a thread for mundane ironists

[b]André Malraux

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.[/b]

Tell that to the artists. And not just the ones already dead.

Be careful—with quotations, you can damn anything.

And not much hasn’t been damned on this thread, right?

In literature, as in Life, one is often astonished by what is chosen by others.

Quite.

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

God for example.

I seek the crucial region of the soul where absolute evil and fraternity clash.

Anyone here able to find it?

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

Rather sexist of course but point taken

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“It is harder to release a nation from servitude than to enslave a free nation.” Simon Bolivar[/b]

A hell of a lot harder. If ever.

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Immanuel Kant

Transcendentally as it were.

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.” Immanuel Kant

In other words, his whole.

“What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.” André Malraux

And, increasingly, of late, Woman.

“Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.” Aristotle

Think about, among other things, the implications of that.

“First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” Epictetus

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

[b]Terry Pratchett

This time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.[/b]

Well, most times.

A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven…Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She’d read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people’s houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can’t tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family.

I guess that’s why they call them fairy tales.

It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes.
This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.

Let’s confirm this.

If I were you, I’d sue my face for slander.

Anyone here ever done that?

…it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done.

What say you, Mr. Objectivist?

He’s out of his depth on a wet pavement.

I know what some of you are thinking: How wet?

[b]C.G. Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.[/b]

Fat chance, right?

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

Sounds like me, doesn’t it? Unless of course it sounds like you.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

That or those intent on imposing their own on all the rest of us.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Wow, let’s bring this “down to earth”.

Sensation tell us a thing is.
Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

And then the part about conflicting goods.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

May I offer you a suggestion? Try this yourself.

[b]Joseph Heller

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.[/b]

Cue [among others] Woody Allen. And, sure, on any given day, me.

…it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

Worse however are those who have an answer for everything.

The important thing is to keep them pledging, he explained to his cohorts. It doesn’t matter whether they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what ‘pledge’ and ‘allegiance’ mean.

Or keep them standing. And not just for the national anthem.

They were the most depressing group of people Yossarian had ever been with. They were always in high spirits.

Some truly get this and some truly don’t.

Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

A dope. You know, like me.

It’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.

On the other hand, isn’t that why you’re here?

[b]Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.[/b]

So, anyone here not governed?

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.

Nope, not yet.
That is still true, right?

Property is theft!

Until of course you own some.

When deeds speak, words are nothing.

Besides, what can go wrong?

Nevertheless, it is with the help of these metaphysical toys that governments have been established since the beginning of the world, and it is with their help that we shall come to resolve the enigma of politics, if we are willing to make the slightest effort to do so. I hope I will be forgiven, then, for labouring this point, as one does in teaching the rudiments of grammar to children.

Even if true, is it still farfetched?

As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.

Sounds about right. Only more or less in theory.

[b]Existential Comics

Everyone is obsessed with physical appearances, but remember: True beauty lies in your boundless, untamed fury at the absurdity of existence.[/b]

Of course that’s just common sense.

There are two ways to satisfy human wants: aquire more, or desire less. One of the two directions terminates at infinity.

Gee, I wonder which one?

Never forget, Capitalism is the reason women’s clothing doesn’t have pockets. If outfits were controlled by the people, it would be pockets for one and all.

Can this actually be true?

David Hume’s ideas were so stupid, but so hard to disprove, that everyone had to do philosophy for real just to shut him up, thus ushering in the modern age.

Can this actually be true?

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the unstoppable rising tide of socialism, which will sweep across the Earth and create a new world order.

If only [so far] in North Korea.

[b]Philosophy teaches us that there are five kinds of things:

  1. Platonic forms
  2. Numbers/dreams
  3. Things that don’t exist
  4. Rocks and insects and stuff
  5. Other[/b]

You know, technically.

[b]Robin Wasserman

Don’t go looking in dark places, because dark things live there.[/b]

Of course, for some, that’s the whole point.

If you can’t remember something, did it really happen?

Yes and no. Just to play it safe.

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

That’s all it takes, alright.

Life is a physics problem. Bodies in motion.

And emotions? Is that all physics too?

And you know what? If there is a God, and it’s that same God who’s so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can’t get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.

Try that on Judgment Day.

You could love something and still understand it had ruined your life.

Not only that but again and again and again.

[b]Maurice Blanchot

We cannot do anything with an object that has no name.[/b]

Like calling it something will always make a difference.

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.

Does Schrödinger’s cat know this?

I went in; I closed the door. I sat down on the bed. Blackest space extended before me. I was not in this blackness, but at the edge of it, and I confess that it is terrifying. It is terrifying because there is something in it which scorns man and which man cannot endure without losing himself. But he must lose himself; and whoever resists will founder, and whoever goes forward will become this very blackness, this cold and dead and scornful thing in the very heart of which lives the infinite. This blackness stayed next to me, probably because of my fear: this fear was not the fear people know about, it did not break me, it did not pay any attention to me, but wandered around the room the way human things do. A great deal of patience is required if thought, when it has been driven down into the depths of the horrible, is to rise little by little and recognize us and look at us. But I still dreaded that look. A look is very different from what one might think, it has neither light nor expression nor force nor movement, it is silent, but from the heart of the strangeness its silence crosses worlds and the person who hears that silence is changed.

He’s right, you know. Whatever this means.

If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself.

Why not both then?

Even death is a power, a capacity. It is not a simple event that will happen to me, an objective and observable fact; here my power to be will cease, here I will no longer be able to be here. But death, insofar as it belongs to me and belongs to me alone, since no one can die my death in my stead or in my place, makes of this non-possibility, this impending future of mine, this relation to myself always open until my end, yet another power. Dying, I can still die, this is our sign as man.

Somewhere in here there’s a real death. And, sooner or later, yours.

Art is not religion, it doesn’t even lead to religion. But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.

In other words, art in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

[b]Simon Singh

The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.[/b]

I know, let’s call it “national security”. Though, sure, “big brother” still works.

…like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion.

Hosted by Don Trump and Pocahantus.

…if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed…

How worried should we be then?

Similarly, if you’re trying to prove something mathematically, it’s possible that no proof exists.

Indeed, we get that all the time here.

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Any youtube videos up yet?

Had the Arabs merely been familiar with the use of the mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, they would not warrant a significant mention in any history of cryptography. However, in addition to employing ciphers, the Arab scholars were also capable of destroying ciphers. They in fact invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key. While the cryptographer develops new methods of secret writing, it is the cryptanalyst who struggles to find weaknesses in these methods in order to break into secret messages. Arabian cryptanalysts succeeded in finding a method for breaking the monoalphabetic substitution cipher, a cipher that had remained invulnerable for several centuries.

Let’s connect the dots here to ISIS. If, of course, it can be done.

[b]B.F. Skinner

A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.[/b]

Not true at all. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The ‘ologies’ will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.

Considering how long society has been at it, you’d expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.[/b]

Clearly, some conditioned responses are more effective than others.

It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.

My guess: they call it something else.

…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

I wonder if he’s talking about me?

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.

And, as likely as not, only to stumble into another mob.

Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.

Capitalism. I mean, talk about conditioned responses!

[b]Philip Pullman

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he’d see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I’d ever done…I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn’t. There is none.[/b]

For a few, something to shoot for.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

Cue the “compatibilists”?
No, seriously.

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.

Indeed, maybe it is all just natural.

Can is not the same as must.
But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.

Please, don’t remind them.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

Let’s pin down how profound this is.

Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

Okay, but what about the ones that see no difference?

[b]The Dead Author

Amazing how the Muslim ban, purchasing a gun for every family member, and armed guards at elementary schools have ended violence in America.[/b]

Nothing kicks in though until the swamp is drained.

That feeling when someone calls critical thinking a “skill” as if it meant fact checking, playing chess, or plumbing and not ethics.

I know what you’re thinking: Don’t get me started.

Nihilism is important for reminding us that not worrying won’t make you happy either.

Let’s just say I’ve known exceptions.

The beauty of postmodern English is that “depressed”, “depressing”, and “depressive” have come mean different things, none of which is “having depression”.

Let’s just say I’ve known exceptions.

Plato and Socrates are like Bruce Wayne and Batman, if Batman’s superpowers are pedophilia and logical fallacies.

How outraged should we be?

Socrates taught me that it’s ok to rather be dead.

If not on principle.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.[/b]

I know. It’s parallel to mine.

Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calender, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

Sounds like something I’d say. You know, if I knew what it meant.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.

In that case, there must be three kinds of writing. And probalby a lot more.

The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don’t say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

It’s true that I’ve never met one that did.

Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.

Not unless you synchronize your watches.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates?

In other words, your guess is as good as mine.

[b]Mary Roach

Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work.[/b]

So he’s the one.

Constipation ran Elvis Presley’s life. Even his famous motto TCB— ‘Taking Care of Business’— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.

He’s still The King though.

Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young.

Yet more proof that God is a fucking genuis. Or so I’ve been told.

You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

Indeed, how many can say that?

There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.

Let’s decide what this explains.

If you found this book in the New Age section of your local bookstore, it was grossly misshelved, and you should put it down at once. If you found it while browsing Gardening, or Boats and Ships, it was also misshelved, but you might enjoy it anyway.

This one: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

[b]John Cage

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we’re overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We’ve gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?[/b]

Quite a jumble, isn’t it?

It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.

Quite a jumble, isn’t it?

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

Oh, sure they are.

Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don’t ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

Next up: the days of the week.

Nothing more then nothing can be said.
We make our lives by what we love.
Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.
Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: I take all the tones there are, leave out he one’s I don’t want, and use all the others. Satie said: When I was young, people told me; you’ll see when you’re fifty years old. Now I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing.
Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.
It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.
All I know about method is that when I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quit clear I know nothing.

And that’s all before breakfast.

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

Anyone else misunderstanding this?

[b]August Strindberg

…if you are afraid of loneliness, don’t get married…[/b]

Best to steer clear of everyone, he thought.

I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.

Of course: feeling ain’t doing.

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.

In other words [as likely as not], way, way, way “in your head”.

Those who won’t accept evil never get anything good.

Let’s just say that some take it too far.

He saw the cause of his unhappiness in the family–the family as a social institution, which does not permit the child to become an independent individual at the proper time.

More to the point [for some], if at all.

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

Well, at least he’s civilized.

[b]Neil Gaiman

She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.[/b]

Or the author does.

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Actually, at the time, I didn’t.

I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.

If only this could go without saying.

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.

Or, sure, three other things.

There are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.
They kill themselves, you mean? said Bod.
Indeed.
Does it work? Are they happier dead?
Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

And surely that includes here.

You’ll think this is a bit silly, but I’m a bit–well, I have a thing about birds.
What, a phobia?
Sort of.
Well, that’s the common term for an irrational fear of birds.
What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?

Are there rational reasons?

[b]God

You’re all unimaginably fucked.[/b]

Some up the ass, I suspect.

Anybody have any theories why I’m allowing Trump to continue? I’m curious Myself.

Uh, You’re not omnipotent?

Someone should do something maybe.

On the other hand, not everyone can do anything.

I’ve been doing fake news literally since Day One.

In other words, since the day He created Himself.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool Robert Mueller.

No, but you can fire him.
Well, God willing of course.

Well I, for one, am curious to see how this all turns out.

He means the tax vote no doubt.

[b]André Malraux

I’ve been very near death. And you can’t imagine the wild elation of those moments—it’s the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it—when one meets death face to face.[/b]

You know, in a perfect world.

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forest, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men’s dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.

On the other hand, that day may not come at all. So, whatever you do, don’t count on it.

No one can endure his own solitude.

Trust me: Some would not have it any other way.

If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?

For what one might ask.

The sons of torture victims make good terrorists.

A logic all its own as it were.

One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say.

Really, this works much the same way here too.