a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Nikola Tesla

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.[/b]

Anyone here ever tried that?

I don’t care that they stole my idea … I care that they don’t have any of their own.

Of course no one here would think of stealing mine.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

For one thing, I’ll need some examples of this.

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

No, really, what the fuck does this mean?

If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world.

Indeed. If not really.

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.

More to the point does he still know this?

[b]Timothy Snyder

Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization.[/b]

Well, that hasn’t changed.

If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one, great bloody accident.

I know: Let’s start here!

Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

With survival itself at stake? Say no more.

Hitler was not a German nationalist, sure of German victory, aiming for an enlarged German state. He was a zoological anarchist who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored.

Never heard that one before.

The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.

Is that a good thing?

We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero invetsment? We get what we pay for.

What some call the “media industrial complex”.

[b]God

Be careful what you wish for: you just might get it.
Kidding! You won’t get it.[/b]

Unless of course you do.

Wow. He even found a way for the US to lose in Vietnam again.

I wonder who that could be?

Time to start over again.

And, it now seems, with millions of planets to choose from.

For every ten people who are stupid, there are 100 others who are also stupid.

So, are you one of them?

“If a man meets a virgin who is unmarried and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her.” - Deuteronomy 22:28-29.
Now that’s empowerment!

Though some might not agree.

“God! Why hast thou forsaken us?”
Because, I mean, just look at you.

Point taken.

[b]Jim Jarmusch

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.[/b]

So, what have you stolen lately?

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

Like it can never be both.

If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

Unless, of course, you’re telling yourself that.

When I get depressed, or anything, I go ‘think of all the music I haven’t even heard yet!’ So, it’s the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

On the other hand, think of all the music you will never get to hear. Being, for example, dead and gone.

It’s hard to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.

Sure, if that works for you.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

I like them both myself.

[b]Francis Crick

We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.[/b]

Lots of different directions we can take this of course.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.

If you don’t tell me yours, I won’t tell you mine.

Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.

Let’s find the morality molecule.

We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s.

Is this worth googling or not?

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

Let’s do it anyway.

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

As often as not though it works both ways.

[b]Existential Comics

Republicans: “we should kill every socialist in Venezuela and take their oil.”
Democrats: “we are holding out that there is a non-violent way we can take their oil.”
Bernie Sanders/AOC: “we promise to close the tax loopholes on all American companies plundering Venezuelan oil!!”[/b]

No, really.

It’s a little known fact but existentialism was actually invented by Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh when he correctly pointed out that everything is sad.

So, is this a true story?

[b]There are a few things we can never truly know:

1. Why we are here.
2. What happens when we die.
3. How the universe was created.
4. Why some 20 year old dudes think growing just a mustache is a good idea.[/b]

Worse: Just a beard.

What philosophers would think if taking selfies:
Aristotle: it is too much vanity.
Kant: you must at the same time think everyone should take selfies.
Sartre: only do it if you authentically want to.
Marx: jesus christ, who cares!? just do a communist revolution already.

Well, it should be Marx, he bellowed.

I’ve found that the secret to building a large twitter audience is making as many jokes about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as possible.

Let’s see if that works here.

If life gives you lemons:
Epicurus: make lemonade.
Epictetus: learn to accept it.
Sartre: make whatever you want.
Hegel: throw away the lemons and write an enormous philosophy book that no one understands.

Lots of lemons here, aren’t there?

[b]Jim Holt

Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.[/b]

Not easy to pin down though.

In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” he answered, “who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings”.

Sure, he thought, why not?

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this ‘I’. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

Who wants to believe that, right?

I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly.

Or even as clearly as I do here.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Farce, sure, but the grace of tragedy?

It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world.

Autonomically as it were.

[b]Existential Comics

The reason why all mythologies are tragic tales is because you have to explain how the world was created, and then explain how it somehow ended up as the world we have today.[/b]

Either tragedy or farce.

I tried to teach my cat stoic philosophy so he wouldn’t whine about not getting to go outside, but it didn’t work. So I tried to teach myself stoic philosophy so that I wouldn’t mind his whining. That also did not work.

You’re either born a stoic or you’re not.

[b]Dating red flags:

• they lie about little things.
• they treat you as a means to an end.
• they only do good things because they want a reward.
  *they sometimes act in such a way that they could not also, at the same time, will that their maxim should become a universal law.[/b]

Remember when that was only applicable to men?

I read some internet comments the other day, and learned that Hollywood is filled with postmodern neo-marxists who are pushing radical feminism into our entertainment.
The evidence for this is that roughly 1 out of 15 comic book movies has a lady as the main character.

Isn’t that enough?

The difference between stoicism and existentialism is that according to stoicism you shouldn’t let anything piss you off, but according to existentialism you are required to be authentically pissed off all the time at everything.

Either that or the least inauthentically.

Philosophers had always suspected that human beings were dumb as shit, but it wasn’t until science came along that it was finally proven.

Not counting us of course.

[b]Nick Cave

I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone’s little finger and break it in three places. [/b]

And so he did: youtu.be/TqhOVY58zIo

It’s a wonderful life if you can find it.

And no one can ever accuse me of not looking.

I can control the weather with my moods. I just can’t control my moods.

Now that’s clever.

Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it.

Unless, of course, you are in sync with the Real Me.

All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.

Let’s just say that some ideas are worse than others.

He who seeks, finds, and who knocks, will be let in.

Much to your chagrin as often as not.

[b]David Bowie

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I’m referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man. [/b]

Sort of like the uberman and sort of not like him.

I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave.

Sort of like the uberman and sort of not like him.

I’ll ruin everything you are, I’ll give you television.

Not counting the actual good programs of course.

I could never have done what I did without being involved with Lindsay Kemp’s company.

For what it’s worth, this guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Kemp

I think that we have created a new kind of person in a way. We have created a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is 12.

And, in our pop culture world, how pathetic is that?

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

A free for all world as it were.

[b]Neil deGrasse Tyson from Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.[/b]

And don’t we have a ton of them here.

In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

Right, of course it was.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the matter, and it’s the gravity we don’t understand.

And not understanding lots of other thngs too.

After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Or, for that matter, even opinions.

…… Neptune, the outermost planet. No, it’s not Pluto. Get over it.

Tell that to these guys: wired.com/2017/03/pluto-thing/

While most branches of science have ascended in this era, the field of astrophysics persistently rises to the top. I think I know why. At one time or another every one of us has looked up at the night sky and wondered: What does it all mean? How does it all work? And, what is my place in the universe?

This and government funding.

[b]tiny nietzsche

ask your mom if I can come over and be your new dad[/b]

What would yours say?

all the best cowboys have cocaine eyes

Or needles in their veins.

an equinox on both your houses

Twice a year as it were.

me: maybe a planet is responsible for things being fucked up
mercury: hey

Remember when it used to be Pluto?

I’m glad we had this time to forget

Like most of us here.

if the leprechaun sees its shadow, six more weeks of drinking

Or twelve if it doesn’t.

[b]Dorothea Lange

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. [/b]

Or not of course.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Maybe, but it’s a stretch.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

Interesting. What would you choose to photgraph?

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

Interesting. What would you choose as a theme?

The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.

And then see how long they will let you.

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon. We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is.

No doubt where I’d take that, is there?

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility.[/b]

If doomed is the right word.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?

Right, that will catch on.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

What is one to make of that?

When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

What is one to make of that?

It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

That or philosophy.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn’t.

You know, being just a baby.

[b]tiny nietzsche

jar of bees for president[/b]

A write-in if there ever was one.

me: I need purpose
space: here
time: lol

Of course time always gets the last laugh.

It’s so quiet out that I can hear into the future

So, what’s it say?

just because I work six days a week doesn’t mean I don’t look forward to the death of the sun

A non-sequitur perhaps.

shocked! shocked that rich people buy their kids way into college

At least until Trump drains the swamp.

long story short, i am naked in the woods

Let’s lengthen it.

[b]Jackson Pollock

If people would just look at the paintings, I don’t think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It’s like looking at a bed of flowers, you don’t tear your hair out over what it means.[/b]

Okay, but how deep is that.

Art is coming face to face with yourself.

Unlike, say, philosophy?

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.

Artspeak on steroids.

When I am in a painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

“Well, that explains a lot”, some will say.

It doesn’t matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.

Drip. Splash. Pour.

I’ve been thinking of death a lot, and I am amazed by its inevitability, frightened, as we all are, of the totally unknown, and yet feel a long sleep is somehow earned by those of us who live on the edge.

Sure, see if that works for you.

[b]Douglas Hofstadter

It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception. [/b]

How the fuck can this be true?!

It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done.

Let’s try that here.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it’s much more than memory.

No way I’m one of them.

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn’t.

You tell me.

It is as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.

We’ll need a context of course.

There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

Let’s make that a criterion for posting here.

[b]so sad today

me: fuck the haters
also me: the haters are definitely right[/b]

Our haters she means.

i don’t understand how people just like live life

Not to worry, they don’t either.

i want sex and to be alone

Don’t we all?

i keep getting older and it’s not good

Not counting when you were a lot younger and it was.

deleting tweets is a basic human right

Let’s amend the Constitution.

the glass may be half full but i don’t like what’s in it

Poison for example.

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance. [/b]

You know, if he has one.

All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.

How to tell? Try flipping a coin.

I really believe that I am the first and only artist to throw not just the ‘subject’ out of my paintings, but every ‘object’ as well.

You tell me: wassilykandinsky.net/painting1896-1944.php

I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could.

Anyone here know what that might even possibly mean?

It should not be forgotten that art is not a science where the latest ‘correct’ theory declares the old to be false and erases it.

It’s not a philosophy either.

In the hierarchy of colors, green represents the social middle class, self-satisfied, immovable, narrow.

More like the upper middle class, right?

[b]so sad today

the internet is destroying my mind, body and spirit and i love it[/b]

My guess: she’s not alone.

there are so many amazing reasons not to like people

Let’s list the top ten.

breaking news: no one actually knows why we exist

Of course: Not counting all those [here for example] who claim that they do.

everyone is doing the best they can, which is terrifying

Fortunately, I’m not one of them.

i don’t feel well but i never have

Maybe tomorrow.

you’re damn right i lack self-confidence

I sort of lack it myself.