Thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
442

Joe Abercrombie from The Blade Itself

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be.

Want to hear mine?

But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.

And, no, not just theoretically.

History is littered with dead good men.

Not including their good men of course.

Broken hearts heal with time, but broken teeth never do.

What part is he missing?

It’s hard to stay calm when you’re terrified, helpless, alone, at the mercy of men with no mercy at all.

Uh, no shit?

I’m trying to put things in the best light, but a turd’s a turd.

Though, as it turns out, some are unflushable.

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What do you mean plan? How is this not a now situation? That sounds like a wager in bad faith.

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Philosophy

“The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.” Milan Kundera

You know, when you can’t afford the operation.

“Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.” Antonio Machado

New thread?

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.” Louis-Ferdinand Celine

See, I told you.

“Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered." Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Right, and what could one possibly have to do with the other?

“We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you.” Dirk Wittenborn

On the other hand: https://youtu.be/uyHM7W8drg4?si=1xl49LhKx_07YJje

“There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.” Arthur Schopenhauer

I suppose even he had good days.

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Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

Then the part where practice makes perfect.

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

Dream on, in other words.

It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.

A hell of a lot better.

On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Let’s make of that what we will.

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.

Try, try again?

Sometimes I feel dead, I told her, and I hate everybody.

She just nodded and walked on.

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John Fowles from The Magus

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

I suspect however that most of us would take our chances with it.

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.

“One shot…missed.”

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

Of course, my own integration is hopelessly fractured and fragmented.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

New thread, gents?

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

Just for the record as it were.

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

On the other hand, I’ll bet you could make them trivial.

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Yuval Noah Harari

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.

Pick two:
Genes
Memes

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.

Uh, theoretically?

History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.

As well they should be, right?

Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.

My guess: lines will be drawn.

Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.

The ruling class approves, of course.

When the faithful are asked whether God really exists, they often begin by talking about the enigmatic mysteries of the universe and the limits of human understanding. ‘Science cannot explain the Big Bang,’ they exclaim, ‘so that must be God’s doing.’ Yet like a magician fooling an audience by imperceptibly replacing one card with another, the faithful quickly replace the cosmic mystery with the worldly lawgiver. After giving the name of ‘God’ to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorces. ‘We do not understand the Big Bang – therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage.’ Not only is there no logical connection between the two, but they are in fact contradictory. The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behaviour.

Next up:astrology.

448

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

And how sick is that?

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

And we must have at least hundreds of them here.

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.

A new thread? Or, perhaps, a new philosophy forum?

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

You first.

What people accept as justification shows how they think and live.

Let’s just leave it at that.

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism.

I doubt that.

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Science

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud." C.G. Jung

With obvious exceptions here, of course.

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.” Peter Singer

How about this: don’t get me started and I won’t get you started.

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” Karl Popper

Uh, theoretically?

“And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.” Mark Haddon

Or something like that.

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.” Bill Bryson

Of course, we still all die in end.

“If you’ve got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn’t prove it.” Robert A. Heinlein

Unless, of course, it’s clouds all the way down.

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No cloud without equipment. No equipment without cloud.

No Biggy without Smally.

They call me…

iamsmallU.S.

(just go with it man)

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God

“Many may have stopped believing in you, but God hasn’t.” Anita R. Sneed-Carter

Of course, that can be the good news or the bad news.

“Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.” C.S. Lewis

Wow, same as in Narnia?

“People often ask: If there’s a God, how can He allow so much suffering in the world? Realize all world suffering you perceive is a mirror to your own psychological self-abuse, gender imbalance, prejudice, poverty, and hunger. You couldn’t even perceive each suffering aspect of external reality if it didn’t already exist within you. Touch and transmute your own psychological suffering, and perceive the world in kind.” Alexandra Katehakis

In other words, There’s practically nothing these folks can’t convince themselves is the God’s honest truth.

“This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ‘spiritual.’ No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.” Sam Harris

Well, click of course. Or is that somehow built right into everything he says?

“God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.” Thomas Deloney

Let’s explain that as best we can.

“When you are convinced that everything that happens is the will of God, what is there to do but wait until God has mercy?” Maaza Mengiste

So, how long have you been waiting…rounded off in years.

452

Joe Abercrombie from The Blade Itself

“Everything frightens me, and it’s well that it does. Fear is a good friend to the hunted, it’s kept me alive this long. The dead are fearless, and I don’t care to join them."

And all you have to do now is just believe it.

"'Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse’ Joseph Brodsky”

On the other hand, perhaps that is actually truer for some than for others.

Different men have different ways, Logen had told him once, and you have to have fear to have courage.

The only thing that some are afraid of, however, is everything.

The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that.

Next up: the equivalent of blood here. In other words, your guess is as good as mine.

Straining and straining, getting nowhere, but unable to stop pushing in case the rock should fall and crush him. Meanwhile, arrogant bastards who were in just the same danger lazed on the slopes beside him saying, ‘Well, it’s not my rock.’

That ever happen to you?
Too?

You have to have fear to have courage.

The part some leave out, of course.

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Philosophy

“The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.” Sam Harris

How about this though, Sam: click.

“Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.” Søren Kierkegaard

I hear that!
That’s what you’re thinking, right?

“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.” Douglas Cupland

Of course, we’ll have to run this by Big Bird.

“Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.” Jorge Luis Borges

Biblical bullshit some call it.

“No lake so still but it has its wave.
No circle so perfect but that it has its blur.
I would change things for you if I could; As I can’t you must take them as they are.” Confucius

At least until the workers of the world unite around Donald trump.

“Anyone who says ‘Trust me’ is the last motherfucker you should ever trust.” R.D. Ronald

Let’s list all the exceptions. You know, before it’s too late.

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Except that something exists.

Every sin is like the first.

Every failure to apply instead of mask recognition…adds another drop that poisons the entire well (that is One).

And also implies it is still here…as if never poisoned. It is not what goes in to the well that defiles it—and nothing comes from it but the good, beautiful, and true.

We can never remove the poison. We can only keep returning to the undefiled well.

Our discourse is not their discourse.

Next up: Biggy continues ignoring me.

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Meaning

“When you put together deep knowledge about a subject that intensely matters to you, charisma happens. You gain courage to share your passion, and when you do that, folks follow.” Jerry Porras

Indeed! Just look at my following here! 8)

“…when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.” Voltaire

Any farmers here?

“What does this beauty or this music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?’ In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.” Helen Keller

On the other hand…

“All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we’re afraid to teach them.” Roberto Bolaño

You tell me.

“She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.” Elizabeth Bowen

Ah, the good old days!

“Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.” Ray Bradbury

Actually, it’s still rather important to some of us.

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It was written in the book of life that I would be correct.

457

John Fowles, from The Magus

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

No, really.

I want to tell you what’s really happened.
Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

I hear that.

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extroverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

Little does he [or we for that matter] know…

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

Um, maybe?

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?
For fun?
Fun! He pounced on the word. Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

What a novel idea, right?

He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

Next up: ‘very poor’.

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Ethics explainer: Nihilism

On the other hand, to what extent then might Joker be seen as either a sociopath or a psychopath? Sociopaths center everything around their own narcissistic wants and needs. And psychopaths in particular are problematic here because how can they be held responsible for something that is largely “beyond their control”?

And because he is a cartoon character inhabiting a cartoon character world, how seriously can we take him?

Any little people here?

Great, that’s just what the world needs, a “populist” understanding of nihilism.

On the other hand, I have never placed as much weight on the meaning of life as on all the things in life that can bring you enormous fulfillment and satisfaction from day to day. That’s meaningful in and of itself.

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I just had a cup of cheer, composed of “chicken and egg” wave nog.

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Yuval Noah Harari

Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

See, I told you.

One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world and think in absolute terms.

See, I told you.

Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.

Just as Adam Smith predicted, right?

At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.

Though a bit unlike it too.

Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

Next up: These guys: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/

Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.

On the other hand, how soon?

461

I can read you like a book reads you.