a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Ernest Rutherford

All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial. [/b]

And all philosophy?

Never say, “I tried it once and it did not work.”

Until: “I tried it hundreds of times and it did not work”.

When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.

He means [by far] the self-conscious human brain.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Except life?

Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.

Okay, so what’s your excuse, Kid?

It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

That would qualify.

[b]Doth

Name a more iconic duo than fog-covered woods & that spooky Edgar Allan Poe bitch. I’ll wait.[/b]

Laurel and Hardy?

Remember, it gets worse before it gets worse.

And forget about why.

Sex is cool but have you ever had a wooden stake stabbed into your heart in a fog-covered cemetery.

By your lover, no less?

I am fully prepared to die trying to pet a wolf.

A whole pack of them.

Sacrifice me to a ancient pagan cult or don’t waste my fucking time.

And his wife and kids too.

Be the reason why you need two priests at your exorcism.

Or be the reason you need the Pope. Both of them.

[b]Natalie Clifford Barney

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.[/b]

Let’s exchange contexts.

I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it.

Virtually, for example.

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

Unless, like me, you fuck it all up.

I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

On the other hand, who the hell does that?

To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.

As you might imagine, that’s no longer a problem for me.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

Here? Should I name names?

[b]Luigi Pirandello

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart. [/b]

Here? I’ll dispense with your dignity if you’ll dispense with mine.

As soon as one is born, one starts dying.

He means conceived of course.

If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

Right, like that will ever stop me.

The facts are to blame, my friend. We are all imprisoned by facts: I was born, I exist.

And, in fact, without our consent.

It is much easier to be a hero than a gentleman.

We’ll need a context, of course.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

We’ll need a context, of course.

[b]tiny nietzsche

do people still exist after you mute them?[/b]

Or, here, foe them?
[size=50]let’s hope so[/size]

a caucus in the streets, but a primary in the sheets

Sure, I can live with that.

parasite won iowa

Again, in other words.

a large abyss the size of a small abyss

That’s postmodernism for you.

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from damn lies

Starting with the microwave oven.

they took my blood pressure and I don’t have any

That can’t be good.

[b]Randall Munroe

Actually, what I’m confused about is how.[/b]

It’s either that or why.

If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.

A little help with this one, please.

If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?

A little help with this one, please.

…computers are limited by our ability to program them, so we’ve got a built-in advantage.

Up next: the tipping point.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

You know, hypothetically.

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth’s atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas’s volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct.

So don’t forget to pass this along.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Zen is the “spirit of the valley,” not the mountaintop.[/b]

So, is that a good thing more or less than a bad thing?

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them has to forego closeness with the people around him.

So, is that a good thing more or less than a bad thing?

But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.

The top of what you might ask.

Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate.

Yes, this is an actual condition.

There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Of course that’s only natural.

Chris asks, What are you going to stick to?
Mah guns, boy, mah guns, I tell him. That’s the Code of the West.

And, here in America, the North, South and East too.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I just pardoned this toilet[/b]

More to the point, here, should σάτυρος be pardoned?

send fruit loops

He means frosted flakes of course.

all presidents are bad, but especially the ones who owned people

Is that even possible?!

all fate, no future

Making no sense at all?

careful with that axe, eugenics

As if the whole point wasn’t not to be.

Happy birthday Galileo! you telescoping motherfucker

Should we [still] run this by the Vatican?

[b]Kate Millett

In sex one wants or does not want.[/b]

And then one gets or does not get.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Naturally, as some say?

Isn’t privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

Cue dasein. You know, among other things.

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

On the other hand, huh?

To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one’s wheels deeper in sand.

Yep, that was me alright.

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours.

Men too more or less.

[b]Vladimir Putin

There is no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died.[/b]

He actually said that. Anyone here know why?

Homosexuals in Russia live in peace, work, are promoted, receive national awards for their achievements in science, art or any other sphere, medals are awarded to them, I have awarded them myself.

Of course here we have Pete Buttigieg.

If you aspire to be a leader of your own country, you must speak your own language, for God’s sake.

So, what’s behind this?

How can I be a gangster, if I worked for the KGB? It is absolutely ridiculous.

There, that settles that.

Donald Trump is a brilliant and talented person, without a doubt.

There, that settles that.

There is no uniform, global model for democracy.

Let’s think up one.

[b]Norman Mailer

There are days when I’ll wake up and think, oh, I’ve really been something. You know, it won’t be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, ‘Don’t kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered’.[/b]

And then the day you don’t wake up at all.

As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

It’s not called a “leap of faith” for nothing.

There are four stages to marriage. First there’s the affair, then there’s the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

I suspect that women have their own version of this.

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

So, any murderers here to confirm this?

It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

Right, like the two are completely unrelated.

Writers don’t have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

Well, not counting the ones that do.

[b]Douglas Adams

Do you find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?[/b]

Trust me: There’s no one right answer.

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions.

No, really think about that this time.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

And getting flatter everyday.

In an infinite Universe anything can happen.

Whatever that means.

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

And not just The Bomb.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.

Just what I need, another optimist.

[b]tiny nietzsche

sartre in a coma, I know I know, he’s condemned to be free[/b]

sartre in a coffin…?

my own private I dunno

I’m still working on it.

the girl with the bernie tattoo

On both cheeks.

the boy who cried nietzsche

Next up: the man who cried dasein.

my chemical divorce

And wasn’t that inevitable.

what a time to be dead

Of course there may well never be a good time.

[b]Brent Weeks

I was a bad child. Fortunately, I’ve come a long way since then. Now I’m a bad man.[/b]

Consistancy counts.

Her nudity is her armor. It blinded the drooling fools. They couldn’t see anything else while they saw her body.

Human nature, probably.

The intuition that had kept Kylar from Vi even from the first time she’d tried to seduce him at the Drake estate suddenly crystallized: You don’t share your life with a woman’s body, you share your life with a woman.

Tell that to, among others, Mr. Reasonable.

You got potential, Kip.
And you know what potential means? he replied.
Ain’t done nothing yet.

Care to respond to that, Kids?

Freedom isn’t the highest good. Power is. For without power, your freedom can be taken.

Things don’t get much more clearer than this.

I’ve taken lives, and I’ve taken my own life in my hands and trusted a friend with it. Yes, sir, I’d say that makes me a man.
Neither makes you a man. The first makes you a killer. The second makes you a fool. Either may get you killed.

Things don’t get much more clearer than this.

[b]Ernest Rutherford

Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery. [/b]

That would be me, he thought.

The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don’t.

One word: dasein.

Gentlemen, now you will see that now you see nothing. And why you see nothing you will see presently.

Let’s probe the equivalent of that here.

I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad and simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.

Simple: we all die.

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

A little help with this, please.

You know, I am sorry for the poor fellows that haven’t got labs to work in.

Do we have one here?

[b]so sad today

overwhelmed by nothingness[/b]

Next up: overwhelmed by somethingness, anythingness and everythingness too.

unfortunately i’m very self-aware

It’s practically a disease now.

whispers during sex am i problematic?

Obviously: before or after coming?

is life just a really long illness before death

Let’s just say it might as well be.

using anxiety to medicate depression

Tricky but possible.

deleting tweets is a basic human right

Just not objectively.

[b]Enrico Fermi

Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.[/b]

So, anyone confused on a higher level about dasein?

Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.

Unless of course it’s a value judgment.

Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know.

It’ll never happen here though. Or is that just me?

It is not good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Let’s note the clear exceptions.

Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven’t they come to Earth?

God knows.

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, ‘with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.’

A math thing let’s call it.

[b]Eugenio Montale

Too many lives are needed to make just one. [/b]

In other words, they’re all in there somewhere.

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

True, but no one really knows what it means.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

Sounds rather soothingly ominous.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

Not to be confused with opportunity.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Worms of thought. And, here, at times, they become particularly slimey.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Thank god for the internet!

[b]so sad today

fuck yeah i apologize for existing[/b]

Like, back at the beginning, she had any choice.

have trouble making decisions because i don’t want to do anything

Like that’s a bad thing.

listen, it’s not like i want to exist

Let alone to become nearly famous.

i need meaningless bullshit

So, thanks, Kids.

life is an uphill climb to death

And then it’s downhill all the way.

are you naturally judgmental or did you go to school for it

She means you, Karpel Tunnel.

[b]Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.[/b]

Or, where you live, around the puddle.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing me.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Well, he was a poet after all.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Less so here though.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

You know, other than nothing at all.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Trust me: there’s no end to it once you’re there. Well, not until the next one.