a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Douglas Hofstadter

We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say “I”, “I” did this because “I” wanted to, because “I” am a good person or because “I” am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination. [/b]

In the loop. And existential down to the bone in some instances.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

Eerier all the more I suspect is why that is.

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth… because they live on in a 'second neural brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them… Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain… a collective corona that still glows.

Sure, if you can make that work for you.

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

Oh the places we can go in a world of words.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Sometimes, I’ll double it at least.

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

What’s that make objectivism then?

[b]tiny nietzsche

how to be a better human: read a book write a letter clean a toilet[/b]

So, I’ll tell you why it didn’t work for me if you’ll tell me why it didn’t work for you.

It’s a Death Mask, Charlie Brown

Hell, even his creator knows that now.

you, an art critic: bob ross is a hack who uses painting tricks to knock out hotel art
me, an art lover: bob ross is a fucking genius who transcends the genre as well as calms my anxiety about everything

I never missed a single episode myself. A mostly true story.

home is where the hurt is

Giving and receiving it as it were.

millionaires can go fuck themselves, too

Thousandaires too as far as that goes.

in the name of drugs, what more in the name of drugs?

In other words, once you’ve given up on love.

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the “skill” (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the “quality of painting” (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures “nice” or “splendid.” Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.[/b]

Not unlike the vulgar herd here.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.

Come on, who would really go that far?

In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.

Come on, who would really go that far?

The joy of life consists in the inevitable, continual triumph of new values.

No, not including you, Mr. Objectivist.

Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.

Obviously: Things artists say.

The eyes are hammers.

What’s that make the ears then?

[b]Angie Thomas

It’s dope to be black until it’s hard to be black.[/b]

Actually it’s dope to be anything until it’s hard. But, no doubt about it: point taken.

Pac said Thug Life stood for ‘The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody’.

That and the other thing? Depends on who you ask.

Once you’ve seen how broken someone is it’s like seeing them naked—you can’t look at them the same anymore.

Unless perhaps it’s you that broke them.

Intentions always look better on paper than in reality.

For one thing, there are likely to be less consequences.

People like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time though, that one time when it ends right.

Just out of curiosity, what’s our hashtag here?

Daddy once told me there’s a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn’t stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there’s nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.

And then the rage passed down by black mothers to their daughters.

[b]Andre Breton

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.[/b]

Artistspeak let’s call it.

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

Sounds like something Jacob might say here. He said in jest. :wink:

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Not unlike the beast.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

Unless of course we do in fact live in a wholly determined universe.

How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is - it can only be - the vigor of his protest against it.

Not much of that is still going around of course.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

My guess: on his terms.

[b]Lenny Bruce

Never tell. Not if you love your wife…In fact, if your old lady walks in on you deny it. Yeah. Just flat out and she’ll believe it: "I’m tellin’ ya. This chick came downstairs with a sign around her neck ‘Lay On Top Of Me Or I’ll Die.’ " I didn’t know what I was goin’ to do.[/b]

What a comedian!

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

[i]Pick one:

  • God
  • Mother Nature[/i]

If you’re going to stop masturbating, you can’t taper off. You’ve got to quit, cold jerky!

True. But why would you?

Part of the kick of making people laugh was doing something different. We were a rare breed — spotting one of us was like pinning a space alien, or abdominal snowman. There were maybe a hundred stand-ups in the whole country when I was doing it.

Now in some places there are a hundred on any given block,

If I just stuck to pot I might have found out what a drag being an aging hipster actually was.

It just wasn’t meant to be.

The only truly anonymous donor is the guy who knocks up your daughter.

Let’s just hope it’s not your son.

[b]Tim Crane

One odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don’t seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists. [/b]

Of course we’re far too mature for that here.

Many people like to think that their moral or political enemies are not just wicked or wrong - as if that were not enough - but stupid or idiotic too.

Of course we’re far too mature for that here.

I like to think of myself as a naturalist - insofar as that term is at all clear.

Like any of the terms we use here are.

I do think it’s important to distinguish between intentionalism about consciousness and externalism about consciousness. Intentionalism says that consciousness is a form of intentionality - the representation of things to the mind. Externalism says that these things have to exist in order for them to be represented, or presented. These are different views.

And that’s before – well before for some – we bring them down to earth.

I do not claim to have any developed or sophisticated views in political philosophy, but I think that one of the lessons of the last few hundred years of history is that the greatest threat to human prosperity and well-being is fanaticism and intolerance, even in the name of apparently laudable goals.

Not true at all, is it, Mr. Objectivist?

The thing I think I have learned from Wittgenstein is the importance of not making things up: philosophers should not invent problems, and they should also be conscious of the risk of inventing pointless ‘technical’ machinery which do not offer real explanations, but often just re-state the known facts in a more complex way.

Cue, among others, Mr. Durant’s epistemologists. Here for example.

[b]so sad today

where’s my award for getting out of bed[/b]

I always start in the kitchen.

so how do you, like, be a person?

So how do you, like, expect me to know?

public displays of fake empathy

Might be a postmodern thing.

the meaning of life is probably annoying

If not downright infuriating.

i’m not sure what my worldview is but i know it’s not great

And sometimes that’s just as far as you can go.

spoiler: when people say it’s going to be ok they don’t really know

Or you can just say, “it’s God’s will”.

[b]Daniel J. Levitin

It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are.[/b]

Sounds like something that has never actually been proven.

The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth at its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today’s truths becomes tomorrow’s disproven hypotheses of forgotten objet d’arts.

Sound familiar?

Be careful of averages and how they’re applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as: "On average, humans have one testicle.”

Well, that is true.

The amount of scientific information we’ve discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

Imagine then twenty years into the future.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

Right, like that’s what it makes us.

A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.

Almost as though it has no choice.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.[/b]

Ah, the objectivist mind. Especially when it’s in the head of a dictator.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

And that means mine, yours or theirs.

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

Make of this what this what you will.

The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.

Definitely make of this what this what you will.

All citizens do have a measure of control, at least in democracies where their votes are counted, of how they belong to their nations.

Some considerably more measurable than others.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

So, what do you think, for better or for worse?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” Bob Dylan[/b]

And what could be clearer than that?

“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” Bob Dylan

Well, that and the money to do it.

“Chaos is a friend of mine.” Bob Dylan

When it’s not your mortal enemy.

“The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead sets themselves against it.” Jean Baudrillard

Of course that will sound [to some] like something a blockhead would say.

“The only thing worse than being bored is being boring.” Jean Baudrillard

Worse still: not even knowing it.

“History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.” Jean Baudrillard

For example: re-electing Trump.

[b]Francis Crick

Hemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your hemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity. [/b]

Clearly: What to make of it?

God is a hacker, not an engineer.

Why would you hack your own creation?

Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.

This thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterior_cingulate_cortex
You know, if it’s true.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Even more than you think you are.

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

But a pack of neurons able to point that out.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Go ahead, point that out to them.

[b]David Sedaris

The Bible says that it’s all right to cast the first stone if someone dead is telling you to do it.[/b]

We’ll need the chapter and verse of course.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

Why is this probably true?

If I’m walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I’ll say, “Hello.” This because, if I don’t say it, he or she might think that I’m anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I’d walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians. Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I’m more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

These things can get tricky.

If practiced correctly, generosity can induce feelings of shame, inadequacy, and even envy, to name just a few.

Imagine then practicing it incorrectly.

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me.

For others of course it’s naked women.

Often I’d take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you’re in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can’t be thought of as cute.

He means almost nothing.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Jean Baudrillard[/b]

Not necessarily a bad thing, he thought.

“Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price.” Victor Hugo

Imagine him saying that today.

“Nothing in nature is by chance… Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.” Baruch Spinoza

And we know how far some will take that.

“Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” Baruch Spinoza

And we know how far some will take that.

“Nothing exists except through language.” Hans-Georg Gadamer

Here maybe.

“Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.” Michel Foucault

Or, quite possibly, both.

[b]David Bowie

One day in Berlin … Eno came running in and said, ‘I have heard the sound of the future.’ … he puts on ‘I Feel Love’, by Donna Summer … He said, ‘This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’ Which was more or less right.[/b]

I like it myself, sure, but, come on.

Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd was the first person in rock I had seen with makeup on. He wore black nail polish and lots of mascara and black eye shadow, and he was so mysterious. It was this androgynous thing I found absolutely fascinating.

Of course we all know his story: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Barre … Pink_Floyd
Or this part of it.

This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll. This is genocide!

You know, for the diamond dogs.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

Anyone here care to rebut this?

The humanists’ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

Let alone objectively.

I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important.

Decide for yourself: youtu.be/TClq1ASjIHw

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

No doubt about it, we’re smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?[/b]

And does that even matter?

…I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon, than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who–or what–is actually in charge.

It’s still God, right?

What we know is that the matter we have come to love in the universe—the stuff of stars, planets, and life—is only a light frosting on the cosmic cake, modest buoys afloat in a vast cosmic ocean of something that looks like nothing.

And then you die.

With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.

And then there’s the hydrogen bomb.

To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.

Apparently, there things actually do exist.

…the universe expands forever in every direction for all of time…

Here’s the part I still don’t get: If the universe is all there is, what is it expanding into?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” Michel Foucault[/b]

The “deep state” some now call it.

"My job is making windows where there were once walls.” Michel Foucault

My job is to smash them, he thought.

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” Gabriel García Márquez

Why do otherwise intelligent people say such preposterous things?

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Not here of course.

"The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Dishonorable works for some of us.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.” Epicurus

This might not always be possible though.

[b]Frida Kahlo

To trap one’s self-suffering is to risk being devoured from the inside.[/b]

If you have anything to say about it at all.

What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?

Or, perhaps, what can you do with them?

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were ‘sure’ of finding shirts.

Or finding a lion wearing your shirts.

There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.

And that is really saying something, isn’t it?

The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody,’ and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.

Let’s hear from the gringos here.

I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only real reason for living.

And back then the revolution was a real thing.

[b]Philosophical Tweets

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” Baruch Spinoza[/b]

Same with how thick you slice it.

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.” Baruch Spinoza

And who is that more applicable to here than me? :wink:

“Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.” Marcus Aurelius

That and curse the darkness.

“Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.” Marcus Aurelius

Or else, as some insist, you can never have too much.

“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Cue, for example, the serious philosophers pedants here.

“The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.” Bertrand Russel

True, but even that will only take you so far.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.[/b]

You don’t get this, do you?

If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.

So, has that actually worked for you?

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Of course the more you know what you want, you more painful it is not getting it.

Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.

If only because they don’t seem to know themselves.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Time to get out my stopwatch, he mused.

There’s a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.

Me, I don’t have anyone to tell. So sometimes it’s really quiet.