a thread for mundane ironists

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8561

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Existential philosophy 1950: picture of Albert Camus
Existential philosophy 2020: picture of the Joker[/b]

Enough said, he thought.

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

The third as Trumpworld.

I think therefore I
Descartes: am
Kant: will
Schelling: want
Hegel: won’t
Marx: do
Kierkegaard: dare
Freud: desire
Nietzsche: don’t

Let’s put them in the correct order.

Hegel: There is no ground of the ground
Lacan: There is no other of the other
Adorno: There is no self in the selfie

These are in the right order. Eccept it’s the other way around.

English lit: My mind is a labyrinth
French lit: My soul is a phantom
German lit: My heart is a furnace
Russian lit: I think I’m going to lie down on these train tracks

American lit: :laughing:

I have a Schrödinger’s cat joke but I don’t have a Schrödinger’s cat joke.

I laughed but I didn’t laugh.

8562

[b]Antonio Gramsci

To tell the truth is revolutionary.[/b]

He means our revolution of course.

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.

You know, in theory.

Every State is a dictatorship.

Let’s decide: genes or memes?

If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.

The wall here being objectivists and Kids.

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

What’s that make dogmatic ideology than?

All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

The sound you hear is that of all women snortling. Except for phoneutria of course. :wink:

8563

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood.[/b]

Find another boyfriend?

Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.

Or apartments.

They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident.

Don’t you just hate that?

She was an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion.

Any canned advice for me?

You can always tell something when a woman is overdressed—either she’s an outsider, or she’s insane.

And if the woman is buck naked?

I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.

No, this is a real condition.

8564

[b]tiny nietzsche

future batman movies:
the princess batman
my dinner with batman
the unbearable lightness of batman[/b]

Thanks, but no thanks.

might fuck around and exist

You know, like we’re doing now.

I didn’t think the future would get here so fast

And then be gone so quickly.

kierkegaard for president

What, and take votes away from Biden!!!

I’m not even me right now

Like we ever even can be.

me: I feel vague and disconnected, like I’m watching myself from a great distance
doktor: it is what it is

A new trope is born. Or resurrected.

8565

[b]Ram Dass

The ego is frightened by death, because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.[/b]

I know that my ego is.
Not having made the acquaintance yet with my soul.

All you can do for another person is be an environment in which if they wanted to come up for air, they could.

You know, on this side of the grave.

We’re all just walking each other home.

Yo, Wendy! :laughing:

When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn’t.

I’ll bet he means us.

The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.

Like after we die, there isn’t plenty of time for that.

Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being.

How grotesque if that were true, he thought.
And I think I know what he means.

8566

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

During a warm winter rain … the basins of her collarbones collected water.[/b]

How strange is that?

It was the combination of many factors… With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn’t mean the chambers were empty.

The virgin suicides let’s call it.

You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.

In a word: nope.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

Here we go again: genes or memes?

I have a lot of novels that I haven’t finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it’s not going anywhere. I don’t publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

Me: two unpublished. That’s all folks.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

I thought that I was. Again, twice. No studio though.

8567

[b]so sad today

listen, i’m existentially complicated, okay?[/b]

No, really, some of us actually are.

a positive feeling can fuck you up forever

Fortunately, some of us never have one.

we should lose hope together

Your place or mine.

can I count on you to let me down?

Sure, but only if I can count on you to let me downer.

i cancelled myself but unfortunately i came back

Hey, you take your chances.

i hate everything in a whole new way

And how exhilarating is that!

8568

[b]Akwaeke Emezi

The first step to seeing is seeing that there are things you do not see.[/b]

A hell of a lot of things. You know, sometimes.

What does a monster look like? Jam asked.
Her mother focused on her, cupping her cheek in a chalky hand. Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.

Well, not counting the one in the White House.

It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn’t even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.

After all, who hasn’t done this?

It was her first time kissing a white person, and briefly, she wondered why he didn’t have any lips.

Well, that is one point of view.

The truth does not change whether it is seen or unseen.

It would have to be that way…

Adults were like that so much of the time, inflexible when they thought they had something to protect.

Imagine then the Kids!

8569

[b]Clarice Lispector

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.[/b]

What some no doubt call the soul.

The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

Or, sure, something altogether different.

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.

Yo, Peta?

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

After all, they have all that time to practice.

At first she dreamed of sheep, of going to school, of cats drinking milk. Little by little she dreamed of blue sheep, of going to school in the middle of the woods, of cats drinking milk from golden saucers. And her dreams became increasingly dense and acquired colours that were difficult to dilute into words.

Of course that’s true of everyone.

For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.

My guess: don’t count on it.

8570

[b]so sad today

sleep all day eat all night[/b]

Though not necessarily in that order.

why am i still doing this?

Let’s tell her.

let’s be honest, you didn’t like me as much as i liked you

Do people still think like this? He said in jest.

it’s hard for me to reach out and tell people what i’m going through because then i have to talk to them

Fortunately, he thought, as close as I get to that is in places like this.

trust your heart just kidding

I will just kidding.

yesss!!! make the global pandemic about you!!!

Or, you know, that guy in the Oval Office.

8571

[b]Erich Maria Remarque

Our knowledge of life is limited to death.[/b]

Of course he’s just paraphrasing the Grim Reaper.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

Well, some of them.

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

How about your school?

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

And this time from the whole shebang.

… clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting.

He means music of course.

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

Never been to war, yourself?

8572

[b]Robert Altman

The Player is not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It’s much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would’ve been interested if I’d shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.[/b]

That probably explains this…

They’ll never give me an Oscar. And I sincerely, honestly don’t care.

No, really, he never got one.

Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you’re finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there’s something in there, but you’re not sure exactly what it is until you find it.

Wow, like posting here!

Words don’t tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It’s all disguise. It’s all hidden – a secret language.

Wow, like posting here!

I have never made a movie that’s attracted a 14-year-old boy.

I can’t think of one.

If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don’t cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.

That’s what I’d do too.

8573

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” Mark Twain[/b]

Remember when it was ink?

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” George Bernard Shaw

Of course that doesn’t work here.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw

Let’s explain that to Mr. Objectivist. Or, sure, Mr. Objectivist can explain it to me.

“Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.” Nikola Tesla

Let’s call this the either/or world.

“A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.” Mark Twain

Let’s file this one under “things I wished I’d thought of first.”

“The desire to write grows with writing.” Erasmus

Not unlike the desire not to write.

8574

[b]Caleb Carr

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and the temerity to style themselves “New York Society.”[/b]

Easy as pie let’s call it.

Kreizler emphasized that no good would come of conceiving of this person as a monster, because he was most assuredly a man or a woman; and that man or woman had once been a child. First and foremost, we must get to know that child, and to know his parents, his siblings, his complete world. It was pointless to talk about evil and barbarity and madness; none of these concepts would lead us any closer to him. But if we could capture the human child in our imaginations – then we could capture the man in fact.

See, asshole, I told you.

…but it was one of those all-too-common moments in New York when one is faced with a damnable set of options.

And, sure, from time to time, in Baltimore.

I fear that in New York State, the electrical chair is increasingly usurping the gallows, Mr. Wolff, he said evenly. Although I suspect that, based on your answers to my questions, you will find that out for yourself. God have mercy on you, sir.

Never actually been on death row myself.

…like the only hummable tune in a difficult opera.

And we know the equivalent of that here. Or at least I do.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; and the more man turns to it, the more the law ought to weed it out.

Still, they do have to catch you first.

8575

[b]Edward O. Wilson

People would rather believe than know.[/b]

Objectively as it were.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

On the other hand, for some, a buck is a buck.

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.

Commie ants and bees for example.

There is no better high than discovery.

Unless it’s discovering it on dope.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

Next up: Actually demonstrating that.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Well, he thought, I’ll be damned.

8576

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.” F. Scott Fitzgerald[/b]

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” Bertolt Brecht

What’s that make philosophy then?

"Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.” Bertolt Brecht

He means both of course.

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” C.G. Jung

Yo, Stooges!

“Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.” Isaac Asimov

So, do robots have postulates then?

8577

[b]Antonio Gramsci

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.[/b]

So, don’t forget to vote!

Man is above all else mind, consciousness – that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

Yo, Satyr!

Before puberty the child’s personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work.

You know, I think he was on to something…important?

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant–has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

Trust me, Kids, this is well beyond your level of comprehension.

Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug – revolution.

Next up: Reactionaries.

Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.

In other words, for better or worse.

8578

[b]Louis Althusser

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.[/b]

Not unlike morality.

In truth, ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’, even supposing this term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a reflected form.

In truth. Right.

Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

And in the first instance?

The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production.

By, among things, reproducing ourselves.

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

And you don’t get much more serious that that. Or, rather, they don’t.

Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle.

Guess where I come in.

8579

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Hell isn’t other people." Ludwig Wittgenstein[/b]

Ludwig slips up.

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Let alone playing word games.

“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” Hannah Arendt

“Mr. Sophist, meet Mr. Objectivist.”

“Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.” Bertrand Russell

You know, as some here believe of moral and political value judgments.

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” Bertrand Russell

Your possessions, not mine.

“We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.” Grace Paley

Imagine then her reaction to Trumpworld.

8580

[b]Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.[/b]

Too cynical…or still not cynical enough?

An Immense hatred keeps me alive… i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.

I used to be that affable myself.

I piss on you all from a considerable height.

I used to be that affable myself.

Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

Except, perhaps, the agonizing parts.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It’s frightening how many people and things there are in a man’s past that have stopped moving. The living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

Or just flip the fucking coin.

So many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don’t know what to do with them … shovelsfull! … but hearts? … very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count … but hearts? … on your fingers!

Well, if you count your thumb.