a thread for mundane ironists

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9661

[b]Philosopohy Tweets

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” Hannah Arendt[/b]

I’ll bet that’s still true.

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." Hannah Arendt

Yo, Mr. Objectivist! Object please.

“What is most difficult is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it.” Hannah Arendt

If not impossible.

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” Hannah Arendt

Let’s explain that.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” George Orwell

Not unlike the Coalition of Truth.

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.” George Orwell

How about CNN, MSNBC and FOX NEWS?
Same thing?

9662

[b]Mircea Eliade

If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist.[/b]

Only now, thanks to him, it does.

Light does not come from light, but from darkness.

Next up [of course]: what darkness comes from.

The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany… One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.

All the way to the grave, for example.

As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.

Fuck it, he thought, that’s close enough.

It would be frightening to think that in all the Cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one’s destiny lacks meaning.

Of course it doesn’t frighten pood in the least. It’s even possible that nothing does.

For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.

We’ve got quite a few of “those” here, don’t we?
And, no, not all of them are pinheads.

9663

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We were talking about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion. Never glimpse the truth - then it’s far too late when they pass away.” George Harrison[/b]

And the truth for him now?

“I’d rather be a musician than a rock star.” George Harrison

Let’s explore the equivalent of that here, Mr. Objectivist.

“Basically, I feel fortunate to have realized what the goal is in life. There’s no point in dying having gone through your life without knowing who you are, what you are, or what the purpose of life is. And that’s all it is.” George Harrison

Imagine then his reaction to someone like me.

“I’ve got the bad news beat, and my reception is loud and clear.” Neil Young

Crystal as some would say.

“Old ways, it sure is hard to change 'em.” Neil Young

And then the part where the new ways become the old ways.

“I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.” Elvis Costello

Progress let’s call it.

9664

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.[/b]

Hint, hint.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

Not much chance of that. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.

Yo, Satyr! Or, to some here, Mr. Chickenshit.

Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

And, not infrequently, dangerous minds. In, say, one or another Coalition of Truth.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Not unlike philosophy. Surplus labor let’s call it.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

Cue, among others, Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

9665

But you could convince the proto-humans like the Netherlanders who had burial ceremonies and never left the dead without a ceremonial send-off…Hint, hint…you are just a naturalistic Yank moron who cherry-picks anthropological and evolutionary evidence when it suits him…Ancient Greeks were not religious…they did not actually believe in life after death and soul and Gods…hahaa, the mental acrobatics of koooks living in their own private worlds…you are fundamentally identical to SATIRE…atheist???check…naturalistic reductionist???check…scientism???check…bizarre and contradictory anti-rationality…check…hostility to Christianity but not other religions???check…too scared to argue his points with people he knows are not insane idiots???check…smear at a distance, run away or ignore when close???check…the difference???he wants to kills jews and negros and you think Jews are the best thing that happened to you and negros must be worshipped…big fucking difference…like that between a schizophrenic having a negative or positive period…

9666

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Jorge Luis Borges[/b]

You know, the equivalent of trees of knowledge. [-o<

“A person hears only what they understand.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I know, I know, Mr. Pinhead: let’s not go there.

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” George Orwell

Next up: Triplethink in base 12.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Actually, this can get really tricky.

“Few people have the imagination for reality.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

And far, far fewer of them post here.

"My point is, it’s not cut and dried, black and white, good and bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you. " Tracy Letts

You in particular, Mr. Objectivist.

9667

[b]Peter Watts

I don’t understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.[/b]

The meat here in particular.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

Next up: the universe is open.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.

And he’s the narrator.

We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.

You know, going back to the existence of existence itself.

There’s no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.

You know, like mine do here.

Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.

On the other hand, it’s not like anyone has caught me yet.

9668

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson[/b]

Cling to that, iambiguous!

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me” Virginia Woolf

See, didn’t I tell you.

“At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.” Karl Jaspers

I know, I know: I’m here to make sure it isn’t found again.

“A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.” Confucius

Next up: a pinhead.

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Hannah Arendt

Next up: those who never can.

“Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” Howard Newton

Of, for example, back then, the Catholic Church.

9669

[b]Garry Winogrand

Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that’s boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let’s say that an artist deals with banality. I don’t care what the discipline is.[/b]

Of course she didn’t mean it.

What I know bores me.

Next up: what she didn’t know.

If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there.

The George Berkeley of photographers.

All I’m doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn’t a project.

You tell me: project or not:
google.com/search?q=garry+w … 5&biw=1368

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

In other words, make up your own.

You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else–and whichever is better you print.

Like we bang away at it here.

9670

[b]Charles Baudelaire

Nothing can be done except little by little.[/b]

Or, sure, if need be, all at once.

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

Or regresses. Leaps and bounds here.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.

Go figure, right?

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

Go figure, right?

The People adore authority.

Next up: the Masses.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Not to mention the other way around.

9671

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself… " Picasso[/b]

Or, for those like me here, failure?

"If we cannot find a way, we will make one.” Hannibal

The rest as they say is history.

“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

We’ll need a context of course.

“Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.” Edgar Allan Poe.

You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.

“The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Edgar Allan Poe

True enough. If she’s white, right Gwen?

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” Edgar Allan Poe

Don’t look at me.

9672

[b]Carl Friedrich Gauss

There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.[/b]

Though for the objectivists a piece of cake.

Sin2 φ is odious to me, even though Laplace made use of it; should it be feared that sin2 φ might become ambiguous, which would perhaps never occur, or at most very rarely when speaking of sin(φ2), well then, let us write (sin φ)2, but not sin2 φ, which by analogy should signify sin (sin φ)

A little help with this one please.

I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I.

Hint, hint.

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

Just our luck, right?

When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.

Anything you’ve clarified and exhausted here of late?

Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

Obviously.

9673

[b]Nein

A gentle reminder. From ideology: Don’t believe everything you think.[/b]

Or, for some here, anything they think.

Life, I’ve been told, is too German to be short.

Unless, of course, you’re lucky.

Fall. My favorite empire.

Going back centuries now.

I’m just here for the quiet desperation and impotent rage.

It was a normal day…

My advice: If you’re going to let some idiot on Twitter ruin your weekend, make sure it’s you.

Same here. In spades.

No matter how you vote on Sunday. Monday always wins.

Spanning the globe for example.

9674

[b]Emile M. Cioran

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.[/b]

So the least we can do is be good at it.

What do I do from morning to night?
I endure myself.

You know, if that’s an option.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one’s reach.

Next up: what is within one’s reach.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Much like our own, he noted.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others.

Like me, here, eh?

Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

No, trust me: this is an actual frame of mind.

9675

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

My thoughts just had a near-depth experience.[/b]

A fluke let’s call it.

To paraphrase the amazing quote by Don DeLillo — People go into hiding especially when no one’s looking for them.

Actually, I understand this.

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands and change your meds.

Anyone happy here?

You can only be sure that you’re good at English when you read Irvine Welsh and suddenly, after 30-40 pages, you just burst with joy because there’s finally a word that you know, and the word is “THE”.

Explain this please.

The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” is a thousand times better than the book.

And the movie?

Little things in life can make you feel more snobbish and pretentious when your spellchecker underlines the words that you do know exist.

For example: naive.

9676

[b]John Green

Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.[/b]

Note to John:
I’ve given up trying to explain this to them here.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities…

Go figure, right?

When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.

But not you, right?

As I recall, you promised to call when you finished the book, not text.

Never texted in my life, he bragged.

You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints.

Trust me: not always.
But you already knew that of course.

Incidentally, did you know that the whole eight glasses a day thing is complete bullshit and has no scientific basis? So many things are like that. Everyone just assumes they’re true, because people are basically lazy and incurious, which incidentally is one of those words that sounds like it wouldn’t be a word but is.

Any incurious people here? And, no, not just the pinheads.

9677

[b]Werner Twertzog

Those who choose the “road less travelled” are often murdered by paramilitary gangs.[/b]

These days in other words.

Dear America: You train your children into apathy and stupidity the way the Spartans trained their warriors to become invincible in battle.

After all, look at all the pinheads here. And I’ll bet most of them are Americans.

When writing dialogue, simply pretend to be stupid in different ways.

And, no, not just in Hollywood.

Half of Americans are below average in intelligence, and so herd immunity is impossible.

Idiocracy let’s call iot.

James Bond is important for showing that espionage is a branch of the fashion industry.

Yep, yet another one is out there.

Remain vigilant as trees, thoughtful as stones, and as silent as the grave.

Don’t post it in other words.

9678

[b]Bette Davis

You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.[/b]

We’ve all got our own rendition of that.

You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation.

Nope, that didn’t work either.

Getting old is not for sissies.

Cue godot.

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist.

She said looking for a target.

It’s true we don’t know what we’ve got until its gone, but we don’t know what we’ve been missing until it arrives.

If it ever does at all.

One can make more enemies as a female with a brain, I think.

You, phoneutria!

9679

[b]Werner Twertzog

Where is my trillion dollar coin?[/b]

Just what we need, another meme.

Your use of “problematic” is problematic. And that, too, is problematic. It is problematic all the way down.

On the back of the problematic turtle.

“The horror” seems inadequate now, does it not?

Oh, it does indeed.

Dear Americans: Do you regret that you spent the majority of your life working for institutions that you know, at 3AM, are indisputably evil?

Or at lesst by the crack of dawn.

It is not that I hate the U.S.
I love it. I love it very much.
But I love it against my better judgment.

Next up: your country.

If you want to know where you rank in the hierarchy of evil, simply look at your paycheck.

Or the check from the government.

9680

[b]Thomas Ligotti

No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.[/b]

Yo, Maia! Rebuttal please.

Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.

Not unlike godot.

Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone.

Well, as Woody Allen would remind us, not counting all the good things.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

After all, ignorance is bliss.

A: There is no grand scheme of things.
B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity.
C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.

D: cue the pinheads?

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

You know, being optimistic.