a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Samuel Butler

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.[/b]

Their tact as often as not.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

Tell me about it…

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

And to think I was once quite good at it.

A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

Of course that has nothing to do with our species, does it?

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

Clever perhaps but for most of us moot.

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism…

I know, i know: get to the point.

[b]Lee Smolin

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.[/b]

Hmm, would you pray to that?

Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.

Let’s file this one unders, “win win”.

But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders.

Who does this remind you of?

By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn’t believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough.

And that’s still before we die.

On the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend’s little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.

I guess they lucked out.

Whatever is real in our universe is real in a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments. The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyze the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present. The future does not yet exist and is therefore open. We can reasonably infer some predictions, but we cannot predict the future completely. Indeed, the future can produce phenomena that are genuinely novel, in the sense that no knowledge of the past could have anticipated them. Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.

Another brief history of time.

[b]Neil Gaiman

There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us, said Odin. You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise.[/b]

Not counting all the new gods since of course.

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.

On the other hand, are these real mistakes though?

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

Okay, let’s pick the one for Don Trump then.

…we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

Some day, he predicted, this would become a cliche.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

Me too. As long as no one really knows what they are.

The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

Anyone care to run this by Zoot?

[b] Jeff VanderMeer

What can you do when your five senses are not enough?[/b]

Anyone here come up with something?

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.

Is this even possible?

We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.

What’s that leave then?

…for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

Not counting Google Street View one hopes.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

Or of late: Ten weeks ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

To cite just one example, the mystery of existence itself.

[b]God

There is life on other planets and from now on that’s my focus.[/b]

I’ll weep for their future.

ALL CAPS are a great way of COMPENSATING for having a small PENIS!

Five will get you ten it’s a reference to Trump.

Lucifer, Chief Demon of Hell, will become My new heavenly gatekeeper. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to St. Peter for his service! Pol Pot will become the new Chief Demon of Hell, the first Cambodian so chosen. Congratulations to all!

Five will get you ten it’s a reference to Trump.

I want to be the kind of God atheists are proud not to believe in.

I know, but what if He means it?

It’s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawking already mathematically proved, to My face, that I don’t exist.

Or, rather, what’s left of Stephen Hawking.

The Bible is 100% accurate. Especially when thrown at close range.

But, sure, shoot the bastard too.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.[/b]

Repeat as necessary.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Repeat as necessary.

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

Or, here, every post.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

And then not so gently.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Or so it seems at the time.

Art is to look at not to criticize.

Like that will ever catch on.

[b]John Dewey

We only think when confronted with a problem.[/b]

That can’t be good.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Let’s call it, say, among other things, an existential contraption.

…a problem well put is half solved.

Not counting mine of course.

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

After all, look at us.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

He means music of course.

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

Not if the whole point of education is, say, the mass production of wage slaves.

[b]The Dead Author

It’s not despair if you don’t also feel it on the weekend.[/b]

Then it is despair.

[b]A Brief History of Philosophy

  1. Caves
  2. Owls
  3. Abysses[/b]

Explain please: Why owls?

Nietzsche’s biggest crush got married to his best friend, and Heidegger’s son was actually the child of his wife’s doctor. Cool how the alt-right’s favorite philosophers are both literal cucks.

Is this important to know?

Here’s what people should want from tech:
Twitter: ban all Nazis
Instagram: ban all brands
Spotify: pay your artists
Amazon: pay your workers
Facebook: delete my data
Snapchat: stop deleting my data

On the other hand, what do you want?

Most of what people think is philosophy is actually psychology, and most of what people think is psychology is actually marketing.

Imagine then if this were not actually altogether false?

If you didn’t leave facebook when you started getting music recommendations from people you haven’t wanted to talk to in 15 years, you probably won’t care that facebook sold your private data to Donald Trump.

So, what do you think he’s doing with yours?

[b]T.S. Eliot

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust[/b]

Or, for some, quite the opposite.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing

From the cradle to the grave as it were.

In my end is my beginning

Unless of course it is the other way around.

The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Reason has nothing to do with it. Or none that [so far] has ever been pointed out to me.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

Which part makes sense to you?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Cue, among others, Maurice Conchis.

[b]Judith Butler

Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “she thinks too much.”

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Sounds like me, doesn’t it?

Relationality is not only a descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.

Sounds like me, doesn’t it?

Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of “sovereignty” of the nation, where “sovereignty” denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality.

In other words, they have their ruling class and we have ours.

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.”

Not unlike all the other ones.

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

Not that there still aren’t consequences of course.

[b]Alan Cumming

It is a startling thing, the need to feel utterly believed.[/b]

Yes, but it still pales next to the need to feel understood. And not even utterly.

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

Including our memories of the future.

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll.

As, say, the days become weeks become months.

You can’t go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay.

Yes, he may have a point there.

Sometimes the worst thing about change is the shock of the change itself and not actually the new circumstances.

You know, when it’s not clearly both.

I also understood how events or circumstances could cascade out of control and your entire ability to deal with the present can be lost.

Perhaps, he thought, but I wrote the book.

[b]Kurt Cobain

Nobody dies a virgin…Life fucks us all.[/b]

Some right up the ass.

Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.

May as well be pragmatic about it.

Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don’t speak bird.

What’s that got to do with it?

Practice makes perfect, but nobody’s perfect, so why practice?

To be the first?

I’m so happy. Cause today I found my friends.
They’re in my head.

So, did they help him to pull the trigger?

I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.

He probably means you, asshole.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.[/b]

Let’s apply this to, say, serious philosophy?

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until–“My God,” says a second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… “Look, look!” recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

Lesson learned? Only God knows what really happened.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing… A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

If not the worst possible time to be alive.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.

In other words, for some of us, what’s left of it. And not just intuitively.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

If you ever mature at all.

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we’d know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

Hmm. And if you dreamed you were a maggot?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.” Nicolás Gómez Dávila[/b]

He means the fucking liberals.

“Swimming against the current is not idiotic if the waters are racing toward a waterfall.” Nicolás Gómez Dávila

You know, if that’s an option.

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” - Henry David Thoreau

Or: Along with love, with money, with fame, give me truth.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Gustave Flaubert

How’s that working out for you?

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end." Simone de Beauvoir

Haven’t heard much from her lately though.

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Some remembering more than others.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that’s what I want just now.[/b]

Of course this doesn’t work for everyone.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

Not counting all the times it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

[i]Had to Google this one:

“Here’s a word that immediately communicates two things (to those who understand it): the discourse referred to is light, and the person speaking or writing is erudite. … Thus, it is a high-toned means of blowing discourse away like dust.”

Who would want any more of that.[/i]

Man is a mistake. He must go.

Probably includes most of the ladies too.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.

Obviously with exceptions.

She was not herself–she was not anything. She was something that is going to be–soon–soon–very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

Did he ever get back to us on this?

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone — the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.[/b]

So, can you live with that?

Is there anything more frightening than people?

Next stupid question.

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

Many even volunteering to.

We’re often silent. We don’t yell and we don’t complain. We’re patient, as always. Because we don’t have the words yet. We’re afraid to talk about it. We don’t know how. It’s not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there’s us, the Chernobylites, and then there’s you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they’re Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. “We’re from Chernobyl.” “I’m a Chernobylite.” As if this is a separate people. A new nation.

What’s your own rendition of this?

I’m not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man.

Like the two are never connected.

‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’

Capitalism!

[b]Sad Socrates

Life is a temporary distraction from nothingness.[/b]

You know, whatever that means.

I don’t want anything to do with my brain.

I don’t mind mine nearly as much.

It appears we have arrived at a point in history when the trash heap smells like the garden.

He’s got it backwards of course. Or am I missing the point?

Things get easier once you realize it’s ok to pretend you care.

In other words, if that’s something you have to do.

I look forward to another insignificant tomorrow. See you then.

Count on it.

Philosophy is the abortion of thinking.

Or, for some, a stillbirth.

[b]John Stuart Mill

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. [/b]

Not including me of course.

For people to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Especially including you of course.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.

Today we call it the postmodern world. Could even Mill have imagined it?

One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.

And how scary is that? As, for example, a double edged sword.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

Consider: youtu.be/OA8N0xy3hjE

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

Let’s make that a rule here.

[b]tiny nietzsche

nihilists to left of me, postmodernists to the right, here I am, stuck in denial with you[/b]

Let’s turn this into a song.

Maybe I’m the abyss.

Or, sure, no maybe about it.

me: it hurts when I do this
doktor: the root of suffering is attachment
me: I’m not going to get any pills, am I?

Least of all opioids.

What’s a good time to never call?

Also: What’s a good time to never post?

I die at the end of my story.

Join the crowd.

maybe she was born with it, maybe late stage capitalism left her no choice

Let’s decide which is worse.

[b]Amy Chua

Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future.[/b]

Maybe that explains me then. How about you?

Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

Let’s decide: genes or memes?

It’s no coincidence that the Constitution didn’t mention “the pursuit of happiness”, which the Declaration of Independence called an inalienable right.

True, but what exactly does that mean? What lesson here is to be learned?

For most Americans, especially now, striving and insecurity are likely to be rewarded with more striving and insecurity; you can do everything right and still have little to show for it.

How about you Brits?

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There’s the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she’d just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn’t feel the need to do the extra-credit problems.
I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. “Why not?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do them?”
“I didn’t want to miss recess.”
A fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time.
“Why?” asked Lulu, when I explained this to her.
For me this was like asking why I should breathe.
“None of my friends do it,” Lulu added.
“That’s not true,” I said. “I’m 100% sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit.” Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu’s class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it.
“But Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they’re not Asian,” she added.
“Aha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn’t say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I’m in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you? You went to recess instead of doing extra credit?” I was almost in tears. “Extra credit is not extra. It’s just credit. It’s what separates the good students from the bad students."
“Aww - recess is so fun,” Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that, Lulu, like Sophia. always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself - an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States.
Rote drilling is another. Once Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

On the other hand, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. No, seriously.

Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition – pure political tribalism.

Who does this remind you of?