a thread for mundane ironists

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4861

[b]John Locke

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.[/b]

That can’t be good. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

On the other hand, what actions, Mr. Intellectual?

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.

And not just mine I suspect.

The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

Unfortunately, there are folks who actually think that’s true. But only if you are one of them.

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.

And that rhymes with dasein. Or nearly does.

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves poison the fountain.

Out of love as often as not.

4862

[b]so sad today

horoscope: uh oh[/b]

But now only 365 days a year.

in a threesome with fear of death and fear of life

Talk about being fucked.

just assume everyone hates you and you should be fine

You know, if you’re doing it right.

“don’t text him” --buddha

Indeed, imagine him on Twitter.

i’ve had some very serious relationships with people who didn’t know i existed

Me too. No one here though.

thank god i don’t know who i am

Unless of course god has nothing to do with it.

4863

[b]Robert Penn Warren

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him.[/b]

In a word [for some]: Huh?

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under you foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal guy like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn’t really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be where you get to the other place.

I may or may not have said this myself. What do you think?

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

Our devil, not yours.

…and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

Unless of course you don’t take shit like this seriously.

It is a human defect–to try to know one’s self by the self of another.

And that’s only half of it. In other words, there’s my half too.

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. . . But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn’t the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

Death figures in there somewhere I suppose.

4864

[b]Karl Popper

Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.[/b]

And not just for the masses anymore.

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

In other words, become one of us.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

And that goes at least triple for ethics.

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

Or, as often as not, the ignoble combination of both.

All life is problem solving.

Either that or creating them for others.

Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.

If not literally.

4865

[b]Charles Darwin

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.[/b]

On the other hand, there are hundreds of reasons we need to.

…But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice… I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton Let each man hope and believe what he can.

I’ll bet he’s in Hell now.

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

On the other hand, instinctive morality is a contradiction in terms. Or so it seems to me.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

Well, how else could we be?

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

The rest as they say is politics.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

But surely not here. :laughing:

4866

[b]John O’Hara

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.[/b]

True, but today it has reached far, far beyond what even he could have imagined.

George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

Or: John Lennon died on December 8, 1980, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

There comes a time in a man’s life…when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it.

Or lots of them even.

There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in.

Of course now they’re as likely to shoot each other.

…Julian believed in a thought process that if you think against a thing in advance, if you anticipate it—whether it’s the fear that you’re going to cut yourself when you shave, or lose your wife to another man—you’ve licked it. It can’t happen, because things like that are known only by God. Any future thing is known only to God; and if you have a super-premonition about a thing, it’ll be wrong because God is God, and is not giving away one of His major powers to Julian McHenry English.

Sure, let me know if that actually works.

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Well, it might be a true story.

4867

[b]P.G. Wodehouse

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.[/b]

Ah, that yawning gap between “in my head” and “out in the world”. You know the one, Mr. Objectivist.

I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

Not counting all the times it stalled.

What’s the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don’t yield to them?

Providing of course they’re legal, right?

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.

Works the other way around too. Right, gents?

Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman.

There are of course alternatives.

As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.

Indeed, we’ve got a few of them here, don’t we?

4868

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Aristotle[/b]

Except when it’s not.
Right?

“Reality is unknowable; we know only appearances.” Herbert Spencer

For example: 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples. Unless you mash them together and make applesauce. Or, you know, something like that.

“The individual as individual is unimportant.” Georg Wilhelm Hegel

And, in particular, after he is dead and gone.

“We feel and know that we are eternal.” Baruch Spinoza

And that’s proof enough, isn’t it?

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” Baruch Spinoza

And then all the way down as it were.

“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” Michel Foucault

Well, so much for immortality and salvation.

4869

[b]Alexandre Dumas

The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.[/b]

Indeed, the simpler the better.

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

I know: If only this were actually true.

What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?

Let’s file this one [hopefully] under “a trick question”.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

Fortunately then if it can’t be taught it can’t be learned. Scientifically or otherwise. Well, my stuff anyway.

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

That or being around Kids.

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.

Well, He certainly does have a lot to answer for.

4870

[b]Maxine Hong Kingston

You can’t eat straight A’s.[/b]

Not even buttering them helps.

This is the most important thing about me–I’m a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I’m a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don’t have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

Of course that doesn’t leave much time to do anything else. You just read about what others do.
But point taken.

In a time of destruction, create something.

That would be today, wouldn’t it?

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

About, for example, the very very big and the very very small.

I’m going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I’m not retarded. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I’m not retarded. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I’m smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I’ve already applied. I’m smart. I can do all sorts of things. I know how to get A’s, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself. So you don’t have to find me a keeper who’s too dumb to know a bad bargain. I’m so smart, if they say write ten pages, I can write fifteen. I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everyone thinks I’m nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. Even if I am stupid and talk funny amd get sick, I won’t let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I’m getting out of here. I can’t stand living here anyore. It’s your fault I talk weird.

Another one gets away.

You’re too young to decide to live forever.

Besides, deciding ain’t got nothing to do with it.

4871

[b]Karl Marx

The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.[/b]

Boy, does that take me back…

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

So, fuck you, Ayn Rand. Well, among others. You know, if this is actually true.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

Come on, that is one way to look at it.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.

Even I never went this far.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

It still is. That and so much more.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

On the other hand, imagine if Marx were around today.

4872

[b]Stephen Fry

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame, and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.[/b]

Hey, whatever works, right?

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

Fine, so long as you can pay the bills.

It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing.

Not true at all, is it Lyssa?

It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.

Of course: Some won’t go that far while others are just getting started.

You should give up.
Why?
For one thing, you’ll live longer.
Oh, you don’t live longer. It just seems longer.

And getting longer everyday. Or so it seems.

I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party.

Or, sure, coming here.

4873

[b]Nein

Discontent. It’s not just for winter anymore.[/b]

At least not for the next 4 years.

1. Don’t panic.
2. Don’t panic.
3. If time still allows, panic.

Expires after 4 years.

[b]Three kinds of hope:

  1. Hope that exists, but we can’t find.
  2. Hope that we find, but doesn’t exist.
  3. Hope that there’s also a third.[/b]

Either that or just make something up.

True: the more you know about politics, the less you want to know. However: the less you know about ideology, the more you want to believe.

And not just objectively anymore.

Yes, civilization is coming to an end. But not without a halftime show.

And commercials of course.

Thanks for calling the White House.
For a lie: press 1.
For an insult: 2.
For all other matters: please hang up and try again in 4 years.

You know, if we’re still around.

4874

[b]Carson McCullers

His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.[/b]

He thought: It can never be solitary enough.
Not even here for all practical purposes.
You just learn to live with it.
Thrive even.

And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

Except of course theoretically.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.

Indeed, they ought to make them for when you’re dreaming.

The human heart is a lonely hunter—but the search for us southerners is more anguished…

Maybe it’s time again to secede from the Union.

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

Either that or turn on the news.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

And some water it like a motherfucker.

4875

[b]Jeanette Winterson

If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t, then I will put all that I can into the going.[/b]

Provided of course you can cue the options.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

Or poor as the case may be. Though time as they say will tell.

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

Must be a youth thing.

Language is a finding place not a hiding place.

Or: Language is a hiding place not a finding place. And not just here.

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

Actually, it works the other way around too. Sort of.

There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.

Not only that, but it’s usually written by ghosts.

4876

[b]Existential Comics

Depression: life is bad
Anxiety: life is going to be bad
Despair: life is necessarily bad
Angst: not being able to decide between the three[/b]

Obviously: All of the above.

If I could talk to anyone alive or dead? Rudolf Carnap. Just so I could really stick it to him about the failure of Logical Positivism.

And it is a failure…right?

If you ever feel like your job is sucking the life out of you, take comfort, at least, that capitalism is working at peak efficiency.

Maybe, but what if the cure really is worse?

…so i did some research and it turns out everyone is wrong but me…

That sounds [and more than just vaguely] familiar doesn’t it?

Scientist: why discuss the “hard problem” of consciousness when the solution is obvious.
Philosopher: what is it?
Scientist: to ignore it.

Besides, for all practical purposes, we do that anyway.

Job interviewer: “You’re qualified, but we are really looking for someone with less self respect, who won’t complain about being exploited.”

Of course that goes without saying. And not just in Trumpworld.

4877

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Fish, he said, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.[/b]

And how many things can we say that of?

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

The only thing harder to imagine than people saying things like this is people believing things like this.

You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.
Yes.
It’s sort of what we have instead of God.

Or, sure, a bastard.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

This is true of course only until it’s not.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be.

And now this generation has Trump. Well, some of them.

I don’t feel any way, the girl said. I just know things.

Still, that’s all it takes sometimes.

It could be worse, Passini said respectfully. There is nothing worse than war.
Defeat is worse.
I do not believe it, Passini said still respectfully. What is defeat? You go home.

On the other hand, what if the Nazis had won. You know, if you hate Nazis.

4878

[b]Thomas Nagel

My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics–a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification.[/b]

The part without dasein in other words.

Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.

That’s where we’re stuck alright.

Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.

That’s where we’re stuck alright.

But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.

Go ahead, wrap “common sense” around the reality of existence itself.

Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.

Obviously: That’s why dualism was invented. In other words, whatever that means.

My skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is especially true with regard to the origin of life.

So, right around the corner from God? At least one of them.

4879

[b]Werner Heisenberg

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.[/b]

I know: Define “fully”.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’.

Not to mention what it means to understand it fully.

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

Next up: Physicists explore The Republic.
Or not as it were.

The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

Of course there is a lot of uncertainty here. Still in other words.

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

Among other things, of course, this pins down absolutely nothing.

If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty—by forms, I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are “true,” that they reveal a genuine feature of nature…. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.

Among other things, of course, this pins down absolutely nothing.

4880

[b]David Byrne

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren’t biased as well–they certainly are–but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed–there is the ‘reporting’ that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.[/b]

In other words, military industrial complex, meet the media industrial complex. In the White House for example. Or in Congress.

Music isn’t fragile.

Instead, we are.

Stop making sense.

So, how am I doing? Or, more to the point, how are you doing?

But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more.

Though, sure, that can sometimes be a good thing.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn’t any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn’t it indeed “true,” not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave?

And not just Nazis.

Patience is a virtue but I don’t have the time.

Indeed, and running out of it more and more with each passing day.