a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses: your problem.[/b]

Well, unless they are white and have marketable skills.

Unsubstantiated claims. Not just for metaphysics anymore.

Trumpworld!

The truth, as we know, hurts. But this shit will kill you.

And maybe even literally soon.

Cogito. Ergo. No.

Or nein if you prefer.

To report a lie: press 1.
A mistruth: press 2.
An alternative fact: press 3.

Ah, the brave new world we now live in.

We regret to inform you that the monster under your bed has moved. Into the Lincoln Bedroom.

Wow, and how far can that be from the Oval Office?!

[iambiguous]

[b]Shirley Jackson

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.[/b]

Aside from being preposterous, let’s critique this.

I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

And, with any luck, slowly.

All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.

He thought: Of course you would risk being shot at by the Secret Service.

When shall we live if not now?

Starting tomorrow for example.

Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.

Even if you die peacefully in your sleep.

I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman’s page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.

You know, in a Trumpless world.

[iambiguous]

[b]Karl Marx

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.[/b]

I’ll calculate mine if you’ll calculate yours.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Come on, tell me that is not all about dasein.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

I know, let’s call this the “corporate media”. And, I’m sorry, Mr. Trump, but that includes the New York Times.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Let alone a Leninist.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Not to mention the opiate of the people.

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?

Well, for some, of course, it is nothing short of goddamn everything.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stephen Fry

Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen.[/b]

I was a terrible parent myself. And, indeed, extremely well-educated.

Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.

Or, sure, laughing with us.

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

He thought: Why does this confuse me?

I am magnificently prepared for the long littleness of life. There is diddley-squat for me to look forward to. Zilch, zero, zip-all, sweet lipperty-pipperty nothing. The only thought that will give me the energy to carry on is that someone has a life which would be diminished by my departure from it.

Nope, nobody here, I suspect.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He tabled the motion and chaired the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.

I got one: dasein!

…Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It’s that kind of fight. And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion.

And then there’s the part I focus on here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=186929

[iambiguous]

[b]Carson McCullers

For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war. [/b]

Then there are those who not only know who they but who we are too. Fine, but why do they all flock here?

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

I know that I did.

…while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world…

On the other hand, this sounds more like it’s true than it may actually be.

The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Just enigmatic enough to be nearly profound.

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

Though not necessarily from a different gender. Or not anymore.

Son, do you know how love should be begun? The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: A tree. A rock. A cloud.

And a dog of course. But that’s it.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeanette Winterson

He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it.[/b]

Actually, it has never even occured to me. True story.

…live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.

And then one day, out of the blue, the darker the better.

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole.

Unless of course you do.

Don’t regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

After all, billions of them already have.

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

Not quite sure how to take this, right?

The free man never thinks of escape.

He thought: And now I’m free to think of it all the time.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.[/b]

Or, sure, sit at the bar.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.

Fortunately [for us] that never happens here.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

Clearly not applicable here. Or all the more so.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Even if I did have a choice.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

Of course [as we all know] that never works for us.

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

Works better the other way, doesn’t it?

[iambiguous]

[b]Existential Comics

I heard in the 70s a rogue philosopher found the TRUE link between word and object, but Quine had them killed to keep it from the public.[/b]

Someone please explain this.

Why do you suffer?
Kierkegaard: to test your faith.
Dostoevsky: to become fully human.
Sartre: I don’t know but it’s your fault.

Trump: I don’t know but it’s definitely not my fault.

[b]What is true depends on:

1. correspondence to the world.
2. successful action.
3. coherence to a system.
4. who won the Electoral Collage.[/b]

See if you can spot the alternative fact here.

Nihilism is funny because everyone sort of thinks that it’s obviously true, but at the same time no one believes it in the slightest.

On the count of three: Ha! Ha! Ha!

For conservatives looking for someone to blame for everything now that Obama is gone: I humbly suggest French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

I think we can trump that.

Remember, life is intrinsically meaningless. If you want you can imbue it with your own meaning, but it’s gonna cost extra.

With or without dasein.

[iambiguous]

[b]Thomas Nagel

The question is there, whether we answer it or not.[/b]

On the other hand, it is still after we answer it too. And all that this implies.

Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.

No getting around that, right, Mr. Skeptic?

To put it schematically, the claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.”

Cue [among others] Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A comprehensively reductive conception is favored by the belief that the propensity for the development of organisms with a subjective view must have been there from the beginning, just as the propensity for the formation of atoms, molecules, galaxies, and organic compounds must have been there from the beginning.

I know: HOW comprehensively reductive?

Are there any alternatives? Well, there is the hypothesis that this universe is not unique, but that all possible universes exist, and we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one that contains life. But that is a cop-out, which dispenses with the attempt to explain anything. And without the hypothesis of multiple universes, the observation that if life hadn’t come into existence we wouldn’t be here has no significance. One doesn’t show that something doesn’t require explanation by pointing out that it is a condition of one’s existence. If I ask for an explanation of the fact that the air pressure in the transcontinental jet is close to that at sea level, it is no answer to point out that if it weren’t, I’d be dead.

Let’s just assume that, as with so many other things like this, we really don’t have a fucking clue. As to how. As to why.

But although realism does not add anything to the catalogue of entities or properties that a subjectivist believes to exist in the world, it does hold that certain truths that subjectivists think have to be grounded in something else do not have to be so grounded, but are just true in their own right. After all, whatever one’s philosophical views, so long as there is such a thing as truth there must be some truths that don’t have to be grounded in anything else. Disagreement over which truths these are defines some of the deepest fault lines of philosophy. To philosophers of an idealist persuasion it is self-evident that physical facts can’t just be true in themselves, but must be explained in terms of actual or possible experience, just as it is self-evident to those of a materialist persuasion that mental facts can’t just be true in themselves, but must be explained in terms of actual or possible behavior, functional organization, or physiology. The issue over moral realism is of the same kind.

So, given that, is it or is it not okay to, among other things, abort a human fetus?

[puddlyd]

normal is a setting on my dryer

[iambiguous]

[b]Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.[/b]

That might explain Donald Trump for example.

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

You know, Einstein’s God.

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

Let’s ask Satyr, he’ll know!

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

For example: jokes4us.com/celebrityjokes/ … jokes.html

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

Cue the objectivists.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Any experts here perchance?

[iambiguous]

[b]David Byrne

You may say to yourself: “Well, how did I get here?”[/b]

In other words, as in, “why does anything exist at all?”
Or so I suspect.

The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.

True. And that’s why we have folks like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. You know, among others.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing.

All the way to the bank as it were.

It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

He may be on to something here. Even philosophically.

[b]One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity—but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names— who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language’s primary “civilizing” function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadministrative words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version.

What’s amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control—to be able to read and write—makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We’ve come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us.[/b]

And the next thing you know we’re electing Donald Trump.

As music becomes less of a thing–a cylinder, a cassette, a disc–and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

He thought: fuck that. But then kept it to himself.

[iambiguous]

[b]Olivia Dresher

The more complicated life gets, the more difficult it is to tell truth from lies.[/b]

And now, of course, from alternative facts.

Your essence has nothing to do with the latest technology.

Your “essence”? Yeah, right.

I’m on Twitter not as social media, not as social media at all.

So, is there a way now to actually tell?

What is reality? It is not the latest technology.

On the other hand [for some] it might just as well be.

If only time moved backwards, then I could move on.

Maybe, but there’s still no getting around oblivion. Either the one before you were born or the one after you die.

Nothing is more simple than to say “I don’t know.”

And sometimes, sure, really mean it.

[iambiguous]

[b]Edna O’Brien

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.[/b]

Of course today Trump will just nuke them.

Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch.

Now that’s original.

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

He wondered: Does that still go on?

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

For example, Kid.

We don’t know others. They are an enigma. We can’t know them, especially those we are most intimate with, because habit blurs us and hope blinds us to the truth.

All I’m suggesting is that in some respects we can’t even know ourselves.

It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless.

And then as Woody Allen points out it’s over far too soon.

[iambiguous]

[b]The Dead Author

Existentialism is simple. Heidegger retweeted Nietzsche, who had plagiarized Kierkegaard and blocked Kant, and got faved by Sartre.[/b]

I know: How gullible does he think we are.

Calling depression a “chemical imbalance” without mentioning its social causes is like talking about lung cancer without mentioning smoking.

Indeed, it’s like blaming genes without thumping memes.

History teaches that you can’t change the world, psychology that you can’t change your life, and philosophy that you should try anyway.

In other words, up in the clouds.

The problem isn’t that Trump is breaking the law, but that most of what he does is legal.

Right, Mr. Obama?

Pop philosophy is not a victimless crime.

Much like serious philosophy.

Political science teaches that it’s important not to psychologize politics. Donald Trump teaches that this is bullshit.

On the other hand, it was always bullshit.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.[/b]

True, but, from day to day to day, we don’t live metphorically.

Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.

Fortunately, no one has ever said that of me.

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

On the other hand, it might be.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

In other words, for better or for worse.

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

You mean literally?

I’m a vegetarian.
You’re a what?
I don’t eat meat.
How can you not eat meat?
I just don’t.
He says he does not eat meat.
What?
No meat?
No meat.
Steak?
No…
Chickens!
No…
And what about the sausage?
No, no sausage, no meat!
He says he does not eat any meat.
Not even sausage?
I know!
What is wrong with him?
What is wrong with you?
Nothing, I just don’t eat meat!

Not a cannibal then, right?

[iambiguous]

[b]Alan Moore

As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.[/b]

They still don’t.

Such a small thing to cast such a long & uneasy shadow over the future. For whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: it just won’t be the same.

And not just the part where he grabs their pussy.

I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space and time. I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion.

Well, God still works for most.

There… Poor little things. You see them? Standing with their numbers on their blank, indifferent faces, Nuremberg in miniature, the ranks of painted wooden men… Poor dominoes. Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history’s fingers down it goes.

Trust me, it’s a historical thing.

When reading you have the opportunity to pause for thought & spark your imagination. It develops intellect. Nothing more threatening to a politician than a well read working class.

[I mean, come on, they just put Trump in office]

Things have their forms not only in space, but also in time.

In other words, they tend to come too early or too late.

[iambiguous]

[b]tiny nietzsche

the village green preservation society massacre[/b]

This could mean anything of course but there is no mistaking a truly great albums: youtu.be/NYMA-qlReg0

It’s so cold I’m probably dead.

Much like, “it’s so hot I’m probably in Hell”.

What idiot said there’s a new threat in town instead of the boys are back?

A f–king liberal no doubt. Right, Lyssa?

A group of clones that become self aware is called a val kilmer

With or without that thing on his elbow.

the five stages of abyss:
denial
anger
bargaining
depression
gazing

Let’s think up a sixth.

groundhogs: the wolves are coming

With Bill Murray leading the pack.

[iambiguous]

[b]Haruki Murakami

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.[/b]

Though some guesses will no doubt be better than others.

The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.

I think I know what he means almost as much as I’m sure that you don’t.

The strength I’m looking for isn’t the type where you win or lose. I’m not after a wall that’ll repel power coming from outside. What I want us the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.

Hey, don’t look at me.

Aren’t you afraid of dying?
Not really. I’ve watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

Of course that won’t work for some. In fact it makes it all the worse.

I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.

And then again and again and again.

I feel like I’ve swallowed a cloudy sky

Or: I feel like I’ve swallowed a hurricane.

[iambiguous]

[b]John Berger

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.[/b]

Indeed, and it’s been working now for centuries. And not just her, him too.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

I know: What if that is actually true.

A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.

Sounds like something I would say if I understood what it meant.

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.

Of course there are more technical ways to put it. Even, as some insist, scientific.

Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look.

In other words [no doubt] neither one of them are here.

The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death. The same sense of culmination.

Also, the same sense of oblivion.