a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Neil Gaiman

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.[/b]

Has the last one closed yet?

All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.

When they lie to us he means.

This little piggy went to Hades
This little piggy stayed home
This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh
This little piggy violated virgins
And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top

Try this one on your kids.

Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.

There are three within walking distance of me. Seriously.

Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you’d answer for your evil deeds and your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls
He must have eaten a lot of people.
Not as many as you’d think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had better be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby…

See? As with most things it all depends.

Furthermore, it goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.

I’d still ask him to prove it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.’” Eduardo Galeano[/b]

You know, when it’s not actually repeating itself.

“Nature has no history.” Martin Heidegger

In other words, nothing is ever actually written down. Still, let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

“The most important consequence of self-sufficiency is freedom.” Epicurus

You either learn that [and live that] or you don’t.

“Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.” Epicurus

How logical is that?

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.” Epicurus

Of course no one can actually do this.

“You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.” William Blake

On the other hand, enough [or more than enough] what?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.[/b]

More to the point, what prompted him to suggest this?

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture —a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually –I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Based on a true story perhaps?

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

One word: cremation.

I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.

Let’s narrow this truth down here.

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.

I used to be curious about that too.

Actually, I do have doubts, all the time. Any thinking person does. There are so many sides to every question.

In particular those beastly conflicting goods.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

Renaissance artist Gregorio Comanini, has counseled the equivalent of “Live an ordinary, regular life so you can be irregular and brilliant in your creativity".[/b]

Tell us how that worked for you.

Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another—writers who could not have read each other—still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.

That’s just how the historical relationship between “I” and “we” and “them” works though, right?

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

Not sure what this means but who could doubt it?

You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.

Come on, how can you even trust yourself here?

My loneliness began to be filled with ghosts. That is the worst thing about loneliness, how easily it becomes filled.

True story: I’ve never been lonely. And how sick is that?

[b]God

Deep down I know I don’t exist but I’m too afraid to admit it.[/b]

Clearly a God thing.

Donald Trump deserves to be reunited with his parents.

So, how cruel is that?

The less you know, the more you think you do.

Double that [at least] here, right?

Summer is so weird! No school shootings, right?

See you in the Fall, God.

You were a bad idea.

He’s just sore because Nietzsche killed him.

Children should be seen and not herded up like animals.

Let alone sent to the gas chambers.

[b]C.G. Jung

The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.[/b]

Think of the citizens here as, say, idiots.

If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.

It’s a miracle that most of us can make it through the day.

One cannot live from anything except what one is.

Or is this just a typo?

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Thank god for Artistotle’s golden mean, right?

Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind’s eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas–a subjective confession.

Right, like he was no different than the rest of us.

The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it — I don’t need to believe it.

Do you believe this?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

By the time you’re 35, you should have forgotten which of your philosophy books you’ve read and which you haven’t.[/b]

Not counting those you were assigned to read, right?

Greek ethics: Be true to yourself
French ethics: Be true to the other
German ethics: Be true to the true
American ethics: Be true to the fraud you call truth

That or the fake news.

Psychology: The past hurts
Sociology: The present hurts
Politics: The future will hurt
Philosophy: The past conditional perfect will have hurt if the future conditional perfect does as well

If only analytically.

Philosophy: We’ve got all the questions
Religion: We’ve got all the answers
Literature: We changed all the questions
Politics: We rejected all your answers

Or not of course.

Live your life as if it were
Descartes: a dream
Beckett: a joke
Nietzsche: a clumsy lie
Camus: definitely a death sentence

Definitely all of the above.

[b]Your professor appeared to conceive of the seminar as

  1. a psychoanalytic session
  2. a Reddit thread
  3. an opportunity to talk about themselves
  4. a lawsuit waiting to happen[/b]

Remember back in the days when it was all just a paper chase?

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.[/b]

Same when we go in the other direction too.

I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to, said Patrick. The rest is packaging.

For most [as often as not] the packaging of others.

His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.

Of course we’ll have to know the reasons why. Right now, I can’t even imagine doing it myself

As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it?

And, no, not just that stuff.

Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about.

You know, in case you actually have to justify it.

Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp, said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.

You’ll either pull this off or you won’t.

[b]Tom Stoppard

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.[/b]

Could it really be as simple [and vexing] as that?

I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness.

Like most of the philosophy here, he thought.

What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.

Even though, sure, he may well be starving.

If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.

On the other hand, as some might put it, “fuck them”.

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.

What am I missing here?

People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.

But not much worse he suspected.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.” Epicurus[/b]

Though not necessarily by choice.

“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning." Hermann Hesse

How fucked is this? You know, usually.

“Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.” Plato

Well, given most men, is that really something to brag about?

"What distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity.” Søren Kierkegaard

Yeah, right. Unless of course you take that leap.

“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.” Søren Kierkegaard

Like life will even notice.

"People know what they want because they know what other people want.” Theodor W. Adorno

Wow, how grim is that?!

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don’t. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don’t know how to pray, also pray.[/b]

After all, what have they really got to lose? Not counting those that do.

People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.

Really, not much isn’t beautiful to someone.

According to Darwin’s theory, it’s not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race.

Tell that to, among others, the Nietzscheans.

There’s no television. No movies. There’s one thing to do—look out the window. Well, and to pray, of course. There used to be Communism instead of God, but now there’s just God. So we pray.

Come on, Mr. Capitalist, tell them what you pray to.

Any animal is afraid of a human. If you don’t touch him, he’ll walk around you. Used to be, you’d be in the forest and you’d hear human voices, you’d run toward them. Now people hide from one another. God save me from meeting a person in the forest!

Men mostly.

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.

Trust me: Not always.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

…to find out what another human being feels, a person who isn’t you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That’s what writing is supposed to do.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “fat chance”. At least I would.

…sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

Most times though not.

No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.

Or: No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, friendship was allowed to trump family.
[no pun intended?]

I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.

That’s just the postmodern way of course.

When you located someone from the past online, it was like finding that person trapped behind glass in the permanent collection of a museum. You knew they were still there, and it seemed to you as if they would stay there forever.

He thought, “good”. Not counting Sharon of course.

Like everyone we knew, we did what we could to protest the war. We signed, and we worked, and we brought our children with us to storefront offices to make calls and type letters. We used mimeographs, the purple ink getting all over us, the place smelling like a schoolroom, and we headed down to D.C. in a long, fossilized traffic jam of cars. The children cried in the backseat, and we pushed them on the Mall in strollers while they begged for juice, their faces blazing with heat, and Joe was among the writers who stood up and screamed into screechy, inadequate mikes.

The last four wars at least.

[b]Nein

Rage. Rage. Against the dining of the right.[/b]

Of course that includes the left too.

Let’s not forget the good news: “Scientists say humans are alone in the universe”: bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/ar … ggests-yes

Now, let’s get out there and prove it.

Well, friends, as they say: Soccer is a simple game. 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes. And at the end: we all grow old and die alone.

Hell, not much that isn’t true regarding.

We regret to inform you that no: It’s not the end of the world.

You know, whatever that is.

The French will always win. In theory.

Let’s run this by the existentialists.

Meanwhile the score in Turkey: 1. Until further notice, there is no opposing team.

Another BFF for Don Trump.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.[/b]

Unless of course you count, “I think that you think that I think that they think that I think that you think that I might possibly exist.”

The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.

The least affectionate: a wet cat.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

Of course that’s everywhere here.

Hash, x. There is no definition for this word — nobody knows what hash is.

[i]On the contrary:
Hash:
1] a dish of diced or chopped meat and often vegetables, as of leftover corned beef or veal and potatoes, sautéed in a frying pan or of meat, potatoes, and carrots cooked together in gravy.
2] a mess, jumble, or muddle
3] a reworking of old and familiar material

And that’s not even counting all the fucking slang.[/i]

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.

Does this sound sinister to you too?

You don’t have to be stupid to be a Christian…but it probably helps.

Or, sure, only possibly.

[b]Anthony Powell

Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.[/b]

Imagine then if this were always true.

I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.

We should all be so lucky. Here, for example.

There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.

Tell them that.

His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.

The sheer gall of them!

But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.

You know, around elementary school.

But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

After all, few things are trickier than chance.

[b]Temple Grandin

I am different, not less.[/b]

And, in some respects, more.

Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.

Let’s run this by Peta.

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

Let’s run this by Peta too.

I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.

Hell, I remember when this once worked for me.

What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?
You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.

Of course most wouldn’t go quite that far.

You simply cannot tell other people they are stupid, even if they really are stupid.

Remember that, Mr. Reasonable. :wink:

[b]Nora Ephron

My religion is Get Over It.[/b]

Okay, but who do you pray to when you can’t?

A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage.

Wow, that’s never even occured to me.

The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sports, and I have no idea what else.
Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what’s more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help.

Let’s call this a more or less general description.

I hear myself saying these words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I’m really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.

How’s that strike you, Mr. Objectivist?

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I accomplished something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.

And, let’s face it, isn’t that what you’re doing now?

I’ve always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn’t get his wife to fetch him the butter.

Let’s boot this one to Joker.

[b]Erica Jong

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.[/b]

My guess: the part that revolves around sex.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

She’s probably watching the wrong ones.

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery”, by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

Not many men like that around. Right, Mr Reasonable? :wink:

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

If only up on their pedestals.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it…

Of course this can mean practically anything. In other words, that’s just another plot.

And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in… underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money.

Let’s pin down exactly how crazy this is.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.” Theodor Adorno[/b]

I know I abjure them.

"There’s nothing more fragrant, more sparkling, more intoxicating than the infinity of possibilities.” Soëren Kierkegaard

Just weighty enough not to be outright silly.

“How the past perishes is how the future becomes.” Alfred North Whitehead

And what might that be?

“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths.” Alfred North Whitehead

Or a fraction thereof.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows." Alfred North Whitehead

Or, for most objectivists, the other way around.

“History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.” Walter Rauschenbusch

Almost as though it repeats itself.

[b]Nathanael West

…all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust.[/b]

Mike: “There’s a sucker born every minute…and two to take him.”

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.

Needless to say, I can’t even imagine it.

They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure.

Of course with some folks leisure is all they’re equipped for.

…what goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock…

What the hell does the sea have to do with it?

It’s solitary drinking that makes drunkards.

I’ll drink to that.

Humanity…I’m a humanity lover. All the broken bastards…

Well, we’ve come to the right place here, haven’t we?