a thread for mundane ironists

[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?!

Cue [among others] Moreno.

Let’s create a new thread and we can discuss it. Only more or less ironically.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

For example those who are obligated to think alike about Nietzsche.

“Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.” Simone de Beauvoir

In other words you either do or do not walk your talk.

“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” Simone de Beauvoir

For some however the worst possible advice.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.” Soren Kierkegaard

Not to worry, Mueller is on to them.

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution” Hannah Arendt

But only if we’re lucky.

“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.” Friedrich Nietzsche

And not excluding, among others, the ubermen.

[b]John Stuart Mill

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.[/b]

Theoretically for example.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

Theoretically for example.

Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Let’s just say you can take this too far. And still be nowhere near despotism.

It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.

On the other hand, who knows, perhaps it is both.

A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes–will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.

And let’s not forget the men who dwarf their women.

…the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.

As though it is actually possible to do this.

Nothing to discuss. You haven’t agreed, so presumably you disagree. Impasse. To me it falls under the definition of your nihilism, that one cannot make such (moral outcome) judgements of one’s behavior and what it led to. To you it is not a problem. We are down to axiom level.

Two guys standing in the driveway.
1There’s a red car in the driveway.
2 No there isn’t.

No amount of rational discussion is going to work that one out. Let alone what passes for rational discussion. We have, here, not conflicting goods. We have conflicting sense of deduction from assumptions. So basic it could be put in a syllogism.

[b]Mary Roach

NASA didn’t invent Tang, but their Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it famous. (Kraft Foods invented it, in 1957.) NASA still uses Tang, despite periodic bouts of bad publicity. In 2006, terrorists mixed Tang into a homemade liquid explosive intended for use on a transatlantic flight. In the 1970’s, Tang was mixed with methadone to discourage rehabbing heroin addicts from injecting it to get high. They did anyway. Consumed intravenously, Tang causes joint pain and jaundice, though fewer cavities.[/b]

The history of Tang and/or all you need to know about it.

Crispy foods carry a uniquely powerful appeal. I asked Chen what might lie behind this seemingly universal drive to crunch things in our mouths. I believe human being has a destructive nature in its genes, he answered. Human has a strange way of stress-release by punching, kicking, smashing, or other forms of destructive actions. Eating could be one of them. The action of teeth crushing food is a destructive process, and we receive pleasure from that, or become de-stressed.

Sure, why not.

Phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient’s body.

No, really: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalloplasty

No man got an erection from looking at brown string sandals.

Doesn’t surprise me at all.

Gelatin fed to animals, the committee reported, was found to “excite an intolerable distaste to a degree which renders starvation preferable.”

This stuff: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatin

The heyday of spiritualism–with its seances and spirit communications zinging through the ether–coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications–disembodied voices mysteriously travelling through space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant.

Makes a lot of sense actually.

Let’s leave it at that. Well, on this thread anyway.

[b]Malcolm Lowry

Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life![/b]

Fortunately, he thought, I don’t need clouds to tell me that.

Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.

I think I get the point. And it’s a grim one.

When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, “weaving fearful vision” … A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one’s great work on “Secret Knowledge,” then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.

With any luck, your own frustrated poet [like mine] is long dead and gone.

He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead.

Or “very little, almost nothing” as Simon Critchley once expressed it.

The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.

Does He know that?

He was safe here; this was the place he loved — sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.

Yours for mine?

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

…genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors.[/b]

Tell me that’s not right around the corner from dasein.

Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.

Plus it takes you off the hook.

Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.

Tell that to, among others, the judge.

Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

Let’s bring this to the attention of, well, probably you.

Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically African a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence. In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defendants more favorably if they’re wearing big, clunky glasses; some defense attorneys even exploit this “nerd defense” by accessorizing their clients with fake glasses, and prosecuting attorneys ask whether those dorky glasses are real. In other words, when blind, impartial justice is supposedly being administered, jurors are unconsciously biased by racial stereotypes of someone’s face.

The art and/or the science of prejudice.

…in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk taking than women…

More or less generally as it were.