a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Richard Rorty

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.[/b]

Let’s just say you can take this too far.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

Well, he was an ironist.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Unless you count the biological stuff.

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

I like to think that here it’s the fucking Kids.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

That and what you let them get away with.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Clearly, you can’t get more remote than that.

[b]Nikola Tesla

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.[/b]

Well, if you know what they are it does.

Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing God.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Like some do here with words.

What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.

My guess: it works that way for women too.

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe.

I’ll need a little help with this one.

Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present. A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.

Sure, why not?

[b]Harlan Coben

Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.[/b]

Tell that to mine.

“…better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don’t show me paradise and then burn it down.

Until one day you’re setting it on fire yourself.

Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.

We’ll need to hear the reason of course.

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world’s scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman’s scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, No, the scariest noise is, you’re all alone in your dark house, you know you’re all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles—and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush.

Either that or from downstairs in the basement.

You bring your own weather to the picnic.

True, and so do all the others.

We are often told during times of bereavement that time heals all wounds. That’s crap. In truth, you are devastated, you mourn, you cry to the point where you think you’ll never stop - and then you reach a stage where the survival instinct takes over. You stop. You simply won’t or can’t let yourself “go there” anymore because the pain was too great. You block. You deny. But you don’t really heal.

One thing for sure he thought: no one will ever mourn like that when I go.

[b]Jim Holt

…“messages from the unseen” that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.[/b]

What’s that make philosophy then?

As Grünbaum is fond of saying, even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by “always” you mean at all instants of time.

Wow, that explains nothing so well.

For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.” Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find.

Tried that myself.

To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness.

Let’s begin some place else, he muttered.

As the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed has put it, “The earth is not the center of the solar system, the sun is not the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is just one of billions in a universe that has no center, and now our entire three-dimensional universe would be just a thin membrane in the full space of dimensions. If we consider slices across the extra dimensions, our universe would occupy a single infinitesimal point in each slice, surrounded by a void.

In case you needed some cheering up.

Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?

And how about arithmetic: 1 + 1 = everything. Or, sure, 1 - 1 = everything.

[b]Sad Socrates

Being alone in hell > Being in heaven with people[/b]

Let’s see if that’s true.

The universe is much larger than it is logical.

Einstein probably proved that.

There’s nothing to live for but the destruction of our bodies.

Of course they don’t need our help for that.

Sometimes I see the me inside me, and it’s never a reflection.

Though no less fractured and fragmented.

I look so much like yesterday.

And even the day before.

Dreams are as meaningless as thoughts.

Of course that’s the brain’s prerogative…

[b]Nick Cave

To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It’s exhausting.[/b]

But, for some, well worth it.

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I’m in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant.

Same here, right?

I’m a believer. I don’t go to church. I don’t belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn’t write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

Say, it ain’t so, Nick!

…think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

That’ll do it.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.

Unless, of course, you’re born a fucking genius.

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

Let’s try to imagine that together.

[b]Iggy Pop

DMT was a gaseous wax that you could smoke that gave you a 20-minute psychedelic high. You’d inhale it. And then when you’d exhale—poof, you’d be high. I saw Buddha, man. I know that sounds like no big deal. But I saw a gigantic holographic Buddha — correct in every way! Buddhas can be very intricate — these drawings that you see in books. Thousands of details were included in this Buddha. Where did they come from? I didn’t make them up. I can’t even draw, you know? I could barely spell cat, you know? And there it was. And I thought, Wow — the power of the mind, you know? [/b]

If only entirely determined! Well, if that’s what it actually is.

I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship’s rabbit. That’s how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they’ve been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

The real crime is watching a crappy movie at all.

It is very important what not to do.

As likely as not the most important thing of all.

What do you do with a lifetime of work? Face it in the morning.

Wow, that’s original.

The more walking-around money I have, the less I walk around.

Especially on election day.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

I’d like to think I put on a good performance here. If I do say so myself.

[b]tiny nietzsche

murder me, murder you[/b]

The musical.

I’m a little teapot, short and stout,
here is my handle, go fuck yourself

I remember it differently.

it’s friday. don’t fuck any clowns

Saturday? Ditto.

my name is nietzsche, I live on the second floor

Wouldn’t bother me.

I’m way too busy to have a life

You wouldn’t think that was possible.

can’t spell masturbation without u

Wow, that’s true.

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

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.[/b]

Especially that?

…That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

You never quite know if something like this is bullshit.

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning.

You never quite know if something like this is bullshit.

Had Earth been much closer to the Sun, the oceans would have evaporated. Had Earth been much farther away, the oceans would have frozen.

Thanks, God!

Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life.

Let’s pin down that mechanism here.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species? These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. 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.

Hell, I’ve noted that a few times myself, right?

[b]Courtney Love

Only dumb people are happy.[/b]

For some [and not just here] dumb and then some.

I’ve discreetly dated a lot of people - I once dated a billionaire, mostly because it was fun to say, “I’m dating a billionaire,” but we did not have the same taste in music, and it was doomed.

Sounds like a true story to me.

The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.

Not all of them one suspects.

You couldn’t pay me a billion dollars to take marijuana. I don’t really like coke anymore. I’m scared of ecstasy. The one drug I’d like to try one day is Ayahuasca, which should be mandatory for everybody. It’s apparently this crazy tea that gives you these intense hallucinations. Everyone who takes it sees a wise old black man who takes you on a wild journey. I’m not going to name names, but everyone who takes it sees the same black guy. I’m not kidding you. Everyone!

This stuff apparently: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca

I want every girl in the world to pick up a guitar and start screaming.

Better that than, say, picking up a shotgun and start shooting.

I am God and my lawyers are my 12 disciples…do not fuck with me!

She’s got my promise not to.

[b]tiny nietzsche

abandon all hope, ye who twitter[/b]

So, should we abandon all hope here?

if you’re looking for reasons to live, try guilt

Among other things, no can do.

April. I blame the nihilists.

I only blame it for January.

I miss the future

What’s left of it, he thought.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: I hear voices
cop: auditory hallucinations can occur from lack of sleep, stress, drug psychosis, or early stages of dementia. let me get you some literature
me: thank you

Based on a true story perhaps.

first there is a sartre, then there is no sartre, then there is

Doesn’t work with Nietzsche.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.[/b]

Let’s just say that some pull more weight than others.

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity after their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it’s the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

It bears repeating: awareness is everything.

Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

For example, eventually.

Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.

And a big gun was his.

The last generation’s worst fears become the next ones B-grade entertainment.

Let’s change that.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

Let’s forget about changing that.

[b]Jackson Pollock

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.[/b]

This is probably the best you can do.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we’re living in.

Rather abstract. But that’s probably the point.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

In other words, not stopping at the frame.

People have always frightened and bored me consequently I have been within my own shell.

Some will hear this louder than others.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

That is one way to look at it.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

For better or worse as it were.

[b]so sad today

i loved it when i didn’t know you[/b]

Let’s reverse engineer that.

you’re damn right i never leave my comfort zone

But, then, out of the blue, I’m here.

i think i have, like, extra feelings

Or, much worse, extra thoughts.

gross i’m alive

Next up: gross I’m going to die.

it’s not my job to like me

I know, let’s make it yours.

[b]my daily affirmations:

1. uh oh
2. oh shit
3. oh fuck
4. hell no[/b]

And that’s just until lunch.

[b]Douglas Hofstadter

The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.[/b]

You know, like in Cube.

Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the “merely mechanical.” But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.

Imagine then not actually being dead and not actually being alive.

Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.

Not only that but they voted for Trump.

For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 ‘is involved’ or not.

Not only that but why 13? Why not 17?

The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.

The subjunctive shit for example.

No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over… the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

This being an example of that.

[b]so sad today

gonna stop worrying about shit beyond my control just kidding[/b]

No kidding.

yeah sex is cool, but have you ever watched two people you dislike equally fight online

And, if you are particularly lucky, about sex.

if you can’t handle me in my acute panic attack then you don’t deserve me in my general sense of persistent underlying doom

Of course that’s just common sense.

capitalism is making me want to vomit and also buy stuff

Though not necessarily in that order.

i have a headache, probably because i exist

Let’s just say that existing is likely to be a contributing cause.

don’t have kids without their consent

Okay, but it might be too late for us.

[b]Greg Iles

The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.[/b]

And this being the best of all possible worlds to boot.

You know, the truth isn’t hard to find, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afraid or too lazy to get dirty. They’re afraid to ask the right questions. The hard questions.

Here, clearly, you more than me.

I listened in amazement. You saw a face on an American street, or in an office, and you had no idea that a tragic epic lay behind it.

Or, here, you read a post.

We do not just belong to this universe, we are it.

Let’s explain the difference.

Whenever life gets too good, whenever fate hands you something wonderful, something else gets taken away.

Right, like this is really how it works.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can’t neuter it.

Still, some have considerably more testosterone than others.

[b]Joan Lindsay

As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.[/b]

That’s still the same of course.

Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.

They still are though.

Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world, said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.

Airily. The perfect description.

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

Of course their parents are filthy rich. Except for Sara.

Thinking’s all right if you have the time for it.

Much to our dismay here.

Where were they going? What strange feminine secrets did they share in that last gay fateful hour?

Though it’s not really based on a true story.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.[/b]

So they tell me.

I’m under absolutely no obligation to make sense to you.

Nor you to me.

Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

And it’s not like you can tell it to go fuck itself.

I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse.
I am not a muse.
I am the somebody.
End of fucking story.

I guess she told us.

It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.

Fascinating for starters.

Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.

Either that or [for some] a blowjob.