a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Terry Pratchett

The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, What about me? and you can just hear the universe replying, Well, what about you?[/b]

Either that or it just snickers.

Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

For example, how to do it.

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.

The banality of it, as it were.

I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.

That or some ideal.

Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.

If not lots and lots of times.

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called ‘the people’. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.

We should all be so lucky.

[b]Joseph Heller

There was no way of really knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of really knowing anything.[/b]

Of course I already knew that.

Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer his men for any target available.

From a distance as it were.

That’s what Paradise is—never knowing the difference.

Or never even knowing there could be one.

Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.

Of course: America the Beautiful!

Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him.

One reason: Because they were ordered to.

Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.

Cue the pugil sticks.

[b]Nein

In the future, friends, we’ll all ignore social media over the holidays. And go back to ignoring our loved ones.[/b]

Eyeball to eyeball as it were.

Discontent. Everyone’s favorite season.

Indeed, why wouldn’t it be?

Locked and Loaded. Fire and Fury. Publish and Perish.

You know, if you’re a liberal.

Philosophy students. Discovering that the point is not to understand the world. But to change your major.

If, for example, you want to earn a living.

The problem with answers: the questions.
The problem with questions: the answers.

Let’s file this one under, “some things never change”.

May cooler warheads prevail.

At least through the Olympics.

[b]C.G. Jung

Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.[/b]

Let’s call this, among other things, the first person subjunctive frame of mind.

There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.

If only up in the clouds of abstraction.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Of course: Not counting yours and mine.

For better to come, good must stand aside.

What then does that say about best?

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

And how far can that be from the mystery of existence itself?
Not that we’ll ever know.

I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.

Perhaps, but from my point of view, you may as well aspire to be a unicorn.

[b]Allen Ginsberg

Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?[/b]

And then [for some] 24 hours a day.

The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

And, back then, that was saying something.

All these books are published in Heaven.

Though not necessarily yours.

Sanity – a trick of agreement.

Not unlike insanity. My own for example.

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you’re twice as aware of the rug.

Probably a “Sixties” thing. But point taken.

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene.

That describe anyone here?

[b]Ali Smith

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile.[/b]

You’re wondering of course if I would go this far.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google…Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

I’m wondering of course if you would go this far.

I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

On the other hand, isn’t that normal now?

Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them.

Especially this one: youtu.be/cvChjHcABPA

And which comes first…what we see or how we see it?

Obviously: Yes.

How are you feeling? Mrs. Rock said.
I’m okay, George said. I think it’s because I don’t think I am.
You’re okay because you don’t think you’re okay? Mrs. Rock said.
Feeling, George said. I think I’m okay because I don’t think I’m feeling.

Let’s explore the distinction.
You know ,“out in the world”.

[b]Stephen Greenblatt

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.[/b]

And, really, how much has changed?

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Thank God?

What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

You know, if Don Trump is reelected.

I am, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, an Epicurean.

Just ask his slaves.

…at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.

Anyone doubt this?

Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.

Let’s bring that back.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Happiness is always a plan B.[/b]

And then all the way to Z.

I love people. It’s humankind that I loathe.

Let’s decide: Genes or memes?

First as tragedy. Then as farce. Then as 2018 where we won’t be able to tell tragedy from farce.

Me, I’ve never been able to. Here, for example.

The world’s biggest environmental problem is that there are only 5 oceans, 7 continents, and nearly 8 billion idiots.

Still only 1 God though.

In the beginning there was Beauty. Then we tried to define it.

Some even succeeding.

Hold me like we’re painted by Chagall.

Or, sure, by Dali.

[b]Ben Goldacre

In the past, medicalization has been portrayed as something that doctors inflict on a passive and un-suspecting world - an expansion of the Medical Empire. But in reality, it seems that these reductionist bio-medical stories can appeal to us all, because complex problems often have depressingly-complex causes, and the solutions can be taxing, and unsatisfactory. [/b]

And we’ve been leaving it to the experts ever since.

…in 2008, shortly after being elected President, Barack Obama demonstrated to many academics and doctors that he had a clear understanding of the deep problems in health care, by committing to spend $1 billion on head-to-head trials of commonly used treatments, in order to find out which is best. In return he was derided by right-wing critics as ‘anti-industry’.

By contrast, what has Don Trump demonstrated here?

If your drug didn’t win overall in your trial, you can chop up the data in lots of different ways, to try and see if it won in a subgroup: maybe it works brilliantly in Chinese men between fifty-six and seventy-one. This is as stupid as playing ‘Best of three … Best of five…’ And yet it is commonplace.

Probably an “industry” thing.

Nutritionists are alternative therapists, but have somehow managed to brand themselves as men and women of science. Their errors are much more interesting than those of the homeopaths, because they have a grain of real science to them, and that makes them not only more interesting, but also more dangerous, because the real threat from cranks is not that their customers might die – there is the odd case, although it seems crass to harp on about them – but that they systematically undermine the public’s understanding of the very nature of evidence.

Not unlike the folks here who rely almost entirely on the “evidence” inside their head.

…people who are incompetent suffer a dual burden: not only are they incompetent, but they may also be too incompetent to assay their own incompetence, because the skills which underlie an ability to make a correct judgement are the same as the skills required to recognise a correct judgement.

Wouldn’t you just know that would be the way it is.

Classically, cosmetics companies will take highly theoretical, textbookish information about the way that cells work—the components at a molecular level or the behavior of cells in a glass dish—and then pretend it’s the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. “This molecular component,” they say, with a flourish, “is crucial for collagen formation.” And that will be perfectly true (along with many other amino acids which are used by your body to assemble protein in joints, skin, and everywhere else), but there is no reason to believe that anyone is deficient in it or that smearing it on your face will make any difference to your appearance. In general, you don’t absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity, you do not get fat, nor do you start farting.

Come on, this shit only works because there millions it will work on.

when i was kid, I wrote a story about a king who had everything who then found a lucky penny. I guess I liked irony early. Boring enough?

Boring? Sure.
Mundane? Not even close. :blush:

Haha

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.[/b]

Maybe back then, but nowadays anything goes.

Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.

Cue the philosopher’s rebuttal.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

Maybe we’re not supposed to.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

Then we kick it up to the next generation.

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.

Now all we need is an actual context.

Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down.

Either that or slowly wither away.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Foucault: Misery loves company
Lacan: Misery loves misery
Sartre: Misery loves nothingness
Camus: Misery loves me[/b]

Of course none of them are miserable now. One would imagine.

Hegel: The pleasure of not
Schopenhauer: The agony of no
Bataille: The sorrowful pain of something
Beckett: The joyful pain of nothing

Let’s decide if this matters.

Idealism: Think, produce
Materialism: Work, produce
Existentialism: Put on airs, have a coffee

Now that’s progress.

Instagram: Tell us what you like and we’ll show you the right ads
Me: Antonioni films, lyric poetry, the early writings of Jacques Derrida
Instagram: You can get a hearty breakfast at Burger King!

Close enough, right?

I would have been a philosophy major, but I couldn’t understand
a) Plato’s Sophist
b) Frege’s predicate calculus
c) why I should take a vow of poverty

That makes [at least] two of us.

2016: Robots are taking our factory jobs!
2017: Robots are taking our clerical jobs!
2018: iPhone X is taking our philosophers’ jobs!

Someone explain this please.

[b]Paul Valéry

Stupidity is not my strong point.[/b]

Now that’s clever.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

We can now narrow this down to yes, no, maybe.

…the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.

Indeed, a really, really big one.

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

Fortunately, for all practical purposes, this is meaningless.

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

It may well never fill up.

Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

How might we actually confirm this?

[b]Celeste Ng

Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things.[/b]

Ironically enough this may well be true.

Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

And then there are those who will knock it over on purpose.

Everything, she had come to understand, was something like infinity.

On the other hand, what is infinity something like?

…wasn’t until he heard the horror in the teacher’s voice…that he realized he was supposed to be embarrassed; the next time it happened, he had learned his lesson and turned red right away.

Or even shrieked from time to time.

Most? What does that mean?

More than the least for starters.

Most communities just happen; the best are planned.

Not unlike the worst.

[b]Naomi Alderman

It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.[/b]

It does sometimes come to that.

One of them says, Why did they do it?
And the other answers, Because they could.
That is the only answer there ever is.

In, for example, this godforsaken world.

This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was.

Obviously: Just make something up.

The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.

If just barely at times.

The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy that land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

For example, try to forget Don Trump.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.

Oh, it’s there all right. And not just in Hollywood.

[b]Mary Roach

…freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer.[/b]

That shouldn’t surprise us. One for the Father, one for the Son and one for the Holy Ghost.

Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input thoughts and feelings.

Explaing what exactly?

Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it’s burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to. McCabe’s policy is to honor the wishes of the family over the wishes of the dead. Willed body program coordinator’s feel similarly. ‘I’ve had kids object to their dad’s wishes [to donate],’ says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. 'I tell them, "Do what’s best for you. You’re the one who has to live with it.

Let’s resolve this.

He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family’s yard.

Is this really as crazy as it sounds?

We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.

I know: How comforting.

For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or “gross lab,” as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often swathe the cadavers in gauze and encourage students to unwrap as they go, part by part.

And then there’s the objectification of the living.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy is important because without it no one would even be asking questions like “is philosophy important?”[/b]

Let alone this: “How important is philosophy?”

One thing to keep in mind in politics is that everyone to the right of you is morally corrupt, and everyone to the left of you is childishly naive.

This has now almost nearly been proven scientifically.

I’ve heard that people tell lies like 20 times a day. But it’s probably 99% because people ask how your day is going, and it’s considered rude to say that thoughts of death always lurk in the dark places of your mind.

Indeed, that’s why we come here, right?

The greatest trick the Capitalists ever pulled was renaming “obeying the property owning class” to “freedom”.

I know: The last Communist.

Remember friends, you cannot use shallow hedonism to flee from your nihilistic despair.

On the contrary, you can use anything that works.

Remember, death comes at any moment, so don’t waste your life worrying about whether or not you are wasting your life.

On the other hand, are you?

[b]George Berkeley

If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.[/b]

I know that I do.

The only things we perceive are our perceptions.

If true, is this the beginning or the end of philosophy?

From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.

Which just begs the question: Is God a solipsist?

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves–that we have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

Upon the whole…or considerably short of it.

He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.

He would have to be, right?

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

He wondered: What on earth prompted that?