a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Terry Pratchett

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.[/b]

Yes, but are they more or less all of these things than, for example, unicorns?

Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane?

Well, it might be hard to trump America these days.

Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

On the other hand, how many librarians are there still around?

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.

We got one of them around here. Or sort of like one of them: normals.com/

If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.

Trust me: Mine is all my own.

[b]Alan Sokal

But why did I do it? I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.[/b]

This is what he did: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.

Sometimes though ambiguity is really all there is.

The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.

Not unlike, for the example, the objectivists’ stance.

A mode of thought does not become ‘critical’ simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

On the other hand, which side doesn’t insist that it is always their content?

[b]Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all ‘faith’ is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: ‘By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.’ It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. ‘Faith’ is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. ‘Faith’ is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.

But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.

And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.

Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?

Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?[/b]

So, what do you think, is this the final word on religion?

Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely)

Well, going back to the Big Bang anyway. Unless, of course, there were others before it. And not only in our universe, but in all the other ones too.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

There is always danger for those who are afraid.[/b]

In other words, rationally or irrationally.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

Or [for the rest of us] something like that.

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.

Not counting all the times it’s the other way around.

I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen.

And, given enough time, again and again and again.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

Actually, there is no way to avoid being miserable. You know, for long.

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.

And now we live in Trumpworld. Where the shocks become routine.

[b]Joseph Heller

To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.[/b]

Of course back then they didn’t have product endorsements.

Men, he began his address to the officers, measuring his pauses carefully. You’re American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.

Well, they don’t call it military intelligence for nothing.

Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honor his father and his mother, and he honored his father and his mother. He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got into the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery or coveted his neighbor’s ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and never even bore false witness against him. Major Major’s elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant nonconformist.

Where might Don Trump’s crowd fit in here?

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

Just out of curiosity, anyone here ever notice that about me?

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

I’ll be one until the day I day. In other words, for better or for worse.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

Don’t expect this to work however.

[b]so sad today

there should be an option besides life and death[/b]

Of course that goes without saying.

unfortunately i’m very self-aware

If you know what she means. Or, rather, if you know what I mean.

i never know what the hell anyone is talking about

Some folks are just lucky that way.

can you fill the existential hole with dick? a memoir

Volume III one suspects.

look, i hate myself as much as the next guy

Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t being ironic. Does anyone here actually know?

relationship goals: leave me alone

And then some for me.

[b]Zoë Heller

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery.[/b]

Like, for example, what happens after we die?

I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

Or, sure, go here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179879

The conclusion of Dowell’s narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist’s business to make a reader ‘see things clearly’, his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no ‘getting to the bottom of things’, no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.

That’s sort of my narrative too.

Music…had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense.

As if that makes a difference. In the moment for example.

One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they’re simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren’t they?

Let’s file this one under, “games people play”.

This is madness. You’re making it into something it’s not. It’s all in your mind.
Sheba was about to protest, and then she laughed. Isn’t that the worst place it could be?

No, not always.
Right, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]Ruth Rendell

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.[/b]

On the other hand, some even manage to do both.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

It’s probably best not to dwell on it though.

It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.

And not just in the Oval Office. Right, Kids?

You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’re even more sick and ugly, aren’t they? And they’re afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn’t very pleasant, but you did ask.
Go on he said.
So you’ve got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who’s unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that’s what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they’re dirty, covered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they’re hateful, they’re low, they’re sub-human. That’s all they’re good for, being hit, being reduced even further.

That’s awful. Well, not counting the times that it’s not.

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

In particular the part about getting caught.

They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.

For some the good old days, for others not so much.

[b]Jasmine Warga

In these moments, it always feels like my skin is too thin, like everyone can see right inside me, can see my empty and dark insides.[/b]

Never had a moment like that in my life.
At least to the best of my recollection.

My teacher, Mrs. Marks, makes this big production out of trying to decode what the poets were trying to say. From my perspective, it’s pretty clear what they were saying: I’m depressed and I want to die.

One poet in particular.
As far as I’m concerned.

One spark can change everything.

So: To spark or not to spark.

Sometimes it takes watching someone else observe how you live to realize exactly how you live.

Would anyone here like to volunteer?

He squeezes my hand so tight, I can’t feel it anymore. I wish someone would do that to my heart.

Would anyone here like to volunteer?

I can’t wait until they don’t have me here anymore.

You too, right?

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

…legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice–that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “the best of all possible worlds”. For example, in theory.

…being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience.

You know, if you’re “one of us”.

…the 10,000 hr rule is a definite key in success…

That’s almost 417 days of whatever he means by this.
Or considerably more or less if you’re an outlier.

We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.

Some, of course, cling desparately.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn’t happen.

Let’s pin down what doesn’t happen here, Kids.

…mediocre people find their way into positions of authority…because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

True, but Trumpworld is in a class all its own.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.” Thomas Carlyle[/b]

Sorry, I’m just not convinced.

“Ruthless striving, overcomes everything.” Petrarch

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Don Trump.

“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.” Richard M. Rorty

Not counting all that genetic stuff.

“The ego is a fictional idea.” David Hume

Not counting all that genetic stuff.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

Nice touch, right?

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” Rainer Maria Rilke

At last, a way to finally narrow it all down.

[b]Arthur Koestler

Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.[/b]

So what? You’re still dead.

It had a strange resemblance to Kafka’s novel,The Trial–that dream-like allegory of a man who, having received a mysterious convocation to attend his 'trial", strives and struggles in vain to find out where the trial would be held and what it would be about; wherever he inquires he receives non - commital, elusive replies, as if everybody has joined in a secret conspiracy: the closer he gets to his aim, the farther it recedes, like the transparent walls of a dream: and the story ends abruptly, as it began,in tormenting suspense.The High Court which Kafka’s hero is unable to find is his own conscience: but what was the symbolic meaning of all these nut-cracker-faced, nail-biting, pimpled, slimy features, spinning their spider webs of intrigue and sabotage in the bureaux of the French Administration? Perhaps I was really guilty, I and my like:perhaps our guilt was the past, the guilt of having forseen the catastrophe and yet failed to open the eyes of the blind. But if we were guilty–who were they to sit in judgement over us?

The closest some come to that here is when they are banned.

There was a dense fog in my brain, impenetrable to any coherent thought, except the dull obsession of counting the minutes – an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy.

The closest some come to that here is when they are posting.

That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: ‘Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process’.

Then they pass around the Bibles. Or the Manifestos.

I have already thought it over, said Rubashov. I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don’t want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell.

Definitional logic no doubt.

For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the `I’ a suspect quality. The Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.

The Party. Just one more rendition of “one of us”.

I refuse to be taken serious…

[b]Roland Barthes

I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.[/b]

And he did after all live in the same world that we do.

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy.
Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Trust me: “I” is in there somewhere.

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What “grace” might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

On the other hand, you can’t have one without the other.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.

Except, of course, in a wholly determined world.

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.

Another “general description”, isn’t it?

Of course that’s for others to decide.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

I said to the doctor, who was with us daily. He’s got a wonderful will to live, hasn’t he?
Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death.
Is there a difference?
Oh dear, yes. He doesn’t derive any strength from his fear, you know. It’s wearing him out.[/b]

This can get tricky.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, Charles, it has killed you.

Anyone here care to explain this?

No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.

Including two of my own then.

It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

Let alone the vulgarians.

…it’s a great thing in life to have a place you can’t be moved from…

On the other hand, why do the Kids choose this one?

Do you want to change?
It’s the only evidence of life.

Well, up to a point of course.

[b]Mary Roach

Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.[/b]

In other words, fuck the starving children. Or so some argue.

The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: ‘I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat’.

Actually, googling this didn’t really help.

In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

What some of us call Kidstuff.

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

Obviously: Some deaths more than others.

Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone.
They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.

Nor counting necrophiliacs of course.

You do not question an author who appears on the title page as “T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G.”

Are we supposed to?

[b]Nein

My dangerously unstable leader is more dangerously unstable than your dangerously unstable leader.[/b]

We hear that a lot these days.

Fire and fury. Locked and loaded. Alliterated and obliterated.

It’s good that we can be clever about it.

Remember last week? When our biggest concern was nuclear war?

Let’s decide what’s replaced it.

Have your Ishmael call my Ishmael.

So, how clever is this?

It was the best of end times. It was the worst of end times.

So, how clever is this?

First Rule: always historicize.
Second Rule: follow the money.
Third Rule: it is what it is.

Now all we need is a context.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.[/b]

Anyone here finally solved it? Not seriously of course.

What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

Right, keep telling yourself that.

[b]What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.

If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.[/b]

Like me, you probably never thought of that.

To say exactly what one means, even to one’s own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.

Hmm. Perhaps that’s our problem here. Or, rather, one of them.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn’t change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Some words obviously more than others.

If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.

Clearly, the shoe either fits here or it doesn’t.
If clearly is the right word.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.[/b]

Actually, that has never happened to me.

Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.

If only all the way to the grave.

Every one needs to talk to someone, the woman said. Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.

Maybe that’s all we really need to explain us.

This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Obviously, he should have omitted this.

Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.

Not many places you can say that about. Well, not counting all the places that you can.

I only like two other things; one is bad for my work and the other is over in half an hour or fifteen minutes. Sometimes less. Sometimes a good deal less.

You know, if it even happens at all.

[b]Philip Larkin

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.[/b]

Anyone here actually accomplished this?

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

This can’t possibly be true, right?

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

Yes, but that too shall pass.

In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps,
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.

I have never loved. And [to the best of my knowledge] I have never been loved.
Though not much beyond that can I go.

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It’s terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can’t see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by, and nothing is done. It isn’t as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn’t: it’s just a waste.

I would like to believe that this is true.
Though not much beyond that can I go.

Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

I’ll explain this if you want me to.