a thread for mundane ironists

[b] Lily King

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.[/b]

Let’s try that here even though, of course, we can’t.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

See, I told you.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

No, this is a real frame of mind.

Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

You know, being philosophical about it.

We’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

So, did she come?

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.

Measured in years, months, weeks, days or hours.

[b]Guy Debord

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.[/b]

Just ask Bernie Sanders.

All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

With the possible exception of all that hasn’t.

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

Like that actually means something.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Like that can’t mean any number of things.

Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.

So, does posting here count?

What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

Things only intellectuals pedants say.

[b]Doth

We never asked to be primates with crippling anxiety.[/b]

I never asked to be primate period.

It’s a perfect night to eat the rich.

You know, before they eat you. Or hire someone here to.

Everyday I don’t live in an abandoned Victorian estate with a horrifying backstory is a day lost.

I’ve already lost thousands of them myself.

Might fuck around and disappear into an ancient forest & never be seen again.

Or do it with a fierce determination.

What you do at night is between the moon and your anxiety.

That and what you can get away with.

If you know someone who is effortlessly good in social situations, that’s a demon. You’re friends with a demon.

Unless of course they’re just an extrovert.

[b]John Updike

If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead. [/b]

Is anyone here mature?

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Not unlike being a nobody.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Just not anymore, right?

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.

On the other hand, no one asked to be born.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.

I’m well beyond that myself.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

We’ll need a context of course.

[b]Douglas Adams

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. [/b]

Sequoias if you can.

I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.

Hint: It rhymes with “I”.

[b]It is of course perfectly natural to assume that everyone else is having a far more exciting time than you. Human beings, for instance, have a phrase that describes this phenomenon, ‘The other man’s grass is always greener.’

The Shaltanac race of Broopkidren 13 had a similar phrase, but since their planet is somewhat eccentric, botanically speaking, the best they could manage was, ‘The other Shaltanac’s joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet.’ And so the expression soon fell into disuse, and the Shaltanacs had little option but to become terribly happy and contented with their lot, much to the surprise of everyone else in the Galaxy who had not realized that the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it.[/b]

Of course they never had to deal with the coronavirus.

I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course–the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.

Remember that “crisis”? Back in the good old days.

So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly? I asked.
He looked at me as if I were stupid.
You die, of course. That’s what deadly means.

Today, of course, you may only wish that you were dead.

Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever… If someone votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I must not move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’… Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

Philosophers have certain ideas here too, don’t they?

[b]God

THE TEN COVID-MENTS

Thou shalt stay home.
Thou shalt not gather in groups.
Thou shalt not panic.
Thou shalt not hoard TP.
Wash thy hands.
Honor thy curfew.
Check on loved ones.
Do not COVID thy neighbor’s wife.
Seriously, THOU SHALT STAY HOME .
Thou shalt make the best of it.[/b]

So, what do you think?

Happy Nowruz.
Tonight, despite the virus, you should party like its 1399.

You get this, right?

Remember days of the week?
Good times.

You get this, right?

If I sent the virus to punish you for anything, it’s for believing I send viruses to punish you for anything.

Just what we need from Him now, right?

I’m trying but the hard part is convincing the virus to enter his body.

So much for omnipotence.

I’m forbidding Jesus from working until this is over.
You’ll have to die for your own sins now.

You knew this was coming, right?

[b]Brent Weeks

We each tend to think of our time as the end product of all that has come before, which is true, but we like to believe our time is therefore the pinnacle, rather than another pearl on the string.[/b]

Pearl? More like another rhinestone.

Desperate men fight best.

Any desperate men here? Not counting the fucking degenerates of course.

Life is empty. Life is meaningless. When we take a life, we aren’t taking anything of value. Wet boys are killers. That’s all we do. That’s all we are. There are no poets in the bitter business.

Any wet boys here? Wet Kids?

How do you know all this? Delara asked.
I’m the Prism, Gavin said. Five minutes.
You can’t treat us like this. We aren’t slaves to take your orders. What will you do if we don’t let you go? Klytos Blue asked.
Turning cold eyes on the little man, Gavin said, I’ll kill you and piss on your corpse. He meant it.

Of course they’ve all been banned here at ILP.

To be king means to accept that others will pay the price of your failures – and even your successes.

What today we call presidents.

And on a difference of three minutes, all of history changes.

Or less of course. All the way down to a blink of an eye.

[b]Jenny Offill

But lately I’m like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let’s be pure of heart again![/b]

Let’s exchange examples of this.

There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m. One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, all the other wives think. Never.

Next up: there is wife who…

At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.

Unless of course he beats her to it.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

She means Kafka of course. And it’s not a lobster.

And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

In fact I’m experiencing it right now.

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

That’s why we invented philosophy, right? To figure things like that out.

[b]tiny nietzsche

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from damn lies[/b]

Remember when it used to be magic?

doktor: stay inside
outside: hey

No getting around that, is there?

rock, toilet paper, scissors

You can still buy rocks and scissors though.

microwaves the mail

No, seriously, should we?

Social Distancing Pick Up Lines: we shouldn’t get together sometime

And then if you don’t, it worked.

if enough people stay home, I can go out

Why [this time] that doesn’t really work.

[b]Stanislaw Ulam

It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is. [/b]

And we certainly have our share of them here, don’t we?

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

That might explain mine then. Or even yours.

Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.

Either that or a sim world.

In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.

That’s as good an excuse as any, right?

Thinking very hard about the same problem for several hours can produce a severe fatigue, close to a breakdown. I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt “strange inside” two or three times during my life.

Though for some here [no doubt] two or three times a post?

By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.

Anyone more amazed than I am?

[b]Max Born

Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist, must be rather silly people.[/b]

Silly, perhaps, but clearly in the minority.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

For that matter, there is no philosophical high-road in philosophy.

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.

See, didn’t I tell you?

I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

Not even counting my own arguments.

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.

Let’s dumb this down even more.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method’.

In other words, including me, there are three.

[b]tiny nietzsche

pay no attention to that virus behind the curtain[/b]

And it’s not like you can see it anyway.

what a time to be a hypochondriac

Yo, Woody!

me: snorts cocaine
doktor: that won’t stop the coronavirus
me: the what?

Better yet…heroin?

late stage existentialism

Fortunately, for you, it’s not contagious.

I am sorry if you actually believe you lost an hour this morning

Besides, you’ll get it back eventually.

it’s okay to touch my butt

That was before the virus of course.

[b]Guy de Maupassant

It’s not difficult to appear bright, don’t worry. The main thing is never to show obvious ignorance of anything. You prevaricate, avoid the difficulty, steer clear of the problem and then catch other people out by using a dictionary. All men are stupid oafs and ignorant nincompoops.[/b]

Sure, why not.

He had never regarded other men as anything but puppets of a sort, created to fill up an empty world. He divided them into two classes: those he greeted because some chance had put him in contact with them, and those he did not greet. But both these categories of individuals were equally insignificant in his eyes.

Sure, why not.

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Except right now of course.

Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.

And, as we all know, it could be for just about anything.

Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.

On the other hand, isn’t that what hate means too? Or am I doing it wrong?

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.

They even have one for philosophers.

[b]John von Neumann

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.[/b]

I’ll bet that goes back to to a complete understanding of existence itself.

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

So much for memes, right Satyr?

I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space any more.

No strings attached? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space

By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.

Come on, just one example please.

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.

For most though this is the equivalent of long division.

You don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in.

Even as you’re fucking it up, Mr. President.

[b]Erwin Schrodinger

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.[/b]

I’m living proof of that, he noted.

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.

Unless of course you make it up.

The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.

How dumb is that, he snickered.

In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.

All the way to the grave, for example.

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.

Paraphrasing Pascal as it were.

The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the way.

Like mine especially.

[b]tiny nietzsche

looks like the end of everything has fucked up my weekend plans again[/b]

Yeah, it can do that.

you don’t have to wait for the weekend to cry

Or stop crying.

live now, die later

After all, it’s perfectly normal.

those books stacked by your bed are just sitting there

And not reading themselves no doubt.

if your drug dealer doesn’t have the virus, they can get it for you

Cheap too.

puts rugged individualism on a ventilator

Uberbmen too.

[b]Lily King

I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.[/b]

And now look what we’re facing.

It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion – you’ve only been there eight weeks – and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.

Nope, not even once.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

Sort of works that way for us too, doesn’t it. And not just here.

Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

Right, like anyone really knows.

What’s the point of all this?
Of all what? she asked.
Of all this life.

Right, like anyone really knows.

Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart, she said finally.

And sometimes you’re smack dab in the middle of it. Until it kills you.

[b]Guy Debord

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.[/b]

Trust me: His spectacle not yours.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

Trust me: His spectacle not yours.

The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

As likely as not, you only think you get this.

The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.

All the more so today, perhaps?

What appears is good; what is good appears.

Next up: bad.

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it.

Besides, nihil sub sōle novum.
And that’s in the Bible.

[b]so sad today

i’m scared…but i’m always scared[/b]

Next up: I’m terrified.

it’s not you it’s the mediocrity of reality

Well, that too.

avoiding other people before it was cool

I invented that by the way.

let’s see…how can i make a global pandemic all about me

Sorry, he has already beat you to it.

i miss fucking the wrong people

And I would like to have been one of them, he thought.

can you feel my anxiety through the internet

Are we supposed to?

[b]John Updike

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. [/b]

How fucking idiotic is that?! But, sure, just for the hell of it, point taken.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Easter eggs too.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

On the other hand, doesn’t everyone?

Government is an illusion the governed should not encourage.

Especially now, right?

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?

Even if that is exactly the case, right?

It’s not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

If, of course, even that’s up to us.