a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.[/b]

I know that I didn’t. On the other hand, what does that even mean?

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

True, but, come on, really, what the fuck are perfect stories?

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

All the way back to, say, before the Big Bang.

We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

More to the point, we all just are people, and none of us know what that really means.

Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.

Light being a metaphor for, well, you tell me.

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

Promises made? Promises received? Too close to call?

[b]John Dewey

There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.[/b]

Or there sure as hell can be.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

Indeed, that was once even applicable to me.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

On the other hand, imagine Aristotle with a smart phone.

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an “ism” becomes so involved in reaction against other “isms” that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.

Think about that, Mr. Objectivist.

To me faith means not worrying.

That and tithing.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Actually, the most important attitude lies in recognizing the limits of what can be learned. For example, in the is/ought world.

[b]C.G. Jung

Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.[/b]

Whatever that means anyway.

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.

How disconcerting is that then?

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.

Does the stone know that?

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Not many like that still around. Here for example.

Our suffering comes from our unlived life–the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche.

Anyone here actually believe that?

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual.

Or [as often as not]: The psychopathology of the individual is rooted in the psychology of the masses.

[b]T.S. Eliot

It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.[/b]

Their rules in other words.

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

Let’s confirm what that means.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Let’s confirm what that means.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

He wondered, any particular dead? Or does this go deeper than that?

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.

There are worse things to use.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

Mine never meant to be. And it shows to say the least.

[b]Nein

Correction: Putin invited Trump to White House.[/b]

Ordered him actually.

Don’t forget the good news. One of these Mondays will be your last.

Maybe the next one then.

Correction: there is a hell. But in heaven there is no beer.

No, seriously, is there?

A gentle reminder from your data: it’s nothing personal.

This time.

To be on Facebook. Or not to be.

You mean, like, period?!

Remember, friends. You are what you delete.

Let’s start with everything.

[b]Judith Butler

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.[/b]

Social, true. But certainly no less political and economic.

It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am.

’ ’ here makes all the difference in the world.

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.

Go ahead, use my terms if you’d like.

Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with “being a man,” others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.

Lots of things weren’t anticipated, were they?

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of ‘evil’.

And then all the fools who insist that they can tell them apart. Objectively, no less.

That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?

And I’m all for repetition, right?

[b]Kurt Cobain

Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem.[/b]

Not the ones I take. Well, so far.

Friends are nothing but a known enemy.

Best to keep that to yourself though.

If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.

Give us a sign then if that’s still true.

I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.

Probably just something attributed to him.

I started to be really proud of the fact I was gay even though I wasn’t.

Had he ever explained that?

The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came.

And then one day it really didn’t.

[b]God

The Easter Bunny is a ridiculous myth that completely detracts from the factual reality of the Son of God rising from the dead.[/b]

Of course He’s biased.

No, it’s about co-opting Passover (along with ancient pagan celebrations of the vernal equinox) to help nascent Christianity syncretize with pre-existing faiths and Easter eggs and bunny rabbits.

Think, for example, Santa Claus.

A better world is possible but extremely unlikely.

Let’s change His mind.

You can be much less of an asshole than Donald Trump and still be an enormous asshole.

Let’s note some.

I made you in My image and I’m an asshole.

He means Asshole of course.

My son is crazy. He thinks he’s Jesus.

Celestial humor.

[b]Tom Stoppard

It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.[/b]

What you might ask.

What are a friend’s books for if not to be borrowed?

And sure, for some, even returned.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

Has anyone actually done that here?

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

We know what that assumes though, don’t we?

I’m going to be dead before I read the books I’m going to read.

Works pretty much the same for music and films. And most everything else for that matter.

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Including the future for some of us.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.[/b]

Not counting the truly insufferable…zealots?

…ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

Nope, not anymore.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

Characters in other words. If not already caricatures of them.

Have I interrupted a conversation? she asked.
No, only a complete silence, said Birkin.
Oh, said Ursula, vaguely, absent.

On the other hand, I can still tell them apart.

The artist usually sets out – or used to – to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Cue the dangling conversations.

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog…Only in the novel are all things given full play.

One man’s opinion. Though clearly true.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is.[/b]

I know that I don’t. Though I do have my suspicions.

Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.

In other words, for those who were actually there.

Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

Some more or less closer to ground zero.

Truth is communal.

Well, with all those individual renditions of it anyway.

I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.

Obviously not for everyone.

It’s certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population.

Lots of things like that over here too.

[b]Existential Comics

Is philosophy of math cool? Are you kidding? What could be cooler than spending your life trying to figure out the relationship between math and logic? Name one thing, I dare you.[/b]

You know, now that James is no longer around.

Nostalgia is a longing for the past, longing for a time when you had not yet realized that everything is shit.

Tomorrow for some of you.

It’s a little known fact, but philosophy actually started when Thales attempted to understand the world as a prank, but the joke went too far when they started doing experiments and created science.

I actually don’t know if this is true.

What distinguishes humans from animals?
Aristotle: reason.
Descartes: a soul.
Nietzsche: keeping promises.
Marx: making industry.
Kierkegaard: being in constant despair every single moment of their lives.

Which one [obviously] took a leap of faith to God?

Sports are the ultimate expression of existential creation of meaning, because there is absolutely no god damn reason anyone should care which five dudes are best at putting a ball through a basket, and yet we do care. It does matter.

Okay, but does it also matter if you don’t care?

I consider myself a true centrist. Both the Anarchists and the State Communists make excellent points. We have to learn from both sides.

Think of them as conflicting goods.

[b]John Stuart Mill

There have been, and may be again, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery.[/b]

Am I the only one here?

We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.

Tell that to these guys: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=193812

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

Let’s not go there, right?

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seem good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

Clearly we can file this one under, “in theory”.

Language is the light of the mind.

In and out of the cave?

…it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner.

You cue your ruling class, I’ll cue mine.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.” Herman Hesse[/b]

Of course it might be argued [by some] that the Nazis exemplified both.

“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” Herman Hesse

Including, for example, this.

“It is a known fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.” Vilfredo Pareto

On the contrary, this may well be among the least known facts of all.

“Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.” Vilfredo Pareto

Let’s just say that here context is everything.

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Let’s keep this one in circulation. Though, sure, we can still debate why it either is or is not true.

“To live alone is the fate of all great souls.” Arthur Schopenhauer

In other words, on purpose.

[b]Amy Chua

Against a backdrop of stark group inequality, the most successful extremist groups offer their members precisely what existing societal institutions do not: a tribe, a sense of belonging and purpose, an enemy to hate and kill, and a chance to reverse the group polarity, turning humiliation into superiority and triumph. This is the formula that al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited.[/b]

No, really, this is almost certainly true.

Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. We crave bonds and attachments, which is why we love clubs, teams, fraternities, family. Almost no one is a hermit.

Holy shit, am I the exception to this rule!

Without taking anything away from their important contributions across the globe, U.S. elites often seem to have more compassion for the world’s poor than America’s poor, perhaps because the former are easier to romanticize.

Not counting all of the Third World dictators sustained by American foreign policy. But, sure, point taken.

For Chinese people, when it comes to parents, nothing is negotiable. Your parents are your parents, you owe everything to them (even if you don’t), and you have to do everything for them (even if it destroys your life).

Clearly: For better or worse.

This what’s so peculiar about America. We have been both exceptionally racist and exceptionally inclusive.

On the other hand, consider this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_(2007_film

…at different times in the past, both the American Left and the American Right have stood for group-transcending values. Neither does today.

Examples please.

[b]Herta Müller

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.[/b]

Would that I could be so lucky.

Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.

Being a man, I suppose, this makes absolutely no sense.

When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

Am I the only exception then?
He said in jest.

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

Nowadays however join the crowd.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

Let’s start here though: worldatlas.com/articles/the … world.html

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

As long as it still works though, why not?

[b]The Dead Author

Not that writing is overrated, but Arthur Rimbaud quit at age 19 and got a life.[/b]

Right, like you can’t do both.

Western philosophy started with Odysseus crying on the beach and ended with Jordan Peterson crying on youtube.

One man’s opinion?

A gentle reminder that Easter egg hunts were created by Protestant capitalists who believed that you had to work and compete to receive even small, stupid gifts.

Seriously though is this true?

God is not dead. April fools. Life is the directionless void you thought it was.

And it’s still April, right?

Slavoj Žižek is the Donald Trump of philosophy because he distracts you from a false statement by saying something even more ridiculous.

Boy is he taking a beating of late.

There is a hell. Look around.

Could it really be as simply as that?

[b]Jane Smiley

We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.[/b]

Until one day it’s no longer just the mood you are in.

I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.

Especially if they’re assholes.

The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I’m being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.

You know, as a rule.

Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn’t have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child’s playroom.

Let’s file this one under, “like father, like son”.

I’m not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.

Me too, right?

She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.

I do too. 365 days a year on average.

[b]Max Tegmark

I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.[/b]

And that explains what exactly?

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

Unless of course it really is impossible.

So I feel that the experimental verdict is in: the world is weird, and we just have to learn to live with it.

That or check out.

…economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear.

It still is.

I feel that my main responsibility as a teacher isn’t to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.

Good luck with that. At least around here.

What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.

I completely agree. Though for very, very different reasons.

[b]so sad today

you’ve mistaken my low self-esteem for kindness[/b]

That’ll happen sure.

nothing good happens out of bed

You know, if you can get out of it.

people want you to be okay so you will shut the fuck up

Not that everyone actually will of course.

don’t worry, things may feel hopeless now but they’ll get better soon and then be hopeless again

It’s genetic after all.

people are like “your depression isn’t your fault” and i’m like “no shit”

I wish I could say that.

high on existential dread

You know, philosophically.

regret or it didn’t happen

Though especially if it did.