a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.[/b]

I know that I will. Or, rather, I will when I find some.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

Among other things, you don’t think it can ever happen to you.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

Indeed. And even when you know it’s only going to get a lot worse.

No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it’s God and hate that.

He means the “infidels” of course. Or, for many here, the “liberals”.

I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.

And I do try to be, right?

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life…These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

On the other hand, the Kids [any number of them], will no doubt take it with them all the way to the grave.

[b]Existential Comics

And then I left Plato’s Cave, and was enlightened by the truth. I was still just as much of an asshole as I was before though.[/b]

Isn’t that probably how it does work?

Philosophy is the only major where you leave school knowing fewer things than when you entered.

Of course we carry on that tradition here.

Philosophers need to battle against:
320 BC: the sophists
400: the mystics
1200: the dogmatists
1700: the skeptics
2017: the Twitter trolls

Here of course it’s still the Kids.

Hansel and Gretel for millennials: Instead of gingerbread the house is made of avocado toast, and the witch lures them into crippling debt.

And not just the witch on Wall Street.

How to lead the good life:
Aristotle: virtue.
Bentham: pleasure.
Sartre: freedom.
Kant: rationality.
Camus: actually leading the good life.

Some being more down to earth than others.

I mean, there are a lot of problems with Capitalism, but at least we get an infinite number of Spiderman reboots.

Thanks, he thought, for putting Don Trump in perspective. You know, if this does.

[b]Marjane Satrapi

Life is too short to be lived badly.[/b]

Whatever that means for example.

In life you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance. Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.

Where does she go off track here?

It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us into cowards.

Either that or, sure, you can die for the cause.

[b]The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself:
Are my trousers long enough?
Is my veil in place?
Can my make-up be seen?
Are they going to whip me?

No longer asks herself:
Where is my freedom of thought?
Where is my freedom of speech?
My life, is it liveable?
What’s going on in the political prisons?[/b]

That’s how it works alright. One way for the Shah, another way for the Ayatollah.

We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat–not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it’s AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there’s the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that’s fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don’t want to eat me. Fuck the worms.

In any event, to the worms, it’s neither here nor there.

We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.

Right about now, of course, I’m howling.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

In this life, you have to be your own hero.[/b]

That can’t be good, Kids.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.

That is certainly my job there.
You know where.
:wink:

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

She meant the Devil of course.

‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.

Going all the way back [so far] to Adam and Eve.

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one’s own chaos was also brought under control.
Whenever I am troubled, said the librarian, I think about the Dewey decimal system.
Then what happens? asked the junior, rather overawed.
Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course—as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.

Don’t suppose that will work for all of us.

I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anyone, an absentee boss is best.

On the other hand, He does see all.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.[/b]

Really, no rational human being doesn’t know that any number of things are hopeless.

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.

Well, some of them were.

Finishing is what you have to do. If you don’t finish, nothing is worth a damn.

Not counting all the things that never do seem to end.

No horse named Morbid ever won a race.

Anyone know if that’s still true?

I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.

We are all more or less pawns in one or another narrative. Though, if we are lucky, it will be one of our own.

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

We think that, sure, but it hardly ever really is that.

[b]Michael Lewis

When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.[/b]

Let’s start here: dasein.

The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand.

Okay, but what’s that got to do with making money on Wall Street?

The frantic stupidity of Wall Street’s stock order routers and algorithms was simply an extension into the computer of the willful ignorance of its salespeople.

Okay, but what’s that got to do with making money on Wall Street?

Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.

Tell that to the folks who lost them.

That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel’s most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.

Like that is ever really necessary.

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

In other words, on purpose.

[b]Neil Gaiman

There’s none so blind as those who will not listen.[/b]

And, sure, see.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Great, he thought, just what we need, another one of them.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

Mine certainly did.

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

You know, for a while.

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

Well, the last of them anyway.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true.

Not counting your own religion of course.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.[/b]

Sure, go ahead, try this the next time they catch you.

The UN special envoy on food called it a ‘crime against humanity’ to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol when almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion human who are living in dire poverty?

Let’s file this one under [what else], “show me the money!!”

My feelings have never once cared about what they should be.

We’ll need some actual examples of course.

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words “I love you” so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said “I love you” without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say “I love you”.

Of course it goes without saying that here at least I don’t love you any more than you love me.

When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me.
Why not?
Privacy.
Privacy from what? From me?
I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d’etre. Just privacy, I said…She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back–undoing what she had just done–so that she could know I was OK.

Yeah, it might be a true story.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember why it is important to get them.

If, for example, that’s how you earn a living.

[b]Sad Socrates

I don’t have time to be alive.[/b]

On the other hand, who asked him?

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

That’s certainly either true or not true.

I try not to think that it should make sense.

This for example.

If I believed in myself, I might exist.

And then, later, I’ll get around to you.

Despair is always in the first place you look.

Here for instance.

There are never enough aphorisms.

Short ones anyway.

[b]Isaac Newton

You have to make the rules, not follow them.[/b]

You know, if others let you.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

I wonder if he really thinks that now?

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

Let’s explore that, Mr. Objectivist. Out in the world for example.

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

Of course anyone can believe that.

I have studied these things - you have not.

Would that it were actually that simple.

In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions. This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.

This has got to be true about something.

[b]Terry Pratchett

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.[/b]

Dump things in it is more likely.

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

Sure, if we’re lucky.

If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.

That and the purring.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Tick…tick…tick…tick.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

No, really, that’s what they tell us!

It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it.

Though every once in a while there’s an exception. You know, theoretically.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.[/b]

One can’t help but wonder: what brought that to mind?
After all, has it ever occured to you?

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

Or [here]: Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any posts except the posts that nobody can read.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

Let’s decide what that makes us then.

Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.

Of course we’re not friends, are we?

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Progress? Yeah, right. But point taken

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Like, for example, Satyr’s scorn of me. If only here and now. :wink:

[b]Joseph Heller

He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.[/b]

That can’t be good. But then he wondered: How do people get this way?

They agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

He means [for example] Trumpworld.

It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.

Of course no one ever stops there.

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.

Right, like that will make the Nazis go away.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

So, let’s pin down exactly what that means.

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.

Only God really knows for sure.

[b]tiny Nietzsche

me: screams death
death: hey[/b]

Either that or around here, Yo!

twitter is reaching peak stupid

Okay, Kids, let’s pin down when we reached it.

robots slowly coming to the realization “fuck this”

More to the point, why haven’t we.

doktor: you have late stage capitalism
me: is it serious?
doktor: yes, but it isn’t permanent

He means for some of us.

space is also slipping into the future

One of them anyway.

nothing exists in itself.

At least not anymore.