a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Brent Weeks

I’m asking you to make an adult decision. Are you ready to die, maybe alone, far from home, with no one even knowing what a hero you were? I can’t even promise that your lives or your deaths will accomplish victory.[/b]

Doctors on their way to New York?

It was the kind of beauty that made you shit your pants.

Let’s post examples.

I feel a sudden, intense desire to throw a temper tantrum.

Cue the Oval Office.

It was like a child addressing a tidal wave, saying, I will not be moved—and before the words are out of his mouth, all is ocean, leaving no sign; not only no sign of the child, but no sign of his defiance, no sign that anything opposed the crushing sea in the least, no eddy, no swirl, no detritus, only simple, plain, indisputable nothingness.

Like, for example, Jared Kushner challenging the coronavirus.

Why did women always believe that talking about a problem would fix it? Some issues were corpses. Hot air made them fester and rot and spread their disease to everything else.
Better to bury it and move on.

Not counting the uberwomen of course. Remember Lyssa?

Tongues should be used to commit indiscretions, not to discuss them.

And not just for dangerous liasions. At least not anymore.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Montaigne: People are unsociable by vice, sociable by nature.
Kafka: One can never be alone enough.
Derrida: The only sentence more terrifying than “I am alone” is “I am alone with you.”[/b]

Yes.

Psychology: The past hurts
Sociology: The present hurts
Politics: The future hurts
Philosophy: The past conditional perfect will have hurt if the future conditional perfect proves to as well

Yes.

Don’t call it “social distancing”. I’ve been waiting for Godot for years!

My guess: I get this more than you.

Writing begins at the point at which we have lost
Hegel: the ability to read
Blanchot: the ability to write
Kafka: the ability to lose

Karl Kraus: “Why do some people write? Because they are too weak not to write.”

Schopenhauer: We’re doomed
Beckett: We’re hopelessly doomed
Kafka: We’re doomed beyond hope and doom
Camus: Your collective optimism is nauseating

Of course Camus was just paraphrasing me.

Quarantine day 1: Kierkegaard
Quarantine day 15: Schopenhauer

Quarantine day 30?

[b]Jenny Offill

Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn’t look at it.[/b]

Don’t look at it tonight and see.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.

In philosophy that’s called objectivism.

I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice. The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.

Let’s slip it into our posts and see what happens.

What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.

Like it isn’t the only thing we’ve got.

Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends.

Go ahead, ask me.

You know what’s punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.

You know, eventually.

[b]Carl Friedrich Gauss

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.[/b]

So, how important is it to know this?

The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.

If only from the cradle to the grave.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

Is this even understandable?

Sin2 φ is odious to me, even though Laplace made use of it; should it be feared that sin2 φ might become ambiguous, which would perhaps never occur, or at most very rarely when speaking of sin(φ2), well then, let us write (sin φ)2, but not sin2 φ, which by analogy should signify sin (sin φ)

But only if 1 = 0.999…

There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

All the stuff derived from dasein, in other words.

When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.

It’s always dark where I go here though.

[b]God

If the coronavirus teaches human beings one thing about how they should live their lives, I’d be stunned.[/b]

Well, that makes two of us then.

I am postponing Armageddon.
This is how bad it’s gotten. I’m cancelling the end of the world because of the end of the world.

Just our luck, right?

People have a funny habit of being morons.

What’s that make the Kids, then?

I work from home in mysterious ways.

I figured that.

Worldwide, there are now over three billion confirmed cases of being an asshole.

On the other hand, there’s still only one Donald Trump. Well, unless you count Sean Hannity.

Maybe now you are beginning to understand just how fucking furious I am at all of you.

Wow, imagine if He wasn’t a loving, just and merciful God!

[b]Guy de Maupassant

How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed for one to be ruined or saved![/b]

Of course now it’s how very little.

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us.

[i]I like that.
But I still like this one better:

If everything is a lie, is illusory, then music itself is a lie, but the superb lie…As long as you listen to it, you have the feeling that it is the whole universe, that everything ceases to exist, there is only music. But then when you stop listening, you fall back into time and wonder, ‘well, what is it? What state was I in?’ You had felt it was everything, and then it all disappeared. Emil Cioran[/i]

Military men are the scourges of the world.

Though let’s not forget about the women.

But I no longer had a taste for anything, a wish for anything, a love for anybody, a desire for anything whatever, any ambition, or any hope.

A normal day, he thought.

I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do.

Back then it was just a mood…but than one day it became a philosophy of life.

‘Charming, charming,’ the lawyer said at intervals.

Next up: what the philosopher said incessantly.

[b]Colum McCann

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.[/b]

If he does say so himself.

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.

My guess: there’s a bigger part of him that doesn’t.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

She’d absolutely love me, he thought.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Bad days, right behind them.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die.

Let’s pin down what this tells us. You know, if we dare.

He might have been naive, but he didn’t care; he said he’s rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

No balls in other words.

[b]God

Counting on Me to fix the virus?
You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why in a few weeks when I see you in person.[/b]

Get the, uh, joke, Mr. Religionist?

I’m well aware you want you-know-who to get you-know-what.
I’ll see what I can do.

So much for omnipotence.

I’m God, I’m omniscient, I’m the Creator of the Universe, and even I can’t believe this shit.

Can God say “shit”?

I didn’t send it.
I didn’t spread it.
I can’t prevent it.
I can’t cure it.
I’m not punishing you.
I’m not protecting you.
I have absolutely positively nothing to do with it.
And, worst of all, I’m not taking requests.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Trump.

Somewhere in China there’s a bat getting high-fives from every other animal he sees.

A well deserved one too.

The kind of people who want to assemble in large groups right now are exactly the kind of people who ought to.

And, no, not just the assholes here.

[b]Primo Levi

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.[/b]

God knows, right?

An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Of course they’re thinking the same thing about you.

We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant impression that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.

Let’s just say I interpret this differently from most.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.

Lots of diverse reactions to this no doubt.

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.

Lots of really diverse reactions to this no doubt.

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man’s dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

You know, if only in the either/or world.

[b]Freeman Dyson

If you don’t have a nasty obituary you probably didn’t matter.[/b]

What might your own say? You know, if you matter.

The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it’s mostly rubbish.

Thank God for Fox News, right?

If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

Sure, a Creator.

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.

In other words, blah, blah, blah.

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

In fact, science is often a collection of truths. Let’s say for all practical purposes.

As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.

Or course it almost seems other things too.

[b]tiny nietzsche

we are all existential now[/b]

Oh boy!

obscured by clowns

And Kids of course.

for sale: one ventilator, never used

Imagine that context.

social nihilists

You know, in theory.

gin and hydrochloroquine

Make mine Mr. Boston Peach brandy and hydrochloroquine.

damn. I ran out of porn

Remember back when you actually could?

[b]N.K. Jemisin

We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.[/b]

For example, cue the world today.

For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

I think, Hoa says slowly, that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.

Next up: hating them.

Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.

No, really, think about that.

But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

Trust me, he thought: not all of them.

They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.

And if they’re not cowards? Or if they’re Nazis?

[b]Edvard Munch

The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.[/b]

Let’s start something like that here.

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.

Or say what I think, but what I thought?

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

Us and these guys: youtu.be/L6EUumSji78

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

Figuratively as it were. At least as far as I know.

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

Would that I could say the same, he thought.
You know, being just a philosopher.

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.

Would that I could say the same, he thought.
You know, being just a philosopher.

[b]tiny nietzsche

Late Stage Capitalism Is Trying To Kill You, Charlie Brown[/b]

You too, Lucy.

send nudes descending a staircase

You know the ones.

sonic youth isn’t half as good as you want them to be

Not counting Goo of course.

I almost did something last week

And you almost caught me.

a respirator in the streets, but a ventilator in the sheets

All jokes aside?

the whole concept of death is invigorating

Next up: Actually dying.

[b]John Updike

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. [/b]

Yo, Kids!

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

As far as he knew, no one ever said that about Baltimore.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

As far as he knew, no one ever described Baltimore that way.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Next up: What one is thinking.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

You know, just in case you are actually wrong.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Up next: Mine.

[b]Douglas Adams

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.[/b]

Yeah, that happened to me too. Only it was the lbrary.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

You tell me: google.com/search?q=kakapo& … 66&bih=657

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

And, for some of us, not even close.

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

What, another one?

Forty-two! yelled Loonquawl. Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?
I checked it very thoroughly, said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.

For what it’s worth, my computer got 42 too.

Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

Bullshit for example.

[b]tiny nietzsche

…puts rugged individualism on a ventilator…[/b]

And how far behind can the ubermen be?

he died as he lived, anxious

Well, that settles that.

starve a cold, feed a pandemic

Not to mention the other way around.

I was sick of me long before I met you

Not to mention the other way around.

karma is taking forever

And not just for Buddhists.

hello entropy my old friend

And now we have a name for it.

[b]William Styron

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode. [/b]

In fact, he wrote a book about it.

What this country needs…what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it.

And now it has. Only as luck would have it [good or bad] he’s no longer around.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

One, for example, that Sophie would choose.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

You know, when you can tell them apart.

I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.

More for folks like him than for folks like you and I.

Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.

Until one day it all gets narrowed down to death.

[b]Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.[/b]

Such as?

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that.

Let alone deontologically.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

See, I told you. And then some.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Being facetious, I’m sure.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.

To wit: youtu.be/VUoXtddNPAM

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Black swans and dasein.

[b]so sad today

my anxiety has been training for this for years[/b]

And your anxiety?

look on the bright side
no

Maybe tomorrow.

if you can’t handle me in my panic attack then you don’t deserve me in my general overall sense of doom

That makes two of us.

it’s rare when something isn’t a piece of shit

Let’s pin down when that first started.
Here for example.

sorry but i hate everything more than you do

You know, for the record.

staying strong is fucking annoying

But only all the way to the grave.