a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Hannah Arendt

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.[/b]

Let’s figure the masses and Trump in all this.

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

So, are we heading there again? Only here this time?

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

Wow, who does this remind you of?

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

If only in theory. At least around here.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Really, think about how preposterous this can be.

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

They don’t call it the class struggle for nothing. Or back when they didn’t.

[b]Existential Comics

Plato: we have to force people to be educated.
Rousseau: we have to force people to be free.
Bentham: we have to force people to be happy.
Bakunin: we have to force people to stop forcing people to do things.[/b]

Or, sure, not force them.

The funny thing about saying “you are your brain”, is that the sentence would be incoherent, if true.

Okay, but how funny?

Italian food culture: “my grandmother taught me how to make the perfect Gnocchi, as her grandmother taught her.”
English food culture: “yeah so we basically just throw whatever’s lying around in here, and call it Shepard’s Pie.”

American food culture: “Burger King or McDonalds?”

Growing up, my teachers always told me that smoking cigarettes was not cool. Later, when I found out this was a lie, and cigarettes are in fact cool, I started to question everything else they taught me.
Anyway, long story short, now I’m a revolutionary Marxist Leninist Maoist.

More to the point: Why isn’t everyone? And what’s smoking got to do with it?

Utilitarians are going to be pretty pissed when the results of the ethical calculus tell us that the best result is achieved by teaching children that utilitarianism is false.

Not if they’re down in the hole that I’m in.

Eventually the Trix Rabbit realized that it wasn’t the children who kept him from eating Trix cereal, it was a structural system of discrimination codified into every level of society.

Not unlike what Roger Rabbit realized. And he was first.

[b]José Saramago

Don’t be afraid, the darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you’ve never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn’t frighten you…my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside.[/b]

You know, if this works for you.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

On the other hand: chronicle.com/blogs/percola … cher/32709

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

Ours especially.

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…

Among other things, pointless. Though, by all means, point taken.

If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

Not that anyone ever does.

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

Unless of course it does.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.[/b]

That’s probably the last thing art is.

I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it.

That’s probably the last thing immortality is.

Every form of happiness is private.

Just as [no doubt] every form of unhappiness is collective.

He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again.

Paint by number love as it were. Or love by the book.

Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.
But I don’t think of you.

Quite the contrary, the Ellsworth Tooheys were all she every thought about.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Let’s pin down the irony here.

[b]Dorothy Parker

I’m not a writer with a drinking problem, I’m a drinker with a writing problem.[/b]

Or, sure, for some folks, a combination of both.

If I had a shiny gun
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folks that cause me pains

Her first poem perhaps.

Living well is the best revenge.

Yeah, that’s what they tell me.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

Even bad writing unfortunately.

Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.

Me too.
You know, if I do say so myself.

It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.

Still, for someone like me, that’s something to shoot for.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The way up and the way down are one and the same.” Heraclitus[/b]

Nope, doesn’t work that way around here.

“It is all one to me where I begin …” Parmenides

It’s all none for him now though.

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” Friedrich Nietzsche

So, is that good or is that bad?

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.” Friedrich Nietzsche

I command you to agree!

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Let’s file this one under, “to each his own.”

“Man’s duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.” Immanuel Kant

Yeah, right, he scoffed.

[b]Asne Seirstad

In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes’ notion of honor and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love, or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death.[/b]

Dasein on steroids.

Do you know what is our problem? We know everything about our weapons, but we know nothing about how to use a telephone.

Let alone a home entertainment center.

There are many things one can think of when one needs someone to vent one’s wrath on.

Here that’s either an art or a science.

Our answer is more democracy, more openness and more humanity. But never naivety.

Their naivety of course.

Wild animals walked in a straight line, tame ones tended to wander more aimlessly.

Clearly with some exceptions: youtu.be/vbnfCsAI0ps

Gerd called life ‘existing minute by minute’. Every single minute felt like a battle.

And, come on, what do most of us know about that?

[b]Erica Jong

It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.[/b]

Actually, for those of us in the know, it’s the other way around.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

Mine didn’t get the message.

…think about how impossible it is to explain to the young what happens when you know you’re not immune from death. Everything changes. You look at the world differently. When you’re young, you have no perspective. You think life lasts forever—days and months and years stretching out to infinity. You think you don’t have to choose. You think you can waste time doing drugs and alcohol. You think time will always be on your side. But time, once your friend, becomes your enemy. It gallops by as you get older. Holidays come faster and faster. Years fly off the calendar as in old movies. All you long for is to go back and do it all over, correct the mistakes.

Great, just what we need, another rendition of this.

I don’t believe what you believe, I yelled, and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m struggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by, I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards.

Trust me: This probably won’t work.

What is the arc of the plot of one’s life? I want! I want!

By hook or by crook as it were.

You must be very specific in your wishes or they’ll come back to haunt you.

Guess what I specifically wish for now.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Take that, Mr. Uberman!

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe” Friedrich Nietzsche

Take that, Mr. Objectivist!

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Though, sure, some may well have been insane.

“Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.” Voltaire

Go, ahead, give it your best shot.

“The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.” Voltaire

And not just in our neck of the woods.

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” Voltaire

Amen!

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

I needed a new mystery.[/b]

And boy does he get one.

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

No shit?

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?
For fun?
Fun! He pounced on the word. Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

On the the other, why not both?

I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.
I think you may be.
I smiled dubiously. Thank you.
It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

He thought this surely sounded deeper than it actually was.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

And not just here of course.

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

Or: Boys possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to nothing in the known universe.

[b]Nein

I’m just here for the degradation of the discourse.[/b]

So, don’t let him down.

Yes, space and time died yesterday. Monday, somehow, survived.

Figures.

Mediocrity walks into a bar. And requests it be lowered.

Imagine then if mediocrity walked into here.

I asked the theorists who wrote it. They told me this shit writes itself.

Academically as it were.

Sorry, sir. This is not a democracy. It is a painting of a democracy.

Paint by numbers nowadays.

A gentle reminder that social media has not destroyed civilization. But I’d like to think there’s still time.

And, with any luck, before you die.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, got any to sell?

Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

Out with the old morality, in with the new.

The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

Let’s just say that so far it’s been a long, long time.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

Demographically as it were.

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

Like that’s just an option.

Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one’s individuality.

Not counting the parts that overlapped of course.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.[/b]

In other words, on purpose.

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres’s someone who feels much worse.

Just don’t expect this to work all the time.

Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”

Let’s run this by PETA first.

The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term , but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.

Like for example when Gomer Pyle courted Lou Ann Poovie.

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people’s eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we’re also inhuman at the same time.

Not many races that isn’t applicable to.

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.

And I was once smack dab in the middle of it.

[b]Neil Gaiman

I’m not scared of falling, he told himself. The bit I’m scared of is the bit where you stop falling, and start being dead.[/b]

Like that’s a reasonable distinction to make up on the 20th floor.

All Bette’s stories have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

Until finally your own.

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

Let’s file this one under, “hey, whatever works”.

When you love something you just don’t want to stop talking about it.

Worse: When you hate something.

Take one, and you cannot take the other, she said. But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk — the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?

How about Anton Chigurh’s way: “Call it, heads or tails”

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story.

That and are willing to pay for it.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

There are two types of people:

1. “What a fool I was.”
2. “What a fool I am.”[/b]

Actually 3: “What a fool I’ve always been and always will be.”

Siri, find the nearest raison d’être.
Sorry, I didn’t get that.
It’s OK, Siri, neither did I.

The next challenge for AI.

Speak in English
Despair in Russian
Philosophise in German
Intrigue in French
Love in Italian
Sleep in Spanish
Dream in Ancient Greek

Next up: Sign language.

A misanthrope: I hope you die.
A true misanthrope: I hope you don’t.

I think I get that.

Say something smart in Russian?
Idiot.

I don’t think I get that.

I want to be the sound of a razor blade gently scratching your face as you shave.

And then [later] down there.

[b]Spike Lee

If you can’t take a hit, you’re not going to last long, that’s for sure.[/b]

Hell, I take them all the time here.

Critics like to build you up, tear you down, and then, if you’re lucky, build you up again.

So, any critics here?

Everybody does what they want to do for their own specific reasons.

You’d think that would go without saying. But here it is again.

Since the days of slavery, if you were a good singer or dancer, it was your job to perform for the master after dinner.

Of course that’s all in the past now.

I’ve never seen black men with fine white women. They be ugly. Mugly dogs.

He means poor black men of course.

What’s the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

If he does say so himself.

[b]The Dead Author

Heidegger is important for showing that people will defend you from accusations of being a Nazi even if you were a member of the Nazi Party.[/b]

Is this more or less complicated than it seems?

I don’t know if the chicken or the egg came first, but hopelessness is the cause of depression as much as the result of it.

Well, at least that’s settled.

Hope is just a sign that something has gone wrong.

Yeah, there is that.

Nietzsche died on this day in 1900. He only got to 55 but at least he outlived God.

You know, if that’s what you believe.

Art is what only you can say but everyone gets.

On the other hand, that may well be the last thing art is.

I sometimes wish narcissists would care as much about other people’s feelings as they care about their opinions.

Or at least work on it.

[b]C.G. Jung

The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own.[/b]

How the fuck could he not? But point taken.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

Now that’s one dumb bastard!

Each is deceived by the sense of finality peculiar to the stage of development at which he stands.

Must be a gene for that, he suspected.

To be “normal” is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful.

So, anyone here both normal and successful?

His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names.

Secular ones as often as not.

What you resist, persists.

Trust me: Not always. Not to mention the other way around.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

A man never is quite such an abject specimen as his wife makes him look.[/b]

Though never the other way around, he snorted.

He also wearied his mother very often. She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.

Imagine my mother then.

Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force one’s way up and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very tiring, very wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens.

On the other hand, the bills won’t pay themselves.

Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines.

Anyone here ever done that? Anyone’s cat?

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

That’s the point I make. If more crudely.

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

You know, if its bite doesn’t kill you.

[b]Existential Comics

One time, like fifteen years ago, the dude in front of me at McDonald’s ordered his Big Mac “medium rare”, and sometime I still think about it.[/b]

As well you should.
For me though it was fucking mustard on the hamburgers.

[b]Jobs for philosophers:

1. Teaching philosophy.
2. Working in politics.
3. Advising companies on ethics.
4. Professional party ruiner who won’t shut up about Kant when people are just trying to watch the game.[/b]

The Super Bowl no less.

People think of nihilism as believing that nothing matters, but there’s another kind of nihilism even more common: thinking that everything matters.

Equally for example.

[b]Tips for people new to cooking:

1. Use more garlic.
2. Every online recipe lies to you about how much garlic to use.
3. One clove? Are you fucking kidding me? I can’t even taste it.
4. I want my whole mouth to taste like garlic for a week.[/b]

He means onions of course.

A “free thinker” is usually, ironically, someone who thinks the ideas that they’ve thoughtlessly absorbed from their culture were generated spontaneously in their mind on account of their genius.
Serious thinking means knowing where you got your ideas from.

Go ahead, tell them you got yours from me.

I wonder if advanced aliens species have printers that work good.

Or, sure, philosophies that work at all.