a thread for mundane ironists

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4301

[b]Randall Munroe

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.[/b]

You know, metaphorically.

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

Just pick a narrative and be done with it.

There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.

Let’s keep it away from the terrorists then. And not just the ones at the Pentagon.

I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

Good to know.

I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Unless of course you’re expressing it from jail.

Maybe civilization will collapse, we’ll all succumb to disease and famine, and the last of us will be eaten by cats. Maybe we’ll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. There’s no way to know.

Or maybe the nanobots will kill the cats.

4302

[b]Ian McEwan

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.[/b]

Not applicable to everyone of course.

This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. … So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision … it already has the quality of an idea … unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.

A few even pretend to know how this works. In other words, how it really works.

A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he’s absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it’s possible he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.

In other words, prove that he’s not.

…and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.

Yep, that’s why they build them.

As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.

With the possible exception of cats and dogs. Or some of them at least.

…the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures.

Or: …the study of philosophy seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about it, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Sarty said in his lectures.

4303

[b]Michio Kaku

But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, Rodney A. Brooks says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a “super-bad robot,” someone has to build a “mildly bad robot,” and before that a “not-so-bad robot”.[/b]

So, should we file this one under “famous last words” or not?

The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes… One can mass-produce hardware and increase it’s power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.

[i]Here the soft-ware is our posts. Though at times they seem close to being mass-produce.

Already physicists are doing the basic calculations necessary to make an MRI machine fit into a cell phone.

My initial reaction: Bullshit!

Indeed, Isaac Newton himself, who introduced the concept of immutable laws which guided the planets and stars without divine intervention, believed that the elegance of these laws pointed to the existence of God.

The Christian God no doubt.

After that cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it, we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. The Cold War is over. You can’t simply say “Russia!” to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, “How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

Try yelling this: ISIS!!!

Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a “perpetual motion machine” led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society.

Hmm. Didn’t John Galt invent that?

4304

[b]Hilary Mantel

This revolution - will it be a living?
We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.
Is that usual?
Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.[/b]

There’s always winners and losers with these things.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

The point being that both be profitable.

By the hairy balls of Jesus.

Blasphemous, right?

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

As though a civilized world could have it any other way.

He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.

Not, one suspects, that it matters.

No rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful.

On the other hand, no rational man wants to topple over into the abyss forever. And you know what that entails.

4305

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

This concern, feebly called ‘love of nature’, seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.[/b]

Either that or being reincarnated as, say, a chicken.

What is more arrogant than honesty?

And, at the RNC, more rare.

Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.

Otherwise known as a nightmare. You know, as likely as not.

Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?

Turd, I challenge you to debate this! :violence-duel:

Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.

Objectively as it were.

I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.

Remember when it used to be the TV?
We know what it is now though.

4306

[b]Existential Comics

Thought experiment: what if life was good?[/b]

Obviously then you can carry it too far.

Sartre: I’m declining the Nobel prize.
Camus: I’m accepting the Nobel prize.
Merleau-Ponty: I’d just be happy if people knew who I was.

We do here, right? Well, more so than, say, Karl Jaspers?

The goal of life is:
Epicurus: to be happy
Sartre: to be free
Kierkegaard: to find faith
Russell: hopefully not to ground math in logic

Fortunately, there are others.

Everyone misses the point of that Robert Frost poem about the road less traveled by. See…it’s actually about how the Jews control the media.

Or, as some will insist, “isn’t everything”?

“What is the most dangerous thing a Philosopher could do?”
“Define ‘dangerous’. And dangerous to who? Do–”
“So it’s annoy people to death…”

Either that or to lecture them right up to the brink of it.

It may surprise some that calling something a “cultural construct” isn’t the same as calling it meaningless.

As though you can actually get much closer.

4307

[b]Sarah Silverman

Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind’s pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality.[/b]

We can do better than that, right?

And there is one thing that I really, really like to have company for. Watching TV. I’m not particularly needy in relationships, I actually demand a fair amount of space. But I really like to be in bed with another human being and watch TV. That’s as intimate and reassuring and tender as it gets for me.

I sure wouldn’t turn her down.

But I think you can make fun of anything as long as it’s funny enough.

And what isn’t funny to at least someone.

If life is a meal, then diaries are the toilets in which we shit out its vile remnants.

Yep, journals too.

I know I’m not funny. I mean, let’s face it, I’m no Groucho Marx. But if you’re a guy, and you’re watching late night television, are you gonna start jacking off to Groucho? I don’t think so!

She said it, not me.

When my father first came home from college, he sat my grandparents down to tell them some very serious news. They followed him quizzically into the living room, and from the bantam couch stared up at their nervous, pacing son.
I’m gay, he announced.
They sat stunned for a moment, and just as his mother started to cry he said,
Just kidding. I smoke.

And then, after a pause, “crack”.

4308

[b]Paula Hawkins

Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.[/b]

First order of business then [as they say about the holes] is to stop digging.

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.

In other words, with the best of all intentions.

I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.

Bye-bye “I” in other words.

…it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it…

Possible? It’s almost impossible not to.

When did you become so weak? I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.

I know: You don’t think it can ever happen to you.

But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn’t it? People you have a history with, they won’t let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can’t disentangle yourself, can’t set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying.

Either that or they shove you out the door.

4309

[b]Tiny Nietzsche

What a time to be a pseudo-intellectual.[/b]

And not just you, Mr. Objectivist.

How can I tweet about my account being suspended if my account has been suspended? - milo minderbinder, catch-22

So, are those things still around?

I have trouble recognizing people and they don’t know how lucky they are.

I hear that.

…a black t-shirt doesn’t make you a nihilist…

True, but imagine a nihilist without one.

If you hold the ocean up to your ear, you can hear the seashells screaming.

Merely a conjecture one suspects…

Trump speech in four words: fuck you, fucking fucks.

You know, to prepare us for Clinton’s.

4310

[b]Tony Kushner

Seven characters are too many for a ten-minute play. It’ll be twenty minutes long! Fuck it. One of them is dead and the others can all talk fast.[/b]

The creative mind at work.

Nothing’s lost forever.

On the other hand, lots and lots and lots and lots of things are never found forever.

If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin?

Let’s just say that, one way or another, it’s applicable to us too.

Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.

Actually, it’s the perfect drug for everyone.

You, the one part of the real world I wasn’t allergic to.

I suspect that no one has ever thought that of me.

I’ve always wondered . . . what if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn’t worth it?

Let’s just say that he knows by now.

4311

[b]Walker Percy

In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement.[/b]

Talk about “in my head”!

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

Hell, I wrote the book here, right Turd? :wink:

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?
Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.
Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
Explain.

See? Even pertaining to boredom there are conflicting goods rooted entirely in dasein

…this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.

Or: this miserable trick that others play on him.

It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.
The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this very effort establishes its own uniqueness. Name another entity in the Cosmos which tries to prove it is not unique.
The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry.

My own reaction? A definite maybe.

At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

Of course I haunted them considerably more than they haunted me.

4312

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Signs Your Heidegger Essay Isn’t Going Well

  1. You just wrote “munchy crunchy”
  2. You’ve likened him to Quine, twice
  3. It’s 400 pages long[/b]

4] not a single mention of Dasein.

[b]What you thought you’d learn about on Twitter:

  1. art
  2. literature
  3. music
  4. politics

What you learned:

  1. Don’t feed the trolls[/b]

Kinda like here, right? You know, if you thought you’d learn some philosophy.

Philosopher: I know that I know nothing
Artist: I know that knowing isn’t everything
Politician: Everything I know could fit in a tweet

So, don’t forget to vote!

College: I know more than the graduate students!
Graduate School: I know more than the professors!
Professors: I was smarter in high school…

Hmm. What does that make us then?

Academese I’m writing = I haven’t started writing
I’m finishing it up = I haven’t started writing
I sent it off = I haven’t started writing

Is that still true?

Philosophical Questions
400 BCE: What can end?
1781: What can the will cause?
2016: What will cause me to end my Pokémon Go addiction?

No, seriously, right?

4313

[b]Marquis de Sade

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.[/b]

On the other hand, you can only take this to the grave.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

Hmm, I wonder where he’s going with this?

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

Of course here he is just paraphrasing Turd.

When she’s abandoned her moral center and teachings…when she’s cast aside her facade of propriety and lady-like demeanor…when I have so corrupted this fragile thing and brought out a writhing, mewling, bucking, wanton whore for my enjoyment and pleasure…enticing from within this feral lioness…growling and scratching and biting…taking everything I dish out to her…at that moment she is never more beautiful to me.

On the other hand, what the hell did he know about feminism?

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

Actually, I haven’t found that to be true at all.

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

Well, within the law, no.

4314

[b]Haruki Murakami

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?[/b]

Again, I just take it a step further: Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of himself or of herself? What “on earth” does that mean?

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.

Do characters in movies count?

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.

Let’s just blame the gods then.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

Worse: Taking crazy things objectively.

Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don’t know a soul?

Next best thing is coming here. Where you only know everyone virtually.

In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.

You know, barely.

4315

[b]Joseph Brodsky

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.[/b]

Or, sure, for some books, writing them.
So, let’s make a list.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.

Unless of course that becomes Evil too.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

Pitch black as it were.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.

Unless that’s not the way it really is at all. Even though [obviously] it is.

When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

Still, that assumes there’s a bottom to reach. And who could ever be that optimistic?

Man is what he reads.

Or, perhaps, more to the point, man is what he does not read.

4316

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.[/b]

Fine, as long as there actually is an end to it.

Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part.

Like anyone can really know.
But who’s kidding whom, right?

When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

As though that weren’t perfectly natural in the Trump universe.

This is some­thing I’ll go to Hell for.

Like that will stop them.

The first step to eternal life is you have to die.

Not to worry: God has a plan.

That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.

In other words, get them first.

4317

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

My point is that one person is responsible, always. If H-bombs exist–and they do–some man controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as ‘state’. Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.[/b]

A bit simplified but no way.

War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say—supply the control.

Right, and Wall Street has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn’t sure that he did, either–he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days–since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other–with, of course, a day off each year for sheer solipsist debauchery.

In other words, whatever works.

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Most No Gods too.

I pity the poverty of your wealth.

To wit: it’s not enough to have money if you don’t know how to spend it.
Yeah, sure.

Harshaw had the arrogant humility of the man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance and he saw no point in ‘measurements’ when he did not know what he was measuring.

There must be a way to make sense of this.

4318

[b]Richard Yates

She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?[/b]

That does make things simpler.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

He thought: So, “who” “am” “I”?

Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?

But some things do: Birth. School. Work. Death.

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

Almost as though [from time to time] we actually tame it.

She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do, something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

Indeed, and one day we’ll discover the actual gene for that.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

Honestly, it has never even crossed my mind.

4319

[b]Leo Tolstoy

The business of art lies just in this – to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.[/b]

Our art of course, not theirs.

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.

Especially the part where we are only fooling ourselves.

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

Yes.

What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

Just clear enough not to be meaningless.

He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.

Admittedly, I don’t get the appeal either.

In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.

He means “me” of course.

4320

[b]Randall Munroe

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they’re frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.[/b]

Well put. I think.

The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.

And, surprisingly, not just in the winter.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

Okay, but what if it’s just a photograph of someone else standing on top of them?

Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.

Indeed, some make the same mistake about God.

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

Sure, but it’s not really the same, is it? And down here we don’t need a ladder.

If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers.

Well, in cartoons maybe.