a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Angie Thomas

DeVante’s got a point. What makes his name or our names any less normal than yours? Who or what defines ‘normal’ to you? If my pops were here, he’d say you’ve fallen into the trap of the white standard.[/b]

More normal for some than for others.

Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people’s lives too. Saving them from their “wild African ways.” Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.

Well, in some ways, all of us need saving.

Don’t fall for that trap. That’s what they want. If you don’t wanna speak out, that’s up to you, but don’t let it be because you’re scared of them. Who do I tell you that you have to fear?
Nobody but God.

Unless, of course, God is the biggest trap of all. For example, by far.

I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang, some attitude, but not too much attitude, so I’m not a ‘sassy black girl.’ I have to watch what I say and how I say it, but I can’t sound ‘white’.

So, do I sound white?

But I realize that being real ain’t got anything to do with where you live.

Being real ain’t got nothing to do with it either.

They act like I’m the official representative of the black race and they owe me an explanation. I think I understand though. If I sit out a protest, I’m making a statement, but if they sit out a protest, they look racist.

Maybe even are racist.

[b]Andre Breton

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful. [/b]

Wouldn’t surprise me.

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

Let the lines be drawn!

Humor is the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

Let’s see what we can do with the Mueller report.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

Right, like that actually makes any sense. To me, for example.

…with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

If in fact that’s actually true.

Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.

Said Don Trump of the Mueller report. At least the AGs version of it.

[b]Lenny Bruce

Today’s comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an act and he told the audience, This is my act. Today’s comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he’s telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.[/b]

So? You turn that into a joke too.

You got to pay your dues to get the joke. Besides, laughter is cheap and very portable. If there’s a pogrom, or they’re blaming you for the plague, nothing is easier to pack than a sense of humor.

Well, if they’ll let you unpack it.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair.

Or: All my philosophy is based upon destruction and despair.

When you’re eight years old, nothing is any of your business.

That’s now down to five.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous.

Unless of course you believe they are.

I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.

He was 40.
Dope of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Or simply not abstract enough.

“It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit." Aristotle

Let’s call it next to impossible.

“There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Chinua Achebe

I wonder if that is applicable to our species?

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Winston Churchill

Him and all his detractors.

“The vice lies not in entering the bordello but in not coming out.” Aristippus

Who doesn’t come out?

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

How idiotic is that?!!