a thread for mundane ironists

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6961

[b]tiny nietzsche

it’s friday. fuck the abyss[/b]

Right, like no one falls into it on Fridays.

you can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep

Not only this but you cannot die if you were never born.
Go ahead, try to.

I’ve ruined me for anyone else

Just as I intended.

you, an art critic: michelangelo’s david is sublime genius
me, an art lover: this dude’s junk is hanging out

On the other hand, as Loudon Wainwright pointed out, “Michelangelo gave him such a tiny pee-pee.”

roses are dead
nothing to do
alone on the beach
with albert camus

As Captured in song: youtu.be/SdbLqOXmJ04

my nihilism is flaring up

Like a hemorrhoid in my brain.

6962

[b]Francis Crick

Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It’s the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra.[/b]

All autonomically perhaps.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

All the while concluding, “It’s alive!”

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Including Heaven and Hell?

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

How else are they going to become consenting adults?

A busy life is a wasted life.

Like, for example, busy doing the thing that we do here?

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Unless of course he’s a Scientologist.

6963

[b]David Sedaris

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.[/b]

Unless of course the rest of us figure that out.

Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat.

And not just in Mississippi.

…never fall asleep in a dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating.

Never get old? Good luck with that.

Me: Did you get your tree yet?
Ken: I’m a Jew, I don’t decorate Christmas trees.
Me: So you’re going to go with a wreath instead?
Ken: I just told you, I’m a Jew.
Me: Oh, I get it. You’re looking for a cheap wreath.
Ken: I’m not looking for a wreath at all. Leave me alone, will you.
Me: You’re probably just tense because you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping.
Ken: I don’t Christmas shop.
Me: What are you telling me? That you make all of your presents.
Ken: I don’t give Christmas presents period. Goddamit, I told you, I’m a Jew.
Me: Well, don’t you at least need to buy something for your parents?
Ken: They’re Jews, too, idiot. That’s what makes me one. It’s hereditary. Do you understand?
Me: Sure.
Ken: Say the words “I understand.”
Me: I understand. So where are you going to hang your stocking?

Same with Barbie.

If you see devils, they lock you up, but in America, if you see angels, they put you on morning TV.

If not the late night shows.

We’d all turn our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.

Nope, never had access to that. Comfortably or otherwise.

6964

[b]David Bowie

It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I’ve never bought into - with any artist. It’s just not a real thing.[/b]

How about philosophical integrity?
Not here of course.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

For me it was the Rolling Stones.

I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human.

My guess: that’s not even possible.

I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

That’s me here, right? No, I admit it.

I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.

I hear that. Not counting Emmylou Harris of course.

I’m really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine.

Let’s just say I’ve never not been there myself.

6965

[b]so sad today

just checking to make sure you’re still not in love with me[/b]

Actually, I might be.

due to personal reasons i will be ignoring you

Fortunately, that can be anything.

i hate everything in a nice way

I tried that once. But now things are back to normal.

fuck everything kind of

Also, everyone sort of.

horoscope: just don’t do anything

And that’s not always easy to accomplish.

studies confirm i’m my own worst enemy

Still, other studies confirm that you are.

6966

[b]Neil deGrasse Tyson from Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

An artist coworker of mine once asked whether alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans. The absence of any other plausible answer forced me to say yes.[/b]

Let’s hope that never becomes a problem.

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

Not that we ever really had a choice of course.
Whatever that means.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

Let’s thank the Lord for that.

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.

How about our brains then? And that part we call “mind”.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Right, like someone actually counted them.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super intelligent alien species? These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

For some philosophically fun, for others philosophically disturbing.

6967

[b]Tara Westover

I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.[/b]

Unless of course they draft you.

What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves? I began the research.

Right, like that will solve it.

…vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

Like we all don’t tangle with guilt in our own unique, idiosyncratic ways.

We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment.

Trust me: Some more than others. Considerably more even.

It would be many years before I would understand what had happened that night, and what my role in it had been. How I had opened my mouth when I should have stayed silent, and shut it when I should have spoken out.

For many though, they’ll run out of years.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

How about this: In being born.

6968

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.” Alfred North Whitehead[/b]

Is this the glass half or the glass half empty?

“Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.” Alfred North Whitehead

Though, for objectivists, it can be the opposite.

“There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.” Alfred North Whitehead

Or quarter-truths.

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.” Alfred North Whitehead

On the other hand, there’s no getting around ignorance in the is/ought world.

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” Alfred North Whitehead

Next up: an actual context.

“Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.” Alfred North Whitehead

Don’t expect miracles though.

6969

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The past is all we know of the future.[/b]

And, every now and again, the present.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Not the ones I read.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Next up: the inconspicuous benefits.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Actually, the most important parts, are the pieces that you can’t know.

Mi’ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.

Or as less wrong as we can.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

We’ll need details of course.

6970

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Lies are the greatest murderers. They kill the Truth.” Socrates[/b]

Or, as Nietzsche opined, convictions.

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates

Or, as I call it here, huffing and puffing.

"If you want to be wrong then follow the masses."Socrates

Or, as I point out here, the Kids.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle

How exactly does someone entertain a thought?

“Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.” Seneca the Younger

Come on, did he really say that?

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.” Seneca the Younger

Of course he’s just paraphrasing JFK here.

6971

[b]Man Ray

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.[/b]

I would love to see them.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

There is still what you can or cannot actually do.

When I saw I was under attack from all sides, I knew I was on the right track.

Indeed, that often works for me here.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

And how subjective is that?

I never knew what I was doing until I was done.

Sigh…
People say things like this all the time.

Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.

So, tell us, how timid are you?

6972

[b]Edward P. Jones

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.[/b]

Pragmatism let’s call it.

But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don’t put me on the nigger side. I’m still on the white man side, John. I’m still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me.

And we know that sort of thing is still going on today.

Best hurry, he thought. Best get outa this weather. He wanted to die but he really didn’t want to catch a cold to do it.

What kind of cold is that?

But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self.

Of course anything can be rationalized.

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one’s still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like James Baldwin, who live in the world of words.

Okay, but, as a novelist, he would bring them down to earth.

What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.

So, would that be a good thing or not?

6973

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato[/b]

For example, Don Trump and Kim Jong-un.

“A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.” Plato

I’m thinking of one man here in particular.

“A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Or, in is/ought world, the absense of facts.

“The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And would that they had remained silent.

“The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.” Arthur Schopenhauer

He means the vast majority of course. Women too.

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And, I suspect, not just on this planet.

6974

[b]David Chalmers

Now I have to say I’m a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it’s a natural fact of life. [/b]

Here and now for example

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Of course we get explanations here all the time.

does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

God’s will?

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

I’m still working on that myself.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a “neural correlate of consciousness”?

For that matter, what does it mean vaguely.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

Luck?

6975

[b]Marc Chagall

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.[/b]

Sounds more like something an artist might be expected to say.

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.

This too. Only less so.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

What exactly does this explain?

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

What exactly does this explain?

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Let’s take a stab at where that is. Then the part where art ends and philosophy begins.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Just don’t ask how.

6976

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

I needed a second opinion, so I asked myself twice.[/b]

Who wouldn’t?

Technically, the future starts now.
Realistically - tomorrow.
More realistically - next Monday.

Unless, of course, you die first. Unless, of course, technically, you still have a future even then.

What language should one study to understand True Detective without subtitles? Asking for a friend.

Not counting the second season of course.

Love is the only language with grammar so unpredictable that any rule may suddenly become an exception and vice versa, and with just one grammatical voice — passive-aggressive.

Either that or rationalization.

What is love?
a) Baby don’t hurt me
b) Don’t hurt me
c) No more

d) or I’ll cut off your dick

When you realise exactly why your phone was given the epithet ‘smart’.

For example, it can be ‘powered off’.

6977

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

Everything starts from a dot.[/b]

Just not here.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Just don’t expect everyone to agree.

The true work of art is born from the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

The intellectual’s equivalent of abstract art?

There is no must in art because art is free.

Just ask the folks from Campbell’s soup.

The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.

Not my circles.

In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

Not my paintings. Or, sure, especially mine.

6978

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.[/b]

And then one day so will the future.

We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Imagine for example the folks at Fox News.

One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Not counting arithmetic of course.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

For some in pure silk.

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

And that’s before they take x-rays of the parts inside it.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

Or maybe it is about all of that.

6979

[b]Werner Twertzog

We have been treated very unfairly by whomever devised the laws of physics.[/b]

Or whatever whomever is.

Dear Americans: You live in an oligarchy with a racial caste system. You always have. It is just more obvious now.

Cue Trumpworld.

Is your coffee roasted on the premises? No? Then I shall see you in hell.

No, for some, really.

The earth will be devoured by the sun. The universe will die. Nothing matters. It is Saturday morning.

Or, now, Thursday afternoon.

Introverts are miserable because stupid people do all of the talking.

Or here, all most of the posting.

When you have commanded 8,000 Amazonian warriors on a $1M budget, then tell me again about your directorial mojo.

Let’s file this one under, “Aguirre: the Wrath of Fitzcarraldo”.

6980

[b]Andre Breton

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well. [/b]

If repetitively.

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it’s so easy, why don’t you want to play? You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

Most of course only wish they could.

The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

Especially our public.

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

How ridiculous is that, he thought. Never having been in love himself.

Dada is a state of mind.

Not unlike Lala.

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

And no one has forgotten more than me. Aside, perhaps, from you.