a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Neil Gaiman

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.[/b]

1] is this true
2] if so, why does it matter?

I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive, he said. The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.

Hear! Hear!

Change. Change. Change. Change … change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

[i]Or:
Dasein. Dasein. Dasein. Dasein…Dasein. Dasein. Dasssein. When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

How’d this go for you?[/i]

Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.

Never needed rain for that, he thought. Let alone in the graveyard.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.

Why stop there? If you get my drift.

I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don’t like.

After all, who’s gonna stop him?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

For all we live to know is known.[/b]

Possibly excepting all that we don’t.

There are two bodies — the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

Now all that’s left is to prove it.

…but it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.

If only for all practical purposes.

I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well.

Anyone here have it on tape?

It was well said of a certain German book that er lasst sich nicht lesen—it does not permit itself to be read.

“Sprechen sie deutsch, baby?”

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss — saying unto it "thus far, and no farther!”

Well, that’s what it would probably say no doubt.

[b]tiny nietzsche

putin: are you my little pissboy?
trump: maybeee
putin: do you want me to piss on you?
trump: yes, daddy[/b]

Let’s pin down close this is.

my sexual orientation is north by northwest

How queer is that?

i can see clearly now, the forest is gone

In fact, the only things left are the trees.

stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself

Should I know what this means?

kiss me, I’m a communist

Wow, that sure takes me back.

kiss me, I’m ambiguous

any takers?

[b]Federico García Lorca

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.[/b]

You get this, right?

I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads

And even that’s hidden behind all the lies.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

No, it can’t be explained any clearer than that.

I am the immense shadow of my tears

Drenched is what he is.

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

Actually at the heart of most shitty art too.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

That and all the other things.

[b]C.G. Jung

If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.[/b]

Of course we all know that it makes no difference.

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.

Okay, but how about a billion?

You are what you do, not what you say you will do.

The guy was a fucking genuis!

But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.

No getting around that, right, Mr. Objectivist? Well, except for you, of course.

Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another.

Let’s file this one under, “the mother of all general descriptions.”
The father too for some of us.

It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past—our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence.

Not counting, say, the slaveowners: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slave_owners

[b]tiny nietzsche

write your obituary in crayons[/b]

Or pay some kid to.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: time is a construct
cop: do you know how fast you were not going?

Obviously they deserve each other.

I’d probably be happy without me.

And we all know that you’d be.

Just because I don’t believe you doesn’t mean you’re not telling the truth.

Still, the odds are I’m not.

violins beget more violins

Clever if not actually true.

portrait of the allusion as a young metaphor

Either that or a simile.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

There’s a bad time coming, boys, there’s a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses.[/b]

Cue [among other things] Trumpworld.

But, mind you, it’s like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple…you’ve fallen off the tree.

I think, therefore I suffer. Or, sure, what it really means.

To die is to move on with the invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live mechanized and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanized life. Life indeed may be ignominious, shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.

Bullsht no doubt. But so well articulated.

But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.

And what man could possibly understand this?

Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.

And then one day, well, she died.

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.

What we need here then is our very own Vladimir Putin.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors.[/b]

On the other hand, you do what you have to do. All the rest is the sideshow.

Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation.

Let’s file this one under, “been there, done that.”

Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

Few things are trickier than emotions, right?

What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.

On the other hand, steer clear of mine.

How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought…

He means me of course.

People think they are individuals because they use the word ‘‘I’’ so often.

The fools!

[b]so sad today

when i see people reproducing i’m like what are you doing[/b]

What would you tell her?

being my own worst enemy is going ok

With me it’s still too close to call.

it’s all fun and games until you’re born

Truth be told, I don’t actually recall.

at least i’m not permanent

Of course first we’ll have to run that by God.

if i get reincarnated i’m gonna be like are you fucking kidding me?

Unless she comes back as a cow.

i love you but i’ve chosen masturbation

What’s love got to do with it, he thought.

[b]Tom Stoppard

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary… I forget the third thing.[/b]

My guess: Working 9 to 5 as a wage slave.

It’s all trivial-your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after but not the life. Believe in god, the solid, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of view. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

Just what the world needs, he thought, another optimist.

I got dizzy, he explained.
I should think you did. What were you doing?
Nothing, said Moon. I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over.
Let that be my epitaph.

Let’s file this one under, “another dumb bastard bites the dust”.

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

For some in other words. Though, in particular, the mutts they recruit to fight them.

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

Trump’s advice to Putin more or less than Putin’s advice to Trump?

You cannot conceive of the quantity of explosives the armies throw at each other for each man killed! The shells make a continuous noise, sometimes like an enormous machine breaking apart. At other times, they come whistling towards you in a thoughtful sort of way and then go crump and the screw cap flies off, hurtling through the air, screaming. There’s a kind of shell which comes with a crescendo like an express train, only faster. Another kind which makes a noise like tearing calico, louder and louder. The largest kind are the ones which burst in the sky and make a double crack, like a wet canvas being shaken out by a giant. Such immense explosions to kill such small, weak animals.

More to the point who makes how much manufacturing them?

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world?[/b]

Sure, if you need it to be.

…often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision.

Sure, if you don’t need it to be.

These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown.

I might say the same about myself. And not just here.

We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbors in memory.

Tell me that’s not embedded in dasein.

You’re young. Why are you doing this? That’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor. You’ll just burn together. I was like a dog, running after them. I’d stand for hours at their doors, begging and pleading. And then they’d say: All right! The hell with you! You’re not normal!

Not much you can do sometimes with “the young”.

I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn’t accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they’d call me.

Can’t really imagine it, can you?

[b]so sad today

i have trouble expressing my feelings except to the whole internet[/b]

Of course here you can always just make things up.

if there’s one thing worse than having to die it’s being born

She’s just going on the record.

got my self-esteem at the dollar store

Or: got my self-esteem at the flea market

my gift to humanity is not having kids

On behalf of all of us, thank you.

remember when i thought I knew you but I didn’t know you at all

Actually, it was the other way around.

many classic works of literature don’t have enough pussy eating

Let’s list the ones that that do.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.[/b]

True, there is that.

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny’s great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn’t rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.

True, there is that.

Bending Spring Ranch, Cole Valley, Colorado.
What kind of a ranch is it anyway? Dennis had asked Jules originally when the property had been purchased. Cattle? Dude? I wasn’t really sure.
No, it’s a tax ranch, she’d said. See, they raise little tax brackets there. It’s the only one of its kind in the world.

It’s a franchise now of course.

They should hand out vibrators if they’re going to demand so much of you that you can’t find time for a private life.

Those and inflatable love dolls.

The present could never be held, it did not allow it.

At least not for long.

For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her class.

Then straight on to Jeopardy.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” Michel Foucault[/b]

Like this can actually be pinned down.

“Explanation is where the mind rests.” David Hume

For example we could make the attempt to explain this.

“Art may make a suit of clothes, but nature must produce a man.” David Hume

The question clearly begged: What then of philosophy?

“Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.” Michel Foucault

So, would he think that is still true?

“He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another.” Epicurus

Yeah, like this is a good thing.
It’s not, right?

“Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?” Epicurus

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Mickey’s father.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Vote, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.[/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.

Philosophy - A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Or: Philosophy - A route of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere.

Lawyer – One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

The only possible exception perhaps being Carleas.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

He means our football of course.

History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

And, no, not just American history.

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

And yet not a single mention of dasein.

[b]May Sarton

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.[/b]

Let’s just say that is not applicable to all of us.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

I’m living proof of this.

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

He thought, how idiotic is that!
He being [among others] me.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

What it is founded on by and large is the creation of wage slaves.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

Of course that doesn’t explain Don Trump though.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Go ahead then, take mine.

[b]Emily Gould

Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.[/b]

Unless you count being born.

As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of “sex” to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream—it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it’s still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice.

Let’s exchange our own versions of this.

Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she’d thought that, she hadn’t understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real.

Someone pass this along to Peter Kropotkin.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

Or: She wondered if it counted as being bad if you did the bad thing for purely selfless reasons.

And there was Sam’s charming Marxist thing of thinking that restaurants, new clothes, et cetera, were frivolities that only served to keep workers addicted and enslaved by Capital. Amy agreed with him about this, in theory, but she loved wearing a new outfit for the first time, ideally to a restaurant.

The new class struggle.

We would talk about the future while holding it forcibly at bay with our inactivity.

Hey, he thought, whatever works.

[b]Temple Grandin

I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people’s behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.[/b]

They’re still butchered though of course.

There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.

Let’s think up one for philosophy.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Does this square with Wittgenstein?

My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.

So, Temple, logically speaking, is it ethical to eat animals?

The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.

On the other hand, just how exceptional is she?

Neither living nor learning was good without order.

Though it is surely more complicated than that.

[b]Nein

The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. Bartender: What will it have been?[/b]

Probably not a true story.

Yes, everything’s already been said. But not by you.

Probably not by you either.

If it’s any consolation, there isn’t any.

What, are you expecting one?

In the beginning, we’ll say, there was Adam. Then they made Smith.

And then they made Don Trump.
[Well, some of you assholes anyway]

We regret to inform you that Twitter has deleted your fake followers. If it’s any consolation, your fake leaders remain all too real.

Trust me: Not just on Twitter.

Listen: Monday doesn’t want to be here either.

Around 4,000 of them won’t want to be for most of us.

[b]Nein

The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. Bartender: What will it have been?[/b]

Probably not a true story.

Yes, everything’s already been said. But not by you.

Probably not by you either.

If it’s any consolation, there isn’t any.

What, are you expecting one?

In the beginning, we’ll say, there was Adam. Then they made Smith.

And then they made Don Trump.
[Well, some of you assholes anyway]

We regret to inform you that Twitter has deleted your fake followers. If it’s any consolation, your fake leaders remain all too real.

Trust me: Not just on Twitter.

Listen: Monday doesn’t want to be here either.

Around 4,000 of them won’t want to be for most of us.