a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

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?

[b]Jordan B. Peterson

I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.[/b]

How about the other way around? And whose rendition of one or the other?

What is your friend: the things you know, or the things you don’t know. First of all, there’s a lot more things you don’t know. And second, the things you don’t know is the birthplace of all your new knowledge! So if you make the things you don’t know your friend, rather than the things you know, well then you’re always on a quest in a sense. You’re always looking for new information in the off chance that somebody who doesn’t agree with you will tell you something you couldn’t have figured out on your own! It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. It’s the antithesis of opinionated.

In, for example, the either/or world.

[b]If you can’t understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences.

For example if someone is making everyone around them miserable and you’d like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.[/b]

Or even not including themselves.

If you fulfill your obligations everyday you don’t need to worry about the future.

Let’s just say this sounds more profound than it probably is.

Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say “Well it’s only symbolic that women are nature”, it’s like no, it’s not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can’t get more like nature than that, in fact it’s the very definition of nature.

I know: Let’s reconcile this with the way the world actually is.

You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.

Let’s file this one under, “things that shrinks say”.

[b]tiny nietzsche

my aesthetic is denying you exist[/b]

Or [if I’m lucky]: your aesthetic is denying I exist.

it’s taking forever to die

Me, I can’t remember that far back.

I hope I’m not like this already.

You tell me.

I hate months that end in january.

Or: I hate years that end in december.

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

Now that’s precocious.

what if mercury was in retrograde the whole time?

What if the Big Bang was?

[b]Anatole France

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another.[/b]

Or certainly something like this.

I sought out the laws which govern nature, solid or ethereal, and after much pondering I perceived that the Universe had not been formed as its pretended Creator would have us believe; I knew that all that exists, exists of itself and not by the caprice of Iahveh; that the world is itself its own creator and the spirit its own God. Henceforth I despised Iahveh for his imposture, and I hated him because he showed himself to be opposed to all that I found desirable and good: liberty, curiosity, doubt.

Clearly, one man’s opinion.

Yet, every now and then, there would pass a young girl, slender, fair and desirable, arousing in young men a not ignoble desire to possess her, and stirring in old men regrets for ecstasy not seized and now forever past.

In other words, some things never change.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

Unless of course it did.

Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.

By definition as it were.

There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science.
What are they? asked Cotta.
Ignorance and folly, replied Aristaeus.

Cue among others Robert Mueller.

[b]Neil Gaiman

What’s the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you’ve actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?
There isn’t one.
Oh. I thought maybe there was.[/b]

Let’s think one up.

This is crazy, said Shadow.
Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.

Indeed, we have a few Shadows here.

Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. ‘Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.’

On the other hand, for all practical purposes, it’s gone.

She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes ‘plum-blossom’ at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.

Still, that’s one more than some have.

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, “He’s an old soppy really, just poke him if he’s a nuisance,” and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

A few people like this too.

Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead.

You either get this or you don’t.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

Our life is made by the death of others.[/b]

Let’s try to pin down what this may or may not mean.

He who thinks little errs much…

Let’s try to pin down what this ought or ought not to mean.

My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.

On the other hand, fuck the plants.

He who does not oppose evil…commands it to be done.

The way that we perceive their evil, in other words, not the way that they perceive ours.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

And he who loves theory over practice…?

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Among other things, so?

[b]Terry Pratchett

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.[/b]

Don’t you just hate that?

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

Expect a discount.

It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country, he read. This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.

And not just on the battlefield.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Going postal we call it.

History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.

Imagine then the history of Trumpworld. And not just in the shitholes.

The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.

Unless it dawns on you.

[b]so sad today

i miss people i never even liked in the first place[/b]

Nope, not yet.

there are two kinds of people in this world and they’re both wrong

Need I remind you: About what?

we only have one president in this country and it’s money

Remember when it was not that way? Me neither.

is being alive a meme?

Naturally.

annoyed that i had to be born and annoyed that i have to die

Of course she’s just paraphrasing, among others, Woody Allen.

je suis a shithole

Perhaps, but she’s not living in one.

[b]Joseph Heller

You’ve got to have a God. Without God, you might turn to something really crazy, like witchcraft, or religion.[/b]

Or, sure, philosophy.

Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor.

As well he should.

Help him!
Help who?
Help the bombardier!
I’m a bombardier.
Help him, help him!
Help who?

On the other hand, are we obligated morally to help him?

You’ve got flies in your eyes. That’s why you can’t see them.

Still, better flies than bees. Or mosquitos.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his ‘Every Change Is for the Worse’ should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

We’re way past there of course. Here order masquerades as chaos. Only theirs and not ours.

It’s the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed. But here, finally, he can become free.

Let’s nail down how this works in Trumpworld.