a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Joseph Heller

He began to wonder with genuine concern just what sort of shithead the Pentagon had foisted on him.[/b]

Cue Colonel Haydon and the silver star.

Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all

Just following orders as it were.

[b]Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing Ping-Pong, and he was as good at playing Ping-Pong as he was at everything else. Everything Appleby did, he did well. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood, and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

I hate that son of a bitch, Yossarian growled.[/b]

This either resonates or it doesn’t.

Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose.

Next up: taxes.

He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.

THE end one suspects.

He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and bad.

He thought: That explains a lot.

[b]C.G. Jung

For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.[/b]

When, instead, neither are.

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.

How then?

But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?

Among others, he means me. And [occasionally] I agree.

Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Not counting the neurotic who don’t have one.

…the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

In the face of, among other things, mere not being.

What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.

Some examples please.

[b]Existential Comics

As Michel Foucault famously said, “Stuff is bad. Even way more bad than you’d think at first”.[/b]

Of course he was just paraphrasing Jacques Derrida.

Philosophy can only save us if it is the philosophy of Socrates: ruthlessly criticising the ruling class, and corrupting the youth by teaching them to question the society they were brought into.

Sans God [and Plato] of course.

The problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of other people’s labor.

Right, I’m sure that keeps them up at night.

When people say “grow up”, they often seem to just mean “quietly accept things as they are.”

Either that or eagerly sustain them.

As the ancient stoic master Zeno of Citium teaches us: shut the fuck up once in a while.

That or grin and bear it.

If I’m perfectly honest, I just don’t believe that I’m going to die. It seems like a totally ridiculous thing to happen.

So, do you think that he will?

[b]Allen Ginsberg

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism[/b]

My guess: Nobody.

Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.

In other words, you get it coming and going.

Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.

And then notices it’s not his own.

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!

You know, if there is one.

Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe…

Obviously before television became what it is today. But only if that’s true.

If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.

Anyone here ever done that?

[b]Ali Smith

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.[/b]

Let alone by Bing.

Words are themselves organisms…

Sure, we can call them that.

No one remembering that old man.
Except, I just did, there.

Should we file this one under, “big fucking deal”?

The boy was in the Hitler Youth, he says, and he was reading a book one day, he was really enjoying it, until his troop leader found him reading it and gave him a severe warning because it was by a, a Jewish writer, it was a banned book. And the boy was so incensed that this really good book he’d been reading had been banned—was the wrong kind of book, the wrong kind of art, if you like, written by the wrong kind of writer—that he thought twice, he began to ask questions about what was happening, and then, it turns out, he went on with his sister, Sophie Scholl, their name was Scholl, to do this stellar work, to try to change things, make it possible for people to think, I mean differently. And they fought back, and they did change things. They did a lot of good before they were caught. And they were killed for it.

True story: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2351269&hilit=sophie+scholl#p2351269

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.

Maybe.

Giving is fraught with danger — as is taking.

Yin and yang as it were.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” Marcel Proust[/b]

Ouch?

“Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.” Blaise Pascal

Could one not perhaps dare to do both?

“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Baruch Spinoza

Or, sure, maybe it is just the absence of war.

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Me? I’m begging you to destroy mine.

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” Martin Heidegger

Like him for example.

“Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.” Ernest Hemingway

You know, in a perfect world.

[b]Mike McCormack

I’ve told you before I’m not guilty of anything; I’m just guilty, that’s all.[/b]

With me though it’s got to be of something.

…no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was our prophets deranged and coming towards us wild-eyed and smeared with shit, ringing a bell, seer and sinner at once while speaking some language from the edge of reason whose message would translate into plain words as we’re fucked well and truly fucked.

Sure, I can live with that. If only once in a blue moon.

I love that we’re living the kind of life where things are wearing down around us.

I sure as shit don’t.

…some things are so awful, you can’t look them square in the face and some things make no sense no matter what angle you look at them from. And of course they happen in other people’s lives, never in your own.

Right, keep telling yourself that.

…telling us that the death has occurred
in the family home
or after a long illness
or after a short illness
or suddenly
or in England
or peacefully at their home in
all the innumerable ways and places in which anyone can die…

This part: youtu.be/ilGahIwQEQ0

…this seemed to be that time in his life when he could suck the life out of any project no matter how promising it appeared…

If only [now] until the day I die.

[b]T.E. Lawrence

He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed…[/b]

Then that makes [at least] two of us.

You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.

On the good days…maybe.

Mankind has had ten-thousand years of experience at fighting and if we must fight, we have no excuse for not fighting well.

Yep, that’s what it’s come to. This and the military industrial complex.

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

Let’s just say I’m working on it.

The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

[i]Shades of G. Gordon Liddy:

Deep Throat: I was at a party once, and, uh, Liddy put his hand over a candle, and he kept it there. He kept it right in the flame until his flesh was burned. Somebody said, What’s the trick? And Liddy said, The trick is not minding.[/i]

By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.

Nature: 24/7.

[b]Ben Goldacre

Torture the data, and it will confess to anything…[/b]

Not unlike people.

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

Someone cue Mr. Objectivist.

Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice.

How nefarious!

Sham ultrasound is beneficial for dental pain, placebo operations have been shown to be beneficial in knee pain (the surgeon just makes fake keyhole surgery holes in the side and mucks about for a bit as if he’s doing something useful), and placebo operations have even been shown to improve angina.

Where shall we take this?

[b]Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:

"I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that ‘Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.’ What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?

Anton", 2006

Thank you Anton.[/b]

We need something like that too. Not counting the Kids of course.

…there is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries…

You know, if you were born a sucker.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.[/b]

Sounds like something from “The Dangling Converstion”.

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

Sure, with me there to watch it.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

Nope, not yet.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Even if it’s true no one knows what it means.

That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

Preferably high as a kite.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

Not so the trivial people today.

[b]so sad today

it’s all fun and games until you’re born[/b]

Naturally.

sometimes i’m like maybe i don’t have depression anymore and then i do

Naturally.

i’ll show you my emptiness if you show me yours

Is there even enough time?.

r u goth? what does it mean to u to be goth in 2018? can u be internally goth w/out a goth aesthetic? r there still untread goth realms beyond its corporatization? in light of hot topic & kat von d, can goth still be alt? who r yr fav indie goth makers of music, clothes, makeup?

New thread: Goth and dasein.

maybe if i buy this shit i don’t need i’ll be a whole person

Besides, it’s good for the economy.

what’s wrong with me: the musical

Or: what’s wrong with me: the Saturday Night Live sketch.

[b]Paul Valéry

How can one not feel enthusiasm for the man who never said anything vague?[/b]

Is this even possible? And, if so, is it even wise?

Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.

After all, time is money.

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind’s fertility: it contains the mind’s promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.

Not counting the parts that pulverize you.

I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

I think I understand this. Would you like to confirm it?

I think of the presence and of the habits of mortals in this so fluid stream, and reflect that I was among them, striving to see all things just as I see them at this very moment. I then placed Wisdom in the eternal station which now is ours. But from here all is unrecognizable. Truth is before us, and we no longer understand anything at all.

I think I understand this. Would you like to confirm it?

There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.

Haven’t I been saying this now for years?

[b]Naomi Alderman

The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.[/b]

Best perhaps not to go there.

It was like being part of a wave of water, she says. A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

Best perhaps not to go there.

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

I know, but what if it is true?

It’s not for us to worry about the men, she says. Let them please themselves, as they always have. If they want to war with each other and to wander, let them go. We have each other. Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, my sisters.

Nor for men to worry about the women?

…you are trying to steal that which you do not even desire.

On the other hand, don’t ever expect to understand why.

Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune into Fox News.

Let’s file this one under, “they deserve each other.”

[b]Mary Roach

I like the term “decedent”. It’s as though the man weren’t dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.[/b]

My own personal favorite: Stiff.

The driving aesthetic of military style is uniformity. Whence the word uniform. From first inspection to Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers look like those around them: same hat, same boots, identical white grave marker. They are discouraged from looking unique, because that would encourage them to feel unique, to feel like an individual. The problem with individuals is that they think for themselves and of themselves, rather than for and of their unit. They’re the lone goldfish on the old Pepperidge Farm bags, swimming the other way. They’re a problem.

I know that I was. Just short of a court martial in AIT.

“Morning breath” is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.

Let’s file this one under, “where would we be without science?”

This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best.

Bonk of course.

cadavers’ intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs…

Clearly, this cries out for a context.

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than “that shapeless scrub” so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, “this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.”

I know: Human all too human. Or, sure, just men.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin. And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol’ nose. I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly, they are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin! A baboon cannot even cook ugali! Ugali is the ubiquitous and repulsive maize meal that everyone eats here. I almost respond that I don’t really know how to cook the stuff either, but decide to show some prudence at last. He is not your cousin![/b]

Another smartass imperialist?

Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.

Sounds like a personal problem.

You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

Unless of course there is lots and lots of money involved.

Being healthy consists of having the same disease as everyone else.

Let’s pin down a disease we all have.

The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery.

For example: Why is there something instead of nothing?

Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there’s immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years.

And then all that stuff Marx suggested.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Just don’t get carried away.

"Art and revolt will die only with the last man.” Albert Camus

Update: Or the last woman.

“The need to be right — the sign of a vulgar mind.” Albert Camus

You might mean you, Mr. Objectivist.

“Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.” Thales of Miletus

Not literally of course. Unless of course it is.

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” Ursula K. Le Guin

And then one by one we’re gone.

“Find a path or make one.” Seneca

Or, sure, you can just take mine.

[b]Anatole France

It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.[/b]

And here we all are, bound to stuff “I” in there somewhere.

War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.

Never in other words.

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.

Between a little and a lot for example.

You see, Dimitri and I, we are both suffering from ennui! We have still the match-boxes. But at last one gets tired even of match-boxes. Besides, our collection will soon be complete. And then what are we going to do?

What everyone does of course. Not that anyone knows what that is.

Ah! Yes, the truth, that ingenious concoction of desirability of appearance.

And not just in the Oval Office.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

Come on, who the hell would ever go that far?

[b]Malcolm Lowry

How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?[/b]

Point taken. If there is one.

To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool … You’ve even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering … Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself.

What does it mean to speak of another’s suffering? Let alone to pass judgment on how genuine it is.

Adiós, she added in Spanish, I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.
Thank you.
Sank you.
Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.
Sank you.

Lost in translation?

Only against death does man cry out in vain.

Maybe in la la land.

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

Let’s file this one under, “he had his reasons”.

Nothing is altered and in spite of God’s mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life. Indeed there was not, nor was this what he’d meant to convey. Please let Yvonne have her dream – dream? – of a new life with me – please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception, he tried…Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life. That wouldn’t do either… Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost. – Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it’s only together, if it’s only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world! he cried in his heart.

I was just thinking this myself.

[b]The Dead Author

A communist, an existentialist, and a fascist walk into a bar. But enough about Slavoj Žižek.[/b]

A fascist? Explain please.

Why read Foucault when you could be at a public library mining bitcoin.

Okay, I admit it: Huh?

The irony of the president of the United States calling other countries shitholes is lost on a lot of people.

Americans for example.

So the founder of IKEA has died. We are all equal in death, if you thought that all your friends owning the same furniture as you wasn’t enough already.

Cue the Coneheads “consuming mass quantities” of IKEA.

No, introversion and anxiety are not the same thing, but the main reason so many people call themselves introverts these days is to romanticize their anxiety.

I know that I do. At least I think I know that I do.

The last Davos conference that actually mattered was the international academic congress of 1929, when Martin Heidegger beat the most respected philosopher of the time, Ernst Cassirer, in a debate on the question “What is man?” Cassirer’s reputation never recovered. Sorry.

You decide: newrepublic.com/article/81380/h … davos-kant

[b]Neil Gaiman

So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?
Love, he explained.
She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. I hope you choke on it, she said, flatly.[/b]

Flatly? That’ll do it.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.

Let alone an analytic philosopher.

We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.

That and other things.

And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

A real atheist in other words. Like the kind we have here.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Not unlike the history of all the other nations.

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

You know, if they ever are.