User:Lunaroxas
Lunaroxas | |
|---|---|
| 46th President of the United States | |
| Assumed office January 20, 2021 Disputed with Joe Biden since July 21, 2024 | |
| Vice President | Kamala Harris |
| Preceded by | Donald Trump |
My name is Lunaroxas. Welcome to my user page.
I'm a former journalist, a current grad school victim, and proud hater of the Unix operating system (despite my daily use of a derivative thereof). My goal is to contribute to the continued success of Wikipedia. If you're thinking it's pretentious for a user page to be formatted like a main space article, you're correct.
I also, very occasionally, contribute to RationalWiki, a wiki dedicated to criticizing the endless stream of bullshit humans are capable of.
Favorite quotes
[edit]Ancient Greco-Roman philosophy
[edit]Marcus Aurelius
[edit]Translated into a rather Jacobean style of writing by British classicist George Long in 1889, the Meditations of Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus instruct us in the third part of its tenth book to keep calm and carry on. The world's greatest philosopher-king tells us:
Everything which happens either happens in such wise as thou art formed by nature to bear it, or as thou art not formed by nature to bear it. If, then, it happens to thee in such way as thou art formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, but bear it as thou art formed by nature to bear it. But if it happens in such wise as thou art not formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, for it will perish after it has consumed thee. Remember, however, that thou art formed by nature to bear everything, with respect to which it depends on thy own opinion to make it endurable and tolerable, by thinking that it is either thy interest or thy duty to do this.
In the first part of the second book, the prince teaches us to steer clear of the iniquities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men:
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me; not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Existentialism
[edit]Emil Cioran
[edit]There is perhaps no greater contrast to the teachings of ancient Hellenic and Roman philosophers than the body of work by the existentialists; my favorite of whom, without question, is Emil Cioran. A Franco-Romanian philosopher, Cioran succeeded Arthur Schopenhauer as Europe's resident pessimist. Unlike Schopenhauer and metaphysicians previous to and following him, however, Cioran abandoned systemic analysis for a much more personal, reflective approach, armed to the teeth with sardonicism and melancholy. In this regard, Cioran embodies what I consider the central attribute of any given philosophical worldview: a self-portrait of its author.
An insomniac whose sleeplessness drove him to depression, Cioran famously said, in his masterpiece, The Trouble with Being Born, that suicide is pointless because "you always kill yourself too late." Similarly, he posed the question to himself, "What do you do from morning to night?" He responded, "I endure myself."
Don't let the insistence on one-liner aphorisms fool you. Cioran was capable of an insane amount of introspection that rivals his metaphysically minded antecedents. Regarding the state of nature of our primate cousins, he remarked:
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
About this user
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Bibliography
[edit]The following are articles in WP:MAINSPACE for which my edits were substantial enough to effect more or less the current state of the wiki, i.e., many of the edits I've made have remained in some material form:
- Îlham Ehmed (old version) [my revision].
- LGBT music (old version) [my revision].
- Roy Cooper (old version) [my many revisions].
And the rest are just userspace articles I've made because I enjoy using the Wikipedia editor.
- User:Lunaroxas/Software, a collection of useful software I've accumulated over the years.