a thread for mundane ironists

[b] Philosophy Tweets

“I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.” Thomas Henry Huxley[/b]

Not to be confused with the possibility of everything?

“An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” Aldous Huxley

If [here] only up in the didactic clouds.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Aldous Huxley

Yo, Mr. Pinhead! You’re up!!

“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” John Coltrane

Let’s start with this sentence. See where we end up.

“The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.” Heraclitus

With obvious exceptions, of course.

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.” Bertrand Russell

Not much that doesn’t include. Or, for some here, exclude.

great quotes friend!

[b]Natalie Clifford Barney

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.[/b]

Let’s name them.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

Let’s note the exceptions.

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

A hell of a lot more.

I’m fond of human beings, but only one at a time.

And spaced as far apart as possible.

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.

Tell that to them.

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

Unless of course it’s even trickier than that.

[b] Philosophy Tweets

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” Bertrand Russell[/b]

Even here?!

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” Aldous Huxley

Yo, Jimbo!

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” Aldous Huxley

Amen!

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu

Think me and the Stooges.

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.” Frank Herbert

Hard to trump that, right?

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” Frank Herbert

Right, like it’s only one step!

[b]John Green

We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.[/b]

What, not even Donald Trump?

If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?

Me?

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.

I taught him that.

Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn’t going to make me deaf.

Ah, the silver lining.

You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it.

Not unlike all the rest of us.

All salvation is temporary, Augustus shot back. I bought them a minute. Maybe that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one’s gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that’s not nothing.

Come on, it’s practically nothing.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“According to the Buddhist belief, you can go on and on indefinitely, so you see your life as just a brief moment in time.” Pema Chodron[/b]

On the other hand, not much that hasn’t been believed, right?

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” Seneca the Younger

Or any wind.

“If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time.” Pema Chodron

We’ll need a context of course.
After all, it’s not like the news is unfolding in Nirvana.

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” Jim Morrison

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca

As in “keep them doped with it”.

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.” Aldous Huxley

Pad Thai and Pastitsio for example.

[b]Marlene Dietrich

Careful grooming may take twenty years off a woman’s age, but you can’t fool a flight of stairs.[/b]

Trust me, he winced, men too.

You can’t live without illusions, even if you must fight for them.

You know the ones. Or you ought to.

To lose your prejudices you must travel.

Or, sure, instead, take them with you.

Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.

In other words, quote, end quote.

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?

Yeah, what the fuck is going on here?

In Europe, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman - we make love with anyone we find attractive.

Wow, he snorted, let’s try that here!

[b]Nein

You are here. For space and time’s amusement.[/b]

If only all the way to the grave.

Freud. The mother of all fathers.

Let’s make it a Complex.

England and Scotland walk into a pub. And buy each other a point.

The goal in other words.

If it were up to me, friends, all games would end 0-0. And we could go home happy that we all lost together.

Let’s try that here.

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

It’s me here, right?

Don’t make me recycle this tweet.

Don’t make me recycle this tweet post.

[b]Percy Bysshe Shelley

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.[/b]

Yo, Mr. Moral Objectivist! Spit on that!!

In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

Yo, Mr. Moral Nihilist! Spit on that!!

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

You know, if that is actually an option.

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

So they tell me.
Still, as it were.

…a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought…

Want to know mine?

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

You know, on this planet.

[b]Werner Twertzog

I whined to my mother that I was hungry, and she handed me an axe and pointed to the mountains.[/b]

Or, if no mountains, the landfill.

Prophesy is one of the privileges of being old and deranged.

In other words, as ridiculous as they are likely to be.

Based on my reading of Q, the historical Jesus played shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And based on your reading of Q?

They are developing a way to market the screams of child laborers.

Tell me that surprises you.

Yes, your death will surely “own the libs.”

You tell me, Mr Right Wing Fulminating Fanatic.

Nothing matters, apart from the Internet, and anime, I am told, by 20-somethings, male virgins.

Any 20-somethings here? A little help please.

[b]Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Silence is the best response to a fool.[/b]

Nope, no way I’ll go in that direction.
Just ask the Stooges.

You’re something between a dream and a miracle.

Let’s call this the perfect description. You know, for now.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

You know, if I said it.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Somewhere between 0.999 and 1.

Light tomorrow with today!

Either that or set the fucker on fire.

It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden of Eden.

You know, if you’re a pinhead.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Tolkien is important for making monarchy, eugenics, and racism seem respectable, sentimentally.[/b]

You tell me.

It was the patriarchy, not radium, that killed Marie Curie.

You tell me.

Dear America: Why do you not simply ban Republicans from the public sphere?

Or at least from here, screeched Sculptor.

It is important to take your children on expensive vacations so they can spend the entire time on their phones while you work on your laptop.

White Lotus!

And then I said to Tilda, “Swinton, you choose the time and location, and I shall choose the weapons.”

Sex toys?

You will take away my susceptibility to a deadly virus when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing urwrongx1,00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[b]Jordan Ellenberg

Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.[/b]

Anyone here actually know what to divide by? You know, now that James S. Saint is no longer around.

Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.

Well, it happens to a kind of person. Just not you.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn’t occur to you to consider.

Golly, notice how he doesn’t provide us with an actual context. Let alone an actual example.
I know: How about you!

Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.

See, I told you.

The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we’d now call mathematics, things we’d now call religion, and things we’d now call mental illness.

Or what I’d call “conditions”.

A math teacher’s least favorite thing to hear from a student is “I get the concept, but I couldn’t do the problems.” Though the student doesn’t know it, this is shorthand for “I don’t get the concept."

Next up: a philosophy teacher’s least favorite thing to hear from a student.

[b]Existential Comics

One thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that smart people can still be dumb as fuck. In fact, having high intelligence does very little to prevent you from being a fucking idiot.[/b]

See, I told you.

“The customer is always right” is just a euphemism for admitting that ownership expects their employees to discard all dignity and self respect if it means earning them a dollar more.

Well, he is, after all, a Commie.

…people are like “you aren’t a real adult, you don’t even own a bed frame”, meanwhile they don’t even own a copy of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” in the original German, so…

Well, he is, after all, a Commie.

…you only have one life to live, imagine wasting it by not doing revenge on your enemies…

Tell me that’s not a good point!

I do believe that, philosophically speaking, one should shut the fuck up 99% of the time.

He means 99.99% of the time, of course.

The “linguistic turn” in philosophy was when one day Ludwig Wittgenstein was like “words, how the fuck do they work?” and philosophers were so pissed off about it they couldn’t think about anything else for like 40 years straight.

And that hasn’t change, right?
I just brought in the part about dasein.

[b]Eugene Ionesco

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying/[/b]

Right, like we won’t need a context here.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Okay, let’s predict something about yesterday.
How about this: iambiguous yammers about dasein, dasein, dasein.

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.

In other words, for some on the day that they die. And, for those rare few, on the day they are born.

To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.

Like mine. Right, Mr. Fulminating Fanatic Objectivist?

When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate “why,” that great “why” is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out.

I know: Invent a God!

I just can’t get used to life.

So, what can’t he get used to now? If anything at all.

[b]Doth

I have said this before but it bears repeating: give women swords.[/b]

Not counting Wendy of course.

If you know someone who is effortlessly happy in the morning, that is a demon. You’re friends with a demon.

And, as you might well imagine, there’s no way in hell I know someone like that.

In honor of George Orwell’s birthday, remember that we don’t have to wait for a dystopian future, we are living in it.

After all, when has it ever not been 1984?

The only thing I want to do before I die is befriend a crow.

You know the one. Or you ought to.

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

A bummer, right?

Nobody gets turned into vampires on dimly-lit cobblestone streets anymore. Because of cancel culture.

The Commies, right?

[b]Mircea Eliade

The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.[/b]

You know, whatever that means.

Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.

And goddess?

And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.

Unless, of course, there really are no other options.

A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it - the element of the sacred.

Tautologically as it were.

Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product.

Tautologically as it were.
Although here, maybe not.

…to have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe.

Or, sure, start with what it can destroy.

[b]Doth

What you do at night is between satan and your anxiety[/b]

That and not getting caught.

I respect the moon because it controls two of our most precious elements, oceans and wolves.

And, here, the pinheads.

Keep others afraid of you by calling Fall “the harvest.”

Better still, “the final harvest”.

Being sad in a museum is art

Though, oddly enough, not being happy.

Let an ancient demon take over your anxiety for a while. You’ve earned it.

Any ancient demons here?

As your goth personal trainer, I urge you to stay in shape so that you can outrun your horrifying past.

And goth personal trainers here?

[b]Peter Watts

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.[/b]

They don’t call us naked apes for nothing, right?

I really wanted to talk to her.
I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

Pillow talk no less.

Maybe your empathy’s just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you’re only feeling yourself, maybe you’re even worse than me. Or maybe we’re all just guessing.

And then it’s maybe all the way down.

How do you say ‘We come in peace’ when the very words are an act of war?

With a straight face I’m guessing.

[b]“My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That’s how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin’ replicate
But brain’s got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.

• The R-Selectors, Trunclade”[/b]

Pure poetry.

…but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

On other hand, not much hasn’t already been lost here.

[b]God

“All men are created equal.” A man who owned 600 other men.[/b]

Wow, a Founding Father!

It took 3.5 billion years for life to evolve into something smart enough to destroy itself.

But that’s just on this planet.

You have a right to your opinion but it’s wrong and you’re stupid.

Yo, Mr. Fulminating Fanatic! Do I have a right to mine?

The best thing most of you can do to help the Earth is to start biodegrading.

Now, that’s the God some know and love!

Out of curiosity, where were you all thinking of moving after you’re done destroying the Earth? Because I assume you’ve thought that through.

Well, I’m sure Elon Musk has. So why worry?

Millions of years from now the next “intelligent” species will destroy itself by burning fossilized people. And I’ll laugh and laugh.

Well, He is loving, just and merciful, right?