a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jordan Ellenberg

There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about.[/b]

Either that or mistaking the either/or world for the is/ought world.

If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don’t worry—probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else’s. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That’s how conspiracy theories work.

Just out of curiosity, who designs them?

We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study if things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.

Next up: we tend to teach ethics as…

Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying “huh,” but rather making a firm assertion: “I’m not sure, this is why I’m not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.” Or even more: "I’m unsure, and you should be too.

Hint, hint, Mr. Objectivist.

Excellence doesn’t persist; time passes, and mediocrity asserts itself.

Well, unless you’re in the Coalition of Truth.

Mark Twain is good on this: It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.

That sound you hear is Ayn Rand spinning ferociously in her grave.

[b]Existential Comics

Me, solving Zeno’s paradox once and for all: “obviously it can go more than halfway there. Stupid.”[/b]

You know, “for all practical purposes”.

Normalize basing your entire philosophical outlook on a misreading of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Or, for some pinheads here, Nietzsche.

…democracy is when you evict people in the middle of a pandemic because nine unelected judges think some dead guys from 200 years ago would have wanted that.

Hey, the rule of law, right?

Lord of the Rings is considered a fantasy because the trees win the battle against industrialization.

Or was that Harry Potter?

It’s not that “nothing matters”, it’s just that 99% of things you are forced to pay attention to are basically stupid bullshit that no one actually cares about, and everyone knows it.

Yeah, that.

I know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but if you consider yourself to be on the left politically, you are actually not required to be obsessed with every little thing AOC does.

On the other hand, he insisted, she is drop dead gorgeous.

[b]Eugene Ionesco

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.[/b]

[i]I’ll try to imagine pood and his ilk understanding this.

Nope, nothing yet.[/i]

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Spiritual needs. Right.

I am not capitulating.

Me, I’ never stop thinking about it.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

To the best of my own recollection, I never read an entire play of his. Though not for the reason most will suspect.

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers…

Some just funnier than others.

It’s not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it’s mankind.

That and Wendy Darling.

[b]Doth

Give Britney the beating hearts of all those who have wronged her.[/b]

Or chop off their dicks?

I reject the notion that we have free will. None of us decided to be here.

You know, to the best of our recollection.

Ask your doctor if being perceived is right for you.

Or your BFF.

I just want to be rich enough where I never have to be seen in public again.

Welcome to the club?

In honor of Mary Shelley’s birthday, rise from the dead each morning and be the monster you’ve always wanted.

Not unlike I am here.

If someone asks how you’re doing, just say “we live in an endless hell” and then they’ll leave.

Or “foe” you.

[b]Petrarch

Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.[/b]

Something that people actually believe!

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

Women too.
On the other hand, here, that’s where I come in.
Just ask the Stooges.

Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence…

Perhaps in here too.

Man has not a greater enemy than himself.

Let’s note all the exceptions.

You keep to your own ways and leave mine to me.

You know, in the best of all possible worlds.

For though I am a body of this earth, my firm desire is born from the stars.

Little did he know!

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

French literature: The devil wanted me to do it
British literature: The devil begged me to do it
German literature: The devil paid me to do it
Russian literature: I am the devil and I didn’t do it![/b]

American literature: nytimes.com/books/best-sell … r-fiction/

Your philosophical hero at age
12: Ziggy Stardust
16: Zarathustra
20: Foucault
24: Deleuze
28: a bot that retweets every tweet with the word Deleuze

At my age: godot.

Freud: It’s not you, it’s your id
Marx: It’s not you, it’s your alienated labor
Levinas: It’s not you, it’s your Other
Twitter: It’s you

In 280 characters or less.

Volume 1 of Marx’s Kapital was published 154 years ago today in Hamburg. You can buy the first edition from an Austrian Antiquariat, but it’ll cost you US$ 304,095.11.

If only promethean75 were still around to take advantage of it.

Plato: Leave the cave
Heidegger: Leave the metropolis
Nietzsche: Leave me alone

iambiguous? You tell me.

Philosophy begins
Plato: in confusion
Aristotle: in wonder
Kierkegaard: with dread
Sartre: when Che lights your cigar

Really, Che lit his cigar.

[b]Peter Watts

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.[/b]

Or, here, in dealing with the fulminating fanatic pinheads.

If you can see it, chances are it doesn’t exist.

And, no, not just your own “personal experiences” with God.
Well, unless of course you can actually prove them.

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

Unless they’re, what, defective?

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune’s orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon’s touch.

Of course you and your abyss might be different.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view’s distorted.

And, no, not just in Flatland.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can’t imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn’t even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can’t quite put your finger on.

Let’s call them Kids then.

[b]God

I’m out of ideas.[/b]

Again in other words.

I care more about the outcome of sporting events than any other aspect of human existence.

So, by all means, pray for the home team, chump!!

Spoiler alert: everyone dies at the end.

Of course it’s the spoiler after this that the faithful cling to.

It’s a fucking mask, people.

Think of it as Halloween 365 days a year.

There’s only one answer to the question “Can people really be this dumb?”, and that answer is yes.

If not definitely.

9/11 takes Me back to a simpler time when America fought terrorists instead of electing them.

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

[b]Garry Winogrand

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.[/b]

Their facts not ours.

I photograph what interests me. I’m not saying anything different.

Another mysterious fact clearly described?

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

You tell me: google.com/search?source=un … =615&dpr=1

I have no expectations. None at all.

I do have a few myself.

I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

Whatever that means.

In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.

Or even something else altogether.

[b]God

Human history’s great if you like true crime.[/b]

On the other other hand, when it comes to crime, He did create us.
Cue Rabbi Kushner?

One day no one will be left to look back on all this and laugh.

That works for me.

You really are just a total disgrace as a species.

And He should know.

When does life begin?
When you leave Texas.
Except Austin.

You tell me.

“Working in mysterious ways” is functionally indistinguishable from “fucking up”.

See, I told you.

When you do it it’s a murder. When I do it it’s a miscarriage.

See, I told you.

[b]Charles Baudelaire

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?[/b]

If he were still around, we’d tell him.

The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

You know, if you’re foolish enough to believe in the devil.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

So, how’s that going for you?

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.

So, sure, why not just call them that.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

He suspected that there might be exceptions.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

He suspected that there might be exceptions.

[b]God

If you think I’m pro-life you’ve never read the Old Testament.[/b]

I smell a new thread.

Abortion should only be permitted in cases of rape, incest, and when the woman chooses it.

God the insufferable Liberal!

Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the world’s oceans, ecosystems and atmosphere.

And damn clever of them to include us in on it.

Human beings are the best thing that ever happened to mosquitoes.

Not to mention, say, viruses?

Human stupidity is rapidly mutating into many other strains of stupid which are far stupider and can inflict even more stupid damage on the stupid world.

It was a normal day…

You know what I hear also works against COVID is cyanide.

Or a bullet in the brain.

Well, the deluge of views seems to be over.

Last week at this time this thread had about 490,000 views. Today is has 832,747.

WTF?!!

If it were a computer glitch then it would seem other threads here would experience the same “surge”.

Any speculation on what’s “behind” it?

For example, remember this exchange from the Desperate Degenerate Support Group thread.

As you might well imagine there is almost no possibility of me having a “fan base” here. Rather than following me most would prefer that I just remove myself from ILP altogether.

You know, with their Precious Self on the line.

Note to promethean:

It’s been a while. And you know where that will take some here…

[b]Carl Friedrich Gauss

The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.[/b]

Well, at least until someone actually finds it.

Mathematicians stand on each other’s shoulders.

In a maner of speaking.

The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.

Astrology, right Fixed Jacob?

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

Please, don’t get them started!!!
Here for example.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

Next up: in the sense of the ethicists.

Ask her to wait a moment…I am almost done.

Let us know how that works out for you.

[b]tiny nietzsche

shout out to people that are sleeping[/b]

And dreaming of better days.

fuck me up, fall equinox

Anyone here get fucked up?

you are in his dms. I don’t believe I exist. we are not the same

You tell me.

slept in my john cage t–shirt and had 4’33" of silence

Of course who wouldn’t?

keys, wallet, phone, despair

Then out the door.

abyss in, abyss out

Repeat as necessary.

[b]John Green

I go to seek a Great Perhaps.[/b]

And, sure, why not here.

And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future-you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

And, as likely as not, you get this: youtu.be/KUwjNBjqR-c

We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think we are invincible because we are.

No, make that

I dislike the phrase ‘Internet friends,’ because it implies that people you know online aren’t really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.

Next up: “internet foes”.

Pain demands to be felt.

Mine owns the patent on it, he sneered.

Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.

Perhaps the biggest side effect of them all.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it turns out I was the abyss the whole time[/b]

You know, on this side of the grave.

shout out to your crippling anxiety

But only if it deserves it.

laughing my fucking abyss off

Again, for example.

don’t hate the poetry, hate the poet

Or, here: don’t hate the post, hate the poster.

looks in mirror “explain yourself”

Nope, nothing yet.

this void isn’t big enough for the both of us

How about now?

[b]Sally Rooney

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.[/b]

How about your real life?

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.

Okay, once and for all: genes or memes?

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

So they tell you.

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

Or the thing you just lug around from day to day out of your head.

Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.

You know, if they’re lucky.

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

And, no, not just the part where you die.

[b]so sad today

what do we want?
serotonin!
when do we want it?
all the time![/b]

On demand for example.

i cancelled myself but unfortunately i came back

Cue the Grim Reaper.

can’t decide if i’m alive

Let alone dead and gone.

powered by bad decisions

If only down to the bone.

that which does not kill you but makes you sleep all day

If only in the best of all possible worlds.

i miss you never contact me again

If not in that exact order.

[b]Tallulah Bankhead

The less I behave like Whistler’s mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.[/b]

Need a little help with this one.

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.

You know, back then.

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

Me? A lead brick I’m guessing.

Here’s a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.

Let alone three or more.

I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late, start without me.

Some did, some didn’t.

I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.

Not unlike the fulminating fanatics here.