks lined the streets around us as Turkey and Greece were ready for war over Cyprus. Not stoic behaviour at all!! But we managed to calm them and they returned to quiescence after our visit. Of couse some United Nations invervention in Cyprus helped too. A shame that they had thoughts of killing each other.. We met some nice people in Greece and Turkey.
Maybe one day the United Nations can be reformed to a sovereign entity with a legal system circumscribing behaviour between states. No doubt there are wonderful people pondering this very possibility and how to do it without it becoming an overbearing, intrusive, bureaucratic monster.
jfred will beome apoplectic at such a suggestion and explain the Goedelian problem with self-referential systems. A one-world nightmare. Of couse there is only one Heaven, Shangri-la and Nirvana, and people have only one spouse. So a singularity is not necessarily a problem. We could always have a Great Escape.
If he says but those are fantasies, the reality is that there is only one world, so we are constrained to a single political system anyway. It is currently Anarchy.
Now I need to find "Ataraxia".
Maurice
PS: Thanks for throwing those pebbles in the stream. |
