a thread for mundane ironists

[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?

[b]Marc Chagall

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.[/b]

Sounds more like something an artist might be expected to say.

If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.

This too. Only less so.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

What exactly does this explain?

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

What exactly does this explain?

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Let’s take a stab at where that is. Then the part where art ends and philosophy begins.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Just don’t ask how.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

I needed a second opinion, so I asked myself twice.[/b]

Who wouldn’t?

Technically, the future starts now.
Realistically - tomorrow.
More realistically - next Monday.

Unless, of course, you die first. Unless, of course, technically, you still have a future even then.

What language should one study to understand True Detective without subtitles? Asking for a friend.

Not counting the second season of course.

Love is the only language with grammar so unpredictable that any rule may suddenly become an exception and vice versa, and with just one grammatical voice — passive-aggressive.

Either that or rationalization.

What is love?
a) Baby don’t hurt me
b) Don’t hurt me
c) No more

d) or I’ll cut off your dick

When you realise exactly why your phone was given the epithet ‘smart’.

For example, it can be ‘powered off’.

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

Everything starts from a dot.[/b]

Just not here.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Just don’t expect everyone to agree.

The true work of art is born from the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

The intellectual’s equivalent of abstract art?

There is no must in art because art is free.

Just ask the folks from Campbell’s soup.

The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.

Not my circles.

In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

Not my paintings. Or, sure, especially mine.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.[/b]

And then one day so will the future.

We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Imagine for example the folks at Fox News.

One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Not counting arithmetic of course.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

For some in pure silk.

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

And that’s before they take x-rays of the parts inside it.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

Or maybe it is about all of that.

[b]Werner Twertzog

We have been treated very unfairly by whomever devised the laws of physics.[/b]

Or whatever whomever is.

Dear Americans: You live in an oligarchy with a racial caste system. You always have. It is just more obvious now.

Cue Trumpworld.

Is your coffee roasted on the premises? No? Then I shall see you in hell.

No, for some, really.

The earth will be devoured by the sun. The universe will die. Nothing matters. It is Saturday morning.

Or, now, Thursday afternoon.

Introverts are miserable because stupid people do all of the talking.

Or here, all most of the posting.

When you have commanded 8,000 Amazonian warriors on a $1M budget, then tell me again about your directorial mojo.

Let’s file this one under, “Aguirre: the Wrath of Fitzcarraldo”.

[b]Andre Breton

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well. [/b]

If repetitively.

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it’s so easy, why don’t you want to play? You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

Most of course only wish they could.

The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

Especially our public.

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

How ridiculous is that, he thought. Never having been in love himself.

Dada is a state of mind.

Not unlike Lala.

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

And no one has forgotten more than me. Aside, perhaps, from you.

[b]Lenny Bruce

Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers. [/b]

Of course that’s still going on.

My mother-in-law broke up my marriage. My wife came home from work one day and found me in bed with her.

That’ll do it.

I was surprised when Nixon passed the test and showed up in heaven, but, I guess Hitler threw off the curve for our century.

Trump on the other hand…

If there was absolute freedom, people would run over babies and charge admission.

Remember when that might not have been true?

If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer.

[i]Pick one:

1] Mother Nature
2] God[/i]

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.

Unless of course there are two or more.

[b]God

How is church still a thing?[/b]

Indeed, he thought, how is God still a thing.

I genuinely don’t remember making you all this stupid.

Alzheimer’s?

Let Me tell you about the birds and the bees.
You are killing them all.

And that’s just on this planet.

Life goes on. Sorry.

Before or after the grave?

There shouldn’t be a stigma about mental health. That’s why I’ve been so open about My struggle with manic depression and anxiety and OCD and paranoid schizophrenia and anti-social personality and conduct disorder and psychopathy and serial killing every creature that ever lived.

God on the couch?

If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to him the other, but then at the last minute duck your head and kick him in the nuts.

Hmm. This doesn’t bode well for Heaven.

[b]Tim Crane

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.[/b]

Taken as hypotheses, death and oblivion…

I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don’t be a follower. Work it out for yourself.

Then get others to follow you. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

I do think that philosophy and science are very different intellectual enterprises, but that does not mean that when we get knowledge from philosophy it is a different kind of knowledge.

Well, not counting conflicting goods of course.

There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.

If only up on the skyhooks.

Catholicism is the most philosophical branch of Christianity.

Of course that’s not saying much.

Since I don’t believe in externalism, I don’t think it can explain consciousness!

On the other hand, nothing else can either.

[b]Daniel J. Levitin

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.[/b]

Me, I’m well below 50 for sure.

Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.

What’s that make ILP then?

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that “the abundance of books is a distraction.” Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

My guess: He picked them.

…knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.

Or, sure, just thinking that you are. Like most of us here, right?

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have.

Isn’t that just common sense? Nope, not any more.

It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults.

He wondered if he had one.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.[/b]

Conviction? Conformity? Which is actually worse?

Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

Of course that could never happen today.

One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking “for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk.”

As I’m sure Trump reminded Kim Jong-un.

Stalin raised a toast: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”

In other words, he wasn’t a real socialist.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

Two words: conflicting goods.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.”

Professional ethics. Right.
For example, ours.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Yes, studying philosophy condemns you to an endless struggle with anxiety, melancholia, and outright catastrophe. And that’s the good part.[/b]

No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.

Are your children texting about Adorno?
TWITF = The whole is the false
TINRLITWO = There is no right life in the wrong one
EWOAIAUC = Every work of art is an uncommitted crime
IPOTEAT = In psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true

ROFLMAO?

Philosophy is an eternal struggle to
Plato: overcome sophistry
Descartes: overcome doubt
Kierkegaard: overcome dread
Žižek: get more media attention than Trump

Nobody [apparently] hates Žižek more than this guy.

Epistemology: I know what it is.
Ontology: I know what is is.
Ethics: I know what is should be.
Aesthetics: I know what it should be.

Cue Bill Clinton.

History: Question the answer
Philosophy: Question the question
Psychology: Pay for the answer
Economics: Pay for the question
Theology: I don’t need a question to know the answer
Politics: I don’t need an answer to forget the question

So, all of the above or none of the above?

[b]When grading papers, professors tend to forget that

1. the students are new at this
2. the assignment was 1 of 20 things the students had to do that week
3. it wasn’t the students who wrote the bad paper topics
4. it’s important to actually read the paper[/b]

Let’s start grading posts.

[b]Francis Crick

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.[/b]

An honest God fearing man in particular.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

Unless of course they run out of it first.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

Except of course in a wholly determined universe.

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.

Let’s explain that.

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

No, but you can hack the bastard back.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

With the possible exception of the average analytical philosophy paper.

[b]David Sedaris

The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood’s only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter.[/b]

Anyone here offended?

I explained that he was Chinese, and she asked if the movie would be in Chinese.
No, I said, he lives in America. In California. He’s been there since he was a baby.
Then what does it matter if he’s Chinese?
Well, I said, he’s got, you know, a sensibility.

Of course these days who doesn’t?

…there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not.

Still, there’s not much that isn’t applicable to.

It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it.

Not unlike most of us, I suspect.

For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited.

Of course that’s all the difference in the world.
At least until it’s not.

I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness.

On the other hand, some of us know exactly why.

[b]Existential Comics

According to Stoic philosophy, there is actually no reason to give a shit about how many likes you get on social media. Also…according to pretty much all the other philosophies as well.[/b]

Or here, views?

Philosophers: philosophy is the queen of sciences, the foundation on which all knowledge lies.
Scientists: oh cool, what are you working on?
Philosophers: we are trying to decide whether or not chairs exist.

And then the part about deciding whether we are working on it autonomously.

…one thing that they don’t teach you in school in that communism is good and we should do it…

Wow, and I thought it was only my school.

Foucault: everything is a prison.
Wittgenstein: everything is a game.
Hegel: everything is a dialectic.
Schopenhauer: everything is suffering and Hegel sucks.

Schopenauer of course.

…according to postmodernism every idea is exactly as good as every other idea, except for communism, which is twice as good.

I know: not your post-modernism.

The main thing that separates humans from animals is that only humans attempt to draw those sort of distinctions.

Well, as far as we know.

[b]David Bowie

People mistake fashion for style.[/b]

Like there is actually a difference. One that matters for example.

There’s a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.

Really, is this a thing?

Make the best of every moment. We’re not evolving. We’re not going anywhere.

On the other hand, few can live with that.

What I do is I write mainly about very personal and rather lonely feelings, and I explore them in a different way each time. You know, what I do is not terribly intellectual. I’m a pop singer for Christ’s sake. As a person, I’m fairly uncomplicated.

On the other hand, few really want to believe that.

If it works, it’s out of date.

Not counting most things of course.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

And then [like him] you’re gone.

[b]tiny nietzsche

my electrons are fucking with me[/b]

Actually, I never even notice mine.

you, a film critic: donnie darko makes no sense
me, a movie lover: the space time continuum is fucked up

No, actually, that’s not a non sequitor.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: probably

Good thing cops have a sense of humor. Probably not that one though.

a pretty cool date would be you helping me dig my grave

Filmed before a live studio audience.

it’s okay to hate harmonicas

Not counting Bob Dylan’s of course.

it was postmodernism in the kitchen with the lead pipe

Let’s vote on the victim.