a thread for mundane ironists

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4601

[b]Steven Weinberg

…at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.[/b]

So, is this worth exploring further?

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article, the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics".

Does anyone really know where one stops and the other begins? Or whether that even makes any sense at all?

Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair.

Maybe, but they are clearly not the one true God.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.

You know, whatever that means.

…once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.

That’s the point though, isn’t it?

Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.

The masses, for example.

4602

[b]André Gide

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.[/b]

Too close to call?

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Unless, of course, they really do find it.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Actually, I used to believe shit like this.

The color of truth is grey.

Actually the color of truth is grayish.

Everything’s already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.

Right, like they are listening now.

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

Time for example.

4603

[b]Kate Chopin

There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.[/b]

May your life be filled with one more than the other.

He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Some can do this, some can’t. And some [like me] remove themselves from any situation where they might have to choose.

Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

In particular, questions without answers.

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

Only touched it once. For about twenty minutes. For the rest, I’ve been on my own.

She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

More often than not, in other words, an infatuation will do.

The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant.

Go on, see how long you can sustain it.

4604

[b]Haruki Murakami

No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “the good, the bad and the ugly”.

It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.

For lots of folks the microwave oven is just plain spooky.

Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.

As though, perhaps, it has a mind all its own.

Please remember: things are not what they seem.

Not even close in some cases.

I don’t know, there’s something about you. Say there’s an hourglass: the sand’s about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.

Maybe, but how many times?

I wonder what ants do on rainy days?

Seriously: mentalfloss.com/article/66523/ho … rvive-rain

4605

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.” Plotinus[/b]

Let’s try to actually pin that down.

“The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.” Milan Kundera

Let’s try to actually pin that down.

“My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.” Aristotle

In other words, don’t look for him here.
[or there for that matter]

“He who hath many friends hath none.” Aristotle

That’s why we invented BFFs

“The unconscious psyche believes in life after death.” Carl Jung

Come on, that either comforts you or it doesn’t.

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Ernest Hemingway

Among other thing [obviously], they think too much.
Too many “questions without answers”.

4606

[b]Alan Moore

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum… and one night, one night they decide they don’t like living in an asylum any more. They decide they’re going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof, and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in the moon light… stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend didn’t dare make the leap. Y’see… Y’see, he’s afraid of falling. So then, the first guy has an idea… He says ‘Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I’ll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!’ B-but the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says… He says 'Wh-what do you think I am? Crazy? You’d turn it off when I was half way across![/b]

So, what’s the moral here?

As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don’t need to be one anymore.

And, if you are really, really lucky, you will never have to be one at all.

That pompous phrase “graphic novel” was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.

Obsiously that will never catch on.

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

Well, I can think of one reason. And it stretches out for all of eternity.

Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away…forever.

Right, like it is the equivalent of blinking your eye.

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

Subatomically as it were.

4607

[b]Richard Ford

I’m a verb, Frank. Verbs don’t answer questions.[/b]

Don’t ask many either. They’re all about the action. Getting things done.

Most things don’t stay the way they are very long.

Possibly even nothing at all. “Long” being relative.

I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn’t been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn’t so hard and risky and didn’t need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I’ve already said, becoming someone else – but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.

Count on it. And count on that changing who or what you think you are. Unless of course you think you are an objectivist.

It’s hard to go through life without killing someone.

I killed a couple. Of course I was a soldier then.

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

We pin them down psychologically. As opposed to, say, philosophically.

If there’s another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.

Cubs won. Period. At least until next year.

4608

[b]Sad Socrates

If you’re panicking, just keep panicking.[/b]

He’ll tell you when to stop.

In the tragedy of being alive comes the comedy of being alive.

I know: Let’s figure out how to tell them apart.

The only way to perceive reality is to ignore it.

Which you are obviously not doing now.

Post-modernism made me do it.

Of course that about covers everything.

They say do what you love, so I’m dying inside.

I know what you’re thinking: That’ll never be me!

I can’t even pretend to know what I’m doing anymore.

He thought: It’s about time!

4609

[b]Orson Scott Card

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it… Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.[/b]

Yes, another classic example of “saying so makes it so.” When, in fact, it doesn’t.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

Anyone here who can confirm that?

As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generaitons, giving brith to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire…I’ll put it bluntly. Human beings are free excpet when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you’re good for.

As a species we are given to bullshit like this. You know, if it is bullshit.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

Come on, the less your life is wasted the more tragic the death.

This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.

Trump? Clinton? Nope, they don’t quite fit do they?

Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It’s so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn’t about killing. It’s about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you’ve got no dog. If you can understand why he’s biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn’t dead. He isn’t even your enemy.

On the other hand, where’s the part about the military industrial complex?

4610

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I can’t count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made.[/b]

You tell them what you are but they hear you asking them why aren’t they.

There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Actually, I encourage it.

I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

Haven’t come across that one yet.

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

Not to mention the other way around.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand…But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we’ve got. Ifactifice is one such word.

I know what you’re thinking: So is dasein.

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.

He pondered: Have I ever even come close?

4611

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Ask yourself twice if you need a second opinion.[/b]

I did. I do. Maybe even a third and a fourth.

“Nothing personal” is a legitimate insult.

It always works for me. Well, except when it doesn’t.

God is dead, but he still hates us.

Their God of course not ours.

Run, Future, run.

After all, it’s not like it will ever run out of time. You know, like we will.

Have taste, will quarrel.

In other words, just not here.

So many aesthetes, so little beauty.

Indeed, more and less all the time.

4612

[b]Ken Kesey

No, that nurse ain’t some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I’ve seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen ‘em all over the country and in the homes- people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin’ you where it hurts the worst.[/b]

Think Billy Bibbit and Mom.

… you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

And not just in the loony bin.

When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it may be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

And not just in the loony bin.

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.

So, how am I doing? On average, say?

I don’t think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I’m not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was-- shall we be kind and say different? It’s a better, more general world than the other one. I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. It wasn’t the practices, I don’t think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me–and the great voice of millions chanting, ‘Shame. Shame. Shame.’ It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.

Of course sometimes being “different” really is the problem. And “society” has almost nothing to do with it.

Billy here has been talkin’ about slicin’ his wrists again, so is there seven of you guys who’d like to join him and make it therapeutic?

Also [as they say] there’s safety in numbers.

4613

So many posts! And all posted by you?

4614

[b]David Wong

Here’s where things get hazy. John claims that the men hauling him away from the scene were escorted by other men carrying submachine guns, though when pressed, he admitted that they may have been flashlights. Either way, John says the men threw him down and intended to execute him, at which point he kicked one of the men in the face and backflipped to his feet. He then wrestled away the man’s gun and “dick-whipped” him with it. I am unclear as to whether or not this means he struck the man in the groin or merely slapped him in the same manner in which he would slap a person with his dick. I never ask John to clarify such things. Anyway, he said he swung again and slammed another man’s skull with the gun, so hard it “made the batteries fly out”.[/b]

So, who plays John in the movie?

A cockroach has no soul. Yet it runs and eats and shits and fucks and breeds. It has no soul, yet it lives a full life. Just like you.

Not a very comforting thought is it?

Well, you’d better hope I am because the world was built by sociopaths, men willing to send a million innocent boys into battle to be chopped to screaming giblets, all so a banner can be raised over another piece of land with houses and markets and roads soon after.

Hell, here in America, we’re about to elect another one.

Some would have doubted their sanity at this point, but by now the part of my mind that issued doubts about my sanity had melted from overuse.

And it can happen to the best of us.

A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn’t change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.

How about that, God?

It doesn’t eat only birds—it mostly eats rats and insects—but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, “Watch it, man, that thing can eat a goddamned bird.” I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it “sir” because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.

A somewhat exaggerated account of these dudes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater

4615

Well, me, myself and “I”. :wink:

4616

Thanks for the information. Is this thread merely meant for you, yourself, and your “I”?

4617

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.” Milan Kundera[/b]

Perfectly normal, right?

“Being against evil doesn’t make you good.” Ernest Hemingway

On the other hand, it does if you believe that it does.

“The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.” William of Ockham

Let’s start with this one: Why does something exist and not nothing at all?

“Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.” Blaise Pascal

Has there ever really been a trickier balance to sustain?

“Even four harnessed horses cannot bring imprudent words back into the mouth.” Confucius

Would someone please pass this along to Turd. That way Turd can pass it along to the Pope.

“A hammer shatters glass but it also forges steel”. Confucius

Though not necessarily in that order.

4618

Nope. Add your own quotes anytime.

In fact, you don’t even have to be an ironist. :wink:

4619

Okay, but I do not know where to begin.

4620

Do you have any suggestion where I can start (with)?