a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jeanette Winterson

There are only three possible endings — aren’t there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.[/b]

Either that or in impeachment.

I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

And that’s just our sun.

…when the dying sun bled the blue sky orange.

Still, we’ll all be long dead and gone by then. Unless of course there’s a miracle.

I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.

Not only that but it still is.

I realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy – speed of light power – to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr. Right will make the world new.

Let’s stuff dasein in there somewhere.

Don’t mix your heart with your liver.

Actually, that has never even crossed my mind. Or not until now.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Don’t let yourself slip and get any perfect characters…keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols.[/b]

Also, keep them away from philosophers. And Kids.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

What I [and someday you] call dasein.

Remember, everything is right until it’s wrong. You’ll know when it’s wrong.
You think so?
I’m quite sure. If you don’t it doesn’t matter. Nothing will matter then.

You can’t go wrong with that.

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Of course they fit in snuggly here.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

So, what 's the equivalent of that on the equator?

Fish, the old man said. Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

Let’s ponder what the fish might say.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Life does not consist of words. Life consists of reality.” Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson[/b]

Let’s go there and see.

“Become who you are!” Friedrich Nietzsche

Or: Become who “you” are!

“By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.” Galileo

Let the word games begin!

“If it is to be it is up to me.” Ancient Aztec Saying

He wondered if this was an accurate translation.

“It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.” Søren Kierkegaard

Sure, maybe even here.

"How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?” Rene Descartes

Let’s file this one under, “Oh, shit, that again.”

[b]Michael Lewis

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.[/b]

Not unlike in the Oval Office.
Again, in other words.

Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away – far, far and away – the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is.

Times 9 [or more]. Then times 162.

I have a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy occurs.

You know, for the “little guy”.

People with Asperger’s couldn’t control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues.

Or posting here.

It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn’t working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.

No, I don’t get it either.

Textbooks in economics, which explain the economic purpose of money (a unit of account, a store of value, and a means of exchange), usually neglect to mention the chief role of money in America: a source of entertainment.

You know, if you can afford it.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.[/b]

My own ideas are dead on arrival.
Among other things, too scary…

Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ‘what kind of tea?’

Let alone ask for coffee.

You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.

On the other hand, if you do that, you can’t blame other people.

You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.

Tell that to those who do.

Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

For example, Trump colluding with the Russkies.

It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

Fortunately, I sleep in a recliner. True story.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Deadline is when you have a whole eternity to finish your work, but no time whatsoever.[/b]

No deadlines here though, right?

Hell is not other people, hell is that one other person.

Sure, him too.

I’ve come up with a new subculture: be yourself.

“I” can go along with that.

While we work, someone else is making money.

Maybe, but not after Trump and Putin drain the swamp.

If it sounds beautiful in your head don’t tweet it.

That’s what Facebook is for.

And while we’re all still waiting for Godot, he’s probably in love.

With that Black Jew Witch no doubt.

[b]Peter Sloterdijk

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.[/b]

Five will get you ten it is always his truth.

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read.

Five will get you ten it is always his humanism. But, sure, point taken.

In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life.

Actually [of course] the crossing will only ever be as wide as you make it.

The biggest and, outwardly, most trustful banker in history is God, the administrator delegated to eternity. And his credit institute is Paradise. Billions of faithfuls, for centuries, have invested in the hope of God, expecting redemption in eternal life. And since the celestial agency is going bankrupt, nothing is left of its capital, on which the hopes of six billion faithful consumers rely. Capitalism is a project of universal anthropology. Humans primarily are beings who desire. Not in an hedonistic, but in a materialistic sense: in the modern period, Westerners have looked for felicity through the possession of objects and the consumption of commodities.

I’ve probably said this better myself. But, sure, maybe not.

There is no ‘eugenics’ in Nietzsche - despite occasional references to ‘breeding’- at least no more than is implicit in the recommendation to choose a partner under decent lightning conditions and with one’s self-respect intact. Everything else falls under training, discipline, education and self-design - the Übermensch implies not a biological but an artistic, not to say an acrobatic programme.

All this while still acknowledging that the question “Why?” finds no answer.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

Unless, of course, you are “one of us”.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.[/b]

In other words, business as usual.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

In other words, business as usual.

The world is a big place, he said, but so is the inside of an apartment!

Big being, among other thing, relative.

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

God knows. Just not, perhaps, literally.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil – only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

Let’s face it, few things disturb people more than in acknowledging that this might be true.
Rip? Let’s start here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

Maybe I’ll try to be more patient with morons.

Unless, of course, they’re Kids.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.[/b]

What have you got to say about that, Mr. Hawking?

Don’t think of it as dying, said Death. Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush.

Yeah, sure, there are days I might fall for that.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

That and all capital letters.

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Ready to ante up?

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

No, he means it.

No! Please! I’ll tell you whatever you want to know! the man yelled.
Really? said Vimes. What’s the orbital velocity of the moon?
What?
Oh, you’d like something simpler?

By the way, it’s 2,288 miles per hour.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.[/b]

Mine was a torch once too. Or, sure, maybe not.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

Well, theoretically.
But point taken.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Imagine then the implicatinons of that!

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

Of course for others that is the ideal condition. You know, just a reminder.

If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.

Right, like that is always an option.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

And that’s in the book.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

The greatest threat to our future is
Marx: the past
Beckett: the present
Derrida: the present perfect
Nietzsche: the future[/b]

Oviously: All of the above.
And then some.

Twitter: Inviting you to rethink your decision to learn how to read since 2006.

Noted on [of course] Twitter.

[b]A Brief History of Justice

  1. An eye for an eye
  2. Due process
  3. The social contract
  4. Respect for the individual
  5. An eye for an eye[/b]

Let’s file this one [obviously] under, “what goes around comes around”.

A good tweet
Hegel: unfolds dialectically
Kant: augments the free play of the mind
Camus: screams “Delete me!” with every fiber of its being

That was before Don Trump of course.

Philosophy’s problem is that it’s too
Schelling: Hegelian
Kierkegaard: Hegelian
Marx: Hegelian
Schopenhauer: Hegelian
Nietzsche: Nietzschean

Which one doesn’t belong?

What do reason and capitalism have in common? They’re both religions that masquerade as the foundation of atheism.

Not counting America of course.

[b]Joseph Heller

Why are they going to disappear him?
I don’t know.
It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar.[/b]

Of course that gets less and less important all the time.

Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out 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. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

That and being in the right place at the right time.

You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you’re at war and might get your head blown off any second.
I more than resent it, sir. I’m absolutely incensed.
You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.
Consciously, sir, consciously, Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. I hate them consciously.
You’re antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if you’re a manic-depressive!
Yes, sir. Perhaps I am.
Don’t try to deny it.
I’m not denying it, sir, said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. I agree with all you’ve said.

Rapport!
With someone!!
With anyone at all!!!
[just not so far]

From now on I’m thinking only of me.
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.
Then, said Yossarian, I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?

You can never be too reasonable.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Trust me: Some considerably more than others. And not just here.

There is no disappointment so numbing as someone no better than you achieving more.

Worse, being famous for it.

[b]Gloria Steinem

…hate generalizes, love specifies…[/b]

Or, more specifically, in general they do.

But why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you take my sister and go to New York? she would say it didn’t matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, If I’d left, you never would have been born. I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

One is born, the other isn’t. What then is the lesson learned?

In truth, we don’t know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.

Indeed. I’m sure that’s why we’re all here. Not counting me of course.

Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.

Let’s run that by Anthony Scaramucci.

Only women could bleed without injury or death; only they rose from the gore each month like a phoenix; only their bodies were in tune with the ululations of the universe and the timing of the tides. Without this innate lunar cycle, how could men have a sense of time, tides, space, seasons, movement of the universe, or the ability to measure anything at all? How could men mistress the skills of measurement necessary for mathematics, engineering, architecture, surveying—and so many other professions? In Christian churches, how could males, lacking monthly evidence of Her death and resurrection, serve the Daughter of the Goddess? In Judaism, how could they honor the Matriarch without the symbol of Her sacrifices recorded in the Old Ovariment? Thus insensible to the movements of the planets and the turning of the universe, how could men become astronomers, naturalists, scientists—or much of anything at all?

Is she missing the point or are men?

Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

“I” and “we” out in a particular world. She has her version, I have mine.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?[/b]

Let’s make this applicable to, among others, Nietzsche’s Ubermen.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Anyone here been thinking instinctively of late?

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Either that or reconfigure it into your own.

Emotion is contagious.

Let’s file this one under, “for better or for worse”. And, occasionally, then some.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

Or your husband as the case may be. And, increasingly [of late], your partner.

The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

On the other hand, good for whom?

[b]Arthur Koestler

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.[/b]

Don Trump is working on the sequel right now. Or so some say.

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

Some objectivists make it this far, some don’t.

The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.

Some objectivists take it this far, some don’t. Though not all of them have a Party.

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

And not just in the Oval Office.

The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country.

Trust me: Not everyone agrees.

Honor is decency without vanity.

You know, theoretically.

[b]Thucydides

Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.[/b]

It still is. You know, thousands of years later.

People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way -even when those stories concern their own native counties…Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

They still are. You know, thousands of years later.

I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usaully goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind.

Among others, Black Jew Witch is now able to confirm that.

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.

Again, some things never change.

A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power clearly to express it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all.

A woman too. Or so some will insist.

The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever.

Some will even reconfigure this into philosophy.

[b]Jasmine Warga

Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “no maybe about it”.

You’re like a grey sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.

Unless of course grey is your favorite color.

Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.

Not even God?

Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it’s in your bones and your blood.

That’s a start anyway.

I once read in my physics book that the universe begs to be observed, that energy travels and transfers when people pay attention. Maybe that’s what love really boils down to–having someone who cares enough to pay attention so that you’re encouraged to travel and transfer, to make your potential energy spark into kinetic energy.

Or, sure, maybe not.

Life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable.

I’ll let you know if – when – that ever happens to me.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy is great because since they all disagree with each other about everything, you can just pick out whoever backs your own opinions.[/b]

Cue the part about dasein. Or, sure, I’ll do it for you.

What they don’t teach you in science class is that reality is shitty, and you are going to have to deal with its shit your whole damn life.

Not to mention philosophy class. And, yes, even serious philosophy class.

The fact that all the top philosophers are huge assholes does make me think the entire discipline has all been a fantastic waste of time.

So, anyone here know who the “top philosophers” actually are?

The fact that we think that if AI gets too smart it will destroy humanity says more about humanity than it does AI.

This seems true of course but not always.

Aristotle’s concept of “essential” and “accidental” properties is a dirty lie invented to make us think hotdogs don’t count as sandwiches.

I know: Do hot dogs go that far back?

[b]Reasons to drink:

  1. You are sad.
  2. You are happy.
  3. You are bored.
  4. It is Friday.
  5. It is Monday.
  6. There is beer in the fridge.[/b]

Oh, and hundreds and hundreds more.

[b]Roland Barthes

To whom can I put this question (with any hopes of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?[/b]

On the other hand, what are the odds of actually figuring this out?

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

He pondered [though not glumly]: What if that is true of philosophy too?

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

Lots of old photographers too.

Suicide.
How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead?

If you suffer enough on this side of the grave, questions like that will never even come up.

I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this “I” who would write himself? Even as he would enter into the writing, the writing would take the wind out of his sails, would render him null and void – futile…

Go ahead, try it and see. Then let us know how futile.

“I can’t get to know you" means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

So, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

[b]Evelyn Waugh

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.[/b]

He’ll just leave it to our imagination.

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?
Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

Let’s choose sides.

The human soul enjoys these rare, classical periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves - the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleepwalker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outside eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.

Yep, that’s how it works alright. And whether you know it or not.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

On the other hand, what’s pretty next to beautiful?

Of course those that have charm don’t really need brains.

On the other hand, what’s charm next to beauty?

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

Hordes and hordes of them no doubt. Just like down here.