a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

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

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farm worker. Not the sweatshop workers. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated.[/b]

That’s how it works alright.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

Maybe not the genetic gap, but the memetic gap…?

Collectively, these findings tell us it’s conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia.

Let’s imagine then the implications of this.

There’s no doubt about it: more varieties of carbon-based molecules exist than all other kinds of molecules combined.

And that [presumably] is just on this planet.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know.

And now with James gone we never will.

Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.

This thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant

[b]Frida Kahlo

Passion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change.[/b]

Unless of course it burns it to the ground.

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

And there may or may not be a reason.

I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best.

In other words, for better or worse.

Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.

Don’t expect this to always be a good thing.

I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.

Then cue, among others, Bono.

Nothing is worth more than laughter.

Unless of course they are laughing at you. Though, sure, even then sometimes.

‏[b]so sad today

if i could just control the uncontrollable nature of reality everything would be chill[/b]

Uh, chill?

it’s my depression and i’ll do what i want with it

Right, like others will let you.

[b]bucket list:

1. taco bell
2. isolation[/b]

[i]Or:

1. isolation
2. the drive-thru at taco bell[/i]

cause of death: i grew up

And [so far] going all the way back to the Big Bang.

likes: death
dislikes: the dying process

You either understand this or you don’t.

i don’t ask for help because then i have to deal with people

You either understand this or you don’t.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

People ask without wanting to know.[/b]

And, sometimes, not even waiting for an answer.

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

With really, really bad food in other words.

Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.

Sure, but only if they fall for it.

Whatever you want the most, it’s going to be the worst thing for you.

Not counting the hundreds and hundreds of exceptions.

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies.

And not much has changed, right?

For scientists, reality is not optional.

You know, whatever that is.

[b]Man Ray

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.[/b]

Of course here we create posts. Or, some, “posts”.

You don’t ask a writer what typewriter he uses.

Let alone what camera.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

Sure, why not.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

And how scary is that.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

On the other hand, some are considerably more adept at them than others.

If the affairs of the world were put in the hands of the screwball artists, it couldn’t be in a worse state than it is now!

How about the screwball philosophers?

[b]Sad Socrates

Fake Socrates is better than Sad Socrates.[/b]

Well, we do live in Trumpworld.

I look so much like yesterday.

Better luck tomorrow?

Dreams are as meaningless as thoughts.

Like he speaks for everyone. But point taken.

Sometimes I see the me inside me, and it’s never a reflection.

It was never supposed to be.

I’m here for a long time not a good time.

Or here for a short time not a good time.

There’s nothing to live for but the destruction of our bodies.

So make the most of it.

[b]David Chalmers

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it. [/b]

Of course only nature knows for sure.

There’s certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

And here any number of simple solutions.

Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.

And not just the bird lovers.

Because the idea of zombies seems to make sense, and seems to, in a certain sense, be possible, I think one can use that to argue against the thesis that everything is purely physical. Now many people, I think, agree that the idea of zombies are conceivable, including people who want to be physicalists.

Consider for example the living dead here.

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

Also, to know what we know now.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one’s sense-data, or something like that.

“Or something like that” works for me.