a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Gloria Steinem

I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way.[/b]

This either explains quite a lot or very little.

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.

Cue Mr. Reasonable? :-"

A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

Let’s file this one under, “tell me about it”.
Or I certainly will.

We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful.

You know, if you believe that sort of thing.

I could leave…because I could return.

Of course first you’d have to want to.

I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.

Or try to.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.[/b]

In other words, give or take ten thousand.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.

Let’s pin down what bad writing succeeds or fails on.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

And, eventually, forever. Unless, of course, I’m wrong.

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.

Tell that to, among others, the teeming masses.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Now, let’s move on to philosophers.

… it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

You know, “inside their head”.

[b]Will Rogers

Lord, let me live until I die.[/b]

On the other hand, how hard can that be?

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

And always leave enough room for tomorrow.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

Unless of course you never do.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Remember when that was actually true?

If stupidity got us into this, why can’t stupidity get us out?

Here, however, that happens everyday.

Things aren’t what they used to be and probably never were.

Let’s figure out why.

[b]Arthur Koestler

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.[/b]

Cue, for example, Karl Marx.
On the other hand…

Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it–an abstract and geometric love.

Totalitarian love as it were.
Still…

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

In other words, one concocted with the best of all possible intentions.

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Provided of course they find each other.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

To you if not to anyone else.

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations.

In other words, one generation of objectivists at a time.

[b]Thucydides

If it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice… in these acts of revenge on others, men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress.[/b]

And to think some once attributed this frame of mind entirely to capitalism. Not that they were wrong of course.

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.

And to think that someone figured this all out “way back then”.

…when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel…

There’s no getting around that, is there?

And do not imagine that what we are fighting for is simply the question of freedom or slavery: there is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it. Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

Of course they didn’t have impeachment back then.

The State that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.

Has that been resolved yet? In other words, short of conscription.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.

Let’s decide if democracy has made things better or worse.

[b]Roland Barthes

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.[/b]

Wholly determined perhaps.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

Tell that to [among others] the paparazzi.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

Not much of that these days.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Right after irony in other words.

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

What’s that make the television then?

As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

So, did he take the words right out of your mouth? Or, instead [like me], would this never have occurred to you in a million years?

[b]tiny nietzsche

first coffee: eyes uncross
second coffee: okay
third coffee: ahab motherfucker[/b]

fourth coffee: he’ll post here.

The side effect of living is dying.

Or [of course]: The side effect of dying is living.

deepthroat voice: follow the idiots

All the way to the Kremlin.

Space is cool. Time can go fuck itself.

Can time go fuck itself?

AP: trump pretends to meet putin for first time

Confirmed by Hannity on Fox.

There is a 93% chance I’ll be holding my phone when I die.

Approaching 100% in some circles.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.[/b]

In other words, if they let us.

You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt people.

Of course that works the same way for them about you.

…she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”

I say this myself. If only to the man in the mirror.

But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

Either that or just plain stupidity.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

No, not that Charles.
Right?

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.

I know that I do.

[b]Marjane Satrapi

I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.[/b]

Don’t always expect it to be possible however.

I want to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.

Let’s consider possible examples. You know, historically.

You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.

Perhaps, but which one ought she to be?

In every religion, you find the same extremists.

Also, with or without God.

I realized then that I didn’t understand anything. I read all the books I could.

Let’s file this one under, “well, that’s a start”.

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we’re going to die.

And not just in Iran.

[b]so sad today

is it me or is everything shit?[/b]

Like it can’t be both.

god has a plan for me [to die]

No exceptions so far, right?

one time i tried to be positive and it was a disaster

Though no, despite what you’re thinking, it wasn’t here.

O nap where art thou

Or, short of that, something to do.

i feel nervous about breathing

Or: i feel nervous about not breathing.

anxiety or it didn’t happen

Oh, it happened all right.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

There are only three possible endings — aren’t there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.[/b]

Either that or in impeachment.

I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

And that’s just our sun.

…when the dying sun bled the blue sky orange.

Still, we’ll all be long dead and gone by then. Unless of course there’s a miracle.

I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.

Not only that but it still is.

I realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy – speed of light power – to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr. Right will make the world new.

Let’s stuff dasein in there somewhere.

Don’t mix your heart with your liver.

Actually, that has never even crossed my mind. Or not until now.