a thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
7921

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.[/b]

And now all the way to the White House.

There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.

What’s that make the smartphone then?

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.

Capitalism in a nutshell, perhaps? That and the part about paying the bills.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—“unstuckness,” in other words—are completely outside its domain.

And that’s before the trek to the is/ought world.

Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

Especially when there are kids involved.

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian.

Maybe. Maybe not. But look at them now.

7922

[b]Nein

You could always try Fatalism. [/b]

After all, who could blame you?

For sale: a year. Practically new. But not quite what I wanted.

I’ve got one for sale too. And I’ll throw in last year and next year for free.

I think I liked you better as an algorithm.

Of course that’s quite common these days.

For everything: there’s a time and place. For nothing: there’s Twitter.

And, for the Kids, there’s ILP.

After the Revolution, friends, there will be no more Mondays. Just proto-Tuesdays.

Except for the ruling class.

Don’t worry: every time a German verb separates, a compound noun is formed.

Male and female.

7923

[b]Tana French

One of my da’s tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.[/b]

How is that different from completely fucking up your life? You know, if there is a difference.

I can’t explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.

This is as obscure a way in which to describe as any other.

We think of mortality so little these days…
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
"Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be…”

Let’s bring that back.

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind.

They know who they are. If they even existed at all.

I’m amazed this guy manages to get out of bed in the morning without working himself into a panic attack over the chance that he might trip on the bath mat and stab himself through the eye socket with his toothbrush and be left with a permanent twitch that’ll ruin his chances of landing an airplane safely if the pilot has a heart attack and doom hundreds to a fiery death.

This describe anyone here? Besides, on occasion, me?

Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other’s heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.

Remember when it wasn’t like that? Me neither.

7924

[b]Criss Jami

If you build the guts to do something, anything, then you better save enough to face the consequences.[/b]

Not much in the way of consequences here though.

I would rather a romantic relationship turn into contempt than turn into apathy. The passion in the extremities make it appear as though it once meant something. We grow from hot or cold, but lukewarm is the biggest insult.

You know, in theory.

At first, they’ll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they’ll dislike you.

Huffing and puffing I call it here.

When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.

Not many that excludes

There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you’re wrong and you can’t face it; the other is when you’re right and nobody else can face it.

Well, that explains one of us.

Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.

What’s it called here, Kids?

7925

[b]Werner Twertzog

Bridges fall not because they are badly built but because the builders have been taught a false system of ethics.[/b]

Yeah, that too.

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.

You know, after Trump is reelected.

Perhaps I shall retweet you. But you will not be the same person afterwards.

Wow, has it come to that already?

You love me; you love me not. America, I need something more stable.

No can do. It’s now a red state/blue state world. We only live in it.

So then I said to George “The Animal” Steele, “What stopped your promotion to full professor?” And he said, “politics.”

So, is it important to understand this?

Unlike our bodies, which are declining even as we dream of future happiness.

Don’t worry, you’ll understand it eventually.

7926

[b]Edward Snowden

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics. [/b]

Right, whatever that means.

You will never be completely free from risk if you’re free. The only time you can be free from risk is when you’re in prison.

I’m sorry, but how idiotic is that?!

We do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power.

At least some of us still remember the Sixties…and the illusion of at least believing that we were.

In the end, the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

Fuck you, Barry! Well, this part anyway.

You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it’s very likely not in your country. It’s somewhere else in the world.

Though, so far, only on this planet.

The US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

Right, like anything has really changed.

7927

[b]Norman Mailer

There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.[/b]

He meant demigod of course.

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

Can we thank nature for that?

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

So, what do you think, has it gotten even worse?

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Does this go deep enough…or does it barely scratch the surface?

I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind.

I know: you think that’s a description of me here. And I’m not saying that it’s not.
Unless of course I’m wrong.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Let’s call this the “corporate media industrial complex”.

7928

[b]Existential Comics

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but if philosophy is ever going to take its place as the queen of the sciences again, we must expel all nerds from the ranks of philosophers.[/b]

He means the analytic nerds, of course. You know, the really, really, really serious philosophers.

why is it that in sports one team always has to be declared the winner and the other team the loser. really says a lot about society.

On the other hand, there is the reality of it.

i don’t think taste can be totally subjective, on account of the fact that everyone agrees that cowboys are cool

Or, for others, Indians.

When Boris Yeltsin visited American and saw the variety of goods in the Supermarkets, he questioned socialism.
When Muhammad Ali visited the Soviet Union and saw there were no homeless people, he questioned capitalism.

Okay, Mr. Objectivist, settle this.

if i were king of england i would simply make “affect” and “effect” be spelled the same way

A little help with this one, please. Magsj?

Yes, the medium is the message. And the message of YouTube is that everyone on earth is an idiot.

We know who that includes, don’t we?

7929

[b]Douglas Adams

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of
the word “Infinite”.
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some.
Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, “wow, that’s big”, time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.
Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.[/b]

Unless, of course, it’s .99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 on and on forever and ever.
For some, that doesn’t even make it 1.

“Why?’ is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you ‘What’s the time?’ or ‘When was the battle of 1066?’ or ‘How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?’ The answers are easy and are, respectively, ‘Seven-thirty in the evening,’ ‘Ten-fifteen in the morning,’ and 'Don’t ask stupid questions.”

We just don’t know why that is.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.
Hang on, can I write this down? said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

Harold having clearly missed the point.

How can I tell, said the man, that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

So, is this a trick question?

In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Woody Allen.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Anyone here know why?

7930

[b]Brent Weeks

The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.[/b]

And, no, not just the terminator.

You might want to think twice before you try to use a man’s conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn’t have one.

Hint, hint…

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

Well, of course.

Life is empty. Life is worthless. When we take a life, we aren’t taking anything of value — Durzo Blint

Let’s prove that this is false. Philosophically, for example.

Dying well is easy, it only takes a moment of courage. It’s living well that I couldn’t do. What’s death compared to that.

In other words, blah, blah, blah.

How can one love the light and live in darkness?

Ambivalence?

7931

[b]Existential Comics

i don’t understand why the english are so against immigrants. if it weren’t for immigrants they would have no good food. or hot people.[/b]

Yeah, it’s sort of racist.

I just received word that in a private conversation in 2018, Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren that Hegel was right about everything. Shocking, if true.

Apocryphal no doubt.

Big congrats to all the people giving up on their New Years resolutions right around now. As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, allowing past decisions to control our actions is a bad faith denial of our transcendent radical freedom.

You know, if you want to take it there.

[b]News that will cause stocks to go up:

  • a minimum wage increase is struck down
  • employees are prevented from unionizing
  • corporate taxes are reduced
  • labor laws are relaxed[/b]

Well, the capitalists did win, right?

The stock market is not the economy, it’s an estimate of how much wealth can be extracted from workers.

Well, the capitalists did win, right?

Do you think Kierkegaard had a “cheat day” for existential despair? Like, where he would just go about his day and enjoy his life.

Let’s just say that, as with most of us, he had his “distractions”.

7932

[b]Niels Bohr

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. [/b]

Not only that, but everything else too.

If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

Or what I like to focus on: If dasein hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.

We’ll need a context of course.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.

And, ever more increasingly, a woman.

A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.

Glibly for example.

Nothing exists until it is measured.

You know, in the either/or world. And, perhaps, only there.

7933

[b]Camille Paglia

Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant. [/b]

Of course she’s just paraphrasing Satyr paraphrasing her.

American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.

In other words, liberal p.c. pap, and not hers.

Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.

Let alone feminists.

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Really, this is how far the objectivist will go. Nothing they assert is not true.

I consider myself 100 percent a feminist, at odds with the feminist establishment in America. For me the great mission of feminism is to seek the full political and legal equality of women with men. However, I disagree with many of my fellow feminists as an equal opportunity feminist, who believes that feminism should only be interested in equal rights before the law. I utterly oppose special protection for women where I think that a lot of the feminist establishment has drifted in the last 20 years.

Let’s pin down this distinction. You know, given a particular context.

If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.

In the cell next to mine, he thought.

7934

[b]Doth

It’s a perfect night to go to a party, have some champagne, wander down the hall, find a corner that bleeds into another dimension, never be seen again.[/b]

Nope, it didn’t work.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: If you truly want to be happy, get turned into a wolf by a forest witch.

Nope, it didn’t work.

Be the reason why the lights burn out when you enter a room.

Or, sure, the lights turn on.

Life is a delicate balance between managing your depression & letting time slowly destroy your body.

Not your life, right?

It’s a perfect night to slip into something more comfortable, like a coffin.

Anyone here sleep in one?

Be the reason why she speaks a dead language in bed.

Unless, perhaps, she’s the reason that you do.

7935

[b]Randall Munroe

Without us, Earth’s geology will grind on. Winds and rain and blowing sand will dissolve and bury the artifacts of our civilization. Human-caused climate change will probably delay the start of the next glaciation, but we haven’t ended the cycle of ice ages. Eventually, the glaciers will advance again. A million years from now, few human artifacts will remain.[/b]

Yeah, there’s always that.

Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.

Nature. Go figure.

By choosing the right words, you can take an idea that’s happening in your head and try to make an idea like it happen in someone else’s.

So, there is still hope for both of us.

They say lightning never strikes in the same place twice. “They” are wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s a little surprising that this saying has survived; you’d think that people who believed it would have been gradually filtered out of the living population.

Cue the “Darwin Awards”?
darwinawards.com/

The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.

Do you not get this too?

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found.

It’s not around my neighborhood, that’s for sure.

7936

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting.[/b]

What’s that make maintaining our philosophy then?

Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator.

Or here: Like trying to keep an objectivist out of the dictionary.

Morals can’t function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought.

I don’t know about that but…

…metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.

I don’t know about that but…

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
The more you look the more you see.

And that’s before we get to, well, you know.

The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

That’s true. But, of far greater importance, that’s as far as it goes. Or, rather, as far as we know.
Well, not counting you, Mr. Objectivist.

7937

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

English lit: Your heart is an enchanting landscape
French lit: Your heart is an eternal mystery
German lit: Your heart is a finely tuned war machine[/b]

Next up: American lit.
[size=50][You know, in Trumpworld][/size]

Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.
Kafka’s Diary Entry on August 2, 1914

Of course that was before the metamorphosis.

Happy New Year!
Sartre: Who’s happy?
Beckett: It’s not new!
Kafka: There are plenty of years, infinite years, but not for us.

Of course they were just the optimists.

Philosophy is your one-way ticket on the bullet train to
Plato: truth
Descartes: clarity
Kant: reason
Schopenhauer: the grave

The bullet train?

Define ambiguity: “The point of ambiguity is that it can’t be defined”
This 12-year-old’s test answer suggests that the middle schools are teaching too much
a) Derrida
b) Quine
c) Sade

d) all of the above

Is your child texting about philosophy?
LOL = Leibniz or Lacan
LMAO = Let me ask Ockham
STFU = Some theories feign universalizability
ROTFL = Reflecting on the fallacious lemma

And then the grim reality:
WBGBWJ = Will Brad Get Back With Jen?

7938

[b]Tana French

This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.[/b]

This Kid too.

Some people should never meet.

And, as we all know here, even virtually.

You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.

In other words, after all the bills are paid.

I wasn’t sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.

Or, from time to time, without pulling the trigger.

I told people I was taking a gap year, but the truth was that I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life.

Next up: the gap existence.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a philosopher…

7939

[b]Simone de Beauvoir

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.[/b]

Good luck with that, right?

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

Good luck with that, right?

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

And not just Mr. Reasonable.

To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

Imagine attempting that here!

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

You’ll know that when you are in its path.

As long as the family and the myth of the family … have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

Nope, it’s still around.

7940

[b]God

My son is a die-hard Socialist.[/b]

For example, read the New Testament.

Racism is unacceptable unless it’s against the human race in general.

Ironic, isn’t it?

What doesn’t kill you just needs a little more time.

If only all the way to the grave.

ANNOUNCEMENT
As of today My son:
• Is stepping away from heavenly duties
• Will no longer be referred to as “Son of God”
• Will no longer receive funds from Christianity
• Will repay indigenous people for the cost of missionary work
• Will spend most of his time in Canada

Who does this remind you of?

I created you as mosquito food.

Go to Hell then.

Next time just dogs.

He means cats of course.