a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” Blaise Pascal[/b]

Let’s pin this down: how light?

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” Blaise Pascal

Except you, right?

“Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.” Bertolt Brecht

Remember when that was actually true?

“Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.” Bertolt Brecht

That’ll be the day.

“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.” Voltaire

For some, even from themselves.

“He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.” Voltaire

And with groots to boot.

Do you enjoy talking to yourself ?

[b]Allen Ginsberg

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.[/b]

A crime or not.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-
man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations!

Must be a poet thing.

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Instead of, for example, kindles.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.

On the other hand [for some]: America I used to be a fascist when I was a kid and I am so sorry.

This is the one and only
firmament; therefore
it is the absolute world.
There is no other world.
The circle is complete.
I am living in Eternity.
The ways of this world
are the ways of Heaven.

That works for me. Just not all the time.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

Indeed: youtu.be/tDPAAR956sg

Doesn’t everyone?

Exorcising/purging? a cathartic activity for one…

[b]Ali Smith

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?[/b]

I’d never want to. That’s where all the best distractions are.

The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

The art of pausing? If not the science.

It was all: it was nothing: it was more than enough.

It was none of the above.

But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They’re foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

Let’s blame it all on that selfish gene. That and everything else.

And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

Cue Heaven?

I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.

Or: I want to be dead.

[b]Stephen Greenblatt

Libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions.[/b]

You know, like philosophy forums.

Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.

Set to topple over from time to time.

In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Like there are other options.

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.

Let’s figure this out: How little is enough?

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

Just not out loud. You know, in public.

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure – an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation – characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet.

So, what’s your contribution?

[b]Ben Goldacre

Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.[/b]

Hell, we’ve got one of them here. Right, James?

The American Academy of Pediatrics officially supports breastfeeding, but receives about half a million dollars from Ross, manufacturers of Similac infant formula.

It’s probably just a coincidence.

More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences.

They couldn’t sell it though if not for the millions who are willing to buy it.

It is clear from the evidence presented in this book that the pharmaceutical industry does a biased job of disseminating evidence – to be surprised by this would be absurd – whether it is through advertising, drug reps, ghostwriting, hiding data, bribing people, or running educational programs for doctors.

Yes, but only until Don Trump drains the swamp.

There are many ways in which journalists can mislead a reader with science: they can cherry-pick the evidence, or massage the statistics; they can pit hysteria and emotion against cold, bland statements from authority figures.

Let’s call this [for the time being] politics.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction…

Bullshit. Someone ought to write a book about it.

[b]Sad Socrates

Those who embrace the infinite have learned how to wait.[/b]

Hmm. Would someone here like to teach me?

Angst is for white males, but anxiety is for everyone.

Me, I’m saddled with both.

Hope keeps despair entertained.

In other words, less and less.

Luck is not to blame for humanity destroying everything.

Fate then?

Polls show that everything sucks.

Polls in particular.

I really look forward to our collective insanity.

Let’s decide if [here] the wait is over.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. [/b]

And then chop everyone else down to fit in turn. Right, Mr Objectivist?

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.

Or, perhaps, more to the point, what does he believe now?

…no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death.

So, does that settle it? Or shall we consider for example what the Nazis loved.

It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.

Can this be taken too far?

The human soul needs beauty more than bread.

Let’s decide if he actually means this.

Be a good animal, true to your instincts.

In other words, for some, Satyr’s instincts.
[that is still true, right?]

[b]Paul Valéry

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.[/b]

Indeed, I remember when it was once inborn in me. So, yes, there’s still hope for the rest of you.

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

One just feels this instinctively, as it were.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Or, at the very least, much further away from being true.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

For example, if you let it.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

When, for example, you actually learn this.

I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.

Aside perhaps from insisting that others agree.

[b]Celeste Ng

People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.[/b]

Not unlike we of them.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

In other words, what if it really was like that?

And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps—and this thought chokes her—that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.

If you’re lucky, it’s just a mood.

…the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them.

In other words, roll the dice.

Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.

Indeed, but why stop there?

You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.

But only if you’re really, really lucky.

[b]Mary Roach

The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It’s okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.[/b]

Let’s start with the fact that this is all true.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot.

Let’s file this one under, “there ought to be a law”.

Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, “old liquified placenta” to “quiet a patient whose hair stands up without cause”, “clear liquid feces” for worms (“the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation”), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema”.

Let’s file this one under, “whatever works”.

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don’t find “anal” on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn’t really use words like anal. Unless they have to.

The connotations no doubt.

As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.

Let’s decide if it’s worth it.

In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled “Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention,” Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.

Crash test cadavers? It never even occured to me.