a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Zelda Fitzgerald

…memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for…[/b]

Right, I’m sure that’ll help.

Death is the only real elegance.

Whatever that means.

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.

That being the best reason of all.

And only weaklings…who lack courage and the power to feel they’re right when the whole world says they’re wrong, ever lose.

Not counting the real world of course.

But I warn you, I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

Okay, but now let me warn you…

Life has puffed and blown itself into a summer day, and clouds and spring billow over the heavens as if calendars were a listing of mathematical errors.

Uh, wow?

[b]Luigi Pirandello

In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.[/b]

You don’t get this do you?

Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don’t somehow con- struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don’t construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don’t construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.

You don’t get this do you?

My opinion is a view I hold until…well, until I find something that changes it.

No, really, that’s how it works.

If we have no other reality beyond the illusion, you too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

Nope, no way I’d go this far, he thought.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won’t work out.

Let’s run this by the laws of matter.

We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can’t make it think.

Them more than me, he insisted.

[b]Doth

My sexual orientation is a spiral staircase draped in century-old moss that leads to Hell.[/b]

Straight to Hell as likely as not.

Sure I have body issues, I can’t explode into a thousand bats.

Me? Not even one.

Give her what she really wants this Valentines Day: privacy & your beating heart in an oak box.

Get back to us on this.

Remember, you can disappear in a haunted forest whenever you want. You’re an adult.

Run it past the spooks first though.

Ideal first date: you secretly plot my murder while we canvas for Bernie Sanders.

Or Trump if you’re one of them.

It’s a perfect night to eat the rich.

Or, sure, just rob them blind.

[b]Randall Munroe

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you’ve just bricked something important because you didn’t pay enough attention to a loose wire.[/b]

Let alone a philosophy tome.

This may be a bit gruesome, but … if someone’s DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?

A couple of planck lengths tops.

It’s weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it’s literally the most predictable thing in the universe.

You know, if that’s true.

To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the tenth story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.

Go figure, right?

Cheaper trade: Time zones make trade more expensive; it’s harder to do business with someone if their office hours don’t overlap with yours. If the Sun went out, it would eliminate the need for time zones, allowing us to switch to UTC and give a boost to the global economy.

On the other hand, what are the odds of that?

One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers.

Place your bets?

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

He wasn’t going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they’d just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn’t see is that she is adjusting. That’s what the insanity is. She’s adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn’t necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn’t necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.[/b]

Insanity would work for me…but it is always just out of reach.

To discover a metaphysical relationship between Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What’s important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.

I think I actually grasp this.

…grades really cover up failure to teach.

Not counting the Kids of course.

It’s all taking the customer’s money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started.

And not just dope deals.

That’s the way it is. The intelligence of the mind can’t think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can’t think of any reason to die.

Well, sort of the way it is.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.

That’ll never catch on.

[b]God

I’m not where I want to be career-wise.[/b]

What else is there?

Don’t spend your life paralyzed by thoughts of gloom and doom.
Just choose one.

Or both. Though not necessarily in that order.

I keep changing My mind about how to destroy Australia.

Of course, a flood is ruled out.

Most atheists are far more respectful of the Bible than Christians.

Any of you here?

SUPER BOWL PREDICTION
New England 0.
And that’s all that matters.

What’s this all about?

A common error in prayer technique is sitting around asking for stuff.
Most experts agree a more effective method is getting off your ass and doing something.

Unless of course you’ve got Stage IV cancer.

[b]Simone de Beauvoir

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.[/b]

A hell of a lot easier.

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

Not quite vague enough to be completely meaningless.

It’s only arrogance if you’re wrong.

Dasein!!!

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

Or never find them at all.

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, so they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

Of course this goes too far. But who really knows how much.

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

Citation needed please.

[b]Vladimir Putin

Whoever is the first to cry “Stop the thief” is the one who is guilty.[/b]

How dumb is that? Well, except in his world.

Nobody should pin their hopes on a miracle.

Either in the White House or the Kremlin.

I think: the powers like to talk about “freedom” in order to wash the population’s brains.

And few are more gullible than “the people”.

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

Let alone as “the chosen”.

Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.

Of course he just paraphrasing Trump’s re election campaign.

I have several portraits of Jigoro Kano and a bust too, a very beautiful one.

This guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan%C5%8D_Jigor%C5%8D

[b]Vincent Van Gone

I am almost ready to begin the autobiography of my next life. The Prelude will be finished soon.[/b]

We can only wish him the best, right?

If you add up all the missing parts of me, very little is left but you can have it

Any takers?

I have been wrong before
I will be again
I hold my convictions
with soft hands
knowing they can die
in the blink of an eye
when I begin to understand
the universe is an expanse
of unknowables

An ironist in the making?

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.” —Ernest Hemingway

Death, for example.

I am proof God makes mistakes

And God is proof that we do.

we could fuck it up worse

You know, with practice.

[b]Norman Mailer

It all comes down to who does the dishes. [/b]

Or takes out the garbage.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

I know that mine is.

Armstrong, sitting in the commander’s seat, spacesuit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilical’s, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is also a man sitting in (what Collins is later to call) a ‘mini-cathedral.’ a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini cathedral, a general of the church of the forces of technology.

Next up: taking the cathedral to Mars. Or so they tell us.

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.

Here that means intellectual contraptions.

I don’t trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes.

Or, sure, dasein.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that.

Though, for some of us, not intentionally. Or just a little bit.

[b]Douglas Adams

Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it.[/b]

For whatever reason that is too.

Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

And so, instead, I come here.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

You know what I’m thinking now, don’t you?

So the hours are pretty good then? he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
Yeah, he said, but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

And then the days, weeks, months and years.

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.

They don’t call it progress for nothing.

But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.

Next up: what philosophers see.

[b]tiny nietzsche

kids, don’t do drugs on camera[/b]

You know if you absolutely, positively have to do them.

sadness level: extra cheese

No, this is a real thing.

too postmodern to fuck

No, this is a real thing.

did you ever figure out what was wrong with me?

If so, please pass it along to Karpel Tunnel. :laughing:

in a relationship with bleach

So, does that make him a racist?

metaphors are great. fuck similes

Like most of us can even tell them apart.

[b]Brent Weeks

Life is empty. Life is meaningless. When we take a life, we aren’t taking anything of value. Wetboys are killers. Thats all we do. Thats all we are. There are no poets in the bitter business.[/b]

What do you say to that, Mr. Philosopher?

If embarrassment were a muscle, I’d be huge.

Next up: if futility and despair were a muscle…

This is why there are few prophets. We end up dead a lot. The truth is offensive to men who love darkness.

Talk about getting it backwards!

Might doesn’t make right. Might makes reality.

You know, if you still make a distinction here.

That’s the burden of leadership, Logan: making the choice when none of the choices are good.

And, as often as not, the burden of followership too.

What happens when you strip away all the masks a man wears and you find not a face beneath them but nothing at all?

More to the point, Kid, your masks.

[b]Niels Bohr

We depend on our words… Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character… We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word “reality” is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.[/b]

In other words, we’re fucked. And not just here.

There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

Surely, there must be examples of this.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

Surely, there must be examples of this.

If we couldn’t laugh at ourselves, that would be the end of everything.

Still, what’s that next to laughing at others?

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Not counting yours, Mr. Objectivist.

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

Or: It is a great relief that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in philosophic contemplativeness.