a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Marianne Moore

Your thorns are the best part of you.[/b]

As you might imagine, no one has ever said that of me.

If we can’t be cordial to these creatures’ fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

Let’s just say that’s debatable.

I’m hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it.

More to the point, a pretentious philosopher.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Now you’re talking!

There never was a war that was not inward.

Maybe. But only after the part about dollars and cents.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Yeah, I used to tell myself that too.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Not only that, but up in the clouds.

“Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties” Arthur Schopenhauer

He thought: Gay or straight.

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.” Albert Camus

You know, and then walks the talk.

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Albert Camus

Not so much these days.

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” Edgar Allan Poe

He means mine of course.

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.” Edgar Allan Poe

Cool. Right, Kids?

[b]Evelyn Waugh

No one is ever holy without suffering.[/b]

On the other hand, who doesn’t suffer?

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

I still don’t know.

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Oh, sure, despair, the only “great evil”.

…for in New York City city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

Among others, cue Woody Allen.

He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

He means Don Trump. Or he would today.

Change is the only evidence of life.

Unless, of course, you’re an objectivist. Then you mount it. Like a butterfly. If only “in your head”.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings.[/b]

Let alone beautiful people.

It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

Up to and including death. Though, sure, I think it’s safe to say it ends for you.

I wrote my way out.

But only after I wrote myself in. Here, for example.

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.

If I coud only write like this, he thought. But we all know that he can’t.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

Cue [among others] Karl Marx.

In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren’t let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

Only here, we’re the therapists, aren’t we?

[b]Nein

Psychoanalysis. The mother of all fathers.[/b]

Let the fucking begin!

Someday they’ll ask us about that thing. That thing we had. And we’ll nod and wonder if they mean the unspeakable. The unthinkable. Or both.

Five will get you ten it’s Trump.

ALT + RIGHT + DELETE

Or, as the case may be, ALT + LEFT + DELETE. And then on to all the rest of them.
You know, if censorship is your thing.

Form. Always your best content provider.

Cue [among others] Plato.

Yes, the US has developed an Intercontinental Ballistic Trump, with a range of several thousand miles. Far enough to hit Warsaw.

Not only that but any moron can launch it.

Somewhere Kafka is blowing out the candles. And celebrating the day that he could curse the day he was born.

Let’s just say that I doubt it.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.[/b]

Is it really possible to wear it all out, he wondered?
In other words, having never been in love himself.

Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.

He means the “wee small hours” of course.

You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?

Works that way for men too. Only different somehow.

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

Of course to understand this you actually have to be a writer. A good one, for example.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing… For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

And then there are organizations for philosophers. Enough said?

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

A universal truth as it were.

[b]Michael Lewis

The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “that doesn’t suprise me”.

And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside.

And not just the thugs.

After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, “I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.”

Just what we need, another one of them.

For geniuses, they are really dumb, she said. Some of them are really pampered: They can’t even put together a cardboard box. They don’t think you do something. They think you call somebody.

Let’s call them, say, “flash boys”.

A big bonus was about as well concealed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor as the results of a hot date in a high school boys’ locker room.

Gee, what do you suppose that means?

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur, Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by ‘Value Theory.’ A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts ‘irrational behavior’ if the behavior in question is in fact observed.

Theoretically, of course, this can mean…what exactly?

[b]Neil Gaiman

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.[/b]

And who among us doesn’t fall in there somewhere.

What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?

He wondered if it also worked the other way around.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

A hell of a lot.

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.

Let’s figure out which one I am.

You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

And we all know the explanation for that. And why it has absolutely, utterly and inexplicably nothing to do with real life.

Biting’s excellent. It’s like kissing - only there is a winner.

That and a loser.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Mom said, His spirit is there, and that made me really angry. I told her, Dad didn’t have a spirit! He had cells!
His memory is there.
His memory is here, I said, pointing at my head.
Dad had a spirit, she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation.
I told her, He had cells, and now they’re on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak![/b]

No one ever wins these things, do they? Though Dad’s still dead.

Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?

Unless of course it’s all just a matter of…perspective?

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

Really, am I the only one who has never been bored? Though even I don’t believe that.

I’ve raised my voice at a human only twice in my entire life. Both times at the same human. Put differently: I’ve known only one human in my entire life. Put differently: I’ve allowed only one human to know me.

Put differently. No getting around that, is there?

He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

Probably written by Nietzsche.

Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.

Alternating back and forth more often than not.

[b]Isaac Newton

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.[/b]

Why does anything exist at all? The simple truth please.

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

Try to figure out mine.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.

Bullshit. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

And he doesn’t mean Albert Einstein.

What goes up must come down.

In other words, not only apples.

Live your life as an Exclamation rather than an Explanation.

And from a scientist no less.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.[/b]

And not just Don Trump. He’s merely the fool to measure everyone else by. Or he certainly will be.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

A crony you might call him.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Is there something we can learn from this?

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Well, if only in your head.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

That would be you by the way.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Starting [usually] with the Nazis. But eventually we get around to the reactionaries here.

[b]Joseph Heller

He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.[/b]

Me too. Though, sure, that goes without saying.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

Trump that Mr. Putin.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
That’s some catch, that Catch-22, he observed.
It’s the best there is, Doc Daneeka agreed.

Of course we’ll have to hear the first 21.

…anything worth dying for … is certainly worth living for.

And in approximately that order.

They’re trying to kill me, Yossarian told him calmly.
No one’s trying to kill you, Clevinger cried.
Then why are they shooting at me? Yossarian asked.
They’re shooting at everyone, Clevinger answered. They’re trying to kill everyone.
And what difference does that make?

Let’s file this one under “the fog of war”.

The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.

In other words, to frag or not to frag?

[b]Gloria Steinem

Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least.[/b]

Now look where we are. But point taken.

In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.

Are they laughing now?

If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

For men on the other hand…
And not just back then.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. ‘If you’re lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,’ she said patiently, ‘you don’t send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!’

Or, sure, try both approaches.

An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.”
But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies.
Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.

Maybe, but the Bible does settle everything else.

This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.

Something to think about?

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.[/b]

Let’s figure out [once and for all] where, philosophically, one ends and the other begins.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

True, but only from the cradle to the grave.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.

You still don’t get that part, do you?

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Cue Karl Marx on the rationalization – alienation – of labor.

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage".

Imagaine then the consequences. Like, for example, living in the jungle.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

You know, like dasein eventually will.

[b]Will Rogers

There is no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.[/b]

Or, to put it another way, imagine if he [or Herbert Block] were around today.

Most men are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Provided of course that’s actually an option.

It is better for some one to think you’re a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

On the other hand, who hasn’t said this?

I’ll bet you the time ain’t far off when a woman won’t know any more than a man.

Let’s just assume there will be exceptions.

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Not unlike, for example, morality.

Plans get you into things but you’ve got to work your way out.

You know, if you can.

[b]Nein

How to find happiness:

1] Think of where you last saw it
2] See if it’s still there[/b]

That’s why we’re here, right?

Eat. Pray. Ruthlessly critique all that exists.

Actually, that never works for me. Let’s figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Yes, play to your base. But act for your superstructure.

Do you even have one?

Soon Monday will be over, friends. And then it shall continue by other means.

Though only seven days a week.

Civilization. The sad thing is how it ended. But let us also remember how poorly it all began.

Just out of curiosity: Was Trump around then?

We regret to inform you that, yes, there is a tomorrow.

[i]On the other hand…

As of 2014, the number of deaths per day is 155,520, based on the number of deaths per year, per 1,000 people. This means there are 108 deaths every minute, or 1.8 deaths per second.

…not for everyone.[/i]

[b]Thucydides

…a collision at sea will ruin your entire day…[/b]

Though not just at sea.

Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others as long as each hearer thinks that he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but, when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous.

And not just in the Oval Office.

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the needs of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.

And who doesn’t think that? Here for example.

Think, too, of the great part that is played by the unpredictable in war: think of it now, before you are actually comitted to war. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them: we have to abide their outcome in the dark. And when people are entering upon a war they do things the wrong way round. Action comes first, and it is only when they have already suffered that they begin to think.

Still, a buck’s a buck.

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.

Anyone think this is the problem that we’ve got?

It is useless to attack a man who could not be controlled even if conquered, while failure would leave us in an even worse position.

In other words, we’re fucked. Of course we’ll need to know who the man is.

[b]Roland Barthes

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.[/b]

Or at least he thinks he does.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

Still every once in a while it should be.

I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: ‘to succeed’ or ‘to fail’ have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings…What impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance…

Well, that and contingency and change.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, “age-old pastime of humanity”.

He means on purpose, willfully, right?

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed…

Unless of course it has been, say, digitally altered?

All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.

While others actually take pride in it!

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Lying is
Augustine: a violation of God’s aim for language
Kant: always unacceptable
Nietzsche: not nearly as dangerous as conviction[/b]

Trump: clearly presidential.

Heidegger: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Parmenides: We cannot think or talk about nothing.
Donald Trump Jr: Uh…

More to the point, which one comes closest to dasein?

Philosophy is forever on the verge of losing the battle against
Plato: sophistry
Kant: dogmatism
Schopenhauer: optimism
Nietzsche: me

Not to mention all of the above.

The revolution doesn’t need the
Marx: philosophers
Lenin: historians
Luxemburg: politicians
Trotsky: poets
Freud: fathers
Beckett: mimes

The rest is all invested in godot. Though not just in waiting for him.

To be is to be
Berkeley: perceived
Hegel: negated
Augustine: loved by God
Lacan: killed by your children
Nietzsche: forgotten

Let’s put them in the right order.

Philosophy is an eternal struggle with
Plato: sophistry
Descartes: doubt
Kierkegaard: dread
Žižek: jealousy of all the attention Trump gets

Žižek in 2020!

[b]Marianne Moore

The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.[/b]

Oh, and who decides that?

They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.

And [for some] getting sicker all the time.

… imaginary gardens with real toads in them …
… if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Though probably not in philosophy.

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

Even, perhaps, in a world all their own.

When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

Though any number of us will pretend to.

I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war

Only in the end to discover it is money.