a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jonathan Nolan

Not too many professions out there that value forgetfulness. Prostitution, maybe. Politics, of course.[/b]

At least until we reelect you.

Everybody else needs mirrors to remind themselves who they are. You’re no different.

I know what you’re thinking: do I?

Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots. The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.

So, Kids, how do you control your own gang of idiots?.

For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick. That’s the miserable truth.

He means this: “A practiced skill with very limited purpose or functionality. Used primarily to impress people, but usually only once.”

We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars; now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.

If not the quicksand.

If time and fear aren’t enough to dissuade people from their revenge, then there’s always authority, softly shaking its head and saying, ‘We understand, but you’re the better man for letting it go. For rising above it. For not sinking to their level. And besides,’ says authority, ‘if you try anything stupid, we’ll lock you up in a little room’.

That’ll do it. You know, for most of us.

[b]God

Why do bad things happen to good people? To even out the good things that happen to bad people.[/b]

Celestial logic.

I’m a bad idea.

Now He tells us.

At this point it would be harder to name news events that aren’t signs of the apocalypse.

So, is that good to know?

If you’re starting to lose faith in all human institutions, what the hell took you so long?

Hmm, not good coming from Him, is it?

Christianity is one massive, 2,000-year-old rape cover-up.

And He would know, right?

In honor of the wave of deregulation sweeping America, I hereby renounce the Ten Commandments. Go nuts, everyone!

Like any number of us already haven’t.

[b]Ben Goldacre

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.[/b]

He means people like me, right?

You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

That might even include all of us.

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.

Them and their cronies in Washington.

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me — I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity.

Me too. You know, while waiting for godot.

And if, by the end of this book, you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you’ll still be wrong, but you’ll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.

May I be so bold as to suggest the same of me? Here for example.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Not true at all, right, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.[/b]

No, as a matter of fact, we don’t.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Another reminder: youtu.be/0fYfBZSnG1Y

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

You know, if that’s actually an option.

It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.

Me, I have always been my own best friend. And, clearly, for better and for worse.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.

Next up: the unsatisfied man.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

He means like mine. And, sure, I’m working on it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Confucius[/b]

Come on, we all know it is almost always the other way around.

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Heads they win, tails we lose.

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!” Friedrich Nietzsche

Here of course that hardly ever matters.
Though, sure, not just here.

“No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do.” Viktor Frankl

But not you, right?

“The more I have, the more I see, and the more experience I get, the more confused I become as to who I am, and what the hell life is all about.” John Lennon

Though not any more of course.

“We think in generalities, but we live in details.” Alfred North Whitehead

Among other things: Uh-oh.

[b]Paul Valéry

To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.[/b]

Okay, got that? Now imagine entering mine.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Indeed, and imagine what it used to be for them.

A man who is of ‘sound mind’ is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.

Here, of course, the obvious exceptions.

…to live means to lack something at every moment…

Some more – much, much, much, much, much more – than others.

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and–crowning injury–inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

Or, sure, not so latent.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

I dare you to pin this down.

[b]Celeste Ng

She understands. There is nowhere to go but on.[/b]

Unless of course she pulls the plug.

One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.

On the other hand [here] you either are or are not banned.

Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, “Show me again, show me another.” Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.

Lydia learns a lesson about the limitations of love.

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?

On the other hand, where does one stop and the other begin. In other words, not unlike most things.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.

Remember what? Well, that is different for all of us.

He can guess, but he won’t ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she’d never told him.

No getting around this, is there?

[b]Existential Comics

Sometimes I get the impression that my cats are not familiar with the teachings of the ancient masters of stoic philosophy.[/b]

Any particular reason why they would be?

A lot of people say philosophy is useless, and they’ll give various reasons, but it’s really just because they think they already have it all solved. They don’t.

On the other hand, neither do philosophers.

[b]Philosophers you shouldn’t bring up on a first date:

  1. Nietzsche
  2. Marx
  3. Malebranche [/b]

Malebranche? You tell me: plato.stanford.edu/entries/malebranche-ideas/

I was reading Augustine’s Confessions the other day when I came to a profound realization: I’m probably the only person to ever read it primarily to try to figure out why it’s funny.

A little help here: How funny is it?

If your problem would go away if you just stopped thinking it was a problem, you don’t have a problem.

Does this really work? Or just not for me.

A good book is one you can’t put down. A great book is one you have to put down after each chapter. But a true masterpiece is one you can’t even bring yourself to pick up to begin with.

No, really, I don’t get this.

[b]Mary Roach

Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nitty-gritty.[/b]

With obvious exceptions of course.

It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind.

Any kind of minds like that here?

Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.

Thank god for memes, right?

Riddle traveled a lot in his twenties and recalls being hit by a realization. So much of people’s lives—their opportunities, their health and longevity—comes down to where they were born. “It’s so random,” he says.

Either that or God’s will.

Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical Institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender…Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.

Not counting the Titanic of course. Well, by and large.

There is a passage in the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate on a series of decomposing bodies in the charnel ground, starting with a body “swollen and blue and festering,” progressing to one “being eaten by…different kinds of worms,” and moving on to a skeleton, “without flesh and blood, held together by the tendons.” The monks were told to keep meditating until they were calm and a smile appeared on their faces.

I actually believe this.

[b]John Cage

Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that’s where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.[/b]

Not to worry. I fumble about there enough for both of us.

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

Let’s just say that’s one way to put it.

I discovered that those who seldom dwell on their emotions know better than anyone else just what an emotion is.

You know, whatever that means. But point taken.

While he rested, she asked, What’s the difference between natives and outsiders? Natives, he replied, eat indoors and shit outdoors, outsiders eat outdoors and shit indoors.

That’s why God invented civilization.

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound’s duration parameter, sound’s only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

On the other hand, doesn’t that sound ghastly?

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

For some here that comes naturally.

[b]Kip S. Thorne

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.[/b]

What, that hasn’t changed?

An explosion in space makes no sound, as there is no air to transmit the sound waves.

So, you’ll have to bring your own.

Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.

Autonomically as it were.

At our meeting, I suggested to Steven and Lynda two guidelines for the science of Interstellar: 1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe. 2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some “respectable” scientists regard as possible.

So, how close did they come?

Yes, that’s what I meant to say. If this seems a bit circular to you, well, it is, but it has deep meaning.

Go ahead, use this yourself, Mr. Objectivist.

Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.

Among other things, why?

[b]so sad today

fake news: it’s going to be okay[/b]

Ever notice how fake news almost nearly rhymes with Fox news.

welcome to anxiety, sponsored by depression

Indeed, imagine one without the other.

a thing i am good at is having no impulse control

Aren’t we all?

can you fill the existential hole with dick? a memoir

Let’s review it.

oh look it’s existential terror

Incidentally as it were.

remember when i thought I knew you but I didn’t know you at all

Of course that didn’t stop her.

[b]Anatole France

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.[/b]

Imagine then pursuing it. On purpose.

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.

And then the stuff you probably never will know. But think that you do.

Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.

Really, check it out: knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora
Oops, almost forgot: :wink:

It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.

I never doubted it.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

The miracle of democracy.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

Anyone here doubt that?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Many much-learned men have no intelligence.” Democritus[/b]

You tell me: where does one stop and the other begin?

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” Carl Jung

The rest as they say is history.
Our own for example.

“Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.” Albert Einstein

So, what are you doing here?
He said in jest.

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

A genius, obviously.

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

Ouch.
Eh, Mr. Satyr?

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato

I know: What if that is actually true?

[b]Neil Gaiman

You got a lifetime. No more. No less.[/b]

As though we can actually know this. But, sure, no doubt about it.

What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

Let’s think of something.

It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

Let’s file this one under “a stacked deck”.

I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

Some barely worth mentioning at all. And not just mine.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

Just one more thing to get entangled in.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.

Me? Well, so far I’ve been lucky. Never even came close.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.[/b]

Meaning what exactly?

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

And he ought to know.

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

That’s bullshit. Unless of course I’m wrong.

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.

So, does that include coming here?

The knowledge of all things is possible.

Indeed, lots of folks here already make that claim.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

And now alas women too. You know the ones.

[b]Terry Pratchett

The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.
The first question they ask is: Why was he eternally surprised?
And they are told: Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.
The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were: ‘Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.’ And he was glad of it.[/b]

Go ahead, see if this works for you. I mean, when you think about, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?

It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.

Either that or slashing their tires.

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

Guess again?

I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat.

Think for example Don Trump and Bob Mueller.

It doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.

Actually it does.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

And not just Alec Baldwin on SNL.

[b]C.G. Jung

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.[/b]

Trust me: Some things more [even considerably more] than others.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Trust me: Some things more [even considerably more] than others.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call “I” behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.

Though sometimes the clown is the least of it.

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.

Hardly even just a persona at all, is it?

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

He means true loneliness of course.

[b]Joseph Heller

In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all.[/b]

We know the type, don’t we? And, no, not just the Kids.

We have no ideas, and they’re pretty firm.

Impregnable for example.

I suppose it is just about impossible for someone like me to rebel anymore and produce any kind of lasting effect. I have lost the power to upset things that I had as a child; I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously.

But not you, right?

We come to work, have lunch, and go home. We goose-step in and goose-step out, changing our partner and wander all about, sashay around for a pat on the head, and promenade home till we all drop dead.

And then do-si-do into oblivion.

Doc Daneeka was Yossarian’s friend and would do just about nothing in his power to help him.

Hey, what are friends for?

Man was matter. Drop him out of a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage.

He thought: My kind of cynic.

[b]Nein

A. True.
B. Sad.
C. Sad but true.
D. Sad enough to be true, yet somehow still false.[/b]

Obviously: All of the above.

If you need me, I’ll be questioning your underlying assumptions.

On the other hand, I’ll never need you.

You might say it’s the shortest day. Or the most merciful.

Come on, 24 hours is 24 hours. If only 365 days of the year.

I’m not anti-holidays. I’m anti-happy.

In other words, a holiday tradition.

The coldest days. The darkest nights. The most wonderful time of the year.

Anyone here believe that?

Remember, friends: there’s no limit to the chaos you can create. But it does require careful planning.

Indeed, and what are you planning for here?