a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

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.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Or, sure, something altogether different.

“…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.” Roland Barthes

Different books, different meaning…different meaning, different lives.
And here we are.

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Not counting all the stuff subtracted out.

“Life begins on the other side of despair.” Jean-Paul Sartre

And which side might that be?

“Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.” Max Weber

Two words: Don Trump.

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber

I know that mine is.

[b]Vladimir Putin

25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?[/b]

He does have a point. Though not necessarily yours.

Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.

He does have a point. Though not necessarily yours.

It’s not considered polite in Russia to count the money in someone else’s pocket.

That’s what you hire the thugs for.

Political populism always poses a great danger because it disorients people, creates excessive expectations or, on the contrary, prioritises objectives that are clearly not priorities or are simply impossible to achieve.

In other words, populism there, populism here.

I consider it to be the meaning of my whole life and my obligation to serve my fatherland and our people.

Wow, an idealist!

Russian police force, fortunately, so far, do not use batons, tear gas or any other extreme measures of instilling order, something that we often see in other countries, including in the United States. Speaking of opposition, let us recall the movement Occupy Wall Street. Where is it now? The law enforcement agencies and special services in the US have taken it apart, into little pieces, and have dissolved it.

Let’s just say this is not altogether exagerated.

[b]Norman Mailer

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.[/b]

And twentieth-century women? You know, with men like him around?

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can’t stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves.

And that was back then!

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

I guess you had to be there.

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

You know, if we could live in the best of all possible world.

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word.

Here? Cue the skyhooks.

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

And was I ever smack dab in the middle of that. And for years!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.” Rem Koolhaas[/b]

And not just buildings.

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Gustave Flaubert

And, some day, to other planets.

“Accuracy is the politeness of kings. “ Louis XV of France

Sounds about right. If only back then.

“The little wisdom that the world possesses, was introduced by lunatics.” Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

And then: Off with their heads!

“Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

And then eventually what we are not going to do. If for no other reason, we no longer can.

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I can still remember that far back, he thought.

[b]Douglas Adams

His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn’t got anything to say yet and shut it again. His brain then started to contend with the problem of what his eyes told it they were looking at, but in doing so relinquished control of the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control of his left hand which then wandered around in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and simultaneously tried to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground.[/b]

Actually, we may never know how it really works.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.

My guess: every planet in the universe.

You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.
Er, five, said the mattress.
Wrong, said Marvin. You see?

The mattress?

You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, "You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

From “The Learning Experience For Dummies” no doubt.

In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.

Of course he is a Pisces.

…they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

Lying about what though?

[b]Brent Weeks

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 but 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 justice. Durzo Blint[/b]

Is it more that this is true or more that this is false.

It is better to suffer evil than to do evil.

Among other things, he thought, fuck that.

I am of you, said Kip. I am Guile as much as you are. True, I have a scrap of decency, but only a scrap. How do you think you can treat a Guile with such disregard and get away with it? Because I am you. I’m as cold as you, I’m as smart as you, and when you push me, I’m as evil and cruel as you. I have a thin film of goodness floating on the top of my Guile, grandfather, but I don’t know how senile you must be to miss just how thin it is.

Any Guiles here?

Idealists mature badly. If they can’t outgrow their idealism, they become hypocrites or blind.

On the other hand, tell them that.

After a while, with nothing to lose, I’ll only able to win.

If only theoretically.

Dangerous knowledge is often hidden under ponderous grammar and obscurantist vocabulary.

Though most of it is just intellectual bullshit.

[b]Werner Twertzog

The average Bavarian thinks of death every seven seconds, as we all know.[/b]

Any average Bavarians here?

Existential-nihilist auteur directing is preeminently a position of moral leadership, as we all know.

Unless of course that’s a contradiction in terms.

But if we un-unbuild it, will they come again?

Let’s unbuild something here and see.

“Not only were the American streets not ‘paved with gold,’ they were not paved at all. And you had to purchase an outrageously expensive and mediocre healthcare plan to help pave them.” Israel Zangwill, as we all know

Of course that was a hundred years ago. But point taken.

The death of cursive writing is yet another signifier of toxic masculinity.

Indeed, something I have long suspected.

I did not make Fitzcarraldo to impress Jodie Foster.

Someone Google this please.

[b]Niels Bohr

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature.[/b]

Concepts by the hundreds here of course.

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

What say you to that, Mr. Objectivist?

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

In other words, for all practical purposes, it’s hopeless.

An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

Among other things, don’t try to either underthink or overthink this.

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.

Okay, how about your great truth?

Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it.

Gee, I wonder what subject that might be?