a thread for mundane ironists

[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. :wink:

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.

[b]The Dead Author

Optimist: the glass is half full.
Pessimist: the glass is half empty.
Existentialist: drink.[/b]

Though, in the end, they all still die.

Where American doughnuts have holes, Germans put strawberry jam. Now you know the difference between analytic and continental philosophy.

That and all the technical stuff.

Of course climate change isn’t real if you can afford air conditioning.

And don’t live on the coast.

Believe in yourself as if you didn’t exist otherwise.

I’ll try it if you will.

Most things in life won’t make you happy, get you a job, or answer all questions, but only philosophy is considered useless because of that.

Not counting here of course.

If it can’t also make you miserable, it probably won’t make you happy.

Yeah, there’s always that part.

[b]Thucydides

Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.[/b]

Though not just from Satyr.

In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.

Talk about phrophetic!

We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing.

I can live with that.

Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.

Of course we’ll have to run this by Don first.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Let’s file this one under, “and some things never change”.

Ignorance is bold, and knowledge is reserved.

Right, Kids?

[b]Roland Barthes

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight, 'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.[/b]

Intellectuals!!

…language is never innocent.

And, to paraphrase someone, “including ‘a’ and ‘the’”.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).

I stopped at “muck”.

Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

More muck, true, but point taken.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

In other words, if it means the same to you as it does to him.

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

Worth thinking about?

[b]Sad Socrates

It helps to live with less meaning.[/b]

Less being more of course.

What a fuckshow.

And not just in Moscow, Don.

The only reality you can trust is the one you’re destroying.

Yours for example. :wink:

I’m recusing myself from existence.

At least until I’m impeached.

Uncertainty is the glue which holds or doesn’t hold the future together.

You know, much like the past and the present.

Enjoy false truths.

For the next four years say. Or, sure, less.

[b]Philippa Gregory

Magic is the act of making a wish come about. Like praying, like plotting, like herbs, like exerting your will on the world, making something happen.[/b]

Herbs?

True obedience can only happen when you secretly think you know better, and you choose to bow your head. Anything short of that is just agreement, and any ninny-in-waiting can agree.

Let’s decide what this makes Satyr’s claque.

To stop us reading forbidden books they will have to burn every manuscript. But to stop us thinking forbidden thoughts they will have to cut off our heads.

That’s worse than being thrown in the dungeon. There. Or, here, being banned.

She looked at me as if for a moment she would seek someone who would understand the dreadful predicament of a woman, in this world ruled by men.

And not just the assholes we have here.

And I am much attached to my cock, brother. Make sure your sister can put another prince in the cradle, he says baldly. Save my balls for her, Anthony!

And then we all became civilized.

Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.

Then call me a fool, he thought.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.[/b]

True. Well, unless you count the time I spend here.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Never thought that yet.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

Actually, just one particular take on dasein. Though I doubt he knew that.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

So, God either did or He didn’t. Or, perhaps, more to the point, He either does or He doesn’t.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

Of course nowadays we call them Kids. Or some of us do.

To understand all is to forgive all.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] none of us will ever even come close.