a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Diane Ackerman

Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can’t really predict success, let alone satisfaction.[/b]

Come on, they do what they are designed to do. Whatever that is.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can’t really share the enormity of our lives.

Right, like we can with them.

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

Hate maybe?

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.

So, does that settle it?

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Of course we try to do lots of things.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.

And then one day they don’t.
In, for example, divorce court.

[b]Paul Valéry

An alone man is always badly accompanied.[/b]

That would make me the exception.
On occasion as it were.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect.

Unless of course it has to.

I am the only medium for your fears.

Then that make two of us.

A difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is a sun.

Imagine then a super nova.

Consciousness reigns but doesn’t govern.

Either that or it’s “an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill”.

There are pigeonholes in the brain with labels on them such as: To be looked into when I feel like it; Never to be thought of; Useless to follow up; Contents as yet unexamined; A blind alley; A rich vein, but exploitable only in another existence; Urgent; Dangerous; A hard nut to crack; Impossible; Discarded; Put in storage; None of my business…and so forth.

Pigeon droppings too.

[b]Mary Roach

It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. There is L, XL, and XXL.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “fucking men!”

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you.

Not to be confused [as often as not] with being right.

I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we’re all connected to something bigger than we are.

I think not. Now what?

On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass.

Well, God does work in mysterious ways.

Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by “life units,” smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality—possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber.

Must be another Edison.

The technical term for tunnel vision is attentional narrowing. It’s another prehistorically helpful but now potentially disastrous feature of the survival stress response. One focuses on the threat to the exclusion of almost everything else. Bruce Siddle tells a story about a doctor who had some fun with an anxious intern. He sent him across the emergency room to sew up a car crash victim’s lacerations. The intern was so intent on his stitching that he failed to notice his patient was dead.

How the hell should we react to that?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” Epictetus[/b]

Cue dasein.
[size=50][you know when] [/size]

“Solitude is the place of purification.” Martin Buber

Or, for some of us, exactly the opposite.

“Through the You a person becomes I.” Martin Buber

Next up: We.
And then them.

“There is no perfection only life.” Milan Kundera

And who doesn’t need to be reminded of that?

“Beware the man of a single book.” Thomas Aquinas

And, no, not just the Bible.

“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.” Theodor Adorno

Wow, that’s my task too!
Isn’t it?

[b]John Stuart Mill

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.[/b]

Their bad men in particular.

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

On the other hand, who hasn’t tried that.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.

Talk about a “general description”.

I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative.

Or [of course]: I did not mean that Liberals are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Liberals.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.

We’ll need a context of course.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Let’s imagine what he might say today.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

How does this work? Rodents produce pheromonal odors with individual signatures, derived from genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produces unique proteins that form a signature for an individual. This was first studied by immunologists. What does the immune system do? It differentiates between you and invaders—“self” and “nonself”—and attacks the latter. All your cells carry your unique MHC-derived protein, and surveillance immune cells attack any cell lacking this protein password.[/b]

Not much here in the way of memes, right Satyr?

Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise castration doesn’t decrease recidivism rates; as stated in one meta-analysis, “hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the antiandrogenic drugs.

Cue, among others, the feminists.

Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she’ll act maternally—retrieving, grooming, and licking pups. Block the actions of oxytocin in a rodent mother, and she’ll stop maternal behaviors, including nursing.

Here’s the thing then: How much of this is applicable to us?

During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round.

I guess you had to be there.

Suppose a person harmed people two generations ago; are this person’s grandchildren obliged to help his victims’ grandchildren? Subjects viewed a biological grandchild as more obligated than one adopted into the family at birth; the biological relationship carried a taint. Moreover, subjects were more willing to jail two long-lost identical twins for a crime committed by one of them than to jail two unrelated but perfect look-alikes—the former, raised in different environments, share a moral taint because of their identical genes.

Let’s untangle this once and for all.

People see essentialism embedded in bloodlines—i.e., genes.

I’ll bet they do.

[b]tiny nietzsche

they shoot nihilists, don’t they?[/b]

Either that or completely ignore them.

barber: a little off the top?
me: everything above the neck

My guess: not literally.

My body is composed of 70% water. The rest is postmodernism

Not counting the soul of course.

show me your kierkegaard tattoo

The one with him taking a leap to God.

So You Think You Should Reject All Religious and Moral Principles Because Life is Meaningless

And Absurd, Yes.

remind me of you later

Or, sure, even later than that.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.[/b]

Let’s rank the pros and the cons.

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

Right, like one has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

Recounting the strange is like telling one’s dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one’s entire day.

Dreams are just fucking mindboggling. Though not nearly as much as why we dream at all.

I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They’re just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I’m married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything’s wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I’m still me. And I’m still here. And that is truly terrible.

Really, what the fuck is going on here?

I don’t know. I had to be something, didn’t I?

I’ve used this a few times myself.

Some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.

Remember back when you thought this might be you?