a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Ali Smith

The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.[/b]

Anyone here want to be mine?

…this is before we’re living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library…

Among others things that’s absolutely out of the question.

What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don’t know, Brooksie, he said, I don’t remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you’d decided to buy it.

Amazon?

… always looking off to the side. But that’s good too. It’s good, to be seen past, as if you’re not the only one, as if everything isn’t happening just to you. Because you’re not. And it isn’t.

You’d think that by now this would just be common sense.

remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf

Let’s keep this going.

The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its colour, it’s not because its time is up and it’s dying, it’s because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf’s been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change colour in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it’s filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that’s coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff which seals it against cold and bacteria. Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds. Clever trees.

Do the trees know this?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Laugh with Kierkegaard, at Hegel, and in spite of Heidegger.[/b]

On the count of three?

It’s not you, it’s your teleological suspension of the ethical.

Sans God as it were.

Capitalism: Capital accumulation is paramount
Late Capitalism: Capital accumulation is paramount
Late Late Capitalism: Capital accumulation is paramount
Late Late Late Capitalism: Have you gotten the message yet?

No, but the Republicans have.

Introductory Critical Theory: Disrupt everything!
Advanced Critical Theory: Except my classroom!

He’s got to draw the line somewhere, right?

The Trump administration has prohibited all US government agencies from using seven words and phrases:
Aufhebung
language game
abyss
Dasein
monad
will to power
the Being of beings

They mean dasein of course.

[man and woman in a museum stand in front of a photograph of a tree]
Man: “That’s a tree.”

Based on a true story.

[b]Leonard Susskind

Before World War II, when physics was primarily a European enterprise, physicists used the Greek language to name particles. Photon, electron, meson, baryon, lepton, and even hadron originated from the Greek. But later brash, irreverent, and sometimes silly Americans took over, and the names lightened up. Quark is a nonsense word from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but from that literary high point, things went downhill. The distinctions between the different quark types are referred to by the singularly inappropriate term flavor. We might have spoken of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, cherry, and mint chocolate chip quarks but we don’t. The six flavors of quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. At one point, bottom and top were considered too risqué, so for a brief time they became truth and beauty.[/b]

Figures, right?

At some point we have to give up and say that’s just the way it is. Or, not give up and push on.

In other words, before, one by one, we die.

From time to time, we hear physicists claim that Einstein didn’t understand Quantum Mechanics and therefore wasted his time with naive classical theories. I very much doubt that this is true. His arguments against Quantum Mechanics were extremely subtle, culminating in one of the most profound and most cited papers in all of physics. My guess is that Einstein was disturbed by the same thing that bothered the slow student. How could the ultimate theory of reality be about nothing more concrete than our own degree of surprise at the outcome of an experiment?

Anyone here disturbed too?

Quantum mechanics can be appreciated, to some degree, on a purely qualitative level. But mathematics is what brings its beauty into sharp focus. We have tried to make this amazing body of work fully accessible to mathematically literate nonphysicists.

As for the mathematically illiterate? Let’s not go there, okay?

…one of the key features of a black hole: different observers have paradoxically different perceptions of the same events.

Theoretically as it were.

The units that we use reflect our own size. The origin of the meter seems to be that it was used to measure rope or cloth: it’s about the distance from a person’s nose to his or her outstretched fingers. A second is about as long as a heartbeat. And a kilogram is a nice weight to carry around. We use these units because they are convenient, but fundamental physics doesn’t care that much about us.

For all we know it doesn’t care about anything at all.

[b]Stephen Greenblatt

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.[/b]

Right, like it can’t be a brutal combination of both.

Poems are difficult to silence.

In other words the few that [nowadays] are actually read.

The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.

And not just here.

The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.

A stretched point, sure, but there it is.

[b]There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.

Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.[/b]

A stretched point, sure, but there it is.

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.

Indeed, and how hard can that be?

[b]Ben Goldacre

The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is sponsored by Coca-Cola.[/b]

Wow, I think he really means it.

Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.

Anyone here not clear about that?

Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody…how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.

Mind over matter indeed. On the other hand, mind being matter.
Go figure…

Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected—not to mention true—that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.

Cue “immortality, salvation and divine justice”. No “basic stuff” taught in school for how they work either.

George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.

Starting with, for example, BO.

It seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don’t understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms—its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world—and channeled into infantile fantasies. “Big pharma is evil,” goes the line of reasoning; “therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism.” This is probably not helpful.

Let’s file this one under, “in one ear and out the other”. You know, for all practical purposes.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.[/b]

If only all the way to the end.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

It goes without saying that men have their own rendition.

Nobody knows you.
You don’t know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?

If even that.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

Right up until you live to regret it.

I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.

Even better: discovering how you hate them.

We fucked a flame into being.

Being what, he pondered.

[b]Paul Valéry

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “if you say so”.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

Like we can actually calibrate the distinction.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

You know, in some circles.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

Not counting the exceptions of course.

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself.

No doubt as God intended.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Here we go again: dasein.

[b]Celeste Ng

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.[/b]

Not to mention all the possibilities in between.

The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you.

And, every once in a while, right down to the bone.

It bothers you, doesn’t it? Mia said suddenly. I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose.

As you might well imagine, that has never once occured to me.

It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted. A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?

He thought: Something like that.

All of that will be gone by morning. Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.

Or, perhaps, even worse, they will have figured it all out.

I don’t have a plan, I’m afraid, but then, no one really does, no matter what they say.

I once thought that I had one.

[b]God

Only irony can save you now.[/b]

My kind of God.

Wrong. I dislike your country immensely.

He means America, Don. Well, the red states anyway.

America was always one of those ideas that looked better on paper.

On the other hand, what if it really is the best of all possible worlds? If only on this planet.

I should never have brought Junior into the family business.

Let alone the Holy Ghost.

Fuck you, racist.

Race and Heaven: New thread?

Life is a small minority of total assholes ruining it for the vast majority of partial assholes.

Now He admits it.

[b]Mary Roach

For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.[/b]

In that case, some here have been up for days.

To quantify the “benefit” side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million.

In, for example, Monopoly money.

Squatting upon the floor of the room, without any perceptible effort he passed into the hollow of his hand the contents of the rectum . . . , wrote the anonymous writer’s physician in a letter printed in one of Fletcher’s books. The excreta were in the form of nearly round balls, and left no stain on the hand. There was no more odour to it than there is to a hot biscuit. So impressive, so clean, was the man’s residue that his physician was inspired to set it aside as a model to aspire to. Fletcher adds in a footnote that similar [dried] specimens have been kept for five years without change, hopefully at a safe distance from the biscuits.

Can you do this?

On the way here, I stopped in the office of a block captain who wanted to tell me about an inmate who was caught with two boxes of staples, a pencil sharpener, sharpener blades, and three jumbo binder rings in his rectum. He became known as “OD,” for Office Depot. They never found out what he intended to do with the stuff.

Like I always say, anything can be rationalized.

People blanch to see “fish meal” or “meat meal” on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal–which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones–most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else.

Any blanchers here?

From time to time, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. You just get a foamy froth, says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray, Bourland adds.

You didn’t know this either, right?

[b]Kip S. Thorne

Some segments of this book may be rough going. That’s the nature of real science. It requires thought. Sometimes deep thought. But thinking can be rewarding. You can just skip the rough parts, or you can struggle to understand.[/b]

And who among us hasn’t grappled with that? And not just with Kant and Hegel.

Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life?

Among others, he’s talking about me. Me going after your established truths. That and you going after mine.

The French translation of ‘a black hole has no hair’ is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail.

“un trou noir n’a pas de cheveux”
You tell me.

Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein’s relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It’s somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself.

Of course that’s just common knowledge now.

The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second.

Let’s calculate a trip to the nearest star.

Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave. When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity.

Let’s calculate the point of dasein here.

[b]Existential Comics

USA: we want to spread democracy!
Me: oh good, let’s spread it to the workplace.
USA: i just added u to the terrorist watchlist u god damn commie[/b]

A true story. Or it might just as well be.

Remember, true wisdom lies in knowing how to grow your own brand.

Or knowing how to own your own bank.

Libertarian: “as you can clearly see by looking at these charts, humanity is actually more free when a tiny number of people control everything.”

You know, whether they want to be or not.

An economist is someone who thinks formulas are responsible for oppressing the working class.

Supply side formulas in particular.

Humanity is funny because some people devote their entire lives to, like, swimming as fast as possible or something, and everyone finds this extremely normal.

Even give some medals.

Nietzsche was the kind of guy who’d have a black and white photo of himself as his Twitter icon, and get in three day fights with anyone who didn’t think his tweets were deep.

Of course that describes most everyone here.

[b]Anatole France

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.[/b]

I promise not to ask you what this mean if you promise not to tell me.

The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

The above average one too.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

Which ones haven’t you read?

Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

Whoppers in particular.

We chase dreams and embrace shadows.

Occasionally even our own.

The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.

Or thinks that he has.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Goodbyes are overrated.[/b]

Right along side, for example, introductions.
You know, when that’s true.

Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does … Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.

I know that mine are.

Can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.

Well, until the next beginning.

I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

Even if they don’t even know it.

I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, There’s no masturbation in the DC Universe. To which my reaction was, Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.

Next up: the Marvel Universe.

Can’t make an omelet without killing a few people.

If that’s true, I must be doing it wrong.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.[/b]

Might I be so bold as to inquire: “See what?”

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Might I be so bold as to inquire: “Resist what?”

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

And then either live to regret it or not.

As you cannot do what you want,
Want what you can do.

Tried that of course. And, I suspect, so have you.

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

Though not necessarily in the way that you imagine.

The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

More or less as it were.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I am undrunk again.[/b]

I’ve been there myself in fact.

they murder horses, don’t they?

That and lots of other terrible things.

If I were invisible, not much would change.

If I were invisible, a hell of a lot would change. Not that I ever will be, of course.

nietzsche
age 8: there is no santa claus
age 9: there is no easter bunny
age 10: life is meaningless

I know: What took him so long?

I reset my factory settings

Or maybe they reset them for me.

a cigarette burn to remember you by

Ever had the occasion to say that?

[b]Terry Pratchett

I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.[/b]

Clever by half?

That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t you then.

For some of us not even close.

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.

You of me more or less than me of you.

Despite rumor, Death isn’t cruel—merely terribly, terribly good at his job.

Hasn’t missed one yet, right?

Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

Gigantic even.

People aren’t just people, they are people surrounded by circumstances.

Indeed, and someday you might even begin to grasp the actual implications of that.

[b]so sad today

one time i was happy and it made the next day worse[/b]

Isn’t it supposed to?

when i’m by myself i’m almost ok

Hell, I’ve come even closer than that.

all i want for xmas is for my death to be quick, painless and in my sleep

Instead, another one has come and gone.

love watching you pretend to be an activist

I loved watching myself be one too.

everything happens for a stupid reason

Not excluding this of course.

no offense but i’m glad you’re all going to die too

No offense but fuck you.

[b]Joseph Heller

He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.[/b]

Let’s decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy.

Let’s hope that by now they have worked it out. Well, if that’s even possible.

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.

Sure, if you don’t believe in God, why not hers?

The years are too short, the days are too long.

I know: You wouldn’t think that was possible.

To pray for their safety was to pray for the death of other young men he did not even know.

That’s how it works alright.

The enemy, retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.

Some things are only there to be retorted.

[b]C.G. Jung

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.[/b]

Why would it be any other way?

Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call “I” behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.

Trust me: It’s actually worse than that.

The Gods have become our diseases.

And now [for some] the No Gods.

The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.

Yeah, I used to believe that too.

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.

In other words, you may well be next.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

Still, no way in hell it will be mine.