a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Douglas Adams

The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.[/b]

Ever been a fantastically, wildly improbable idea here?

[b]How to Leave the Planet

1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible.
2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try.
4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important that you get away before your phone bill arrives.[/b]

Nope, still here.

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

About what you’d expect, right?

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone.

Must be the equivalent of that here, for sure.

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Well, our universe anyway.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder… Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

How much would you be willing to pay for one?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Politics have no relation to morals.” Machiavelli[/b]

Of course he’s only paraphrasing, among others, Mitch McConnell.

“At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.” Karl Jaspers

Like that’s necessarily a bad thing. If you know what I mean.

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.” Friedrich Nietzsche

You in particular, Mr. Pedant.

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Friedrich Nietzsche

My guess: this also includes interpreting what he means here.

“For things change and get so different that we can hardly recognize them and it seems that only our names remain the same.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yeah, but lots of things like this seem to be lots of different things to lots of different people.

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” Franz Kafka

Or, sure, avoided at all cost.

[b]Brent Weeks

The perfect killer has no conscience.[/b]

Let’s call him, say, a killing machine.

If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.

I know: Who looks busier here than me?

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. But when those stories are lies, we are the most surprised of all.

He means least surprised of course.
Well, for some of us anyway.

Put on some armor. Just remember what’s armor and what’s you, so when it’s time to take it off, you can.

Tell me this isn’t awash in dasein.

Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it’s a lie.

True, but in ways we may never understand.

Truth doesn’t depend on your belief in it.

On the other hand, your context or mine?

[b]Niels Bohr

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.[/b]

Unless of course, essentially, it doesn’t.

There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.

Help me to find one.

No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.

I’m sort of saying that myself, right?

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

I’m sort of saying that myself, right?

Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.

QM of course.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Rhymes with quarks.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.” Thucydides[/b]

Well, not counting mine, of course.

“Whether it’s Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupid is certainly celebrated. … Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly.” Jon Hamm

You know, after he stopped being an Ad Man.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” Marie Curie

How dumb is this, he thought?

"Let us be terrible in order to prevent the people from being terrible themselves!” Georges Danton

Oh, yeah, that would work!

"Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.” Gorgias

Sure, I was once this optimistic myself.

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” Francis Bacon

Two words:
1] comfort
2] consolation

[b]Zelda Fitzgerald

All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own-to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.[/b]

Next up: All I get instead is…

Isn’t it funny how danger makes people passionate?

For example, scared shitless.

The trouble with emergencies is, she said, that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.

Must be a class thing, he thought. Or a gender thing.

Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world?

Needless to say, no one ever said that of me.

By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.

This person for example.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

Just in time for those idiotic Super Bowl commercials.

[b]Luigi Pirandello

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have … the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality…which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory. [/b]

Not counting your life of course.

Those who understood, in fact, say: ‘I mustn’t do this, I mustn’t do that,’ so as not to commit some stupidity or other! Splendid! But at a certain point we realize that all life is stupidity; so tell me yourself what it means never to have done anything foolish. At the very least it means you have never lived.

Okay, somewhat hyperbolic.

It is so. When YOU think so.

The part that YOU still don’t get.

We’re like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

And not just in Trumpworld.

We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Not counting Karpel Tunnel and Phyllo of course.

If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.

Let’s invent a gadget for that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"If you don’t build castles in the air you won’t build anything on the ground.” Victor Hugo[/b]

Let’s just say that, here, some take this way, way, way too far.

"I shall die in the belief that to make France free, republican and prosperous, a little ink would have sufficed - and only one guillotine.” Camille Desmoulins

A really sharp one though.

"Viking women were able to rule kingdoms, divorce husbands, own land, and Vikings were very progressive in terms of the rights of women.” Gabriel Byrne

We’ll need to run this by Thor of course.

“Where there is no hope, we must invent it.” Albert Camus

Needless to say, count me out.

“What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.” Samuel Beckett

Now that’s some serious philosophy.

“In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.” Martin Rees

Does Can anyone really understand this?

[b]Randall Munroe

If we divide up the world’s land area evenly, there’s enough room for each of us to have a little over 2 hectares each, with the nearest person 77 meters away.[/b]

Of course stuff like this may well be completely made up.

In conclusion, if the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits across many areas of our lives. Are there any downsides to this scenario? We would all freeze and die.

So, is it worth it?

What if every day, every human had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a human?

Or, in my case, a chimp.

So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn’t worth the trouble—though it would definitely be green.

Let’s first pin down Yoda’s actual existence.

GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it’s one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations.

So, is this important to know?

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

This guy? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Willem_van_Loon

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind […] I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable., and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forger work or welding sees “steel” as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There’s nothing else there.[/b]

Ayn Rand could not have – would have not? – said it better herself.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.

Then I must be doing it wrong, he thought.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. There’s not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn’t suffered from that one so much that he’s not instinctively on guard. That’s the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, give 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. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.

So there!

From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: The Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.

A little help with this one please.

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.

Not counting conflicting goods of course.

Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there’s nothing ahead but increasing darkness.

You don’t get this, do you?

[b]Simone de Beauvoir

You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done. [/b]

Uh-oh.

In a way, literature is true than life,’ he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that’s why it’s false. But it’s damned satisfying. In life, you’re constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

Not so much on paper these days. But point taken.

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

The C word comes to mind.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Next up: the assembly line.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.

Right, see how far that got her.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Talk about an intellectual contraption!!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Nothing is more real than nothing.” Samuel Beckett[/b]

That and everything else.

"Words are the clothes thoughts wear.” Samuel Beckett

And, here, not just the emperors.

“There is no place in a fanatic’s head where reason can enter.” Napoleon Bonaparte

And who is more fanatic than you, Mr. Objectivist?

“The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense — he is always satisfied with himself.” Napoléon Bonaparte

And who is more the fool than you, Mr. Objectivist?

“To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.” Simone de Beauvoir

In other words, either Trump or No Trump, we’re all to blame.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.” Chinese Proverb

Next up: the best time to cut it down.

[b]Vladimir Putin

Everything will probably never be Ok. But we have to try for it.[/b]

Given, for example, our own political prejudices.

Those who fight corruption should be clean themselves.

Hell, he could be talking about Don Trump.

Without the values at the core of Christianity and other world religions, without moral norms that have been shaped over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. One must respect every minority’s right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be put into question.

I dare you to bring this down to earth.

Russia doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. It destroys them.

Spot the irony yet?

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

In other words, right make might vs. might makes right.

There used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. There used to be Soviet troops in the GDR. And we must honestly admit that they were occupation troops, which remained in Germany after WWII under the guise of allied troops. Now these occupation troops are gone, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact is no more. There is no Soviet threat, but NATO and U.S. troops are still in Europe. What for?

Pick one:
1] we’re the good guys
2] hypocrisy

[b]Nein

Tweets, tweets, everywhere. But not a thought to think.[/b]

How about this: Posts, posts, everywhere…

If you need me, I’ll be eroding your ontological and epistemological foundations.

Wow. That’s my job here too!

A gentle reminder from February. Every month is the cruelest.

True, but not every month is the shortest.

Please pardon our profound indifference.

Sure. After all, it’s no match for our own.

You say you want a revolution. But perhaps I could interest you in a weekend.

Of debauchery say.

A gentle reminder that before social media there was society and there was media. No one misses them.

He means a harsh reminder of course.

[b]Norman Mailer

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. [/b]

Or, if you are one of the masses, count least.

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy.

Well, so far, only historically.

The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre … had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.

Let’s [somehow] confirm this.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

Sure, why not, Mr. Intellectual.

We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd… Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste…? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?

Sure, why not, Mr. Intellectual.

The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.

Not here though, right?

[b]Douglas Adams

What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong![/b]

You know, being optimistic.

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth — when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass — the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another — particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

Of course that’s still a bit off in the future.

Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!
The what? said Richard.
The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …
Yes, said Richard, there was also the small matter of gravity.
Gravity, said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered. …You see? he said dropping his cigarette butt, They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap … ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.

Again, that ever crucial distinction between inventing something and merely discovering it.

Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.

You know, whatever that means.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

I’m living proof of that, he thought.

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Or, for that matter, coming here.

[b]Werner Twertzog

My pain scale goes to 12. You would not understand.[/b]

Nigel Tufnel does: youtu.be/KOO5S4vxi0o

For those who would rather “be in the coffin than give the eulogy,” it would be even better, perhaps, to never have been born, if one has nothing to say at such a crucial moment.

Me, I would rather that no one had been born.

It is important to vote, but even more important to have a coherent epistemology, ontology, hermeneutic, dialectic, and vinyl LP collection.

In exactly the opposite order of course.

Methuselah lived to be 969, but enjoyed little after the age of 51, I am told.

We’ll need to know who told him first.

Unpaid work will not look good on your resume, dumbass.

And, in particular, unpaid posting.

Vacations are important for teaching children that they will never be happy.

Not even in [or especially in] Ocean City.

[b]Brent Weeks,

Do you know why you feel destined for something greater?
Why? Kip asked, quiet, hopeful.
Because you’re an arrogant little shit.[/b]

If only 9 times out 10.

And what fun is it being a genius if no one appreciates you?

Ain’t that what you’re thinking, Kid?

The perfect killer has no identity.

And then he’s out there to take yours.

That pain you feel, Master Blint said almost gently, is the pain of abandoning a delusion. The delusion is meaning, Kylar. There is no higher purpose. There are no gods. No arbiters of right and wrong. I don’t ask you to like reality. I only ask you to be strong enough to face it. There is nothing beyond this. There is only the perfection we attain by becoming weapons, as strong and merciless as a sword. There is no essential good in living. Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing by the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justification.

Wow, what if this is actually true?!!

We become the masks we wear.

And then pass them around to others.

This world has only two kinds of people: villains and smiling villains.

Or three if you count villains with shit-eating grins.

[b]Niels Bohr

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words. [/b]

Let’s blame dasein.

If you think you understand it, that only shows that you don’t know the first thing about it.

What do you think, we’ll need a context first?

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

I’m thinking you, you’re thinking me.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we say about nature.

Einstein meets Wittgenstein as it were.

Physics is the belief that a simple and consistent description of nature is possible.

The key word [of course]: belief.

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

Well, not counting here for sure.

[b]Existential Comics

Should we steal other people’s jokes?
Utilitarianism: if it makes more people laugh, then yes.
Deontology: if everyone stole jokes, no one would bother to write jokes.
Virtue Ethics: god damn dude, really? what kind of fucking loser steals jokes and passes them off as their own.[/b]

You know, if this is actually important to you.

Should we go to war with Iran?
Plato: no
Augustine: no
Aquinas: no
Maimonides: no
Marx: no
Locke: no
Mill: no
Russell: no
Every other philosopher ever: no

Hypothetically as it were.

When you have anxiety in your dreams, don’t worry, that’s just your brain trying to figure out the most efficient ways to give you anxiety in waking life.

Going all the way back to God for some. The Big Bang for others.

Frege believed humans beings could never count higher than 10,000, but Kurt Gödel later showed that even for numbers as small as 500 things simply cannot be counted.

True?

[b]“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”

• the Democratic National Committee[/b]

Of course the Republican National Committee contracts that out to the Kremlin.

Sometimes I like to think Karl Marx is out there somewhere, looking down on us, saying to himself “man you guys really fucked it up.”

Either that or rolling in his grave.