a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Federico Fellini

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life. [/b]

No beginning? No end? Well, what then of birth and death?

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

Autonomically as it were.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

How about this: I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a philosophy.

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

That and almost anything else.

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don’t want free men who can think for themselves and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Next up: Real philosophy.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train…But we must at least take them to the station…to a point of departure.

Let’s make ILP the station, he quipped.

[b]Frans de Waal

We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them.[/b]

On the other hand…

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Indeed, what could possibly be more obscure?

The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

Or not of course.

This book demonstrates something we had already suspected on the grounds of the close connection between apes and man: that the social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true.

Except we have the internet.

Our vaunted imagination is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it causes desperation in a situation in which an ape might remain unworried, but it also gives hope as it allows us to envision a better future. We look so far ahead, in fact, that we realize that our life will come to an end. This realization thoroughly colors our existence, leading to a permanent search for meaning as well as bitter jokes along the lines of “Life’s a bitch, and then you die!” Would we have developed a belief in the supernatural without this cloud hanging over us? A partial answer comes from research showing that the more aware people are of their own mortality, and the more they think about it, the more they believe in God.

Well, imagine that!

…the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.

Or think Wag the Dog on a bigger scale.

[b]Existential Comics

The funniest thing about people who complain that “postmodernists” are destroying society is that they can never name a single living postmodernist and describe accurately what they believe.[/b]

And not just Americans.

so far as i can tell people of all political ideologies agree that wolves are cool as shit

He means dragons of course.

[b]Ways to overcome your existential dread:

1. Try to create great art.
2. Throw yourself into politics.
3. Take a leap of faith into religion.
4. Just sort of stop thinking about it and watch TV or something instead.[/b]

Obviously: Not necessarily in that order.

Young people these days spend all their time hooking up on tinder when they should be spending time forming a revolutionary socialist party and then splitting the party over minor ideological differences,

Indeed, that’s what I once did.

have to admit, people in real life are not as impressed with how many twitter followers you have as I had been anticipating

He still has 269,900 more than I have.

[b]Likely reasons you can’t get a girlfriend:

• You are an asshole.
• You have poor hygiene habits.
• You are too scared to even ask girls out.

Unlikely reasons you can’t get a girlfriend:

• postmodern neo-marxists have infiltrated the universities.[/b]

Let’s prove this.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

I’m a sociopath. I look normal, but I’m not. I’m smarter, better, and freer, because I’m not bound by rules, law, emotion or regard for you.[/b]

Something to strive for, perhaps?

I’ve read that one out of twenty-four people is a sociopath, and if you ask me, the other twenty-three of you should be worried.

So, which one [or two] of us here is one?

I don’t really like you, but I’m so good at acting as if I do that it’s basically the same thing.

Basically and [sometimes] then some.

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave.

Let’s run this by Tom Cruise.

They never see me coming.
Know why?
Because I’m already there.

That’ll do it.

You need somebody to stand up for you. You’re the little guy, you just don’t realize it yet. The Commonwealth has all the aces, and you don’t even know you’re playing cards.

At least until Trump drains the swamp.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Most people of my grandparents’ generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics … This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn’t too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools … A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids’ attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt–two undeniable ingredients of farming. It’s good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.[/b]

Yep, that’s how it works all right.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

Yep, that’s how it works all right.

What do you think people want, if it’s not greatness and to be remembered for all time?
Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.

That and philosophy.

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn’t really want to eat 700 more calories a day.

She means 700 more calories a meal of course.

So you make a deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.

Lucky for us though there’s prayer.

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.

And who doesn’t have their own rendition of that?

[b]Existential Comics

The most important attribute of a philosopher is:
Socrates: humility.
Russell: rigor.
Nietzsche: courage.
Hegel: writing down as many words as possible.[/b]

Also, words no one could possibly understand.

Nietzsche is basically your stereotypical bitter, lonely loser who thinks the reason they didn’t succeed in life is because they are too deep for everyone around them to understand.
The difference is he was the only one in history who was actually right about that.

Could I be the second?

Joe Biden is the liberal dream for defeating Trump because he is an old, racist, sexist white guy who will 100% serve the rich and powerful while offering as little as possible to working Americans – but he promises not to say most of that stuff out loud.

Let’s file this one under, “anyone but Trump”.

The cleverest thing the capitalist class does is conceal information from us. All the inner working of how society truly functions is hidden in the one place they know no one will ever look: books.

Does that include Kindle?

[b]There are four basic ways of doing philosophy:

1. Criticizing commonly held beliefs.
2. Advancing novel ideas about reality.
3. Working on philosophical puzzles.
4. Whatever the fuck Nietzsche was doing.[/b]

Clearly, the first four.

Republicans: “corporations should rule over every aspect of society.”
Democrats: “yes, but they should be more polite about it.”

Too close to call?

[b]Patricia Churchland

If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought ‘experiments’, that is another thing. I am not so interested in the latter, though I do appreciate that it can be fun, however unproductive. [/b]

Of course some things don’t really lend themselves to a “nature”.

Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discussions of morality. It may help us all to think a little more carefully and rationally.

Either that or lead us to blows.

In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.

Not for the “know-it-alls” here, right?

If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

Well, what do you know, another “general description”.

I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.

Right of course.

It is surely important that the differences between coma, deep sleep, being under anesthesia, on the one hand, and being alert on the other, all involve changes in the brain.

Absolutely important is my best guess.

[b]Martin Gardner

Consider a cow. A cow doesn’t have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems. [/b]

Any cows here?
Also, am I the only chimp?

Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.

A few examples please.

In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.

Wow, what were the odds of that?

Let the Bible be the Bible. It’s not about science. It’s not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

The good news? It’s not just your Bible.

One day, when I was doing well in class and had finished my lessons, I was sitting there trying to analyze the game of tic-tac-toe… The teacher came along and snatched my papers on which I had been doodling… She did not realize that analyzing tic-tac-toe can lead into dozens of non-trivial mathematical questions.

Really? Name one.

If present trends continue, our country may soon find itself far behind many other nations in both science and technology nations where, if you inform strangers that you are a mathematician, they respond with admiration and not by telling you how much they hated math in school, and how they sure could use you to balance their checkbooks.

In other words, there’s the human condition and then there’s America.

[b]tiny nietzsche

you might be a postmodernist if you don’t actually believe the things you are saying[/b]

Or, far more likely, if you can’t actually believe the things you’re saying.

nothing tastes as good as nothing feels

As opposed to something tastes as good as something feels.

waiting for the detachment to kick in

More than a decade so far.

no shirt, no shoes, no postmodernism

Here though you can be a buck naked Platonist.

trump will probably trip on a staircase or choke on some kfc. that’s how this ends

That it ends is the point though.

you can’t make me exist

I know: Like you would ever want to.

[b]Greg Iles

Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he’d never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time … the school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran – none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action Life from death.[/b]

Finally, it’s almost close to being cleared up.

The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what’s behind it comes out under its own power.

Let’s confirm this. You first.

When you start talking to yourself in a graveyard, it’s time to go home.

Until one day it is home.

Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they’re paralyzed by fear.

Bullshit!
Right?

A man’s biggest enemy is his mouth.

Unless he is armed and dangerous.

There’s no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it.

Unless of course there’s no meaning in that either.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.[/b]

Come on, who can ever really know that?

It’s a hard business, reconciling what the truth used to be with what the truth is now.

Next up: reconciling both with what the truth will be.

If she knew how often I was thinking about her, she wouldn’t feel lonely.

If only it really worked that way.

You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

And you can take that to the grave.

It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.

Been there, done that. Once, it was twice in the same day.

The sun will rise no matter what pain we encounter. No matter how much we believe the world to be over, the sun will rise.

Until eventually, expanding, it swallows the Earth whole.

[b]tiny nietzsche

mumble nihilism[/b]

Ask me to explain.

me: fuck the future
the future: hey

Fuck it anyway.

thursday is the real friday

Mine never is.

a painting that watches you across the room, but also loves you unconditionally

Or: a philosopher that watches you across the room, but also loves you unconditionally.

my horoscope says fuck the police

Imagine then their horoscope.

other things that inadvertently left a starbucks’ cup in the scene:
lincoln’s assassination
battle of waterloo
the last supper

The crucifixion of Christ?

[b]Janis Joplin

Don’t you know that you’re nothing more than a one night stand?[/b]

Then seventy plus years of them.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

Right, like not being one is any different.

I would trade all my tomorrow’s for one single yesterday.

Let’s make sense of this.

You know why we’re stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don’t let themselves feel things.

Let’s pin this down: Genes or Memes?

What we’ve had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we’re doing - the music.

Of course here it’s the philosophy. Or what’s left of it.

I won’t quit to become someone’s old lady.

How about a punching bag? Or is that all just rumor?

[b]so sad today

just when you think life can’t get any longer[/b]

Or shorter as the case may be.

“good” morning

Next up: “good” night.

i’ll be the cruel judge of me, thanks

But, sure, you too.

i came, i saw, i went back to bed

If only 365 days a year.

i’m fun when i’m alone

Trust me: I am too.

human beings just aren’t my thing

Wow, that’s my thing too.

[b]Woody Allen

God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.[/b]

Man and Mia Farrow.

I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?

How about a swift kick in the balls?

A wife lasts only for the length of the marriage, but an ex-wife is there for the rest of your life.

Mine is still around.

Figures tell us there are already more people on earth than we need to move even the heaviest piano.

Okay, but how far?

God is either cruel or incompetent.

Like He can’t be both.

If the world is a progressively realized community of interpretation, then either quadruplictity will drink procrastination or, provided that the nothing negates, boredom will ensue seldom more often than frequently.

Great, another serious philosopher.

[b]Jurgen Habermas

From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out. [/b]

Among other things, I beg to differ. And they do too.

The speaker must choose a comprehensible expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another.

You know, in theory.

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

Now that is some serious philosophy.

The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas — in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

Fucking philosophers, he thought.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

That, crony capitalism and the military industrial complex.

Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

This and the parts about God.

[b]so sad today

maybe if i buy this shit i don’t need i’ll be a whole person[/b]

If not this shit, then that shit.

obsessing over a problem that doesn’t exist

Call this the problem then.

i really liked you. i mean, I didn’t but everyone else is worse

Yes, this can actually happen.

sleeping all day speaks louder than words

So does being awake all night.

many things are the worst

A lot more than things that are the best.

in a complicated relationship with the amount of shit i have to do just to stay alive

Next up: in a complicated relationship with death.

[b]Rene Magritte

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.[/b]

Thanks for clearing that up.

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.

Especially if you don’t feel anything at all.

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well.

For some, even from themselves.

I detest my past, and anyone else’s. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people.

A metaphor perhaps.

I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn’t mean we decide anything.

I think that maybe, possibly this is peacegirl’s point too.

The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.

That and Trump with his finger on the button.

[b]Harlan Coben

There is a certain fate to the universe and a certain randomness.[/b]

Or, far more likely: There is an uncertain fate to the universe and an uncertain randomness.

I’m paraphrasing, but basically Sherlock warned that you should never theorize before you have the facts because then you twist the facts to suit the theory instead of twisting the theory to suit the facts.

Like that will stop anyone here.

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.

First we’ll need to know if Myron deserved it.

Did tragedy cause fissures, open them wider–or did tragedy merely turn on the light so you could see the fissure that had always been there?

Yes.

Things can always be said later, but things can never be unheard.

Though long forgotten.

You have heart disease, people understand. When the brain gets sick, well, it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

Unless, of course, it’s a tumor.

[b]Philosophy Quotes

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Albert Camus[/b]

Before he commits suicide of course.

“Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.” Albert Camus

Well, he couldn’t get them all right.

“Nothing can be believed unless it is first understood; and that for any one to preach to others that which either he has not understood nor they have understood is absurd.” Peter Abelard

Tell that to, among others, the Kids and the objectivists. And, okay, the nihilists too.

“The man of science is a poor philosopher.” Albert Einstein

You know, if we’re lucky.

“We must not allow the ‘irrationality of rationality’ to overtake reason.” Edward Delia

We’ll need a context of course.

“How can an eternal God be the cause of anything evil?” Augustine

Well, he’s either closer to or farther away from answering that than we are.