a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Erica Jong

God is not dead but missing in action, and we are destined to wander again for more millennia than there are undiscovered stars.[/b]

And that’s just in this universe.

The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees.

Well, as they say, you get what you vote for.

I loved Aphrodite from the first and steeped myself in her legends. My mother told me that in ancient times her rituals were bloody and cruel, but I only half believed it.

I guess we’ll never know.

And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

Unless, of course, you don’t.

Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion.

And to think I once believed that it was.

Is love freedom or is it bondage?

Yes.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Kant: Act as if you were free
Schopenhauer: Act as if you were never free
Nietzsche: Act as if freedom never existed
Beckett: Act as if you never existed[/b]

Hey, different folks, different strokes.

Capitalism is a religion that offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.
–Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is the belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the good of everyone.
–J.M. Keynes
Capitalism has worked very well.
–Bill Gates

Those and lots of other things no doubt.

I wanted to be a philosophy major, but I didn’t want to learn about
a) the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system
b) the meaninglessness of my existence
c) the infinite pain of thought
d) logical positivism

Obviously: e)

Is Twitter a waste of time?
Kant: What is “time”?
Bataille: What is “waste”?
Schelling: What is “is”?
Heidegger: What is “of”?
Wittgenstein: What is “a”?
Camus: Yes.

Yes works for me. Not counting Jan of course.

As you type, this website (t2i.cvalenzuelab.com ) translates your words into an image.

Try this: “dasein, conflicting goods, political economy”. I’m scared to.

Walter Benjamin: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Sure, where there’s a yin there is always a yang.

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.[/b]

No one ever thinks it will come to this, of course.

I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

No one ever thinks it will come to this, of course.

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

Do you dare then to pursue it?
Oh yeah.

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

Trust me: The dice are loaded.

There are three types of intelligent persons: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see that he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind.

I’m the fourth kind of course.

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects.

Just not all of them.

[b]Seneca

Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.[/b]

Back then maybe, but not so much today.

Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant.

Different folks, different fates. You know, if it works that way.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

If only going back [so far] to the Big Bang.

Often a very old man has no other proof of his long life than his age.

Of course we won’t go there, will we?

It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.

On the other hand: Huh?

The part of life we really live is small.’ For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.

That probably explains some of us then.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy began with Socrates corrupting the youth by telling them how the “wise” old men were full of shit. And philosophy is still important, because 2500 years later, the old men are just as full of shit as ever.[/b]

[i]And not just the assholes in Trumpworld.

I firmly believe that if we could get Samuel L. Jackson to do a dramatic reading of the Communist Manifesto, communism would be achieved within a year.

Let’s send this suggestion along to the Capital One folks.

Growing up means letting go of the childish dream that other people care what kind of music you like.

Two words: Fuck them!

Look, socialism just doesn’t work in the real world. I bet you can’t name a single socialist country that successfully defended itself from being violently destroyed by the imperialist capitalist powers.

Cue Phyllo.

Existentialism is for people who want to be free.
Absurdism is for people who want to be cool.
Nihilism is for people who want to piss off their parents.

Mine? They couldn’t have cared less.

[b]Philosophers generally fall into five categories:

1. System builders.
2. Puzzle solvers.
3. Skeptics.
4. Cultural critics.
5. Old white dudes who came up with one vaguely clever thought experiment in the 70s, and have been milking it ever since.[/b]

Or, sure, 6.

[b]Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.[/b]

And them of us.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes–believes with all its heart–that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Practically running the world. At least for now.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It’s been years now for me.

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

Of course that doesn’t bode well for it.

Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

There must another Google then.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

Just not yours or mine.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.[/b]

A few bucks at a time though.

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

I’ll drink to that, he thought.

I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.

Duck!

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

I know, let’s change that.

I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.

And fucking you as often than not.

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.

Not counting Emmylou Harris and Nanci Griffith of course.

[b]Neil Gaiman

But the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable.[/b]

Thump by thump by thump.

The young woman was crying, in the way that grownups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way.

Like so much else beyond our control.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Let’s pin this down.

If you can’t eat it, drink it, smoke it, or snort it…then fuck it!

You know, before it fucks you.

We were expecting to see you at the market.
Yes. Well. Some people thought I was dead. I was forced to keep a low profile.
Why . . . why did some people think you were dead?
The marquis looked at Richard with eyes that had seen too much and gone too far. Because they killed me.

They’ll get him next time.

He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

[b]Spike Lee

I believe in destiny. But I also believe that you can’t just sit back and let destiny happen.[/b]

Obviously not Destiny with a capital D.

I think black people have to be in control of their own image because film is a powerful medium. We can’t just sit back and let other people define our existence.

Right, like all black folks will come to the same conclusions.

Those that’ll tell don’t know, and those that know won’t tell.

You might wonder what though.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it’s been a quest since then to define who we are.

Not counting Clarence Thomas of course.

It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody.

Second only to the ones we kill ourselves.

I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night.

Deep, man.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.” Arthur Schopenhauer[/b]

Making some all the more miserable still.

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.” Arthur Schopenhauer

The guy just kept pummeling us.

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Let’s file this one under, “at least”.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein

Let alone objectively.

"The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.” Jean Baudrillard

So, what does that tell us about us?

"Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.” Jean Baudrillard

Cue R. Mutt.

[b]Leslie Feinberg

You’re more than just neither, honey. There’s other ways to be than either-or. It’s not so simple. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people who don’t fit.[/b]

Not fitting. The more the merrier.
Well, if not always.

Surrendering is unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival.

You know, if that’s even an option.

Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.

One thing for sure: It will always be asked.

Strength, like height, is measured by who you’re standing next to.

Or, here, you you’re posting next to.

Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.

Our truth he means.

I remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stare—their eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am “other.” I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.

Still, there’s now and there’s then.
Going back, say, 60 years.
At least around here.

[b]‏The Dead Aurthur

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899, who showed that being a good writer, fighting fascism, or having a family won’t make you happy if you’re depressed.[/b]

And don’t rule suicide out.

Erwin Schrödinger was born on this day in 1887. By now the cat is probably dead.

Anyone here know for sure?

Things that teach you how to be alone:
cats
books
capitalism

Or at least make you wish that you were alone.

Yeah, we live in an Orwellian nightmare where a few Nazis are kicked off of a handful of social media sites after being able to make millions of dollars there.

Any of them one of you?

Kafka taught me that there is freedom in laughter. And nowhere else.

Unless you’ve found another.

Nothing keeps you busier than procrastination because the closer a deadline gets, the better the distraction has to be.

Bad news: No deadlines here!

[b]C.G. Jung

We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.[/b]

I’ve always intended to do this myself.

The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly.

Dreams. Now that’s living!

You do not have an inferior function, it has you.

Though from time to time it’s more like a collusion.

Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself.

Tell that to, among others, the Nazis.

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does.

Explain that to mine then.

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.

Come on, we all forget that. Though, sure, some considerably more than others.

[b]God

It’s easy to blame other people for your problems, so do that.[/b]

Wow, a tip from God.

Stop kissing My ass and start not raping kids.

Now He tells them.

The road to enlightenment always leads through the valley of morons.

No morons here of course.

Donald Trump will at some point die.

In other words, He [and His mysterious ways] are still working on it.

So this turned into kind of a fun day.

He means Manafort and Cohen.

To the man who just prayed to Me for a sports car and a big penis: sorry pal, but no one’s got both.

Does anyone here have both?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Strut said Ursula. One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.[/b]

Lots of strutting here of course.

Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion.

Neither will dasein.

She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one’s bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile.

Let’s file this one [for now] under, “a timeless truth”.

The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.

Beware of course when this is not just a state of mind.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans … read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

And what of the “high-brow Americans”? Or is that now just ludicrous?

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

Right, like that will ever stop them.

[b]V.S. Naipaul

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.[/b]

Really? I hadn’t noticed.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Trust me: most find a way.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

On purpose, in other words.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

How clever [or idiotic] is that?

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

That and the possibilities allowed us by others.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling…

As well it should, Mr. Objectivist.

[b]Herbert Spencer

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.[/b]

Our own for example.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Begetting, among other things, Trumpworld.

Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion…On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects.

So, what do you think…maybe?

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

Not counting the Kids of course. You know, if we’re lucky.

Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.

In other words, our peace, our civilization.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Makes you wonder how we have always managed to avoid that here. Once in a blue moon for example.

[b]tiny nietzsche

freud: tell me about your mother
me: no
freud: want some cocaine?
me: sure[/b]

It’s either one or the other.
If not both.

to don’t list:
don’t @ me
don’t follow me
don’t taze me, bro

Hey, don’t get me started.

if this week feels like last week don’t worry, time is a construct

Not counting next week of course.

donald trump in the ballroom with the nondisclosure agreement

Again.

that feeling when the mayans were only off by six years

Or sure [soon enough] seven.

the only thing that can stop a bad person with an abyss is a good person with an abyss

At least theoretically.

[b]Ferdinand de Saussure

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.[/b]

And, aside from myself, we all know what that means.

Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.

If not downright reactionary.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

If it is even coherent at all.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Naturally, Mr. Objectivist.

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

Sure sounds hopelessly scholastic to me.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

Sure sounds hopelessly scholastic to me.

[b]Leon Trotsky

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.[/b]

Of course this can get tricky.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

Revolutions included.

Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

Of course then life can become too easy. Call it, say, the “one of us” syndrome.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Indeed, it went and drafted me.

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Of course some will see this as brutally ironic.

As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.

Like most things of this sort, you either get it or you don’t.