a thread for mundane ironists

[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!

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?

[b]Tana French

I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?[/b]

Well, they are, after all, basically mass produced these days. And not just in America anymore.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

Or come here of course.

For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.

Jesus, never felt that before!

Sartre was right, Hell is other people.

No, not the way she imagines it.

Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

The concept, sure.

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.

You either get this or you don’t.

[b]Existential Comics

The minimum for a Democratic nominee should be the iron clad promise not to go to war with Iran. The middle ground should be sending George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump to The Hague for trial, and the left wing should be the complete removal of all foreign military bases.[/b]

I’ll start holding my breath.

Only in the United States will we drop a bomb on a state official in a foreign country that we’re not at war with, and then call them the terrorist.

Of course, no one is not a terrorist to at least someone in this world.

Imagine thinking we have the authority to assassinate foreign leaders halfway around the world with drone strikes.
On what is this authority based?

Uh, might makes right?

…as philosophers wisely reminds us, you cannot post your way to happiness. but you can post your way into pissing off your haters, which is probably better anyway…

Well, it is here of course.

be very suspicious of anyone who calls themselves a “leftist” but dislikes raccoons

Me? Only if it’s rabid.

…of all the philosophy quotes i’ve heard, i always thought Simone de Beauvoir’s “all men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation” would be the most badass one to say just before you shoot someone.

We’ll need a context of course.

[b]Heraclitus

There is a stability in the Universe because of the orderly and balanced process of change, the same measure coming out as going in, as if reality were a huge fire that inhaled and exhaled equal amounts. [/b]

Of course we know what this can be taken back to. If, that is, it can be.

It is wise to agree that all things are one.

Of course we know what this can be taken back to. If, that is, it can be.

The fairest harmony springs from discord.

For example, given contexts of our own choosing and not theirs.

Invisible harmony is better than visible.

Not to mention the other way around.

Even what those with the greatest reputation for knowing it all claim to understand and defend are but opinions.

Surely that doesn’t include Aegean!
Unless, of course, it includes him in particular.

Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.

Or, as some prefer, oblivion.

[b]Edward Snowden

We have to decide why terrorism is a new threat. There has always been terrorism. [/b]

They’re the new Communists of course. The military industrial complex always needs the Bad Guys.

Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

Why not? It’s been stopped any number of times before.

I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

Wow, who would have ever thought that?!

We have to be able to ask questions in order to answer them.

If you know what he means.

The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

On the contrary, things are getting worse.

It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

Oh, yeah, they’re trembling in their black boots.

[b]Doth

Let an ancient demon take over your body for a while. You’ve earned it.[/b]

Okay, any ancient demons here?

Might fuck around and disappear into an ancient forest & never be seen again.

Anyone here ever done that?

It’s a perfect night to slip into something more comfortable, like a nuclear bunker.

Nope, Khamenei blinked. Or Trump did.

Remember, you can become possessed by a demon whenever you want. You’re an adult.

Or, sure, if you prefer, possess the demon instead.

2020: a reality tv personality issues an assassination leading to World War III

My guess: on Big Brother.

Be the reason why your therapist needs their own therapist

Or, here, the reason another objectivist bites the dust.

[b]Norman Mailer

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.[/b]

Or big battles by any means necessary.

We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

And now Trumpworld.

You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.

Like with men it’s any different.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods…

I’ll argue with any you bring here.

As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.

The living dead as it were.

I don’t hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.

To protect them from him more or less than to protect him from them?

[b]Douglas Adams

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.[/b]

Let’s finally pin this down. You know, if it can be.

The Door Was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.

Another example: Dasein.

Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.
Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.

I guess we’ll never know if He did.

It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

Still, what’s that next to the unconscious part?

That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.

Got a few of them here, don’t we? And not just the Kids.

But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.
I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish, said Zaphod, nothing but a gnab gib.
A what?
Opposite of a big bang.

Well, at least we know what it’s called.

[b]God

Attention: Will the owners of a blue planet with plate tectonics please attend to your vehicle. It is overheating.[/b]

Don’t look at me, I’m just a retired wage slave.

I used to be religious but then I grew out of it.

Now He tells us.

I’m on the side of whichever side doesn’t say I’m on their side.

Let’s make sense of this someday.

From now on only bad things happen.

Let’s file this one under “business as usual.”

Say what you like about the President, but you have to admit: he’s a fucking piece of shit.

Okay, then what?

There’s a direct link between climate change and not doing anything about climate change.

I thought so!

[b]Bob Dylan

We all like motorcycles to some degree. [/b]

Come on, is that really true?

Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift
Look out out kid, they keep it all hid

They still do.

When I first heard Elvis’ voice, I knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody … hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail

How about hearing his voice for the first time? Nope, it was the fucking songs.

Everybody’s the first somebody, y’know.

And y’know what that’s worth.

The land of milk and honey, they say it is the land of money.

What’s the difference some will insist.

People are going to say, ‘Well, it’s not very truthful.’ But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth.

Here for example: youtu.be/FmbwU3J-2kk

[b]Murray Gell-Mann

All of modern physics is governed by that magnificent and thoroughly confusing discipline called quantum mechanics … It has survived all tests and there is no reason to believe that there is any flaw in it. We all know how to use it and how to apply it to problems; and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it. [/b]

Next up: Is 1 = 0.999?

I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe.

You all know my pitch.

Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face.

But not you, right, Mr Objectivist?

My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands and I are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?

No equivalent of that here, is there?

In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.

Next up: the work of philosophers.

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can’t believe they did all those things and didn’t also have a modern language.

Maybe it goes back to the Garden of Eden.