a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Ethan Hawke

There have always been two ways to be rich: by accumulating vast sums or by needing very little.[/b]

Or, if you’re a big Hollywood star, a carefully calibrated intertwining of both.

Pay attention: what you need to know is usually in front of you. There are no secrets, just things people choose not to notice.

So, does this sound more astute than it actually is?

Don’t fear suffering. The strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire. The facts are always friendly. Without a little agony, none of us would bother to learn a thing. The earth has to be tilled before the seeds can be planted.

So, does this sound more astute than it actually is?

Now it’s different, and to me it was shockingly humble, but there with my girl in my arms and our child in her belly I knew I had reached the moment my life had been waiting for. I was going to be a father and a husband.
I spanked her bottom and cranked up the tunes.

A perfect balance perhaps.

Which wolf will win?..
…whichever one you feed…

Provided of course it’s not you on the menu.

We all see the world through the prism of our identity.

Dasein he mean.
Even if he doesn’t.

[b]Joseph Heller

Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.[/b]

Let’s figure out why.

It made him proud that 29 months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.

The miracle though is that it didn’t make it worse.

After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. “They asked for volunteers. It’s very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I’ll write you the instant I get back.” And he had not written anyone since.

The guy was a fucking genius. You know, in a Catch-22 world.

Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

And it didn’t help that he was a Kid.

Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

You might call him an all American hero. Loosely.

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers’ night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar.
All right, I’ll dance with you, she said, before Yossarian could even speak. But I won’t let you sleep with me.
Who asked you? Yossarian asked her.
You don’t want to sleep with me? she exclaimed with surprise.
I don’t want to dance with you.

Based on a true story perhaps.

[b]Steven D. Levitt

If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.[/b]

Yes, but only statistically.

One thing we’ve learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

Of course that’s only “human all too human”.

Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.

In other words, as “one of us”.

Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they’re hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.

Unless of course it’s “one of ours”.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Or, more to the point [usually], the other way around.

But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others. This doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them human.

That or [if they’re assholes] both.

[b]Stephanie Danler

Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.[/b]

Actually, it’s in how you think you are making the other person feel. How they really feel is often their own business.

It’s an epidemic with women your age. A gross disparity between the way that they speak and the quality of thoughts that they’re having about the world. They are taught to express themselves in slang, in clichés, sarcasm—all of which is weak language. The superficiality of the language colors the experiences, rendering them disposable instead of assimilated. And then to top it all, you call yourselves ‘girls.’

Let’s describe the rendition for “boys”.

BITTER: always a bit unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, citrus rinds, wine.

Words. Though hardly ever unanticipated. At least not here.

Aging is peculiar, she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?

Like it makes any difference. As, for some of us, it didn’t.

[b]Not being able to swipe into the subway when people are backing up behind you. Waiting for him at the bar. Leaving your purse open on a stool with a mess of bills visible. Mispronouncing the names while presenting French wines. Your clogs slipping on the waxed floors. The way your arms shoot out and you tense your face when you almost fall. Taking your job seriously. Watching the sex scene from Dirty Dancing on repeat and eating a box of gingersnaps for dinner on your day off. Forgetting your stripes, your work pants, your socks. Mentally mapping the bar for corners where you might catch him alone. Getting drunker faster than everyone else. Not knowing what foie gras is. Not knowing what you think about abortion. Not knowing what a feminist is. Not knowing who the mayor is. Throwing up between your feet on the subway stairs. On a Tuesday. Going back for thirds at family meal. Excruciating diarrhea in the employee bathroom. Hurting yourself when you hit your head on the low pipe. Refusing to leave the bar though it’s over, completely over. Bleeding in every form. Beer stains on your shirt, grease stains on your jeans, stains in every form. Saying you know where something is when you have absolutely no idea where it is.

At some point, I leveled out. Everything stopped being embarrassing.[/b]

Trust me: not everything.

We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.

And not just 42nd Street.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

Practical intelligence is practical in nature: that is, it’s now knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.[/b]

Amorally as likely as not.

Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation”–that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously…within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

I know: How dumb is that?

Horchow’s daughter, Sally, told me a story of how she once took her father to a new Japanese restaurant where a friend of hers was a chef. Horchow liked the food, and so when he went home he turned on his computer, pulled up the names of acquaintances who lived nearby, and faxed them notes telling them of a wonderful new restaurant he had discovered and that they should try it. This is, in a nutshell, what word of mouth is. It’s not me telling you about a new restaurant with great food, and you telling a friend and that friend telling a friend. Word of mouth begins when somewhere along that chain, someone tells a person like Roger Horchow.

That’s what ILP needs then: the philosophical equivalent of Roger Horchow. Well, once the Kids are gone of course.

Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.

So, how important is this?

…he waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid’s face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. Is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? This is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

Let’s make this applicable here. You know, if that’s even possible.

. . . it is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren’t enough tall people to go around.

Apparently even in to NBA.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Only a philosopher can grasp
1460: God as an infinitely simple essence
1688: the pure certainty of doubt
2017: iPhone Terms & Conditions[/b]

He means a serious philosopher.

Sociology: It looks worse than it is
Philosophy: It sounds worse than it is
Psychology: It feels worse than it is
Politics: It’s a disaster

Not counting Wall Street of course.

Art History 101: The form is (in)visible!
Art History 201: The content is (in)visible!
Art History 301: It sold for how much?!?!

So, all you artists, does this seem reasonable?

“A picture is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know.” Diane Arbus

Not unlike most posts here.

Literary Criticism 101: the author said A but meant B
201: the “author” said A but meant B
301: “the” “author” “said” “A” “but” “meant” “B”

Only now on Kindle.

Ancient philosophy: I know I know nothing
Enlightenment philosophy: I can know virtually anything
Modern philosophy: Knowledge? Just say no!

Post-modern philosophy: Knowledge? Just say maybe.

[b]André Gide

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.[/b]

Though I’m sure that together we’ll come up with something more fatal still.

I can’t expect others to share my virtues. It’s good enough for me if they share my vices.

Unless of course you’re an ironist.

Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

Let’s file this one under, “that’ll be the day”.

ما أكثر الأشياء التي كان من السهل الإقدام عليها لولا تلك الاعتراضات التي يتفنن الانسان في ابتكارها لنفسه وكثيرا ما حيل بيننا وبين هذا العمل أو ذاك لأننا قد سمعنا صوتا من داخلنا او من المحيطين بنا يقول لنا :اننا لن نقدر عليه
ولو لم نسمع هذا الصوت ونستجيب له لكشفت لنا التجربة عن نيله والفوز به

So, is this worth translating?

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.

Clearly, that doesn’t work here.

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

They don’t call it “nasty, brutish and short” for nothing.

[b]Roland Barthes

Language is never innocent.[/b]

Not even counting the times it is guilty as sin.

…that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

Or, for some, unambiguous.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of ‘reality’ — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

If he means what I think he means, he may well mean what I think I mean.

Freud to his fiancée: “The only thing that makes me suffer is being in a situation where it is impossible for me to prove my love to you”
Gide: "Everything in her behaviour seemed to say: Since he no longer loves me, nothing matters to me. Now, I still loved her, and in fact I had never loved her so much; but it was no longer possible for me to prove it to her. That was much the worst thing of all”

Don’t be surprised however if you fall somewhere in the middle.

Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man – all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

As you may well guess, I’ve never even come close.

The other’s body was divided: on one side, the body proper–skin, eyes–tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice–abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave. Or further: on one side, the soft, warm, downy, adorable body. and on the other, the ringing, well-formed, worldly voice–always the voice.

Not unlike that [at times] inexplicable [even confounding] distinction between words and worlds.

[b]Walter Kaufmann

Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.[/b]

Now that is existential!

Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life…The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worth while and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die.

Let’s file this one under, “it sounded good at the time”.

No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

Well, it certainly wasn’t Heidegger.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire…The world winks at dishonesty. the world does not call it dishonesty.

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.

[b]What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything.

There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician ‘became an idiot’.[/b]

Wow, this complicates things considerably.

Reason may not always tell us what to believe, but it can help us on what we shouldn’t believe.

Is it reasonable then to believe this? Or, rather, when is it not reasonable to believe this?

[b]Mary Roach

I agree with Dr. Makris. Does that mean I would let someone blow up my dead foot to help save the feet of NATO land mine clearers? It does. And would I let someone shoot my dead face with a nonlethal projectile to help prevent accidental fatalities? I suppose I would. What wouldn’t I let someone do to my remains? I can think of only one experiment I know of that, were I a cadaver, I wouldn’t want anything to do with. This particular experiment wasn’t done in the name of science or education or safer cars or better-protected soldiers. It was done in the name of religion.[/b]

Now that is an atheist!

Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let’s not use the word “maggot.” Let’s use a pretty word. Let’s use "hacienda.”

Isn’t that already taken?

Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It’s just something you do sometimes.

Even worse: being seen taking a shit.

In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women’s college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, “People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.”

Much like they know what they believe, rather than believe what they know. Well, here anyway.

No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.

Or [one hopes] the size of their tits.

Not that there’s anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it’s way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It’s just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.

So, just how nonsensical is that?

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don’t stand on the rim, don’t sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.[/b]

Tell that to some of the “serious philosophers” here. Like, for example, I’m doing now.

Women always bring it back to the personal, said Handsome. It’s why you can’t be world leaders.
And men never do, I said, which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

Let’s call it a tie.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

That’s sort of my own point, isn’t it?

I am civilised. My feelings are not.

Not many that isn’t applicable to. Eventually.

I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.

In other words, I don’t have them so much as they have me.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about being happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is when I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Not unlike, “I was miserable but miserable is an adult word.”