a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Martin Buber

And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.[/b]

And that means what exactly?

Every man’s foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.

And that means what exactly?

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.

Oh, I see the world in Him alright. You bet I do.

Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.

I’m sorry but I just can’t help it: What on earth does that mean?!

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

True, but our deceptions not theirs.

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.

Yes, but it still serve its purpose. You know, for better or worse.

[iambiguous]

[b]so sad today

can’t decide if i hate most things or everything[/b]

Obviously: flip a coin.

your natural beauty is getting on my nerves

Not unlike your natural youth.

when i’m by myself i’m almost ok

Actually, a couple of times I was.

loneliness, because i’m worth it

Can you say that?

i don’t give a fuck but i totally do

I know: You think that will never happen to you.

to be, or not to be? or to be, but extremely reluctantly

Is that even a philosophical question?

[iambiguous]

[b]Thomas Aquinas

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.[/b]

And if it were instead the highest aim of a philosopher…?

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

Or, as others put it, a man is rational to the extent that he agrees with me.

Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.

A simple truth?

…the intention of every man acting according to virtue is to follow the rule of reason, wherefore the intention of all the virtues is directed to the same end, so that all the virtues are connected together in the right reason of things to be done, viz. prudence…

Indeed, all objectivists abide by this. However hopelessly conflicted they are regarding what is said to be prudent.

The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.

Let’s note the part where things get sticky.

Man cannot live without joy. That is why one deprived of spiritual joys goes over to carnal pleasures.

I know that I do.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jean Baudrillard

This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars are so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.[/b]

Anyone here not think this is about America? I mean aside from whether any of it is actually true.

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

On the other hand, let’s face it, perhaps not.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish-fulfillment.

If only their statistics.

It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth, but the fact that there isn’t any—that is to say, the continuity of the nothing… Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgment, in immortality. The only problem is to survive there. For there the irony, the challenging, the anticipation, the maleficence come to an end, as inexorably as hope dies at the gates of hell. And it is indeed there that hell begins, the hell of the unconditional realization of all ideas, the hell of the real.

I stopped at “simulacrum”. Or at least I should have.

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them.

Not only that, but all the way to the bank.

Today…no performance can be without its control screen video…its goal is to be hooked up to itself…the mirror phase has given way to the video phase. What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doing so, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.

Now it’s all digital of course. But no less deeply meaningless.

[iambiguous]

[b]Tom Perrotta

Maybe that’s what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.[/b]

That’s well before the divorce of course.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

On the other hand can it really be that simple?

Once you’d broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

I’ll be sure to let you know if that ever happens.

There’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

And, if we’re lucky, only from the cradle to the grave.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Of course, we’re kind of stuck with them here.

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

How about lying awake in broad daylight too?

[iambiguous]

[b]Gloria Steinem

We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons…but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.[/b]

Let’s decide if that’s better or worse. Though point taken.

Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.

True, but from the wrong people?

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Do they know that?

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Trust me: You can take this too far.

You’re always the person you were when you were born, she says impatiently. You just keep finding new ways to express it.

Well, that sure shoots my narrative to shit. Or is that the good news?

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

With or without a man as it were.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stieg Larsson

When all the media assertions were put together, the police appeared to be hunting for a psychotic lesbian who had joined a cult of Satanists that propagandized for S&M sex and hated society in general and men in particular. Because Salander had been abroad for the past year, there might be international connections too.[/b]

That’s where Putin and Trump come in.

She had discovered that the most effective method of keeping the fear at bay was to fantasize about something that gave her a feeling of strength. She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of gasoline.

Either that or napalm.

Who knows about this?
Just me, the police, the killer, and now you.

Ever had someone say that to you?

Take “no” as an encouragement to redouble his efforts, so it was easier to say “yes” right away.

I used to be like. Or I used to think that I was.

Taking away a person’s control of her own life - meaning her bank account - is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose, especially when it applies to young people. It is an infringement even if the intent may be perceived as benign and socially valid.

And not only because we worship money.

You were difficult enough to catch, Faste said. Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.

A gift that some are born with.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stephen Fry

The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything is blamed on ‘the barbarians’.[/b]

Them and [here] the Kids.

The Hungarians have a wonderful word, said Trefusis. It is puszipajtás and means roughly “someone you know well enough to kiss in the street”. They are a demonstrative and affectionate people, the Hungarians, and enthusiastic social kissers. Do you know young Adrian? you might ask and they might reply, I know him, but we’re not exactly puszipajtás.

What’s the word then for someone you know well enough to fuck in the street? You know, if there is one.

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text — or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

What say you then Mr. True Believer?!

They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumphalism; if I smiled too weakly it might look like a feeble bid for sympathy. If I smiled somewhere in between it would, I knew, look, as always, like plain smugness. Somehow I managed to bare my teeth in a manner that expressed, I hope, sorrow, gratitude, determination, shame, remorse and resolve.

Not unlike the frown when you’re trying to get it just right.

Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made the following entirely endearing remark soon after he had invented the telephone: ‘I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America.

Let’s file this one [obviously] under, “little did he know.”

[b]And please, whatever you do, don’t tell us that what we do, either in love or lust, is unnatural. For one thing if what you mean by that is that animals don’t do it, then you are quite simply in factual error.

There are plenty of activities or qualities we could list that are most certainly unnatural if you are so mad as to think that humans are not part of nature, or so dull-witted as to believe that ‘natural’ means ‘all natures but human nature’: mercy, for example, is unnatural, an altruistic, non-selfish care and love for other species is unnatural; charity is unnatural, justice is unnatural, virtue is unnatural, indeed — and this surely is the point — the idea of virtue is unnatural, within such a foolish, useless meaning of the word ‘natural’. Animals, poor things, eat in order to survive: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have Abbey Crunch biscuits, Armagnac, selle d’agneau, tortilla chips, sauce béarnaise, Vimto, hot buttered crumpets, Chateau Margaux, ginger-snaps, risotto nero and peanut-butter sandwiches — these things have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old greed. Animals, poor things, copulate in order to reproduce: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have kinky boots, wank-mags, leather thongs, peep-shows, statuettes by Degas, bedshows, Tom of Finland, escort agencies and the Journals of Anaïs Nin — these things have nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old lust. We humans have opened up a wide choice of literal and metaphorical haute cuisine and junk food in many areas of our lives, and as a punishment, for daring to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, we were expelled from the Eden the animals still inhabit and we were sent away with the two great Jewish afflictions to bear as our penance: indigestion and guilt.[/b]

Note to Satyr: See how complicated this stuff gets?

[iambiguous]

[b]tiny nietzsche

I think I fucked up my irony.[/b]

Is that even possible?

a group of capitalists is called a dick

Though some clearly bigger than others.

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, postmodernism.

Up to and now including Don Trump.

How deep is your void?

Let’s just say it’s deep enough.

It feels like today again.

Only considerably more so.

you talk in meme, but you’re not saying anything

He means [of course] anything that he can agree with.

[iambiguous]

[b]Liane Moriarty

Anyway, weren’t women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they’d evened up the score?[/b]

That, among other things, is something that my ex-wife often pointed out.

Every day is a gift, Jake. Of course sometimes it’s a really horrible gift that you don’t want.

No one tells you that though. Not that anyone really has to of course.

…but the rule of life was that the boys got to decide which girls were pretty; it didn’t really matter how ugly they were themselves.

That’s not the rule anymore. But it’s still close enough.

I’m the only one left holding a grudge. They say it’s good to let your grudges go, but I don’t know, I’m quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.

So much more to the point though: What do you do about it?

People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

Out in the real world for example.

Parents do tend to judge each other. I don’t know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we’re doing? And I guess that can sometimes lead to conflict. Just not normally on this sort of scale.

In other words, no one actually gets killed.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ludwig van Beethoven

I shall seize fate by the throat.[/b]

Or, sure, kick it in the balls.

It seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.

On the other hand, that’s a rather common concern among mere mortals.

It is my wish that you may have a better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.

Imagine him – anyone! – saying that today.

My misfortune is doubly painful to me because it will result in my being misunderstood. For me there can be no recreation in the company of others, no intelligent conversation, no exchange of information with peers; only the most pressing needs can make me venture into society. I am obliged to live like an outcast.

He thought: Join the club.

Love demands all, and has a right to all.

If it even exists of course.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

Let’s file this one under, “little does he know”.
You know, if that’s actually true.

[gustaave]

Science asymptotically approaches reality. :-"

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeanette Winterson

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.[/b]

Yes, but what in particular does it not signify.

Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family’s claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.

I tried this and it didn’t work.
Of course it never really had a chance.

I don’t know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it’s not knives and kicks I’m afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I’m afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It’s then you know you’re there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can’t come up for air.

It never works that way with Light though.

Slightest accidents open up new worlds.

You still don’t get this, do you?

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection.

I wasn’t. And never wanted to be.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

And, sure, you too.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ernest Hemingway

The shortest answer is doing the thing.[/b]

And then either regretting or not regretting it.

I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing from the Bible.

Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.

Let’s file this one promptly under “twisted logic”.

One cat leads to another.

Well, until you get a dog.

I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.

In other words for better or for worse.

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

He thought: I’ll have to try that myself.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

I asked Nietzsche. He told me to ask God.[/b]

God told him to ask Trump.

Yes, our age is dark. But its metaphors are darker.

Darker still: its similes.

Sure, nihilism is fun. Then it becomes a brand. A foreign policy. A dating criterion.

A rationale for impeachment?

My God: dead.
My indifference: profound.
My day: only just begun.

Not to worry, there’s always tomorrow.

Liberté. Égalité. Calamité.

Well, almost.

Face it. Your weekend was ruined 115 days ago.

I wonder what that might be in reference to?

[iambiguous]

[b]Michael Lewis

The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.[/b]

And now all the way to Moscow.

The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.

Not to worry, he thought, that will never happen here.

You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.

Then put him in charge of the FBI.

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.

Right, and now they program each other.

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.

Maybe, but now Don Trump is here to drain the swamp.
Right?

…human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance… Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him… When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress. In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.

Among other things, that explains a lot.

[iambiguous]

[b]Alan Moore

She finds herself suspicious of religious zeal that has a business plan.[/b]

Not counting the Vatican of course.

If gods are transcendent ideas, then the idea of a god is a god.

Well then, intellectually, that about settles it.

It doesn’t matter how “successful” each of us is in life. We’re all doomed to die. Why can’t anyone else see that?

In other words, see it as he does.

…man should be his own ideal and champion, however long it takes him to arrive there.

In other words, if ever.

As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don’t need to be one anymore, realizing that the game has changed and that the stakes are different and that there isn’t necessarily a place for you in this strange new pantheon of extraordinary people.

Anyone here ever been a hero?

…a venting of unspeakable emotions from a place where language holds no jurisdiction.

Let’s try that here, okay?

[iambiguous]

[b]Neil Gaiman

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.[/b]

Though only in the fairy tale of course. Unless you count Don Trump.

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.

Unless your major is Wall Street.

[b]I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.[/b]

In other words, it’s believing things all the way down.
The Buzzcocks reconfigured it into this: youtu.be/_V8jbA1x-Cs

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Fortunately there’s a cure. Or, sure, unfortunately.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

Let’s figure out [once and for all] what this means.

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

He means a used book store of course.

[iambiguous]

duplicate post

[iambiguous]

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.[/b]

Whatever that means.

I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It’s so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.

He thought: I wish I could be grateful for that.

They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.

So, should we envy them or not.

…the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge.

Sounds true though, doesn’t it?

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

True, but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.

How did her life live itself without her.

Well, regarding my life that’s not an option.
As far as I know.