a thread for mundane ironists

[b]William F. Buckley

Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.[/b]

Unlike conservatives who insist that only their own point of view even counts.

Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.

Right, like conservatives don’t harrangue us with their own dogmas.

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

Not unlike, for example, liberalism.

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing.

Anone here care to bring this down to earth?

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth.

Anone here care to bring this down to earth?

Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace.

Now, doesn’t this speak volumes regarding just how idiotic the man could be? Or would someone here like to defend that point of view?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Are your children texting about philosophy?
LMAO = Leibniz misread Aristotelian ontology
IMHO = Idealism makes Heidegger ornery
FWIW = Foucauldians won’t instrumentalize Wittgenstein
ROTFL = Rationalists obviously truly fear Lucretius[/b]

How idiotic or clever is this?

Classical aesthetics: Truth is beauty
Romantic aesthetics: Beauty is truth
Modernist aesthetics: What are you looking at?

Postmodern aesthetics: Who the fuck cares?

Hegel: I can only go on not being what I am not going to not have been
Kierkegaard: I can only go on sacrificing what I am in order to become what I will never have been
Sartre: I can only go out for so many coffees

Well, at least Jean Paul is down to earth.

French philosophy: Mind or body?
German philosophy: Will or whim?
British philosophy: Causal or casual?
American philosophy: Coke or Pepsi?

It’s still Coke, right?

When the apocalypse comes
Schopenhauer: you’ll wish it had arrived much earlier
Camus: you’ll realize it’s been here all along
Kafka: it’ll turn out to have been one day too late

On the other hand, what if it doesn’t come at all?

philosophy student: I thought we’d learn about truth!
art student: I thought we’d learn about beauty!
law student: I thought we’d learn about justice!
economics student: You want the truth? Beauty and justice won’t make you rich!

Let alone get you elected president.

[b]David Sedaris

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.[/b]

There’s really only one off switch of course. Unless you count all the others.

In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.

Priorities in other words.

In Japanese and Italian, the response to “How are you?” is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.”

Let’s confirm this.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

Really, what if that explains it?

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing…I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

Like we can actually live without them now.

I’d always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call “understanding” is basically just fantasizing.

If not actual insanity.

[b]Existential Comics

Person who gets all the credit:
Movies: director.
Plays: writer.
Musical: composer.
Musician: performer.

Person who gets no credit:
Movies: writer.
Plays: director.
Musical: director.
Musician: composer.[/b]

Let’s explain why that’s true.

Computers are cool and all, but I still feel like the microwave is the most futuristic thing we’ve made. You put your food in, and magic invisible lasers just make it hot in like 10 seconds. WTF?

Is it even possible to doubt this?

What did I learn from philosophy?
From Aristotle: how to be virtuous.
From Epictetus: how to deal with loss.
From Descartes: how to be skeptical. From Sartre: how to be free.
From Russell: how to ground math in logic so you can be sure 2+2=4, only for a paradox to destroy it all.

That’s still four things more than I learned.

Moral relativism is bad because it gives us no ground to say that Tom Brady sucks and the Patriots should lose every game forever from now on.

My guess: That’s literally the least of it.

Should we all own guns in case the government gets too tyrannical? Maybe.
Should we all own guillotines in case the private sector gets too tyrannical? Absolutely.

He really, really hates capitalism.

The reason ghosts are so scary is because it means that we might have to live forever.

True, he thought, but I’ll roll the dice.

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.[/b]

Lots of poets think that. And that’s before they get to the even more barbarous main event.

Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!

Not the real Satan of course.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,
Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

Let’s help each other to actually find it.

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

I’ll bet for some of you it has.

What an old maid I’m getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!

It sort of just creeps up on you.

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all of you.

Imagine him saying that today.

[b]Barbara W. Tuchman

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.[/b]

And now the election of Don Trump.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

Or me, myself and I as we call it today.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Today, at the very least, we can triple it.

…the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.

She means firstly music of course. You know, if we lived in a perfect world.

No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

Here we call them Kids.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five to tenfold.

Of course that was before the advent of fake news. At Fox, the multiples are now off the chart. And, okay, maybe at MSNBC too.

[b]tiny nietzsche

if you don’t wake up tomorrow, there’s always the day after[/b]

Maybe for example.

don’t hate yourself, hate what you’ve become

Unless of course you’ve become yourself.

in space, there is no five second rule

On the other hand, isn’t Earth in space?

I’m at the point in the movie where I wonder what the fuck I’m doing with my life

My guess: Somewhere between the opening and the closing credits.

the sun will come out when it’s ready, it doesn’t care what time you think it is

Twice a year around here.

drugs mean never having to say you’re dying

Obviously: define “never”.

[b]José Saramago

…just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.[/b]

True, but don’t expect it to always be a good one.

…that is what we say when we do not wish to play the weakling, we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one’s courage in both hands…

Of course it won’t fool all of the people all of the time.

…there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

Yeah, it can get that bad.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

And who the hell really knows why that’s true.

We’ve all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we’ll be sure to have some tomorrow.

Does it work that way for strength? Maybe more, maybe less?

We all know that each day that dawns is the first for some and will be the last for others, and that for most people it will be just another day.

Let’s think about that some more.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.[/b]

Right, in this world.

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

Of course there’s still the part where we don’t know that.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Just don’t expect that to always be enough. If it ever is.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true, but you haven’t told anyone yet.

If there’s anyone you actually want to tell.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

So, all you Americans, don’t forget to vote!

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

In fact, not even a relative sometimes.

[b]so sad today

i’m not bad at masturbating[/b]

He thought, prove it!

hi, i’m an existential hole

Great, he winced, another hole.

i don’t need to sleep forever just for 1000 years

Forever [eventually] is much more likely. If you call that sleep.

help me not be myself

Okay, but it will cost you.

i only give 5 fucks but they’re all very obsessive

What, he wondered, does it actually mean to give a fuck? Obsessively or not.

i’m probably going to end up just being nothing

At all as likely as not.

[b]Lidia Yuknavitch

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.[/b]

Most times though it finds you again.

That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.

Don’t count Jesus out though. He’s not still on top for nothing.

Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations.

In either direction though you can go too far.

I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.

I’m not a woman who does much the same.

I don’t have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images.

Not counting all the times we don’t know why we do it.

He treated my scarred as shit past and body as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.

But only if you let him.

[b]Lillian Hellman

A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.[/b]

Instead, we elect him president.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

If you can count that high.

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

We’ll have to hear it first.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

Providing of course they have one.

The world is out of shape when there are hungry men.

Then there’s this part: worldhunger.org/world-child-hunger-facts/

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

I’d certainly like to believe that mine is.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened”. Michel de Montaigne[/b]

Or, sure, most of which did.

“Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.” Seneca the Younger

They certainly do here.

“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.” Richard M. Rorty

Right, like we were never indoctrinated as kids.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

Well, if in fact we actually do.

“Character is simply habit long continued.” Plato

Not including all serious philosophers of course.

“No human thing is of serious importance.” Plato

For very long anyway.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

It is me. I am his madness. For years he’s been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.[/b]

And then, after adding you to his collection, he killed you.

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

And then, even worse, some days I do.

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

Let’s just say that, as with most things she attempted to impart, it was over his head.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts.

Clearly with some godawful exceptions.

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It’s like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

What in your life would you compare to Hiroshima?

The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

And then one day one of them kidnaps and kills you.

[b]Colson Whitehead

One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.[/b]

Next up: The whores of Mensa.

On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.

For some of us, darker than ever.

The Four Questions? As put forth by Mettleheim:
How did this happen?
How could this happen?
Is it exceptional?
How will it be avoided in the future?

Or [of course] how can we make it happen more often.

I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.

Next up: Learning to play poker.

She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.

Worshipping No God for example.

All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

And half of us actually aren’t.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it’s beginning to look a lot like fuck you[/b]

If only 365 days a year.

if you’re not sure who you are anymore, take a number. twelve is available

Actually, twelve is long gone.

if you don’t want to wake up tomorrow, don’t go to sleep

That’ll do it.

one day I’m going to find me a grave and settle down

That’ll do it.

rosemary’s large adult son

That would be Ronan Farrow.

what if it was postmodernism the whole time?

And what if it doesn’t even matter?

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Quoting Nguyen Du - "Talent and destiny are apt to feud.” [/b]

After all, what does it mean to call something that is destined, talent?

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise.

And how might that be?

Let’s just hope history forgets the snafus.

Obvioulsy: Not the ones today.

Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.

Unless, of course we are the fools.

Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other.

Let’s call it something else though.

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.

Let’s name the ones here.

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

It’s easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand. When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It’s not easy to be moved by abstract things.[/b]

Twelve more today.

I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings.

True, but that doesn’t make men any less from Mars and Women any less from Venus.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

Or, for some of us, non-fictions.

The essential difference between the culture of the past and the entertainment of today is that the products of the former sought to transcend mere present time, to endure, to stay alive for future generations, while the products of the latter are made to be consumed instantly and disappear, like cake or popcorn.

Depending on the products of course.

They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime.

Sounds like human nature to me.

Nostalgia is cowardice.

Well, I guess that settles that.

[b]Dave Eggers

It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear.[/b]

That and knowing.

I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.

Of course no one is always able to.

What is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?

Or of necessity.

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?

Here for example.
Or here in particular.

It occurred to her, in a moment of sudden clarity, that what had always caused her anxiety, or stress, or worry, was not any one force, nothing independent and external. it wasn’t danger to herself or the constant calamity of other people and their problems. It was internal: it was subjective: it was not knowing.

On the contrary, he thought, it is that too.

So I should be aware of the dangers of self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured.

Or, as I often insist, mocked.

[b]Werner Twertzog

You have little to fear if I follow you. But you do not have nothing to fear.[/b]

My advice: Get the restraining order.

It is important to live alone, and go to therapy, until you recover your authentic self, which, as we all know, does not exist.

Obviously, this might take a while.

There is so much horror in the world, sometimes I feel like I cannot take it. And then I remember the inevitability of death, and, even more, the annihilation of all matter.

Of course this won’t work for everyone.

Almost none of you will trend when you die.

Almost none was will trend before either.

Everyone in your graduation class photograph will be dead.

In fact, I might be the last one.

The United States has become Rwanda with nuclear weapons.

Let’s decide how troubling this is.