a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.” Aeschylus[/b]

Or sometimes [in this world] to actually be foolish.

“I shall seize fate by the throat.” Ludwig van Beethoven

Let’s decide if this is actually possible.
For example, of our own volition.

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world – that we are not everything and that we will die.” Georges Bataille

And then, after we die, that we are not nothing?

"You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.” Georges Bataille

You know, for starters.

"Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso

Or, rather, as real as you need it to be.

“Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.” Albert Camus

Not our football obviously.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.[/b]

Words: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

By “guts” I mean, grace under pressure.

I know: Let’s decide what it really means.

I’d like to destroy you a few times in bed.

Although [obviously] that can be taken in different ways.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

You know, in a fair fight.
Or, sure, maybe not.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

From [of all things] The Old Man And The Sea.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

In my war that was called “fragging”.

[b]Michael Lewis

The Piranha didn’t talk like a person. He said things like “If you fuckin’ buy this bond in a fuckin’ trade, you’re fuckin’ fucked.” And “If you don’t pay fuckin’ attention to the fuckin’ two-year, you get your fuckin’ face ripped off.” Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.[/b]

No, not the fucking fish.

What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.

Of course it goes without saying: Not just baseball.

The author refers to a player’s affected nonchalance and comments he is, “too young to realize you are what you pretend to be”.

Which then begs the question: Are you too young here, Kids?

What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: “One hand, one million dollars, no tears".

Or, in short, “fuck 'em”.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.

Not unlike the general managers in all the other fields.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money.

He thought: Indeed, that’s always been my own experience. Or would have been if it could have been.

[b]Alan Moore

…But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.[/b]

But only the parts between birth and death.

You asked for Knowledge, Evey, and that is what I shall pass on to you. Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.
Oh, V, come on. You’ve always kept thinks mysterious: yourself, this place, your plans…If knowledge is like air, you’ve been suffocating me.
Not at all. I’ve been teaching you to breathe.

In other words, to breathe [think] like he does. Another fucking objectivist as it were.

Let me show you the firmness of my belief.

Lots of way to take that, right?

He plans to use every low-down technique he knows to loosen up the suspect, everything from good cop/bad cop to a four-pound bag of oranges that damage the internal organs but don’t leave a mark upon the skin. Or, failing that, he’ll Google him.

Or log on to Facebook.
Plus all that other stuff of course.

The Shakers also have one golden rule – back to William Morris: Do not make that which is not useful. And so it was their interpretation that all useful things should also be beautiful.

Not counting philosophy of course. Or, rather, serious philosophy.

Labor at your work until people cannot imagine what you have designed existing any other way.

So, how am I doing so far?

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.[/b]

Not counting, among other things, life itself.

It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.
But it was not the end of the world, Grandfather said.
It was. He just did not come.
Why did he not come?
This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened - there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.
What if it was a challenge of your faith? I said.
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
What if it was not in his power?
I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.
What if it was man and not God that did all of this?I do not believe in man, either.

Let’s file this one under, “and then it’s ‘what ifs’ all the way down”.

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don’t know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don’t have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.

Unless, of course, it’s the other way around. And not just on the internet.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

We all think this way of course. Even those who don’t.

I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

There’s a lesson here. Let’s figure it out.

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

Of course there’s not much that he can do these days. But he gets by.

[b]Haruki Murakami

No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.[/b]

One possible solution: ignore all that.
For some anyway.

Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection.

Anyone here actually try that?

Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?

Let’s file this under, among other things, “who gives a fuck?”
But, sure, point taken.

Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.

Or: Once she was in the car and with me, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless. Just not as often.

The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.

Is it just me, or is that pathetic?

I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all.

Not only that but he doesn’t go out of his way to keep them either.
Or is that just me?

[b]Sophocles

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.[/b]

Perhaps, but only if it’s true.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.

Not counting all the days you just wake up knowing that it isn’t.

There’s nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.

We’ve certainly learned that lesson, haven’t we?

I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.

Tell that to your brain.

Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.

I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.

You can kill a man but you can’t kill a idea.

Really? Take it to Room 101.

[b]Martin Buber

We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.[/b]

Or, for that matter, hate powerfully.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

So, anyone here know what they did ask him?

There are three principles in a man’s being and life: The principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don’t do what I say.

Generally speaking as it were.

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

He thought: I still don’t get it.

Solitude is the place of purification.

Maybe, but it’s also the place of other things.

Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique…If there had been someone like her in the world, there would have been no need for her to be born.

True, but we’re still just one of billions.

[b]Thomas Aquinas

It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation.[/b]

Imagine someone still believing that now. Though sure there must be millions of them.

Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.

A = A. Just as Ayn Rand [a champion of Aquinas] assured us.

Man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.

Let’s run this by Leonard Peikoff and the ARI.

While injustice is the worst of sins, despair is the most dangerous; because when you are in despair you care neither about yourself nor about others.

Does God know that?

…our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

Does God know that?

By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.

You can’t help but wonder how that might be applicable in Heaven.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.[/b]

You know, in conjunction with Washington. The capital not the state.

And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.

So, don’t forget to vote!
And to paint!

I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

In other words, what’s left of the class struggle.

We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.

Trust me: It’s an intellectual thing.

One of life’s primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn’t hide too well. You mustn’t be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.

So, does this include philosophers more or less than it excludes everyone else?

Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be fragmented, disjointed, so that it can be sent down the circuits; every kind of language has to be resolved into a binary formulation so that it can circulate not, any longer, in our memories, but in the luminous, electronic memory of the computers. No human language can withstand the speed of light. No event can withstand being beamed across the whole planet. No meaning can withstand acceleration. No history can withstand the centrifugation of facts or their being short-circuited in real time.

What this lacks in perspicuity it more than makes up for in pedantry.

[b]Sarah Ruhl

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.[/b]

Is that true, Ivanka?

[b]Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.

If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn’t talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.

But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.[/b]

Let’s all weep for their future together.

I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

Well, there’s always your funeral.

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

Sounds clever enough, sure, but, come on, is it really true?

I think a person has to believe in something, or search out some kind of faith;
otherwise life is empty, nothing. How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky…Either you know why you live, or it’s all small, unnecessary bits.

What she means of course is small and essentially meaningless bits.

There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me (truly you have not lived until you have changed one baby’s diaper while another baby quietly vomits on your shin) and finally I came to the thought: all right, then, annihilate me, that other self was a fiction anyhow.

He pondered: thank god I only had one?

[b]Stieg Larsson

Wennerström was devoting himself to fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal––it was business.[/b]

More to the point, business as usual.

You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn’t much time left.

Not only that but it may or may not happen in the blink of an eye.

From a purely physical standpoint she didn’t have a chance, but her attitude was that death was better than capitulation.

Another moron dies for the cause.
Though not always a moron of course.

I don’t want any inheritance from my father. Do whatever the hell you want with it.
Wrong. You can do what you want with the inheritance. My job is to see to it that you have the opportunity to do so.
I don’t want a single ore from that pig.
Then give the money to the Greenpeace or something.
I don’t give a shit about whales.

Then give it to me. That’s what I would have said.

She had been sharing a house with him for a week, and he had not once flirted with her. He had worked with her, asked her opinion, slapped her on the knuckles figuratively speaking when she was on the wrong track, and acknowledged that she was right when she corrected him. Dammit, he had treated her like a human being.

In other words, the other side of the coin.

She saw him drenched with gasoline. She could actually feel the box of matches in her hand.

Oh boy!

[b]Stephen Fry

The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. [/b]

Lesson learned, Kids?
No, I didn’t think so.

He’s your enemy, Donald!
He most certainly is not,’ said Trefusis. Not unless I say so. He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.

To intuit or not to intuit, sometimes that is the question.

That’s why I love talking and teaching: the act of reproducing ideas out loud reinforces them in the head. If, every time you read a complex book or idea, you had to explain it to someone else, you’d never forget it.

Unless of course you fuck the whole thing up.

I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that – don’t you? – when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It’s too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then.

Up to and including the T word, he thought.

The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements. a: None of what follows ever happened b: All of what follows is entirely true.

In other words, at the same time.

[b]Liane Moriarty

It was unfortunate the way adults had to repress their true feelings.[/b]

You know, when it isn’t really, really fortunate instead.

…the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn’t close your heart completely, but you couldn’t leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes.

Let’s make a list of all the things we think about.

She’d once been appalled to hear of women claiming PMS as a defense for murder. Now she understood.

Nothing much in the way of an equivalent for men. There isn’t, is there?

It was just so very surprising that the good-looking, worried man who had just offered her a cup of tea, and was right now working at his computer down the hallway, and who would come running if she called him, and who loved her with all of his strange heart, would in all probability one day kill her.

You can’t help but wonder if that might surprise him even more.

Cecilia didn’t care what the fine print said about free will and God’s mysterious ways and blahdy-blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. “You have lost me as a customer.”

Right, that will show Him.

…about six months ago, after my fortieth, I started to feel so…the only word I can think of is ‘bland.’ Or ‘flat’ might be a better word.

He thought: Trust me, you’ll pine for those days.

[b]Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is … A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy.[/b]

Well, the right music of course.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.

Or, in any event, what some call the divine.

Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.

Said to have been uttered on his deathbed.
So, just out of curiosity, what will you utter on yours?

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

False. True.

I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.

Let’s decide if that is going too far.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors.

Sure, he thought, I suppose that could happen.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.[/b]

Sometimes. Notice how vague that is. Almost like it has to be.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

On the other hand, to each his own.

You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.

Or maybe a few less words to describe it.

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

We’ll have hear the stories first, of course.

If I let them take away my demons, I’ll have to give up what I’ve found.

Not to worry. You can always find more.

What sex are you?
Doesn’t matter does it? After all that’s your problem.
If I keep you, what will happen?
You’ll have a difficult, different time.
Is it worth it?
That’s up to you.

Besides, you can always change your mind.
You know, if that’s an option.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.[/b]

Among other things, define good. But point taken.

I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

To fish or not to fish, that is the question.

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.

Can you say the same of your spouse?

You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.

You know, if you can tell the difference.

The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.

Let’s run that by William Somerset: youtu.be/Ylu0O0_rTMI

I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe, the older waiter said. With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.
I want to go home and into bed.
We are of two different kinds, the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.

I’m in there now.

[b]Michael Lewis

The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. That is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bucks, you had to offer them even better odds than you offered them for flipping it for a hundred. The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes, wrote Amos and Danny. It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object. It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle, they wrote.[/b]

Another “general description” of human interaction? Sure, but considerably more substantive. You know, if it actually is.

Those who say don’t know, those who know don’t say.

Not counting when it’s the other way around.

Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.

Probably invented at Axe Capital.

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women.

Or, sad to say, especially the women.

Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.

Though even if they were, they’re still behind the curtain.

For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness!

Let’s decide if that’s a good think. Starting [of course] with Mr Reasonable.

[b]Alan Moore

You have to impress him! Be independent and plucky, but often do things that are moronic and out of character![/b]

I know: You wouldn’t think that would be necessary.

Seymour, we do not dignify absurdities with coverage. This is still America, god damnit! Who wants a cowboy actor in the White House?

Trump that Seymour!

These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal.

But not you, right?

We’re saints and sinners both, the lot of us, or else there’s no saints and no sinners.

Let’s finally sort this all out.

It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.

And we all know where that takes us. Besides, it’s not like we really have a choice.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

How dare he remind us of this!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.” Henry James[/b]

Right, like imagining it makes it possible. But point taken.

“Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.” Edmund Burke

Ours? Theirs? Let’s decide.

“The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One imagines that the Nazis [among others] would agree.

"Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.” Thucydides

Trump either learns this or he doesn’t. Indeed, our very lives may well depend on it.

“Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.” Pericles

I wonder if he thinks that now.

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.” Karl Popper

Still, a rather ambiguous truth.
How shall we test it?