a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.[/b]

And then eventually for all of eternity.

I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.

Same for me. Unless you count a few threads here.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

Not counting God of course.

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

I’d like that to have been said of me. Not yet though.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of political life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Oh, it’s destroyed all right. But that’s yet another thing that distinguishes us from the other animals.

I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results.

They thought: She notes this as though it were a bad thing.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.[/b]

Let’s explore this mathematically.

It’s funny, I said. It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.
Do you think so? her eyes looked flat again.
I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.
No, she said. I think it’s hell on earth.

Clearly, love is hard to pin down.

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

Not unlike all the other wars.

The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

We’ve got a few of them here, don’t we?

Strong in all the Broken Places

I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Of course, you all know my own obscene words…

[b]Excistential Comics

What can’t you know?
Descartes: whether you are being deceived.
Kant: things as they are in themselves.
Schopenhauer: why Hegel is popular.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, is Hegel still popular?

How to do philosophy:
Analytic philosophy: replace words with math symbols.
Continental​ philosophy: replace words with more words.

And don’t forget to stir from time to time.

Fuck literature, marry science, kill philosophy.

A word of advice: Pace yourself.

Socialism would be great if it weren’t for the socialists.

Not unlike, for example, all the other “ists”.

Regular despair: I’m depressed.
Existential despair: I’m depressed because of how smart I am.

No, really.

When Republicans talk about how you need to work for everything you get, I close my eyes and pretend they are talking about shareholders.

Not counting Mr. Reasonable of course.

[b]Michael Lewis

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.[/b]

Let’s figure out the philosophical equivalent of that.

He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

Typical pragmatist.

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.

No one here believes that, right?

Investment bankers make money for a living.

That way their sons and daughters can inherit it for a living.

Losing shouldn’t be fun. It’s not fun for me. If I’m going to be miserable, you’re going to be miserable.

The trick though is to actually pull it off.

The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.

Can they say that about you? Me? Too close to call.

[b]Neil Gaiman

People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.[/b]

No, really, what are dreams?

She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Literally infinite maybe. But she’ll come and go.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

Come on, ever seen a naked witch on TV?

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

On the other hand, what we need here are more blank threads.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done.

I’ll try it: dasein, conflicting goods, political economy.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

Right, like they all start out the same.

[b]Existential Comics

Jesus: “Love your neighbor.”
Everyone else: “Fuck that, no way! In fact, let’s kill this guy for even suggesting it.”[/b]

Among other things, what Jesus will face when He does come back.

What did philosophers do to relax?
Epicurus: gardening.
Schopenhauer: music.
Nietzsche: hiking.
Kant: work on ethics instead of metaphysics.

At least Kant never stooped to huffing andf puffing.

Maturation is the slow process of realizing how profoundly unimportant you are.

And [fortunately] everybody else.

How to live an authentic life: don’t ever do anything that you were already not going to have done.

Or, sure, maybe not.

Nihilism: nothing matters
Absurdism: nothing matters, but in a cool way.
Existentialism: freely choose among everything that doesn’t matter!

Let’s pick the top three.

Philosopher I would most want to have a beer with: Camus.
Philosopher I would sneak out the back of the bar if I saw him coming: Socrates.

Want to know who I would choose?

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

In the water I saw my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.[/b]

Around here we don’t have that kind of water. As far as I know.

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.

Sometimes you just have to settle for things.

There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books.

Never even finished War myself.

Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing.

Bad people never apologize at all. And there’s no getting better than that.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.

And it’s still not enough.

He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man. Does she suck his penis? he wondered. I know this is a silly thought, a thought that will only bring me pain, but I can’t free myself of it. And when she sucks his penis, because she must, what is he doing? Is he pulling her hair back to watch? Is he touching her chest? Is he thinking of someone else? I’ll kill him if he is.

Of course not even all bureaucrats are the same.

[b]Haruki Murakami

You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.[/b]

The fool!
[Right?]

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.

Unless of course [like me] you revel in it.

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?

Yes. Except when it’s no.

Sitting on the floor, I’d replay the past in my head. Funny, that’s all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I’d been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

Me? Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t call it a monument.

If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again.

The exception being all the times when you don’t.

What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing?

Not to worry. There’ll be another one along.

[b]Sophocles

Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—
A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.[/b]

Surely that doesn’t count the objectivists here. Unless of course it goes double.

Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none more wonderful than man.

Some obviously more than others. Especially if you count women.

How terrible–to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!

Been there, haven’t you?

A soul that is kind and intends justice discovers more than any sophist.

For example, in a perfect world.

If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

How about both? You know, if that’s even possible.

Once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

For example, in la la land.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.[/b]

Let’s explain the difference.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

On average as it were.

Animals are my friends…and I don’t eat my friends.

Except for chickens he thought. And most fish.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

On the other hand, perhaps progress isn’t the right word.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Or, to put it another way: YOUTH IS WASTED ON THE YOUNG!!!
[size=85][and really, really, really wasted on the Kids][/size]

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Though clearly not in that order.

[b] The Dead Author

Preserving Obamacare is Trump’s biggest success so far.[/b]

You don’t get this, do you?
So far anyway.

That a book is only as good as its readers is the curse of good writers and the consolation of the bad.

Or [here]: That a post is only as good as its readers is the curse of good posters and the consolation of the bad.

No, claiming that philosophy is useless isn’t science. That’s trolling.

Not counting serious philosophy of course.

Depression: nobody cares about me.
Narcissism: everybody should care about me.
Anxiety: everybody does care about me.

Dread: All the rest of it.

Existentialism: We are free.
Nihilism: That’s why we’re lost.
Marxism: We’re neither free nor lost.

Let’s decide this once and for all.

Every time a celebrity from the 90s dies, an angel checks wikipedia.

Now that’s routine for everyone.

[b]Gloria Steinem

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.[/b]

Well, our God does work in mysterious ways.

Women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

Back when that was true for example.
It isn’t now, right?

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

A small price to pay for Salvation of course.

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

Not on Fox News they aren’t.

When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.

Obviously: Tell that to the ones on top.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

On the other hand, the more you live the more you have to lose dying.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.[/b]

Indeed, and how many have we already forgotten?

“Take your desires for reality!” can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.

And how far is that from, “take your desires for morality”?

In the past, we had objects to believe in—objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, …Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information.

That’ll all change of course once Don Trump drains the swamp.
Anyone here happen to know how far along he is?

It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.

Best not to take the first part too literally.

In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire.

Of course I’ve been pointing this out for years.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

Ideologically for example.
Religion for the modern man!

[b]Sad Socrates

Don’t laugh at humanity, laugh for it.[/b]

Or, sure, with it.

I’m recusing myself from existence.

But only until Don Trump drains the swamp.

People are the reason I don’t.

You know, in case you’re wondering.

My body is breaking like the news.

Almost every day now. Right Don?

We must forget to move forward.

Unfortunately, I forgot how.

Don’t solve problems. Eliminate solutions.

Let’s start with mine. You know, when I finally find one.

[b]Tom Perrotta

I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there’s always another perspective.[/b]

Novels once worked that way for me too. Now nothing does.

Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that the best days had come and gone without her even realizing it.

Worse: when you do.

Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid’s day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can’t catch up with it, not even if you try.

Worse: when you do.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

Way, way, way back then, he thought.

When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.

I figure that’s what you think about me. No less so then I think it about you.

It’s a matter of dignity, the Chief explained. At a certain point, that’s all you have left.

Of course you have to actually have it first.

[b]Stieg Larsson

I would have to be totally insane to stop seeing you just because you’re going to leave one day.[/b]

Besides, she can always leave him first.

One more man who hates women, she muttered at last.

Lots of them here too. Indeed, they have a whole philosophy to back it up. Naturally as it were.

Mathematics was actually a logical puzzle with endless variations—riddles that could be solved. The trick was not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five. The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever.

Well, except this one: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=190558

This is so much money that it scares the shit out of me. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know the purpose of the company besides making more money. What’s all the money going to be used for?

Let’s ask Putin.

The opportunity makes the thief.

For example, entrapment.

Take it all off. I don’t intend to fuck somebody in his underwear. And you have to use a condom. I know where I’ve been, but I don’t know where you’ve been.

On the other hand, in this day and age, no one really knows where they’ve been.

[b]Noël Coward

It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.[/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.

My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but of my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.

Go ahead, stick yourself in there somewhere.

Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?

I’m embarassed to say that I did. If you know what I mean.

Strange how potent cheap music is.

Anyone here actually know what that is?

Work is more fun than fun.

Not many of us will ever get to say that.

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.

Well, if you remind them.

[b]Liane Moriarty

Try not to saddle yourself with too distinct a personality too early in life. It might not suit you later on.[/b]

Of course back then that never occurs to you.

The sound of the children singing floating down from the second floor of the building always made her weep. She’d never believed in God, except when she heard children singing.

Believe it or not, that doesn’t work for me.

However, at the end of the night I saw Nick stomping out to the car park, obviously in a terrible mood. They take their lives so seriously, these young people. “Just appreciate the fact that you can stomp so energetically,” I wanted to say to him. I’d pay a million dollars to be Alice and Elisabeth’s age again for just one day. I’d dance like Olivia’s butterfly and bite into crisp green apples and run across hot sand into the surf, and I’d walk, as far as I wanted, wherever I wanted, in big loping, leaping strides, with my head held high and my lungs filling with air.

Let’s not go there, he thought.

But if the girls hadn’t got their knickers in a knot, and that might sound sexist but it’s not, it’s just a fact of life, ask any man, not some new age, artsy-fartsy, I-wear-moisturiser type, I mean a real man, ask a real man, then he’ll tell you that women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.

And not just in prison.

But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It’s pathetic.

Yeah, I’d say so.

If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.

On the other hand, in your eighties why would it astonish you?

[b]tiny nietzsche

I’m a post-fatalist.[/b]

Uh oh, he thought. What if I am too?!

…sets notifications to stun…

We need something like that here.

…when you’re dying, the whole world dies with you…

That’s probably not really true though.

gregorian: 14,119 dog
jewish: 40,439 dog
chinese: 32,991 ÷ 12 = year of the dog 2,749

A little help with this one please.

…well if you told me you were listening to phil collins, I would not lend a hand

[i]In other words , Phil Collins is to Peter Gabriel what Paul McCartney is to John Lennon.
Right?

me: explain postmodernism to me
doktor: I’m not sure
me: thank you

Thank him for me too.

[b]Aeschylus

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.[/b]

Depending of course on what you remember.

Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

You know, back then.

Rumours voiced by women come to nothing.

You know, back then.

They sent forth men to battle
But no such men return;
And home, to claim their welcome,
Come ashes in an urn

Let’s file this one under, “…and some things never change”.

I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death.

Until, among other things, the hope runs out.

Call no man happy till he is dead.

And even then only for all of eternity.