a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Mitchell Heisman

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.[/b]

Let’s just say that he walked the talk.

What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain?

So, is that a good point?

Uncertain of uncertainty, skeptical of skepticism, it seems that the most important question is whether there is an important question.

In, among other things, an absurd and meaningless world.

If there is no extant God and no extant gods, no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, no meaning and no purpose: if there are no values that are inherently valuable; no justice that is ultimately justifiable; no reasoning that is fundamentally rational, then there is no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism, art, conservatism, nihilism, liberalism, surrealism, fascism, asceticism, egalitarianism, subjectivism, elitism, ismism. If reason is incapable of deducing ultimate, non-arbitrary human ends, and nothing can be judged as ultimately more important than anything else, then freedom is equal to slavery; cruelty is equal to kindness; love is equal to hate; war is equal to peace; dignity is equal to contempt; destruction is equal to creation; life is equal to death and death is equal to life. Nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals–because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.

I can live with that. He couldn’t.

I might be a nihilist except that I don’t believe in anything.

Cue [among others] Wittgenstein.

What really happens in the Western countries that adopt feminism and individualism is not the complete end of the human race, but rather, the relative demographic decline of the native populations of liberal democracies. The individual irrationality of the self-sacrificial parent to child relationship helps produce genetically suicidal birthrates.

So he killed himself.

[b]John Searle

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.[/b]

This speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

In general, I feel if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.

With the possible exception of everyone here.

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God’s existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

Or objectivists.

Moods are not to be confused with emotions. Moods will dispose you to having an emotion. Certain moods you’re more likely to get angry than others, as we all know, but emotion is not the same as mood. Emotions, I think, always have to do with agitated forms of desire. Whenever you’re in an emotional state, you have some sort of agitated desire. So, emotions are fairly special – I am not always in some sort of emotional state or other, but I think I am always in some mood or other.

Yeah, sure, maybe.

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky’s syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

Let’s decide if this is important.

Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what’s going to happen.

Let’s decide if this is important.

[b]Roland Barthes

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.[/b]

Also, because it wounds or seduces others.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Either when enduring or inflicting it.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

He wondered if [when] his own language ever would.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

Me too no doubt if I ever thought about it.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Or none as the case may be.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?

Pick one:
Yes.
No.
Maybe.

[b]Philippa Gregory

Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have.[/b]

Said Don Trump to Vladimir Putin. Or, yeah, the other way around.

The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.

Unless, like us, they become…civilized.

En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement - In my end is my beginning.

For some, like clockwork.

Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together.

Here of course you only get banned. Or, there, sent to the dungeon.

Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don’t see that there is in life only ever one goal.
And what is that?
More, George said simply. Just more of anything. More of everything.

And, if need be, take it from others. That’s still the same.

The law is what powerful men say it shall be.

So, do you think that might still be true today?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

French drama: We are so witty!
English drama: We are so refined!
German drama: We are so cynical!
American drama: Yeah, it’s theatre. So?[/b]

Off with his head!

Mondays are
Hegel: bleakly cunning
Schopenhauer: cunningly bleak
Nietzsche: meaningfully painful
Beckett: painfully short on meaning

Iambiguous: the same as all the rest of them.

French novel: you hope it’ll never end
British novel: you’re not sure it can end
Russian novel: the end is great, but you never get there

Not counting translations of course.

A philosopher’s greatest humiliation is to be a slave to
Hume: reason
Kant: passion
Hegel: mastery
Nietzsche: slavery
Camus: nicotine

Which one is it really though?

Kantian Trump: I am a categorical imperative
Hegelian Trump: I negate bigly, I sublate hugely
Sartrean Trump: You’re scared of freedom? Sad.

In other words, three Trumps too many. Or four if you count Don.

Epistemology: I know what it is.
Ontology: I know what is is.
Ethics: I know what is should be.
Aesthetics: I know what it should be.

Nihilism: I know what it will end up being.
And not just nothing at all.

[b]Aeschylus

In war, truth is the first casualty.[/b]

Not unlike in peace.

Bastions of wealth
are no deference for the man
who treads the grand altar of Justice
down and out of sight.

Right, like deference has a part to play.
Well, okay, maybe back then it actually did.

But the lust for power never dies- men cannot have enough.
No one will lift a hand to send it from his door, to give it warning, 'Power, never come again!

Of course nowadays we’ve civilized it.

Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out; and that is far the most unhappy thing of all.

Alas, poor women too.

Neither the life of anarchy nor the life enslaved by tyrants, no, worship neither. Strike the balance all in all and god will give you power.

On the other hand, we don’t hear that much these days.

Horror gives place to wonder at your true account;
The rest outstrips our comprehension; we give up.

Let’s file this one under, “it’s about fucking time”.

[b]Jean-François Lyotard

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.[/b]

This: “the state of being unwilling or unable to believe something”. And what’s simpler than a deefinition?

…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?

Well, it certainly can be.

Saddam Hussein is a product of Western Departments of State and big companies, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were born of the ‘peace’ imposed on their countries by the victors of the Great War. Saddam is such a product in an even more flagrant and cynical way. Because the Iraqi dictatorship proceeds, as do the others, from the transfer of aporias in the capitalist system to vanquished, less developed, or simply less resistant countries.

Gee, not even Rachel Maddow will go this far.

I shall call modern that art which presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.

Or something like that.

Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst – and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized’s desire be totally ignored, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy – for what? – does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either.

Let’s make this relevant to the special election in Georgia.

Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively ‘producing’ more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and ‘experiences’, to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words…

Guess where I come down on this? Though not objectively of course.

[b]Existential Comics

An economist is someone who, when asked if the slaves should be freed, tells you whether freeing them will cause the GDP to go up or down.[/b]

He means wage slaves of course.

What is philosophy?
You know when you’re at the bar, and someone asks something you can’t​ answer, so everyone argues all night?
Not that.

Remember when that was actually true?

[b]Notable demons in intellectual​ history:

1. Descartes’s demon.
2. Maxwell’s demon.
3. Laplace’s demon.
4. Nietzsche’s relationship to women.[/b]

Well, he didn’t call them Ubermen for nothing.

If you hate the new Twitter design, remember: Parmenides teaches us that all changes is illusory.

Is it okay if you didn’t even notice?

People like to point out our cosmic insignificance, but it’s important to remember that pretty much no one on Earth cares about you either.

But that’s a given.

Why do we need philosophy?
Uh…to answer questions like this?

You know, if there are answers to questions like this.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.[/b]

Don’t count on this though.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

Don’t count on this though.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Now this you can count on. And then some.

You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.

For better or for worse as it were.

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

She means if they even exist at all. Or, rather, she ought to mean that.

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

I tried this but it didn’t work.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.
Come let us fart in the home.
There is no art in a fart.
Still a fart may not be artless.
Let us fart and artless fart in the home.[/b]

Yeah, he was a poet too.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

And then all the days that will never be. For you anyway.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Or ought not to be. After all, who is to really say?

The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

Not counting all the fish he didn’t catch.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

And they’re not the only ones.

Never mistake motion for action.

Also, never mistake words for writing.

[b]Michael Lewis

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions.[/b]

Works that way for philosophers too. You know the ones.

The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.

Or, sure, sometimes you go to the grave not understanding it.

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became—though even to use words like “corrupt” and “sinister” made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them.

And that goes double [at least] for Don.

What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man, says McCarthy. And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.

Human nature as it were.

Before I went to college the military had this “we do more before 9am than most people do all day” and I used to think and I do more than the military. As you know there are some select people that just find a drive in certain activities that supersedes everything else.

And not just the assholes anymore.

Confirmation bias, he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening, he said.

He means you, Mr. Objectivist. Or, worst case scenario, me.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Most people don’t realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn’t value its librarians doesn’t value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?[/b]

He wondered: Are libraries still around?

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

Not counting those who believe that believing is enough.

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane.

I’ll tell you what this says about me if you’ll tell me what it says about you.

A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…“Do the stars gaze back?” Now, that’s a question.

Well, if you count dumb ones.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

Well, if you count dumb ones.

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day’.

Like you [no doubt] I never even came close.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

…he was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face.[/b]

Let’s file this one under “the very embodiment of insanity”.

There’s a Hasidic proverb: ‘While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.’

Actually, that’s never been a problem for me.

If God exists, he is not to be believed in.

Their God in other words.

It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950’s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.

Let’s decide if the two are equivalent.

You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird’s existence than the bird ever was?

So, does this make more or less sense to you than it does to me?

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

He thought: Bah! Humbug!

[b]Sophocles

A man’s anger can never age and fade away, not until he dies. The dead alone feel no pain.[/b]

That’s how it worked alright. And still today.

Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.

Couldn’t say that myself of course.

I will suffer nothing as great as death without glory.

Right, like you can take it with you.

It is a painful thing
To look at your own trouble and know
That you yourself and no one else has made it

Let’s file this one under, “no shit”.

Show me a man who longs to live a day beyond his time who turns his back on a decent length of life, I’ll show the world a man who clings to folly.

In fact, millions of them.

Come, Fate, a friend at need,
Come with all speed!
Come, my best friend,
And speed my end!
Away, away!
Let me not look upon another day!

“The end.
Beautiful friend.
The end.”

[b]George Bernard Shaw

“My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.”
[From his will] [/b]

I wonder if he thinks that now?

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

I never leave home without it.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

That tells us a lot, doesn’t it?

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

Ha ha ha.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Or: Liberty means freedom. That is why most men dread it.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Still, how many more tigers can there be?

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Here’s a great business idea: love insurance.[/b]

Maybe, but it’s got scam written all over it.

Life is when you’re being simultaneously stalked by your past demons and carefully observed by your future ones.

Think of it as a “tag team”.

Live like there’s no tomorrow. Because there will be.

Of course you can only take this so far.

Your childhood ends when love becomes your biggest fear.

How about yours then?

God is dead, but he’s still laughing at Nietzsche.

Come on, dead as a doornail, He’s still laughing at all of us.

I’m “Thank you, I’m fine” years old.

Let’s pin this down.

[b]Gloria Steinem

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician.
For instance, here’s an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.[/b]

Let’s boot this one over to KT.

Only food and water are more important than music and privacy.

But only all the way to the grave.

As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.” The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.

Let’s hear from the Real Men here about that.

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life–a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality-- then why, why should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

Sooner or later though it will come around to this: men can’t, don’t and won’t get pregnant.

We are all trained to be female impersonators.

Unless of course we are all trained to impersonate males.

Anyone who believes we’re living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history.

First [obviously]: Is this actually true?

[b]Adam Phillips

The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as assaults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.[/b]

As you might well imagine, I’d settle for being less misunderstood.

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.

Less than zero works for me.

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

His past maybe.

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

Nobody here though, right?

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs and analysts as readers of signs and wonders.

Bringing epistemology “down to earth” as it were.

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Let’s file this one under, “don’t get me started”.

[b]Will Rogers

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.[/b]

Don’t try this with cats.

The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.

Well, that and their goddamn stupidity.

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

So, is this true story or not?

A fool and his money are soon elected.

Not to mention re-elected.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Right, like there’s always only one herd.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Not counting ours of course.

[b]John Searle

One of the many marks of a philosophical sensibility is an obsession with problems which most sane people regard as not worth bothering about.[/b]

My wife used to say that.
A lot.

But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding? This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.

And that’s before we get to the part about determinism.

The best objects to think with are words, because that is part of what words are for. Indeed, it is a condition for something to be a word that it be thinkable.

Let’s think of one that isn’t, Mr. Objectivist.

I have thus defined the concept of the “Background” as the set of nonintentional or preintentional capacities that enable intentional states of function.

Not unlike the background here, he thought.

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

Or the solution posed of course.

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

And not just unicorns.