a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Naomi Alderman

We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.[/b]

How’s that working for you?

[b]The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn’t have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.

So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary’s time. He’d go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then… well, of course eventually he’d be running the whole office. It’s important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.[/b]

How’s that working for you?

It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.

Anyway, don’t forget to vote.

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent…But we don’t have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we’ve based our ideas on.

Cue the fucking idealists. One or another cure being worse than one or another disease.

It’s enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.

Next think you know they’re dumping her in a hospice.

Just like a man, she says. Does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say, always talking talking talking, interrupting his betters.

Just like a woman in other words. Only more of them.

[b]Mary Roach

Sudden loud noise triggers a cluster of split-second protective reflexes known as the startle pattern. You blink to protect your eyes, while your upper body swivels toward the sound to assess the threat. The arms bend and retract to the chest, the shoulders hunch, and the knees bend, all of which combine to make you a smaller, less noticeable target. Snapping the limbs in tight to the torso may also serve to protect your vital innards. You are your own human shield. Siddle says hunching may have evolved to protect the neck: a holdover from caveman days. A big cat stalking prey will jump the last twenty feet and come down on the back and shoulders and bite through the neck.[/b]

Cue Satyr?

Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.

Hell, it can be downright terrifying.

Téléclitoridienne means simply “female of the distant clitoris,” but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than “frigid.”

We need more words like that, don’t we?

…there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people’s saliva.

I never doubted it.

And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.

Among other things, no one will ever say that about me.

Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine and the Human Embryo, analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the subject that man was not a chicken.

So, do chickens have souls?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Enlightenment: Fact over fiction
Modernism: The facts are the fictions
Postmodernism: There are no facts; there are no fictions
Post-Postmodernism: It’s a fact that your fictions aren’t marketable[/b]

You knew that money would get in there somewhere.

To truly love wisdom you must
Kant: set it free
Hegel: set it free and watch it come back
Nietzsche: set it free, watch it come back, and kill it

And that’s before eternal recurrence.

Monday mornings I wake up, get a cup of coffee, and reflect on
Schelling: the infinite pain of thought
Kierkegaard: the haunting creep of unbounded anxiety
Kristeva: the abject horror of knowing I’m still alive
Žižek: how best to boost my sales on Amazon

Obviously: Kristeva.
If only now and then.

Judge a person by Voltaire: the questions they ask
Nietzsche: the questions they pretend not to answer
Heidegger: the strength of their conviction that a question asked is a question answered

Now all we need is an actual question.

Philosophy teaches you all the shortcuts, if by shortcuts you mean abyssal tumbles into aporetic voids.

Clearly, that’s what I’m here for.

Ontology: It is what it is
Epistemology: I know what I know
History: We know what it was
Politics: Whatever!

Then cue the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

[b]Jordan B. Peterson

You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.[/b]

On the other hand, money talks. That’s always true.

The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.

If, for example, you’re a fool.

Of course, my socialist colleagues and I weren’t out to hurt anyone – quite the reverse. We were out to improve things – but we were going to start with other people.

Just as they aim to start with you.

Don’t use language instrumentally.

On the other hande, try not to use language instrumentally.

There’s a class of things to be afraid of: it’s “those things that you should be afraid of”. Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You’re always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they’re not the gore type of horror movie. They’re always hinting at something that’s going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don’t know what’s out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it’s frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it’s a category, frightening things.

And we all know the one on top. Though it’s hardly ever the same thing.

The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.

And we all know the one on top. Though it’s hardly ever the same thing.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They’re about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.[/b]

Imagine then what that makes memes.

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick from purely social, psychological stress.

On the other hand, sick is sick.

The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.

Note to Satyr: Uh-oh.

In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.

ASAP as it were.

Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.

Men in particular.

if you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress, your health suffers.

Cue the postmodern world.

[b]Anatole France

Within every one of us there lives both a Don Quixote and a Sancho Panza to whom we hearken by turns; and though Sancho most persuades us, it is Don Quixote that we find ourselves obliged to admire…[/b]

Either him or [for some] Hannibal Lector.

I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.

Either that or [for some] the age of the dinosaurs.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

In other words, if they let you.

As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.

Cue the serious philosophers. Though not just here.

Nature teaches us to devour each other and gives us the example of all the crimes and all the vices which the social state corrects or conceals. We should love virtue; but it is well to know that this is simply and solely a convenient expedient invented by men in order to live comfortably together. What we call morality is merely a desperate enterprise, a forlorn hope, on the part of our fellow creatures to reverse the order of the universe, which is strife and murder, the blind interplay of hostile forces. She destroys herself, and the more I think of things, the more convinced I am that the universe is mad. Theologians and philosophers, who make God the author of Nature and the architect of the universe, show Him to us as illogical and ill-conditioned. They declare Him benevolent, because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit that His acts are atrocious. They attribute a malignity to him seldom to be found even in mankind. And that is how they get human beings to adore Him. For our miserable race would never lavish worship on just and benevolent deities from which they would have nothing to fear; they would feel only a barren gratitude for their benefits. Without purgatory and hell, your good God would be a mighty poor creature.

You either start here or you don’t. But who with any intelligence at all doesn’t finally end up here.

All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.

And then there are those who would rather revel in them.

[b]Neil Gaiman

The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.[/b]

More to the point, only the fool thinks he knows it all to tell.

One thing I’ve learned: you can know anything, it’s all there, you just have to find it.

Anyone here actually believe that?

They might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés.

Or groots.

The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself…That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.

Then you only need the balls to act on it.

I believe that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

So, do they live or die?

The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn’t want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

So don’t forget your binoculars.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

Why does the eye see more clearly when asleep than the imagination when awake?[/b]

In other words, if yours does.

He who wishes to be rich within a day, will be hanged within a year.

New thread: How might that still be applicable today?

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Point taken. Well, once I figure out what it is.

The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

Even though [as we all know] lots of things are.

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.

Try to imagine the world without dissimulation!
And not just [here and now] in the United States Senate.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Or counting his money.

[b]Terry Pratchett

The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it.[/b]

Into the wee hours of the morning for example.

…no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…

Unless perhaps dead is dead.

One day I’ll work out what it is you are saying, my lad, and then you’ll be in trouble.

Of course that could take years.

We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.

In the name of, for example, national security.

[b]The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That’s the advantage of space. It’s big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.

People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.

There’s nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there’s a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere. [/b]

And [so far] going all the way back to nothing at all. If you believe that story.

Multiple exclamation marks, he went on, shaking his head, are a sure sign of a diseased mind.

Not counting the times you will never have enough of them.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“One should always aim at being interesting, rather than exact.” Voltaire[/b]

Let’s at least agree that one can take this too far.

“The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.” Voltaire

No, not just the objectivists.

“Anyone who has to call himself a genius…isn’t.” Stephen King

Who else: Don Trump.

“All the darkness in the world can’t put out the light of one candle.” Confucius

Let’s file this one under, “it’s so deep it’s meaningless”.

“Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.” John Kenneth Galbraith

Let alone what they needed.

“Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Let’s pray that it is.

[b]Joseph Heller

He began to wonder with genuine concern just what sort of shithead the Pentagon had foisted on him.[/b]

Cue Colonel Haydon and the silver star.

Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all

Just following orders as it were.

[b]Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing Ping-Pong, and he was as good at playing Ping-Pong as he was at everything else. Everything Appleby did, he did well. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood, and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

I hate that son of a bitch, Yossarian growled.[/b]

This either resonates or it doesn’t.

Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose.

Next up: taxes.

He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.

THE end one suspects.

He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and bad.

He thought: That explains a lot.

[b]C.G. Jung

For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.[/b]

When, instead, neither are.

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.

How then?

But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?

Among others, he means me. And [occasionally] I agree.

Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Not counting the neurotic who don’t have one.

…the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

In the face of, among other things, mere not being.

What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.

Some examples please.

[b]Existential Comics

As Michel Foucault famously said, “Stuff is bad. Even way more bad than you’d think at first”.[/b]

Of course he was just paraphrasing Jacques Derrida.

Philosophy can only save us if it is the philosophy of Socrates: ruthlessly criticising the ruling class, and corrupting the youth by teaching them to question the society they were brought into.

Sans God [and Plato] of course.

The problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of other people’s labor.

Right, I’m sure that keeps them up at night.

When people say “grow up”, they often seem to just mean “quietly accept things as they are.”

Either that or eagerly sustain them.

As the ancient stoic master Zeno of Citium teaches us: shut the fuck up once in a while.

That or grin and bear it.

If I’m perfectly honest, I just don’t believe that I’m going to die. It seems like a totally ridiculous thing to happen.

So, do you think that he will?

[b]Allen Ginsberg

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism[/b]

My guess: Nobody.

Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.

In other words, you get it coming and going.

Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.

And then notices it’s not his own.

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!

You know, if there is one.

Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe…

Obviously before television became what it is today. But only if that’s true.

If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.

Anyone here ever done that?

[b]Ali Smith

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.[/b]

Let alone by Bing.

Words are themselves organisms…

Sure, we can call them that.

No one remembering that old man.
Except, I just did, there.

Should we file this one under, “big fucking deal”?

The boy was in the Hitler Youth, he says, and he was reading a book one day, he was really enjoying it, until his troop leader found him reading it and gave him a severe warning because it was by a, a Jewish writer, it was a banned book. And the boy was so incensed that this really good book he’d been reading had been banned—was the wrong kind of book, the wrong kind of art, if you like, written by the wrong kind of writer—that he thought twice, he began to ask questions about what was happening, and then, it turns out, he went on with his sister, Sophie Scholl, their name was Scholl, to do this stellar work, to try to change things, make it possible for people to think, I mean differently. And they fought back, and they did change things. They did a lot of good before they were caught. And they were killed for it.

True story: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2351269&hilit=sophie+scholl#p2351269

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.

Maybe.

Giving is fraught with danger — as is taking.

Yin and yang as it were.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” Marcel Proust[/b]

Ouch?

“Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.” Blaise Pascal

Could one not perhaps dare to do both?

“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Baruch Spinoza

Or, sure, maybe it is just the absence of war.

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Me? I’m begging you to destroy mine.

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” Martin Heidegger

Like him for example.

“Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.” Ernest Hemingway

You know, in a perfect world.

[b]Mike McCormack

I’ve told you before I’m not guilty of anything; I’m just guilty, that’s all.[/b]

With me though it’s got to be of something.

…no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was our prophets deranged and coming towards us wild-eyed and smeared with shit, ringing a bell, seer and sinner at once while speaking some language from the edge of reason whose message would translate into plain words as we’re fucked well and truly fucked.

Sure, I can live with that. If only once in a blue moon.

I love that we’re living the kind of life where things are wearing down around us.

I sure as shit don’t.

…some things are so awful, you can’t look them square in the face and some things make no sense no matter what angle you look at them from. And of course they happen in other people’s lives, never in your own.

Right, keep telling yourself that.

…telling us that the death has occurred
in the family home
or after a long illness
or after a short illness
or suddenly
or in England
or peacefully at their home in
all the innumerable ways and places in which anyone can die…

This part: youtu.be/ilGahIwQEQ0

…this seemed to be that time in his life when he could suck the life out of any project no matter how promising it appeared…

If only [now] until the day I die.

[b]T.E. Lawrence

He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed…[/b]

Then that makes [at least] two of us.

You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.

On the good days…maybe.

Mankind has had ten-thousand years of experience at fighting and if we must fight, we have no excuse for not fighting well.

Yep, that’s what it’s come to. This and the military industrial complex.

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

Let’s just say I’m working on it.

The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

[i]Shades of G. Gordon Liddy:

Deep Throat: I was at a party once, and, uh, Liddy put his hand over a candle, and he kept it there. He kept it right in the flame until his flesh was burned. Somebody said, What’s the trick? And Liddy said, The trick is not minding.[/i]

By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.

Nature: 24/7.

[b]Ben Goldacre

Torture the data, and it will confess to anything…[/b]

Not unlike people.

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

Someone cue Mr. Objectivist.

Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice.

How nefarious!

Sham ultrasound is beneficial for dental pain, placebo operations have been shown to be beneficial in knee pain (the surgeon just makes fake keyhole surgery holes in the side and mucks about for a bit as if he’s doing something useful), and placebo operations have even been shown to improve angina.

Where shall we take this?

[b]Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:

"I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that ‘Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.’ What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?

Anton", 2006

Thank you Anton.[/b]

We need something like that too. Not counting the Kids of course.

…there is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries…

You know, if you were born a sucker.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.[/b]

Sounds like something from “The Dangling Converstion”.

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

Sure, with me there to watch it.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

Nope, not yet.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Even if it’s true no one knows what it means.

That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

Preferably high as a kite.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

Not so the trivial people today.