a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Michael Lewis

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.[/b]

This is the part where we follow the money. Again, in other words.

That’s what happens when you’re 37 years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

And then, at 67, really, really different.

Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.

Let’s prove it. Or, better still, disprove it.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos.

You know, for starters.

The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.

What say you, Mr Reasonable?

That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.

He thought: Give me some, I’ll take my chances.

[b]Elena Epanseshnik

Sometimes what stands between two people is freedom.[/b]

In other words, or the lack thereof.

There’s a special place in hell for people who don’t love. And it’s freezing.

I’m already starting to shiver.

What we long for the most and fear the most is called freedom.

Though not necessarily in that order.

That fine, fine line between fashion and fascism.

And not just in footwear.

The Good, the Bad and the Double Standards.

I’m all for it of course.

Don’t be perfect. Be better than that.

On the other hand, that may not even be possible.

[b]Alan Moore

Uglier than death backin’ outta the outhouse readin’ mad magazine and crazy as a football bat.[/b]

He may well have been the first to think this. You know, true or not.

I am tired of this Earth, these people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.

Of course he could actually do something about it.

If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we’d lobotomise him.

Me too.

Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves.

Let’s decide if this time he has gone too far.

Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.

There’s still death though.

It seems as if from being a novelty nine-day wonder, the super-hero has become a part of American life. It’s here to stay.
For better, or for worse.

Still, better them than objectivists.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.[/b]

We could even give peace a chance.

Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.

Really, why the would anyone want to do that? You know, whatever it even means.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Our music of course not theirs.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless–it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

This is so true. It just doesn’t work anymore.

I regret how much I believed in the future.

More to the point, what’s left of it.

Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

On average.

[b]Haruki Murakami

Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.[/b]

Lots of really smart people say this. But no one is ever smart enough to know what it means.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

Well, for starters, you can’t.

Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband’s. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people’s standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”

Occasionally though it’s the husband borrowing the wife’s.

He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn’t take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.
How very strange.
Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, Then what do polar bears exist for? Yes, exactly, he said with a big smile. Then what do we exist for?

Of course polar bears don’t fuss with memes.

You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.

You know, if that’s what you’re looking for in it.

Sometimes we don’t need words. Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.

Obviously, this is as deep as you’ll ever need it to be.

[b]Thornton Wilder

Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. “I am alone, alone, alone,” he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, “We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes”.[/b]

That’s banal enough for some of us.

The best thing about animals is they don’t talk much.

At least not around us.

If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Either/or sure but which? And which ought it be?

He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer-- a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

Two out of six. How about you?

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

Now of course as we all know that’s just not true. Even if it’s not ecactly false.

I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really ‘shocked’ — that being shocked is always a pose.

Actually, a few times I really was. And not just here.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

A Brief History of Ontology

1. Being
2. Becoming Being
3. Being and Nothing
4. Nothing and Being
5. Becoming Nothing
6. Nothing[/b]

And yet ironcially covering everything.

Dostoyevsky × Poe ÷ Baudelaire = Kafka
Kafka - Artaud = Borges
Borges - Borges = Twitter

Let’s add to this.

Philosophy I & II
101 I understand Aristotle.
102 And Kant.
103 And Husserl.
201 I don’t understand Aristotle.
202 Or Kant.
203 Or Husserl.

& III
I do understand iambiguous

The German word for the confusion you feel when a host of people express great enthusiasm for something that strikes you as deathly boring.

I think it is pretty much the same word in all languages. Or should be.

One brags about finishing Russian novels, understanding German novels, liking French novels, and knowing the names of American novels.

He means American comic books of course.

Ancient Philosophy: How do I live the good life?
Medieval Philosophy: Why does evil exist?
Modern Philosophy: When will I get a TED Talk?

TED talks. I refuse to Google it. So please don’t tell me.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do which is what you are only has meaning in relation to other people.[/b]

Still, even if that’s true philosophically, it’s bullshit. If, for example, you’re me.

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl.

More to the point: the look on her face as she chomps down.

Lois looked edible, and you know it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue…

I know the type. Only her name is Lucy.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.

Let’s figure out what that is.

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string–or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?–and the string is what we don’t know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man’s Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man’s Knowledge will be equal to God’s Knowledge and there won’t be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away.

And then Big Bang 2.0 begins. With or without God.

The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help. By His help and in His wisdom.

Try to imagine God reacting to this. Your God, for example.

[b]Philip Plait

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It’s because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.”[/b]

Of course that’s just common sense.

I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.

In other words, not just in the White House.

I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means “guess.” To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is “just a theory” too.

Let’s move on then to the “theory of everything”.

Science asymptotically approaches reality.

For example, all the way up to infinity.

Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.

Let’s find the one that may or may not have created us.

They say that even the brightest star won’t shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.

How about this: Sooner or latter, one way or another, we all die.

[b]Existential Comics

Humans are:
Aristotle: the animal that thinks.
Marx: the animal that works.
Kierkegaard: the animal that is sad all the time for no reason.[/b]

Pick three of them.

If I’m perfectly honest, I don’t really believe that I’m going to die. It just doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would ever happen.

He said in despair.

What people were looking for:
3000 BC: food.
200 AD: glory.
800 AD: salvation.
1600 AD: freedom.
2017 AD: a place to charge your phone.

Is that post-modern enough for you?

New rule in philosophy: if you don’t solve a problem in a couple thousand years, move on to something else.

Not much this doesn’t cover, right?

Hope may be for fools, but cynicism is for the lazy.

Even if that were true it wouldn’t apply to me. Well, unless of course it does.

Metaphysics: what exists?
Ethics: what should we do?
Epistemology: how do we know?
Existentialism: why even fucking care?

Well, perhaps because we’ll have all of eternity not to.

[b]Thomas Aquinas

Beware the man of a single book.[/b]

The Bible comes to mind. That or Atlas Shrugged.

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

And this explains…what exactly?

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Actually, of course, it’s the study of what men thought the truth was. And then every once in a while a woman.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

First person subjunctive as it were.

How is it they live in such harmony, the billions of stars, when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds?

Of course now we know that harmony can be anything but.

I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.

How deep is that?
No, really, how deep is that?

[b]Jean Baudrillard

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.[/b]

So, Mr. Trump, where do you fit in here?

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

God: The Simulation. Coming to a universe near you.

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland…digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this “ideological” blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

Did Walt know this?

We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us—because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand—the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests—the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature—only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value—leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand.

I know: Sounds like something that Satyr might profess.

One has never said better how much “humanism”, “normality”, “quality of life” were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

And [obviously] not just in theory.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

In other words, when it’s not sinking.

[b]Shirley Jackson

Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns.[/b]

Not counting all the fears that aren’t of course.

The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.

Or [of course]: The gap between the philosophy she wrote and the philosophy she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable. At least I suspect as much.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her.
It isn’t fair, she said.
A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Lots of villages like that, aren’t there?

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

Of course most pointless violence isn’t really the point at all, is it?

Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister’s shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.

Custom. The first objectivism we might call it.

He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education.

So, who does this remind you of, Satyr?

[b]Joyce Maynard

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.[/b]

Either that or no meaning at all.

It’s like life: sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.

It’s mostly still the biggest thing though.

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman’s folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man’s shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.

He thought: That’ll never catch on.

Daughters, he told her as they dug. Nothing better than a good daughter.

Unless of course she’s a son.

My mother didn’t believe in germs but I did. Germs are something they made up to distract people from what they should really be worried about, she said. Germs are natural. It’s the things people do you have to worry about.

Right, like they both don’t have a point.

I love him, Patty said. But our dad is a loser.

Of course we haven’t heard his side.

[b]Han Kang

Why, is it such a bad thing to die?[/b]

My guess: It depends on who you ask.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

Why don’t we just keep this our own little secret.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.

On the other hand, we will – someday – have all of eternity not to think about it.

Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time.

That’s how it can work alright.

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

Meaning yours better be hers.

She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.

Wow, how many of us can say we never even knew the bars were there?

[b]Stieg Larsson

It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding.[/b]

Of course we all know how that turned out.

When this is all over I’m going to found an association called ‘The Knights of the Idiotic Table’ and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You’re all members.

Of course we all know how that turned out.

When their love was not reciprocated, it could quickly turn to violent hatred.

Then they all end up on Dateline or 48 Hours.

Isn’t it fascinating that Nazis always manage to adopt the word freedom?

Hell, everyone wraps that one around them.

As a girl, she was a legal prey, especially if she was dressed in a worn black leather jacket and had pierced eyebrows, tattoos, and zero social status.

So, among other things, she learned to push back.

Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.

Of course we might ask ourselves the same thing. Including the ones that really ought to.

[b]Stephen Fry

There are times when I’m doing QI and I’m going, ‘Ha ha, yeah, yeah,’ and inside I’m going ‘I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die.’[/b]

Me too. Or, rather, me too if I ever actually do it.

I hope you forgive the unedifying sight of my struggle to express some of the truths of my inner self and to measure the distance between the mask of security, ease, confidence and assurance I wear (so easily that its features often lift into a smirk that looks like complacency and smugness) and the real condition of anxiety, self-doubt, self-disgust and fear in which much of my life then and now is lived.

If I didn’t know better I’d say he got that from me.

His favourite word, one for which I have a great deal of time myself as a matter of fact, was “arse.” Everyone was more or less an arse most of the time, but I was arsier than just about everyone else in the school. In fact, in my case he would often go further — I was on many occasions a bumptious arse. Before I learned what bumptious actually meant I assumed that it derived from “bum” and believed therefore with great pride that as a bumptious arse I was doubly arsey — twice the arse of ordinary arses.

Some things are just harder to pin down than others.

A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

I know, he thought, let’s make it a crime too.

LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry “Wow!” all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

Let’s decide if this is close enough.

Religionists from pulpits and evangelical TV stations announced that this [AIDS] was all God’s punishment for the perverted vice of homosexuality, quite failing to explain why this vengeful deity had no interest in visiting plagues and agonized death upon child rapists, torturers, murderers, those who beat up old women for their pension money (or indeed those cheating, thieving, adulterous and hypocritical clerics and preachers who pop up on the news from time to time weeping their repentance), reserving this uniquely foul pestilence only for men who choose to go to bed with each other and addicts careless in the use of their syringes. What a strange divinity. Later he was to take his pleasure, as he still does, on horrifying numbers of women and very young girls raped in sub-Saharan Africa while transmitting his avenging wrath on the unborn children in their wombs. I should be interested to hear from the religious zealots why he is doing this and what kind of a kick he gets out of it.

Wow, doesn’t he know yet that God works in mysterious ways?

[b]Liane Moriarty

It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.[/b]

He wondered: What sort of distractions? And how do they differ from the ones that men deploy?

It was interesting how you could say things when you where walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table.

On the other hand, don’t expect this to work all the time. If it ever does.

I’d be at work where people respected my opinions, said Nick. And then, I’d come home and it was like I was the village idiot.

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

Shut up said Madeline.
I thought we didn’t say ‘shut up’ in our house.
Fuck off, then, said Madeline.

Means about the same thing, right?

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else’s tragedy - but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you.

There’s probably a good reason for that.

Bonnie is so ‘calm,’ you see. The opposite of me. She speaks in one of those soft . . . low . . . melodious voices that make you want to punch a wall.

In other words, not only when she’s wrong.

[b]Sad Socrates

Maybe one day you can fail like a philosopher.[/b]

Clearly, some more than others. Though even then only scholastically.

I have waited so long to run out of ideas.

On the other hand, a lot longer than you.

Stupidity never goes out of fashion.

And that’s before we get to all the places where it actually flourishes.

I want to know but I don’t want to care.

Been there, done that.

Don’t solve problems. Eliminate solutions.

Hmm, is this as easy [or as hard] as it sounds?

The cup is half-awful.

And half awfuller.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

…in order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.[/b]

Unless of course you inherit your success from Mom and Pop.

I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man’s heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.

Is that as ominous as I think it is?

I hope you don’t mind my saying so, boss, but I don’t think your brain is quite formed yet. How old are you?
Thirty-five.
Then it never will be.

Of course we know who is really the boss here, don’t we?

Who knows, perhaps God is simply the search for God.

Uh-oh.

Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love.

That ever happen to anyone here?

Oh, how crafty of religion, I cried out indignantly, to transplant rewards and punishments into a future life in order to comfort cowards and the enslaved and aggrieved, enabling them to bow their necks patiently before their masters, and to endure this earthly life without groaning (the only life of which we can be sure)!

Not even counting the part where some cash in on it.