a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Colum McCann

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.[/b]

If he does say so himself.

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.

My guess: there’s a bigger part of him that doesn’t.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

She’d absolutely love me, he thought.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Bad days, right behind them.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die.

Let’s pin down what this tells us. You know, if we dare.

He might have been naive, but he didn’t care; he said he’s rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

No balls in other words.

[b]God

Counting on Me to fix the virus?
You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why in a few weeks when I see you in person.[/b]

Get the, uh, joke, Mr. Religionist?

I’m well aware you want you-know-who to get you-know-what.
I’ll see what I can do.

So much for omnipotence.

I’m God, I’m omniscient, I’m the Creator of the Universe, and even I can’t believe this shit.

Can God say “shit”?

I didn’t send it.
I didn’t spread it.
I can’t prevent it.
I can’t cure it.
I’m not punishing you.
I’m not protecting you.
I have absolutely positively nothing to do with it.
And, worst of all, I’m not taking requests.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Trump.

Somewhere in China there’s a bat getting high-fives from every other animal he sees.

A well deserved one too.

The kind of people who want to assemble in large groups right now are exactly the kind of people who ought to.

And, no, not just the assholes here.

[b]Primo Levi

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.[/b]

God knows, right?

An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Of course they’re thinking the same thing about you.

We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant impression that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.

Let’s just say I interpret this differently from most.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.

Lots of diverse reactions to this no doubt.

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.

Lots of really diverse reactions to this no doubt.

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man’s dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

You know, if only in the either/or world.

[b]Freeman Dyson

If you don’t have a nasty obituary you probably didn’t matter.[/b]

What might your own say? You know, if you matter.

The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it’s mostly rubbish.

Thank God for Fox News, right?

If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

Sure, a Creator.

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.

In other words, blah, blah, blah.

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

In fact, science is often a collection of truths. Let’s say for all practical purposes.

As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.

Or course it almost seems other things too.

[b]tiny nietzsche

we are all existential now[/b]

Oh boy!

obscured by clowns

And Kids of course.

for sale: one ventilator, never used

Imagine that context.

social nihilists

You know, in theory.

gin and hydrochloroquine

Make mine Mr. Boston Peach brandy and hydrochloroquine.

damn. I ran out of porn

Remember back when you actually could?

[b]N.K. Jemisin

We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.[/b]

For example, cue the world today.

For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

I think, Hoa says slowly, that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.

Next up: hating them.

Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.

No, really, think about that.

But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

Trust me, he thought: not all of them.

They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.

And if they’re not cowards? Or if they’re Nazis?

[b]Edvard Munch

The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.[/b]

Let’s start something like that here.

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.

Or say what I think, but what I thought?

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

Us and these guys: youtu.be/L6EUumSji78

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

Figuratively as it were. At least as far as I know.

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

Would that I could say the same, he thought.
You know, being just a philosopher.

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.

Would that I could say the same, he thought.
You know, being just a philosopher.

[b]tiny nietzsche

Late Stage Capitalism Is Trying To Kill You, Charlie Brown[/b]

You too, Lucy.

send nudes descending a staircase

You know the ones.

sonic youth isn’t half as good as you want them to be

Not counting Goo of course.

I almost did something last week

And you almost caught me.

a respirator in the streets, but a ventilator in the sheets

All jokes aside?

the whole concept of death is invigorating

Next up: Actually dying.

[b]John Updike

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. [/b]

Yo, Kids!

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

As far as he knew, no one ever said that about Baltimore.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

As far as he knew, no one ever described Baltimore that way.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Next up: What one is thinking.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

You know, just in case you are actually wrong.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Up next: Mine.

[b]Douglas Adams

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.[/b]

Yeah, that happened to me too. Only it was the lbrary.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

You tell me: google.com/search?q=kakapo& … 66&bih=657

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

And, for some of us, not even close.

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

What, another one?

Forty-two! yelled Loonquawl. Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?
I checked it very thoroughly, said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.

For what it’s worth, my computer got 42 too.

Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

Bullshit for example.

[b]tiny nietzsche

…puts rugged individualism on a ventilator…[/b]

And how far behind can the ubermen be?

he died as he lived, anxious

Well, that settles that.

starve a cold, feed a pandemic

Not to mention the other way around.

I was sick of me long before I met you

Not to mention the other way around.

karma is taking forever

And not just for Buddhists.

hello entropy my old friend

And now we have a name for it.

[b]William Styron

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode. [/b]

In fact, he wrote a book about it.

What this country needs…what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it.

And now it has. Only as luck would have it [good or bad] he’s no longer around.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

One, for example, that Sophie would choose.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

You know, when you can tell them apart.

I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.

More for folks like him than for folks like you and I.

Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.

Until one day it all gets narrowed down to death.

[b]Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.[/b]

Such as?

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that.

Let alone deontologically.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

See, I told you. And then some.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Being facetious, I’m sure.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.

To wit: youtu.be/VUoXtddNPAM

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Black swans and dasein.

[b]so sad today

my anxiety has been training for this for years[/b]

And your anxiety?

look on the bright side
no

Maybe tomorrow.

if you can’t handle me in my panic attack then you don’t deserve me in my general overall sense of doom

That makes two of us.

it’s rare when something isn’t a piece of shit

Let’s pin down when that first started.
Here for example.

sorry but i hate everything more than you do

You know, for the record.

staying strong is fucking annoying

But only all the way to the grave.

[b]Jenny Offill

There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, the other wives think. Never.[/b]

Next thing you know, it’s an episode on Dateline or 48 Hours.

Survival in space is a challenging endeavor. As the history of modern warfare suggests, people have generally proven themselves unable to live and work together peacefully over long periods of time. Especially in isolated or stressful situations, those living in close quarters often erupt into hostility.

Welcome to spaceship Earth, right?

What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.

In other words, like all the rest of us.

How do you know all this?
I’m a fucking librarian.

The last one perhaps.

This morning Margot talked about the difference between falling and floating. With practice, she says, one may learn to accept the feeling of groundlessness without existential fear. This is akin to the way an experienced parachutist or astronaut might enjoy the wide view from above even as he hurtles through space. She gave us a formula: suffering = pain + resistance.

Get back to us on this, okay?

She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea. But only possibly.

Meds are tricky though, aren’t they?

[b]Carl Friedrich Gauss

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false. [/b]

Are we going to take that?!

Complete knowledge of the nature of an analytic function must also include insight into its behavior for imaginary values of the arguments. Often the latter is indispensable even for a proper appreciation of the behavior of the function for real arguments. It is therefore essential that the original determination of the function concept be broadened to a domain of magnitudes which includes both the real and the imaginary quantities, on an equal footing, under the single designation complex numbers.

Uh, for example: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=190558

I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I.

Sort of my point too, isn’t it?

Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.

That’s sure big of him.

By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction to the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary.

Of course, as with philosophers, we’ll need a context.

No contradictions will arise as long as Finite Man does not mistake the infinite for something fixed, as long as he is not led by an acquired habit of mind to regard the infinite as something bounded.

Any Finite Men here? How about Finite Ubermen?

[b]so sad today

many things are the worst[/b]

Or, as Keith once opined: “worse”, “worser”, and “worst”

i’m fine till i google symptoms: a memoir

Or: i’m fine till i google symptoms: a musical

your positive attitude hurts my feelings

Of course no one has ever accused me of that.

imagine being pregnant for nine months and then giving birth to a hamburger

Anyone here willing to try?

i don’t want to know how i feel

And you sure as shit don’t.

in these difficult times, never forget what’s important: deleting tweets is nothing to be ashamed of

Let’s work on that, okay?

[b]Colum McCann

The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.[/b]

And think of the whoppers today!

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

My guess: not all of them.

…it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

Lots and lots of that here, isn’t there?

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

All the more so in the world today of course.

Nobody falls halfway.

Unless they hit the awning.

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

Make a note of that, God.

[b]Iain McGilchrist

None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth. The word ‘true’ suggest a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be ‘true.’ It is related to ‘trust,’ and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one’s trust. Such a situation is not an absolute - it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith and it involves being faithful to one’s intentions.[/b]

Or certainly close enough.

Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.

Well, not counting the top forty perhaps.

The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.

What say you to that, Mr. Objectivist?

Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.

I know: The fool!

Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.

Okay, but we still need an actual context.

So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.

That must be it, he thought.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Suppose you’re teaching math. You assume that parallel lines meet at infinity. You’ll admit that adds up to something like transcendence.” Günter Grass[/b]

You know the thread. :wink: :laughing: :wink:

“In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we seldom allow someone to be of another opinion.” Immanuel Kant

Luckily, here we all agree on what is and what is not beautiful. And what is and what is not moral.

"Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at.” Arthur Danto

That and bought and sold.

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” Ian Fleming

If only in the real world.

"Hell is truth seen too late.” Thomas Hobbes

Yo, Mr. Trump!

"‘True’ and ‘false’ are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither ‘truth’ nor ‘falsehood.’” Thomas Hobbes

Wow, he thought, what if that is actually true?!