a thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
7721

[b]Pete Seeger

There is an old Arabic proverb, ‘When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet’, so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music… [/b]

Hell, just look at the “Hot 100”.

Did you ever want something really bad and then when you finally got it all you could do was stand there and grin at it?

Let’s trade anecdotes.

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

Fuck that, said the philosopher.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

They make them wage slaves is what they do.

The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.

No shit?

Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.

Let alone philosophy departments.

7722

[b]so sad today

oh fuck i woke up[/b]

Don’t you just hate that?

if there’s one thing i don’t like it’s the consequences of my actions

Let’s put an end to that. At least here.

i hate when reality interferes with my imaginary world

This is actually a real thing.

can’t decide if i’m dying

If you were born, you’re dying.

i can’t wait to tell you about my suffering

And, sure, eventually, we’ll get around to yours.

ranting about capitalism on my iphone

I mean, who doesn’t?

7723

[b]Douglas Adams

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.[/b]

Still, it’s okay to pray for one.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport’.

Let’s explain why.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Like that’s even possible.
His point, perhaps?

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

Just not yours, Kid.

There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

Theology 101.

There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.

Like that will stop some here.

7724

[b]Bob Dylan

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I’ve got nothing, Ma, to live up to[/b]

That makes two of us, Bob.

I’m looking for a woman who’s head is mixed up like mine.

I found one. For about 20 minutes.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

If not the whole fucking universe. And not just ours.

Call me any name you like I will never deny it.

If you get his drift.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

Though, believe it or not, some still do.

I’m good with songs I haven’t written, if I like them. I’m glad I didn’t write any of them. I already know how they go, so I have more freedom with them. I understand these songs. I’ve known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I’m not coming to them like a stranger.

Let’s make that applicable to posts here.

7725

[b]so sad today

everything is getting worse in a boring way[/b]

The deadliest combination.

the subtle art of everything being annoying

Soon to be an actual science.

no of course i’m not going to relax and enjoy life

Is that still even possible, he pondered.

if you need me i’ll be hunched over my phone

In the missionary position.

thought of the day: no

She means “no fucking way!” of course!

that which does not kill you but makes you sleep all day

And then on into the night.

7726

[b]Blake Crouch

Do you hear that? Ethan asked.
Hear what?
For five seconds, Ethan was silent on the line. That’s the sound of me not giving a fuck. [/b]

Let’s come up with the equivalent of that here. Only no time limit.

The world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely.

Or, as the case may be, barely.

I hate clowns!
That’s not a real clown, another boy said. That’s just some guy dressed up like a clown!

Can YOU tell them apart?

I am not allowed to think I’m crazy. I am only allowed to solve this problem.

For example, consent violation. :wink:

Look, I say, I’ve tried to explain to you how the box works, but forget all that for a minute. Here’s the thing. The box isn’t all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you’ll find.

Fear being the least of it.
Right?

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. — C.S. Lewis

Clever if nothing else.

7727

[b]Jacqueline Woodson

I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.[/b]

Just not in this really, really imperfect Now.

Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

Trust me: not all time.

You can’t always be pushing people away. Someday nobody’ll come back.

Unless of course that’s actually the whole point.

When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.

Unless of course this is the only world there is.

In all your getting, get understanding.

Just don’t expect to get understood.

Sometimes…you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

They see to that, don’t they?

7728

[b]so sad today

just checking to see if everything is still fucking stupid and it is[/b]

I’ve put that on automatic pilot myself.

i need so much shit i don’t need

On the other hand, I want so much shit I don’t have.

she died as she lived, feeling like she was about to die

Well, that’s the end of that.

it’s a beautiful day to be in denial

Or an ugly day not to be.

fears:
-disappearing
-not disappearing

Or, sure, the other way around.

i would consider getting out of bed if the world was another bed

Maybe in Heaven?

7729

[b]Neal Stephenson

But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.[/b]

No getting around the scum part though.

Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.

Once again: genes or memes?

…he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it – say, in a nice stained-glass window – not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.

You know, if transcendence is even a thing.

Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead.

He left out objectivist. Right, Kid?

In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

Too close to call, isn’t it?

If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer’s ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

Could be ketchup, mustard or mayonnaise, right?

7730

[b]Miles Davis

I usually write from the rhythm section…If a drummer got a funky beat on some things - like a half-shuffle or a shuffle or a backbeat that’s even - I can write something. [/b]

Of course that’s just common sense.

I ain’t no entertainer, and ain’t trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

What’s the equivalent of that here?

If you don’t know what to play, play nothing.

What’s the equivalent of that here?

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling.

Wow, is this actually true?

You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn’t played.

That’s a stretch, right?

Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.

He means all he was was a trumpet player.

7731

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.” Franz Kafka[/b]

Died.

“Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.” Marcel Proust

No, you moron, not literally.

“The truth is always an abyss.” Franz Kafka

I know: not yours.

“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” Franz Kafka

Objectively as it were.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a “brief.” Franz Kafka

Technically as it were.

"Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.” Emile Durkheim

Out in the real world for example.

7732

[b]Kelley Armstrong

Dont talk to the crazy kids. I longed to shout back that we weren’t crazy. I’d mistaken her kid for a ghost, that’s all. [/b]

Probably Casper, right?

I had to take responsibility, even if it meant saying no to an authority figure, because I was the authority on me.

Little does she know, he smirked.

Maybe my expectations for honesty are too high.

He thought, walking out of the Oval Office.

Never go easy on allies if you have to take them down. Especially allies. You’re already fighting the urge not to hurt them. Counteract that and hit them with everything you’ve got.

We’ll need a context of course.

My past was a private obstacle, not a public excuse.

Unless you need it to be.

A name is so important. A surname connects you to your past, to your family. Even a given name has meaning - why did your parents pick that particular one?

Let’s run this by Engelbert Humperdinck.

7733

[b]André Aciman

Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.[/b]

You know where I’d be going with this.

People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.

People who write too.

Is it better to speak or die?

No.

If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

You know the one.

I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more…

That’s God of course. After all, what’s the alternative?

Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.

And then some of us know the rest.

7734

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.[/b]

Either that or [for some] new meat.

You’ll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time.

Philosophers in particular, right?

The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it.

Of course men have a few holes too. But point taken.

The muscles of my face were beginning to hurt. Under some conditions, smiling is a workout.

Not unlike a grimace.

But sins must not be overlooked simply because the sinner is skilled.

Lots of loopholes though.

Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

Of course that was then.

7735

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Dialectic is the art of intellectual fencing; and it is only when we so regard it that we can erect it into a branch of knowledge.” Arthur Schopenhauer[/b]

Now that’s some serious philosophy!

“The usual duty of the ‘intellectual’ is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae” Christopher Hitchens

Now that’s some serious philosophy!

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.” Theodor W. Adorno

Our utopia of course.

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” Carl Jung

“I” on the other hand…

“In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.” Galileo Galilei

Let’s exchange sparks then.

“He who says either that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it has passed is like someone who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it has passed.” Epicurus

Why is this absurd? You know, among other things.

7736

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.[/b]

On the other hand, stuck on what?

It was the ghost of rationality itself … This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

Spooky, isn’t it?

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

There must be a half-truth in there somewhere.

Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

This fucking myth again, he thought.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it.

Of course we know why, don’t we?

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns.

Those goddamn genes and memes again!

7737

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Three keys to success: read, read, read.” Vladimir Lenin[/b]

The right books of course.

“When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.” Jorge Luis Borges

Grimmer still: my own rendition of it.

“The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral…” Jorge Luis Borges

So, is this a universal truth?

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ― Lao Tse

The devil here being in the details.

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.” Jorge Luis Borges

Not counting death of course.

"Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.” Immanuel Kant

Yeah, sounds like something he’d say.

7738

[b]Julian Assange

If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth. [/b]

We’ll need a context of course.

Every War in the past 50 Years is a Result of Media Lies.

That and the military industrial complex.

You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.

In theory as it were.

One of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on.

The rest being, as they say, history.

The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary.

Next up: Joe Biden.

The only way to keep a secret is to never have one.

Among other things, this is far too extreme to be true.

7739

[b]Pythagoras

Do not despise anyone: an atom shadowing. [/b]

A little help with this one please.

There are men and gods, and beings like Pythagoras.

Am I the only one here who understands that?

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons.

My guess: pi.

As the sea-crab swimmeth always against the stream, so doth wit always against wisdom.

Hey, Kids, what do you think?

Above all have respect for yourself.

You know, if you deserve it.

The earth affords a lavish supply of riches of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.

Pythagoras for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

7740

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I think you should be serious about what you do because this is it. This is the only life you’ve got.” Philip Seymour Hoffman[/b]

And how ironic is that?

“What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely is not universality but circularity.” Willard Van Orman Quine

A world of words, right?

“I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don’t believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet.” Iggy Pop

Let’s finally pin this down.

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” Gabriel García Márquez

Or, rather, it once was.

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Right, like they are all exactly the same.

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” Jean-Paul Sartre

My guess: for better or for worse.