a thread for mundane ironists

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7841

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.” Søren Kierkegaard[/b]

Of course that doesn’t make my points go away. You know, if I do say so myself.

“Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.” Jorge Luis Borges

But here you are, reading this.

“The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral…” Jorge Luis Borges

Especially if you count death.

“You can’t. You just have to.” William Faulkner

If only day after day after day.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.” William Faulkner

That can’t be good. Still, when you can, take advantage of it.

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.” William Faulkner

Surely not counting yours and mine.

7842

[b]Sharon Stone

I carry condoms in my purse, even though I haven’t had sex in a long time. [/b]

I know: How long?!

I used to want to pack as much as I could into my life, but now I realize it’s more about quality of life than quantity.

She’ll get over that no doubt.

It’s funny, but I never knew I was hot or could be beautiful until I saw ‘Basic Instinct,’ and I was so shocked when I saw how pretty they made me.

Anyone here actually believe that?

Any man in Hollywood will meet me if I want that. No, make that any man anywhere.

I may well be the only exception. You know, if that’s true.

Celebrity is a pretty stunning thing. At first I was like ‘They love me! Oh, I love them, too.’ And suddenly, I was tap-dancing on my pedestal and it was whack! Facedown in the dirt.

So, is there the equivalent of that here?

Sex is so much more in the mind than in the body.

Then I must be doing it wrong, he thought.

7843

[b]Robert Macfarlane

As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a “continual agitation alive” in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.[/b]

You get this or you don’t. Or you do but don’t want to.

Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.

You get this or you don’t. Or you do but don’t want to.

Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal’s holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare’s run, the hawk’s high gyres : such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise that live by voices inaudible to you.

Among other things, a world without memes.

All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world’s disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.

Yo, God. Why?

We lack - we need - a term for those places where one experiences a ‘transition’ from a known landscape… into ‘another world’: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.

Death, for example. If we’re still around to think and feel at all.

To enter water is, of course, to cross a border. You pass the lake’s edge, the sea’s shore, the river’s brink – and in so doing you arrive at a different realm, in which you are differently minded because differently bodied.

Especially if there are crocs or sharks around.

7844

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.[/b]

Not only is this not true, but, even if it is true, it could only have ever been that way.

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.

We’ll need a context of course.

You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isn’t a mechanic alive who doesn’t louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you don’t hear about it—just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at least get the benefit of some education.

With motorcycles, sure, but what about what we do?

Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.

Not if, like mine, it was a mattress on the floor.

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time.

Yeah, sure, sometimes.

He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person.

Not counting math of course. Unless you do.

7845

[b]Nein

It’s starting to signify a lot like nothing.[/b]

365 days a year now.

Yes, future civilizations will say, “Christmas.” It celebrated the birth of Baby Yoda.

No less idiotic some say.

A gentle reminder to stop staring blankly at your screens. And start staring blankly at your friends and family.

Or, here, start staring blankly at your posts.

You bring the dialectic. The neighbors will provide the enlightenment.

You haven’t met my neighbors of course.

Yes, the fire, we know. We’re all slowly dying.

On the other hand, does the fire know that?

Peace on Earth. Joy to the world. Fuck Trump.

Though clearly not in that order.

7846

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.[/b]

Not much that doesn’t include.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

I’ll bet you still believe it, Mr. Objectivist. Well, your take on it of course.

Life sucks, end of story, said Ada.

You know, on this side of the grave.

How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment.

Not counting ours, of course. Trump being one in a million.

I don’t remember that school day much, because why would I? It was normal. Normal is like looking out a car window. Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance. You don’t register such hours; they’re habitual, like brushing your teeth.

And then IT happens. The part embodied in, among other things, dasein.

When push comes to shove, only one’s own nightmares are of any interest or significance.

Or, for that matter, with some of us, even before push comes to shove.

7847

[b]Julian Assange

A lot of people who work for WikiLeaks have the same instinct as me: If you are pushed you push back. [/b]

Next up: the consequences.

Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, more than $80 billion.

But isn’t she a liberal?

I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I’m no rapist.

You are if your enemies need you to be.

You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.

Wow, how naive is that!!

This movement is not about the destruction of law, but the construction of law.

Which the movement of others will seek to destroy no less.

Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.

Just reform? Nothing controversial about that, right?

7848

[b]Werner Twerzog

There are too many board games, and most of them are stupid.[/b]

When did it stop being all of them?

This was a vile and debased decade.
But every decade is so.

Actually, now it’s every century.

The earth will crash into the sun and the universe will die. Merry Christmas.

Oh, and Happy New Year. It won’t happen for billions of years.

It is important not to major in the humanities or arts, so that you will never question a life of service to corporate oligarchs.

Like anyone still does,

The average Bavarian thinks of death every seven seconds, as we all know.

Well, as we all know now.

The soul of Kinski long ago exhausted the patience of the devil, and he was sent back, in what form I am not told.

In other words, the Devil works in mysterious ways too.

7849

[b]Heraclitus

How can you hide from what never goes away?[/b]

Uh, you can’t?
Or have you found a way.

Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeated all things.

Talk about something a serious philosopher would say.

Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, men are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.

Talk about something a serious philosopher would say.

The most beautiful ape is ugly when compared to a human. The wisest human will seem like an ape when compared to a god with respect to wisdom, beauty, and everything else.

He means your God, right?

Learning many things does not teach understanding.

Especially learning the wrong things.

The best of men choose one thing in preference to all else, immortal glory in preference to mortal good; whereas the masses simply glut themselves like cattle.

Here, he thought, I’m with the masses.

7850

[b]Werner Twertzog

Dance like a Boomer with no student loans and a massive early-retirement plan.[/b]

Or, sure, just lay down and die.

I am waiting for a seat at Red Robin, like any proletarian.

Do people actually do things like that?

Today is a good day to die.
But so is every day.

So, why is he still around, right?

I do not shop at stores with self-checkout, on principle.

Steer clear of Giant then. At least the ones around me.

Jerry Seinfeld meets death.
Asks, “What’s up with the scythe? Is the scythe really necessary? Are we wheat?”
He dies.
The rest is silence.

You know, just like the rest of us.

American healthcare cures you of having money. And health.

Though, for some, all the way to the bank.

7851

[b]Norman Mailer

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind. [/b]

Hurricane Don, for example. Catagory 5 last measured.

What’s the use of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people?

Or, sure, here, a poster.

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

In a word: dasein. :wink:

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Objectively. Right, Kids?

I do believe that America’s deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.

Let’s decide: genes or memes.

The true religion of America has always been America.

Love it or leave it, dude.

7852

[b]Douglas Adams

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.[/b]

Or, as Freud suggested, slip through. And often with disasterous consequences.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.”

Isn’t this from a Star Trek movie?

What happens if I press this button?
I wouldn’t…
Oh.
What happened?
A sign lit up, saying ‘Please do not press this button again.’

Anyone here know if he did?

I was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

No, really, my own wife more or less expressed the same.

of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

Okay, Kids, let’s pin this down. You for me, me for you.

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? - because you’re not!’

Just not your religion, right?

7853

[b]Bob Dylan

They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants.[/b]

How about if they asked you? :wink:

You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.

I know, he thought: iambiguous.

You have to look at every one of your songs and be able to identify with them in a meaningful way. You can hardly sing your songs unless you’re in them. If you want to fake it, go ahead. Fake it if you want. But I’m not that kind of singer.

And, with any luck, you’re not that kind of a listener.

After becoming famous once again - a 1976 song, “Hurricane,” even marked a return to protest songwriting - [Bob] Dylan got addicted to drugs, found Jesus, left Jesus, and put out a lot of swill.

You know, in the third person.

Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world has just gone on.

Let one of us change that.

You’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom.

In other words, whatever that means.

7854

[b]Existential Comics

People think time travelers will try to kill Hitler, but they don’t realize that the time travel machines will almost certainly be owned by capitalists, so time travelers will just be sent back on like…marketing missions so people will want to buy more stuff in the future.[/b]

You know, when we finally invent one.

Christmas has become a materialistic holiday, but don’t forget the true spirit of Christmas, and remember that the best gift you can get is actually a working understand of the Hegelian dialectic.

Too late now, but maybe next year.

objective reality is fake as shit. anyone who claims they know facts is a damned liar. one time i thought i observed reality directly, but it turned out to be naught but illusions and lies.

You know, if that was objective reality.

It’s weird there aren’t more anti-capitalists among gamers. Games are so often obviously ruined by catering to shareholder interests over the gaming community and developers themselves who just want to make a fun game.
The only explanation is that all gamers are fucking idiots.

Fucking Kids too.

Harry Potter is considered a “fantasy novel” because a group of technocratic liberal elites defeated the rising tide of fascism.

Fascism of course almost always being interchangeable with Communism.

They say “write what you know”, but then they also say “no one wants to read a novel about a guy who sits around all day watching reruns of The Office on Netflix.”

I know that I wouldn’t.

7855

[b]Neal Stephenson

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.[/b]

Or here: This would be an idyllic philosophical paradise if not for…

Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it.

That’s me too, he beamed.

When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.

Here of course it’s a horror story. And no one will not believe it.

I am an Aleut.
Oh, I’ve never heard of that.
That’s because we’ve been fucked over, the big scary Aleut says, worse than any other people in history.

Any Aleuts here able to confirm this?

The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.

Cool, right?

Time, tide, and comets waited for no man.

And only a very few women.

7856

[b]Doth

Take a moment to apologize to your body for your brain’s bullshit.[/b]

I tried this once. And look at me now.

The ghosts of my past, present and future better haunt me tonight or don’t waste my fucking time.

Well, maybe next year. You know, if I’m still around.

I have said this before but it bears repeating: give women swords.

Kill Bill Vol. III

What idiot called it a human skull instead of an anxiety cabin.

Some scientist no doubt.

I like my women like my wolves, wandering around the woods at night and could kill me at any moment.

Wow, does that not bring back memories.

What you do at night is between you and the fucking moon.

And God of course.

7857

[b]Camille Paglia

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts. [/b]

Well, as some insist, she is basically a reactionary.

The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.

Great, another “true mission”.

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

Their cant of course.

When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.

And when the fraternity brother drunkenly commits rape?

Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.

And teenage girls?

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

Sure, he thought, even intellectual quacks get it right occasionally.

7858

[b]Robert Macfarlane

The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies – from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space – have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.[/b]

Next up: the whole brain.

Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist – as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.

Nope, never felt exhilarated so far.

The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo’s cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.

Another path to dasein in other words.

We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places - but we are far less good at saying what places make of us…

There’s a reason for that. But [no doubt] mine isn’t yours.

Kimmeridge (n.): 'The light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing’

Well, that’s what it is now.

Reading kept him alive, she said, right till the end.

More to the ploint, it didn’t keep him alive forever.

7859

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

New Year’s Resolutions should be
Kant: categorical and imperative
Schelling: an exercise in self-abnegation
Beckett: mocked out of existence
Camus: a good excuse to smoke[/b]

All of the above, right?

I asked the class what Walter Benjamin means when he says that capitalism is a religion. A student answered with one word: Christmas.

And, now, 365 days a year. Or, next year, 366.

All I want for Christmas is
Leibniz: a perfectly rational language
Hegel: a perfectly determinate negation
Marx: a perfectly dynamic model of labor
Nietzsche: a perfectly good excuse to ignore you clowns

Next up: All we want for next Christmas.

Ancient philosophy: Is this the real world or shadows on a cave wall?
Enlightenment philosophy: Am I awake or am I dreaming?
Modern philosophy: 'Pics or it didn’t happen.

And, even then, only on Twittter.

[b]Holiday Values

  1. Peace
  2. Joy
  3. Goodwill toward all

Holiday Realities

  1. Social anxiety
  2. Financial anxiety
  3. Anxiety anxiety[/b]

You know, under capitalism.

Nothing says “Happy Holidays!” like philosopher socks.

etsy.com/market/philosophy_socks

7860

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.[/b]

And the winner is…

Oh, the laws of physics and of logic…the number system…the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

Yeah, right.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.

But then there’s the stuff that I point to.

You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate.

You meaning, among other things, not me.

You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they’re changing all the time and the changes aren’t always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.

And inside us: dasein.

The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.

Of course lateral is everywhere in the is/ought world.