a thread for mundane ironists

[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? :laughing:

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! :laughing:

[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. :laughing:

[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.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.[/b]

Ontologically as it were.

Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Politics in other wrods.

One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade.

That’ll do it.

I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.

That’s me here, right? But never you.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.

Cue Uncle Porky.
Nope, don’t ask.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

No, this time, really think about it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.” Ayn Rand[/b]

Of course, recall the fate of those who dared to choose other than as she did.

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” Ayn Rand

Talk about an intellectual contraption! Though, sure, that’s the reality alright. But: her reality or yours?

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

My guess: An enormously complex, problematic coalition and collision of both.

“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.” Victor Hugo

My guess: An enormously complex, problematic coalition and collision of both.

“We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.” Voltaire

Hmm, where do you suppose he is going with this?

"Historians are not by and large inclined to supernatural explanations, but they are addicted to a near equivalent - ‘inevitability’.” Eric Ives

So long as it doesn’t repeat itself.

[b]Kate Millett

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. [/b]

Sniggering for example.

I believe there’s a killer in all of us. I know there’s one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

Or not of course.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media’s diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

My sister said, You’re making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.

I wonder how that turned out.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

In other words, a revolution in la la land.

No one should be adored, it’s fundamentally immoral.

Tell that to this guy: youtu.be/4D2qcbu26gs

[b]Vladimir Putin

I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work. [/b]

As though autocrats have to be.

I believe that meetings at the top level in a relatively informal atmosphere are always useful, and there is reason to hope that we will make progress in resolving the matters we will be considering.

Hint, hint…

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

In other words, from “election” to “election”.

We didn’t have any relationship at all with Trump.

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist’s job is very interesting.

Of course journalists don’t have an army of thugs at their disposal.

The point is that in any country, including the United States, maybe in the United States even more often than in any other country, foreign policy is used for internal political struggle.

Let’s call it crony capitalism. Or, in Russia, state capitalism.

[b]Philosopohy Tweets

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein[/b]

Like there’s any other kind.

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems” Epictetus

Well, that’s certainly debatable.

“Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.” Euripides

True, but do you have the strength to then follow through?

“Habit to us is given from above: it is a substitute for happiness.” Alexander Pushkin

I know that mine is.

“Only he who already understands can listen.” Martin Heidegger

He’ll need a context of course.

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.” Martin Heidegger

He’ll need a context of course.

[b]Norman Mailer

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. [/b]

In that case, any writers here?

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn’t always enough.

In that case, any men here?

Dying can’t be all that difficult—up to now everyone has managed to do it.

Technically as it were.

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.

Which part is more idiotic? You know, if either of them are.

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic’s assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

And, with the subjunctive state, double it. At least.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.

On the other hand, we don’t invent distractions for nothing.

[b]Douglas Adams

Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind.[/b]

That even happens here, right Kids?

Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.

Or, sure, with no irony at all.

It seemed to me, said Wonko the Sane,'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

In French and Spanish too.

Oh dear, says God, I hadn’t thought of that, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

He was discussing dasein with me of course.

He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.

What, no philosophy?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Fuckin’ A, he thought.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Nothing in nature is by chance… Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.” Baruch Spinoza[/b]

Okay, but how far might this be taken if not to the conclusion that everything is only as it ever could have been.

“Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” Baruch Spinoza

Okay, but how far might this be taken if not to the conclusion that everything is determined.

“I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza

Not that he could have ever done otherwise.

“Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.” Alexander Pushkin

You get this or you don’t.

“… Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.” Max Weber

And a man of philosophy?

“Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.” Rene Descartes

A hell of a lot more.

[b]Brent Weeks

To be a man is to bring together that which you should be and that which you are. Deception is darkness.[/b]

[i] :laughing:

Of course that’s just me.[/i]

I am the stupidest person I have ever met.

In that case, what’s that make you?

Delayed obedience is really disobedience.

We’ll need any number of contexts here.

It wasn’t a great question, but the real questions were so big that Kylar didn’t even know how ask them.

Enough said?

At some point, you have to decide not merely what you’re going to believe, but how you’re going to believe.

You do get the difference, right?

An oath you only keep when it’s convenient isn’t an oath at all.

Isn’t that all of them though?

[b]Jenny Offill

She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts.[/b]

Anyone here do that?

Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.

That makes [at least] two of us.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] I’m not.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

Next up: philosophy monsters.
A double entendre of course.

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

Another fucking pragmatist?

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain?

Sure, maybe.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"What is this much repeated phrase ‘active citizen’ supposed to mean? The active citizens are the ones who took the Bastille.” Camille Desmoulins[/b]

Now they vote for Bernie.

“I was not born to amuse the Tsars.” Alexander Pushkin

So, what’s the equivalent of that today?

“The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.” Edgar Allan Poe

It would have to be one or the other, wouldn’t it?

"Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.” Alexander Pushkin

What say you to that, Mr. Objectivist?

“Unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more.” Maximilien Robespierre

Like that has anything at all to do with our interactions in the real world.

"In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere.” Rudolf Carnap

There is, however, “deeper”.

[b]Enrico Fermi

Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown” followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.[/b]

Let’s not go to what I’m feeling.

Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Yeah, I used to believe that once myself.

…on what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence.

Politics? You know, like everything else.

Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Just out of curiosity, how many particles are there now?

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

I’d go lower myself.

Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments.

Good to know, right?