a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Andre Breton

Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.[/b]

I’ll buy yours if you’ll buy mine.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

Not counting what we buy and sell from our dreams.

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

Or, for some, more desire.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.

On the other hand, how far into the future?

Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.

Or here [sometimes] fucking.

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

Still, let’s not dismiss the part about reality altogether.

[b]The Dead Author

Drafts, the dick pics of literature.[/b]

What am I missing here?

Depression is just your body’s way of telling you to give up.

The brain in particular.

Send nudes but never your unfinished writing project.

Has it come to this for you?

Me:
Kafka: The meaning of life is that it ends.

We’re all “Me” here.

Valentine’s Day is like reading Sartre: unnecessary because most people already know that they will die alone.

Just in case though, buy the flowers and the chocolates.

Capitalism alienates you all year, and on Valentine’s Day makes you feel guilty for it.

When is Valentines day this year?

[b]Lenny Bruce

You know there’s no crooked politicians. There’s never a lie because there is never any truth. [/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trump!

You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person - you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it.

Moms and dads? Brothers and sisters? Pets?

Koolaid is goyish. All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish, and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes - goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish - very Jewish cake. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won’t go near them.

What’s that make philosophy then?

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Or, these days, William Barr.

Alright, let’s admit it, we Jews killed Christ – but it was only for three days.

We can run this by Jesus when he returns.

Never trust a preacher with more than two suits.

And that now includes pant suits.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.[/b]

No, really.

It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

Well, after all, he is Hamlet.

I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Though more easily crushed.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

Here? Let’s make it the Kids.

…his own father told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Anyone talented here?

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

And then one day it all becomes too much.

[b]Daniel J. Levitin

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.[/b]

Plus they could dance to it.

As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.

Imagine then the man with 5 or more.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

He means on this planet of course.

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects.

Proving yet again that’s it’s always never nothing.

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn’t have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

A distant cousin to the tree falling in the forest.

…people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

Totally agree. At least I think I do.

[b]Timothy Snyder

We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.[/b]

Of course here democracy in the modern world is all about the survival of the middle class.

The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.

Not counting the parts that actually are inevitable.

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

I know that I wouldn’t. Well, hypothetically.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

Let’s pin down why they didn’t.

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning.

That’s how it works all right. Some might even call it logical.

The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps.

Of course here you “prove” only what you already believe. Not unlike all objectivists.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it’s friday. fuck the abyss[/b]

Right, like no one falls into it on Fridays.

you can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep

Not only this but you cannot die if you were never born.
Go ahead, try to.

I’ve ruined me for anyone else

Just as I intended.

you, an art critic: michelangelo’s david is sublime genius
me, an art lover: this dude’s junk is hanging out

On the other hand, as Loudon Wainwright pointed out, “Michelangelo gave him such a tiny pee-pee.”

roses are dead
nothing to do
alone on the beach
with albert camus

As Captured in song: youtu.be/SdbLqOXmJ04

my nihilism is flaring up

Like a hemorrhoid in my brain.

[b]Francis Crick

Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It’s the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra.[/b]

All autonomically perhaps.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

All the while concluding, “It’s alive!”

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Including Heaven and Hell?

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

How else are they going to become consenting adults?

A busy life is a wasted life.

Like, for example, busy doing the thing that we do here?

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Unless of course he’s a Scientologist.

[b]David Sedaris

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.[/b]

Unless of course the rest of us figure that out.

Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat.

And not just in Mississippi.

…never fall asleep in a dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating.

Never get old? Good luck with that.

Me: Did you get your tree yet?
Ken: I’m a Jew, I don’t decorate Christmas trees.
Me: So you’re going to go with a wreath instead?
Ken: I just told you, I’m a Jew.
Me: Oh, I get it. You’re looking for a cheap wreath.
Ken: I’m not looking for a wreath at all. Leave me alone, will you.
Me: You’re probably just tense because you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping.
Ken: I don’t Christmas shop.
Me: What are you telling me? That you make all of your presents.
Ken: I don’t give Christmas presents period. Goddamit, I told you, I’m a Jew.
Me: Well, don’t you at least need to buy something for your parents?
Ken: They’re Jews, too, idiot. That’s what makes me one. It’s hereditary. Do you understand?
Me: Sure.
Ken: Say the words “I understand.”
Me: I understand. So where are you going to hang your stocking?

Same with Barbie.

If you see devils, they lock you up, but in America, if you see angels, they put you on morning TV.

If not the late night shows.

We’d all turn our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.

Nope, never had access to that. Comfortably or otherwise.

[b]David Bowie

It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I’ve never bought into - with any artist. It’s just not a real thing.[/b]

How about philosophical integrity?
Not here of course.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

For me it was the Rolling Stones.

I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human.

My guess: that’s not even possible.

I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

That’s me here, right? No, I admit it.

I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.

I hear that. Not counting Emmylou Harris of course.

I’m really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine.

Let’s just say I’ve never not been there myself.

[b]so sad today

just checking to make sure you’re still not in love with me[/b]

Actually, I might be.

due to personal reasons i will be ignoring you

Fortunately, that can be anything.

i hate everything in a nice way

I tried that once. But now things are back to normal.

fuck everything kind of

Also, everyone sort of.

horoscope: just don’t do anything

And that’s not always easy to accomplish.

studies confirm i’m my own worst enemy

Still, other studies confirm that you are.

[b]Neil deGrasse Tyson from Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

An artist coworker of mine once asked whether alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans. The absence of any other plausible answer forced me to say yes.[/b]

Let’s hope that never becomes a problem.

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

Not that we ever really had a choice of course.
Whatever that means.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

Let’s thank the Lord for that.

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.

How about our brains then? And that part we call “mind”.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Right, like someone actually counted them.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super intelligent alien species? These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

For some philosophically fun, for others philosophically disturbing.

[b]Tara Westover

I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.[/b]

Unless of course they draft you.

What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves? I began the research.

Right, like that will solve it.

…vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

Like we all don’t tangle with guilt in our own unique, idiosyncratic ways.

We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment.

Trust me: Some more than others. Considerably more even.

It would be many years before I would understand what had happened that night, and what my role in it had been. How I had opened my mouth when I should have stayed silent, and shut it when I should have spoken out.

For many though, they’ll run out of years.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

How about this: In being born.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.” Alfred North Whitehead[/b]

Is this the glass half or the glass half empty?

“Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.” Alfred North Whitehead

Though, for objectivists, it can be the opposite.

“There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.” Alfred North Whitehead

Or quarter-truths.

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.” Alfred North Whitehead

On the other hand, there’s no getting around ignorance in the is/ought world.

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” Alfred North Whitehead

Next up: an actual context.

“Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.” Alfred North Whitehead

Don’t expect miracles though.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The past is all we know of the future.[/b]

And, every now and again, the present.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Not the ones I read.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Next up: the inconspicuous benefits.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Actually, the most important parts, are the pieces that you can’t know.

Mi’ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.

Or as less wrong as we can.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

We’ll need details of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Lies are the greatest murderers. They kill the Truth.” Socrates[/b]

Or, as Nietzsche opined, convictions.

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates

Or, as I call it here, huffing and puffing.

"If you want to be wrong then follow the masses."Socrates

Or, as I point out here, the Kids.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle

How exactly does someone entertain a thought?

“Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.” Seneca the Younger

Come on, did he really say that?

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.” Seneca the Younger

Of course he’s just paraphrasing JFK here.

[b]Man Ray

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.[/b]

I would love to see them.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

There is still what you can or cannot actually do.

When I saw I was under attack from all sides, I knew I was on the right track.

Indeed, that often works for me here.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

And how subjective is that?

I never knew what I was doing until I was done.

Sigh…
People say things like this all the time.

Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.

So, tell us, how timid are you?

[b]Edward P. Jones

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.[/b]

Pragmatism let’s call it.

But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don’t put me on the nigger side. I’m still on the white man side, John. I’m still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me.

And we know that sort of thing is still going on today.

Best hurry, he thought. Best get outa this weather. He wanted to die but he really didn’t want to catch a cold to do it.

What kind of cold is that?

But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self.

Of course anything can be rationalized.

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one’s still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like James Baldwin, who live in the world of words.

Okay, but, as a novelist, he would bring them down to earth.

What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.

So, would that be a good thing or not?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato[/b]

For example, Don Trump and Kim Jong-un.

“A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.” Plato

I’m thinking of one man here in particular.

“A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Or, in is/ought world, the absense of facts.

“The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And would that they had remained silent.

“The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.” Arthur Schopenhauer

He means the vast majority of course. Women too.

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And, I suspect, not just on this planet.

[b]David Chalmers

Now I have to say I’m a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it’s a natural fact of life. [/b]

Here and now for example

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Of course we get explanations here all the time.

does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

God’s will?

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

I’m still working on that myself.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a “neural correlate of consciousness”?

For that matter, what does it mean vaguely.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

Luck?