a thread for mundane ironists

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5161

[b]Exitential Comics

Mysteriously, almost everyone who describes themselves as a “free thinker” have almost exactly the same ideas.[/b]

But not you, right Mr. Objectivist?

The nice thing about freedom is that you get to do what you want, but the downside is that instead of doing it you just sort of do nothing.

And not just in America anymore.

Hard Determinism is great because you get to shift all the responsibility onto the Big Bang. Fucking Big Bang.

Well, let’s not forget what came before it.

How we achieved:
Women’s suffrage: militant protests.
40 hour work week: militant protests.
Racial equality under law: militant protests.

See if you can spot the common denominator.

Remember that there is nothing easier than cynicism. The cynical, ironic, and nihilistic are all the same: lazy.

With obvious exceptions of course. :wink:

Real love is finding someone who thinks the same movies are stupid that you do.

Let’s start with The Mummy.

5162

[b]Sophocles

Never honor the gods in one breath and take the gods for fools the next.[/b]

I suspect that doesn’t really change just because there is only one of them now.

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech. The second best is to have seen the light and then go back quickly whence we came.

Nope, he thought, I still don’t know if I agree.

Cling not to one mood,
And deemed not thou art right, all others wrong.
For whoso thinks that wisdom dwells with him,
That he alone can speak or think alright,
Such oracles are empty breath when tried.
The wisest man will let himself be swayed
By other’s wisdom and relax in time.

So, are you snickering too?

Enough words! The criminals are escaping, we the victims, we stand still.

But only until the next election.

To the man who is afraid everything rustles.

Until one day when, instead, everything howls.

Only a fool could be in love with death.

That’s only true until it’s not though.

5163

[b]George Bernard Shaw

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend … if you have one.
— George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)

Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.
— Churchill’s response [/b]

Anyone know if he actually did?

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.

Tell me that isn’t all about context and point of view.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

Best then that he stay away from mirrors.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…

Yet millions upon millions fall for it. Much as with, among other things, gender and race.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

In other words, the jokes on you, Don.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Rather risque isn’t it?

5164

[b]Gloria Steinem

Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.[/b]

Not counting those who take it too far. Unless, of course you do count them.

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

Not unlike the individuals who make them up.

Remember: “For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost.” This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn’t count.

Yes, I was once this naive myself, he thought.

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure.

He thought: I want one.

I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.

Well, there is damnation to consider.

We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

Yep, that’s what it will take alright.

5165

[b]Jean Baudrillard

A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.[/b]

Perhaps my whole point is to take away yours.

Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.

Of course I’ve been saying that for years. And not just about children.

For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end.

That can’t be good.

The only benefit of a Campbell’s soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.

I wonder if he knew that?

But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that Presidents were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.

Let’s fit Don Trump in there somewhere.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have.

I still say it’s the other way around. Unless it’s not.

5166

[b]Tom Perrotta

Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy’s breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy’s skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they’d lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, competing for attention, relying on each other for companionship and emotional support, forming the intense, convoluted, and probably unhealthy bond that for better and worse would become the center of both of their identities, fodder for years of therapy, if they could ever figure out a way to pay for it. It wasn’t going to be an easy future, Sarah understood that, but it felt REAL to her – so palpable and close at hand, so in keeping with what she knew of her own life – that it almost seemed inevitable, the place they’d been heading all along. It was enough to make her wonder how she’d ever managed to believe in the alternate version, the one where the Prom King came and made everything better.[/b]

Let’s file this one [enigmatically] under, “heads they win, tails you lose”.

Next time she’d have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she was concerned, the way a guy’s face contorted so violently and then relaxed, as if some terrible mystery had just been solved.

That’s the part with all the “Oh Gods!”.

These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.

Those days too.

In the far corner of the yard, two squirrels raced up a tree trunk, their little feet scrabbling frantically on the bark. He couldn’t tell if they were having a good time or trying to kill each other.

Exactly!

Actually, he hadn’t just complained; she’d come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked him what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the book before it killed him.

Exactly!

And right now he was feeling the weight of all those losses, and the weight of the years that were behind him, and the weight of the ones that were still ahead, however many there might be – three or four, twenty or thirty, maybe more.

Oddly enough though some still want to live forever.

5167

[b]Stieg Larsson

I’m not arguing. I just think that it’s pathetic that creeps always have to have someone else to blame.[/b]

I won’t bring up Don Trump if you don’t.

It was this simple. Some had it. Others would always falter when it came to the crunch.

He thought: Not always but often enough.

The whole organization seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.

Or [of course]:
The whole Trump administration seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.

Apart from the fact that you’re not really a dyke. You’re probably bisexual. But most of all you’re sexual—you like sex and you don’t care about what gender. You’re an entropic chaos factor.

He wondered: Am I an entropic chaos factor?
How about you?

Equations are classified by the highest power (value of the exponent) of its unknowns. If this is one, the equation is of first degree. If this is two, the equation is of second degree, and so on. Equations of higher degree than one yield multiple possible values for their unknown quantities. These values are known as roots. The first-degree equation (the linear equation): 3x – 9 = 0 (root: x = 3).

They thought [collectively]: Fucking math!!!

This is how it goes. We are born. We live. We grow old. We die. He had played his part. All that remained was the disintegration.

I know: If only it really were that simple.

5168

[b]Christopher Marlowe

All live to die, and rise to fall.[/b]

So far anyway.

I am Envy…I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

That’s how it works alright.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight; Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

That’s how it works alright.

Had I as many souls as there be stars, I’d give them all for Mephistopheles!

Of course back then they had no idea just how many stars there are. Well, not that this changes anything.

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,
And now and then stab, when occasion serves.

Viciously if need be.

All beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv’d in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu’d in hell.
Curs’d be the parents that engender’d me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv’d thee of the joys of heaven.

We all either do or do not fit in there somewhere.

5169

[b]Julia Kristeva

Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?[/b]

That works for me, he thought.
He being [among others] me.

Since he has nothing, since he is nothing, he can sacrifice everything.

In other words, what’s left of it.

He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.

Or, if you do, go with him.

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear” – a fluid haze an elusive clamminess – no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.

Though not objectively of course. Still, abject works for me. However hard it is to actually pin down.

And nevertheless, no, I have nothing to say to them, to my parents. Nothing. Nothing and everything, as always. If I tried – out of boldness, through luck, or in distress – to share with them some of the violence that causes me to be so totally on my own, they would not know where I am, who I am, what it is, in others, that rubs me the wrong way.

My parents, sure. And then on to everyone else.

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?

Let’s file this one under, “that again”.

5170

[b]Philippa Gregory

He promised her that he would give her everything, everything she wanted, as men in love always do. And she trusted him despite herself, as women in love always do.[/b]

The fools!

A man will always promise to do more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.

Going all the way back to Adam so far.

Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.

Let’s file this one under, “different folks, different strokes”. And be done with it.

He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?

And being a serious philosopher doesn’t help.

Good god what men can do to their brains when their cocks are hard.

Tweet for example.

The wheel of fortune tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.

And not just because it all ends in oblivion.

5171

[b]tiny nietzsche

Why did the postmodernist cross the road? Why do anything?[/b]

No, really, why did she?

for sale: dick pics, never sent

Trump tweeted.

marxists in the mirror are larger than they appear

Not only that but considerably smaller.

nihilists aren’t even people

Or, like all the rest of us, won’t be eventually.

thus tweet zaratrumptra

And for sure God is dead.

If you can’t tell if it’s art, it is.

Isn’t it?

5172

[b]Aeschylus

She looked just like a painting dying to speak.[/b]

Rather than just smile.

In war, the first casualty is truth.

Not only that but you can take it to the bank. Well, some can.

We spoil ourselves with scruples long as things go well.

Just as we spoil ourselves with God when things go bad.

Death is softer by far than tyranny.

Not counting all the times it’s not.

A great ox stands on my tongue.

Not literally one suspects.

They came back
To widows,
To fatherless children,
To screams, to sobbing.
The men came back
As little clay jars
Full of sharp cinders.

They still are. And soon the women too.

5173

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you are, drifting away now, the centre cannot hold.[/b]

Let’s move the Oval Office up there.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

He thought: And certainly not here.

In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don’t obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of spleen and intestine. In the lymph nodes they are swelling with pride. It used to be their job to keep her body safe from enemies on the outside. They were her immunity, her certainty against infection. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have rebelled. Louise is the victim of a coup.

Ah, that precarious point where “I” ends and the body begins. If [autonomously] it even exists.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the library desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it’s best to be ahead of the queue.

Let’s start one here.

There’s no story that’s the start of itself.

I’ll wrap my head around that if you will.

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Nope, not this one.

5174

[b]so sad today

should i masturbate or sleep: a memoir[/b]

Volume 1

“fuck the capitalist system” i say, filling my basket with shit i don’t need at whole foods

Stiil, better that than Walmart.

what’s wrong with me: the musical

Soundtrack by Morrissey.

ted talk on eating ass

Worse: Ted Talk on dasein.

i like to blame myself for everything just in case

Just in case Don Trump doesn’t drain the swamp.

spoiler: your parents fucked you up

True, but only because your grandparents fucked them up.

5175

[b]Ernest Hemingway

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?
Of course. Who said it?
I don’t know.
He was probably a coward, she said. He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.[/b]

Of course no one really knows what shit like this means.

Perhaps wars weren’t won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.

Cue the military industrial complex.

I don’t know. There isn’t always an explanation for everything.

Let alone the right one.

He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.

That’s what I’m doing here myself: giving you versions.

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

Sooner or later though one tends to prevail.

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

While sneaking a peek [now and then] at the future.

5176

[b]Michael Lewis

After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.[/b]

Those poor souls.

There is nothing more satisfying to me, he said, than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.

Or [here] a self-contained world of words.

In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California.

He means southern California [and San Francisco] of course.

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

But only all the way to the grave.

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes, he said. When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work.

And look where they are now. Well, with a little help from Trumpworld.

A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As I say, I fell in love with a story. The story is about professional baseball and the people who play it. At its center is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way.

Next up, the science of philosophy.

5177

[b]Neil Gaiman

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.[/b]

More often than not though it’s a hopelessly entangled agglomeration of them all.

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

Let’s file this one under, “for all that’s worth”.

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend…

I challenge you to wax more philosophically than this.

Even nothing cannot last forever.

On the other hand for all of eternity seems long enough.

There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Not counting the part where it’s all about the Benjamins.

[b]I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you’re looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and… for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?”[/b]

Bravo!

5178

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I made up my mind that nothing, nothing was going to stop me. Not even me.[/b]

Let’s just say that, for some, this is easier said than done.

“I love you” also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

Not unlike “I hate you”.

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can’t hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don’t they get to curl up by the fire? Why can’t they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

So, Jonathan, how many pigs curl up by the fire with you?

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Oh, I think we get the gist of it.

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.

In other words, what some folks call progress. And other folks don’t.

You’re incredibly beautiful, I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.

Ah, the games we play.

5179

[b]Haruki Murakami

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?[/b]

In other words, where does one stop and the other begin? For example, if we actually do have free will.

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.

Either that or a giant squid.

I’m an average person. It’s just that I like reading.

Let’s decide if this explains a lot or very little.

It is cognition that is the fantasy… Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will… My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.

Let’s decide if this explains a lot or very little.

I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

Oh shit, he thought, which one am I?

We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

And look where that’s got us.

5180

[b]Sophocles

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.[/b]

Clearly: with lots and lots and lots of exceptions.

What do I care for life when you are dead?

Like that makes all our obligations go away.

Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.

Like, for example, becoming president of the United States.

Sentry: King, may I speak?
Creon: Your very voice distresses me.
Sentry: Are you sure that it is my voice, and not your conscience?
Creon: By God, he wants to analyze me now!
Sentry: It is not what I say, but what has been done, that hurts you.
Creon: You talk too much.

Hell, this could be a transcript from the Oval Office.

And if my present actions strike you as foolish, let’s just say I’ve been accused of folly by a fool.

Gee, maybe it works like that here too.

You, you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!

That and [for some] deaf and dumb.