a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

Optimist: the glass is half full.
Pessimist: the glass is half empty.
Communist: the bourgeoisie robbed the noble worker of half his glass![/b]

You know, if there are still any Communists around.

And then Jacques Derrida was like, “everything is just opinions and stuff”, which created Postmodernism and destroyed society as we know it.

All that meme shit, right Satyr?

Freedom is:
Hume: acting according to the will.
Mill: the lack of constraints.
Kant: always following all the rules, surprisingly enough.

No, really, what is freedom?

Imagine a world where millions paid to watch the greatest intellectuals in a mental boxing match: rational debate.

In other words, Mr. Objectivist knocked out in the first round. A TKO probably.

[b]Things that keep the existential dread at bay:

1. Love
2. Art
3. Friendship
4. Passionately arguing over the most pointless shit imaginable[/b]

And [admittedly] not just the Kids.

Epistemology in:
Germany: the thing-in-itself is unknowable
France: knowledge is socially constructed
America: the customer is always right

And even when he’s wrong he can always be pardoned.

[b]Sarah Waters

I barely knew I had skin before I met you.[/b]

I wonder [of course] if anyone had ever thought that of me.

And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

It never really works like that, does it?

Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?

And who the hell might they be, he thought.

Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters’ stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist’s.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone do that here?

Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?

Oh, yeah. But it’s always easier said than done. Or almost always.

Even ashes are a part of your freedom.

Not that you will know it at the time.

[b]Jasmine Warga

We’re suicidal, not innumerate.[/b]

But, sure, it’s possible to be both.

You’re like a gray sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.

For some though, gray is our favorite color.

Don’t you ever think about that? What if this isn’t the end and we just go on to a place even worse than this one?

I’ll let you know if I do. You do the same, okay?

But just because it’s cowardly doesn’t guarantee it’s going to be easy.

The part that is often overlooked.

Guidance counselors always love to say, ‘Just think positively,’ but that’s impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster.

Like the faithful here telling you to “just believe”. That way if you don’t it’s always your own damn fault.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the energy of the universe. And if energy can’t ever be created or destroyed, only transferred, what do you think happens to people’s energy once they die?

It goes into one of the other universes.
Maybe.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

Character isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.[/b]

Sounds [more or less] like an existential contraption to me.

You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?”

On the other hand, sometimes that is more or less beyond our control.

Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way. I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgements. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.

I’ll accept yours half way if you’ll accept mine.

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.

If not out and out toppled.

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.

That and who they can pardon.

I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.

The sheer gall of suggesting that. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]André Gide

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.[/b]

Depending on their options of course. And yours.

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.

But point taken.

The color of truth is grey.

Dark grey as likely as not.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

This sounds like it either may or may not be true. Anyone here care to cite an example.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Let’s see if we can all agree that’s a perfect description of Don Trump.

Everything’s already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.

Oh, yeah, that’ll work.

[b]Roland Barthes

Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection → Encyclopedias are impossible → I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) → “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .[/b]

This may well be the mother of all “general assessments”. In fact, I dare someone to explain it.

It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.

True more often than not. But it’s probably best to just keep it to yourself.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel.

And a postmodern novel as likely as not.

There is no sadness and no cruelty in that gaze; it is a gaze without adjectives, it is only, completely, a gaze which neither judges you nor appeals to you; it posits you, implicates you; makes you exist. But this creative gesture is endless; you keep on being born, you are sustained, carried to the end of a movement which is one of infinite origin, source, and which appears in an eternal state of suspension.

Which character in which novel does this remind you of?

I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.

Or, sure, the revolutionay darkness.

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

Just not in the sentences that we write.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn’t end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, why is this important to know? Oh, and is it actually true?

Oh, why did nobody warn me? cried Grimes in agony. I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I’ve risked them, and I don’t mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.

Obviously: You’ve either been there or you haven’t.

I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.

Trust me, for some, this is not in the least bit funny.

Comparisons are odious.

Compared to what?

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I wonder if it is still that way today.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Personally, I don’t see it catching on.

[b]The Dead Author

Libertarian: someone who is too young to work.
Conservative: someone who is too old to work.
Neoliberal: someone who is too rich to work.[/b]

On the other hand, there can never be too many stereotypes.

Everybody is interested but nobody cares.

Not much [these days] that isn’t applicable to.

Žižek, 2016: Trump will cause revolution in America.
Reality, 2017: Americans miss George W. Bush.

No, really.

What is fascism?
Freud: Death.
Benjamin: Art.
Arendt: Total.
Trotsky: Capitalist.
Hayek: Socialist.
Adorno: Heidegger.
Orwell: Unclear.

Surely, this can be trumped.

Someone drove his Dodge into group of people and Trump’s response was to praise himself for bringing manufacturing back to America.

Yeah, it might be true.

Schrödinger’s Nazi: claiming that they’re laughable basement-dwelling losers while maintaining that they’re a threat to public safety.

Or close enough?

[b]Mary Roach

One young woman’s tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver’s hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. “The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish”, she wrote. “Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart”.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “if you say so”.

Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.

In other words, lots and lots of taboos.

The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won’t, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.

Thank God then for Immortality and Salvation.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

Give or take the occasional compound fracture.

I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, “I felt at one with the divine source of creation.”

Not unlike the things that folks say here. And, yes, they too expect to be taken seriously.

In the words of the late Francis Crick…You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Including [one would assume] her writing it and you and I reading it.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Atlas said, Must my future be so heavy?
Hera said, That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.
How can I escape my fate?
You must choose your destiny.[/b]

Either that or shrug.

Something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown.

In other words, a normal day at the Oval Office.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates?

Obviously, yes. Clearly, no. Though, quite possibly, maybe.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

Otherwise summed up as “human-all-too-human” art.

It’s the clichés that cause the trouble.

For example, “Don’t forget to vote!”

Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display.

In other words, on purpose.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world–or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin.[/b]

Boiling it all down to dasein. But that’s just me.

I don’t know who made the laws; But I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.

On the other hand, there are laws against stealing.

No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can’t expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party’s over and you are with your hostess now.
I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.

He wrote the book, sure; but then walked the talk.

Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Then he added, Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is.

Just out of curiosity, if you were God, what would you do?

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Never once in my entire life have I felt like this. You know, so far.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows.

In other words, not just icebergs.

[b]Philip Larkin

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action.[/b]

You know, if you’re lucky.

I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time’s - it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not.

Let’s be charitable and call it a mood.

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide.

In other words, fuck you.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

And that’s right around the corner from desperation.
But don’t get me started.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

And then every three years after. Excluding Antarctica of course. Well, for most of them.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.

Let’s continue in the same vein. Or, sure, go even farther.

[b]Neil Gaiman

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.[/b]

Though not just in the Capital Letter World.

It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

Or: It is a fool’s prerogative to believe truths that no one else will utter.

Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.

Among other things, let’s examine the implications of that. You know, for all practical purposes.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

Of course that takes some of us to this: the human spirit.
Whatever that might possibly be.

Liberty, boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

And even then, he boomed louder, only in the best of all possible worlds.

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

An uberboy in the making.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods — should we eat animals?[/b]

Like there’s only one “right answer” here. Or is he acknowledging that, in fact, there isn’t one?

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

Next up: All the things that should have.

Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don’t taste quite right — how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? — but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste.

Not counting the chicken that I eat of course.

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

Well, mine did try.

Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it’s happening.

That reminds me, do people really die in their sleep?

When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, “To mourn,” and then, “To mourn try to live,” he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, “Neither.” “For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?” “For as long as I can.” “Are we talking about a weekend or a year?” I didn’t write anything. The man said, "Next.”

There are just some things you can’t pin down.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events – the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there – that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.[/b]

Why do assholes always have to spoil things like this?
Right?

I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers…this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted.

I’ll bet they have big tits too.

The enemy isn’t men, or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no one has the right to be stupid.

But we do have the right to point them out. Or at least I do.

Anyway, if you stop tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.

They’ll do that anyway.

Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your responsibility.

And, of course, vice versa.

No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…

Right, like your still around to note them.

[b]Sad Socrates

90% of life is terrible and the other 10% you’re too busy to enjoy.[/b]

You know, generally.

Is this a waste of time or a time of waste?

Unequivocally, yes.
Well, maybe.

I don’t believe in past lives because thinking about living more than this existence depresses me.

And then there’s Nietzsche’s rendition of the future.
Let’s deduce which is worse.

Free to do whatever we want and this is where we find ourselves.

Free to be whatever we want…
So, anyone here ever even come close?

The only rule of Existential Club is lower your expectations.

I challenge yours to be lower than mine.

I spy something impossible.

If only theoretically.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.[/b]

You know, being optimistic.

I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.

Of course now we know for sure, don’t we?

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.

With the possible exception of Trump under Putin’s.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

Given, for example, the history of our own species.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Let’s pin down what this says about him.

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

For some though it’s not the same thing.

[b]e e cummings

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.[/b]

Not that anyone really knows what that means.

To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

Not that anyone really knows what that means.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

True, but let’s decide who among us comes closest.

Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

Right, like there’s a clear distinction to be made between one stopping and the other starting.

listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

Unless of course that’s what they’re saying about ours.

life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

Well, he knows now. You know, if he does know now.

[b]Joseph Heller

That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left.[/b]

Some may well say that about me here. Not that I’d disagree.

I wouldn’t want to live without strong misgivings.

Not to worry: No one ever does.

Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.

In other words, define “good”.

Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?
Yes, sir, it has.
Then why do you do it?
To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.

For philosophers of course it is intellectual impotence. Though it has little or nothing to do with women.

You’re an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I’m an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I’m in an ideal position to appreciate it.

You be one, I’ll be the other.

What the hell are you getting so upset about?’ he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of amusement. I thought you didn’t believe in God.
I don’t, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him to be.
Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us, he proposed obligingly. You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to . Is that a deal?

Not many bases this doesn’t cover. Assuming of course I understand it.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I enjoy nothing[/b]

Let’s be charitable and assume this is a double enntendre.

I am binge watching a tree.

Starting with the acorn no doubt.

if you’re a postmodernist and you know it, shake your head

Vigorously, goddamn it!

we can figure out what we mean later

And even then only after they do.

remember not to wear late stage capitalism after labor day

Unless of course you’re white, making minimum wage and voted for Trump.

AP: trump donates 1 million to hurricane relief; says russia will pay for it

I heard it was North Korea.