a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Edward Abbey

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.

Resolved: That's going too far.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

And on Wall Street of course.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

My guess: not much wilderness left here.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Maryland? No fucking way.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

I'll bet I'd find something.

I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patriotism.

That or witless.

[iambiguous]

so sad today

whispers during sex would you tell me if i was canceled?

Come again?

can’t stop won’t stop habitually thinking

Oh, she'll stop one day alright.

due to personal reasons i’m clinging to false beliefs

Or, sure, maybe it's all "in the stars".

manifesting by ignoring

Wouldn't think that's possible, would you?

my addictive personality will see you now

Under the covers, with any luck.

a nice shiny new catastrophic thought

On the hour as it were.

[iambiguous]

Joe Abercrombie

There’s nothing worth less than what men think of you after you’re back in the mud.

Especially if they put you there.

It’s a rare man who’s made better by a bit of power.

Next up: a rare woman.

Knowledge is so often the antidote to fear. But not here. Not now.

Not here. Not ever.

Fine lies beat tedious truths every time.

Well, actually, not every time.

Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.

Or, on this side of the pond, a line.

Prickomo fucking cocksca. That bastard old arsehole-fucker.

You don't hear that every day.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte

You can't being this back around too often.

"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." Aristotle

Right, "the light".

"Silence is one of the great arts of conversation." Marcus Tullius Cicero

Perhaps the greatest, Mr. Pinhead.

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered. ” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or, sure, just a weed.

"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead." Aristotle

Okay, I agree: let's not go there.

"To arrive is to be in prison.” Henri Matisse

Up or down as it were.

[iambiguous]

Thomas Ligotti

For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born.

Yet here we are.

Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die.

How stringently you might ask.

There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race — no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book.

With one possible exception: https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-again ... 0143133144

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willing consume the terror of the tomb... and find them to our liking."

That loud enough for you?

In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent.

Feculent to say the least.

Although few would own up to it, even to themselves, we love havoc in both life and art. What we call "evil" captivates us from childhood to old age, never paling in its seductive entreaties, its heady effects on our imaginations and our glands. We are gluttons for atrocity and yawn at the quiescent. The most prominent of the angels is the one who started a war in heaven.

Problematic enough for you?

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed." Dwight D. Eisenhower

Right, like that will stop them.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies...a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Dwight D. Eisenhower

Right, like that will stop them.

"I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge." Herman Melville

That's still the case, right?

“The Eyes of Others Are Our Prisons
Their Thoughts our Cages” Virginia Woolf

Well, as was once suggested, hell is other people.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

See, I told you.

“I am rooted, but I flow.” Virginia Woolf

At least try to think this through.

[iambiguous]

Bart D. Ehrman

And so we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian tradition. The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times.

Ironic and then some to me.

...to cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees “and all the Jews” washed their hands before eating, so as to observe “the tradition of the elders.” This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.

Yeah, what about this?

...few religions in the history of the human race have shown a greater penchant for conflict than the religion founded on the teachings of Jesus.

Well, it is, after all, the One True Path.

Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

This can't be true, right?

...some believers took the Christological views of the Gospel to an extreme and maintained that Jesus was so much God that he could not really have been a man. The book 1 John was written, then, to counter that view by insisting that 'Jesus Christ came in the flesh' and that anyone who refused to acknowledge his fleshly existence was in fact an antichrist.

That settles that then.

The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back.

Anyone here back from it?

[iambiguous]

Existential Comics

J.K. Rowling's great achievement in imagination was creating a world where anything was possible through magic, but somehow everyone still just wanted to be conservative English social climbers.

I'll let the Brits weigh in on that.

My favorite kind of online socialists are the people who just lists things that everyone basically loves, like beer, restaurants, sports, or having a yard, and assures us that these things will all be abolished under socialism.

Let's add to the list.

I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all powerful, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny. It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.

Ah, let's run this by her.

One thing the Turing test doesn't take into account is that if a machine fools a person into thinking it's a person, there is a distinct possibility that the only reason it did is because the person is a gullible moron.

Or a fulminating, fanatical pinhead.

Marx: we have no way to conceive of the form a communist society will take, and it is not our task to describe it.
People on this website: they won't have golf there.

Well, maybe miniature golf.

The Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, set up a system of "checks and balances". That's where judges, appointed by a President who got less votes, can lie to Congress and then enact Theocratic laws against the will of the population.

Ring any bells for you?

[iambiguous]

Brian Eno

It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

Either that or not amazing at all.

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

No good in it either.

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

He means like I do here.

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.

Or, sure, absolutely nothing like this at all.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Next up: the internet.

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

What to make of it here?

[iambiguous]

God

I am always here for you.
Unfortunately, you're there.

In fact, you're still there.

The people who think life begins at conception also think it began 6,000 years ago.

Got a few of them here, of course.

One day someone should start a religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Hint, hint.

When a rapist gets a woman pregnant, only one of them should be considered a criminal.

Tough one, isn't it?

I commit 70 thousand abortions a day and no one tells [/i]Me[/i] it's a sin.

Exactly my point!

Everything's bigger in Texas. Especially the fear of the 21st century.

On the other hand, "remember the Alamo".
You know "manifest destiny" and all that imperialist crap.

[iambiguous]

Steven Pinker

Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.

Not including philosophers, right?

Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.

Not that they aren't of course.

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don’t do anything.

Let's start there for a change.

Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

See, I told you!

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns.

Back again to this: https://youtu.be/6Zp7dq6b2PI

The two deepest questions about the mind are “What makes intelligence possible?” and “What makes consciousness possible?”

In other words, if perchance it's not God.

[iambiguous]

Yuval Noah Harari

Tolerance is not a homo sapien trademark.

And I suspect we're no exception here.

The heated debates about homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

Yo Satyr! Yo're up!!

The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation.

Next up: the United States over or under Russia.

In year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo Sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today's dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500 humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day.

You know, and on and on and on.

At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world are either humans or domesticated animals.

Hint, hint.

In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.

Meh?

[iambiguous]

Emile M. Cioran

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Or it certainly can be.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Or it certainly can be.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

Unless, perhaps, you garble your own.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.

My guess: different lines are drawn here.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget!

You do grasp this, right?

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

We'll need a context of course.

[Ichthus77]

Doubt your doubts, pinhead.

[iambiguous]

so sad today

my wild conspiracy theories are all like: x thinks i'm a loser

Well, as they say, the personal is political.

i’m not an intellectual i’m, like, a feeler

Yo, Gib!

baby they’re all dark times

Then the part where they're getting darker and darker, baby.

the void is opening up about its experience as emptiness

I'll translate it for you.

shoutout to the unknown

Indeed, on both sides of the grave.

an attention span is so last century

Remember the war in Ukraine?

[Ichthus77]

Somebody who is not afraid of the reset button needs to win chicken with all the nuclear powers who exploit people who work full time & still can’t pay the necessities. All other major conflicts, now & in the bud, will resolve as a result.

We have the powa.

[iambiguous]

Banksy

People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one.

Of course some wouldn't go that far.

...the people who run our cities don't understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit...the people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff....any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you...its yours to take, rearrange and re use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head...

Of course some wouldn't go that far.

My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time.

Unless you actually need one?

You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Probably some companies more than others.

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.

The Horror! The Horror!

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said, 'That's clever. It's an anagram of art,' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

Sure, it could be a true story.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"Let my enemies devour each other." Salvador Dali

Anyone here recall if they did?

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." Friedrich Nietzsche

Either that or go cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs.

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics...does not mean that politics won't take an interest in you.” Pericles

So don't forget to not vote.

"Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason." Voltaire

With or without a "condition".

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” Victor Hugo

Again, it's not nothing to die. Or not for some of us.

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." Vincent Van Gogh

Yeah, but look at him today!!

[iambiguous]

Emily St. John Mandel

Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin.

That'll do it.

You know what I've learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that's when I realized that money is its own country.

So, when did you realize it?

The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.

Or sometimes even think about it at all.

No star burns forever.

Unless you call billions of years forever.

See, that illustrates the whole problem, Dieter said. The best Shakespearean actress in the whole territory, and her favourite line of text is from Star Trek.

Uh, live long and prosper?

Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?
I don't know. Maybe. Yes.
Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be.
Yes, Kirsten said, that's exactly it.

On the other hand, any ghosts here?

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

The repetition of “heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer is a stylistic flaw that one one cannot resolve easily, as we all know.

Thanks. Until now, I didn't know that.

It is important, in American social events, for background noise to render conversation impossible.

It certainly does here.

May cause mania, uncontrollable and explosive bowel movements, and a desire to throw monkeys and ocelots.

Hell, that could be almost anything.

Salvador’s final words to me: “I am ambulatory, cerulean, and Antwerp.”
Death arrived stealthily, like a crimson Aardvark in the night.

Kind of surreal, isn't it?

No Slavoj, there never was a Kinski Wheaties box.

Nor, for that matter, a Lope de Aguirre Wheaties box.

Confidence depends on ignorance.

Ah, the Pinhead Syndrome.

[iambiguous]

Edward Abbey

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

You know, among other things.

Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Anyone not understand this?

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

And, sure, the occasional cat.

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do...nothing And find it enough.

Posting here for example.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Now that's a crock of course.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

And thus the expression, "a snowball's chance in Hell".

[iambiguous]

Geraldine Brooks

For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.

Or, these days, a man's tatoos. A woman's too.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Well, so far, anyway.

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

Yo, Mr. Pinhead! You're up!!

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

Let's make today the exception.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

Besides, as often as not, it's beyond your control.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.

Virtually in particular.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." Gore Vidal

Let's pin this down.

"I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard." William F. Buckley Jr.

Let's check them out. Both of them.

"The brain that doesn’t feed itself, eats itself." Gore Vidal

Okay, but why do they all end up here?

"The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary." Vidal Sassoon

And not just for hair stylists.

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice." Gore Vidal

And not just in the voting booths.

"Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75." Benjamin Franklin

On the other hand, most people?

[Ben JS]

[...] Confidence depends on ignorance. [ - Werner Twertzog ]

Ah, the Pinhead Syndrome.

I believe I understand the intent behind the quote, but also, I think it goes both ways.

To the fool, ignorance empowers their confidence, for they're ignorant of the many different ways their belief could be wrong.
Inversely, to the wise, the lack of ignorance empowers their confidence, for as one rules out possibilities - one comes ever so slightly closer to accuracy. (thus, slightly increasing their confidence in the accuracy of a proposition)

In both cases, the quote applies, but I'm pretty sure it only intended one meaning - an insult.

[iambiguous]

Thomas Ligotti

My point, I said, is that there's hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.

Never mind lots of things.

Everyone prefers to continue their existence as a mind and a self, no matter what pain it causes them, no matter how false and unreal they might be, than to face the quite obvious reality and being only a body set in motion by this mindless, soulless, and selfless force which he designated the shadow, the darkness.

Everyone not meaning you of course.

Take my advice, as someone who dabbles in tales of extraordinary doom, and walk away from all of this madness. There are enough fatalities of a mundane sort. Find a quiet place and wait for one of them to carry you off.

Let's just say that eventually I'll let you know.

The universe is not just meaningless, but malignantly useless.

Yo, God!

I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.

Yo, God!

To think that another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things.

Okay, I admit it, Maia. You down into the hole, not me up out of it.