a thread for mundane ironists

[b]so sad today

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

A new decade will do that.

the enemy of my enemy also probably sucks

Now that’s the spirit!

when i was in the womb it was a simpler time

Simpler still: before you were even conceived.

let’s pretend i’m better looking than i am

So, is she?

i find dead people more relaxing

Naturally as it were.

when i hear people talk i honestly feel like i’m from another planet

Either that or want to go to another planet.

[b]Camille Paglia

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.[/b]

Talk about “ludicrously binary”! :wink:

A woman simply is, but a man must become.

Talk about “ludicrously binary”! :wink:

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature’s fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

Eroticism: the intellectual contraption.

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Definitely maybe, perhaps?

The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

Things only particularly obtuse intellectuals say?

If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech.

Right, like that will settle it.

[b]Robert Macfarlane

My sense, I say to Christopher, is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.[/b]

My guess: that’s debatable?

Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.

Let’s imagine the deepest time of all.

…to understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.

You go first.

For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.

And then the deepest time of all: oblivion.

…perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing.

Of course that will never catch on. Nor should it, he insisted.

From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. ‘I can only meditate when I am walking,’ wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his ‘Confessions’, ‘when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.’ Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself ‘so overwhelmed with ideas’ that he ‘could scarcely walk’. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as ‘employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy’ and Wordsworth of his own ‘feeling intellect’. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - ‘Only those thoughts which come from ‘walking’ have a value’ - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: ‘Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.’ In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.

On the other hand, knowing what?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"My opinion is a view I hold until I find something that changes it.” Luigi Pirandello[/b]

Could it all really be as simple as that?

"Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.” Luigi Pirandello

I know that mine are.

“We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.” Mencius

I know that I do.

“Opportunities? I make opportunities.” Napoleon Bonaparte

Not unlike the Grim Reaper.

“The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.” James S.A. Corey

Is this true? Let’s flip a coin and find out.

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

Or, sure, lots and lots of both?

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

“What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.[/b]

Nothing new here though.

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.

:laughing: :wink: :laughing: :wink: :laughing: :wink: :laughing:

Though not necessarily in that order.

Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked” but…but what?…Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others—a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.

Little objectivists in particular.

John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.

Yo, promethean!

The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.

Or, every once in a while, the real beauty.

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum.

Well, that’s good news, right?

[b]Tana French

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.[/b]

Any little Chernobyls here?

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better–Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos–so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

As, for example, a substitute for living. Though, sure, point taken.

Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.

My guess: for some more than others.

She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up.

How old were you?

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.

Anything? I mean, get real.

Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God.

I get the point. Having been around the block myself dozens of times.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.” Ronald Wright[/b]

My guess: for some more than others.

“The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.” Napoleon Bonaparte

Make it all between you and God.

“Remember, you have no companions but your shadow.” Ghenghis Khan

Of course that’s all changed now with the internet. Right?

“It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.” Napoleon Bonaparte

And their cause as likely as not.

“I don’t want to be a genius. I have enough problems just trying to be a man.” Albert Camus

Never had that problem myself of course.

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” Kurt Vonnegut

Let’s finally pin this down.

[b]Heraclitus

What sense or thought do they have? They follow the popular singers, and they take the crowd as their teacher.[/b]

Of course that’s all changed today, hasn’t it?

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

On the other hand, make of this what you will.

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.

Let’s make sense of this.

The unexpected connection is more powerful than one that is obvious.

Let’s just say that it can be.

All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things.

I know: what if that was actually true.

Realize that war is common and justice is strife, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.

It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it?

[b]Edward Snowden

Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.[/b]

Though clearly not for all of us, right?

Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we’re tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don’t even have an inquiry into it.

Sure, this might be true.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

Sure, this might be true.

Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an e-mail, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace, and the Government has decided that it’s good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of doing a crime.

Sure, this might be true.

If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.

We’ll need to know the beliefs first, of course.

Privacy is a function of liberty.

You know, in the best of all possible worlds. Hypothetically for example.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.” Kurt Vonnegut[/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trump!

“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” Kurt Vonnegut

Virtually every actor too.

“He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.” John Milton

Name one.

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre

And that’s before you die.

"Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Not counting the Kids of course. With them it can never be simple enough.

“When you accept yourself, the whole world accepts you.” Lao Tzu

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

[b]Norman Mailer

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.[/b]

In other words, been there, done that.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

Yes, including the characters we play here.

I don’t trust compliments. I’ve been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn’t. But generally when people give you compliments there’s one of two things wrong with them. Either they’re false, or what’s worse is they’re sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they’re offering you their loyalty. And I’m kind of a stingy… Well, I don’t necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let’s skip the compliments.

Of course not many are complimenting me here. Or, for that matter, there.

It’s very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don’t say, ‘I’m going to fall in love next Tuesday, I’m going to begin my novel.’ The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

Wow, that probably explains the two that I wrote. And why they ended up in the dumpster.

For 40 years we were led to think of the Russians as godless, materialistic and an evil empire. When the Cold War ended, we suddenly discovered that Russia was a poor Third World country. They had not been equipped to take over the world. In fact, they were just trying to improve a miserable standard of oppressive living, and couldn’t. They had to spend too much on arms build-up. We didn’t win the Cold War; we bankrupted the Russians. In effect, it was a big bank exhausting the reserves of a smaller one.

Someone run this by Phyllo! :wink:

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind.

Also, a quick grasp of the secret to insanity.

[b]Douglas Adams

Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it, said Marvin.
And what happened? pressed Ford.
It committed suicide, said Marvin. [/b]

I hear that.

…and we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

Of course your secret may be different.

Ahenny (adj.) The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.

A neologism as it were.

Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.

Yes? No? Maybe?

One is never alone with a rubber duck.

He means ducky of course.

He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.

On the other hand, don’t we all?

[b]Nein

If you need me, I’ll be devising a five-year plan for surviving the decade.[/b]

You know, if you have five years.

I’m just here to see how we end.

And, sure, why.

Let’s be honest. Your new year was ruined decades ago.

Or, to be more precise, at the Big Bang.

Never forget: anything is possible. And always remember: that’s not good news.

Unless, of course, it is.

January 2. The resolution begins eating its children.

Maybe next year.

We regret to inform you that the new decade will last 10 years.

Unless the Big One hits.

[b]Bob Dylan

You just have to keep going to find that thing that lets you in the door. Sometimes in life when that day comes and you’re given the key, you throw it away. [/b]

Yep, that’s what I’ve always done.

It’s mighty funny. The end of time has just begun.

Any day now, Bob. Ha ha ha?

Everybody has their own idea of what’s a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they’re all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.

youtu.be/zw1FH-2n4LQ

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Of course we know better, don’t we?

I have always believed that fame is a curse. I never envied one of the famous people I’ve known.

Of course we know better, don’t we?

When I was growing up - say in the fifties - the thirties to me didn’t even exist. I couldn’t even imagine them in any kind of way, so I don’t expect anyone growing up now is gonna even understand what the sixties were all about, anymore than I could the thirties or twenties.

Say it ain’t so, Bob, say it ain’t so!

[b]Murray Gell-Mann

If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it. [/b]

Or: If someone says that he can think or talk about human identity without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Let’s assign this task to you, Mr Objectivist.

The mathematics clearly called for a set of underlying elementary objects-at that time we needed three types of them-elementary objects that could be combined three at a time in different ways to make all the heavy particles we knew. … I needed a name for them and called them quarks, after the taunting cry of the gulls, “Three quarks for Muster mark,” from Finnegan’s Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce.

A true fucking story as it were.

Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.

Anyone here know the tiniest one of all?

The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

Or, for most of us, nothing at all.

I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn’t commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don’t commute.

Sounds like a personal problem.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Yogurt is alive. But almost no one hears its cries of pain.[/b]

Either that or revel in it.

I have never seen “The Star Wars.” What is it about?

It’s about Good versus Evil in Hollywood. You know, for the masses.

Hell is other people.
Hell, also, is being alone.
Everything is hell.

Not to mention everything else.

It is important to admit errors and show vulnerability in the workplace so that you can be fired and then die in the streets, sooner rather than later, I am told.

Sounds like something Don Trump would tell his white working class base.

I am trying to 3D-print a better 3D printer.

Next up: the first 4D printers.

Grammar is one of many foundations for ethics.

That and semantics.

[b]Camille Paglia

Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an enedless round, cycle upon cycle. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm. Free will is stillborn in the red cells of our body, for there is no free will in nature. Our choices come to us prepackaged and special delivery, molded by hands not our own.[/b]

Of course liberals have a version of this too.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

Yeah, sure, that works for me too.

Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.

Yeah, sure, that works for me too. You know, sometimes.

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

This including every man who has ever existed, exists now or ever will exist. Go ahead, ask her.

I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea.

Or, sure, man’s worst. If for example you’re a woman.

The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.

Of course she’s only paraphrasing Satyr here.

[b]Randall Munroe

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.[/b]

Just what we need, he thought, another smartass.

Whatever happened to our dreams? The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox.

Anyone want to know what happened to mine?

There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.

Well, it is “the rarest naturally occurring element in the Earth’s crust”. I’ve never found any.

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

Set him straight, Mr. Objectivist.

I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. In our reactor? He thought about it for a moment. You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.

Okay, you’ve been warned.

Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.

We’ll need the context of course.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Introverts know that most of the talking in meetings is done by stupid people. [/b]

Right, Kids?

As Kant tells us, we judge the moral worth of an act by the cost incurred by the actor.

Let’s run this by, among others, the Randroids.

It is arguably fine that you studied business, young ones, but I only hire graduates in foundational disciplines, such as English, history, or philosophy.

My guess: That will never catch on. In Hollywood, for example.

The transformation of Scrooge from rationalist-capitalist to romantic-socialist is too sudden to sustain itself for long. The novella requires a sequel in which a mirthless, almost desperate Ebenezer confronts the revolutions of 1848, penury, and ostracism, once his giving stops.

Except around Christmas time. Each and every year so far.

Philosophy precedes biology, as we all know. The rat survives not because of its tail, or its teeth, but because it has chosen ontological realism.

What’s this mean then for cats and dogs?

The cost of expensive possessions is not their price but the need to control the billions who live in squalor.

And not just the kids in the sweat shops making them.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

…not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much.[/b]

That’s always worked here.

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

=D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D>

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.

Gumption again!!

She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted.

Next up: ennui 24/7.

If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don’t give it opportunities.

Of course we do thump nature back a bit, right?

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of the political nature… I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important and products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right.

Uh, cue Peter Kropotkin? :wink: