a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Lee Smolin

The Five Great Problems in Theoretical Physics: Problem 1: Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity. Problem 2: Resolve the problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics, either by making sense of the theory as it stands or by inventing a new theory that does make sense. Problem 3: Determine whether or not the various particles and forces can be unified in a theory that explains them all as manifestations of a single, fundamental entity. Problem 4: Explain how the values of the free constants in the standard model of particle physics are chosen in nature. Problem 5: Explain dark matter and dark energy. Or, if they don’t exist, determine how and why gravity is modified on large scales. More generally, explain why the constants of the standard model of cosmology, including the dark energy, have the values they do.[/b]

All subsumed perhaps in explaining why anything exists at all. If that’s deemed a problem by you.

Quantum theory, in turn, has its own trouble with infinities. They appear whenever you attempt to use quantum mechanics to describe fields, like the electromagnetic field. The problem is that the electric and magnetic fields have values at every point in space. This means that there are an infinite number of variables (even in a finite volume there are an infinite number of points, hence an infinite number of variables). In quantum theory, there are uncontrollable fluctuations in the values of every quantum variable. An infinite number of variables, fluctuating uncontrollably, can lead to equations that get out of hand and predict infinite numbers when you ask questions about the probability of some event happening, or the strength of some force.

For some of course this is infinitely hard to understand. Not excluding myself by the way.

To understand what we mean when we say that space is discrete, we must put our minds completely into the relational way of thinking, and really try to see and feel the world around us as nothing but a network of evolving relationships. These relationships are not among things situated in space - they are among the events that make up the history of the world. The relationships define the space, not the other way around.

Admittedly I have no idea what the relationship is between this and all the relationships that actually concern me.

If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory, a theory that answers every question in terms of sensible finite numbers.

Imagine then the equation for that. Or the equation for what brought it all into existence.

Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproved.

Among other things, I don’t doubt that.

A singularity is a point or region in spacetime at which some physical quantity such as the density of mass or energy, the temperature, or the strength of the gravitational field, becomes infinite. Whenever they happen, they pose serious difficulties for physics because they signal a breakdown in the description of the world in mathematical terms.

Anything infinite here?

[b]Neil Gaiman

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.[/b]

Would you like me to introduce you to mine?

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.

Really, come on, how do we wrap our heads around this?

There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.

Really, come on, how do we wrap our heads around this?

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber, she explained. There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.

I wonder if that’s true in Baltimore, he thought.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

And that’s true even if you buy a new mirror.

He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

Must be an insanity thing, he figured.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Facebook: Let’s pretend the world is a friendly place
Instagram: Let’s pretend the world is a beautiful place
Twitter: Let’s pretend the world is going to survive past Thursday[/b]

Are there actually people around who know if this is true?

Happy May Day
Marx: Workers of the world, unite!
Luxemburg: Freedom is the freedom of dissenters!
Žižek: Be sure to buy the hipster t-shirt I’m endorsing!

On the other hand, another one bites the dust.

You can’t spell Monday without
Schopenhauer: m-o-a-n
Kierkegaard: m-a-d
Camus: our pitiless stumble into a merciless void of exacting doom

He probably just made this up.

Better to have loved and lost than to have realized that
Lacan: love is loss
Bataille: loss is love
Klein: there is no love
Beckett: there is only loss

Klein?

Schopenhauer: The will to life
Nietzsche: The will to power
Heidegger: The will to will
Wittgenstein: What will it take to shut you all up?

On the other hand, where are they now?

Philosophy: I want to know the answers
Literature: I want to know the questions
Economics: There are no questions
Politics: There are no answers

Which one is least likely not to be true?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.[/b]

Needless to say there was not much else.

In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.

Trust me though: Not always.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

This time, he means.

When I was young and filled with folly, I fell in love with melancholy.

If only because it rhymes.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deserved.

The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.

And that goes straight to the brain.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.[/b]

Control. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

Purpose. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?

Worse: a fucking tick.

Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person’s body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person’s object of undying hatred.

Well, sure, assuming they survive.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

Don’t you just hate that?

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

Actually, I have no idea how that might feel.

[b]God

If what other people think of you, what you think of yourself, and who you actually are ever met, the three of you wouldn’t recognize each other.[/b]

God’s own rendition of dasein no doubt.

The Feds now have more on Trump than I do.

Maybe, but not more than Rachel Maddow.

You are an asshole. This is the basis of all morality.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Only one species on Earth is so arrogantly alienated from its ecosystem it has to set aside a day just to reluctantly acknowledge it lives on a planet.

I’m guessing it’s not penguins.

Star Wars Day always reminds Me of the time I told Jesus I was his father and he had the same reaction Luke did.

There actually fucking is one!!!

Rudy Giuliani had one good day and that was the worst day in American history.

It’s Hell for him.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.[/b]

Control. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

Purpose. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?

Worse: a fucking tick.

Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person’s body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person’s object of undying hatred.

Well, sure, assuming they survive.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

Don’t you just hate that?

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

Actually, I have no idea how that might feel.