a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]C.G. Jung

The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.[/b]

And then one day it dawns on you: You almost certainly won’t.

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.

Yet another intrguing observation that can mean almost anything.

In the interview, he gave an example of a man who falls head over heels in love, then later in life regrets his blind choice as he finds that he has married his own anima–the unconscious idea of the feminine in his mind, rather than the woman herself.

Don’t you just hate that?

have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

God willing, he’s right.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown….

Eventually forever and ever.

Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt.

Really repressed, right Mr. Objectivist?

[b]T.S. Eliot

time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present[/b]

I don’t doubt it.

Only through time time is conquered

That and with the space to do it.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

And this guy died over 50 years ago.

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

Wow, does that take me back.

We must learn to suffer more.

You can’t help but wonder: What prompted that?

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

Of course few of us will ever stop there.

[b]so sad today

wouldn’t say i have a death wish but i don’t have a life wish either[/b]

Unless of course she’s faking it.

hope i don’t get reincarnated

Seriously though, would you if you could?

honk if you’re sick of your own bullshit

Let’s face it, for some, there’s not a horn big enough.

i don’t care if you don’t love me just love me

Ever been this desperate yourself?

no, i can’t just accept myself as i am

On the other hand, try getting around it.

can’t tell if I’m dead

A little help here.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.[/b]

Let’s explain that. Providing of course it’s true.

She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.

Trust me: Not counting my strangeness.

And didn’t it always go like that–body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Even fascinating from time to time.

I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don’t want that to happen to me.

On the other hand, anyone here that hasn’t happened to?

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well.

Obviously some more than others.

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.

Stumbling about blindly as it were.

[b]Kurt Cobain

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.[/b]

On the other hand, try and stop them.

Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out.

I suspect that no one ever did.

I feel compelled to say fuck you fuck you to those of you who have absolutely no regard for me as a person. You have raped me harder than you’ll ever know. So again I say fuck you although this phrase has totally lost its meaning. Fuck You! Fuck You!

And that’s just Courtney, he said in jest.

It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

Plants too.

This song is dedicated to Frank Zappa, and River Phoenix, Fred Gwynne who played Herman Munster, Dixie Lee Ray, Thomas P, Tip O’Neil, and you, dumb ass, who just threw water on me.

Anyone know which song that was?

Hi, my name is Kurt Cobain, I’m homosexual, I’m a pagan, I’m a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs!

Maybe, but he still pulled the trigger. Or so they say.

[b]so sad today

it’s important to give up on everything first thing in the morning[/b]

Or, sure, pace yourself.

when you see the emptiness in everything i’ll be here for you

Probably shouldn’t count on me though.

thought about asking this guy on the street if he wanted to fuck but then didn’t

He wondered: Was it me?

help me not be myself

And what might that be?

one thing i don’t like is the way things are

My advice? Don’t underestimate that.

things i fear:
the unknown
the known

Me too, but not in that order.

[b]Tom Stoppard

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.[/b]

Ain’t that not the truth?

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

First, of course, is this true?

Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

So, can you live with that?

Uncertainty is the normal state.

But how certain can we be of that?

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Let’s cite the most obvious examples.

You can’t treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

Does anyone here still do?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.[/b]

A metaphor for something obviously.

If only there weren’t so many other people in the world, he said lugubriously.

Lugubriously indeed.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

Comforting, isn’t it?

And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll’s house, a voice would start whispering: There must be more money! There must be more money! And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. There must be more money! There must be more money!

Cue [among other things] Trumpworld.

A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

So, how did I pull it off, he wondered.

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

For some, the perfect relationship.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.[/b]

Human all too human indeed.

The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that’s all the justice you’ll find in this world.

This either comforts you or it doesn’t.

Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.

Perhaps a bit too philosophical?

Pretty soon, I’ll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that’s left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is… I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.

On the other hand, where do people end and the pieces of paper begin?

In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing. Boundless.

Doesn’t work that way at all here, does it?

Women’s war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.

We really are doomed then.