a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Saul Alinsky

This is the world as it is. This is where you start.[/b]

That can’t be good.

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, “Is this true?” Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality? To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

He is nearly extinct.

If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them.

Not counting those who really don’t.

Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you’re free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in. We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

He thought: Did I actually once believe that?!!

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

No, really, think about that.

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral…

That’s what it is alright.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"There is no beginning of the infinite, for in that case it would have an end. " Anaximander[/b]

And here we all are somewhere in the vast, vast middle.

“Immortal and indestructible, surrounds all and directs all." Anaximander

Not counting us of course. Unless you do.

“I know of no great man except those who have rendered great services to the human race.” Voltaire

Nobody like that here one suspects.

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

If only essentially absurd.

“It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.” David Hume

He means power.

“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.” George Berkeley

Your move. Either that or mine.

[b]C.G. Jung

The sure path can only lead to death.[/b]

On the other hand, does he still think that now?

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

Surely then they don’t just make one up.

His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.

Yeah, I once thought this too. And now look at me.

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

He thought: Bullshit!

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be…

But then we have death to look forward to.

Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity.

I know that mine did.

[b]Allen Ginsberg

Banks burn, boys die bullet-eyed, mothers scream realization the vast tonnage of napalm.[/b]

Tell that to the military industrial complex.

You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there’s no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

Personal breast bliss…right.

Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.

I actually tried to publish mine.

I don’t do anything with my life except romanticise and decay with indecision.

In other words, all but one of the masses.

The electric network selling itself: The medium is the message

If only all the way to the bank.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.

Though not literally one suspects.

[b]Nein

To be or bot to be.[/b]

Or bot to be both.

Sorry, I’m out of the office at the moment. If this is an urgent matter, I suggest you leave yours as well.

I’m already gone.

Russia. And literature. They’ve been colluding for years.

Trump and literature?

The sad thing is, of course, everything. Otherwise, no complaints.

On the other hand, I’ve got tons of them.

I suggest we read Lacan. Misunderstand him. And fall in love.

Let’s decide if this is even possible.

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
Understanding.

That and the state of the union.

[b]Ali Smith

She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in.[/b]

When he entered her [no doubt] it was considerably less complicated.

Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.

Is there the Kindle equivalent of this?

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you’d have to add the equivalent describing word and that’s how you’d know. The black girl ran across the park.

This sort of thing either matters to you or it doesn’t.

The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.

Of course he hasn’t actually drained the swamp yet.

You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.

Best to keep that to yourself.

I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen.

Gee, I wonder what [or who] brought this on?

[b]T.E. Lawrence

The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.[/b]

And broken bones. If not actual skeletons.

Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.

And now?

We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God…

They still are.

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

Not quite the white man’s burden as it were.

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.

That and all the weapons of mass destruction.

Half-way through the labour of an index to this book I recalled the practice of my ten years’ study of history; and realized that I had never used the index of a book fit to read.

Does this make sense?

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

The two most vital philosophical questions of the Russian intelligentsia:

  1. Where does money go;
  2. Where does dust come from.[/b]

God knows. Or, sure, maybe Trump.

Perfect memory implies occasional forgetfulness.

If you’re lucky for example.

A Short Introduction to Surrealism: Ceci n’est pas une ceci n’est pas.

Something about a pipe I think.

The only lingua franca we all speak fluently and confidently is, in fact, misunderstanding.

Could we possibly be the exception? :laughing:

The only language we must all be fluent in is beauty.

As in drop dead gorgeous.

In the beginning there was Beauty. Then we tried to define it.

Logically as it were.

[b]Kurt Andersen

…mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.[/b]

Then throw Don Trump in there.

The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

That and political economy.
To wit:

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

And, boy, do we have some wacky ones here!

Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage “quality time,” that it was yuppie parents’ smiley-face equivalent to lawyers’ “billable hours.”

Back now too.

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”

True story?

If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else, and probably under martial law. The bombings back then seldom made the national news because a reasonable and rational Establishment was still in charge of the media discourse, determined to help Americans remain reasonable and rational.

And now?

[b]Nicholas von Hoffman

Taken as a whole the mass media seldom rises to the level of deplorable trash, but it is also true that there is no mass audience in America for anything better… [/b]

And not just Republicans.

Some flag waving is good, a lot of flag waving is tolerable, incessant flag waving is crazy and dangerous and easily manipulated by the war party to get people bubbling at the mouth in fear and rage.

Especially the masses. But who stops there?

We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn’t pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20 cent on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.

Shh. Let’s not go there.

Americans will quarrel over how, who, or what to rescue or save, but the idea that the nation ought to be off doing it is challenged only by a few.

And getting fewer all the time.

We are the people are parents warned us against.

My guess: Just like them.

…with the computer, things are not so much created as they are produced, with the producer-director becoming the star and the controlling force of much that was in other hands at other times.

You tell me: What other times?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.[/b]

Though, sure, for most of us vicariously.

My God, these folks don’t know how to love – that’s why they love so easily.

Or: My God, these folks don’t know how to hate – that’s why they hate so easily.
Then just move on to the next one.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

Let’s file this one under, “just look around you”.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

I know: You don’t think this can ever happen to you.

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

Or something pretty damn close to it.

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame… She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Look, back then this was really something.

[b]God

Omnipresence is just a fancy word for stalking.[/b]

You know, for our own good.

The degree to which you’re all fucked has far outpaced your ability to comprehend it.

In Trumpworld He means.

As a matter of fact I have no respect for human life whatsoever.

And what rational man or woman could possibly doubt that?

In an ideal scenario the President of the United States and the worst human being in the world would be two different people.

Imagine then Trump on Judgment Day. You know, if there is one.

At this point I’m just like, whatever.

Hmm, should we be worried?

Remember sanity? Those were the days.

Back in the days of the Old Testament?

[b]Paul Valéry

What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon’s devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention … How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?[/b]

Let’s pin down what that might be.

It is only by chance that we are reminded of the permanent circumstances of our life.

Temporarily as it were.

Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.

Not to worry: It isn’t you.

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Unless of course it whitens. At least theoretically.

You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.

Of course he was looking in the mirror at the time.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.

Or they on you.

wrong thread

[b]Diane Ackerman

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.[/b]

I used to not want that too.

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.

Come on, is it really the same from down here?

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

At least our version of it.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Well, there must be two of them then.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Indeed. And who would deduce dasein from the soul?

Which is crueler, an old man’s lost memories of a life lived, or a young man’s lost memories of the life he meant to live?

Yes.

[b]Mary Roach

An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can’t be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, any pedigreed women seeking love here?

If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse - and this I truly don’t recommend - you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound. "Rice Krispies.

I know: What was God thinking?

Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it’s possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn’t suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them—the paraclitoridiennes of the world—are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are “where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from”.

I know: What was God thinking?

It’s called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for ‘Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,’ an example of PLEASE— Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.

Clearly then you can carry acronyms too far.

What she perhaps didn’t realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body’s erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.

Really though is it worth it?

Nineteenth-century operating “theaters” had more to do with medical instruction than with saving patients’ lives. If you could, you stayed out of them at all cost. For one thing, you were being operated on without anesthesia. (The first operations under ether didn’t take place until 1846.) Surgical patients in the late 1700s and early 1800s could feel every cut, stitch, and probing finger. They were often blindfolded—this may have been optional, not unlike the firing squad hood—and invariably bound to the operating table to keep them from writhing and flinching or, quite possibly, leaping from the table and fleeing into the street.

Let’s file this one under, “holy shit!”

[b]Malcolm Lowry

But who could agree with someone who was so certain you were going to be sober the day after tomorrow?[/b]

Let’s decide if this makes sense.

Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more…and it’ll begin to dawn on you that even your behavior’s part of its plan.

I’ll bet some are still in the dark about that.

For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

Over the Nunes memo no doubt.

What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn’t there.

Let’s pin down the lesson to be learned.

Can’t you see there’s a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.

Let’s run this by Don Trump.

I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure.

I’ll file this one under, “I doubt it”.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Confucius[/b]

Among other things, boundless.

“What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” Isaac Newton

Of course what we know is probably up to a puddle by now.

“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” Isaac Newton

Let’s run this by Don Trump.

"Failing to understand the workings of one’s own mind is bound to lead to unhappiness.” Marcus Aurelius

If only all the way to the grave.

“You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart.” W.H. Auden

You know, being a realist.

"Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Right, like it can’t be both.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression—the insular cortex processes gustatory disgust. Ditto for disgusting smells.[/b]

In other words, with or without God.

Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed. Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder.

In other words, with or without God.

Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.

Especially in men.

Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile. This is boggling.

True, but all the more boggling is the Big Bang itself.

The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.

Autonomically as it were.

Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.

Okay, but what if we don’t live in a wholly determined universe?

[b]Neil Gaiman

Being a writer of fiction isn’t like being a compulsive liar, honestly.[/b]

Unless of course he just made that up.

Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

That’ll do it alright.

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

It goes without saying: for better or worse.

For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the bed we wake up in in the morning and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

Or for some of us the recliner.

The only reason people die, is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it.
It’s rubbish, death. It’s stupid. I don’t want nothing to do with it.

Any chance that might work?

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

Let’s just call him confused.