a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

Stupid people often think they are more “rational” because they don’t understand the social context of a problem, making the problem simple.[/b]

Objectively as it were.

Nazi: we will eliminate the Jews.
Antifa: no.
Liberal: whoa, let’s just have a civil discussion about whether or not to eliminate the Jews.

He does have a point, right?

Philosophy is when you think about a topic so much you realize that not only do you not understand it, but you don’t understand anything.

On the other hand, even that’s something.

The major problem with life is that you have to be yourself the whole time.

Now that you mention it…

Imagine explaining Capitalism to a alien: “Well…a few people own everything, and for 40 hours a week everyone else has to do what they say.”

I know: Let’s have a revolution!

Nihilist: nothing matters, nothing’s good or bad, there is no meaning.
Also nihilist: I’ll riot if this computer game doesn’t run at 60 fps.

So, what’s the problem?

[b]John Cage

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.[/b]

Just short of, say, a contradiction in terms.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Well, since the big bang anyway.

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

Just what we need, another metaphsyical pragmatist.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.

Besides, it’s all in the genes anyway.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

Whether you put them there or not.

Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it’s own accord.

Tried that once myself. And I still don’t understand it.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.[/b]

Not many of us are up to that though.

If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?

You tell me.

You’re going to have things to repent, boy,’ Mr. John had told Nick. 'That’s one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.

Among other things, sins.

This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Just don’t expect to actually pin this down.

Imagination is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.

Imagine that, he thought. But then couldn’t.

That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here.

So, where would you rather have been born?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” Buddha[/b]

Really, how could anyone in their right mind actually believe this?

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” Denis Diderot

Really, how could anyone in their right mind actually believe this?

“What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.” Denis Diderot

Indeed. Yesterday being the 100th anniversity of the Russian Revolution.
You know, for better or for worse.

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” Aristotle

So, how am I doing?

“When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it’s time for artists to make their mark.” Joni Mitchell

Recognizing of course that the world has never not been that way.
But, sure, now especially.

“The sun at noon is the sun setting. The thing born is the thing dying.” Chinese Proverb

Now that’s grim.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Truly, life is wasted on the living…[/b]

Is it possible to take it that far?

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

Of course 9 times out of 10 she’s a he.

There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

And who among us doesn’t?

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.

Let’s at least agree it’s not a cliche.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

As opposed to, say, philosophy.

[b]Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.

She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.

Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.

Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months’ pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.

There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.[/b]

Actually, I didn’t know her. But that sounds like something the Gestapo would do. In fact, it sounds like something certain folks here might do.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.[/b]

Maybe, but that never stopped me.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
I can’t remember. Which?
Do you know what those words mean?
Not really.
An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical.
I’m an optimist.
Well, that’s good, because there’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.

Clues, evidence. You have yours, I have mine.

I beg you, no matter what happens, no matter where you go in life or how many millions you make, no matter anything, I beg you: never buy a German car.

So far, I’ve bought two of them. But point taken.

My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] mine is running out.

Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.

In fact, he’ll teach you.

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

Because [for some] it’s not a cat.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.[/b]

Like for example the microwave oven.

Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading.

Or [if we’re really, really lucky]: Always remember that the crowd that applauds your election is the same crowd that will applaud your impeachment.

There is always time for another last minute.

Obviously: Until there’s not.

It’s going to look pretty good, then, isn’t it, said War testily, the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocalypse.

The second coming of a lesser God.

There is a lot of folklore about equestrian statues, especially the ones with riders on them. There is said to be a code in the number and placement of the horse’s hooves: If one of the horse’s hooves is in the air, the rider was wounded in battle; two legs in the air means that the rider was killed in battle; three legs in the air indicates that the rider got lost on the way to the battle; and four legs in the air means that the sculptor was very, very clever. Five legs in the air means that there’s probably at least one other horse standing behind the horse you’re looking at; and the rider lying on the ground with his horse lying on top of him with all four legs in the air means that the rider was either a very incompetent horseman or owned a very bad-tempered horse.

And that’s not even counting the Confederate statues. Well, in the civilized world.

Why bother with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?

Ego?

[b]God

The first step is admitting you have a penis.[/b]

Cue Louis C. K. among others

Sanity is becoming more and more of an achievement.

On the other hand, what does this tell us about God?

Mary was underage. I knocked her up. I’m a child molester.

And, after all, He did make Roy Moore in His image.

I apologize to some of you for most of you.

Thus God reveals to us the actual existential limits of His power.

The only person who ever needs to watch you masturbate is Jesus.

Though, for all practical purposes, He’s God.

A year ago today, I officially forsook all of thee.

Clue: He means November 8th, 2016.

[b]C.G. Jung

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.[/b]

And where might that be?

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

And what might that be?

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Among other things, cue the Ubermen.

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

Let’s try to note some exceptions. If not here.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Let’s ponder the implications of this, Mr. Objectivist.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.

No people either.

[b]Joseph Heller

He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the circumference of the equator and always wrote “enhanced” when he meant “increased.” He was a prick.[/b]

An autodidactic prick no doubt.

[b]The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins.

The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by the discovery. It was miraculous.

It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue, 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.[/b]

Maybe, but you can’t fool God.

Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

In other words, a scholar.

[b]Oh, they’re there all right, Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby’s eyes after Yossarian’s fist fight in the officers’ club, although he probably doesn’t even know it. That’s why he can’t see things as they really are.

How come he doesn’t know it? inquired Yossarian.

Because he’s got flies in his eyes, Orr explained with exaggerated patience. How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?[/b]

Catch 17 as I recall.

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What could you say to him?

Hell, you could say that about a few folks here.

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

Sounds like something Don Rumsfeld’s machine would write.

[b]Steven D. Levitt

Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don’t contain methane.[/b]

Anyone here know why?

Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.

Not counting Bernie Madoff of course.

How are you supposed to get everyone to pull in the same direction when they are all pulling primarily for themselves?

Who would think that you can?

The future is far less knowable than you think.

Trust me: You’ll die.

Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact. And here’s why: the people making these wild guesses can usually get away with it!

For example, not get impeached.

To Borody and a small band of like-minded brethren who believe in the power of poop, we are standing at the threshold of a new era in medicine. Borody sees the benefits of fecal therapy as “equivalent to the discovery of antibiotics.” But first, there is much skepticism to overcome.

Let’s explain that.

[b]Lawrence M. Krauss

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.[/b]

On the other hand, not much here in the way of immortality and salvation.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe…We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.

Not that any of us will be around to confirm it.

A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.

Nope, that doesn’t work for me. In fact, not even close.

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

Sure, that will catch on.

I like to say that while antimatter may seem strange, it is strange in the sense that Belgians are strange. They are not really strange; it is just that one rarely meets them.

Any Belgians here?
Any antimatter?

In science we have to be particularly cautious about ‘why’ questions. When we ask, ‘Why?’ we usually mean ‘How?’ If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might ask: ‘Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?’ but what we really probably mean is, ‘How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?’ That is, we are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. ‘Why’ implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.

Why is this beyond actually knowing? For example, so far.

[b]Existential Comics

I heard Marie Antoinette’s last words were “Monsieur, I beg your pardon”, but that’s a lie, it was actually “so much for the tolerant left.”[/b]

So, what will your last words be?

What will destroy Western Civilization:
1600: democracy
1800: atheism
1900: feminism
2017: fuck it, let’s just destroy it for real this time

Cue Don Trump.

Philosophy teaches us that no matter how smart you think you are, you are actually a stupid idiot.

Though not if you are one of us.

It wasn’t until it was too late that Captain Kirk realized space wasn’t the final frontier– the real frontier was confronting his sexuality.

A little help here please.

Click here to discover this one weird trick to a meaningful life that existentialists DON’T want you to know about.

You know, hypothetically.

[b]There are three categories of comedy:

  1. Satire.
  2. Observational humor.
  3. When someone all of the sudden gets kicked in the balls.[/b]

Go ahead, imagine that it’s me.

[b]Robin Wasserman

But things don’t just fall apart. People break them.[/b]

Not counting acts of God of course.

You don’t even realize you’re living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.

Or even the day after that.

I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.

Never been there myself. Unless, perhaps, I’m in denial.

Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on.

You know, in theory.

I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn’t about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.

I suspect that no one reads philosophy for this.

The only thing more dangerous than a willingness to ignore the law is an ability to change it.

If, for example, you’re “one of them”.

[b]Rick Moody

Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a foetal ball?[/b]

And let’s not forget the women.

There are men who need to defile themselves in order to get on with their lives.

Anyone here doing that now?

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation.

Maybe, but the very end is right up there.

There should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse?

After you come, for example.

Isn’t a tangle of limbs a glorious thing to behold? Don’t you wish to be in a tangle of limbs?

Anyone here want to tangle with mine?

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.

Not many like them around.

[b]Maurice Blanchot

A writer who writes, ‘‘I am alone’’ can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.[/b]

Point taken. And then some.

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.

Who would have figured on it being all that complicated.

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.

Who would have figured on it being all that complicated.

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

And then, eventually, for all of eternity. Whatever that means.

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

Of what you might ask.

And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world - man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying.

And, as luck would have it, he had damn near a 100 years in which to ponder it.

[b]André Gide

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Essential to remain between the two, close to madness when you dream and close to reason when you write.[/b]

Or [sometimes] the most ugly things.

How would one tell a story about happiness? One can only tell of the origins of happiness and its destruction.

That sounds like a story to me.

Everyone was good at talking about day-to-day events, but no one ever looked at what motivated them.

On the other hand, with folks like me, that’s all we do.

One has to choose. The main thing is to know what one wants…

No, the main thing is to know how to get it.

There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.

Indeed, we don’t see much of that here, do we?

The self requires a story.

Not to worry. As soon as you’re born you’ll be given one.

[b]Sad Socrates

I will never get tired of lying to myself.[/b]

But not you, right?

We have so many desires which are not important.

To him maybe.

I am the source of my unhappiness.

Unless of course we count you.

Consciousness is the least interesting feature of a human being.

Above the belt in other words.

I don’t care about who I am.

As, for most of us, it should be.

Stay tuned for more boredom.

Maybe, but thank god for Robert Mueller.

[b]Philip Pullman

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.[/b]

Or, for some, before them.

We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

Indeed, once upon a time that was true of me. And it still is.

I think it’s perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don’t know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I’d want nothing to do with them.

My kind of God then.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

Like the two have absolutely nothing in common.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

Like the two have absolutely nothing in common.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and skeptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once.

Same here. Only in the first person. First person plural as it were.

[b]Lou Reed

I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.[/b]

In other words, always be your own best friend.

I always believed that I have something important to say and I said it.

Let’s pin down what that was.

The only thing constantly changing is change
The living only become dead
Your hair falling out
Your liver swelled up
Your teeth rot your gums and your chin
Your ass starts to sag
Your balls shrivel up
Your cock swallowed up in its sack
The only thing constantly changing is change
And it’s always change on your back.

Just what we need, another optimist.

[b]I don’t know just where I’m going
But I’m goin’ to try for the kingdom if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Then I tell you things aren’t quite the same

When I’m rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus’ son
And I guess I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t know[/b]

On the other hand, a lot of folks just don’t know. They just don’t know that.

It takes a busload of faith to get by.

And, hopefully, not all of it blind.

They listen to the music of idiots and amuse themselves with the sordid miseries of their businesses. They are not the things of angels or of any higher outpost that humanity might aspire to. Your loathsome vomitous businessman king is of the lowest order, his advisors crumbling mockeries of education driven by avarice. My love, dress them in the suits of mockery, and in their advanced state of stupidity and senility, burn and destroy them, so their ashes might join the compost which they so much deserve.

Of course they do produce all the things that we buy.