a thread for mundane ironists

[b]tiny nietzsche

the best part of waking up is avoiding getting murdered[/b]

Clearly harder for some than for others.

my horoscope says abandon all hope ye who enter

Not many that isn’t applicable to. Eventually anyway.

there are two kinds of people in the world: those who kill spiders, and those that don’t

Or: there are two kinds of spiders in the world: those who kill people, and those that don’t

I dreamt I needed to get some sleep

Who doesn’t?

by age 30 you should have:
rode a horse
killed a rival in a duel
eaten ten thousand tacos
painted something you can live with
sampled many drugs
told your abyss to fuck off
given up

Seems rather arbitrary to me. But, sure, maybe not.

I was in a postmodernist coffee shop this morning surrounded by young nihilists taking a break from rejecting all religious and moral principles. a group of them next to me were whispering about how grateful they are that god is dead and life is meaningless

I’ll need the location of course.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

It’s despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It’s despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world.[/b]

It’s despair, true. But all the more [or less] in an essentially meaningless world.

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I’ve more knowledge of life than you, I’ve lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what’s trivial and what’s important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don’t want to be virtuous. My charm for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I’m not a good man. Perhaps morally I’m younger even than you are. Can you understand that?

Let’s be honest: Can anyone?

People won’t admit it, they’re too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can’t see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there’s always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness. The black and the black and the black.

Great, he thought, another matrix.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

Any fresh and green ideas here?

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

Of course today it’s millions and millions.

He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.

Here the great dead things that are collected by many here: definitions.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Here’s a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it’s going to pay off later.[/b]

And how bleak is that.

The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn’t take.

We know where this is going.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

No getting around that, right?

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

No getting around that, right?

To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment.

Of course there’s a version of that for all of us. But point taken.

You go on about reasons, Cora said. Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true.

Calling things. Just around the corner from defining things here.

[b]so sad today

sanctimonious bullshit: the musical[/b]

I hear a few folks here are in it.

I think I only like people when I’m not with them

Is there any other way?

i was okay and then i wasn’t

And not for the first time.

sometimes it’s like “how are people so content?” and then i’m like oh yeah i’m mentally ill

On the other hand, you don’t have to be.

would love to make new mistakes instead of the old ones

Like there isn’t always room for both.

by happy i mean moderately depressed

On the good days.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.[/b]

It’s not called the war economy for nothing.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.

Sure, I tried that once.

Here was one representative example of Richard Hedd’s highly esteemed Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction: The Vietnamese peasant will not object to the use of airpower, for he is apolitical, interested only in feeding himself and his family. Bombing his village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him.

Next up: the postmodern rendition.

Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same.

Needless to say, that’s only the start of it for me.

This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.

After all, how many times is this really the only option?

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him.

I know, Mr. Objectivist: You still don’t get it.

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.[/b]

Come on, what could possibly be more dangerous in politics than purity?

The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o’-the-wisp.

Believe it or not, that’s the good news.

Why did you spend your whole life working in an insurance company? You should have been a painter, a musician, well, I don’t know. Why didn’t you follow your calling?
Don Rigoberto nodded and reflected a moment before answering.
Because I was a coward, son, he finally murmured. Because I lacked faith in myself. I never believed I had the talent to be a real artist. But maybe that was an excuse for not trying. I decided not to be a creator but only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. Because I was a coward is the sad truth. So now you know. Don’t follow my example. Whatever your calling is, follow it as far as you can and don’t do what I did, don’t betray it.

Another smugly contemptuous dig at the working class, he thought. Like the world even needs artists!

A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.

Not unlike all the rest of us.

Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges’s pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.

A “statuesque quality”. Right. Like the real world isn’t everywhere here.

The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.

Boy, does that take me back.

[b]Ricky Jay

The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain’t through with us.[/b]

And there’s more of it all the time.

I love amazing people. I love dazzling them. That’s why I think performing magic is one of the greatest things a person can do.

That and posting here.

Not only do I lie, I take real pleasure in lying, in the transmission of magic effects.

Lies you can love.

It probably is harder to fool people when they know they’re going to be fooled.

Hell, here, I do it all the time.

I like being fooled. When I watch someone who does sleight-of-hand and fools me, it’s a great feeling.

It helps though to be on both sides.

The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.

Or: The pain is bad philosophers ripping off good ones, doing philosophy badly, and making a mockery of the art.
And, no, not just the Kids.

[b]Dave Eggers

When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.[/b]

Not counting complete strangers one hopes.

You’re like part human, part rainbow.

You meaning not me.

If your hand doesn’t work for it, your heart doesn’t feel sorry for it.

Need a little help with this one.

That the volume of information, of data, of judgements, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable–it was too much.

Right, like that will make it stop.

And it’s eliminated my ability to just talk to you. He was still talking. I mean, I can’t send you emails, because you immediately forward them to someone else. I can’t send you a photo, because you post it on your own profile. And meanwhile, your company is scanning all of our messages for information they can monetize. Don’t you think this is insane?

Either that or business as usual.

Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.

Is that where you’re heading more or less than that’s what you’re leaving behind?

[b]Robert Cormier

It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.[/b]

On the other hand, dying is basically a sure thing.

You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they’re safe in the bleachers. That’s why it works, Carter, because we’re all bastards.

That and bitches.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

Meanwhile, they’ve dumped you in a nursing home.

…pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.

Although you might wish you were dead.

Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes I do, I do.

My guess: The universe never feels disturbed.

Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.

That and antidisestablishmentarianism.

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

Biology enables, Culture forbids.[/b]

Though not necessarily in that order.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Imagine then what that makes the Industrial Revolution.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

Let’s put a stop to that!

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

He means corn of course. That or rice.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

Unless of course the more likely explanation is this one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Bad_ … ood_People

The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

I know: What if this is really true?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"The question is not ‘To be or not to be,’ it is what we should be until we are not. Soren Kierkegaard[/b]

Let’s run that by, among others, Albert Camus.

“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.” Soren Kierkegaard

Imagine if that was actually true.

“Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.” Aristotle

Unless, of course, you’re a slave.

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” Aristotle

We know where some folks will take that.

“You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.” Roberto Bolaño

I’ll let you know if I find it.

“If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.” Alexander Pushkin

Good luck with that, right?

[b]Russell Banks

Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.[/b]

And then one day it’s their turn with you.

I’ve got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It’s just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you’re a parasite of sorts.

Obviously: Some towns more than others.

The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It’s as if, attending to the day-long life cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly. We can stand at night on a high, cold plain and look out toward the scrabbled, snow-covered mountains in the west, the same in a suburb of Denver as outside a village in Baluchistan in Pakistan, and even though beneath our feet continent-sized chunks of earth grind inexorably against one another, go on driving one or the other continent down so as to rise up and over it, as if desiring to replace it on the map, we poke with our tongue for a piece of meat caught between two back teeth and think of sarcastic remarks we should have made to our brother-in-law at dinner.

That’s close enough, right?

Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.

You know, if you’ve got any.

It’s hard to know more about a person’s life than what that person wants you to know.

And even then you never really know what’s true.

He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.

And then explaining why the shit hit the fan.

[b]Nein

For a war to end all wars, press 1.
For a past to end all pasts, press 2.
For a present to end all presents, please stay on the line.[/b]

Indefinitely as it were.

Remember, friends: true Nihilists have nothing to be thankful for.

So don’t ask them to be.

Yes, perhaps we’d be happier if we didn’t follow the news. But it’s nice to know how it all ends.

It’s Mueller time!

Marx: the father of all dialectical materialism.
Nietzsche: the mother of all mustaches.
Freud: the mother of all fathers.

And now we’re all their progeny.

December. The seasonal affective disorders are in bloom.

Worse: Just getting started.

Live. Laugh. Hail Satan.

You know, if that’s your thing.

[b]David Sedaris

States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don’t want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.[/b]

Well, he thought, I wouldn’t go that far.

If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm.

Let’s not go there, okay?

I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I’m pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.

Besides, he could have been smoking crack cocain. Or shooting smack into his veins.

The landscape is best described as ‘pedestrian hostile.’ It’s pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.

At least that’s an option.

They were Jesuits, she told me. That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.

Any truth to this?

If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that you might go from day to day without finding shit in your hair.

Any truth to this?

[b]Elena Ferrante

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.[/b]

Unlike philosophy too.

There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.

By all means, leave.

I was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

Trust me, it’s only a matter of time.

Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.

No, but that doesn’t mean you can.

Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

Good luck with that of course.

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

Well, that makes three of us then.

[b]Werner Twertzog

I know little about Lena Dunham. But I would like to know even less.[/b]

Why her one might ask.

Dear America: I see pallets of bottled water in your future, then pallet fires, then cannibalism.

If only [so far] in the movies.

Good intentions pave the road to hell.
Bad intentions do so also.
Intend nothing.

That may well be harder than it sounds.

Big football drains university budgets and creates endless scandals, but at least it undermines the mission of higher education.

Jocks. They come right after Kids.

Avoid dating people who collect human skulls.

Any skull collectors here?

My heart disease will kill my cancer, I am told.

Thank God?

[b]Garry Kasparov

If you’re already in a fight, you want the first blow to be the last and you had better be the one to throw it.[/b]

Tell that to Vladimir Putin.

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

Tell that to Vladimir Putin. He’ll pass it on to Don Trump.

Somehow, people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.

Let alone to vote one out.

Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.

Not unlike [for many] capitalism.

Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake.

How consoling, he thought.

To become good at anything you have to know how to apply basic principles. To become great at it, you have to know when to violate those principles.

Then, to become the greatest of all, knowing how to get away with it.

[b]José Saramago

Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.[/b]

Time to get a new mirror. However futile that might be.

…human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.

We’ll need some examples of course.

Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune…

Let’s just say that here it depends on how broadly or narrowly you define them.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Perhaps not still seems more likely.

Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.

And what meaning might that be, he asked?

It just isn’t possible for you to ask me all the questions, or for me to give you all the answers.

Pertaining to, say, what’s behind the existence of existence itself?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Read Schopenhauer to understand Nietzsche.
Read Hegel to understand Schopenhauer.
Read Kant to understand Hegel.
Then read Spinoza to understand that you don’t understand anything.[/b]

Oh, and why is that?

[b]Would have taken Twitter by storm:
Pascal
Hume
Wittgenstein
Adorno
Lacan

Would do well to stick to Facebook:
Plato
Descartes
Kant
Heidegger
Derrida[/b]

Let’s entirely clear this up.

Who gave philosophy such a bad name?
Plato: Sophistry
Aristotle: Plato
Leibniz: Aristotle
Hume: Leibniz
Kant: Hume
Hegel: Kant
Schopenhauer: Hegel
Nietzsche: philosophers

Let’s entirely clear this up.

Bacon: Knowledge is power
Foucault: Power shapes interpretation
Nietzsche: Interpretation destroys knowledge
Hegel: The destruction of knowledge is knowledge
Bacon: Knowledge is power

Hey, what goes around comes around, right?

Idealism: You’ve got all the answers for all the right reasons
Realism: You’ve got all the answers for all the wrong reasons
Materialism: You don’t have any answers for all the right reasons
Existentialism: You don’t have any answers for all the wrong reasons

Thank god for nihilism, he thought.

[b]A Brief History of Philosophy

1. Know the void
2. Accept the void
3. Embrace the void
4. Fill the void
5. Null and void[/b]

Who cares, as long as there’s a void there.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Morning always comes.[/b]

Among other things, define “always”.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

Not only that but with no end in sight.

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

And for all practical purposes [in this world] they aren’t.

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

And look how useful we are here.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Though not unlike any other Scripture.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Brain cancer as it were.