a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Judith Butler

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?[/b]

Anyone care to tackle that?

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a ‘one’ who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

Anyone care to tackle that?

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

Of course they don’t sell it at the grocers.

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

Anyone able to translate this into English.

When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be.

Here of course we have the Kids. The classic combination of both.

…laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.

From what then was Don Trump derived?

[b]Vincent van Gogh

Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you’re put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.[/b]

Tell that to the landlord.

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

Would he still say that today?

I’m such a nobody.

Let’s call it a mistranslation.

It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one’s youth.

Trust me: You don’t know the half of it.

I shouldn’t precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can’t very well get out of it.

On the other hand, I’ve been trying now for years.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.

We should all be so lucky.

[b]Philosophy tweets

"“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” Buddha[/b]

Sounds like something he’d say. Or, more to the point, perhaps, does it sound like something you’d believe?

“Those who tell the stories rule society.” Plato

Actually, it is those who pay for the stories who rule society. And not just the advertisers.

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato

He fires Bob Mueller is what he does.

“Leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.” Epictetus

Way, way, way back then in other words.

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” Nietzsche

Starting tomorrow let’s say.

“Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life." Marcus Aurelius

Not counting trips to the toilet of course.

[b]Alan Cumming,

You know what I hate most of all in the whole wide world?..More than people who think that if you’re bisexual it means you’ll fuck absolutely anyone especially them?[/b]

The Kids who think that?

You should have an experience; it shouldn’t just be an experience.

Ever had one?

Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.

Not to worry: I’m working on it.

Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.

Haven’t reached that part yet. Not to the best of my knowledge.

Be who you like as long as you mean it.

Of course to get paid most will be who they aren’t.

It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.

How’s that not working out for you?

[b]Tom Stoppard

We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
No, no, no… Death is…not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.
I’ve frequently not been on boats.
No, no, no–what you’ve been is not on boats.[/b]

We get it, right?

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

There’s practically no end to how far you can take this.

Stark raving sane.

Ever been?

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

At least until we get to Heaven.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

Maybe on another planet.

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

Cue Vladimir Putin.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.[/b]

Clearly, even this doesn’t quite pin it down.

One sheds ones sickness in books—repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

You die in other words.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. Anger is blood, poured and perplexed into froth; but malice is the wisdom of our blood.

That works for me.

She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died.

There’s always that, true.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

I once thought that I was.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing?

Like that’s actually a choice for some.

[b]Susan Griffin

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.[/b]

Trust me: not for long. Let alone forever.

In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which organized crime established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.

Doesn’t surprise you, does it?

There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.

Way, way, way outside.

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future…Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.

And, boy, do we need a new one now.

The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.

Though why [in the name of God] should it?

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.

For some, going back to Adam and Eve.

[b]John Stuart Mill

Protection, therefore, against tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.[/b]

My guess: this gets really, really complicated really, really fast. If only out in, among other things, the real world.

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

Anyone here figured this formula out?

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

Usually, for example. Though sometimes almost certainly.

Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

Either way though shit happens.

The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally found person to rediscover it, until some of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

I know: Name one.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.

Let’s file this one under, “oh shit, here we go again”.

[b]Jane Smiley

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.[/b]

Let’s decide: Is that still true?

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes—and it will come—may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.

I wonder if that includes mine?

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

Or, for some, not exist.

Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.

Ah, the objectivist years…

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

And then, for most of us, we become the wage slave.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

With any number of different endings.

[b]Nein

The good news: your lost hour has been found. The bad news: you’ll get it back Monday afternoon.[/b]

Or, in a few more months, just skip one.

A gentle reminder from the optimists. Rome didn’t burn in a day.

Right, like that helps.

Liberté. Égalité. Friday.

And not just in France anymore.

Changing my privacy settings. From Salinger to Pynchon.

Is that too drastic?

Monday. The cruelest month.

He means whatever today is of course.

A gentle reminder from Potemkin: it takes a village.

Or even the facade of one.

[b]Samuel Butler

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.[/b]

Their tact as often as not.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

Tell me about it…

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

And to think I was once quite good at it.

A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

Of course that has nothing to do with our species, does it?

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

Clever perhaps but for most of us moot.

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism…

I know, i know: get to the point.

[b]Lee Smolin

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.[/b]

Hmm, would you pray to that?

Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.

Let’s file this one unders, “win win”.

But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders.

Who does this remind you of?

By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn’t believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough.

And that’s still before we die.

On the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend’s little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.

I guess they lucked out.

Whatever is real in our universe is real in a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments. The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyze the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present. The future does not yet exist and is therefore open. We can reasonably infer some predictions, but we cannot predict the future completely. Indeed, the future can produce phenomena that are genuinely novel, in the sense that no knowledge of the past could have anticipated them. Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.

Another brief history of time.

[b]Neil Gaiman

There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us, said Odin. You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise.[/b]

Not counting all the new gods since of course.

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.

On the other hand, are these real mistakes though?

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

Okay, let’s pick the one for Don Trump then.

…we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

Some day, he predicted, this would become a cliche.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

Me too. As long as no one really knows what they are.

The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

Anyone care to run this by Zoot?

[b] Jeff VanderMeer

What can you do when your five senses are not enough?[/b]

Anyone here come up with something?

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.

Is this even possible?

We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.

What’s that leave then?

…for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

Not counting Google Street View one hopes.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

Or of late: Ten weeks ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

To cite just one example, the mystery of existence itself.

[b]God

There is life on other planets and from now on that’s my focus.[/b]

I’ll weep for their future.

ALL CAPS are a great way of COMPENSATING for having a small PENIS!

Five will get you ten it’s a reference to Trump.

Lucifer, Chief Demon of Hell, will become My new heavenly gatekeeper. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to St. Peter for his service! Pol Pot will become the new Chief Demon of Hell, the first Cambodian so chosen. Congratulations to all!

Five will get you ten it’s a reference to Trump.

I want to be the kind of God atheists are proud not to believe in.

I know, but what if He means it?

It’s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawking already mathematically proved, to My face, that I don’t exist.

Or, rather, what’s left of Stephen Hawking.

The Bible is 100% accurate. Especially when thrown at close range.

But, sure, shoot the bastard too.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.[/b]

Repeat as necessary.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Repeat as necessary.

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

Or, here, every post.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

And then not so gently.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Or so it seems at the time.

Art is to look at not to criticize.

Like that will ever catch on.

[b]John Dewey

We only think when confronted with a problem.[/b]

That can’t be good.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Let’s call it, say, among other things, an existential contraption.

…a problem well put is half solved.

Not counting mine of course.

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

After all, look at us.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

He means music of course.

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

Not if the whole point of education is, say, the mass production of wage slaves.

[b]The Dead Author

It’s not despair if you don’t also feel it on the weekend.[/b]

Then it is despair.

[b]A Brief History of Philosophy

1. Caves
2. Owls
3. Abysses[/b]

Explain please: Why owls?

Nietzsche’s biggest crush got married to his best friend, and Heidegger’s son was actually the child of his wife’s doctor. Cool how the alt-right’s favorite philosophers are both literal cucks.

Is this important to know?

Here’s what people should want from tech:
Twitter: ban all Nazis
Instagram: ban all brands
Spotify: pay your artists
Amazon: pay your workers
Facebook: delete my data
Snapchat: stop deleting my data

On the other hand, what do you want?

Most of what people think is philosophy is actually psychology, and most of what people think is psychology is actually marketing.

Imagine then if this were not actually altogether false?

If you didn’t leave facebook when you started getting music recommendations from people you haven’t wanted to talk to in 15 years, you probably won’t care that facebook sold your private data to Donald Trump.

So, what do you think he’s doing with yours?

[b]T.S. Eliot

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust[/b]

Or, for some, quite the opposite.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing

From the cradle to the grave as it were.

In my end is my beginning

Unless of course it is the other way around.

The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Reason has nothing to do with it. Or none that [so far] has ever been pointed out to me.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

Which part makes sense to you?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Cue, among others, Maurice Conchis.

[b]Judith Butler

Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “she thinks too much.”

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Sounds like me, doesn’t it?

Relationality is not only a descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.

Sounds like me, doesn’t it?

Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of “sovereignty” of the nation, where “sovereignty” denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality.

In other words, they have their ruling class and we have ours.

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.”

Not unlike all the other ones.

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

Not that there still aren’t consequences of course.