a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Hannah Arendt

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. [/b]

That and the military industrial complex. Or, rather, the military industrial complex and that.

The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.

Not all that different from how it works for any number of folks in Israel. Only the condemnation there is aimed in another direction.

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Of course we will really never know, will we?

What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s existence on the normal strata of society.

In other words, one way or another, we’re stuck with it.

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.

It sounds better though when we call it “manifest destiny”. And considerably more noble.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

Or is this still being too optimistic?

[b]José Saramago

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.[/b]

Probably true…but only more or less than it’s probably not.

There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.

Anyone here ever had one?

Don’t you know, If you don’t step outside yourself, you’ll never discover who you are.

Oh for christ sakes, he thought.

It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that 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.

Sounds like a plan, he thought.

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.

Loosely speaking that may or may not be true.

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.

Let’s tie this somehow to Brett Kavanaugh.

[b]so sad today

ever just look at a dude and know his name is “Brett”.[/b]

Starting now, okay?

i think i’ll spend the day imagining the worst

Not unlike all the others.

obsessing over a problem that doesn’t exist

Thus making it considerably worse.

making the same mistakes and expecting different results and lovin it

This can take years to perfect.

imagining a world without frat boys

Better still: A world without jocks.
And Kids of course.

sorry to hear about your positive attitude

But keep it away from me.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance. There’s no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes.[/b]

Let alone objectively.

Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now.

Right, like a stark naked unadorned human body is ugly.

What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it’s only a building. It’s not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.
Isn’t it?

We’ll have to see the building first, of course.

Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.

No getting around the beauty of that.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

In other words, not see in precisely the same way that she does.

It’s such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don’t even know that you’re being subtle and vicious.

More to the point [sometimes]: don’t even care.

[b]Herta Müller

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.[/b]

You know, like I’m doing here.

Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.

Hard to believe, but people think like this in much the same manner that you and I think like we do.

When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

More or less, he thought.

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

In my case though, for good reason.

Everyday brought me further away from other people. I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

Going on decades now, he beamed.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

Let’s make list of those assholes here.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Custom is the great guide to human life.” David Hume[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “ouch”.

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” Niccolò Machiavelli

Trust me here: Including yourself.

“Always assume incompetence before looking for conspiracy.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Not counting the dumb bastards who combine them both.

“How perilous it is to free a people who prefer slavery.” Niccolo Machiavelli

More or less than the other way around?

“A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Not to mention the ignorance of others.

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Don Trump!!!

[b]Lillian Hellman

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell. [/b]

Been there, done that.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented’, changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

And then it’s pentimento all the way down.

You don’t always know how to do things when they’re happening.

Of course that’s basically the rule here.

It doesn’t pay well to fight for what we believe in.

And that’s before we get to what it cost.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

Just ask Bob Mueller.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

Next thing you know it’s a whole philosophy.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand.[/b]

No getting around the slippery slope [or tangled web] that is freedom.

It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

So, in that sense it could have been the hardest bed.

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.

I must fit in there somewhere, he thought.

…and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.

Me, I’m a train station man myself.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

You know, if that actually turned out to be a good thing.

She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

And that’s before the calamity of climate change.

[b]Werner Twertzog

If I block you, you cease to exist. As we all know.[/b]

Or, here, if I “foe” you.

Yuppies were important for showing that Baby Boomers were, in the end, indifferent to the pain of others, unless it made them look hot.

Something to tuck away for your very own “dangling conversation”.

When you look in a mirror, the only question you should ask yourself is who’s behind all this.

You know, in case it isn’t God.

My followers are a mix of Hollywood types, academics, tattoo artists, comedians, sex workers, and religious professionals. Just like Jesus’s.

Let’s try to imagine Jesus on Twitter: WWJT.

I don’t know, define “suicidal.”

Or: I don’t know, define “murder.”

God to Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth.”
Job to God: “I do not know God, where were you when I was being tortured by Satan?”

Anyone here know?

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.[/b]

Let’s start doing that here, okay?

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man’s mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness…

Holes [and tunnels] coming and going.

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

Let’s figure out who runs things here. Then, sure, change it.

If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

Nope, nothing yet.
Right?

Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.

And I doubt that changes just because you’re gay.

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.

Them as often as not.

[b]Neil Gaiman

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.[/b]

Any kind people make it here? Or are we all still monsters?

They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn’t it?

Maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.

Either that or just make something up.

The universe knows someone is missing, and slowly it attempts to replace him.

Okay, but what about her?

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Anything from God on the World Series yet?

It’s easier to believe in aliens than in gods.

And easier for the aliens to believe in us.

[b]so sad today

what the fuck is everything[/b]

First off, why do you want to know?

in theory i’m totally over you

In theory I don’t agree.

just forgot that life is pain and then remembered again

And, no, not just in theory one suspects.

take a lot of naps and ignore a lot of people

Repeat as necessary.

i’m always late for everything because i don’t want to be anywhere

My advice: shoot for not showing up at all.

gonna stop worrying about shit beyond my control just kidding

Besides, if you’re doing it right, it can’t be done.

[b]Dave Eggers

When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.[/b]

He thought [repeatedly]: Don’t get me started!

We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? Young people are creating ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive.

Fortunately [for us] there’s not much clarity here.

Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.

Any dorks here, Kids?

Thank you, he says.
Thank who?
I don’t know. You?
No, not me. Jesus.
Thank you, Jesus?
Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.

But only after He invented the credit card.
You know, if that’s actually true.

I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.

You’d think it might be the other way around.

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

Once that was 15 minutes, but now most will settle for the blink of an eye.

[b]Philip Larkin

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.[/b]

Let’s explain how we write philosophy. And then see what happens.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

Really, how can nothing happen anywhere? Let alone reconfigure into something everywhere.

Sex means nothing–just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

Unless of course you count reproduction.

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

You wonder: What was nature thinking?

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

You wonder: What was nature thinking?

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

Next thing you know, we’re huffing and puffing.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” Jorge Luis Borges[/b]

Wow, who would have ever thunk that?

“To what purpose should I trouble myself about the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?” Anaximenes of Miletus.

I know: What would Carl Sagan say?

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates

He means huffing and puffing of course.
Right, Kids?

“Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.” Socrates

Let’s say that’s what my walls here are for.

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” Karl Popper

Ultimately evolving and/or devolving into one or another TOE.

“Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.” Søren Kierkegaard

And this may well be true objectively.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.[/b]

At least there is an end, he thought.

Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.

And then the part where we’re six feet under it.

You live most intensely in human contact—and that’s what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will generally paw it with dirty hands.

I know the bungling fools here do. If not literally.

He felt again irresistibly drawn to her. He felt there was a secret bond, a secret thread between him and her, something very exclusive, which shut out everybody else and made him and her possess each other in secret.

Anyone here actually ever come close?

If it be not true to me,
What care I how true it be.
Though it be not true to thee,
It’s gay and gospel truth to me.

No getting around that, right?

Bolshevism, it seems to me, said Charlie, is just a superlative hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is, isn’t quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them.

Maybe this is close enough, maybe it’s not.

[b]William F. Buckley, Jr.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples’ money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples’ freedom and security.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “true by definition.” His for example.

I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.

He noted to the man in the mirror while shaving.

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.

And not just at The National Review.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

Starting with the folks on Wall Street.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.

Just look at the bailout of the banking industry.

I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.

And he’s closer to the truth here than we are. Well, assuming of course there is a God that did in fact turn out to be his God.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Kant: Don’t lie.
Hegel: Don’t steal.
Schopenhauer: Don’t underestimate the power of despair.
Nietzsche: Don’t make me laugh.[/b]

Too close to call?

At the pinnacle of wisdom you become
325 BCE: a philosopher king
1781: a tutor to the rich
1910: a Cambridge don
2018: an insufferable promoter of your Twitter feed

Though nowhere near as insufferable as some of us here are.

[b]Why should I study philosophy?

  1. To avoid law school
  2. To avoid med school
  3. To avoid business school
  4. Pirated PDFs of Spinoza and Hume abound on the interwebs[/b]

Or, sure, for the sheer joy of it.

Science: This
History: This then that
Literature: This means that
Philosophy: This therefore that
Economics: I’ll give you this for that
Politics: I’ll keep this and take that

Though not necessarily in that order.

Schopenhauer: We’re doomed
Beckett: We’re hopelessly doomed
Kafka: We’re doomed beyond hope and doom
Camus: Your collective optimism is nauseating

Of course Camus was a fucking genius.

Living “off the grid” means
2010: the wifi is weak in your closet
2014: you once went outside without your cellphone
2016: you took off your Apple Watch during surgery
2018: your hair dryer isn’t Alexa-enabled

Anyone here [besides me] even more off the grid than that?

[b]David Sedaris

It is funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.[/b]

Either that or buck naked with an erection.

What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.

Or, if it’s a woman, a bush.

There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus “Leave me the fuck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.”

Don’t you just hate that?

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

Anyone here like this?

The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention.

Of course for you it might be others.

A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.

Different folks, different strokes, right?

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.[/b]

And then eventually you go nowhere fast.
If you’re lucky.

[b]My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.[/b]

Let’s decide what was most insane about it.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

I can do that now before breakfast.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I reviled her.

Of course we’ll need to hear her side.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

I wonder how that turned out, he thought.

Eternity is the sun
mixed
with the sea

Including death of course.