a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

Welcome to anarchist club. The first rule is that there are no rules. The second rule is that there are no rules. And now to business: half of you have clearly broken the rules, and are not real anarchists, so you have to leave.[/b]

And then all hell broke loose.

It’s Friday, my friends, time to cast off the values of our ancestors and remake the world in our image.

Works for Thursday too.

How to write an existentialist novel:
Beginning: dude is sad that life is meaningless.
Middle: dude is kinda okay that life is meaningless.
End: dude finally has sex with the girl.

Meaningful sex at that.

I can’t necessarily prove it, but I have a strong intuition that intuitions can’t be trusted.

Okay but what’s your gut tell you?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I realized that I’m missing something in my life.

Think about finding it then.

What’s bizarre is that people think that humans pursue their own rational self interest, and the fact that people are going around having babies doesn’t seem to deter this idea at all.

I think he means in this world.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.[/b]

How often though is debatable.

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.

If only on this planet.

It is superstition, she admitted. But it might be true.

Go ahead, walk under the ladder and see.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’ve alive.

Go ahead, be the first to really understand this.

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

Like me though you might not.

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

Let’s exchange examples of this.

[b]Robert Crumb

You don’t have journalists over there anymore, what they have is public relations people. That’s what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists.[/b]

And that’s just in the media industrial complex.

When I come up against the real world, I just vacillate.

Seventy four years for him now and counting.

I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.

Mission accomplished?

Hey kids, while you’re out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Abbie Hoffman.

Your vigor for life appalls me.

I’m sure they were devastated.

As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn’t much like it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them.

In a word: maybe.

[b]C.G. Jung

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.[/b]

You know where this is going. Or, perhaps, where I will take it.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Trust me: Not the objectivists.

You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

Hell, I can do this before breakfast.

One book opens another.

Or closes another.

Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists…But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.

My own fucking being in particular.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Yeah, good luck with that.

[b]The Dead Author

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on this day [4/25] in 1889, who claimed that a philosophical work could be written that consisted entirely of jokes. It’s unclear if he meant his own.[/b]

Probably meant Karl Popper’s.

Aristotle read Plato. Aquinas read Aristotle. Brentano read Aquinas. Husserl read Brentano. Heidegger read Husserl. Sartre read Heidegger. Camus had a date to get to.

With a cigarette perhaps.

There should be a rule that for every book you buy, you have to read one you already own.

So, would you?

Immanuel Kant was born on this day [4/22] in 1724. Every year, Kant would bake a raw bean into his birthday cake. Whoever of his guests got the piece with the bean would have to give a talk in his honor.

Hell, he’d be morally obligated to.

Every 50 years, someone declares that philosophy is over. Now you know the history of philosophy.

Come on, there’s no getting around those “big questions”. Probably never will be.

Nearly all hatred of smartphones and social media comes from the realization that other people have friends to talk to.

Not counting mine of course.

[b]T.S. Eliot

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.[/b]

Or as some smartass might put it: blah blah blah.

There was a door
And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle.
Why could I not walk out of my prison?
What is hell? Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to Escape to. One is always alone.

And not a single rhyme.

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

Well, you can’t say I didn’t try to. But point taken. Or not of course.

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference…

It all just sort of happened to me.

The journey not the arrival matters.

Says who?

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

And [perhaps] what makes it all the more insufferable are all the times it is possible.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

…he’s infuriated that his e-reader allows him to only know the percentage of a book he’s read, not the number of pages. This, he thinks, is 92 percent stupid.[/b]

Any e-readers here? Is this actually true?

And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?

First of all, let’s decide if this is a rhetorical question.

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

She means yours, asshole.

Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last – yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind of and worshipful of and being humbled by tiny. You couldn’t help but think of your own father as you saw your little girl with hers.

So, did Donald and Ivanka leap to mind?

And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it toward you, and as it collects, you really can’t believe that there’s something else at the end of it. Something that isn’t just more pain. But there’s always something else at the end; something at least a little different. You never know what that thing will be, but it’s there.

Unless of course [for you] the end is still nowhere in sight.

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.

Another brute facticity of life as it were. If only for almost all of us.

[b]Sad Socrates

Focusing on the good is as much a skill as focusing on the bad.[/b]

You know, if you can find any.

It’s a blessing to know Jesus was never my god.

How you might ask.

It may not be useful to think the universe is absurd, but it’s fun.

How you might ask.

The world is only dark when I open my eyes.

And that’s before I get to my ears.

Monday is just another horrible fucking day.

If only along with all the horrible fucking others.

One day you wake up and things are bad forever.

You tell me about yours, I’ll tell you about mine.

[b]Kurt Cobain

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.[/b]

Not much this isn’t applicable to. Or, sure, that’s just him and me.

No one is afraid of heights, they’re afraid of falling down.

In other words, they’re afraid of heights.

If you read, you’ll judge.

And if you write expect to be judged all the more.

I’m not like them
But I can pretend

On the other hand, so can they.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

Not unlike, for example, grunge.

Here we are now, entertain us.

That reminds me: How am I doing?

[b]tiny nietzsche

If you’re feeling lonely and small on a monday, remember the universe is vast and beyond comprehension.[/b]

And, for most of us, that’s tomorrow.

…when you know god is dead

For example, for sure.

hate it when I’m aware of everything I do

While some actually don’t hate it at all, do they?

i need another brain just for secrets

Nope, mine works just fine.

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

Must be millions like that.

I’m so old that dressing entirely in black wasn’t goth, it was Tuesday.

Just out of curiosity, how old is that?

[b]Tom Stoppard

All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.[/b]

You know, sort of.

Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It’s the currency дf living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?

You know, before we get to all the things you should assume instead.

A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

How dumb is that, he thought.

James Joyce…an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Kind of ironic don’t you think?

It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box would you?.. Even taking into account the fact that you’re dead, it isn’t a pleasant thought. Especially if you’re dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I’m going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.

That or life in an urn.

They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.

This guy apparently: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus

[b]D.H. Lawrence

There was only this one lamp-post. Behind was the great scoop of darkness, as if all the night were there.[/b]

Sounds like a rehearsal for something.

Somewhere, deep down him, he was scared, he was born scared. And those who are born with fear are natural slaves, whose profund instint leads to dread, with poisonous fear, all of those who suddenly can possibly cut loose the slave colar around their necks.

I can’t even reach mne.

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

On the other hand, who cares?

You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.

More fucking gibberish about love, he thought.

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else… The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

This might not be true, of course. But not by much.

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.

Not counting commercial art of course.

[b]so sad today

depression is like “i’m always here for you baby”[/b]

For some, not unlike dread.

unfortunately i’m very self-aware

For me that gets a bit tricky.

there’s nothing to fear but fear itself and also the dying process, the uncontrollable, the strange fact that we exist, other humans

Of course she’s just getting started.

can you fill the existential hole with dick? a memoir

Probably not. But there are other holes.

i came, i saw, i hid in the bathroom

With all the medications.

i’m aware of what i’m doing but not enough to stop

Even if I wanted to.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

‘A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.’ I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill.[/b]

More or less as a dumb bastard.

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger — I’ve got a sixth sense for it now. We’re homesick for it, some of us; it’s called the ‘Afghan syndrome’.

After all, boys will be boys. On the other hand…

I still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, ‘I don’t want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don’t want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.’

The other side of the coin perhaps.

They’re all Tajiks, they have the same Koran, the same faith, but the Kulyabs kill the Pamirs, and the Pamirs kill the Kulyabs.

Go figure, eh?

As my physics teacher always said, “My dear students! Just remember that money solves all problems, even differential equations.”

You can pay someone else to solve them.

We all live through it by ourselves, we don’t know what else to do. I can’t understand it with my mind. My mother especially has felt confused. She teaches Russian literature, and she always taught me to live with books. But there are no books about this. She became confused. She doesn’t know how to do without books. Without Chekhov and Tolstoy.

So, don’t let this happen to you.

[b]Robert Musil

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.[/b]

What do you say, let’s not go there?

Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people’s goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know.

Not unlike the bad and ugly parts.

And what would you do if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.

Let’s imagine what’s left then.

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

Let’s clear that up.

What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.

Imperfectly noted and then some.

Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one it comes to the same thing.

Let’s just say I doubt it.

[b]Jane Smiley

We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.[/b]

Ain’t that the truth? About, for example, almost everything.

It didn’t occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

Drowned a few others though.

If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows.

True. And, for some of us, considerably more.

If you lived in the same place long enough, everything reminded you of everything else.

I’ll let you know if that ever happens to me.

Arthur said, You must know that you don’t love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.
Why do you love them?
Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don’t know what’s coming and maybe you do.

Then it’s just a matter of whether, once they find out, they still love you.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Not always of course or who would still be around.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” James Joyce[/b]

In other words, better for some.

“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I should be so lucky, he thought.

“To be great is to be misunderstood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just for the record, does anyone here understand me?

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein

Need I say more?

“To be prepared is half the victory.” Miguel de Cervantes

Trust me: Don’t try that here.

“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be” Miguel de Cervantes

We’ll need a context of course.

[b]Han Kang

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.[/b]

What’s your rendition of this? You know, if the shoe fits.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

If we’re lucky only probably.

Why is it such a bad thing to die?

Dasein I suspect is riddled all through this one.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.

But then more or less out of the blue it’s gone forever.

After you died I could not hold a funeral, and so my life became a funeral.

Now that’s glum.

She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.

One in a million in other words.

[b]Max Tegmark

With a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, the ERH implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis that our physical world is a mathematical structure.

This means that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematical, making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.[/b]

In other words, we come mathematically?

Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever a politician wanted to do, he or she could find an economist as advisor who had argued for doing precisely that. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to increase government spending, so he listened to John Maynard Keynes, whereas Ronald Reagan wanted to decrease government spending, so he listened to Milton Friedman.

Gee, he thought, I wonder why it works like that?

Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of these nuclear incidents carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For example, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine that was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.

Makes you wonder what we don’t know here and now.

Verification asks “Did I build the system right?,”
Validation asks “Did I build the right system?”

Two different things, right?

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Not counting mine I’m guessing.

[b]In summary, time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is. So is change. In spacetime, the future exists and the past doesn’t disappear. When we combine Einstein’s classical spacetime with quantum mechanics, we get quantum parallel universes as we saw in Chapter 8. This means that there are many pasts and futures that are all real-but this in no way diminishes the unchanging mathematical nature of the full physical reality.

This is how I see it. However, although this idea of an unchanging reality is venerable and dates back to Einstein, it remains controversial and subject to vibrant scientific debate, with scientists I greatly respect expressing a spectrum of views. For example, in his book The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene expresses unease toward letting go of the notions that change and creation are fundamental, writing, “I’m partial to there being a process, however tentative…that we can imagine generating the multiverse.” Lee Smolin goes further in his book Time Reborn, arguing that not only is change real, but that indeed time may be the only thing that’s real. At the other end of the spectrum, Julian Barbour argues in his book The End of Time not only that change is illusory, but that one can even describe physical reality without introducing the time concept at all.[/b]

Or, sure, none of the above.

[b]Nein

Let’s be honest: if there’s one thing more political than politics, it’s spending more time with your family.[/b]

Including [of course] our family of friends here.

Monday. No better time to read Marx.

Anyone here know why?

Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs not mistaken.

Not unlike objectivism.

Twitter. Come for the epic meltdowns. Stay for your own.

Describe your own meltdown. If only for our entertainment.

Yes, friends, things are good. Also some places. Even a few people. Verbs are the problem.

Worse: embodying them.

Sure, we could do without civilization. But we’d miss the decline.

Here of course we’re part of it.