a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Steven D. Levitt

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.[/b]

I think that, among others, Don Trump would agree.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent–all depending on who wields it and how.

I think that, among others, Bob Mueller would agree.

Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.

Well, not here of course.

As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Drunk or sober.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Which doesn’t mean that, in fact, it really can’t be done.

Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of “identity”. It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.

Not really a problem for some of us.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The vain man does not think he is vain.” Gilbert Ryle[/b]

Let’s run this by, among others, me.

"Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” Jorge Luis Borges

That’s certainly worth bringing up.

"At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.” Karl Jaspers

Not to worry, you’ll find it again, right?

“Man is something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process.” Karl Jaspers

Until perhaps [once and for all] he is dead.

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” Bertrand Russell

Anyone here willing to die for theirs?

“You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough." William Blake

Philosophy being the least of it.

[b]Brit Bennett

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.[/b]

If not hammered to a pulp.

The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.

No, really, what if it always was that way?

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

Statistically as it were.

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit.

In much the same way there are two types of women. But, sure, point taken.

A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.

And [of course] with absolutely, positively no exceptions.

She’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference.

Ugly too.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade…It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’re really like to be.[/b]

Let’s pin down a description of great writing.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

Great, yet another component of dasein.

I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups–and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand … you have to go back to the past … it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.

True. Now, let’s see who can reconfigure it into the most extreme point of view.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

So, we need find only one black God.

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Any special few here?

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

I know that you have.

[b]Existential Comics

How to be a philosopher:

  1. Sit around and think about stuff.
  2. Really hard.
  3. No, even harder…keep thinking.
  4. Okay done.
  5. Philosophy![/b]

Don’t try this at home.

[b]How to write an existentialist novel:

  1. Thirtyish white guy thinks he’s the first person to ever be depressed.
  2. No real plot.
  3. The end.[/b]

Volume 1 probably.

Remember, my friends, very little in this life is remotely serious at all. But the few things that are serious are serious beyond measure.

Trust me: We’re not one of them.

[b]Dating tips for feminist men:

  1. Be confident, but respectful.
  2. Don’t treat women as a means to an end.
  3. Be mindful.
  4. Kill all men.[/b]

Obviously: Starting with yourself.

[b]How to have a fulfilling life:

  1. Be true to yourself.
  2. Find a job that helps others.
  3. Radicalize the youth towards worldwide communism.[/b]

Maybe, what, 50 years ago?

Jesus: love your neighbor.
Nietzsche: love your fate.
Sartre: love your freedom.
Schopenhauer: I hate everything and so should you.

Of course it goes without saying: Not necessarily in that order.

[b]André Gide

Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.[/b]

On the other hand, this may sound considerably more profound than it actually is.

Yet I’m sure there’s something more to be read in a man. People dare not – they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry – I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia – it’s the worst kind of cowardice. You can’t create something without being alone. But who’s trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that’s the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that’s just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

On the other hand, this may sound considerably more profound than it actually is.

The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.

Tell that to the folks on the assembly lines. Or in the cubicles.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

For one thing, it’s considerably more ambiguous.

Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.

Maybe back then, sure, but now it’s more in the way of blah blah blah.

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

Anyone here actually believe that?

[b]Roland Barthes

There is a time when death is an event, an adventure, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.[/b]

He means his death, your death and my death.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Though, sure, go ahead, take your chances.

Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.

I must be doing it wrong then. Unless, of course, he is.

What I hide by my language, my body utters.

Here that gets particularly tricky.

The editors of Life rejected Kerész’s photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images ‘spoke too much’; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Or, going out on a very short limb, both.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to ‘express’ what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

Or, going out on a very long limb, both.

[b]Nein

War is data. Hell is data analysis.[/b]

And not just on Wall Street. Or in the Oval Office.

Language. I miss it sometimes.

I know: a rather peculiar way to put it.

Eat. Pray. Delete.

Or: Eat. Pray. Save draft.

Let’s be honest: the best things in life are free. With the purchase of another.

So, philosophically, is it really free?

Friday. Casual capitalism.

Maybe not your capitalism though.

Let’s be honest: your weekend was ruined years ago.

On the day you were born perhaps. If not conceived.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime…which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise.[/b]

Not, as it were, that the particulars matter.

A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most 19th-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do … Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all … If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

True, but not too conservative. Or, for that matter, liberal.

One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.
Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.
You see, I’ve run rather short.
Yes? said my father without any sound of interest.
In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.
Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke? On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, ‘Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.’

This then gets passed down through the generations.

Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh.

Bosh being the least of it. You know, for some.

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

And not just on the Korean Peninsula.

Modernization is just another jungle closing in.

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

[b]Mary Roach

Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter.[/b]

Unless of course religion is more about comforting and consoling you here and now than in whatever might actually be your fate there and then. That’s the beauty of it.

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

Is that really something to joke about?
[sure, apparently]

There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They’d done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we’d asked for the basic carwash and they’d gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn’t order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly polite.

Not counting mine of course.

The slang for the rectum is “prison wallet”.

Gee, I wonder what that means?

It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics…and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.

Sure, it could all be as simple as that.

…think of it, said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

Right, like that will work, among other places, here.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.[/b]

Or, perhaps, in a determined world, the only player.
In other words, whatever that means.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

How is it that way indeed.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Mine is tragic, sure, but no way in hell would I [could I] ever imagine it the most tragic.

Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

You actually know, don’t you?

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous.

Or, rather, that’s what we tell ourselves it does. Though, sure, it might.

Their throats were bare for God.

That can’t be good.

Even now when I’m furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It’s better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

That makes [at least] two of us.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“It is easier for a man to burn down his own house than to get rid of his prejudices.” Roger Bacon[/b]

Pick one:
1] that’s going too far
2] that’s not going far enough

“Life is opinion.” Marcus Aurelius

Is that a fact?

“Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions.” Epictetus

What does that even mean?

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” Epictetus

On the other hand, don’t be too content.

“The quest for absolute certainty is an immature, if not infantile, trait of thinking.” Herbert Feigl

Of course we can be absolutely certain about that.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand." Albert Einstein

For example, all the things that we can’t.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run.[/b]

Of course we haven’t heard the fish’s side yet…

Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world, and I loved him like you love God.

And this means what exactly?

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.

And this means what exactly?

But are there not many fascists in your country?
There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

And not just in Trumpworld.

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.

What’s the equivalent of that in ballpoint pens?

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

Of course that still hasn’t happened yet.

[b]Philip Larkin

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.[/b]

Actually, I can’t say I’m sorry enough to my own daughter.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

Sounds about right anyway.

I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation.

On the other hand, consider the fucking alternatives.

…books are a load of crap…

Right, every single last one of them.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It’s more like a desire to separate a piece of one’s experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

Maybe not, sure, but can you come any closer?

life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age.

Maybe not, sure, but can you come any closer?

[b]tiny nietzsche

What’s a good time to not call?[/b]

Or, here, a good time not to post.

hot singles in your area slowly withering with age as they march towards death

And, more than anything, you wish you were one of them.

If you can’t destroy yourself, who can you destroy?

Or, if you’re like me, you’ll think of someone.

eventually you understand nothing is about you

And then you die.

everybody dies sometimes

No, really.

dogs shouldn’t have jobs unless they want them

Like cats in other words.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Fuck you, said Czernobog. Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.[/b]

In other words, like most of us.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people’s heads. Books are good that way.

That’s called rubbing it in.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

With or without a happy ending.

I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.

You know, like the terminator. Well, sort of.

I am frightened of nothing.
Nothing?
Nothing.
Are you extremely frightened of nothing?
Absolutely terrified of it.
I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?
No, I most definitely would not.

Can you spot the double entendre?

You have a very open relationship with your fans.
Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.

Same with me and my fans here.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I think after you live it’s like before you lived.[/b]

Only longer?

When you hide your face from the world, you can’t see the world.

Unless of course that’s the point.

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering.

Still, I’ll settle for it.

Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis.

Anyone here know why?

What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you’d turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shit you’d turn brown, and if you were blue you’d turn blue. Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you’d never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you’re angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, “Congratulations!” Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!

Not the dumbest “what if?” perhaps but it’s up there.

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don’t hear the water.

You know, if they’re deaf.

[b]so sad today

i was born not ready[/b]

Of course that’s only natural.

you need to learn how to be fake better

Until, with enough practice, you can even fool yourself.

it’s not that i like satan so much as i want satan to like me

I can think of only one reason for that.

sexually transmitted anxiety

And then [inevitably] the limp dick.

can you not talk to me about nuclear war unless it’s literally happening

Besides, it won’t be long now.

when you see the emptiness in everything i’ll be here for you

Until you see the emptiness in that too.

[b]Terry Pratchett

A good plan isn’t one where someone wins, it’s where nobody thinks they’ve lost.[/b]

Not unlike the debates we have here.

Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.

So they tell me.

Just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re not a nasty small-minded little jerk.

As for the ethnic majority, double it at least.

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them. My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat.

Of course if doesn’t quite work that way here in America.

What’s a philosopher? said Brutha.
Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting, said a voice in his head.

Clearly a pragmatist.

Some things are fairly obvious when it’s a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.

You know, if that’s actually true.

[b]Philosophy Tweet

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Ah, the phenomenal world!

“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.” Voltaire

Well, not counting every fucking objectivist that has ever lived. Or [no doubt] will ever live.

“We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.” Epictetus

You know, if you actually have hope.

“Reason is nothing without imagination.” Rene Descartes

Just don’t get carried away, okay?

“How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?” Rene Descartes

One, say, that God is having.

“One word Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.” Sophocles

One other word: Unrequited.