a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Saul D. Alinsky

History is made up of “moral” judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin’s acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition’s means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values.[/b]

Makes you wonder if that might still be going on.

Mendoza said to Tanner, I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich.
Tanner replied, I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.

Makes you wonder if that might still be going on.

…one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict.

Now why do you suppose that is?

One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.

But not you, right?

The real action is in the enemy’s reaction.

Here? Cue the huffers and the puffers.

Mark Twain once put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

I think the right word here might be “hyperbole”.

[b] C.G. Jung

I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.[/b]

Oh, sure, absolutely.

Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

Spooky is what it is. If only the more you think about it.

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

How scary is that? For example, if you know what I mean.

Every transformation demands as its precondition “the ending of a world”—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.

True, but look what I’ve stumbled into now.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

He means me, doesn’t he?

I indignantly answered, Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?
To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger, My light is not of this world.
I cried, I know of no other world!
The soul answered, Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?

The soul does have a point. I wish I had one.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy is important because without it we’d have to leave it up to scientists to figure out the meaning of life, and it would probably end up being a bunch of nerd shit.[/b]

I know: God forbid!

Advice to philosophy students: you aren’t Ludwig fucking Wittgenstein. Stop trying to solve philosophy, and just try to understand what the main questions are, and why.

This one: How ought one to live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that ends in oblivion? New thread maybe?

Free speech: saying something.
Censorship: saying something criticising that thing.
More free speech: saying something criticising that criticism.

And then it’s turtles all the way down.

Here is my critique of contemporary culture: it is bad.

Not to mention getting worse.

Left unity will only ever happen when all the leftists factions learn to come together and hate themselves as much as they hate each other.

Right unity too.

And then the centrist examined both sides and wisely proclaimed: “everyone seems pretty pissed off, so the best course of action must logically be to change nothing.”

Phil Ochs wrote a song about that.

[b]T.S. Eliot

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.[/b]

That sounds about right.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

The rose garden if you’re lucky.

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

Mom said to Adolph.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Keep telling yourself that until one day you actually know what it means.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I know that I am. And now so do you.

Books. Cats. Life is good.

Or: Films. Dogs. Life is even better.

[b]Ali Smith

Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small.[/b]

Here, there and everywhere?

I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more.

Ain’t that the truth?

She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death.

Permissible? In some circles it’s all but obligatory.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

And that’s before you get to the junkshop of everyone else.

The still-alives. They were all crazy.

Doesn’t that more or less go without saying?

I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust. Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I’m silent forever, haha, it’s all words words words with me. Now that I can’t just reach out and touch, it’s all I want, is to.

Right around the corner for some of us.

[b]Willard Quine

Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.[/b]

One man’s opinion?

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

It rhymes with dasein.

How many possible men are there in that doorway?

Not nearly as many as there are women.

Believing is a disposition. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing takes no toll.

On the contrary, it can literally take the lives of hundreds…thousands…millions.

And so come the cults, claiming to meet the needs that science has thus far failed to meet–and offering the prospective inductee a place on the ground floor. Some cults may be harmless enough, but whenever false doctrine is propagated there is some cost.

The cult of Satyr for example.

Irrefragability, thy name is mathematics.

A little help here please.

[b]Vincent van Gogh

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.[/b]

That certainly explains a lot. Especially if it actually does explain a lot.

Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.

Not counting all the shit of course.

…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

Obviously, however, he was missing something.

A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.

And we know how that turned out.

If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.

On the other hand, how many others know better?

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.

Let alone fields of wheat.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” Voltaire[/b]

Especially if you believe them objectively.

“When you want to fool the world, tell the truth. ” Otto von Bismarck

Sure, go ahead, start here.

“You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” Albert Einstein

Right, like that will stop them.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”.
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”.
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”.
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits”. Albert Einstein

Clearly this bears repeating.

“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god” Aristotle

Nope, just little ole me.

“Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one place in the physical world.“ Alexander Pushkin

I think he really means it.

[b]Kurt Andersen

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.[/b]

And look where we are now today. Right, Don?

…the major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular.

Infantile even.

Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. I grew up reading Ayn Rand, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.

A wall of words, true. But actually one worth reading.

In 1967 young Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing actors playing characters, and the amusing, confusing jumble of fiction and reality. Stoppard knew he was onto something new and important. “I have a feeling,” he said at the time, “that almost everybody today is more trying to match himself up with an external image he has of himself, almost as if he’s seen himself on a screen.”

Any character actors here?

But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California is America squared.

I spent a few hours in San Francisco once.

Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don’t be stupid. Shall we say, then, he wrote about Genesis, there was such a sense of hearing in that formless and shapeless creation, whatever it was, to which God thus uttered a sound when He said, ‘Let there be light’? Let such absurdities have no place in our thoughts.

Obviously that never caught on.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.[/b]

They would be, wouldn’t they?

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

Some go to Heaven, some go to Hell.

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.

Oh, and by the way, thanks.

The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.

Not counting reality of course. Mine if not yours.

What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

And no he doesn’t mean the game.

For she had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.

Or [increasingly] the old.

[b]Diane Ackerman

In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden—a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants.[/b]

Trees in a dog eat dog world. And not a meme in sight.

A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces… Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.

A life like that, sure. A life like lots of other things too.

Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer sun blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit.

Next up: Dawn another day.

Out of the blue, Paul reported feeling bouts of calm euphoria, a mystical sense of all’s-right-with-his-life-and-the-universe, a bright future in sight. … I knew well the state of vigorous calm he meant, a frequent visitor throughout my own life.

He pondered: Have I ever felt like that?

Antonina felt convinced that people needed to connect more with their animal nature, but also that animals long for human company, reach out for human attention.

Actually, almost no animals do.

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

If not a lot pedantic.

[b]John Stuart Mill

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.[/b]

Let’s run this by, among others, Don Trump.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

On the other hand, money still talks. And more than occasionally screams.

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Well, he does choose to opt for the custom.

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.

Right, and look where that got me.

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.

Isn’t that [still] something?!

Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.

By all means then make that me.

[b]The Dead Author

So a postmodernist walks into a bar…Postmodernist: “Can I tell you a story?” Bartender: “Sure.” Postmodernist: "So a postmodernist walks into a bar. Postmodernist: ‘Can I tell you a story?’ Bartender: ‘Sure.’ Postmodernist: 'So a postmodernist walks into a bar…[/b]

And then its turtles all the way down.

If ignorant people really were confident they wouldn’t constantly try to rationalize their beliefs.

On the other hand, who doesn’t have to rationalize their beliefs?

Don’t let civilians have assault rifles, let soldiers have them to kill civilians.
Don’t let teachers have guns, they belong to cops to kill teens.
You don’t need a silenced pistol for protection, use a shotgun!
Welcome to American arguments for gun control.

Hey, here it’s a man’s world.

Your best life isn’t good enough.

Perhaps, but it only really has to be better than yours.

Socrates walks into a bar, according to Plato.

And the bit about the hemlock?

Yes, American teachers should be armed. Arms are important for pointing at things on the blackboard, making things on a desk more reachable, and operating your hands while writings. Arms are great. Teachers should have two.

Legged too.

[b]Mary Roach

she has talked to cancer patients whose taste receptors have been destroyed by radiation treatments. The situation is well beyond unpleasant. Your body is saying, ‘It’s not food, it’s cardboard,’ and it won’t let you swallow. No matter how much you tell your brain that you need to eat to survive, you’ll gag.[/b]

Once more: What was God thinking?

…as dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.) The takeaway lesson is that if the palatant smells appealing, the dog will dive in with instant and obvious zeal, and the owner will assume the food is a hit. In reality it may have only smelled like a hit.

Actually I didn’t know that.

No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

Note this first though.

Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much, wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

Well, it could be a true story.

It’s one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it’s a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone actually accomplished this?

Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: “Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the esophagus.” Beaumont was right about some things, but he was dead wrong about spit.

For example, out on the mound, the spit ball.

[b]Malcolm Lowry

In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.[/b]

Not quite bread and circuses, perhaps, but certainly headed in that general direction.

Not that it was not a nightmare. It was, but of a very special kind he was scarcely old enough to appreciate.

I’ll bet he’s old enough now.

It’s amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir!

And few beasts [including occasionally ourselves] seem to be exmpt.

Every man must ceaselessly struggle upwards. What was life but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn?

And now every woman. Or, for that matter, every transgender.

Hell, he finished absurdly. Because…He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on the table. I like it, he called to them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar, with scared eyes, holding the cockerel. I love hell. I can’t wait to get back there. In fact I’m running, I’m almost back there already.

Perhaps there’s two of them.

In Arizona, a 1000-acre forest of junipers suddenly withered and died. Foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement as to what caused the fright.

Insects probably.

[b]tiny nietzsche

the void who cried wolf[/b]

Fat chance?

my mother always said, if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, please sit next to me

We can call it a club.

Maybe the serial killer has a point.

His for example.

I want my postmodernism to mean something.

Take mine then.

a burning bridge gathers no moss

Not unlike a rolling stone.

exile on hemlock street

But only if you Know Thyself.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.[/b]

That can’t be good, right Satyr?

The candidate gene approaches show that the effect of a single gene on a behavior is typically tiny. In other words, having the “warrior gene” variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior than does believing that you have it.

That can’t be true, right Satyr?

There’s also subliminal cuing about beauty. From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We’re more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.

Perhaps we can now call it common sense. With all that this will imply.

What happens when children observe domestic violence, warfare, a gang murder, a school massacre? For weeks afterward there is impaired concentration and impulse control. Witnessing gun violence doubles a child’s likelihood of serious violence within the succeeding two years. And adulthood brings the usual increased risks of depression, anxiety, and aggression. Consistent with that, violent criminals are more likely than nonviolent ones to have witnessed violence as kids.

Perhaps we can now call it common sense. With all that this will imply.

…call the game the “Wall Street Game,” and people become less cooperative. Calling it the “Community Game” does the opposite.”

In other words, less autonomously?

Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other factors, biological and otherwise, that fill these pages.

Damn, it would have to be really, really complicated.

[b]Neil Gaiman

It’s astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best.[/b]

So, are you astonished? Unlike, for example, me.

Some things may change, said Wednesday, abruptly. People, however… People stay the same.

Really, imagine actually believing that.

Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.

Anything here tried that?

On the whole, stories don’t write themselves.

How about wikipedia entries?

If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

Trust me: Not always.

I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.

Among other things, bullshit.

[b]so sad today

gave up on everything but then forgot to stay given up[/b]

But now I remember.

beautiful things: dying in my sleep

And, with any luck, tonight.

i’m hungry but not sure if i deserve to exist: the musical

Let’s cast it.

it was the best of dicks, it was the worst of dicks

Or: it was the best of holes, it was the worst of holes

I want to get to know you
[gets to know me]
oh

Or [for some of us]: Oh shit!

your natural beauty is getting on my nerves

Worse: your youth.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

Most people, if you give them a book, they sniff around on it awhile, then try to eat it.[/b]

Come on, did he really say this?
Not that I doubt it.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

Tell that to the folks who run the schools.

Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing.

On the other hand, what’s that next to unrequited love?

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting.

Maybe, but is it any good?

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

In other words, it is what it is.

There is nothing which deceives us as much as our own judgement.

He means the liberals of course.