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So You Think Your Cat Is a Communist

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Gray has consistently voted flexibly, for what he sees as the lesser of two political evils at any political moment. “Had I been around, I would have strongly supported the Attlee government in 1945,” he says, but by the 1970s, he believed that postwar Labour settlement had become unwieldy and corrupt. Setting himself against most of the university academy, he supported Thatcher as a necessary corrective in British political history. “But then it turned into another ‘universal project’, certainly by 1989. And I would say I started jumping off in about 1987.” He was in favour of New Labour for a while, before abandoning the idea of that project for the same reasons. Alarm bells must have gone off for Gray when Dominic Cummings started promoting the powers of “super-forecasting”, while the government appeared unable to predict what was likely to happen the following day? The cat always lurks in the shadows, listens to other animals, watches over them. It is also the only animal which leaves the farm and visits other farms and nobody knows what it is doing there. In fact, nobody knows what it is doing anywhere, what is the work that cat does. The cat is one of the animals inherited from old system, is used then warped or discarded as the new system takes form. Cats allegiance is uncertain but it does its job well. What’s it like to be a cat? John Gray has spent a lifetime half-wondering. The philosopher – to his many fans the intellectual cat’s pyjamas, to his critics the least palatable of furballs – has had feline companions at home since he was a boy in South Shields. In adult life – he now lives in Bath with his wife Mieko, a dealer in Japanese antiquities – this has principally been two pairs of cats: “Two Burmese sisters, Sophie and Sarah, and two Birman brothers, Jamie and Julian.” The last of them, Julian, died earlier this year, aged 23. Gray, currently catless, is by no means a sentimental writer, but his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, is written in memory of their shared wisdom. Gray believes that our innate need to explain mortality and suffering with imagination and myth is far too fundamental. “I don’t have an idea of God or anything but I find the idea that you could wipe the slate clean of that impulse to be ridiculous. I once met in America a Christian fundamentalist, who told me in all seriousness that if young people were brought up in a completely chaste environment, they wouldn’t experience sexual urges until they got married.” He laughs loudly. “That’s exactly what Dawkins thinks about religion. Myth-making has been a part of every single human culture in history, why would we imagine that it is disappearing from our own?”

If you’re an academic, before you say anything at all, you have to give about 20 caveats,” he says. “And when I was a professional academic, I used to do that. But now I take a different view. I just say I’m just putting this out for you to consider. Don’t throw it away – or if you do at least give it to Oxfam.” In these three-tiered times our original plan for this interview was to meet and sit outside a cafe in Bath – Gray, 72, is wary of inside – but the forecast suggested we’d have got soaked, so we have retreated, catlike, indoors, and to Zoom. In some ways, I suggest, Gray’s is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic. How has he coped? including bold and italic. Over 1,300 free fonts are also supported for all devices. Any other font And what does he say to those critics who argue that his writing dwells on the reductive, brutish side of humanity, as opposed to its great collective achievements?Protesters calling for a second referendum on Brexit, something John Gray saw as a delusional hypocrisy. Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP via Getty Images Well, the book is in some ways an experiment in that respect,” he says. “Of course, it’s not a scientific inquiry. But if you live with a cat very closely for a long time – and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you – then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.” Cats don’t appear to get bored, because in Gray’s terms it would never occur to them to struggle to be happy. Humans, on the other hand, “are self-divided creatures whose lives are mostly spent on displacement activity”. Much of this displacement activity is a product of that other disabling difference to their feline companions, the certain knowledge of death. Gray is, typically, both irreligious and anti-atheist, reserving genial contempt for the likes of Richard Dawkins, and their censorious belief “that religion can be simply erased”. The point of the voice I have in books is to trigger a process of thought in some readers whose outcome is uncertain Yes! Animated meme templates will show up when you search in the Meme Generator above (try "party parrot").

I wonder if he chose to live in Bath for the same reasons he suggests Schopenhauer chose to live in Frankfurt for the last decades of his life: “no floods, better cafes and good dentists”?I’ve tried to emulate what I recall of my wonderful cat Julian,” he says. “Which is, not to live in an imagined future. We simply don’t know how this is going to develop. And of course, the political response in most places, and certainly here, has been shambolic. But that inability to come up with a clear response reflects, I think, something deep: that even the most well-developed systems of knowledge always leave an enormous amount of uncertainty.” Does he see that 10-point plan, offered half in earnest (“as a cat would offer it”) as an answer to those people who criticised Straw Dogs for offering little in place of what it debunked? He laughs. “Well the dentists seem pretty good.” He came to Bath after leaving academic life – having been a professor of politics at Oxford, he was for a decade professor of European thought at the London School of Economics – to become “a freelance writer”. “I was looking for a walking city,” he says. “And I like the fact here that if you look up you can see trees.” The liberation from academia has given him more liberty, he suggests, to write exactly as he pleases, cat-like.

The cat represents both intelligence and unsavory part of society, in a way. In short, the cat represents secret intelligence services, specifically civilian ones (KGB, CIA etc). It's spy and spy community. you want can be used if you first install it on your device and then type in the font name on Imgflip. Take HS2, Gray suggests. “Always a mistake for cost and environmental reasons, but now it’s surreal, because huge numbers are never going to travel for work again, not in the way that they did. There is kind of a lag built into politics – in which adapting to a radically changed circumstance is easier to do in practice for individuals than for governments.” Cats, he says, returning to our theme, don’t have stories to which they get deeply attached. “Of course, you may say that’s because they haven’t got the intellectual capacity, but I think it’s just as likely they’re not interested.” If you think, as I do, that civilised life is like a spider’s web, easy to destroy, but hard to construct, then what I write is perhaps a caution, a warning. I’m anti-hubris.”Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.” sunglasses, speech bubbles, and more. Opacity and resizing are supported, and you can copy/paste images Exactly. I would say that a lot of torment in our lives comes from that pressure for finding meaning. Unless you adopt a transcendental faith which imagines a wholly other world where meaning is secure from any accident, most of the things that happen to us are pure chance. We struggle with the idea that there is no hidden meaning to find. We can’t become cats in that sense – we probably will need to always have the disposition to tell ourselves stories about our lives – but I would suggest a library of short stories is better than a novel.” There's someone of that kind in every society, who has no interest in the politics and leaves in the end. This cat represents all of those people.

user-uploaded templates using the search input, or hit "Upload new template" to upload your own template Gray predicted the election victory of Trump in 2016 for something like the same reasons – “the feeling of abandonment, and disrespect in large parts of the working population” had to go somewhere – and suggests that even in the event of a Biden victory next month, those forces will not be silenced. Human beings, particularly in extremis, should never be expected to make rational choices. “As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the first world war, when it started, was welcomed largely as an interruption of boredom.” She skulks around and doesn't do any work, votes for both sides, and makes people satisfied enough that she never actually has to do anything. Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.

Yes, yes,” Gray says, in his engaged and friendly voice, that still carries a north-east inflection (he chose the theme of When the Boat Comes In as one of his desert island discs). “Many people didn’t like Straw Dogs. The criticism was that I swept the board of philosophy and left nothing standing. I should say that I got some wonderful responses from people who weren’t philosophers. For example, three over the years, from war correspondents who said that adapting to what they’d witnessed, the trauma, had been one of the great struggles of their lives. And somehow my book helped them.” Imgflip supports all fonts installed on your device including the default Windows, Mac, and web fonts, However, you can also upload your own templates or start from scratch with empty templates. How to make a meme

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