a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Tom Stoppard

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.[/b]

Doesn’t surprise me.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Remember when it was only one?

For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Actually, it is twice as mysterious as it sounds.

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.

On the other hand, I am inundated with such moments now.

We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

Glum enough for you?

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone- -it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says, ‘One day you are going to die.’

Gee, you think so?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interested him more.[/b]

As you might imagine, that doesn’t work for me.

He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him.

As you might imagine, that doesn’t work for me.

But you don’t fuck me cold-heartedly, she protested.
I don’t want to fuck you at all.

Let’s weep for their future.

You know, he said, with an effort, if one person loves, the other does.
I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing, she said.
Yes, but it is — at least with most people, he answered.

Let’s just say it’s not the least most perceptive observation.

And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

Unlike, for example, philosophy.

Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.

More in the way of grunts and sighs.

[b]God

Retweet this and you can kill a guy.[/b]

Just kidding probably.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the last people you should trust, and I mean that both literally and alphabetically.

God being clever.

Reality was a bad idea.

Not unlike, for example, religion.

Sometimes in life all you need is fifty million dollars.

Sure, I’ll settle for that. Even a little less.

Do unto others as others would do unto you if they weren’t so fucking mean and stupid.

An update was long overdue.

Donald Trump is an asshole’s asshole. He’s the kind of asshole other assholes look at and say, ‘Now there’s an asshole’.

Okay, let’s impeach him for that.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.[/b]

The second part for sure.

I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.

Unless they’re killing Nazis of course.

At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we’d been taught that this was a magical factory that made “energy out of nothing,” where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons.

Cue Chernobyl.

My life has always been like a change jar. It’s full, then it’s empty, then it’s full again, then it’s empty again.

And then the time it is either half full or half empty.

Yur Karyakin once wrote: ‘We should not judge a man’s life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.’ And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.

Obviously: Yes.

I’m afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.

Maybe even Putin himself.

[b]Milos Forman

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don’t violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.[/b]

Just short of, say, making things up.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

In Trumpworld for example.

The worst evil is – and that’s the product of censorship – is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.

That’s what it will do alright.

I’m convinced the Beatles are partly responsible for the fall of Communism.

How partly?

You know, 20 years… the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they’re clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.

Those were the days.
[for some anyway]

What I like about masturbation is that you don’t have to talk afterwards.

That’s true and then some.

[b]Existential Comics

Memorizing a list of fallacies and thinking you understand rationality is like memorizing the distance between celestial bodies and thinking you understand astrophysics.[/b]

Let’s at least admit that it might be true.

Remember, existentialism isn’t just about being sad all the time. It is about being sad all the time while reminding everyone how well read you are.

What’s that make nihilism then?

I know we’re not living in a simulation because any species smart enough to simulate reality would be smart enough to make something better than this.

Well, that settles it then.

Paul Ryan’s legacy? Wasn’t it basically just saying over and over: “look, I don’t want to do racism, but if that’s what we have to do to give more money to the rich then I guess we have to do it.”

Probably?

Philosophers today need to follow the example of Socrates: whenever people are having fun at a party, badger them with philosophical questions until everyone hates you.

Did they have raves back then?

[b]There are only three things that I know for certain:

  1. That I exist.
  2. That one day I will die.
  3. That the comment section will be bad.[/b]

Pick 1:
1] clever
2] stupid

[b]Robert Musil

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.[/b]

Not counting you of course.

…by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore.

Let me guess: That can’t be true!

The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one.

But it’s a beaut.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

Let’s think up something.

One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

You know, approximately.

‘True’ and ‘false’ are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.

In other words, if that’s true.

[b]The Dead Author

Melancholia is depression for happy people.[/b]

Let’s ask the happy people here.

Existentialism is simple. Heidegger retweeted Nietzsche, who had plagiarized Kierkegaard and blocked Kant, and got faved by Sartre.

Simplified as it were.

What do we need?
Nietzsche: a hero.
Plato: a king.
Heidegger: a god.
Sartre: a drink.

Camus: a smoke.

Aristotle is the guy you hate even though he lets everyone copy his homework.

On the other hand, why do you hate him?

Modern Art = I Could Do That + Yeah, But You Didn’t
People keep posting this in defense of modern art even though it’s based on the myths that modern art requires no technical skills, and that it’s either too simple or too hard to understand.

Your own bristling reaction please.

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Adorno walk into a bar. Separately.

Let’s explain that.

[b]Herta Müller

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn’t be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.[/b]

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.

To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.

Could it really be as simple as that?

At a time I used to think that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently.

So, how might you walk differently?

No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.

How many here can say that?

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity.

Where’s the great hall here? The one with all the fist pumping.

No cities can grow in a dictatorship, because everything stays small when it’s being watched.

How small? twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref … r%5Eauthor

[b]Jane Smiley

I always think that things have to happen the way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it becomes a kind of fate. I learned from studying Buddhism that there’s beauty, and certainly a lot of peace, in accepting that. I sniffed. A smile twinkled sheepishly across his face. Okay, okay, he said, how about this? If you worry about it, you draw it to you.[/b]

So, which is it?

There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother…

Clearly, she had never been to my house.

Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world—in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.

If only in your head.

…not to borrow trouble by worrying about it.

Let’s file this one under, “easier – a lot easier – said than done”

When your parents don’t like you, then you are free.

If anything, mine were indifferent.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

And on your terms to boot.

[b]Jan Miesizkowski

Philosophy: there is something rather than nothing
Literature: there is a something for every nothing
Political Economy: I got something, you got nothing[/b]

Only now in reverse order.

Adorno: There is no right life in the wrong one
Bataille: There is no right life
Beckett: There is no life
Schopenhauer: No

Amazingly enough in exactly that order.

Plato: A good idea is worth dying for
Kant: The idea of the good is worth dying for
Beckett: Dying sounds like a good idea

What’s a better idea still?

Kant: The flower is beautiful
Baudelaire: The flower is evil
Nietzsche: The flower is a cry from the abyss
Beckett: The flower is dead, like everything else

What would that make a weed then?

I liked philosophy better when I thought that
a) Hegel was joking about knowing everything
b) Socrates was joking about knowing nothing
c) Beckett was joking about knowing that everything was nothing
d) Heidegger was a joke

I liked it better [a lot better] when I didn’t think objectivism was joke.

10:30 PM sends his students a stern email reminding them that deadlines are sacred
10:31 PM sends emails to two different editors and a dean begging for extensions

One more miniscule reflection on the human condition.

[b]Max Tegmark

Life 1.0: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of
Life 2.0: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes. [/b]

Life 3.0? Buy the book.

Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.

First, is this true? Second, why does it matter?

As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how.

On the other hand, even today “why?” is still out there.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks.

Or [today] the parabolic orbits of weapons of mass destruction.

Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.

Does this sound like Donald Trump to you?

“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it." —Eugene Wigner, 1960

God, maybe?

[b]Lee Smolin

So, in the end, the most improbable and hence the most puzzling aspect of space is its very existence. The simple fact that we live in an apparently smooth and regular three dimensional world represents one of the greatest challenges to the developing quantum theory of gravity. If you look around at the world seekimg mystery, you may reflect that one of the biggest mysteries is that we live in a world in which it is possible to look around, and see as far as we like. The great triumph of the quantum theory of gravity may be that it will explain to us why this is so.[/b]

He means RM/AO of course.

I have already mentioned two features that successful unifications tend to share. The first, surprise, cannot be underestimated. If there is no surprise, then the idea is either uninteresting or something we knew before. Second, the consequences must be dramatic: The unification must lead quickly to new insights and hypothesis, becoming the engine that drives progress in understanding. But there is a third factor that trumps both of these. A good unified theory must offer predictions that no one would have thought to make before. It may even suggest new kinds of experiments that make sense only in light of the new theory. Most important of all, the predictions must be confirmed by experiment. These three criteria-surprise, new insights, and new predictions confirmed by experiment-are what we will be looking for when we come to judge the promise of current efforts at unification.

He means VO of course.

In fact, the particle-antiparticle annihilation and the closing of the string is necessary, if the theory is to be consistent with relativity, meaning the theory is required to have both open and closed strings. But this means it must include gravity. And the difference between gravity and the other forces is naturally explained, in terms of the difference between open and closed strings. For the first time, gravity plays a central role in the unification of the forces.

Give the cat some string and test it.

Extending Polyakov’s argument, he found evidence that the string theory describing those emergent strings is actually a ten-dimensional supersymmetric string theory. Of the nine dimensions of space in which these strings live, four of them are like the ones in Polyakov’s conjecture. There are, then, five dimensions left over, which are extra dimensions as described by Kaluza and Klein. The extra five dimensions are arranged as a sphere. The four dimensions of Polyakov are curved, too, but in the opposite way from a sphere; such spaces are sometimes called saddle-shaped. These correspond to universes with dark energy, but where the dark energy is negative.

Anyone here know if this has actually been demonstrated? You know, so that “all rational men and women are obligated to believe it.” :wink:

Whatever is happening on very small scales near the horizon of the black hole will be enlarged by the effect whereby the wavelengths of light are stretched as the light climbs up to us. This means that jf we can observe light coming from very close to the horizon of a black hole, we may be able to see the quantum structure of space itself.

Don’t try this at home.

When someone answers a question about the foundations of a subject, it can change everything we know.

You all know my three.

[b]Sad Socrates

Your beliefs are your problem.[/b]

Or [here]: My beliefs are your problem.

I don’t know what it’s like to be me.

More to the point [mine]: I can’t know.

It couldn’t be a better time for earth to be destroyed.

Or, sure, right after Bob Mueller drains the swamp.

I can’t wait until machines are advanced enough to be depressed.

Like they’d ever admit it.

At least everyone dies in the end.

If only as far as we know.

It’s good to have strong opinions you don’t believe in.

In other words, as long as they don’t know it.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.[/b]

We’ll need a context of course.

What’s your name, lad?
Newton. Newton Pulsifer.
Lucifer? What’s that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your Stygian and hellish masters?
That’s Pulsifer, explained Newton. With a P. I don’t know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey.
The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed.

It should.

You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so t here wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.’ No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points.

“I” would never go that far myself.

It is said that scattered through Despair’s domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

Not unlike despair itself.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

Including nightmares.

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It’s that something’s going on in your head, and you can’t control it. I mean, It’s like there’s these bad worlds inside you. But it’s just you… it’s like you’re betraying yourself.

Or, sure, fulfilling yourself in the good ones.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.[/b]

A couple of ways to interpret that, right?

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.

My guess: neither here nor there.

But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Well, sure, technically.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

Let’s prove that once again.

That is another of your odd notions, said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”

Including dasein, right?

Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

I know: At least a hundred.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Sun Tzu[/b]

Not counting Michael Cohen of course.

“The future depends on what we do in the present.” Mahatma Gandhi

Wow, who would have ever thought that?!

“Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.” Zhuangzi

With the possible exception of those that work.

“Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.” Rem Koolhaas

And not just in architecture.

“I am the punishment of God…If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” Ghengis Khan

No doubt akin to Aguirre’s wrath of God.

“Tell me where is the love in what your prophet has said? Man, it sounds to me just like a prison for the walking dead.” Jeff Buckley

Someone should have told him that, for many, that’s the whole point.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.[/b]

Isn’t sex biological?

This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a ‘pristine wilderness.’ They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.

How then does your life measure up?

It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.

One way or the other, it always seems to be maybe.

There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill…

Anyone here able to pin this down? Substantively as it were.

People who asked questions didn’t necessary like being asked questions.

And not all of them work for the government.

Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

If they even have one.

[b]John Dewey

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.[/b]

Let’s run this by the military industrial complex.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

Let’s run this by the ruling class.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

If not axiomatically.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Indeed, imagine my thoughts getting around.

Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate–unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.

At 40, some are just getting started.

I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I’m an atheist.

At least until the day we die. Then, come on, all bets are off.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I fought the ocean and the ocean won[/b]

Imagine then fighting the whole fucking universe.

If i could afford to be a loner, i wouldn’t talk to anybody.

Unless you count posts here.

do you believe in tragic?

Oh yeah.

out on the road today, I saw a catcher in the rye sticker on a cadillac. a little voice inside my head said “phonies”

Apologies to Don Henley.

have you tried explaining yourself to yourself?

Better me than you.

a mystery that murders the reader

Let’s take this one to Creative Writing.