a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]C.G. Jung

The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.[/b]

I know, but what if it’s true?

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Unless of course it’s your only option.

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.

Unless of course it’s no longer an option.

To make what fate intends for me my own intention.

Clearly that makes no sense.

Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life – these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens to paralyze and suppress the individual.

And we’re all stuck in the middle somewhere.

It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them.

Satyrs alone are debilitating.

[b]T.S. Eliot

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.[/b]

And look where that got me.

Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.

You know the one.

And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find
And of the shame of never finding it.

Like there actually is a cure.

If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

Another fucking objectivist. I think.

That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.

Like that will stop them.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Trust me: mine less than yours.

[b]The Dead Author

Sam Harris has two audiences: people who are so bored that they’ll even listen to someone as resentful as Sam Harris, and people who are so resentful that they’ll even listen to someone as boring as Sam Harris.[/b]

And to think that to some this guy is still a hero.

Sigmund Freud was born on this day in 1856, and people on the internet are still debating whether it’s ok to eat pussy.

If only in your dreams.

Today is the 205th birthday of Søren Kierkegaard and the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, who knew that romance doesn’t last, but neither does capitalism.

Let’s decide: Who came closest?

Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ taught me that sometimes it’s ok to stay in bed.

Not unlike ‘The Trial’.

Solitude: being alone.
Loneliness: thinking that other people are not.

Let’s confirm this.

Dante. Hell yeah.

Literally perhaps.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.[/b]

Or, like me: After a certain age, you felt a need to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

Well, said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.

And who hasn’t had a few of those.

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star…

On the local access channel say.

Apparently, something can happen inside someone you love—it can just happen somehow—and like magic she thinks that she’s had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone.

I know: Like me, you wrote the book.

Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.

Or, for that matter, a father.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

Either that or great bitterness.

[b]Kurt Cobain

Believe everything you read.[/b]

What a kidder!

I’m on my time with everyone.

On the other hand, who wouldn’t let him?

I only remember a few things about Jimmy Carter. He had big lips and liked peanuts. I now know that Jimmy Carter was and is a good man.

As United States presidents go.

Words suck. I mean, every thing has been said. I can’t remember the last real interesting conversation I’ve had in a long time. Words aren’t as important as the energy derived from music, especially live.

Clearly not a philosopher. Let alone a serious one.

I never went out of my way to say anything about my drug use. I tried to hide it as long as I could. The main reason was that I didn’t want some 15-year-old kid who likes our band to think it’s cool to do heroin, you know? I think people who glamorize drugs are fucking assholes and, if there’s a hell, they’ll go there.

Anyway, he meant well.

I am not well read, but when I do read, I read well.

Let’s decide if that is good enough.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I’m always a little skittish around people. Places. Things.[/b]

If nothing else.

we’re only making plans for nihilists

Now that Nigel is taken care of.

hold my hair while I die

Sure, why not.

doktor: your physical strength and stamina are extraordinary
me: for a dead man
doktor: sure

On the other hand, how extraordinary would it have to be?

keeping up with the kierkegaards

Only in Denmark of course.

void and his dead god

The comedy act I’m guessing.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Hamlet’s madness really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws – riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public – knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.
And talking to himself.
And talking to himself.[/b]

On the other hand, nobody’s perfect.

Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.

In case you confuse them.

It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.

Who could doubt it?

If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.

Some don’t even stop there.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

Though not to be confused with motel rooms.

A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

And not just up in the clouds of abstraction.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and- produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction under- neath. Until such time as it will have to hear.[/b]

He means the fucking liberals, right?

It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.

Is that even possible anymore?

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best.

So, did he?

Couldn’t one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the earth are not five minutes from Charing Cross nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth.

Imagine then his reaction to the internet.

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

And that too shall pass.

As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness in her life that affected her.

And then the other one.

[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]

Or, sure, for some, not better.

“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” William of Ockham

And then the entities that should never have been at all.

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

The man was a fucking genius.

“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Clearly not an option for me.

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Also, when we are completely fucking wrong.

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions—to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” Michel Foucault

You know, generally.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it. To hell with it![/b]

A global supermarket as it were. To hell with it or not.

I hear about death so often that I don’t even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they’re worried about what’ll happen after the nuclear war.

And not just in Chernobyl.

I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all I’ve read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives weren’t entirely wasted.

Me, I’m still clinging to the faintest of minute hopes.

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You’re just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about.

Anyone here ever been there, done that?

We don’t need anything. Just listen to us and try to understand. Society is good at doing things, ‘giving’ medical help, pensions, flats. But all this so-called giving has been paid for in very expensive currency. Our blood.

Though hardly ever theirs.

We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful socialist society.

Or of late: We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful capitalist society.

[b]Robert Musil

You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody’s been living for them, not even for a single hour.[/b]

I may myself not be that cynical. But point taken.

A man matters, his experiences matter, but in a city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves, and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.

Not to mention the general descriptions.

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.

Or the failure of his enemies.

…a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.

Name one.

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

Especially their ideology. Either that or ours.

His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.

Among other things, it’s not easy to do.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The individual is the product of power.” Michel Foucault[/b]

Go ahead, try telling him that. Or, for that matter, her.

“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?” Michel Foucault

Tell that to, among others, Satyr. In regard to, say, homosexuality?

“I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.” Michel Foucault

Though clearly not of the stained glass sort.

“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Actually, it’s in being able to make it go away.

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” Aristotle

Not counting the slaves of course. And by definition no women.

“Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Unless of course God is not dead.

[b]Jane Smiley

…the two of them prayed to Jesus that they might learn their lessons sooner rather than later, and that they would be gentle lessons rather than hard lessons.[/b]

And then later Heaven rather than Hell.

He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.

Needless to say, for better or for worse.

She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed.

Clearly then it’s time to move on.

Her stare was like a small room he couldn’t get out of.

And, then, as it segued to a glare, getting smaller all the time.

There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret—it was a source of pride.

Okay, but should it be?

I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, could feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes.

Consider it done?

[b]Han Kang

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.[/b]

Or: He’s a good man, she thought. The kind of man whose goodness is oppressive.

Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves – living, in other words.

On the other hand, here, one size definitely doesn’t fit all.

When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there’s simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.

And with or without you.

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.

And, in some cases, neither are you.

Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time.

You either get this or you don’t. But don’t doubt that you almost certainly will.

The pain feels like a hole swallowing her up, a source of intense fear and yet, at the same time, a strange, quiet peace.

Reminds me of this: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”

[b]so sad today

cause of death: got out of bed[/b]

Still #1 though: Being born.

i was fine till you gave me hope

Don’t even think about it.

you need to learn how to be fake better

Or real better.

there should be an option besides life and death

Let’s think up one.

a romantic obsession a day keeps the meaningless nature of existence away

No, not really, he thought.

“sorry about all the tweets” — my tombstone

Don’s too.

[b]Max Tegmark

On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. [/b]

Among other things, it’s a miracle we’re all still around.

If the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct, then our Universe is a mathematical structure, and from its description, an infinitely intelligent mathematician should be able to derive all these physics theories.

Where’s James S. Saint when we need him?

…in the external reality of general relativity, you’re an extended braidlike pattern in a static four-dimensional spacetime…

Wow, who woulda thunk it?

Imagine a thought experiment where a perfect clone of me is built asleep, complete with all my memories, and is only woken up long enough to perceive a single observer moment. He’d still feel that time flowed from a complex and interesting past, even though he got to experience only that one moment. This means that the subjective perceptions of duration and change are qualia, basic instantaneous perceptions just as redness, blueness or sweetness.

Thought experiment indeed!

…there’s no such thing as brown light! The color brown doesn’t exist in the external reality, but only in your internal reality: it’s simply what you perceive when seeing dim orange light against a darker background.

Is shit still brown then?

Above we worried about how to think about our initial conditions, and we now have a radical answer: this information isn’t fundamentally about our physical reality, but about our place in it. The vast complexity we observe is an illusion in the sense that the underlying reality is quite simple to describe, and what requires close to a googol bits to specify is just our particular address in the multiverse.

Just one more thing we’ll take to the grave.

[b]Lee Smolin

Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found—those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes—were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches.[/b]

Actually, I didn’t know that.

Einstein’s theory of gravity is a theory of causal structure. It tells us that the essence of spacetime is causal structure and that the motion of matter is a consequence of alterations in the network of causal relations. What is left out from the notion of causal structure is any measure of quantity or scale.

Sounds plausible to me.

[b]Before Einstein, geometry was thought to be part of the laws. Einstein revealed that the geometry of space is evolving in time, according to other, deeper laws.

It is important to absorb this point completely. The geometry of space is not part of the laws of nature. There is therefore nothing in those laws that specifies what the geometry of space is. Thus, before solving the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, you don’t have any idea what the geometry of space is. You find out only after you solve the equations.[/b]

Next up: Before Newton.

Science is not about what’s true. It’s about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by way of public evidence.

And then there’s the stuff that, say, the engineers believe.

The geometry of a universe is very much like the grammatical structure of a sentence. Just as a sentence has no structure and no existence apart from the relationships between the words, space has no existence apart from the relationships that hold between the things in the universe. If you change a sentence by taking some words out, or change their order, its grammatical structure changes. Similarly, the geometry of space changes when the things in the universe change their relationships to one another.

You know, as a general description.

For simple black holes, which do not rotate and have no electric charge, the values of the temperature and entropy can be expressed very simply. The area of the horizon of a simple black hole is proportional to the square of its mass, in Planck units. The entropy S is proportional to this quantity. In terms of Planck units, we have the simple formula S = .25 A / h G. Where A is the area of the horizon, and G is the gravitational constant.

Not to be confused with the considerably more complex black holes.

[b]Neil Gaiman

And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they’re meant to.[/b]

Either that or it never went at all.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

This may well be even deeper than I think.

Names come and names go.

Not unlike everything else.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god? asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people’s minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you’re a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

And surely not just the God of Abraham and Moses.

If Hell is other people…then Purgatory is airports.

Either that or strip malls.

If the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads.

Or, I’ll bet, something altogether different.