a thread for mundane ironists

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10241

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I am I plus my circumstances.” Jose Ortega y Gasset[/b]

Among other things, cue dasein.

“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Ah, the pinheads!

“The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Next up [of course]: the philosopher.

“Indeed, the whole of our society may be likened to a black comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Actually, that’s not quite pessimistic enough for some of us.

“If you want to reach a large audience appeal to idiots.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Got a few of them here, he groused.

I like people who shake other people up and make them feel uncomfortable." Jim Morrison

He’d love me then.

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It’s not delivery, it’s Adorno.

I’ll have what he’s having, as long as it’s not global oppression.

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10243

[b]Joe Abercrombie

If a man seeks to change the world, he should first understand it.[/b]

Or fail to understand it the least.

When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.

You tell me.

Amazing the rubbish idiots will believe if you shout it loudly enough.

Even after they promise to leave us.

Conscience and the cock-rot are hardly equivalent, snapped Lorsen.
Indeed, said Cosca, significantly. The cock-rot is rarely fatal.

Never killed anyone here, he suspected. Though, sure, it might have.

To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock

My guess: you’ll make of this what you will.

Call it art, you can get away with anything.

Or, here, call it philosophy.

10244

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” Arthur Schopenhauer[/b]

You know, being optimistic.

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Arthur Schopenhauer

I know, I know: what if that was true here!

“After your death you will be what you were before your birth.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Uh, nothing at all?

“It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.” Victor Hugo

Their lies of course.

“Necessary illusions enable us to live.” Ingmar Bergman

God on down.

“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” Victor Hugo

So, what’s that make The New ILP then?

10245

[b]Thomas Ligotti

Whatever else we may be as creatures that go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it, we are meat. A cannibalistic tribe that once flourished had a word to describe what they ate. That word translates as “the food that talks.” Most of the food that we have eaten over the course of human history has not talked. But it does make other noises, terrible sounds as it is converted from living meat to dead meat on the slaughterhouse floor. If we could hear these sounds every time we sat down to a hearty meal, would we still be the wanton gobblers of flesh that most of us are now?[/b]

Uh, cue dasein?

As a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: “If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.”

Indeed, I’m not iambiguous here for nothing.

And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no more.

Let’s exchange lists.

…this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.

You’ll be there or you won’t.

In a world without a destination, we cannot even break ground on our Tower of Babel, and no amount of rush and hurry on our part will change that.

Of course, that won’t stop you, right?

…reason is merely the mouthpiece of emotion.

Bullshit sure. Unless of course it’s not.

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[b]Who?

We love you even though you’re as passive aggressive as a woman.[/b]

¡Speak for yourself!

10247

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I remember those days with Bergman with great nostalgia. We were aware that the films were going to be quite important, and the work felt meaningful.” Max von Sydow[/b]

Wow! Just like in Hollywood!! :laughing:

“All of this is really impossible, in the way that it is really impossible that monkeys should by chance type out a copy of Hamlet.” Hilary Putnam

Or stage a production.

“…science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position—and no end to it is in sight—is that of having to philosophise without ‘foundations’.” Hilary Putnam

And, if nothing else, I’m here to remind you. And, of course, her.

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a God.” Aristotle

Next up: the wild God.

“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” Jorge Luis Borges

Rebuttal please, Mr. Pinhead.

“Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” Aristotle

Right. Like it cannot possibly be a profoundly complex intertwining of both. Besides, how can a destiny be reconciled with choice?

10248

[b]Bart D. Ehrman

You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.[/b]

Tell that to the pinheads.

In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says,“Whoever is not against us is for us.” Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?

:-"

The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.

He means “human all too human” of course.

Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable.

He means your own “private and personal” early Christianity of course.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus–that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes.

On the other hand, anything for a buck.

Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and–most striking of all–his beliefs were not ours.

Right, like that will stop the pinheads here from preaching their gospels.
Starting of course with her.

10249

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.” Jorge Luis Borges[/b]

Mine always is. At least so far.

“The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.” Herodotus

And, no, I’m sure, not just me here.

“Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.” Albert Camus

Another rendition of this perhaps: youtu.be/Ylu0O0_rTMI

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” Albert Camus

I know that I once did.

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” Albert Camus

Nihilism for example.

“Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily.” Epicurus

We don’t call him Epicurus for nothing.

10250

[b]Laurie Anderson

Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into words.[/b]

Much like performance posting here.

Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.

Mars as often as not.

I’m not usually where I think I am. It’s kind of spooky.

Like, for example, I’m not here.

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an adaptation of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he’s pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That’s an interesting way of saying No.

Actually, a banjo would seem to suggest maybe. On the other hand, a bagpipe…

People are really suffering these days. There’s a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.

Isn’t it still the America Dream? :laughing:

As an artist I’d choose the thing that’s beautiful more than the one that’s true.

Let’s debunk this.

10251

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing" Epicurus[/b]

A little of what?

“The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.” Walter Cronkite

That and kowtowing to the advertizers.

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” Machiavelli

Ah, social media.

“A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.” Mark Twain

Important to bring this one back around.

I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along." Walter Cronkite

The shock, right.
Next up: Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” William of Ockham

Much less divided.

10252

[b]Laurie Anderson

Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into words.[/b]

Much like the performance posting here.

Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.

Mars as often as not.

I’m not usually where I think I am. It’s kind of spooky.

Like, for example, I’m not here.

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an adaptation of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he’s pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That’s an interesting way of saying No.

Actually, a banjo would seem to suggest maybe. On the other hand, a bagpipe…

People are really suffering these days. There’s a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.

Isn’t it still the America Dream? lol

As an artist I’d choose the thing that’s beautiful more than the one that’s true.

Let’s debunk this.

10253

[b]Steven Pinker

You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.[/b]

Let’s call this the either/or world.

If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.

Let’s call this a general description intellectual contraption.
And a ghastly one at that.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor favor to those of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.

And I’m certainly here as a reminder of that, Mr. Objectivst.

The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.

Go nature!

Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.

Our free enterprise, not theirs.

The final word on the political non-implications of group differences must go to Gloria Steinem: “There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone.

Let’s list the jobs that do.

10254

[b]Nein

Spring. The German words growing longer again. The adjectives, sprouting fresh and ever more terrible endings.[/b]

Not counting Dasein of course. On the other hand, dasein…

The bad news: your tweet won’t change the world.
The worse news: some other idiot’s might.

Cue Musk cueing Trump.

You can have love. You can have peace. You can have cheap fossil fuels. But not all three.

Of course, that’s just common sense now.

Sorry. There is a tomorrow.

Cue, among others, Vladimir Putin. You know, to change that.

[b]Signs that Twitter is adversely affecting your mental health:

  1. You’re on Twitter.
  2. You’re okay with that.[/b]

[i]Or:
Signs that ILP is adversely affecting your mental health:

  1. You’re on ILP.
  2. You’re okay with that.[/i]

Sorry, sir. We’re all out of context.

Let’s put that in context.

10255

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspects of reality: statistics.[/b]

Cue Disraeli: "There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created new conditions and problems that none of the existing social, economic, and political models could cope with. Feudalism, monarchism, and traditional religions were not adapted to managing industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing nature of the modern economy. Consequently, humankind had to develop completely new models—liberal democracies, communist dictatorships, and fascist regimes—and it took more than a century of terrible wars and revolutions to experiment with these models, separate the wheat from the chaff, and implement the best solutions. Child labor in Dickensian coal mines, the First World War, and the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 constituted just a small part of the tuition fees humankind had to pay.

History let’s call it.

As of 2016, humankind indeed manages to hold the stick at both ends. Not only do we possess far more power than ever before, but against all expectations, God’s death did not lead to social collapse. Throughout history prophets and philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan, all law and order would vanish. Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and His all-encompassing plans. God-fearing Syria is a far more violent place than the atheist Netherlands.

Make of this what you will of course.

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

Some humans anyway. For the rest there’s pop culture, mindless consumption and reality TV.

True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.

A small group of us here thank god.

The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.

That’s what Wall Street is for.

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[b]Werner Twertzog

Most people get Monkeypox in childhood, from being kissed by elderly relatives, and not from that incident at summer camp, as we all know.[/b]

This thing: washingtonpost.com/health/2 … eypox-faq/

Death awaits us all, John Boy.

Richard Thomas? He’s still around.

It is important to find love, so you can also experience loss.

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

No, Elton John—if that is your real name—astronauts cannot burn down the dreams of Erewhon.

You tell me. Or not of course.

The black hole at the center of the galaxy beckons.

And that means all of us.

The chickens come home to reap what they have sown, as we all know.

What, even the free range chickens?

10257

[b]Emile M. Cioran

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.[/b]

Not all that different from their place.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

And certainly between you and I.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

If not downright dread eventually.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

Hell, that practically makes me a star here.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

If only for 15 minutes.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

The ultimate fantasy as it were.

10258

[b]Existential Comics

To everyone freaking out about Elon Musk buying Twitter, you realized that he’s just a slightly dumber version of the billionaire vampires that owned it already, right?[/b]

Anyone here dare doubt that?

…is it just me or is anyone else starting to think this Godot fella is a no show

He means godot of course. A common mistake however.

According to the ancient stoic philosophers, you can lead a happier life if you just chill the fuck out once in a while.

Right, in this world!!!

It feels like Israel is abandoning even the pretense of morality.

Well, their kind did murder Christ, right?

“That’s not what the Founding Fathers wanted”…my dudes the whole idea of setting up a democracy is that the people can decide for themselves.

In other words, fuck the Constitution. Or boot it around like a political football.

This should be an ice cold take really but Bill Gates has had a far worse effect on the world than Elon Musk.

Define “ice cold take”?

10259

[b]John Malkovich

And if you say a word about this over the radio, the next wings you see will belong to the flies buzzing over your rotting corpse.[/b]

We all have our own versions of this, right? Celebrity or not.

I think 1973 was the nadir of fashion. When you watch the coverage from that era, you’re struck by the astonishing ugliness of the clothes.

To me, fashion is a t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Never a nadir there.

You know, I’m really not interested in someone telling me that something’s good or bad.

Well, except for fashion, of course.

I don’t have a great intellect, and I can’t compete with people who do. I feel certain things. And all I know, and all I can do, is what I feel.

My kind of honesty.

As an actor there are no drawbacks.

Especially for the very, very, very successful ones.
On the other hand, it can make death all that much more unbearable.

You can be a mason and build 50 buildings, but it doesn’t mean you can design one.

We all know the equivalent of that here of course.
Okay, not counting you, Mr. Pinhead.

10260

[b]Doth

I wasn’t built from millions of years of stardust to “reply to an email”[/b]

Or post here of course

The best compliment you could ever give a woman is “you look like you could scare weak men.”

Hell, that’s not even in my top ten. Or wouldn’t be if I had one.

I’m in a threesome with death and being alive

Fucked coming and going.

I’m a real person which is fucking devastating

Or sure as shit can be.

When I was a kid everyone told me I had an old soul but it was just debilitating anxiety.

Yep, they’re still easily confused.

Horse girls and cat ladies get all the attention but what about crow women

Any crow women here?