a thread for mundane ironists

[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?

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.[/b]

With considerably more limitations of course.

…the love of anything is the offspring of knowledge, love being more fervent in proportion as knowledge is more certain.

Among other things, completely preposterous?

Like a kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom, the mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.

Appropriately vague of course.

Lies don’t solve problems it just make it worst …so liars beware.

Even back then this would surely be bullshit.

For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

Of course ignorance never stopped most of us.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness and Light, Solidity and Color, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

Exactly 10. How convenient.

[b]so sad today

that’s not the clitoris: a love story[/b]

Got wood?

mistakes sexy hair for emotional depth

We should all be so lucky.

i never know what i’m feeling because i don’t want to

What’s wanting to got to do with it?

i want to sleep through everything except when it’s time to sleep and then i want to be online

A perfect world, in other words.

i can fantasize about two people who are wrong for me at the same time

That’s two less than I can.

i never liked myself: a love story

You don’t get this, do you?

[b]Saul D. Alinsky

Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.[/b]

While others of course never move forward.

Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.

Or the disharmony of consonance. But let’s not go there. Again.

The sit-down strikers began to worry about the illegality of their action and the why and wherefore, and it was then the chief of all C.I.O. organizers, Lewis, gave them their rationale. He thundered, ‘The right to a man’s job transcends the right of private property! The C.I.O. stands squarely behind these sit-downs!’ The sit-down strikers at GM cheered.

Can you even imagine something like that today?

A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.

Can you even imagine something like that today?

Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.

Anyone here not learned that yet?

The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.

What some call terrorism for example.

[b]C.G. Jung

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “!!!”

The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there. As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal, overwhelming forces.

Let’s file this one under, “!!!”

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

We can run this by, among others, Ivanka Trump.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

Riddle me this: Why?

Everyone is in love with his own ideas.

And you will be too…or else.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Meaning what exactly?

[b]T.S. Eliot

What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.[/b]

And certainly not just poetically.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

As in, for example, dust to dust.

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

You pay someone else to tell you.

Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended.

Never had one. Not really.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

And then, one day, the abyss.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion…

And in the image of God no less.

[b]Nein

The sad thing is, of course, everything. Otherwise, no complaints.[/b]

Really? I’ve never had no complaints myself.

Hello. Ask me about my ruthless critique of all that exists.

First, ask me about mine.

If it’s any consolation, the markets aren’t happy either.

Of course we’ll have to run this by Don Trump.

My advice: if you’re going to let some idiot on Twitter ruin your weekend, make sure it’s you.

In other words, not him.
You know the one.

A gentle reminder from the economists that money can’t buy you happiness. But happiness can’t buy you anything.

Unless of course it’s priceless.

Our love is:
A. True
B. False
C. Forever
D. Forever but not in a good way

Like, for example, death.

[b]Ali Smith

…their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we’d had was winter, all we’d had was rations. Just very good at keeping quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age.[/b]

You had to be there. Or not.

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

Here I’ve just about run out of hope.

No art has ever really changed anything.

Come on, maybe a little bit.

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] I’ve never had that problem.

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.

And now once again a body count.

It was cruel, though, to want to, and tempting, so I’d become an expert at almost.

Vicariously as often as not.

[b]Willard Quine

Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.[/b]

Wow!
I’m just not entirely sure why.

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Wow!
I’m just not entirely sure why.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

Along with billions and billions of others.

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

No, really, go ahead, try.

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

On the other hand, this is only probably true.

Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.

Still, not all cranks are created equal.

[b]Kurt Andersen

Even Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that…research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”[/b]

Okay, okay: guilty as charged.

Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.

And look where we are now…smack dab in the middle of Trumpworld!

Neither side has been aware of it, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been wearing different uniforms on the same team—the Fantasyland team.

Hell, I was one of the quarterbacks.

Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings, and in 1968 the court finally ruled—unanimously—that states could not ban the teaching of evolution.

Cue among others the Christian Nazis. You’ll know the ones. And perhaps sooner than we think.

You know how young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it.

Or: You know how objectivists always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it.
And not just the fucking Kids anymore.

If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Sure, and maybe it is just human nature.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction.[/b]

As we all know there is nothing that we all know.

Life is a traveling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

And not just into the abyss.

But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to?
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.

Not counting those who just make something up. Or, all the more, those who let others make something up.

Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.

But then there are the objectivists, who promptly put it on a leash.

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.

I always say, “whatever works”. But how that seems to disturb some…

You’re spending your life without renewing it. You’ve got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You’re spending your vitality without making any. Can’t go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

Not counting those for whom the brain has a mind all its own.

I try to be a sublime ironist.

But you can’t spit out assessments of guilt and bad deeds and be a nihilist. Remove the beam in thine own eye, and all that…
Otherwise you are tilting at windmills.

[b]Diane Ackerman

I don’t understand all the fuss. If any creature is in danger, you save it, human or animal.[/b]

Fusses however are not unlike other things: in the mind of the beholder.

Why was it, she asked herself, that animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.

Sounds more like something that some might want to be true than in fact really is.

Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.

Maybe, but it’s either warranted or it’s not.

One job of the unconscious is to act as a workshop for rough-shaping ideas; crafting notions as new parts or tools become available; storing observations until something relevant appears in the landscape – generally soaking, simmering, and incubating ideas. Gradually, while combing through its inventory, it finds bits and pieces that create a pattern. When it slips knowledge of that pattern to the conscious mind, it’s a surprise, like a telegram slid under the door.

Possibly, but how exactly will we know this for sure?

The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest.

Examples please.

Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.

True, but what the fuck does that mean?!