a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Michael Lewis

Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.[/b]

Of course everyone knows that.

When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off, he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.

Still, lots of Democrats know about this too. Just follow the money, right Bill?.

What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God’s power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.

That’s how it works all right. Just as God [if He does in fact exist] intended.

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn’t?”

Cue the part about teachers and cops and firemen.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

Or have cronies in Washington.

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

I prefer the original definition. There is one, right?

[b]Alan Moore

History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.[/b]

Then you go out looking for the true believers.

Outside an ambulance begins to scream as if overwhelmed by the suffering it must forever carry in its belly.

In fact I hear one now.

My mind’s like a dance hall fire, a crowd of terrified voices all screaming instructions at once.

And all stampeding for an exist that isn’t even there.

I’m not questioning your powers of observation. I’m merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

And that’s only the mask you can see.

And I’m thinking about the old man. He’ll be pounding on the glass right about now… or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he’ll be pounding and… will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.

Of course the only thing that really counts is how much of it is yours.

Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother.

No, not that one. Unless of course it is.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

In the end, everyone loses everyone.[/b]

And that always starts right at the very beginning.

What the meat industry figured out is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable…Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That’s the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying. We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.

True, industries figure out lots of things like that.

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.

Well, he thought, that’s one more thing I’m doing wrong.

I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.

Among other things: How utterly ridiculous. Right, Kids?

Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

Who actually calculates these things? You know, if it’s even true.

A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.

Let alone which universe you were not living it.

[b]Haruki Murakami

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I’d move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I’d meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I’d tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.[/b]

Exactly!!
But not you, right?

What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can’t understand?

Cue Don Trump. And [of course] Fox News.

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Cue these guys: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalis … visual_art
Unless, of course, their own approach to art is even worse.

I don’t think jealousy has much of a connection with real, objective conditions. Like if you’re fortunate you’re not jealous, but if life hasn’t blessed you, you are jealous. Jealousy doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a tumor secretly growing inside us that gets bigger and bigger, beyond all reason. Even if you find out it’s there, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Just out of curiosity: Anyone here jealous of me?

Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I’m glad that’s not me. It’s basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.

Let’s figure out how that is applicable here.

So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?
Basically…
I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff. I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation.

Anyone here know how to do it? Just believe in something.

[b]Thornton Wilder

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.[/b]

Mind [like God] is in there somewhere. If not, well, the other way around.

They had been brought up to think that the domestic virtues were self-evident and universal; they had been starved of the knowledge that most attracts the young mind: that the crown of life is the exercise of choice.

Of course that’s where I come in, isn’t it?

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Or, as others put it, “the masses”.

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.

Remember back when love was just never having to say that you were sorry?

There is not a single untruth, no—but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple’s corridors; she does not know herself. ‘I can endure lies,’ she cries. ‘I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude’.

Or for that matter – here for example – even the appearance of it.

Love is its own eternity.

Not unlike hate.

I learned that it was fun to learn.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.[/b]

The dreaded telegram. So, are they actually still around?

No, the Boss corrected, I’m not a lawyer. I know some law…but I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.

Let’s decide if the Boss right.

You are dehydrated, I said. The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good.

In other words, what we have come to call a conundrum.

And he said, ‘Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.’

In other words there is always never nothing.

You don’t write poems sitting at a typewriter…

Or [it would seem] on a laptop computer.

But I knew how the play would come out. This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down.

You don’t see that very often. Even when it happens all the time.

[b]Martin Buber

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.[/b]

It starts with a D.

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

Does God know that?

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

In other words, let God be the one who finally fits everything together.

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

Okay, and if you see yourself as a Nazi?

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

Or, as often as not, one becoming the other.

Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.

Meaning what exactly?
Go ahead, try to pin this down for us.

[b]tiny nietzsche

Why do I keep happening to me?[/b]

On the other hand, better to me than to you.
Well, to most of you.

a time traveler that minds their own fucking business

Is that even possible?

put your postmodernism on my shoulder, whisper in my ear, “irony”

Well, sure, that goes without saying.

Have scientists figured out why I’m like this?

More to the point: Have philosophers confirmed it?

“what happened to men leading lives of quiet desperation?” Sarah Nicole

How about that, Kids?

Did it hurt when you found out there is no Heaven?

Nope, back then I was invincible.
Like you, right?

[b]Thomas Aquinas

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.[/b]

Well put.
It is, isn’t it?

There must be must be a first mover existing above all – and this we call God.

In other words, that settles it.

Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.

In other words, that settles it.

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

You know, if you are to be accepted as “one of us”.

It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need.

Sounds like something a Commie would say.

God is never angry for His sake, only for ours.

Let’s file this one under, “Duck!”

[b]Jean Baudrillard

History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.[/b]

In other words, and now we live in Trumpworld.

Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, ‘after-the-orgy’ ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age… A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.

Let’s figure out what that makes us then.

Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.

Psychobabble. Yes or no?

This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this ‘cool’ smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion.

And now we have these: :wink:

Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning…

In other words, hell on earth. For example, here and now.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

This may well be carved on his tombstone.

[b]Han Kang

When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there’s simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.[/b]

That or not let them.

Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] I have lost mine.

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t realised was there.

How about you? Do you realize it’s there?

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.

On the other hand, how will others see her? No getting around that, is there?

Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.

Really, what if that was actually true.

Perhaps the only things he truly loved were his images—those he’d filmed, or then again, perhaps only those he had yet to film.

We can start of course by asking him.

[b]Stieg Larsson

When I find the motherfucker who tortured an innocent cat to death just to send us a warning, I’m going to clobber him with a baseball bat.[/b]

I hear that.

Salander was afraid of no-one and nothing. She realized that she lacked the necessary imagination - and that was evidence enough that there was something wrong with her brain.

Of course it’s easier to be fearless when it’s all being scripted. Or harder.

An introverted person obviously affected by her past. Lived alone, had no sex life, had difficulty getting close to people. Kept her distance, and when she let loose there was no restraint. She chose a stranger for a lover.

Cue eharmony.
Or not maybe.

There’s always someone willing to believe malicious rumours.

More to the point there’s always someone willing to make them up. And even more to spread them.

It did no good to cry, she had learned that early on.

Or, for that matter, to laugh.

Salander in love. What a fucking joke.

Maybe, but I’d be the punch line.

[b]Stephen Fry

It is simply a question of fulfilment. You feel perfectly alive and magnificently perfected by the knowledge that you are doing what you were put on earth to do.[/b]

No, really, some do have actual thoughts like this.

The object of love should feel honoured or flattered, responsible in some way. Instead he felt insulted, degraded and revolted. More than that, he felt put upon.

Love coming, love going.

…he and his kind having been almost entirely eclipsed by the Parisian post-structuralists and their caravanserai of prolix and impenetrable evangels and dogmatically zealous acolytes.

I’d like to think that I am his kind. Though, sure, you may well not agree.

I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that. You know it. Everybody agrees this to be a manifest truth so self-evident as to need to repetition. What is strange to me is that, despite the fact that the world knows this, it does not want to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as if it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading the high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

Of course it may well depend on, among the things, the individual.

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.

That’s the part where clichés [some of them] segue into irony.

The desire to be famous is infantile, and humanity has never lived in an age when infantilism was more sanctioned and encouraged than now.

Indeed, it’s now even possible it will only get worse.
[size=50]Of course some of us are only really famous here.[/size]

[b]Liane Moriarty

She found it soothing to get caught up in a brightly colored, plastic world where all that mattered was how much you ate and exercised, where pain and anguish were suffered over no greater tragedy than push-ups, where people spoke intensely about calories and sobbed joyfully over lost kilos. And then they all lived happily, skinnily ever after.[/b]

Actually, they gain it all back and then some. And then try to live happily ever after.

Why did they all have to tread so very delicately around Celeste’s money? It was like wealth was an embarrassing medical condition. It was the same with Celeste’s beauty. Strangers gave Celeste the same furtive looks they gave to people with missing limbs, and if Madeline ever mentioned Celeste’s looks, Celeste responded with something like shame. “Shhh,” she’d say, looking around fearfully in case someone overheard. Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else. Oh, it was a funny old world.

Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with folks like us, does it?

They both went to opposite sides of the bed, snapped on their bedside lamps and pulled back the cover in a smooth, practiced, synchronized move that proved, depending on Madeline’s mood, that they either had the perfect marriage or that they were stuck in a middle-class suburban rut and they needed to sell the house and go traveling around India.

Ah, the “Lost In America” syndrome.

Did one act define who you were forever? Did one evil act as a teenager counteract twenty years of marriage, of good marriage, twenty years of being a good husband and a good father? Murder and you are a murderer.

He thought: Well, first they have to find out.
No, seriously.

Life would go back to being unendurable, except – and this was the worst part – she would in fact endure it, it wouldn’t kill her, she’d keep on living day after day after day…

Also, night after night after night…

It occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child’s nanny. And then there was the sort of evil which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts.

And then there’s all the stuff that you see on the news.

[b]so sad today

what i lack in self-esteem i make up for in self-obsession[/b]

Yes, there is a difference. Though not for everyone.

when people are nice to me i feel guilty: a love story

My advice: Don’t try that on me.

a beautiful day to hide in my room

More to the point: my recliner.

mental illness police: you have depression stop laughing

Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t.

trust the universe (to eventually kill you)

With absolutely no regret. Probably.

what should I wear to never leaving my room?

Nothing at all always works for me.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

The great difference between us is this: you believe you have found salvation, and believing this, you are saved; I believe that salvation doesn’t exist, and believing this, I am saved.[/b]

He thought: What am I missing here?
[he being me]

We have but a single moment at our disposal. Let us transform that moment into eternity. No other form of immortality exists.

Let’s file this one under, “sounds good, doesn’t it?”

You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord’s service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.

And not just the terrorists.
For example, if that’s actually true.

Confucius says: ‘Many seek happiness higher than man; others beneath him. But happiness is the same height as man.’ That is true. So there must be a happiness to suit every man’s stature.

If that means what I think it does feel free to, among other things, disregard it.

But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.

Is there really any chance that this is not true?

The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

Let’s just say that I am holding my own with Him. Even pinned Him to the mat once or twice.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.[/b]

Not counting all those familiar objects that [unfortunately] don’t.

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.

So, is this the final truth about love?

[b]You’ll get over it…’ It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to greive over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I’ve thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word was yours.

The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.[/b]

Unlike most of us, he filed this one under, “yada, yada, yada”.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

On the other hand, small down here, small up there? But point taken.

I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.

How true. Though some of us can’t help but to rub it in.

Life has never been All or Nothing—it’s All and Nothing.

Mostly though it’s all the shit in between.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.” Aeschylus[/b]

Or sometimes [in this world] to actually be foolish.

“I shall seize fate by the throat.” Ludwig van Beethoven

Let’s decide if this is actually possible.
For example, of our own volition.

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world – that we are not everything and that we will die.” Georges Bataille

And then, after we die, that we are not nothing?

"You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.” Georges Bataille

You know, for starters.

"Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso

Or, rather, as real as you need it to be.

“Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.” Albert Camus

Not our football obviously.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.[/b]

Words: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

By “guts” I mean, grace under pressure.

I know: Let’s decide what it really means.

I’d like to destroy you a few times in bed.

Although [obviously] that can be taken in different ways.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

You know, in a fair fight.
Or, sure, maybe not.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

From [of all things] The Old Man And The Sea.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

In my war that was called “fragging”.