a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

People are really out there vigorously advocating for free speech, but at the same time saying philosophy is useless. Like everyone should shout their opinions all the time, but under absolutely no circumstance should anyone examine these opinions seriously.[/b]

On the other hand, how seriously is too seriously?

Joe Biden: the only thing that can stop a bad old senile racist getting elected president is a good old senile racist getting elected president.

This time though it’s probably true.

a great philosopher is someone who can explain their dumbass idea so well that no one can even figure out why it was so dumb anymore

Well, not counting me of course.

[b]Philosophers who would most hate their modern fans:

1. Nietzsche
2. Marx
3. Diogenes
4. The rest of them because philosophers are all snobby pricks[/b]

In other words, all of the above.

when your boss says he thinks of the workplace like a family, he doesn’t mean like a group of people who take care of each other no matter what. he means like a patriarchal power structure where the children obey the parents no matter what.

But only 9 times out of 10.

Children really make the best philosophers. They have infinite curiosity and wonder, and they haven’t yet aquired any of the prejudices that close adult’s minds off from possibilities. The only real problem is that children are dumb as shit.

Not half as dumb as Kids though.

[b]Roger Penrose

Consciousness … is the phenomenon whereby the universe’s very existence is made known. [/b]

1] How?
2] Why?
Though not necessarily in that order.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Most of us being resigned to taking his word about that.

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance. Some people take the view that the universe is simply there and it runs along—it’s a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don’t think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it, about its existence, which we have very little inkling of at the moment.

Of course that’s still true.

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

You know, like dominoes toppling over.

Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.

On the other hand, no one really knows what that means.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature’s actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained ‘fine structure constant’ … governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

Going back to, say, the mystery of existence itself.

[b]Sad Socrates

My only advice is to start eating the garbage out of the sea.[/b]

You know, more than you throw into it.

Mom used to say if you frown and the wind changes direction it doesn’t really matter because you’ll still be unhappy.

Of course Mom was sad too.

Complaining is doing something.

And, sure, every now and again, that’s enough.

I had one of those moments this week where I was eating and choking and someone saved me and I realized I wanted to be alone for the rest of my life.

No heroes here, eh?

My doubts are always correct.

Every other one of mine actually might be.

If you truly regarded the feces on the ground you would only begin to realize how beautiful humanity is.

Feces as in shit?

[b]Dan Savage

…the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it. [/b]

You know, to paraphrase Shane.

Today’s unspeakable perversion is tomorrow’s kink, is next week’s good clean fun.

And not just on Twitter.

Straight couples don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn’t compulsory and its absence doesn’t invalidate a marriage.

Okay, but where does, among other things, AIDS figure in here?

Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you’ll need to pass an eventful weekend.

That sounds like a challenge, Mr. Reasonable!

If kids got raped at Denny’s as often as they get raped at church it would be illegal to take your kids to Denny’s.

Let’s decide: Is this going too far?

The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.

Let’s decide: Is this going too far?

[b]Georg Cantor

A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.[/b]

I know, let’s put one in the White House.

To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.

For example, “why?”

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

For example, the set of, “workers of the world unite.”

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Encompassed in equations of course.

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.

Next up: the real infinity.

Don’t always blindly follow guidance and step-by-step instructions; you might run into something interesting.

Unless of course you’re anal.

[b]tiny nietzsche

practice things that don’t come natural to you until you can fake it[/b]

Here, for example, being a philosopher.

there are known known pleasures; there are pleasures we know we know. we also know there are known unknown pleasures; that is to say we know there are some pleasures we do not know. but there are also unknown unknown pleasures, the pleasures we don’t know we don’t know

Next up: pain.

good places to cry:
museums
train stations
outer space

Or, for some, a parallel universe.

inadvertently propping up late stage capitalism because I need to eat

We’re all doing what we can.

wake me up when I’m dead

I’ll let you know, okay?

I saw Louisiana trending and I thought maybe trump had sold it back to france

We lost billions.

[b]Edith Piaf

I’m the only one who still believes in Santa Claus! [/b]

My guess: not any more.

I wouldn’t mind at all coming back to earth after my death.

Anyone of you here her?

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.

Right, like this can actually be proven.

I don’t want to die an old lady.

Unless 47 is old, she didn’t.

Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went.

I’m reasonably sure that I don’t have it.

Death is the beginning of something.

The end, for example.

[b]Margaret Cho

I don’t think I’m gay. I don’t think I’m straight. I think I’m just slutty. Where’s my parade? [/b]

Let’s start one for her.

I think white people like to tell Asian people how they should feel about race because they’re too scared to tell black people.

Sorry, but she’s allowed to say things like this.

I think comedy is an angry art form.

Well the joke does have to be on someone.

Love is the big booming beat which covers up the noise of hate.

At the very least, probably.

I don’t like people telling other people what to do. Sex work for a lot of women is really important, especially in countries where women don’t have a lot of power. Here we can have at least some form … of making money.

Of course there are other ways to look at it.

Silence equals nonexistence. If I don’t raise my voice, it’s like I never existed.

Nope, never felt that way.

[b]Daniel Silva

But that’s the beauty of American cable news, darling. It doesn’t have to be credible. It just has to be entertaining.[/b]

Cue, among others, the masses.

On Yom Kippur, it is not enough for one to feel sorry for the foul deeds one has done. To achieve forgiveness, one must go to the injured parties and make amends.

Unless of course they’re Palestinians.

The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German.

A little help with this one please.

He looked older, harder, perhaps wiser. The Middle East was like that. It turned hope to despair, idealists into Machiavellians.

Not unlike in Washington D.C. here.

Like many Vatican pronouncements, the official version of events would bear little resemblance to the truth.

Not unlike pronouncements in Washington D.C. here.

To understand Russia today, you must understand the trauma of the nineties. Everything we had, everything we had been told, was swept away. We went from superpower to basket case overnight.

Still, with 6,500 nuclear warheads. On the other hand, in the 1990s, it had over 60,000 nuclear warheads.

[b]Oswald Spengler

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.[/b]

Of course there’s no getting around the bills being paid.

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals …

Of course there’s no getting around the military industrial complex.

Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

Let’s call this…capitalism?

For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honored custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.

Likely to be just one man’s opinion though. Or, sure, likely not to be just one at all.

Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defense against the incomprehensible.

Though not much that isn’t.

When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.

Then billionaires. Or are there actually trillionaires around?

[b]tiny nietzsche

in space, no one can hear you access your ex’s financial records[/b]

Though you’ll probably catch hell when you get back down to Earth.

philosopher is a complicated profession

Seriously?

it has been [0] days since the last billionaire’s death

Time to speed things up, he thought.

abc: always be crying

If only from the cradle to the grave.

take a moment to watch other people run out of ideas

Or to just keep repeating the same ones.

sure nihilism is great, but have you ever had sex?

Probably the first time that’s ever been asked.

[b]Bob Dylan

I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity. [/b]

That and being Bob Dylan.

We’re living in times where men commit crimes and crime don’t have a face.

Of course we’re not fooled, are we?

They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives
Put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs, or their wives

And then every couple of years, they vote.

Well, I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them
They sing while you slave
And I just get bored

You know, being him and all.

It is the first line that gives the inspiration and then it’s like riding a bull. Either you just stick with it, or you don’t.

For example, “I” is an “existential contraption.”

I didn’t know whether to duck or to run, so I ran.

Unless your packin’ of course.

[b]Blake Crouch

I think I finally understand why God went away and left the world to destroy itself.[/b]

He wondered if it was the same reason that he thought.

You killed your ambition, didn’t you?
It died of natural causes. Of neglect.

Mine may well have been stillborn.

At this point, I’m not even sure what to be afraid of—this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head.

Maybe a lethal combination of both.

I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.
I am only allowed to solve this problem.

We’ll need to know the problem of course.

What it comes down to for me is that I’d rather us make bad decisions as a group, than to live in the absence of freedom.

We’ll need to know the decisions of course.

When you were a child, I didn’t tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.

Like it’s actually hard to figure out.

[b]so sad today

i love mistakes right before they turn out to be mistakes[/b]

We’ll need an example of course.

when you see the emptiness in everything i’ll be here for you

Just for the record, don’t expect me to be.

i was okay and then i wasn’t

Okay, but don’t stop there.

i’ve never liked my birthday especially the first one

That one has actually completely slipped my mind.

no matter what i’m doing, there is a quiet voice in my head whispering “what’s the point?”

And getting louder all the time.

dreamt we fucked

Okay, but I’ll still need proof.

[b]Ani DiFranco

I have earned my disillusionment. [/b]

In spades, for example.

Science chases money
And money chases its tail
And the best minds of my generation
Cannot make bail.

Well at least it rhymes.

I mean, I think it’s hard enough to find somebody you can stand for more than ten minutes, so, like, you shouldn’t narrow your options.

Ten minutes tops she means.

People talk about my image like I come in two dimensions, like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind, like what I happen to be wearing the day that someone takes my picture is my new statement for all womankind.

Well, sure, the assholes.

We get a little further from perfection each year. I think that’s called character. I think that’s just how it goes.

And then one day it’s just how it went.

I think I’m a very solitary person. To actually not be anonymous is a bit claustrophobic for me.

No, I get this.

[b]Neal Stephenson

This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.[/b]

Of course philosophers know better, don’t we?

The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you’d just hate to disappoint her.

Nope, haven’t bumped into her yet.

If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.

I’ll need to know the name of the book of course.

…in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations.

I’ve heard that myself. For example, at the grocery store.

I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness.

Almost four decades myself.

Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind. Like instructions for programming a VCR.

Or [for me here] reading Meno’s posts.

[b]Luis Bunuel

I find science analytical, pretentious and superficial, largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox—in other words, all the things I love the most. [/b]

Right, science has got to go.

Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.

You know, among other things.

I think films are perishable, because they depend too much on technology, which advances too quickly and the films become old-fashioned, antiques. What I hope for is that technology advances to the point that films in the future will depend on a little pill which you take; then you sit in the dark, and from your eyes you project the film you want to see on a blank wall.

So, how close are we coming?

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

Perhaps even more than nothing.

I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.

Now it’s our turn.

If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I’d decline. ‘‘Just keep my liver and lungs in good working order,’’ I’d reply, ‘‘so I can go on drinking and smoking!’’

Cause of death: cirrhosis of the liver.

[b]Catherine Deneuve

At a certain age, you have to choose between your face and your ass.[/b]

What the hell does that mean?

If you try to measure the future, you will never risk the present. Playing it safe. A ghastly game.

What the hell does that mean?

Men are good but women are magic.

You know, when it’s not the other way around.

I know who I am, how I was. I don’t want to know how I will be because nobody knows that.

And right up to the day you die.

I don’t see any reason for marriage when there is divorce.

Let’s decide if that makes sense.

It is very fashionable for good-looking ladies to say how hard it is to be beautiful, but that’s not true. There are times when it depresses and bothers me to see just how easy things are made for a beautiful woman.

And, who knows, she might even mean it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” Albert Einstein[/b]

Not likely we’ll be around though.

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzu

Unless of course it’s a trip to the bathroom.

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.” Jawaharlal Nehru

I like that. And, who knows, it might even be true.

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.” Aldous Huxley

If, for example, pastitsio, is on the menu.

“History should be written as philosophy.” Voltaire

Is that even possible? And how about the other way around?

"If the populace knew with what idiocy they were ruled, they would revolt.” Charlemagne

Instead, they reelect them.

[b]Billie Holiday

If nobody can learn from the past, then there’s no point in raking it up. [/b]

Like it won’t always be raked up anyway.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody’s business but my own.

Not counting the real world of course.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

Though, sure, it’s okay to borrow stuff and make it your own.

The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy … it’s sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.

From time to time I almost get that.

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.

From time to time I almost never get that.

They think they can make fuel from horse manure - now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.

It would sure stop me.