a thread for mundane ironists

[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:

[b]Ali Smith

It’s about the connecting force from form to form. It’s the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It’s the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.[/b]

Inherently so?

Want is quite a complicated word there, because there’s volo, which means I want, but it’s not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love. But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want?

Hell, you may not even want to. Or do you actually need to?

It is like everything in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. They’re all also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both–the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is.

Tell that to the man with the duck.

Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren’t relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

She means [at least I think she does] in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

… because I can read you like a book and because the thing about a beloved book, if it’s a good one, is that it shifts like music; you think you know it, you’ve read it so many times, of course you know it, of course the pleasure of it is in how well you know it, but then you hear, in the background, the thing you never heard in it before, and with the turn of a page you see a combination of words you know you’ve never seen before, you thought you knew this book but it dazzles you with the different book it is, yet again, and not just that but the different person you have become, the different person you are now, reading it again, and you, my love, are an excellent book for me, and then us both together, which takes some talent with rhythm, but luckily we are quite talented at reading each other.

It goes without saying: you can count them on one hand. If not one finger.

You’re not the first person who was ever wounded by love. You’re not the first person who ever knocked on my door. You’re not the first person I ever chanced my arm with. You’re not the first person I ever tried to impress with my brilliant performance of not really being impressed with anything. You’re not the first person to make me laugh. You’re not the first person I ever made laugh. You’re not the first person full stop. But you’re the one right now. I’m the one right now. That’s enough, yes?

We’ll see. And I’m not the first person to say that.

[b]Willard Quine

A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word–‘Everything’–and everyone will accept this answer as true.[/b]

Whatever that means of course.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Whatever that means of course.

Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

Though not necessarily in that order.

To be is to be the value of a bound variable.

In the process of becoming something else.

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

For example, all the way to the Moon and back.

Language is a social art.

More or less surreal.

[b]Kurt Andersen

Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.[/b]

Admittedly, back then I fell for it too. You know, if it’s true.

No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press…

And we’ve been dumbing that down ever since.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing almost no one.

A kind of unspoken grand bargain was forged between the anti-Establishment and the Establishment. Going forward, individuals would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes, or social opprobrium. “Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees.

Is this country great or what?!

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

So be it. And all the way to the bank for some.

The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.

True, but Trumpworld is on a whole other level.

[b]The Dead Author

After outliving his gambling addiction, imprisonment, execution, brother, wife, and god, Dostoevsky died as a happy and successful writer on this day in 1881.[/b]

One of the lucky ones?

[b]The 4 Stages of Reading Nietzsche

  1. Age 15: I am a nihilist.
  2. Age 20: I am a revolutionary.
  3. Age 25: I am an existentialist.
  4. Age 30: I am Nietzsche. Lonely and underemployed.[/b]

Or 5 if [here and now] you count me.
But let’s not go there.

Disliking something isn’t a sign of intelligence in the same way that thinking about it won’t keep you from hating it.

Let’s just leave it at that.

Introducing twitter to Adorno is going as well I thought it would.

No, seriously, just imagine it!

Mass sports events like the Olympics aren’t symbols of peace, but just an inversion of war because the violence and cruelty happens in between the spectators instead of the direct competitors.

On the other hand, what the hell and why not: Let the games begin!

Defending Tarantino from charges of sexism continues the myth created by his movies that sexism, racism, and fascism are pathologies of a few psychopaths and not a broader social problem.

Next up: Woody Allen.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.[/b]

Unless of course it’s the mind.

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.

Day too. For some of us.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

And, on occasion, ravished and then some.

If you could only tell them that living and spending isn’t the same thing! But it’s no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily…

Not counting necessities of course. And, for millions, that’s basically all they are spending for.

Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.

Even ‘fuck’ nowadays.

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.

Of course we all know now it’s the other way around.