a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Tom Stoppard

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I’m not dead.[/b]

This ring a bell for anyone?

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Let’s grapple with how different.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.

Not counting the ones who are dying to.

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

The Big Bang 2.0?

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Clearly a serious philosopher.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it.

Has anyone here actually pinned that down?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.” Bob Dylan[/b]

The guy was clearly a fucking genius.

“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” Bob Dylan

Okay, but try doing that without money. And I’ll take his if he’s willing.

“Man is by nature a political animal.” Aristotle

By nurture too.

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” Lao Tzu

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Gandhi

You know, historically.

“Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.” Jeremy Bentham

I think he means it, Joker.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.[/b]

Would you like me to trample on yours?

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

You can always count on me to.

For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Or, sure, for goodness sake.

And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells – they are a sign that pure creation takes place – even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

Let’s decide: too harsh or not harsh enough.

One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

Shall we just chalk this up to a bad mood?

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

Or: He looked at her…

[b]Diane Ackerman

How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?[/b]

My guess: You don’t.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Here, of course, we’re just scratching the surface.

There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

Though not yet confirmed by science.

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

The only antidote that has ever [and always] worked for me is in being my own best friend.

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.

Right, like this is actually applicable to all of us.

Every day our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death.

Right, like this is actually applicable to all of us.

[b]The Dead Author

It is important to popularize philosophy so that people who didn’t used to take it seriously become convinced they were right.[/b]

Clearly, I’m doing my part.

In case you thought that the lack of women philosophers isn’t a problem: Sisyphus was a sadist who murdered his guests, plotted to kill his own brother, and sexually abused his niece, but gets remembered for having to roll a rock up a hill.

Really, I didn’t know that.

Not a conspiracy theorist, but Socrates and Plato never appear together in any of the dialogues.

Cue the serious philosophers: Any truth to this?

Alexander the Great was the first modern philosophy student because he quit grad school and got a real job.

Cue the serious philosophers: Any truth to this?

Cool how half of twitter, facebook, and youtube is fascists complaining that they no longer have the right to speak.

Cue the Kids: Any truth to this?

The internet often makes you forget that it’s possible to be angry without telling other people about it.

No doubt about that here, right?

[b]John Stuart Mill

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “we’re fucked”.

Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.

Me, if I do say so myself.

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

Not me, if I do say so myself.

It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind’s eye closed.

Not counting of course all of the millions it is given to.

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Imagine then his reaction to, among other things, Trumpworld.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

Imagine then his reaction to, among other things, Trumpworld.

[b]Amy Chua

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, “Hey fatty-lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.[/b]

Let’s run this by the Kantians.

Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits, and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

Let’s connect the dots between this and, oh, I don’t know…dasein?

Unlike Western parents, reminding my child of Lord Voldemort didn’t bother me.

Anyone here actually know what the fuck that means?

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it.

Unless you can afford not to be.

Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything.

B.C. in other words. If you know what I mean…

That’s why I liked the Suzuki method of teaching piano. There are seven books, and everybody has to start with Book One. Each book includes ten to fifteen songs, and you have to go in order. Kids who practice hard get assigned new songs each week, whereas kids who don’t practice get stuck on the same song for weeks, even months, and sometimes just quit because they’re bored out of their minds.

Let’s apply this to philosophy. For example, what would be Book One?

[b]Existential Comics

Possible Democratic slogans for midterms:
“We’ll say mean things about Trump as we deregulate the banks.”
“Maybe Russian hackers are the reason you are poor?”
“Okay fine, we’ll raise the minimum wage, but no unions.”
“We promise to sell you out to the good kind of billionaires.”[/b]

Let’s call this a grim snapshot of our two-party system.

The year is 2233. A wise Philosopher King rules the Earth. Wisdom is mandatory. Also it is now legal to punch moral relativists in the face.

Can’t come soon enough, right?

I don’t know whether or not Mathematics exists entirely in our minds, but I know for a fact that authority does.

Starting, for example, on the day you are born.

Brief history of philosophy:
Platonism: wisdom
Aristotlelianism: virtue
Epicureanism: pleasure
Stoicism: perseverance
Utilitarianism: good
Kantianism: duty
Existentialism: freedom
Nihilism: no

He means NO! of course.

What they don’t tell you about bullies in school is that they can ALL be defeated by French Phenomenology. Bullies cannot stand up to the unrepentant gaze of the Other.

Someone please cue Melania.

Every Friday I have to remind myself that alcohol can do nothing to overcome my despair, only mask it for a moment, leaving me more empty than ever. Tonight I’m feelin’ lucky though.

Not unlike all the other nights.

[b]Samuel Butler

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.[/b]

Plus God of course.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Sort of anyway.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.

Let’s fill in the blanks here.

Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Cue Virgil: youtu.be/4smgVpcFMp8

Logic is like the sword—those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

By those with bigger swords as likely as not.

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

Some lies though being the exception.

[b]Steven Moffat

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly…time-y wimey stuff.[/b]

Well, either one or the other.

The universe is big, its vast and complicated, and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles. And that’s the theory. Nine hundred years, never seen one yet, but this would do me.

Of course it may well be a miracle that anything exist at all.

Bow ties are cool.

Trust me: All ties are ridiculous.

Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink.

Actually, I forget the context here.

You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!

Maybe in a perfect world, sure.

You know when grown-ups tell you everything’s going to be fine, but you really think they’re lying to make you feel better?
Yeah…
Everything’s going to be fine.

Why not? It works almost every time.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.[/b]

No, really: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes
Any Brits here able to tell us why this is found amusing?

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness…

Sure, like you can just flick the switch here.

A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

Due South of the Twilight Zone there’s one. Another is just East of Eden.

Still. Four words.
And I didn’t realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:
Dear Neil,
If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children’s area, what would it be?
Thanks!
Lynn
I pondered a bit. I’d said a lot about books and kids’ reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote:
I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned:
… and then what happened?

Or, if five words, life sucks, then you die.

I saw her chewing gum, when I was thirteen, and I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

What is this most likely to mean?

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.

You know, if Death was a philosopher.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.[/b]

And [for some] how hard can that be?

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

You know, until you vote him out of office.

Silence creates its own violence.

For example, when it’s not just a general description.

A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.

Of course a square looks at a circle and wonders, “why didn’t I think of that?”

We all live in a kind of continuous dream, I told him. When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.

And it can come from, among other things, out of nowhere.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

Even worse [in many cases] those who think that they do.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“All great music is contemporary. If it’s still alive and kicking, then it’s contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it.” Steve Reich[/b]

Naturally that includes every piece of music that has ever been written.

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” Frank Zappa

In other words, our deviation from the norm.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare

And not just in Hamlet.

“¿uʍop ǝpᴉsdn pǝuɹnʇ plɹoʍ ɹnoʎ ǝʌɐɥ oʇ ʎpɐǝɹ noʎ ǝɹ∀”

Let’s file this one under, “how the hell do you do that?”

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.” Jorge Luis Borges

Of course we’ll need some examples here.

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Friedrich Nietzsche

So, who can tell us the one and the only thing that Nietzsche means by this?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

Even in the grave, all is not lost.[/b]

I know: I wonder if he still thinks that?

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.”

Does anyone actually remember why?

You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Hmm, I always thought this was Shakespeare.

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.

Not many like this left around, are there?

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

Anyone here planning to?

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

Well, for starters.

[b]Saul D. Alinsky

Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the Weathermen and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide.[/b]

He wondered: why am I still around?

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.

Clinton in 2020!

There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.

Going on two decades now.

The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.

And we know who they are right around the corner from.

In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.

And certainly not objectively.

Most of us view the world not as it is but as we would like it to be. The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins—that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is.

Nowadays of course you can’t even count on that.

[b]so sad today

obsessing over a problem that doesn’t exist[/b]

Hoping to find a solution that doesn’t exist either.

just checking to see if everything is still fucking stupid and it is

Do people actually still check?

can’t decide if i’ve made enough mistakes yet to go to bed

Or just roll the dice like I always do.

can I count on you to let me down?

Oh yeah.

anxiety or it didn’t happen

I know: that’ll never happen to you.

making the same mistakes and expecting different results and lovin it

I know: that’ll never happen to you.

[b]C.G. Jung

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.[/b]

So, is this the place to start, or the place to end up?
In other words, once you figure out what it means.

I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery.

Right, see where that gets you.
[would you like to know where it got me?]

Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.

Sure, you can still be the exception.

Every human life contains a potential. If that potential is not fulfilled, that life was wasted.

That people say things like this is surpassed only by the people who believe things like this. It’s either that or the other way around.

Whether you call the principle of existence “God,” “matter,” “energy,” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol.

And to think it all came out of nothing at all.

When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.

This horseshit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini
Unless of course it’s true.

[b]T.S. Eliot

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.[/b]

So, whose business would it be then?

Teach us to care and not to care

Why both you might ask.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

My own guess? Not here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=193924

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

This might even be true.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The still point? Nope, not yet.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

True. I have seriously mocked as many folks as have seriously mocked me.

[b]Judith Butler

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?[/b]

Anyone care to tackle that?

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a ‘one’ who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

Anyone care to tackle that?

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

Of course they don’t sell it at the grocers.

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

Anyone able to translate this into English.

When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be.

Here of course we have the Kids. The classic combination of both.

…laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.

From what then was Don Trump derived?

[b]Vincent van Gogh

Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you’re put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.[/b]

Tell that to the landlord.

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

Would he still say that today?

I’m such a nobody.

Let’s call it a mistranslation.

It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one’s youth.

Trust me: You don’t know the half of it.

I shouldn’t precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can’t very well get out of it.

On the other hand, I’ve been trying now for years.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.

We should all be so lucky.