a thread for mundane ironists

[b]tiny nietzsche

How can you identify someone who thinks they’re nihilist?
they will tell you over and over again[/b]

And with groots no less.

it’s raining knives

Hunting knives around here.

baby, it’s sexual harassment outside

And not just among the ruling class…or the Christians.

Sunday night was for depression, but monday night at dusk was always for the existential dread

You know, if you can tell the two apart.

crouching heidegger, hidden derrida

Let’s signify what that means for Nazis.

if you love a meme, set it free. If it comes back, ignore it

Genes? Forget about it.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.[/b]

For some, they can’t come too soon.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

Shame on them!

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.
I said I was afraid of not living.

Or, sure, maybe both.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

When it isn’t shattered on the floor in a thousand pieces.

If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

Let’s pin this down. Then move on to the father.

I can’t believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we’re here, we’re alive, we’re the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it’s a record of our survival.

Obviously: Some more than others.

[b]Mary Roach

Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think.[/b]

Just like chimps, right Satyr?

Last year, I was conversing by e-mail with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was “vagina with clitoris.” She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with it. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I said to this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he’d have bothered with the clitoris?

I guess we’ll never know.

…many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it.

Nothing gets past them these days.

You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination.

Ain’t that the truth?

A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping cart.

Let’s file this one under, oh, I don’t know, “common sense”?

Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.

Clearly as God intended.

[b]John Cage

It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.[/b]

Like this is [more often than not] a distinction with a difference.

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

In 200 classes for example.

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.

Perhaps even as unfamiliar as you are.

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

But: For any particular one of us at any particular time, it all gets narrowed down considerably.

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life–not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

Come on, for any particular one of us at any particular time, what are the odds it’s anywhere near this convoluted?

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.

For example, in an essentially absurd and meaningless world. A world in which everyone and everything becomes but the brute facticity of, well, something.

[b]so sad today

I don’t feel at peace unless I’m torturing myself[/b]

Apparently this is a real condition.

likes: death
dislikes: dying

Apparently this is a real condition.

person: hi
me: stop pretending it’s not fucking weird that we exist, ok?!!

Well, isn’t it?

capitalism is making me want to vomit and also buy stuff

So, don’t forget to vote!

when people are nice to me i feel guilty: a love story

Fuck them: a love story.

what should i wear to never leaving the house?

Buck naked always works for me.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

It’s funny, I said. It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.
Do you think so? her eyes looked flat again.
I don’t mean fun in that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.
No, she said. I think it’s hell on earth.[/b]

For example, unrequited love.

The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.

Well, until you get to the part about memes.

But man is not made for defeat, he said. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

On the other hand, destroyed works for me.

Do you suppose it will always go on?
No.
What’s to stop it?
It will crack somewhere.

And the list here is endless.

He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men were receiving.

And that matters to God.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

Let’s try that here. You first.

[b]so sad today

take a selfie at my funeral[/b]

Then post it on youtube.
That is what’s next, right?

it’s not my fault i was born: the musical

Soundtrack by Morrisey.

tired or dying? a memoir

Volumes I through IV.

“i’m different” – someone who is exactly the same

Though, really, not always.

we could wait for death together

Or, in the interim, godot

cause of death: your positive attitude

You know the ones.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.[/b]

Not counting all the times that he is.

Birds are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they’re vicious.

Plus, to gall us all the more, most of them can fly.

This is the only country in the world, said Wednesday, into the stillness, that worries about what it is.
What?
The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.

So, what is it then?

Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes…

Let’s make sense of that.

The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.

Does the squirrel know that?

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.

He thought: Like country music.
Not counting Emmylou Harris of course.

[b]André Malraux

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.[/b]

Though, for some, it’s more what they think they hide.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

You know, to be optimistic.

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

Indeed, and you can take that to the grave.

I don’t argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.

And then [occasionally] arm them.

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

Any folks here despise themselves? Were you forced to?

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.

So, does that explain you? Too, I mean.

[b]Nein

Saying “guns don’t kill people” is like saying “defibrillators don’t save people”.[/b]

Well, sure, if they’re worth saving.

This is the alternate universe other universes warn their kids about.

Wouldn’t you?

Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs nor mistaken.

Rhymes with objectivism.

It’s not you. It’s your socially necessary form of pathology.

Actually, in Trumpworld, both.

In the beginning: there was the end. And it was good.

Just not good enough.

A. True.
B. Sad.
C. Sad but true.
D. Sad enough to be true, yet somehow still false.

Hell, not much that can’t be.

[b]Terry Pratchett

There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.[/b]

If only in your head.
If that’s all it takes.

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.

Tragic music then for some.

Whut’s the plan, Rob? said one of them.
Okay, lads, this is what we’ll do. As soon as we see somethin’, we’ll attack it. Right?
This caused a cheer.
Ach, 'tis a good plan, said Daft Wullie.

See something. Attack it. See something else. Attack it.
If only all the way to the grave.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

Let’s make this a cliche.

Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

If not hack them to pieces.

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one.

On the other hand, how logical is that?

[b]C.G. Jung

Shame is a soul eating emotion.[/b]

For those who feel it anyway.

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

After all, where do the genes end and the memes begin?

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.

And I suspect it has only gotten [much, much, much] worse.

What you resist, persists.

Fortunately, as some insist, that only makes you stronger. Or, sure, with others, unfortunately.

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.

So, how’s that working out for you?

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

The unlived life. And then some.

[b]God

Elephants are like people, only humane.[/b]

Unless of course they’re in musth. But, sure, we’ll pass this along to Mr. Trump.

Alabama is a stupid fucking state full of stupid fucking people and I forsook it long, long ago.

By Alabama, He must mean all the other states down there too. But, sure, maybe not.

A religion based on the teachings of Jesus would be a great idea.

Let’s call it, say, socialism.

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.

So much for omnipotence.

I apologize to some of you for most of you.

Well, that’s a start.

Sanity is becoming more and more of an achievement.

Any sane folks here?

[b]Joseph Heller

Of course you’re dying. We’re all dying. Where the devil else do you think you’re heading?[/b]

See, another “general description”.

I have a feeling that someone nearby is soon going to find out something about me that will mean the end, although I can’t imagine what that something is.

I’m a little better though at pinning this down.

His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment of two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away.

Women, of course, have their own version of this.
Don’t they?

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

And then on to the next war.

Yossarian’s attitude toward his roommates turned merciful and protective at the mere recollection of Captain Black. It was not their fault that they were young and cheerful, he reminded himself as he carried the swinging beam of his flashlight back through the darkness. He wished that he could be young and cheerful, too. And it wasn’t their fault that they were courageous, confident and carefree. He would just have to be patient with them until one or two were killed and the rest wounded, and then they would all turn out okay.

And then on to the next war.

Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.

Let’s grapple with the irony.

[b]Lawrence M. Krauss

No matter where you go, there you are.[/b]

Whether you want to be there or not.

[b]Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime.

As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space.

This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise.[/b]

Of course that was before RM/AO.

[b]A physicist, an engineer and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report.

The first to be called is the engineer, who states: The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods.

The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes:

The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow color than brown and should help induce greater milk flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom.

Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: Assume the cow is a sphere…[/b]

Let’s assume the consultant was a philosopher.

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.

And, yes, that includes all that shit you’ve been accumulating in your head over the years.

Reality doesn’t owe us comfort.

Neither apparently does God.

“I don’t mind not knowing. It doesn’t scare me". Richard Feynman

Especially not anymore. Unless of course…

[b]tiny Nietzsche

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo[/b]

280 characters no doubt.

My horoscope says I should eat ass

On the other hand, what can celestial bodies possibly know about that?

single set of footprints gives camus an idea for a book

Confirmation please.

this void is unavailable

But sure make me an offer.

wolves: hey we can chase you through the snow or you could just give the fuck up now

You know, if they could speak English.

how can you identify someone who thinks they’re nihilist?
they will tell you over and over again

None like that here though.

[b]Robin Wasserman

There are some moments you’d rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it’s mostly those moments in which it’s smarter-safer- to stay awake.[/b]

It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it?

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

There’s probably a gene for it. Unless, of course, you count me.

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn’t exist, all at the same time.

He wondered if that included dasein.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe, Max said. And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

And who does that remind you of?

I guess that’s the secret. It would never have occurred to Lia to want to escape – but then she gets kicked out. Best thing that ever happened to her? I’m not sure she would say yes, because obliviousness tends to be rather pleasant, but once you realized you’ve been oblivious, there’s no turning back. You can’t un-know what you know.

Let’s think up a loophole.

Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.

That ever happen to you?

[b]Maurice Blanchot

My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?[/b]

Not all that different from my own being. Or, perhaps, it couldn’t be further away from it.

But this is the rule, and there is no way to free oneself of it: as soon as the thought has arisen, it must be followed to the very end.

Which we more or less make up as we go along.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

And now we’re feeling them.

As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy.

That ever happen to you? No, I didn’t think do.

A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, ‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being - the very fact that it does not exist.

Note to others: Is this what I’m saying too?

The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.

Let’s start with the Mona Lisa.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.” e.e. cummings[/b]

Existentially, is this more or less metaphysical?

“Music is the melody whose text is the world.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Obviously: For better or worse.

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Can you get more upbeat?

“The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement.” Karl Popper

And there will be casualties.

“Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” Karl Popper

Let’s call them objectivists. Or, sure, nihilists.

“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

My kind of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

[b]Simon Singh

Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.[/b]

And then some.

All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.

If only in the either/or world.

An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. “How interesting,” observed the astronomer, “all Scottish sheep are black!” To which the physicist responded, “No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!” The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, “In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.”

And even that might have been painted.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

Let’s just leave it at that, okay?

…if N is large enough, it is virtually impossible to deduce p and q from N, and this is perhaps the most beautiful and elegant aspect of the RSA asymmetric cipher.

Anyone here disagree?

Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that ‘the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it’. He then argued that the possible prize of eternal happiness has an infinite value and that the probability of entering heaven by leading a virtuous life, no matter how small, is certainly finite. Therefore, according to Pascal’s definition, religion was a game of infinite excitement and one worth playing, because multiplying an infinite prize by a finite probability results in infinity.

You know, leaving out, among other things, theodicy.