a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeanne Moreau

If you want to live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously. [/b]

Imagine how many have already taken that path to a premature grave.

Every night I go over what I did in the day, in ethical or moral terms. Have I treated people properly? Did I tell the truth?

Sounds absolutely exhausting, he thought.

I don’t feel guilt. Whatever I wish to do, I do.

You know, being her.

I need, absolutely, to be alone.

I need, absolutely, to agree with her.

To me age is a number, just a number. Who cares?

Tell that to your disintegrating body.

If you’re extremely, painfully frightened of age, it shows.

More to the point, the parts that don’t show.

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I am convinced of the afterlife, independent of theology. If the world is rationally constructed, there must be an afterlife.” Kurt Gödel[/b]

Yo, Kurt! Give us a sign – any sign – that you yourself are still arond.
[size=50][let’s look for it][/size]

“Once freedom lights its beacon in man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.” Jean-Paul Sartre

etc.

“The cry ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!’ was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.” Louis de Bonald

Well, nothing’s perfect.

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” Otto von Bismarck

Not to go too far out on a limb here, but maybe learn from both?

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” Oscar Wilde

Ouch!
Right?

“Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.” Benjamin Disraeli

As well he should, some insist.

[iambiguous]

[b]Martin Rees

Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented. [/b]

Next up: dismantling dasein uninventing itself.

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just “virtual reality”.

Next up: “virtual morality”.

Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.

Of course: How worried should we be about this?

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.

How about a McDonald’s on every planet?

The politics is far harder than the science.

Gee, I wonder why?

In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves.

Next up: What philosophy has changed…ever.

[iambiguous]

[b]Guy Debord

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit. [/b]

Must be a Letterist thing.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Imagine that. Then get back to us.

…just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

This actually makes more sense than you think it does. Or, sure, less.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

Lifestyles we call them.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

Must be a dada thing.

In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

Some having perfected it more than others.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

A gentle reminder from Monday that, yes, it might not have killed you. But it will be back again next week. Stronger.[/b]

And more contagious.

It was the winter of our disinfectant.

Next up: the spring of our sold out disinfectant.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was, at best, not yet the very worst of the very, very, very worst of times.

Will you survive them?

We regret to inform you that, yes: there is a tomorrow.

Fortunately, it’s the day to rest.

Russian literature. It was made to be read in the winter. Quoted knowingly in the spring. Forgotten over the summer. Remembered vaguely in the fall. And deeply, darkly repressed happily ever after.

Next up: American literature best sellers.

February 29. It’s questioning your existence.

Next one: 2024. Start preparing now.

[iambiguous]

[b]John Updike

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.[/b]

Let’s just say he died trying.

Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times.

The other end of schadenfreude. Or is there a word for this too?

Chaos is God’s body. Order is the Devil’s chains.

However futile, let’s try to make sense of this.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Clearly with some exceptions.

It’s great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

I’ve no doubt sharpened the senses of a few here. Not that it’s made any difference.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Right, like it’s the same thing.

[iambiguous]

[b]Douglas Adams

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.[/b]

Let’s swap anecdotes.

Beppu (n.) The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page.

Actually, it’s a city in Japan. But we do need a word for that, right?

The light works, he said, indicating the window, the gravity works, he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. Anything else we have to take our chances with.

Hey, the world can be a really scary place.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Sloth Kids let’s call them.

If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

And we all know the equivalent of that here.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

On the other hand, does that include Buddism?

[iambiguous]

[b]Werner Twertzog

Anarchy will arrive in 20 days, I am told. Cannibalism in 50.[/b]

Yo, Joker!

The real question is how this might disrupt the global 1% as we all know.

The Hells Angels? No, he means the other 1% of course.

The idea of United States will perish, as it started, with the irreconcilable tension between equalitarian aspirations and oligarchy, racism, fanaticism, and bloodlust, as we all know.

Anyone here not know this?

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, and I come for you, in the night, when you least expect me.

Then there’s Dubya’s rendition…
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Read, if you want to be a filmmaker. Study literature, skip film school. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read.

And, no, not just scripts.

I have never been “shushed” by a librarian. Nor has one defeated me in a chain fight.

That makes two of us then.

[iambiguous]

[b]Brent Weeks

There is no cheating in war; there are only survivors and victims.[/b]

In other words, cheating.

He wasn’t afraid of death, but he was afraid of dying before he accomplished his purposes.

Right, your “purposes”.

Less weight and less strength just means you need to be smarter.

Unless, of course, you’re packin’.

Analogies are lies grown-ups tell.

And not just to their kids.

…what does money matter when you have love?

It wouldn’t be the first time his sharp tongue had cut his own throat.

Only this time it killed him.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jenny Offill

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.[/b]

But then the part about admitting it.

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

That’s what suicide is for, he thought.

I met an Australian who said he loved to travel alone. He talked about his job as we drank by the sea. “When a student gets it, when it first breaks across his face, it’s so fucking beautiful”, he told me. I nodded, moved, though I’d never taught anyone a single thing. “What do you teach”, I asked him. “Rollerblading”, he explained.

Better that than philosophy, right?

My husband gets a new job…The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. Not bad, he says with a shrug. Only vaguely soul-crushing.

Not many jobs that doesn’t describe, right?

…get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I’ve jotted down a few of them. Objects create happiness. The animals are pleased to be of use. Your cities will shine forever. Death will not touch you.

And, of course, this one: Show me the money.

There is a picture of my mother holding me as a baby, a look of naked love on her face. For years, it embarrassed me. Now there is a picture of me with my daughter looking exactly the same way.

Me? Don’t ask.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stanislaw Ulam

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.[/b]

Or a new virus.

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

On the other hand, for all practical purposes, there it is.

I’m an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate.

Tolerate? How about bring into existence. Or is the coronavirus the Devil’s work?

A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

If only in the either/or world. Unless, of course, the is/ought is just another part of that.

Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.

But, sure, that’s just me.

In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug.

Can anyone here actually explain that?

[iambiguous]

[b]Guy de Maupassant

Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.[/b]

Your nights may differ.

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

Might that be applicable to a country near you?

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

Well, it is a postmodern world.

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

Boy, is that changing!

She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.

By the millions, for example. If you count the sweet boys.

Get black on white.

Apropos to something I suppose.

[iambiguous]

[b]Werner Twertzog

Social distancing on the rise. Introverts rejoice.[/b]

As well we should.

toilet paper is for the weak, as we all know.

Next up: paper towels.

In an abundance of caution, I have purchased a coffin factory.

Next up: purchasing a mass grave.

No, airlines, universities, athletic promoters, and governments, I do not believe my health is your “top priority.”

But you’re more trusting, aren’t you?

If I die from this, resulting from a failure of will, I would like my remains to be burned on a mountain of devalued US currency.

On Wall Street at 4 P.M.

Dear Americans: do not mourn your retirement accounts. Life will be extinguished long before you need them.

You know, if you’re lucky.

[iambiguous]

[b]John von Neumann

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.[/b]

You know, going back to an explanation for existence itself. Or even a model.

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

Theoretically, for example.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Right, like anything here can be described as sin other than as it is compelled to be.

There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.

At least admit that, Mr. Atheist.

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

A little help with this one, please.

Problems are often stated in vague terms… because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.

Or, as some call them, “general description intellectiual contraptions.”

[iambiguous]

[b]Erwin Schrodinger

Whence came I, whither go I? Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears. Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity – the One of Parmenides – of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God – with a capital ‘G’. Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.[/b]

Nor philosophy. Although, sure, the philosophers may well be closer.

The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.

That’s certainly one kind of obligation.

The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy… has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.

I’ll need some help with this one, please.

It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, “Who are we?”

Next up: Why we are who we are and not something else.

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it…

Unless of course it’s the other way around. Whatever that means.

If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.

Women too.

[iambiguous]

[b]Existential Comics

Why should I have to pay for someone else’s healthcare??
someone who is deeply confused about what their private insurance company does with the premiums they pay[/b]

Okay, but being confused is still part of the American dream.

Socialists: We want more democracy. Democracy at work, democracy in politics, democracy over resources, and democracy over the media.
Capitalists, for some reason: this is a threat to democracy.

Must be a class thing.

The real torture wasn’t that Sisyphus has to roll the rock up the hill for eternity, it was that Zeus kept telling him that if he worked hard and applied himself, one day he might be able to pay off his student loans.

Roll on, Sisyphus, roll on!

Society: we are all going to die if grocery store workers don’t risk their lives to keep the shelves stocked.
The Free Market: I’d say that wage is worth about…minimum wage, with no sick leave.
Economists: wages fairly reflect society’s needs based on supply and demand.

Or something like that.

[b]Questions I’d like to see moderators ask Joe Biden at the next debate:

• what year is it?
• what city are we in?
• what is 9 times 6?
• if a clock has the minute hand pointing up, and the hour hand pointing down, what time is it?
• what was the first question I asked you?[/b]

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Sean Hannity.

The entire machinery of capitalism mobilized to stop Bernie Sanders: the television networks, the newspapers, the political establishment, wall street, the business community, and a billionaire spending $500 million on ads.
Dudes online: this is Elizabeth Warren’s fault.

Uh, let’s not go there?

[iambiguous]

[b] Lily King

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.[/b]

Let’s try that here even though, of course, we can’t.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

See, I told you.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

No, this is a real frame of mind.

Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

You know, being philosophical about it.

We’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

So, did she come?

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.

Measured in years, months, weeks, days or hours.

[iambiguous]

[b]Guy Debord

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.[/b]

Just ask Bernie Sanders.

All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

With the possible exception of all that hasn’t.

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

Like that actually means something.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Like that can’t mean any number of things.

Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.

So, does posting here count?

What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

Things only intellectuals pedants say.

[iambiguous]

[b]Doth

We never asked to be primates with crippling anxiety.[/b]

I never asked to be primate period.

It’s a perfect night to eat the rich.

You know, before they eat you. Or hire someone here to.

Everyday I don’t live in an abandoned Victorian estate with a horrifying backstory is a day lost.

I’ve already lost thousands of them myself.

Might fuck around and disappear into an ancient forest & never be seen again.

Or do it with a fierce determination.

What you do at night is between the moon and your anxiety.

That and what you can get away with.

If you know someone who is effortlessly good in social situations, that’s a demon. You’re friends with a demon.

Unless of course they’re just an extrovert.

[iambiguous]

[b]John Updike

If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead. [/b]

Is anyone here mature?

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Not unlike being a nobody.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Just not anymore, right?

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.

On the other hand, no one asked to be born.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.

I’m well beyond that myself.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

We’ll need a context of course.