a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Lionel Shriver

Cynics are spoiled romantics. They are always the ones who had the highest expectations at the start. They were once so naïve themselves that they despise naïvety more than any other quality. Alchemists, they turn grief to gold. They take quinine in their tonic, Campari with their soda—bitterness is an acquired taste. Cynics have learned to drink poison and like it. They are resourceful people, though the sad thing is, they know what’s happened to them. They remember what they wanted to be when they grew up, and not a single one of them dreamt of becoming a cynic.[/b]

As a cynic myself I may or may not agree with this.

You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her. Evidence to the contrary found nowhere to lodge, like a book on chaos theory in a library that didn’t have a physics section.

Exactly like that. In other words, more or less.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization’s latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

On the wrong side of the tracks for example. Where Mom raised me.

We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations–beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: if a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous.

Didn’t Albert Camus write a book about this?

Frankly, the reason why lawyers were compensated so lavishly was that they were paid to attend to the most stultifying aspects of modern life.

You buying that? Me neither.

They drummed into you that pain was good, you were supposed to go with it, push into the pain, and only now did I contemplate what retarded advice this was.

No pain, no gain. When, more often than not, it was our pain and their gain.

[iambiguous]

[b]William Gaddis

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.[/b]

And then one day he didn’t bounce back. And now that’s what he can’t stand.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Not entirely sure what this means but who could really doubt it?

I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it’s unique, but people are all so ordinary.

Oddly enough though it’s people who write them.

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway.

Of course that involves working for it. Or it does more often than not.

Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.

Or [more likely than not] don’t want to be.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Some minutes being more consequential than others.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

As if there weren’t enough bad news: it is now possible to retweet yourself.[/b]

1] is this true?
2] how bad is it?

What’s so awesome about nihilism? Nothing.

Well, more or less.

Yes, we’ll say: Twitter. It was for waking up to insults from strangers in other time zones.

Or: Yes, we’ll say: ILP. It was for waking up to insults from strangers in other time zones.
Vicous at times.

Remember, friends, that there is no shame in following sports.

One man’s opinion.

It turns out there is something better than reading Vonnegut as an angry teenager: reading Vonnegut as a disappointed adult.

Or, sure, worse.

Good news: “Poll shows Pennsylvanians find Phillie Phanatic more qualified to be President than Donald Trump.”

He probably just made that up.

[iambiguous]

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.[/b]

True, but most of us will take our chances.

Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.

Starting with, for example, conception.

She’d wear shades of lipstick you’d expect to see around the base of a penis.

Fifty at least.

I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla’s stories.

The one in her obituary say.

If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate/

Unless of course you come back as a frog.

There’s al­ways the chance you could die right in the mid­dle of your life sto­ry.

The highlight as it were.

[iambiguous]

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

As it says in the Bible, God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery.[/b]

Come on, does it really say that?

The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

You have to admit that is a miracle. Of sorts.

Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code — family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an “obscene” sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code.

Cue Wilhelm Reich.

Must be a yearning deep in the human heart to stop other people from doing as they please.

Sure, but only the wrong people doing the wrong things.

Jill: I don’t pay attention to politics.
Ben: You should. It’s barely less important than your own heart beat.
Jill: I don’t pay attention to that, either.

Jill’s what some call “a goner”.

Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Of course we know where some will take this.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

1646: I think therefore I am
1846: I work therefore I am
1946: I agonize therefore I am
2016: The WI-FI is broken therefore I’m livid[/b]

Or close enough, right?

Stages on Life’s Way…
16: I love philosophy!
20: I’m studying philosophy
25: I’m writing a philosophy PhD
30: I read philosophy on Twitter

Hmm. What does that make us then?

Overheard at the International Derrida Conference: “I started understanding Derrida much better once I stopped reading his work.”

Indeed, it works the same way here. You know the ones. And not only me.

Overheard at the International Derrida Conference: “A colleague gushed that he loves Derrida’s concept of the rhizome. We no longer speak.”

This thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy
And this thing: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=190091

Twitter: Come for the camaraderie and good cheer. Stay for the jokes about anxiety, hopelessness, and death.

Must be the part I never go to.

How To Speak Academese
Great work! = I could have done better
Good work! = I have done better
Nice work! = Anyone could have done better

You know, if it’s actually true.

[iambiguous]

[b]Salman Rushdie

You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.[/b]

We come across this from time to time. You know, whatever the fucks it means.

If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse.

Like most even have one.

Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind…

Not if you can actually do something with it.

What would a respectful political cartoon look like?

Obviously: no one knows.

And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed.

Or, here, banned.
But it’s not really the same is it?

Are you familiar, he said finally, with the Bang?
The Big Bang? Luka asked. Or some other Bang I don’t know about?
There was only one Bang, said Nobodaddy, so the adjective Big is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from.

One more thing I don’t really give much thought to. Like if Pluto’s a planet.

[iambiguous]

[b]Leo Tolstoy

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.[/b]

On the other hand, .999 = 1. Except when it doesn’t. Still, point taken.

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

Tried it once, didn’t work.

Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.

Well, maybe in la la land.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

Well, maybe in la la land.

Which is worse, the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

Let’s ask the lamb.

Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

Let’s just say you see that a lot here.

[iambiguous]

[b]Sigmund Freud

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.[/b]

Three words: rationalization of production. Unless of course you’re a shrink.

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

What some call a mitigating circumstance. And what others don’t.

I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.

More often attribued to Groucho Marx. Or Alvy Singer.

All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’.

Or maybe God just has a sense of humor.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.

Indeed, entire worlds can come from them.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.

You know, up to a point. Which for example is my point.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ian McEwan

He’s never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.[/b]

Of course that’s more or less the rule here.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

Sorry, no exceptions.

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

godot for example.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future.

The thicker the better I always say.

In Leon’s account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree…Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.

You know, in this world.

Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re ever going to be at peace with each other…the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.

It might just be me, but this sort of shit can meaning anything.

[iambiguous]

[b]Michio Kaku

Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.[/b]

As though they have any choice.

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.

You know, whatever that means.

Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationship, or through personal experiences. However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life.

You know, whatever that means.

There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.

Or, sure, it may well get worse.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

Let’s start with smart phones.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg likens this multiple universe theory to radio. All around you, there are hundreds of different radio waves being broadcast from distant stations. At any given instant, your office or car or living room is full of these radio waves. However, if you turn on a radio, you can listen to only one frequency at a time; these other frequencies have decohered and are no longer in phase with each other. Each station has a different energy, a different frequency. As a result, your radio can only be turned to one broadcast at a time. Likewise, in our universe we are “tuned” into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot “tune into” them. Although these worlds are very much alike, each has a different energy. And because each world consists of trillions upon trillions of atoms, this means that the energy difference can be quite large. Since the frequency of these waves is proportional to their energy (by Planck’s law), this means that the waves of each world vibrate at different frequencies and cannot interact anymore. For all intents and purposes, the waves of these various worlds do not interact or influence each other.

I know: What if this really is true.

[iambiguous]

[b]Hilary Mantel

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.[/b]

True, but for some it’s now godot all the way down.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

Truth. Great, that again.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Disguised as [what else] facts.

At New Year’s he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

Worse, stick in people, then eat them.

Those who are made can be unmade.

Eventually for all of eternity.

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.

Or stench as the case may be.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ethicist For Hire

Block all pop-ups
Block all ads
Block all cookies
Block all videos
Block all images
Block all text
Block all humans
Internet fixed…[/b]

Not counting us of course.

What are guns?
Plato: “Shadows”
Kant: “Immoral”
Nietzsche: “Nihilism”
Heidegger: “Challenging-forth”
de Beauvoir: “Penises”

The right answer: All of the above. Or [of course] none of the above.

Q: “How many philosophers does it take to ruin a dinner?”
A: “Well what do you mean by ‘ruin’?”

Worse: “How do you define it?”

Socialism. Come for the takedown of the old Capitalism. Stay for the rise of the new Capitalism…

Right, rub it in.

[b]How to make a machine that will defeat the Turing Test:

1. Teach it to drink coffee
2. Teach it to only talk about coffee.[/b]

On the other hand: Can this be done?

Should we fear human-like robots?
Heidegger: “We are human-like.”
Marx: “We are robots.”
Nietzsche: “We are not worth fearing.”

Obviously: Too close to call. Well, unless you count Nietzsche.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

Grain grows best in shit…[/b]

Among other things.

She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.

You know, on average.

It is the nature of the idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows stronger from being stepped on.

Up to a point, maybe. But let’s not get carried away here.

I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It’s a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you’re not with it. That’s a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I’m not me. I’m a basketball letter. I’m a popular kid. I’m my friend’s friend. I’m a black leather growth on a Honda. I’m a member. I’m a teenager. You can’t see me, all you can see is us. We’re safe. And if We see you standing alone by yourself, if you’re lucky we’ll ignore you. If you’re not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don’t like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their jeans reminding us that we’re each alone and none of us is safe.

Or, anyway, something like that.

That is between me and my shadow.

And even then only on a sunny day.

One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.

Indeed, and not just aliens.

[iambiguous]

[b]Michael Cunningham

You know, if you’re hopeful, if you’re even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn’t affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart.[/b]

What some call [and some don’t call] consolation.

It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

Next up: The Grim Reaper. One way or another.

Without rich people who want it done now, who would animate the free world? In theory, you want everyone to live peacefully according to their needs, along the banks of a river. In fact, you worry that you’d die of boredom there. In fact, you get a buzz from someone like Carole Potter, who keeps prize chickens and could teach a graduate course in landscaping; who maintains a staff of four (more in the summers, during High Guest Season); a handsome, slightly ridiculous husband; a beautiful daughter at Harvard and an incorrigible son doing something or other on Bondi Beach; Carole who is charming and self-deprecating and capable, if pushed, of a hostile indifference crueler than any form of rage; who reads novels and goes to movies and theater and yes, yes, bless her, buys art, serious art, about which she actually fucking knows a thing or two.

Some really, really, really want to believe this. Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small.

Barely a pinprick for some of us. If even that.

Who knows what succession of girls and boys sneak in through the sliding glass doors at night, after the mother has sunk to the bottom of her own private lake, with the help of Absolut and Klonopin?

In fact, no need to sneak in at all.

Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.

Hate too. But then they do often come in pairs.

[iambiguous]

[b]Marilynne Robinson

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.[/b]

And then the part where you get what you crave…and never do again.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

Don’t you just love that? You know, when you don’t just hate it.

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

For some there’s just no going back.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

Not much this isn’t applicable to. Well, all the important stuff anyway.

She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.

In one ear and out the other, right God?

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

Let’s file this one under, “human all too human”. And all the other emotions too.

[iambiguous]

[b]Walker Percy

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.[/b]

Naive…but stirring.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

Well, that’s certainly right up there near the top.

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

The mother of all daseins.

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

But first of course the philosophers will need to analysis the stench.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

Sure. For some however that’s actually the good news.

Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

Not to mention Saturday night. Though that’s where I’ll be.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren’t left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical–because they weren’t musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they’d done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.[/b]

My own default [believe it or not] was philosophy. Hell, back then I even took it seriously.

Sixty trillion years ago a god-scientist dug a hole through the earth, filled it with dynamite and blew the earth in two. The smaller of these two pieces became the moon.

Actually, 60,280,408,997,431 years ago to be exact. Or it will be on August 30th.

But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister’s iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she’d voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.

And, no, not just the Sixties.

At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche, Leonard didn’t want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn’t that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical.

He thought [and then some]: Or certainly close enough.

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet’s back.

It can get confusing.

Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.

And now he can add this one to the list.

[iambiguous]

[b]Lionel Shriver

I mean when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I’m a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can’t believe this.[/b]

Of course that’s only the case for my generation. No, really.

What is cool changes; that there is such a thing as cool is immutable.

“Cool”? God I hate that word! Only don’t ask me why.

…the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.

True, but only from the cradle to the grave.

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.

And then, one day: in nothing at all.

[b]To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we’re not especially bothered by what happens once we’re dead. As we age—oh, so reluctantly!—we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you’ve got. We justly cherish characters capable of living “in the moment.”…We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives with as much various experience as time and money provide, who never stop learning, engaging, and savoring what every day offers—in contrast to the dour killjoys who are bitter and begrudging in the ceaseless fulfillment of obligation. For the role of humble server, helpmate, and facilitator no longer to constitute the sole model of womanhood surely represents progress for which I am personally grateful. Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.

Yet the biggest social casualty of Be Here Now is children, who have converted from requirement to option, like heated seats for your car. In deciding what in times past never used to be a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.[/b]

You can’t help but wonder what folks like Marx and Freud [among others] would make of all this.

Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don’t. If you’re ‘trying’, you don’t.

Of course: You’re not trying hard enough. Or so the argument goes. As [for some] it should.

[iambiguous]

[b]Existential Comics

A great philosopher is someone who is wrong in a very interesting way.[/b]

Or someone who is right in a very threatening way. And, no, not just me.

The world divides into:
Marx: proletariat and bourgeoisie
De Beauvoir: people and women
Nietzsche: ignorant sheep and Nietzsche

Not to be confused with ignorant sheep and Satyr. Which is not to be confused with ignorant sheep and Turd. Though, sure, understandably, many do.

How I know Kant wasn’t a consequentialist: he wrote The Critique of Pure Reason, which caused suffering for generations of students to come.

That’s certainly one way to look at it. Though [obviously] there are others.

The problem with the world isn’t that people are stupid. It’s that they are really really stupid. Like way stupider than you even thought.

Not counting us of course. Well, not counting some of us.

Ironically, half the time when people say “be more open minded”, what they really mean to say is just “have my ideas”.

Half the time? I’d double it. At least.

Consider the set of all sets that do not cause paradoxes in set theory. Does it contain anything that will piss off Bertrand Russell?

Or, perhaps, James S. Saint?