a thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
6881

[b]God

This year I’m going to be more of the kind of God that you deserve. Yes, that’s a threat.[/b]

That OT Dude.

Retweet this and you’ll go to heaven. Yes, the standards are now that low.

It’s a trick, I’ll bet.

This is the alternate universe.

Great, the alternate God.

HOW I MADE IT VS. HOW YOU SEE IT
Animals: Meat
Birds: Poultry
Fish: Sushi
Vegetables: Potato Chips
Fruit: Fanta Blue Raspberry Slurpee
Trees (living): Lumber
Trees (dead): Coal
Gold: Happiness
Land: Property
Ocean: Dumpster

Of course we were made in His image.

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be all alone?
With your cover blown?
Your collusion shown?
A complete self-own?
Like a Roger Stone.

Anyone here know Don Trump’s nickname for God?

Why don’t poor people just have more money?

So much for being omniscient.

6882

[b]Bernhard Schlink

She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling.[/b]

More or less, she’s me.

Did my moral upbringing somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing—then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn’t stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.

On the other hand, there’s the moral majority.

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks-understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

Would that life wasn’t always confronting us with things like this.

Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

At least before she hung herself.

It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.

Like the dead give a shit.

In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement.

Actually, not even here.

6883

[b]Lenny Bruce

If you can’t say “Fuck” you can’t say, "Fuck the government.” [/b]

Let alone “fuck censorship”.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

One of those things that, sure, might be true.

The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.

What a bummer, he thought.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it…try to fake three laughs in an hour – ha ha ha ha ha – they’ll take you away, man. You can’t.

What’s funny about that?

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Wasn’t that Lester’s point?

Liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

Same with conservatives, only double it.

6884

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Plato: Know the form of X
Aristotle: Analyze X
Spinoza: Intuit why God loves X
Leibniz: Learn how God integrates X
Nietzsche: Y?[/b]

Nietzsche, right?

Parmenides: Being
Heraclitus: Becoming
Plato: Being or Becoming
Aristotle: Being and Becoming
Spinoza: Being is becoming
Hegel: Being is becoming nothing
Nietzsche: Nothing is quite so unbecoming as philosophers’ thoughts on being

Nietzsche, right?

Civilization is a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness, Charlie Brown.

As for Lucy, fuck her.

Philosophy has no solution for
Rousseau: tyranny
Kant: the finitude of knowledge
Nietzsche: our devotion to guilt
Camus: high cigarette taxes

With Jan, you’d think all Camus ever did was smoke.

Read Hegel to laugh, Kierkegaard to cry, and Nietzsche when you’re not sure you want to be able to tell the difference between laughing and crying.

Instead, let’s pin down why you read me.

Philosophy 101: Everything you believe is false
Philosophy 201: Everything you believe is true and false
Philosophy 301: Truth and falsity don’t believe in anything, especially you

Philosophy 401: And then you die.

6885

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.[/b]

Any secrets here?

I don’t want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

Me, I’m still working on it.

…life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.

Let’s just say that some go here more often than others.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This can be tricky.

In the Oval Office for example.

The man who knows his limitations, has none.

How dumb is that, he thought.

That 99 of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100 of the things they spend 99 of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99 of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the ever living shit out of itself.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] this is only 99 percent true.

6886

[b]Dave Eggers

It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.[/b]

But not you, right? And definitely not me.

The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.

On the other hand, his junk did.

If a boy became sick he walked alone; the others were afraid to catch what he had, and did not want to know him too well for he would surely die soon. We did not want his voice in our heads.

Over there and back then from our point of view.

None of this I’d mine. My father is not mine- not in that way. His death and what he’s done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing not my town nor its tragedies. How can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it.

See how far that gets you.

Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table - Nicaragua!

Tell that to the CIA.

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.

And around and around we go.

6887

[b]Klaus Kinski

The ultimate acting is to destroy yourself.[/b]

Let’s run this by Herzog.

Where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent.

Let’s run this by Herzog.

What do you think, that a dollar in a savings account is freedom? Maybe you have understood nothing I have said.

How about a million of them?

Whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can’t explain this.

Not to worry, it can’t be understood.

Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets.

And lots and lots and lots of other things too.

You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

Here we need a context. Not that we’re likely to ever get many.

6888

[b]Timothy Snyder

The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that ‘only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate’.[/b]

Run that by the young today. And not just over there.

Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.

Unless of course you’re convinced that it is.

Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.

Any of you Americans here?

If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, wrote Havel, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.

Let’s run that by Roger Stone.

When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading.

Welcome to the media industrial complex.

Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

Welcome to the media industrial complex.

6889

[b]James D. Watson

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.[/b]

Has any philosopher ever felt that?

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

For example, why something and not nothing?
No thrilling answers yet.

I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn’t have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don’t bother.

Let’s pin down the point here.

A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

His very own rendition of “one of them”.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

Even worse: the right-wing nuts.
If I do say so myself.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

Let’s guess who.

6890

[b]so sad today

we could wait for death together[/b]

She means godot of course.

for fun i like to break my own heart

For fun I like to watch her.

i’m aware of what i’m doing but not enough to stop

Why? Just lucky I guess.

you can’t make someone love you but you can pretend they do

You know, if that’s your thing.

it’s my body and i’ll shame it if i want to

Apologies to Lesley Gore.

fuck yeah i apologize for existing

Like we ever asked to be born.

6891

[b]David Sedaris

The iPhone 2 led to the 3, but I didn’t get the 4 or 5 because I’m holding out for the 7, which, I’ve heard on good authority, can also be used as a Taser. This will mean I’ll have just one less thing to carry around.[/b]

I’m still using the iPhone 0.

Since when do politics affect a mammals ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who says a burning mouse can’t run a distance of twelve feet?

But what if it isn’t a non sequitur?

I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.

We have ours, they have theirs.

True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.

With me it’s true philosophy.

In France the most often used word is “connerie,” which means “bullshit,” and in America it’s hands-down “awesome,” which has replaced “incredible,” “good,” and even “just OK.” Pretty much everything that isn’t terrible is awesome in America now.

Okay, by me. As long as it isn’t “cool”.

…the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.

The art of exploitation.

6892

[b]David Bowie

I’m always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don’t even take what I am seriously.[/b]

He was after all a celebrity.

The moment you know you know you know.

What, for example?

Comfort comes into your house first as guest, then as a host, then finally as the master.

If it comes in at all.

You can’t stand still on one point for your entire life.

Let alone carry it into the next one.

I met my wife because we were both going out with the same guy.

Now that only gets you a shrug.

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

Name one.

6893

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“John Lennon said it right. ‘God is a concept by which we measure our pain.’” Paul McCartney[/b]

He also said this: youtu.be/LNjTPZW7GCU

“Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man’s?” Friedrich Nietzsche

Yes.

“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” Martin Heidegger

Cue, among other things, dasein.

“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.” Martin Heidegger

Language and emotions.

“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” Jean Paul Sartre

Unless of course it’s two o’clock.

People talk about egos as if it were objects." Bob Dylan

Let’s explain why.

6894

[b]Dashiell Hammett

To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.[/b]

Actually, some men [and some women] don’t.

I once knew a man who stole a Ferris Wheel…

That doesn’t make two of us.

Listen, Dundy, it’s been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn’t like me.

Or, for that matter, a philosopher.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it’s good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You’re not likely ever to get all these things, and you’re not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don’t, but that is – and should be – your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

The piddling part most of us get of course.

Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.

How about you?

So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.

Vague but surely.

6895

[b]Tara Westover

He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.[/b]

Positive liberty. People just make these things up.

I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

Actually, it’s even more confusing than that.

Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.

If you know what she means.

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she should have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.

You know what I call it.

The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you.

In other words, you may be having one now.

There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain.

Explain that please.

6896

[b]Werner Twertzog

Toxic masculinity is the primary cause of the U.S. governmental shutdown, I am told.[/b]

And not just Nancy’s, Don tweeted.

It is important for the music in bars to be loud to reduce conversation to the lowest common denominator.

We should have a soundtrack here then.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to be happy.

Not counting Miners Mills of course.

Uneasy lies the head that rolls on the ground.

Count on it…

Kinski’s primary insight, derived from Sade, is that we do not understand human nature until the shackles of morality, decency, revulsion, and horror are systematically unlocked, as we all know.

Well, now we all know.

How about instead of faxing it, you place your message in a bottle a kilometer below the polar ice sheet and wait for climate change to bring it me?

Or, as a last resort, email it.

6897

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they’d sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn’t occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.[/b]

Among other things, this ain’t Kilanga.

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

Anyone here ever heard it?

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

Death’s glancing blow. That’s a new one.

Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you.

I know: Imagine that happening to me.

I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.

Look it up and get back to us.

Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

But then once in a blue moon it’s the other way around.

6898

[b]Jonas Mekas

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.[/b]

In reality [he suspected] not a single one.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.

Right, like they actually exist.

I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains.

At least he’s doing it right.

Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.

In other words, our education not theirs.

Don’t we have enough ugliness already? And don’t we know these things already? Why always fight ugliness with ugliness, stupidity with stupidity, displaying still more and more of it?

And who hasn’t thought this? Not that anyone really knows what it means.

I do not understand, I never really understood, never really lived in the so-called real world. I lived… I live in my own imaginary world, which is as real as any other world, as real as the real worlds of all the other people around me.

He learned that from me. Or might as well have.

6899

[b]God

It’s important to remember that not every Catholic priest is a pedophile. Some of them are xenophobic racists![/b]

Small comfort?

[Money can’t buy happiness, but love can’t buy a Ferrari either.

Unless you’ve got yourself a sugar daddy.

The reason I’m not sending a giant asteroid to destroy you is it wouldn’t be fair to the asteroid.

That’s the God we know and love.

I did not want Donald Trump to be president. I can’t believe I have to say that.

Noted. But so much for omnipotence.

The last people I legitimately wanted to perform a mission for Me were named Jake and Elwood.

Going all the way back to Second City.

Fuck her, and fuck him, and fuck them all.

God has a shitty day.

6900

[b]Stephen Hawking from Brief Answers to the Big Questions

When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race. [/b]

Let’s just say he took this to the grave.

The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.

Maybe in the next life.

No matter how powerful a computer you have, if you put lousy data in you will get lousy predictions out.

Lousy data here too.

I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Some can believe this, some cannot.

People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Some can believe this, some cannot.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

We can just leave it at that and move on. Or take the fucking leap and be done with it.