a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Werner Twertzog

What do you mean you can’t make a documentary? You have a cell phone, do you not?[/b]

Wow, how postmodern is that!

Do not shoot one minute more than you need. We are artists, not garbage collectors.

Garbage? Let’s not go there here, okay?

I am at Bed, Bath and Beyond, thinking about the afterlife.

That could never happen in a Walmart. As we all know.

Two roads diverged in a wood And I took neither I calmly walked into the foliage never to be seen again.

Not unlike Inés one suspects.

Driverless humans, next year, Musk is convinced.

No, really, is Musk convinced of this?

Extroverts are happier because, as all introverts know, they are stupid.

As an introvert myself, I agree. If stupid goes far enough.

[b]Jerry Fodor

Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.[/b]

My guess: For different reasons.

Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

Or at least up to their necks?

On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

Not unlike everyone else.

The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.

Okay, but is that banal enough?

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect…but I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs.

So, what’s your intuition tell you about this?

Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.

Things that only intellectuals pedants say.

[b]Patricia Churchland

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines. [/b]

Let’s split the difference and call them both.

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

I know: Don’t take this too far.

I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

We’ll need to know the problem of course.

If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out.

Fine, I’m missing out then.

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

Right, genuinely significant.

It seems that the brain has a “small world” architecture - or at least the cortex does. Everything can connect to everything else in a few synaptic steps.

Well, that solves that then.

[b]Martin Gardner

The more the public is confused, the easier it falls prey to doctrines of pseudo-science which may at some future date recieve the backing of politically powerful groups…a renaissance of German quasi-science paralleled the rise of Hitler. [/b]

Uh-oh. Few publics have ever been more confused than the one here in America.

Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Is this a real thing?

A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.

And what if it’s your God, Kid?

The sudden hunch, the creative leap of mind that “sees” in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence.

Any actual flashes here?

Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs.

Any falsifiers here?

As Bertrand Russell once wrote, two plus two is four even in the interior of the sun.

Not counting Betelgeuse of course.

[b]Greg Iles

Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty.[/b]

Let’s start one here.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.

I’ll bet that includes the past too.

Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.

Next up: the Shadow meets dasein.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Of course Einstein was only a genius. But point taken.

You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool.

Is this a real thing?

The faith of children is an awesome thing to behold. If only we could all be worthy of it.

Faith in what though?

[b]God

I don’t know what else I can not do to prove I don’t exist.[/b]

Let’s think of something.

If there were a shot that cured stupid, anti-vaxxers still wouldn’t take it.

Let’s poll the Kids here.

People who are wrong are just as sure they’re right as people who are right. The only difference is, they’re wrong.

Wow, God must be a fucking genius.

Never underestimate the ability of things to get worse.

He can count on me.

At the end of the day, it’s 11:59pm.

Of course technically that’s not true.

Once you start allowing gay people to marry, what’s next? Going on with your life in exactly the same way you did before?

I know: what if that was actually true!

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices.[/b]

Right, fate or not.

That’s the part I was stuck in, the part where you accept the apology because it’s easier than addressing the root of the problem.

Until that becomes the root of the problem itself.

They say that when you remember something, you are really remembering the last time you remembered it. Each time you recollect a memory, you change it, ever so slightly, shading it with new information, new feelings.

If only going back to the day you were born.

…forgiveness is different from absolution.

Spelled different too.

It’s very easy to rationalize what you’re doing when you don’t know the faces and the names of the people you might hurt. It’s very easy to choose yourself over someone else when it’s an abstract.

My guess: There’s a good reason for that.

Sometimes divorce isn’t an earth-shattering loss. Sometimes it’s just two people waking up out of a fog.

Much like a marriage can be two people walking into one.

[b]God

The next time I create mankind I’ll conduct an environmental impact study first.[/b]

And it’s not like He doesn’t have billions of planets to choose from.

Most homophobes are secretly gay. However, most arachnophobes are not secretly spiders.

Hmm, a category mistake?

The Easter Bunny is a ridiculous myth that completely detracts from the factual reality of the Son of God rising from the dead.

What’s that make Santa Claus then?

Human beings are the only species on earth who are all a bunch of morons.

Created in His image to boot.

It wasn’t a Good Friday for Jesus, I can tell you that.

Well, He did die for our sins.

It’s weird being an atheist when you have My job.

Really, I can’t even imagine it.

[b]Janis Joplin

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time. [/b]

Next up: the Yippies.

All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik. Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time. That’s all I ever wanted. Except I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock ‘n’ roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me. And I decided then and there that that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that’s the trouble.

Among other things, they should put this on her tombstone.

I’m not really thinking much…Just sort of, trying to feel.

Not unlike everyone else. Eventually.

It’s hard to be free but when it works, it’s worth it.

Providing of course you have nothing left to lose.

I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV.

So, how superhypermost are you? You know, if that’s even an option.

Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.

If not anymore.

[b]Woody Allen

Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.[/b]

I was once this optimistic myself.

I didn’t believe in reincarnation in my past life, and I still don’t.

Let’s see if we can spot the flaw here.

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

One wonders if he ever did.

Error, no keyboard. Press F1 to continue.

Is this even possible?

Existence for eternity could get a little boring…especially towards the end.

Is this even possible?

The universe is haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

And not just in September.

[b]Richard Rorty

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of “knowingness”- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.[/b]

No, not just you, Kid. But, here, especially you.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

Let’s explain this to, among others, me.

The difference between people and ideas is…only superficial.

If not profoundly superficial.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

A classic general description.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

Worse [far worse] is the philosophical equivalent.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

On the other hand, who wouldn’t abjure that?

[b]Rene Magritte

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world. [/b]

Besides, it just makes you all the more miserable still.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Here we do that with words.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!

Let’s analyze this to shreds.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

Or, sure, both.

Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.

So, what’s invisible here?

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Up next: the nightmares.

[b]Harlan Coben

…desperation can toy with you and if you give desperation any wiggle room, it will find alternative answers…[/b]

The creepier the better he thought.

Do you believe in love at first sight? Neither do I. I do, however, believe in major, more-than-just-physical attraction at first sight. I believe that every once in a while—once, maybe twice in a lifetime—you are drawn to someone so deeply, so primordially, so immediately—a stronger-than-magnetic pull.

Let’s just say that some of us are running out of time.

Every person has hopes and dreams.

And two to take them.

This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.

And just on their arms.

There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.

Hmm, never tried that before.

We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don’t put it in those terms. But we do.

Maybe one in a thousand get around to this. And even less in America.

[b]Bob Dylan

…the only thing i knew how to do was to keep on keeping on…[/b]

Not much gets done without that.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

Though I suspect that he’s fared better here than most of us.

You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more.

Needing it. And then what?

Dealing with my own life takes priority over other people dealing with my life.

Right, like that will stop them.

People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.

I know that I do.

… we’re living in a Machiavellian world, whether we like it or we don’t.

Next up: Machiavelli meets dasein.

[b]Leonard Cohen

You live your life as if it’s real…[/b]

You might even say you’re determined to.

The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.

Though even less that God is.

You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.

Just a few of us of course.

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.

That actually happen to anyone here?

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

Trust me: Speaking it is one thing, living it another.

Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.

I’ve never been less empty than when alone. But I am a very strange person.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Age 20: I want to write the great American novel
Age 30: I want to write a brutal satire of popular culture
Age 40: I want to write a tweet[/b]

Let’s imagine Age 50.

English philosophy: I feel that the world is beautiful
French philosophy: I think that my soul is beautiful
German philosophy: I’m a monster

And not just the Nazis.

Favorite Punctuation Marks
Aristotle: period
Kant: semicolon
Hegel: dash
Sartre: exclamation point
Heidegger: question mark
Beckett: asterisk
Lacan: slash
Deleuze: backslash
Derrida: scare quotes

Imagine mine then.

The Long Eighteenth Century: 1688 – 1815
The Long Nineteenth Century: 1789 – 1914
The Long Twentieth Century: 1870 – 2012
The Long Twenty-First Century: 2019

In a word: Trump.

Friday is a friendly reminder that
Kierkegaard: your thoughts will never be your own
Marx: your labor power will never be your own
Beckett: your life will always be your own, but it’s the one thing you don’t want

Beckett by a nose. Or two.

May 5th: Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard share a birthday today. Marx has the snazzier grave, but it will cost you £4 to see it.

True, but the workers of the world get a discount. Or they certainly ought to.

[b]Federico Fellini

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life. [/b]

No beginning? No end? Well, what then of birth and death?

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

Autonomically as it were.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

How about this: I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a philosophy.

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

That and almost anything else.

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don’t want free men who can think for themselves and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Next up: Real philosophy.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train…But we must at least take them to the station…to a point of departure.

Let’s make ILP the station, he quipped.

[b]Frans de Waal

We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them.[/b]

On the other hand…

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Indeed, what could possibly be more obscure?

The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

Or not of course.

This book demonstrates something we had already suspected on the grounds of the close connection between apes and man: that the social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true.

Except we have the internet.

Our vaunted imagination is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it causes desperation in a situation in which an ape might remain unworried, but it also gives hope as it allows us to envision a better future. We look so far ahead, in fact, that we realize that our life will come to an end. This realization thoroughly colors our existence, leading to a permanent search for meaning as well as bitter jokes along the lines of “Life’s a bitch, and then you die!” Would we have developed a belief in the supernatural without this cloud hanging over us? A partial answer comes from research showing that the more aware people are of their own mortality, and the more they think about it, the more they believe in God.

Well, imagine that!

…the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.

Or think Wag the Dog on a bigger scale.

[b]Existential Comics

The funniest thing about people who complain that “postmodernists” are destroying society is that they can never name a single living postmodernist and describe accurately what they believe.[/b]

And not just Americans.

so far as i can tell people of all political ideologies agree that wolves are cool as shit

He means dragons of course.

[b]Ways to overcome your existential dread:

1. Try to create great art.
2. Throw yourself into politics.
3. Take a leap of faith into religion.
4. Just sort of stop thinking about it and watch TV or something instead.[/b]

Obviously: Not necessarily in that order.

Young people these days spend all their time hooking up on tinder when they should be spending time forming a revolutionary socialist party and then splitting the party over minor ideological differences,

Indeed, that’s what I once did.

have to admit, people in real life are not as impressed with how many twitter followers you have as I had been anticipating

He still has 269,900 more than I have.

[b]Likely reasons you can’t get a girlfriend:

• You are an asshole.
• You have poor hygiene habits.
• You are too scared to even ask girls out.

Unlikely reasons you can’t get a girlfriend:

• postmodern neo-marxists have infiltrated the universities.[/b]

Let’s prove this.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

I’m a sociopath. I look normal, but I’m not. I’m smarter, better, and freer, because I’m not bound by rules, law, emotion or regard for you.[/b]

Something to strive for, perhaps?

I’ve read that one out of twenty-four people is a sociopath, and if you ask me, the other twenty-three of you should be worried.

So, which one [or two] of us here is one?

I don’t really like you, but I’m so good at acting as if I do that it’s basically the same thing.

Basically and [sometimes] then some.

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave.

Let’s run this by Tom Cruise.

They never see me coming.
Know why?
Because I’m already there.

That’ll do it.

You need somebody to stand up for you. You’re the little guy, you just don’t realize it yet. The Commonwealth has all the aces, and you don’t even know you’re playing cards.

At least until Trump drains the swamp.