a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Nicholas von Hoffman

Taken as a whole the mass media seldom rises to the level of deplorable trash, but it is also true that there is no mass audience in America for anything better… [/b]

And not just Republicans.

Some flag waving is good, a lot of flag waving is tolerable, incessant flag waving is crazy and dangerous and easily manipulated by the war party to get people bubbling at the mouth in fear and rage.

Especially the masses. But who stops there?

We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn’t pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20 cent on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.

Shh. Let’s not go there.

Americans will quarrel over how, who, or what to rescue or save, but the idea that the nation ought to be off doing it is challenged only by a few.

And getting fewer all the time.

We are the people are parents warned us against.

My guess: Just like them.

…with the computer, things are not so much created as they are produced, with the producer-director becoming the star and the controlling force of much that was in other hands at other times.

You tell me: What other times?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.[/b]

Though, sure, for most of us vicariously.

My God, these folks don’t know how to love – that’s why they love so easily.

Or: My God, these folks don’t know how to hate – that’s why they hate so easily.
Then just move on to the next one.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

Let’s file this one under, “just look around you”.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

I know: You don’t think this can ever happen to you.

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

Or something pretty damn close to it.

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame… She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Look, back then this was really something.

[b]God

Omnipresence is just a fancy word for stalking.[/b]

You know, for our own good.

The degree to which you’re all fucked has far outpaced your ability to comprehend it.

In Trumpworld He means.

As a matter of fact I have no respect for human life whatsoever.

And what rational man or woman could possibly doubt that?

In an ideal scenario the President of the United States and the worst human being in the world would be two different people.

Imagine then Trump on Judgment Day. You know, if there is one.

At this point I’m just like, whatever.

Hmm, should we be worried?

Remember sanity? Those were the days.

Back in the days of the Old Testament?

[b]Paul Valéry

What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon’s devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention … How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?[/b]

Let’s pin down what that might be.

It is only by chance that we are reminded of the permanent circumstances of our life.

Temporarily as it were.

Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.

Not to worry: It isn’t you.

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Unless of course it whitens. At least theoretically.

You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.

Of course he was looking in the mirror at the time.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.

Or they on you.

wrong thread

[b]Diane Ackerman

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.[/b]

I used to not want that too.

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.

Come on, is it really the same from down here?

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

At least our version of it.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Well, there must be two of them then.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Indeed. And who would deduce dasein from the soul?

Which is crueler, an old man’s lost memories of a life lived, or a young man’s lost memories of the life he meant to live?

Yes.

[b]Mary Roach

An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can’t be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, any pedigreed women seeking love here?

If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse - and this I truly don’t recommend - you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound. "Rice Krispies.

I know: What was God thinking?

Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it’s possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn’t suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them—the paraclitoridiennes of the world—are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are “where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from”.

I know: What was God thinking?

It’s called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for ‘Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,’ an example of PLEASE— Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.

Clearly then you can carry acronyms too far.

What she perhaps didn’t realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body’s erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.

Really though is it worth it?

Nineteenth-century operating “theaters” had more to do with medical instruction than with saving patients’ lives. If you could, you stayed out of them at all cost. For one thing, you were being operated on without anesthesia. (The first operations under ether didn’t take place until 1846.) Surgical patients in the late 1700s and early 1800s could feel every cut, stitch, and probing finger. They were often blindfolded—this may have been optional, not unlike the firing squad hood—and invariably bound to the operating table to keep them from writhing and flinching or, quite possibly, leaping from the table and fleeing into the street.

Let’s file this one under, “holy shit!”

[b]Malcolm Lowry

But who could agree with someone who was so certain you were going to be sober the day after tomorrow?[/b]

Let’s decide if this makes sense.

Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more…and it’ll begin to dawn on you that even your behavior’s part of its plan.

I’ll bet some are still in the dark about that.

For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

Over the Nunes memo no doubt.

What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn’t there.

Let’s pin down the lesson to be learned.

Can’t you see there’s a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.

Let’s run this by Don Trump.

I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure.

I’ll file this one under, “I doubt it”.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Confucius[/b]

Among other things, boundless.

“What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” Isaac Newton

Of course what we know is probably up to a puddle by now.

“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” Isaac Newton

Let’s run this by Don Trump.

"Failing to understand the workings of one’s own mind is bound to lead to unhappiness.” Marcus Aurelius

If only all the way to the grave.

“You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart.” W.H. Auden

You know, being a realist.

"Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Right, like it can’t be both.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression—the insular cortex processes gustatory disgust. Ditto for disgusting smells.[/b]

In other words, with or without God.

Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed. Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder.

In other words, with or without God.

Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.

Especially in men.

Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile. This is boggling.

True, but all the more boggling is the Big Bang itself.

The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.

Autonomically as it were.

Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.

Okay, but what if we don’t live in a wholly determined universe?

[b]Neil Gaiman

Being a writer of fiction isn’t like being a compulsive liar, honestly.[/b]

Unless of course he just made that up.

Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

That’ll do it alright.

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

It goes without saying: for better or worse.

For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the bed we wake up in in the morning and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

Or for some of us the recliner.

The only reason people die, is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it.
It’s rubbish, death. It’s stupid. I don’t want nothing to do with it.

Any chance that might work?

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

Let’s just call him confused.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul.[/b]

Doubt that you’re reading this?

Those who, in debate, appeal to their qualifications, argue from memory, not from understanding.

Right, but tell them that.

He who can copy can do.

Let’s note all the exceptions.

To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

Let’s connect this to the Nunes memo.

Experience is never at fault; it is only your judgment that is in error, in promising itself such results from experience as are not caused by our experiments. For having given a beginning, what follows from it must necessarily be a natural development of such a beginning, unless it has been subject to a contrary influence, while, if it is affected by any contrary influence, the result which ought to follow from the aforesaid beginning, will be found to partake of this contrary influence in a greater or lesser degree in proportion as the said influence is more or less powerful than the aforesaid beginning.

Or something like that I suppose.

And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.

I have my own version of this, don’t I?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.[/b]

Been there, done that.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Not only that but they can write them down.

I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.

Cue The Donald?

I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.

One thing for sure: It’s always never nothing.

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.

You know, being optimistic.

Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.

Well, they work for me.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

If we think we survived Monday, it can only mean
Kierkegaard: the forests of irony have swallowed us whole
Schopenhauer: our faculty of reason was decimated long ago
Camus: it’s actually still Monday[/b]

Of course that’s only counting this Monday.

Philosophy: It is what it is
History: It was what it was
Psychology: It is what it was
Literature: It isn’t what it wasn’t

If only until the day you die.

Are your kids texting about nihilism?
IRL – I rue life
LMAO – Losing my abyssal orientation
ROFL – Rational once, forever lugubrious
LOL – Laughter of loathing
FML – Finitude meets lunacy

Come on, we can do better.

Only philosophy can save us from
Plato: chaos
Kant: tyranny
Heidegger: techno-nihilism
Nietzsche: philosophy

Or, sure, maybe not.

My dream is to dance
Socrates: alone
Schelling: across the abyss
Nietzsche: in the abyss
Žižek: on Dancing with the Stars

Žižek is sure taking a beating of late. Anyone here know why?

The moral man
Augustine: is at home with himself
Adorno: is not at home with himself
Nietzsche: probably doesn’t have a home
Beckett: probably doesn’t have a self

In other words, not unlike the immoral man. And let’s not forget woman.

[b]Saul D. Alinsky

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.[/b]

Rules for radicals indeed.

People always do the right thing for the wrong reason.

In for example a utilitarian world.

Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith…Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.

Next up: outrage and fear. The other side of the coin as often as not.

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.

The hell you say!

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

As likely as not in full compliance.

In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that “Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property."

Elaborated on by, among others, Marx and Engels.

[b]C.G. Jung

I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.[/b]

I hear that, Mr. Objectivist!

Nature has no use for the plea that one ‘did not know’.

But you can sneak one in from time to time.

One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.

I like that. And not just becasue it is almost certainly true.

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.

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

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

And certainly another that others do not know.

Whatever we look at, and however we look at it, we see only through our own eyes.

And how far can that be from our own mind.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy is important for when you want to understand why no one understands anything.[/b]

And not just objectively.

French novel: I can’t decide who to fuck.
British novel: I can’t decide who to marry.
Russian novel: I can’t decide who to kill.

And the American novel?
Okay, let’s not go there.

Harry Potter and the Justification for Extreme Wealth Disparity.

The Cliff Notes edition.

First we had feudalism, and then the Feudal Lords were like, “wait a minute, what if we made the serfs compete with each other for who can do the most work for the least money?” And Capitalism was born.

The Cliff Notes edition.

Little known historical fact: you can actually track how bitter Nietzsche was towards women by the size of his mustache.

Any little known historical facts about Don Trump yet?

The good thing about death is that at least you don’t have to think about how horrifying death is anymore.

While, for example, burning in Hell.

[b]T.S. Eliot

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.[/b]

Just not mine, right?

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

On the other hand, there are those pesky consequences when you do.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Just so it ends, he thought.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Or not of course.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

Let’s not forget this though: At who’s expense?
[sometimes there’s just no getting around it]

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

I know that mine were.

How would you know? Have you finally solved conflicting goods and objective morals?

Obviously you’re not a mundane ironist. :wink: