a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Ron Carlson

I always write from my own experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.[/b]

Doesn’t seem right, does it?

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It’s hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

Okay, maybe, but I’m working on it.

It never ceases to amaze us that when we were in kindergarten they taught us that a frog turning into a prince was a nursery fairy tale, but when we got to college they told us that a frog turning into a prince was science.

Get it? Darwin.

Get down, get naked, get savage.

Just not here please.

The writer is the person who stays in the room.

Providing of course that the room has a recliner.

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.

And He really is who for example?

[b]God

I am God and this is My Twitter account. It’s not a joke. It’s not a “bit”. I am actually God and all who doubt it shall burn in eternal fire. Now send Me money.[/b]

Preferably U.S. dollars.

Your thoughts and prayers are My shits and giggles.

With any luck though, He’s the wrong God.

“In an old-fashioned, prescientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn the twenty percent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist.” Aldous Huxley, The Island

Of course Huxley is up there with Him now.

The world should be run by dogs and Canadians.

Of course not counting pit bulls and Conservatives.

In My defense, I don’t exist.

Wow, what to make of that!

If you want to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill, don’t elect them President.

Let alone re-elect them.

(Sublime) ironic nihilism

"Nihilism in which an individual employs aesthetic appropriation to uncover pretenses in opposing views or “truths.”
-Urban dictionary

This can in turn be applied to nihilism and certainly to ‘nihilism’.

[b]Neil Gaiman

I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who’d swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. 'Course they made him eat a bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.[/b]

Same thing happened to a friend of mine.

The one thing you have that nobody else has is you.

Aren’t they the lucky ones.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Either them or one of the Gods.

Someone killed my Mother and my Father and my Sister?
Yes, someone did.
A Man?
A Man.
Which means, said Bod, you’re asking the wrong question.
Silas raised an eyebrow. How so?
Well, said Bod. If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t who will keep me safe from him?
No?
No. It’s who will keep him safe from me?

The perfect reaction.

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.

I’ll do it with you.

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

Let’s look for it here.

Well, this is sure going nowhere fast.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.[/b]

I’ll bet he doesn’t think that now.

Man discourseth greatly, and his discourse is for the greater part empty and false; the discourse of animals is small, but useful and true: slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.

Anyone here discourseth just the right amount?

No human investigation can be called real knowledge if it does not pass through mathematical demonstrations; and if you say that the kinds of knowledge that begin and end in the mind have any value as truth, this cannot be conceded, but rather must be denied for many reasons, and first of all because in such mental discussions there is no experimentation, without which nothing provides certainty of itself.

Cue for example the is/ought world.

I thought I was learning to live but I was learning to die.

How’s that coming for you?

Instrumental or mechanical science is the noblest and, above all others, the most useful.

On the other hand, it either is or it isn’t.

I awoke, only to see that the rest of the world is still asleep.

Exactly what they surmise about you.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski‏

Truth be told,
Schopenhauer: we’ve forgotten how to be alive
Beckett: we’re already dead
Kafka: we don’t know how to die.[/b]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2016: The book is in the other room. I’ll download a pirated PDF.
2017: The book is 10 feet across the room. I’ll download a pirated PDF.
2018: The book is in my lap. I’ll download a pirated PDF.

Let’s explain this.

To gain true knowledge you must first establish a relationship with
1250: God
1675: nature
1781: reason
1844: material praxis
1943: ecstatic praxis
2016: Google Search
2018: the futility of all relationships

Let’s clarify this.

I’m interested in reading some philosophy. Where should I start?
Levinas: Facebook
Merleau-Ponty: Instagram
Foucault: Grindr
Baudrillard: Snapchat
Habermas: Reddit
Nietzsche: Anywhere but Twitter

You know, just supposing.

[b]Lies you were taught in school

1. There’s no accounting for taste
2. You’re entitled to your opinion
3. The market will adjust[/b]

Or of course truths.

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

Which one is likely to be fiction?
Extra credit: Why?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

Years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute.[/b]

What a bummer.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Just don’t get carried away.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

My point exactly. If I have one.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

The Gods in other words.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…

Let’s just say that for some of us it’s right up there.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

Don’t you just hate that?

[b]Existential Comics

I have a dream. A dream of more horsepower and greater torque in a dependable pickup truck.[/b]

Nope, never had that one.

Sometimes I feel like my life is spiraling into inescapable despair, anxiety, and hopelessness over the meaninglessness of my brief, absurd existence. But then it turns out I was just hungry.

Or needed to masturbate.

I guess what I’m saying is that my favorite thing about sports is seeing collosal fuck ups in a single moment ruin years and years of hard work and dedication.

Providing no one actually breaks their neck?

Now that we have more perspective, we can see that the Mayan calendar wasn’t counting down to the end of the world in 2012, it was counting down to Men in Black 3.

Either that or this: imdb.com/title/tt2283336/

I hate postmodernism. Why? Well, first of all, I’m pretty sure postmodernists stole my car.

Could it really come down to something as simple as that?

These damn millennials are always on their phones. You shouldn’t spend your whole life staring at a little screen. You should spent it at home, alone, thinking about death.

Or at least encouraging others to think about it.

[b]Saul D. Alinsky

History is made up of “moral” judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin’s acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition’s means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values.[/b]

Makes you wonder if that might still be going on.

Mendoza said to Tanner, I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich.
Tanner replied, I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.

Makes you wonder if that might still be going on.

…one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict.

Now why do you suppose that is?

One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.

But not you, right?

The real action is in the enemy’s reaction.

Here? Cue the huffers and the puffers.

Mark Twain once put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

I think the right word here might be “hyperbole”.

[b] C.G. Jung

I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.[/b]

Oh, sure, absolutely.

Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

Spooky is what it is. If only the more you think about it.

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

How scary is that? For example, if you know what I mean.

Every transformation demands as its precondition “the ending of a world”—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.

True, but look what I’ve stumbled into now.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

He means me, doesn’t he?

I indignantly answered, Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?
To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger, My light is not of this world.
I cried, I know of no other world!
The soul answered, Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?

The soul does have a point. I wish I had one.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy is important because without it we’d have to leave it up to scientists to figure out the meaning of life, and it would probably end up being a bunch of nerd shit.[/b]

I know: God forbid!

Advice to philosophy students: you aren’t Ludwig fucking Wittgenstein. Stop trying to solve philosophy, and just try to understand what the main questions are, and why.

This one: How ought one to live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that ends in oblivion? New thread maybe?

Free speech: saying something.
Censorship: saying something criticising that thing.
More free speech: saying something criticising that criticism.

And then it’s turtles all the way down.

Here is my critique of contemporary culture: it is bad.

Not to mention getting worse.

Left unity will only ever happen when all the leftists factions learn to come together and hate themselves as much as they hate each other.

Right unity too.

And then the centrist examined both sides and wisely proclaimed: “everyone seems pretty pissed off, so the best course of action must logically be to change nothing.”

Phil Ochs wrote a song about that.

[b]T.S. Eliot

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.[/b]

That sounds about right.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

The rose garden if you’re lucky.

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

Mom said to Adolph.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Keep telling yourself that until one day you actually know what it means.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I know that I am. And now so do you.

Books. Cats. Life is good.

Or: Films. Dogs. Life is even better.

[b]Ali Smith

Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small.[/b]

Here, there and everywhere?

I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more.

Ain’t that the truth?

She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death.

Permissible? In some circles it’s all but obligatory.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

And that’s before you get to the junkshop of everyone else.

The still-alives. They were all crazy.

Doesn’t that more or less go without saying?

I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust. Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I’m silent forever, haha, it’s all words words words with me. Now that I can’t just reach out and touch, it’s all I want, is to.

Right around the corner for some of us.