a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

The worst crime for:
Utilitarianism: causing suffering.
Existentialism: going along with the herd.
Stoicism: being affected by what you can’t control.
Capitalism: trying to do things that benefit society instead of maximizing shareholder profit.[/b]

Let’s decide: Which is the best of all possible worlds?

Epictetus: “Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
Carnap: “Yeah but how do I verify that empirically?”
Epictetus: “God damn it, shut up, nerd.”

You know, hypothetically.

My New Year’s resolution is to not start a podcast. Wish me luck.

No, seriously, what on earth does this mean?

Okay, but have we completely ruled out the idea that postmodernism was created by Russian bots in order to undermine Western values??

Of course nothing really can be ruled out.

…we’ve been doing philosophy for like three thousand years, and not only have we not discovered the truth, but we still can’t even agree on what “truth” means.

No, but I’ll bet many here can define it.

Philosophically speaking, everyone’s tweets are bad. The only ethical thing to do is for us all to delete our accounts and never speak of this again.

Let’s apply that to here. You first.

[b]Bernhard Schlink

Or is there no such thing as ‘too late’? Is there only ‘late’ and is ‘late’ always better than ‘never’? I don’t know.[/b]

Actually, no one does.

People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy.

A hell of a lot easier.

We make our own truths and lies…truths are often lies and lies truths.

At least when it’s not the other way around.

She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn’t do.

For example, read and write.

I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.

Let’s just say that, eventually, we come to find out why.

What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?

And then of course there is each new generation of Nazis.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. [/b]

One pain in particular.

I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.

Of course how likely is that?

Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent.

Not counting immortality and salvation of course.

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both.

Well, maybe for a day or two.

We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

Or, eventually [for some], wanting to die.

Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.

Does anything make less sense than this?

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I…[/b]

I know: How ironic is this?!

… That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Yet, he meant.

Mediocrity is contextual.

Here for example.

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

As opposed to what…a white miracle?

…most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

Actually, when you think about it, it’s quite the opposite.

Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

Well, why not?

[b]Dave Eggers

You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?[/b]

It rhymes with dasein.

The author would also like to acknowledge makers of comic book villains and superheroes, those who invented, or at least popularized, the notion of the normal, mild-mannered person transformed into a mutant by freak accident.

Of course we know that’s not real.

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

Trust me: Washington has its own version of this.

Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.

Then keep your hand in your pocket.

That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.

The dumbing down further of what was already dumb to begin with.

Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.

Still, that’s closer than most of us have come.

[b]The Dead Author

Read less, but more.[/b]

You know, more or less.
But point taken.
More or less.

Is there hope?
Schopenhauer: No.
Nietzsche: No.
Cioran: No.
Camus: No.
Spengler: No.
Adorno: No.
Kafka: Yes, but not for us.

Update: Not for them either.

Thinking of Santa Claus and all other seasonal migrant workers.

Of course Santa Claus is white. At least aound here.

Just because God is dead doesn’t mean he wasn’t born.

Doesn’t mean he was either.

'Twas the night before Metamorphosis…

That and the Trial.

China landing on the dark side of the moon to own Pink Floyd’s tired liberal critique of authoritarianism.

That can’t be good. And not just for Pink Floyd.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. [/b]

Between the commercials of course.

Listen for dangerous words.

Dangerous to us in particular.

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.

He means you, Mr. Objectivist.

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.

Though not just our side.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

In other words, my fellow Americans, just look around you.

What is truth? Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.

Yeah, I once believed this was true too.

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others. [/b]

Hmm, why does that sound familiar?

Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

Hmm, why does that sound familiar?

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.

Talk about a commodity fetish.

Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.

Depending of course on who’s on top.

In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.

But not us, right?

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

This and the death of God.

[b]tiny nietzsche

2019: new chances to fuck everything up[/b]

And everything else too.

what’s your favourite short story about a cask of amontillado?

The one I’m writing now.

me: no
doktor: I didn’t say anything
me: you had that look

In other words, no fucking way.

schrödinger’s birdbox

An ostrich for example.

the enemy of my enemy is taking forever

And not just in Congress.

lol existence

He means Roflmao, of course.

[b]James D. Watson

Knowing “why” is more important than learning “what”.[/b]

Why what?

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

Of, for example, mere mortals.

We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.

And we know where this will take him.

Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.

Not that some of us ever will.
Right?

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

Not that existence itself isn’t spooky at times.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?

Cue [among others] the racists.

[b]Stephen Hawking from Brief Answers to the Big Questions

When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race.[/b]

I mean, come on…

The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.

Who says it has to?

I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Sure, why not?

People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

I guess that settles it then. Though, sure, maybe not.

I have spent my life travelling across the universe, inside my mind.

Not really quite the same though, is it?

When you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realise that there are lots of things you want to do before your life is over.

Wow, who would have ever thought that?!

[b]David Sedaris

Real trouble doesn’t walk around with a ponytail. It doesn’t have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.[/b]

Probably less applicable here though.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you what you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea of how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
Her maybe?

I’m not a misogynist. I’m a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally.

Don’t be fooled by this, right?

My sister’s the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline…Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it’s not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it’s certainly under investigation…

He means Eyewitless News of course.

My sister Amy lives above a deaf girl and has learned quite a bit of sign language. She taught some to me and so now I am able to say, “SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON’T THINK SO."

Let’s file this one under, “lost in translation”.

Six months earlier, my ice breaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation.

I know I’ve never tried it.

[b]Elena Ferrante

Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.[/b]

Maybe you, in particular.

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

Okay, then what?

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

What then of the posts we create here?

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

Well, in the Bible of course.

No, to produce ideas you don’t have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.

I know we do that here.

Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.

It must be the institution itself then. So, no doubt about it?

[b]so sad today

is being alive a meme?[/b]

She means more or less than a gene.

reasons i eat:
☒ boredom
☒ felt a feeling
☒ attempt to fill hole in soul
□ hunger

Or: reasons I fuck.

i don’t like anything related to reality

Well, not counting her potential for fame and fortune of course.

being my own worst enemy is going ok

Though not nearly as good as being yours.

i’m annoyed, therefore i am

Or [especially] really, really pissed off.

oh god the fucking future

And you can’t have that without the fucking past.

[b]Garry Kasparov

Good riddance, you might imagine. But the worries about operator-less elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars. In fact, I learned something surprising when I was invited to speak to the Otis Elevator Company in Connecticut in 2006. The technology for automatic elevators had existed since 1900, but people were too uncomfortable to ride in one without an operator. It took the 1945 strike and a huge industry PR push to change people’s minds.[/b]

Just in case you didn’t know that.

Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim!

We have our own rendition of that here too.

In a 1959 speech in Indianapolis, John F. Kennedy famously observed that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. It turns out that this is not literally true.

As a matter of fact, he insisted, it is.

I used to attack because it was the only thing I knew. Now I attack because I know it works.

Of course that may well be what your opponent is thinking too. So defending yourself works too.

Grandmasters play chess by combining experience with intuition, backed up with calculation and study. Computers play chess by brute calculation; their “study” consists of a gigantic database of opening moves.

Still, you either win or lose. That or [with chess] no one does.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.” If we err and must begin again, we must.

You know, if, in some cases, they let you.

[b]David Bowie

Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.[/b]

Let’s confirm it.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

That might explain none of his lyrics.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

Though we can only try to imagine what he is hearing now.

One day I realized that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can’t even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life. That’s when you can begin really looking for a relationship. When you can appreciate the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking.

Naturally this can mean practically anything.

You can neither win nor lose if you don’t run the race.

Unless of course you bet on it.

If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.

I don’t think anyone will doubt that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.” Benjamin Franklin[/b]

I know: Let’s not go there.

“…the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.” Eckhart Tolle

And how far can that really be from delusions.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Chinese Proverb

Is this as deep as some imagine it to be?

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut

That line does get tricky at times.

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

Let alone divided.

“Language is wine upon the lips.” Virginia Woolf.

Or here [sometimes]: Wine going in, vomitus coming out.

[b]José Saramago

…we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people…[/b]

Me? Quite often to other people.

Without a future, the present serves no purpose, it’s as if it did not exist. Perhaps humanity will manage to live without eyes, but then it will cease to be humanity, the result is obvious, which of us think of ourselves as being as human as we believes ourselves to be before, I, for example, killed a man.

So, does this make sense to you?

What torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.

I think that once described me, he thought.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand…

Time and, with any luck, luck.

I still have the strength to carry the bread I eat, What always weighs more is the bread of the others.

You know, of that even matters to you.

Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil. Less is said about the evil that can come out of good.

Of course sometimes we get them mixed up.

[b]Masha Gessen

A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen.[/b]

Don’t worry, they’ll get it right next time.

‘Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,’ Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin.

Sort of as it were.

But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs.

Just one more rendition of the ruling class.

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent. At least, that was what Freud might say. At least Arutyunyan had read him. Future generations of Russians might not be so lucky—if there were any future generations of Russians, that was. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

At least until Vladimir Putin drains the swamp.

Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively…

Still, remember when we [not to mention they] belived in it?

…adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions’ general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children’s forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words.

Suffer the little children…over and over and over and over and over again.
What say you, God?

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

But Anatole said suddenly, Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I’m warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.
What are you telling me?
I am telling you what I’m telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky. [/b]

What actually is beyond God’s dominion?

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

Has there ever been even one exception?

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.

And then, after dinner, pick up the tab.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Like there aren’t times we have no choice.

…you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece…

She means lots and lots of them of course.

One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.

Point taken though.