a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky[/b]

Back again to this: Genes more or less than memes?

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” Albert Einstein

Let’s research that. Philosophically, in other words.

“Maybe everyone should do what they want; we haven’t tried that in a while.” George Carlin

You know, if they’ll let us.

“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.” Nathaniel Hawthorne

And wouldn’t that be something.

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” Michel Foucault

And definitely what they are.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” Italo Calvino

Baltimore too?

[b]Ludwig Feuerbach

I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.[/b]

Next up: Our truths, not theirs.

It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.

Yeah, whatever.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

Right, like there’s not a No God ideological rendition of that.

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.

Down to zero myself, he thought.

The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence … for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Imagine then him being around our own “present age”.

What yesterday was religion is no longer such today; and what today is atheism, tomorrow will be religion.

Yo, Mr. Objectivist! It’s about you again.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Italo Calvino[/b]

No more than a handful now.

“Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.” Theodor W. Adorno

Right, like this can actually be understood.

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.” Theodor W. Adorno

And do we have these assholes here or not?

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Gilles Deleuze

Start here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296
Then go here: amazon.com/Irrational-Polit … 0961328967

“Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.” Gilles Deleuze

See, didn’t I tell you?

"If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.” Gilles Deleuze

Well, actually, with them, you’re fucked anyway.

Your critique of Feuerbachs work is impressive. If he were alive he would surely come to his senses and pick up Heideggers being in being in a state of being philosophy of being.

[b]George Saunders

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.[/b]

Next up: Just before I die.

American society is uncomfortable with the idea that some people’s lives are difficult past the point of sanity and that they aren’t necessarily to blame. There’s no way you can argue that everyone has a difficult life. This is an incredible culture; the majority of people live in amazing comfort, with real dignity, maybe more comfort and dignity than any other culture in the history of the world. We live relatively safe and sane lives, which, if you’ve ever loved anybody and therefore feared for them, is a wonderful thing. But part of our moral responsibility is to keep in our minds those whose lives are unsafe and insane. In this way, fiction can be like a meditation, a way of saying: Though things are this way for me right now, they could be different later and are different for others this very moment.

So, which side are you on?

I’m not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever.

Hey, like me, he thought!

Look, show your cock. It’s the shortest line between two points. The world ain’t giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It’s what you got.

Next up: penis envy.

I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough—enough accomplishment, money, fame—my neuroses will disappear. I’ve been in this fog certainly since, at least, my own graduation day. Over the years I’ve felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I’ll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It’s a cycle that can go on … well, forever.

Let’s bring kindness back here, he chortled.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.

Communism!!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” Angela Carter[/b]

The assholes especially.

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.” Angela Carter

Though one would hope not all the time.

"From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.” Michel Foucault

Yo, dasein! Steer clear!!

“I’ve never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.” Toni Cade Bambara

On the other hand, that’s where I come in.

“In the last analysis, even the best man is evil.” Friedrich Nietzsche

He means “evil” of course.

“We are always in our own company.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Okay, but some of us actually know this.

[b]Jane Harper

Life out here is hard. We all try to get through the best way we can. But trust me, there’s not a single person here who isn’t lying to themselves about something.[/b]

Or, here, about damn near everything.

It wasn’t as though the farm hadn’t seen death before, and the blowflies didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.

Nature’s way let’s call it.

Sometimes things turn out for the best. And when you end up in the right place, it’s not always helpful to go digging up the road that got you there.

I’ll let ypou know when that happens to me.

She was smiling in every photo, looked truly happy in none.

You know, with practice.

He avoided small talk at the best of times, and this, unquestionably, was a million horrific miles from the best of times.

A normal day for some of us.

And yes, he battled the daily commute to work and spent a lot of his days under fluorescent office lights, but at least his livelihood didn’t hang by a thread on the whim of a weather pattern. At least he wasn’t driven to such fear and despair by the blank skies that there was even a chance the wrong end of a gun might look like the right answer.

Yo, Hollis Brown!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” Virginia Woolf[/b]

No, but, for some of us, we get a hell of a lot closer.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” Anais Nin

Yo, Mr. Objectivist!

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” Niels Bohr

And then the part about dasein.

“Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.” Anais Nin

Unless of course, as with me, it’s too close to call.

“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” Anaïs Nin

Well, that or philosophy.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin

Of course she’s only paraphrasing me paraphrasing her.

[b]Olga Tokarczuk

Man harnesses his suffering to time. He suffers as a result of the past and extends his suffering into the future. In this way he creates despair.[/b]

Cue Dr. Prtichett?

I could feel the huge, unbearable burden of my own body.

Just as, eventually, we all do.

Additional senses will appear: the feeling of lack, the taste of absence, the ability for particular precognition. Knowing what won’t happen. Being able to smell what doesn’t exist.

You know, in all of the additional dimensions.

Sometimes, when a person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which it’s hard to attain in any other state.

Next up: blinding rage.

We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves . . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.

Mine: moral nihilism.
His: value ontology.

The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.

Next up: the new method.

[b]Nein

Don’t worry. There’s always enough disappointment for everyone.[/b]

You know, if that’s something you worry about.

Yes, German words are too long.

Not all of them.

A gentle reminder from March. Every month is the cruelest.

Next up: a gentle reminder from 2020.

Spring is in the air. Please: wear a mask.

At least until the Summer?

Montag: der Tag ohne Ende.
Dienstag: der Tag ohne Eigenschaften.
Mittwoch: der Tag ohne Tag.

Let’s pin down Donnerstag.

Yes, spring is coming. Please don’t tell the poets.

Let’s tell them anyway. And see what happens.

[b]Vilfredo Pareto

It is a known fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.[/b]

Yo, Che?

Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless.

No doubting why Satyr loves this guy.

Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them.

No doubting why Satyr loves this guy.

Society is not homogeneous, and those who do not deliberately close their eyes have to recognize that men differ greatly from one another from the physical, moral, and intellectual viewpoints.

And, nowadays, women and transgenders.

My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry.

Hell, who doesn’t wish that.

Empirical laws have only slight or even no value beyond the limits within which they have been observed to be true.

Right, like that’s a trivial observation.

[b]Werner Twertzog

English departments are important for preventing Joyceans from hurting the general public, I am told.[/b]

Can you imagine if they weren’t around!!

Dear God: Give me serenity.
And thirty-one million dollars.

Thirty-one million dollars?
Uh, pick one: google.com/search?source=hp … gle+Search

Coffee should not involve whipped cream or sweet syrups. It should be a black, bitter foretaste of the day that is to come.

And drunk right out of the pot.

Extroverts are happier because, as all introverts know, they are stupid.

Anyway, this introvert knows it.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, there is no point even trying to make a decent chair.

Not counting recliners of course.

Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Just remember that everything is Caesar’s.

Yo, God!

[b]Emile Durkheim

Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.[/b]

You know, historically, culturally and experientially.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics… The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

You know, for all practical purposes.

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.

In other words, just like they do.

When man discovered the mirror, he began to lose his soul.

Actually, he invented it. But point taken.

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.

Not to mention fractured and fragmented.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

Your context or mine?

[b]Werner Twertzog

With great powerlessness comes great irresponsibility.[/b]

That’s probably a good thing for the chickenshit assholes here.

It is important, for young people, to develop more resilience, so that they can survive longer working hours with lower wages, and chronic, untreated ailments, with no hope for a better future, thus maximizing corporate profits, and goodness, as we all know.

Well, not counting the dumb bastards who voted for that white dude Trump.

Defund the Illuminati.

If not behead them.

There is a nihilism gap in America. There are countless communities with little or no access to Nietzsche.

No way that can still be true, right?

We all get the power grid we deserve.

Remember the Alamo!

Nihilists will be busy this year.

True, but at least it’s not a leap year.

[b]Louise Bourgeois

A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you.[/b]

Not unlike your posts here?

I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.

All genes, no memes, right?

I am a searcher…I always was…and I still am…searching for the missing piece.

What’s that make me then, he wondered glumly.

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

Like me, here?

The subject of pain is the business I am in - to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.

I hear that.

Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.

But: some pasts being less past than others.

[b]Existential Comics

We need to do philosophy so our brains don’t become so filled with worms that we say things like “reality exists objectively, therefore we don’t need philosophers to analyze social problems.”[/b]

[i]That in reaction to this from Richard Dawkins:

“Science is not a social construct. Science’s truths were true before there were societies; will still be true after all philosophers are dead; were true before any philosophers were born; were true before there were any minds, even trilobite or dinosaur minds, to notice them.”

Too close to call?[/i]

Democrats are making it increasingly clear they remain the party of “we should have good guy billionaires in charge of everything”.

No, really.

If a $15 minimum wage were put to a national vote it would win by a bigger landslide than any President since FDR. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a democracy because our representatives only respond to the demands of capital, who do not like to pay workers more money.

No, really.

The billionaires who own the news have the millionaires who report it sit there and tell you with a straight face that you don’t deserve $15 an hour.

No, really.

…the minimum wage should be $100 an hour and you should be legally allowed to punch your boss in the dick once per week…

Actually, I might not go this far myself.

My response to the people saying you should never celebration someone’s death: “lmao shut the fuck up.”

The right deaths especially.

[b]Ernest Cline

No matter where you go, there you are.[/b]

And, for a few of us, then some.

Over the past five years, I’d worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.

How about you?

These tiny creatures weren’t worth any experience points if you killed them. I’d checked.

Mostly Kids.

You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

Either that or waiting for godot.

Like nearly every race of evil alien invaders in the history of science fiction, the Sobrukai were somehow technologically advanced enough to construct huge warships capable of crossing interstellar space, and yet still not smart enough to terraform a lifeless world to suit their needs, instead of going through the huge hassle of trying to conquer one that was already inhabited—especially one inhabited by billions of nuke-wielding apes who generally don’t cotton to strangers being on their land.

Hell, that could be Earth, right?

Surely, you must be joking, Aech said.
No, I am not joking. And don’t call me Shirley.

That one again.

[b]Doth

Women are legally allowed to commit a little murder today[/b]

Still, just out of caution, try not to get caught.

Goth foreplay is reading to each other about the occult while secretly planning each other’s murder.

Imagine then actually fucking.

Take a moment to apologize to your body for your brain’s bullshit.

Again in other words.

If you’re happy and you know it, that will pass.

You know, if you’re doing it right.

I exist & unfortunately that is something I’m going to have to deal with the rest of my life.

Not to worry, it’s perfectly normal.

Being able to avoid human interaction should be a basic human right.

Unless you count what we do here.

[b]Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness.[/b]

His work, sure.

When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.

Can’t argue with that, right?

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

And bottoms.

The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work.

Or, here, our posts?

There are some things in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is essential.

Vaguely as it were.

Everybody has their reasons.

Even polishyouth and ecmandu.
Scary, isn’t it?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

March 2020: Martin Heidegger/Being and Time
March 2021: Jean-Paul Sartre/Being and Nothingness[/b]

And getting more and more nothing all the time.

March 2020: Kierkegaard
March 2021: Schopenahuer

A leap of bad faith?

Facebook: It’s Monday and I’m walking the dog!
Instagram: It’s Monday and I’m having pizza for lunch!
Twitter: It’s Monday, the void is ascendant, and my tortured soul vibrates with the horrors of undead hopes and dreams.

You know, the other Twitter.

Schopenhauer + Sartre as graffiti: “LIFE IS PAIN”

And then you die.

Sure sex is cool, but have you ever read something you’ve written and thought it was pretty good?

Repeatedly, for example.

[b]Define ambiguity.

“The point of ambiguity is that it can’t be defined.”

This 12-year-old’s test answer suggests that the middle schools are teaching too much
a) Derrida
b) Quine
c) Sade[/b]

Uh, Yes?