a thread for mundane ironists

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4801

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy began when Socrates had questions for everything, but it really went downhill when Plato said he had the answers.[/b]

In other words, Mr. Objectivist, the only answers. And not necessarily yours.

Kids these days. Since when did it become “cool” to act in such a way that, at the same time, you cannot will to become a universal law?

On the other hand, youth is still wasted on the young. We just never thought it could get this bad.

[b]What have I learned from philosophy?

  1. To question everything.
  2. All I know is I know nothing.
  3. The victory of communism is inevitable.[/b]

Maybe, but it still doesn’t explain Donald Trump. Let alone his hair.

In other words, I don’t think Kepler meticulously charted the stars so one day people could play Angry Birds on the toilet.

Now, now, let’s keep an open mind.

People who bash philosophy because it isn’t “useful” and hold up science because it gave us the iPhone don’t understand why we do either.

Of course there’s always the possibility that they do.

Nietzsche seems like the kind of guy who would quote himself in daily conversation.

Or, sure, misquote himself.

4802

[b]Thomas Nagel

Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that’s nothing to worry about. Perhaps we can recognise it and just go on as before.[/b]

Like, if, as a whole, it is meaningless, we would have much choice.
Well, except that one.

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

I know: Let’s call this God.

The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future–though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

I know: Let’s call this God.

In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives.

Not true at all, right, Mr. Objectivist?

I am drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology, or teleological bias, as an account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate. I believe that teleology is a naturalistic alternative that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law.

Natural, maybe, but no less entirely theoretical. Or nearly almost entirely.

Postmodernism’s specifically academic appeal comes from its being another in the sequence of all-purpose “unmasking” strategies that offer a way to criticize the intellectual efforts of others not by engaging with them on the ground, but by diagnosing them from a superior vantage point and charging them with inadequate self-awareness. Logical positivism and Marxism were used by academics in this way, and postmodernist relativism is a natural successor in the role.

Hmm. That must mean my own postmodern speculations are the wrongs one. But then you always knew that, didn’t you?

4803

[b]August Wilson

You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.[/b]

As you might well imagine, I’m the one exception.

Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.

First we’ve got to establish which one you that is.

I ain’t never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over. It ain’t nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

So, sure, I started here. And I fit in fine, don’t I?

When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave room for me.

Like daddy would have let her.

I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.

Though not literally one suspects.

Okay, Troy…you’re right. I’ll take care of your baby for you…cause…like you say…she’s innocent…and you can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child. A motherless child has got a hard time. From right now…this child got a mother. But you a womanless man.

Of course this may or may not be an option for others.

4804

[b]The Dead Author

The birth of the Messiah just proves that fake news didn’t start with Trump.[/b]

Of course some make that claim about the Big Bang.

Love is a bourgeois illusion, but try it anyway.

Or, at the very least, profit from it.

Liberalism: falsely denying there’s such a thing as a ruling class.
Populism: falsely denying you’re a part of it.

Can’t trump that, right?

[b]What the American resistance to Trump will look like:

  1. Twitter.
  2. Hoping people will come to their senses again after the nuclear war.[/b]

Or maybe the working class will rise again. Well, here anyway.

History is pretty clear on two things: 1) right-wing authoritarianism is bad 2) pointing this out isn’t what stops them.

Come on, admit it: Left-wing authoritarianism too.

Bad art lies. Good art makes you believe it.

Wow, that can’t be good.

4805

[b]Zadie Smith

I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.[/b]

I still don’t understand it.

…can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize?

All I can do here is to imagine Mom [mine] reading this.
Nope, nothing.

If my dad hadn’t died young? No way I’d be here. It’s the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That’s our secret fucking strength.

Irony embodied, eh?

I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a very distant point, hovering over it.

He thought: Why the fuck doesn’t that ever happen to me?

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

He thought long and hard: Maybe I shouldn’t go there.

Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we’d all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer.

Nothing at all like that today, right?

4806

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That’s the truest version of our story of eating animals.[/b]

He thought: Not counting chicken, I agree.

I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

Just not here, in other words.

I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember.

True, it’s not always under our control.

I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

Is that laughable or what?

…sometimes you have to put your fears in order…

No, not alphabetically.

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

He means hypothetically.

4807

[b]so sad today

everyone is doing their best, which is terrifying[/b]

Not to worry: I’m not.

let’s check and see if we’re still bad for each other

How about it, Mr. Objectivist?

for fun i like to break my own heart

For fun I’d like to watch her.

masturbating to a self-help audiobook

Well, at least it’s working.

accidentally started thinking about nuclear war while i was getting head

Welcome to Trumpworld?

have your anxiety call my anxiety

Collect of course.

4808

[b]Alan Moore

You see, there’s the way things seemed and then there’s the way things were and one is so often the total reverse of the other.[/b]

Go ahead, try and point this out to someone.

The clothes you’re wearing, the room, the house, the city that you’re in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there’s nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.

Sure, maybe even autonomously.

MADNESS IS THE EMERGENCY EXIT…

Just out of curiosity: Do we have one here?

When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I’d turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I’m sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can’t help feeling that if the two had ever met they’d have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage’s world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?

Obviously: The one with the fewest Turds.

I’m the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain isn’t imaginary.

Someone think that through for me, okay? I’ll owe you.

The disciplines of physical exercise, meditation and study aren’t terribly esoteric. The means to attain a capability far beyond that of the so-called ordinary person are within the reach of everyone, if their desire and their will are strong enough. I have studied science, art, religion and a hundred different philosophies. Anyone could do as much. By applying what you learn and ordering your thoughts in an intelligent manner it is possible to accomplish almost anything. Possible for an ‘ordinary person.’ There’s a notion I’d like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.

Maybe, maybe not. But there are clearly far too many normal people around.
Provided of course you don’t ask me to pin that down.

4809

[b]Haruki Murakami

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.[/b]

Let’s explore the implications of this, okay? :wink:

…most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

Even here?!

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

And sometimes just as badly.

You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.

There must be exceptions though, right?

According to Chekhov, Tamaru said, rising from his chair, once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.
Meaning what?
Meaning, don’t bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.

What if a gun appears in a post? Hell, we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

Not true. Mine did.

4810

[b]John Berger

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.[/b]

With absolutely no exceptions, right?

To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

Let’s actually test this out ourselves, okay?

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.

I know, let’s call this capitalism. Otherwise known as the best of all possible worlds.

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

Hmm…
I’ll have to get back to you on this one.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

Let’s all pretend to understand this.

To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.

One sounding considerable more felicitous than the other.

4811

[b]Alfred North Whitehead

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions.[/b]

Spot the irony here, Mr. Objectivist.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

That and all the stuff they air on the Science Channel. Including the commercials.

My criticism of Hegel’s procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

Much, I suspect, as when James S. Saint does the same thing here. :wink:

Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.

In other words, saying so makes it so.

If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

Cats or dogs. Will this ever be resolved?

The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

Not to mention all the stuff that I talk about.

4812

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think” Hegel[/b]

He’s quoting Satyr of course.

“Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.” Otto von Bismarck

Wow, how clever is that?!

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” Dostoyevsky

Right, like the experience of love cannot itself [at times] be a hell on earth.

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Schopenhauer

He means dasein. Mine though not Heidegger’s.

“Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!” Nietzsche

You know, like he did. If only psycho-somatically.

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

Let’s file this one under, “the sky’s the limit”.
[and then some for folks like me]

4813

[b]Kevin Wilson

Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes, their father told them. Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.[/b]

Next thing you know, the thread is locked.

He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.

Next thing you know, the thread is locked.

What you’ll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.

Trust me: It hardly ever works that way at all.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

Even more so for the terrible philosophers. And [believe it or not] not just the Kids.

She’s got a way of making a man feel guilty for certain things he’d never feel bad about on his own, like watching someone shoot himself in the face.

With both barrels. Right, Lyssa?

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy’s thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland’s five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

That and bank accounts.

4814

[b]P.G. Wodehouse

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.[/b]

Me? Oh, I was definitely loafing.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

And Fate may well be be just another word for everything.

Mike nodded. A somber nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, “So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?”

So, Mr. Historian [probably Turd], just how somber is that?

It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all.

Obviously: Say what?

A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

And that goes double for all the critics of my last groot here.

There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

Or [he said in jest]: There is only one cure for Trump’s hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

4815

[b]tiny nietzsche

no shirt
no shoes
no nihilism[/b]

Me? Hell, you can come buck naked.

thus sext zarathustra

You know, if Friedrich Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé were still around.

What if you’re already shattered, but you’re just waiting for the ice to melt?

Two days from now, right?

#TrumpNoir: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Pisstown.”

Is that supposed to be a joke? :laughing:

All we are saying is give nihilism a chance.

Mine though, not his.

scientists declare “hell yeah, party people!”

Within the laws of nature, of course.

4816

[b]Christopher Bram

Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?[/b]

Well, let’s just say that he didn’t know a lot of things.

Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

True as you need it to be I suppose.

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. It’s why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.

True as you need it to be I suppose.

It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.

Not to be confused with going around and around in circles. Unless of course it is.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

From cover to cover as it were.

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn’t help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

It’s all sub-conscious no doubt.

4817

[b]Alexandre Dumas

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.[/b]

That and the actual options you have.

The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.

Like the differencer between a terrorist and a freedom fighter.

As a general rule…people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.

Let’s file this one under, “whatever works”.

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.

Quote the father or the son.

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

He thought: Too close to call.

Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words—wait and hope.

Assuming of course it’s your God and not theirs.

4818

[b]Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.[/b]

At least not objectively.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

Well, I’ll have to know the title of course.

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

Let’s file this one under, “time will tell”.

I can’t help it when people are frightened, I always want to frighten them more.

Or, for some: I can’t help it when people are terrified, I always want to terrify them more.

Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.

Oblivion does bring that out in some.

We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.

In one hole and out another.

4819

[b]Karl Marx

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.[/b]

Imagine Marx reacting to Trump. No, really, give it your best shot.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Or, sure, maybe not that way.

The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

You know, in theory.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Let’s see how high Trump raises the bar.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Tell us about it!

I am nothing but I must be everything.

Well, he was certainly something.

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.

To be reactionary too. And the rest as they say is history. Ours for example.

4820

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil
Deleuze: Beyond the Reality Principle
Trump: Beyond Depressing[/b]

You know, it that’s actually true.

Trump’s antics are quickly eroding your faith in
a) capitalism
b) democracy
c) the notion that existence has any value whatosever

Come on, we can do better than that.

Social Media and your Delusions of Grandeur
Instagram: I’m an artist!
Twitter: I’m an aphorist!
Facebook: I’m not completely insufferable!

And ILP?

What is the good?
Plato: the true
Kant: willing without contradiction
Nietzsche: I’m going to have to go with glam rock

No way. Nietzsche is New Wave down to the bone.

Kierkegaard: I’m free to be terrified
Sartre: I’m terrified to be free
Nietzsche: Feel free to keep your terribly trite thoughts to yourself

Okay, Kids, weigh in here.

Sartre: It’s hopeless
Beckett: It’s beyond hopeless
Kafka: There’s plenty of hope, infinite hope, but not for us
Camus: Shameless optimists!

Obviously: yet another homage to Trump…