a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]tiny nietzsche

all the president’s convicts[/b]

Cue Bill Barr.

déjà vu is seeing the same thing over and over again and not trusting the results

Again: genes or memes?

nothing is my everything

And, from time to time, my anything at all.

me: I have an impending sense of doom
doktor: that’s normal for friday

He means monday of course.

me: I’ll have the chicken
waiter [tosses coin] okay fish it is

Outtake from No Country For Old Men.

AP: heavy smoker gets cancer

Though surely not on the front page.

[b]Natalie Clifford Barney

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet. [/b]

Next up: dead philosophies.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

And what might those possessions actually be?

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

Don’t look at me.

The past is such a subtle thing. But in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

So, is the present .999… or 1?

I’m fond of human beings, but only one at a time.

I’m not, and even then on line.

… anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

How preposterous is that?

[b]so sad today

i don’t feel well but i never have[/b]

Maybe when she’s dead.

just gonna do this to make sure it’s still a bad idea

It was. Next up: why it always will be.

if you need me i’ll be blowing shit way out of proportion

In other words, some things never change.

i never know what the hell anyone is talking about

Why? Just lucky I guess.

i’m annoyed, therefore i am

At least I think I am.

is being alive a meme?

Or is being a meme just another gene?

[b]Luigi Pirandello

The secret of living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand. [/b]

Anyone here want to lend me their own?

When man is happy he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn’t analyze it, just as if happiness were his right.

Yeah, I used to do that myself.

Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.

I know that mine does.

When you say you are in love with humanity, you are well satisfied with yourself.

Never done that before. Never been that before.

None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.

Let’s change that.

Refusing to have an opinion is a way of having one, isn’t it?

Anyone not have an opinion about this?

[b]Randall Munroe

…two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second.[/b]

More time or less?

…what year did a single typical desktop computer surpass the combined processing power of humanity? 1994.

June 25th at 4 in the afternoon to be exact.

Even calling DNA “source code” sells it short—compared to DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators.

Pick one:
1] God
2] Nature
3] Something we don’t know about yet

Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.

Around here? Red cardboard apples.

Air has very little viscosity. That is, it’s not gooey. That means things flying through the air experience drag because of the momentum of the air they’re shoving out of the way—not from cohesion between the air molecules. It’s more like pushing your hand through a bathtub full of water than a bathtub full of honey.

Noted. Then moved on.

That’s one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.

or: That’s one in 26.999… quinquatrigintillion

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Listen up, there’s no war that will end all wars!” Haruki Murakami[/b]

In that case let’s start one that will.

“…language is never innocent.” Roland Barthes

Guilty as charged then, right?

“Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.” Roland Barthes

Next up: “It hurts like hell!!”

“We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.” Winston Churchill

Tell me that genes don’t trump memes here.

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce

And we all know what that means, don’t we?

“Those who do not weep, do not see.” Victor Hugo

At least not what we do.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There’s nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There’s no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn’t an ‘object’ of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself. There’s no such thing as a ‘disease’ of patterns of intellect. There’s only heresy. And that’s what insanity really is.[/b]

This thing again!

It’s sometimes argued that there’s no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn’t hold up. The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life—the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.

This thing again!

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.

Probably not literally though.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.

And this explains what exactly?

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

Not counting the ones that didn’t, perhaps?

“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?”

Of course world wars have begun over the answers here.

[b]Kate Millett

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on? [/b]

Been there, done that. Thrice so far.

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Or: Many men do not recognize themselves as discriminating against women; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.

Sex itself having first been invented by nature of course.

The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the ‘revolutionary or utopian’ goal of feminism.

Yeah, we actually believed that back then.

Perhaps patriarchy’s greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. … Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

Unless of course it really is nature’s way.
Right, Satyr?

You have to be a little patient if you’re an artist. People don’t always get you the first time.

Or here: You have to be a really, really, really patient if you’re a nihilist. People don’t always get you the first few hundred times.