a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Alan Guth

The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.[/b]

Let alone the banging of dasein.

It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.

You know, for 70 odd years.

It turns out that the energy of a gravitational field—any gravitational field—is negative. During inflation, as the universe gets bigger and bigger and more and more matter is created, the total energy of matter goes upward by an enormous amount. Meanwhile, however, the energy of gravity becomes more and more negative. The negative gravitational energy cancels the energy in matter, so the total energy of the system remains whatever it was when inflation started—presumably something very small. …This capability for producing matter in the universe is one crucial difference between the inflationary model and the previous model.

Of course that’s just common sense.

We should not act like we know that the universe began with the Big Bang…we’ll see that there are strong suggestions that the Big Bang was perhaps not really the beginning of existence, but really just the beginning of our local universe, often called a pocket universe.

I know: What was God thinking?!

The conventional Big Bang theory says nothing about where all the matter came from. The theory really assumes that for every particle that we see in the universe today, there was, at the very beginning, at least some precursor particle, if not the same particle, with no explanation of where all those particles came from.

Obviously: the Christian God.

A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories…which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction. We’re talking about energies which are about 1016 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. The initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10-28 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it.

Let’s get out our slide rules.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.” Epictetus[/b]

It is best perhaps not to dwell on this too long.

“Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything” Immanuel Kant

It is best perhaps not to dwell on this too long.

“You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am.” Immanuel Kant

Categorically and imperatively as it were.

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Napoléon Bonaparte

At the time, his in particular.

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?” Diogenes of Sinope

Right up to the point that you get banned.

“Aristotle dines when it seems good to King Philip, but Diogenes when he himself pleases.” Plutarch.

Ought Aristotle to then be ashamed?

[b]Ernesto Che Guevara

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.[/b]

Not nearly as many around like that today.

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

Nope, I haven’t found that yet.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.

Hate, on the other hand, is right up there. Or it certainly was for me.
Back then in other words.

Be realistic, demand the impossible!

Come on, how reasonable is that? But point taken.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

But only if you stick around to hear it.

And then many things became very clear…we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.

No, really, that was once thought to be true.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing![/b]

You rewrite mine, I’ll rewrite yours.

Every true story ends in death.

If it ends at all.

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.

Of course that’s only natural.

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish

Unless, of course, there’s a full moon.

I don’t know, I said. There isn’t always an explanation for everything.
Oh, isn’t there? I was brought up to think there was.
That’s awfully nice.

Comforting, he means.

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

Let’s just say this is easier said than done.

[b]Neil Gaiman

I’m going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.[/b]

Of course that might not work.

I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.

Not that it makes any difference to gravity.

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn’t feel anything at all.

Here you might as well just flip a coin.

Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?

And not just the ones in Hollywood.

I really don’t know what “I love you” means.
I think it means "Don’t leave me here alone.”

And that certainly comes close enough for some.

Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

That’s obvious isn’t it? Though, sure, maybe not.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I trust that you have a good purpose for your ignorance.[/b]

No, I don’t trust that you do at all.

There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.

Let’s call this, among other things, human nature. Though, sure, check with Satyr first.

I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel like I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But point taken.

She always saw through him, as if he were just another window.

And then, out of the blue [sort of], he was banned.

Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.

In other words, blah, blah, blah. Though not for him of course.

There was nothing, which would have been unfortunate, unless nothing was a clue. Was nothing a clue?

Maybe. But it’s something that’s for sure.

[b]Terry Pratchett

It was sad, like those businessmen who came to work in serious clothes but wore colorful ties in a mad, desperate attempt to show there was a free spirit in there somewhere.[/b]

Somewhere between sad and pathetic perhaps. We’ll, until we hear their side.

Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They’d been brought up to it, and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights. And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else.

Somewhere between sad and pathetic perhaps. We’ll, until we hear their side.

Gods don’t like people not doing much work. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think.

Out loud for example.

My name is immaterial, she said.
That’s a pretty name, said Rincewind.

Hmm, now that you mention it…

Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.

Someone’s truth anyway.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

You know, after you teach him how to fish.

[b]Nein

Sorry, time. I need some space.[/b]

How about for all of eternity?

It’s not you. It’s your ruthless critique of all that exists.

No, it’s that too.

Your rage, sir. Please: not against the machine.

May I suggest Trumpworld?

It’s not that after reading Moby Dick you want to die. Or are ready to die. But when the time comes, maybe you’re more ready to want to die.

Anyone here able to explain why?

Sorry, we’re out of context. But perhaps I could interest you in a fundamental misunderstanding.

In other words, before one of us gets banned.

A beautiful day to change color. Fall gently to the ground. And make a charming little spectacle of your decay.

Not only that but it’s nature’s way.

[b]C.G. Jung

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.[/b]

I like that. And god knows it is appropriate here.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

I know: define “addiction”.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

Well, not as a child perhaps, but I am more than making up for it now.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

Let me guess: You know what that means.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Let me guess: You know what that means.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

So, did he?

[b]Sad Socrates

No one will ever love me as much as I hate myself.[/b]

Let’s confirm that.

If it weren’t for bad ideas, how would we suffer?

Or, as we say here: “I suffer therefore I am”.

I’d rather hoot with the owls than endure the programs of existence humanity has constructed to oppress us.

I guess that’s true.

I would hate to be a star, imagine dying for millions of years.

On the other hand, do they know that?

I don’t care about who I am.

Or, rather, just enough to point it out.

Don’t worry. Don’t be happy.

How’s that working out for you?

[b]Joseph Heller

Oh, I´m not complaining. I know there´s a war on. I know a lot of people are going to have to suffer for us to win it. But why must I be one of them?[/b]

For the Vietnam war, you have to double it. At least.

I really do admire you a bit. You’re an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I’m an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I’m in an ideal position to appreciate it.

The new yin and yang.

The night was full of horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts…

Of course he’s just paraphrasing the Bible.

[b]What the hell are you getting so upset about? he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. I thought you didn’t believe in God.

I don’t, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “covering all the bases”.

He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom.

You know, as a last resort.

Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me…Maybe people have told me, and I’m too senile to remember.

That does narrow it down.

[b]Steven D. Levitt

Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the “right” thing to do.[/b]

Anyone here ever done it?

But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

Or: But one need not oppose forcing women to give birth on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

And then there’s the tale of an economist on holiday in Las Vegas. He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million? he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn’t much to see—but still, $1 million! She agreed to go back to his room. All right then, he said. Would you be willing to sleep with me for $100? A hundred dollars! she shot back. What do you think I am, a prostitute? We’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.

Let’s decide how reasonable this is.

[b]In Freakonomics, we examined the causes of the rise and fall of violent crime in the United States. In 1960, crime began a sudden climb. By 1980, the homicide rate had doubled, reaching a historic peak. For several years crime stayed perilously high, but in the early 1990s it began to fall and kept falling. So what happened?

In Freakonomics, we identified one missing factor - the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. The theory was jarring but simple. A rise in abortion meant that fewer unwanted children were being born, which meant fewer children growing up in the sort of difficult circumstances that increase the likelihood of criminality.[/b]

Let’s decide how reasonable this is.

Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

I predict that few will.

The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them—smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn’t easy.

In other words, once an objectivist, always an objectivist. Well, not counting me of course.

[b]Jade Chang

And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn’t mind being an asshole?[/b]

Our kind of asshole for example.

Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.

You know, if they have any.

Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.

All the more reason for the welfare state.

Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

Tell that to, among others, Don Trump.

The world destroys itself and we rebuild it. The destroying is as important as the rebuilding. There can be as much joy in the destruction as the rebirth.

He thought: Let’s call this bullshit and move on.

Love saves you, as long as there’s a you to be saved.

Me? Well, obviously there wasn’t.

[b]Rick Moody

I think literature is best when it’s voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.[/b]

On the other hand, that could be anything.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

For some, in other words, a normal day.

The past was so past it hurt.

And it’s probably never coming back again.

Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin.

Right, like that’s supposed to comfort us somehow.

People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man… The stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars.

For one thing, you’ve got to reach them first.

If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.

That’s the big fiddle, isn’t it?

[b]André Gide

One must allow other people to be right, he used to say when he was insulted, it consoles them for not being anything else.[/b]

Besides, every once and a while they actually are.

I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest.

I know, I used to hate them too.

When I was younger, I used to make resolutions which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not growing old.

Not literally of course. And that’s before the part when you’re dead.

…the facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive in the sun.

Just like all our facts today.

The priest accepted me, I accepted the priest, so everything went off smoothly.

Though maybe not the next time.

In a world in which everyone cheats, it’s the honest man who passes for a charlatan.

Let’s just all agree that you can take this too far.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

Seneca

“No man was ever wise by chance.”[/b]

Maybe. But, along with contingency and change, don’t ever underestimate chance.

"Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.” Bertrand Russell

Not to be absolutely certain about this too.

“Anticipated spears wound less.” Thomas More

Not counting the ones that kill you.

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die." Leonardo Da Vinci

How’d that work out for him?

“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.” Jorge Luis Borges

No, really.

“Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions.” Epictetus

Right, keep telling yourself that.

[b]Roland Barthes

The grim
egoism (egotism)
of mourning
of suffering[/b]

He means on the good days. Or is that just me?

There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research. Now perhaps comes the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.

So, have you unlearned much from me?

I cannot countenance the traditional belief that postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a ‘freedom’ and the latter with a ‘vocation’ equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Or, as Lyssa once put it: Har Har Harr.

To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.

Among other things, no shit.

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

Why is this true? And it is you know.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.

Me? Maybe in the womb.

[b]Charles Seife

Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang.[/b]

For example, in a world of words.

The Greeks couldn’t do this neat little mathematical trick. They didn’t have the concept of a limit because they didn’t believe in zero. The terms in the infinite series didn’t have a limit or a destination; they seemed to get smaller and smaller without any particular end in sight. As a result, the Greeks couldn’t handle the infinite. They pondered the concept of the void but rejected zero as a number, and they toyed with the concept of the infinite but refused to allow infinity-numbers that are infinitely small and infinitely large-anywhere near the realm of numbers. This is the biggest failure in Greek mathematics, and it is the only thing that kept them from discovering calculus.

I know what you’re thinking: That’s Greek to me.

The infinite zero of a black hole-mass crammed into zero space, curving space infinitely-punches a hole in the smooth rubber sheet. The equations of general relativity cannot deal with the sharpness of zero. In a black hole, space and time are meaningless.

On the other hand, how many times has he been in one? My guess: zero.

The laws of quantum mechanics treat particles such as the electron as points; that is, they take up no space at all. The electron is a zero-dimensional object, and its very zerolike nature ensures that scientists don’t even know the electron’s mass or charge.

The laws of quantum Mechanics? Isn’t that “for all practical purposes” a contradiction in terms.

In string theory, zero has been banished from the universe; there is no such thing as zero distance or zero time. This solves all the infinity problems of quantum mechanics.

Let’s find a string and check it out.

This is the definition of the infinite: it is something that can stay the same size even when you subtract from it.

Aren’t definitions just wonderful?!!

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson. What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?”[/b]

Unless of course he’s wrong.

What is luck, he said, but the ability to exploit accidents?

As in, “you make your own luck”. Though, sure, sometimes you don’t have to.

I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I’m not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion?

What, before you are judged?

I kissed her and forgot death.

Noted, said the Grim Reaper.

There’s no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take it seriously.

You know, provided you won.

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn’t bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It’s saying, I’m here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.

This is just a fancy way of saying…what exactly?

[b]God

In the beginning, Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates; and I saw that it was good.[/b]

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

This could be the week I give Donald Trump a heart attack.

And [it goes without saying] send him straight to Hell.
You know, if it does go without saying.

The more people retweet this the more likely it is that, despite having blocked Me, Joel Osteen will see God thinks he’s a fucking asshole.

So, apparently, God is not omnipotent.

Question: what would you consider more apocalyptic, a mega-volcano eruption or a 10.0 earthquake? Asking for a friend.

His Son probably.

I created mankind to destroy itself over Me.

Let’s just say we’re still working on it.

People who are wrong are just as sure you are wrong as you are sure they are wrong. The only difference is, they’re wrong.

Assuming of course that God really is on your side.