a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

Analytic philosopher: let’s simplify this to the point it has no relation to the problem.
Continental philosopher: let’s complicate this to the point no one understands it.[/b]

All of the above?

Harry Potter, and the Purging of the Socialist Wing of the Party.

Maybe on another planet.

The thing they don’t tell you about channeling your despair into art is that you have to be good at art or you just end up with shitty despair.

Let alone channeling your despair into philosophy?

Philosophy is important because it teaches you to not understand things.

Or, if you are really lucky, not to want to.

It’s weird when people thank military members for their “service to the country.” As if we got any benefit out of invading Iraq. If you want to thank someone for their service, thank your garbage man.

Or, more realistically, your mailman.

The reason for morality being defined as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” took thousands of years to formulate is because you have to write huge volumes of philosophy first in order to get anyone into a confused enough state of mind to actually believe it.

Or not believe it.

[b]Dave Eggers

Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.[/b]

And not just from the deep state.

Don’t you think if someone like me, someone who invented most of this shit, is scared, don’t you think you should be scared, too?

Who said that I wasn’t?

People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.

On the other hand…

Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.

So, who controls that here?

Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds.

Okay, but where exactly is this Circle?

Then why are you talking about exhibitionism? It’s a ridiculous term. Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. It’s niggardly. If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself.

Right, like you can’t take that too far.

[b]Timothy Snyder

This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.[/b]

That works for me. Sort of.

Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States—fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.

Okay, what does that really mean?

Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap.

Has Don already trumped this?

A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

While swallowing one or another religion hook, line and sinker.

A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency.

Like for example the war on terror.

Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

Now hold on there!

[b]James D. Watson

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.[/b]

Are there any of those left?

A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.

Really, what if there was one?

I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.

Let’s connect the dots between this and…Hitler?

I don’t think we are here for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating a good lunch.

This is actually quite profound, he thought.

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration .

Anyone here care to collaborate with me?

If scientists don’t play God, who will?

Let’s make a list.

[b]The Dead Author

It’s 2019 and we still haven’t given up on linear history.[/b]

Define “we”.

Raindrops are just dead snowflakes.

And God wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s never too late to start writing but always too early.

That can’t be good.

Why did Narcissus go to a nude beach when he can’t swim.

Why would anyone not go?

The name of your Kafka character is the job your father wanted you to have + the first name of the last person you ghosted + K.

He means the other Kafka, of course.

If you’re feeling empty, at least you still have space inside.

And if that doesn’t console you?

[b]David Sedaris

When it happens to you it’s a national tragedy—Why aren’t the papers reporting this? you wonder. Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is.[/b]

What do you think, human nature?

Dad followed his I’m-So-Disappointed speech with a lecture on career opportunities.
You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what? he asked. Literaturizing?

Then he steered him to Wall Street.

Today a child told Santa that he wanted his dead father back and a complete set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Everyone wants those Turtles.

Of course I never did.

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

Of course that would never happen with your dog.

…that’s what fantasies are for: they allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top.

You know, IN the fantasy.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn’t have a TV, but television didn’t teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

Imagine then not having a computer.

[b]David Bowie

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings. [/b]

Of course all philosophy is stable.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

Feel free to confront mine.

There’s a terror in knowing what the world is about.

And it’s not just that it’s meaningless and absurd.

I’m not sure whether it is me changing my mind, or whether I lie a lot.

Or whether you’re changing your lies.

The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.

And Bowie does that?

Look up here, I’m in heaven.

I know: When did he say that?

[b]tiny nietzsche

AP: trump denounces canadian prog rock “we must protect our borders from concept albums”[/b]

He means Rush of course. If you’d call them progressive.

it was a dark and stormy nihilist

Is there any other kind?

sartre don’t surf

And imagine how he felt about napalm.

I dreamt the trees had teeth

Who hasn’t?

buzzfeed: trump drinks his own piss
trump: fake news
mueller: accurate

In a parallel universe say.

you’re living in your own private isotope

In Idaho of course.

[b]Dashiell Hammett

I haven’t laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.[/b]

Actually he fed him to them.

The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they’re easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You’d think they’d be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.

Not only that but no one knows why.

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.

And isn’t that pretty much what I do here, Mr. Objectivist?

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.

Yeah, but he’s Sam Spade.

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

Or, here: The dumber the philosopher…

I couldn’t be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There’s only one Maltese Falcon.

And, after all, it is a material world.

[b]so sad today

sexually transmitted anxiety[/b]

I’ll take my chances, he thought.

take my feelings out with the trash

You know, along with the thoughts.

can’t tell if people know they are full of shit or have no clue

Like [for all practical purposes] it makes any difference.

we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head

Better mine than yours.

why does everyone have to make everything so stupid

My guess: they’re stupid.

wish i could retire from thinking about big beautiful dicks

Let’s help her.

[b]Tara Westover

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.[/b]

And how many can say that?

There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them.

Would that this might happen to me.

To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.

Right, like this makes my points go away.

Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

Of course that’s perfectly normal. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

Then you go on to discern other things.

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.

Could anything be more absurd? But point taken.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.[/b]

Okay, but who can actually afford to believe it?

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Is this an actual thing?

…the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.

Well, it is after all the new religion.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

In fact, in the world today, figure out both.

Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

Let’s keep it that way.

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

Sure, but look at all the fantastic things that we’ve gained. Let’s list them.

[b]Pat Conroy

Time moves funny and it’s hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.[/b]

Time: Don’t forget to seize it.

. . . I have come to revere words like “democracy” and “freedom,” the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America’s flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. . . . I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong.

Among other things, he thought, fuck that.

…I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

And then the equivalent of that when we post them here.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

In other words, you can forget arithmetic here.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

The whole fucking South for that matter.

My mother’s voice and my father’s fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.

One way or another we’ve all got a slice of that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith”. William Faulkner[/b]

My guess: More or less blind.

“Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” William Faulkner

How can this not be ironic? Or perfectly natural.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” Plato

Tell them that.

“It is fatuous to apologise for the bad behaviour of our ancestors. In fact, it is impossible.” Mary Warnock

That never stops most of us though.

“Philosophy seems to stop being interesting just when it starts being professional.” Mary Warnock

Analytically as it were.

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. David Hume

Three words: Context. Context. Context.

[b]Zhuangzi

To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders.[/b]

Let’s prove this.

To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.

How profound is this? No, really.

During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.

Imagine the implications of this if it’s actually true.

The sound of water says what I think.

On the other hand, is it a trickle or a torrent?

I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.

What we call the “American Dream” here.

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening.

My guess: Whatever that means.

[b]Werner Twertzog

No one even bothered to shoot Lawrence Welk.[/b]

That’s actually true.

You are not good enough. You are not smart enough. No one likes you. But you will endure nonetheless. Why? Because I will it.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Klaus Kinski.

Better to be a dissatisfied director than a pig bloated on swill, soon to be eaten.

And he means it.

Count yourself lucky if you merely die penniless and insane.

Let’s decide if that makes sense.

You have little to fear if I follow you. But you do not have nothing to fear.

And, if he’s lying, you’d better run for your life.

Remove all the motivational, wood signs in your house if you want me to take you seriously.

Are those a real thing?

[b]Russell Baker

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong. [/b]

Not unlike an uneducated person.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

Of course we know better, don’t we? Or certainly some of us.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

On our smart phones no less.

The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it.

Consider it not done.

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Fortunately, my daughter didn’t even come close. And turned out fine.

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.

What’s the equivalent of that here?

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.[/b]

You know, if that’s actually an option.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

24/7 sometimes.

Better never means better for everyone…It always means worse, for some.

Some of them in particular.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

That’s how it works alright.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

That’s probably applicable to people too.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

That can get tricky of course.

[b]God

This year I’m going to be more of the kind of God that you deserve. Yes, that’s a threat.[/b]

That OT Dude.

Retweet this and you’ll go to heaven. Yes, the standards are now that low.

It’s a trick, I’ll bet.

This is the alternate universe.

Great, the alternate God.

HOW I MADE IT VS. HOW YOU SEE IT
Animals: Meat
Birds: Poultry
Fish: Sushi
Vegetables: Potato Chips
Fruit: Fanta Blue Raspberry Slurpee
Trees (living): Lumber
Trees (dead): Coal
Gold: Happiness
Land: Property
Ocean: Dumpster

Of course we were made in His image.

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be all alone?
With your cover blown?
Your collusion shown?
A complete self-own?
Like a Roger Stone.

Anyone here know Don Trump’s nickname for God?

Why don’t poor people just have more money?

So much for being omniscient.

[b]Bernhard Schlink

She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling.[/b]

More or less, she’s me.

Did my moral upbringing somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing—then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn’t stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.

On the other hand, there’s the moral majority.

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks-understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

Would that life wasn’t always confronting us with things like this.

Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

At least before she hung herself.

It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.

Like the dead give a shit.

In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement.

Actually, not even here.