a thread for mundane ironists

[b]David Sedaris

That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.[/b]

True, but I threw mine into a dumpster. Though once I almost regreeted it.

Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, I’m going to ask you to come with me.

That’s when some will blow him away.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

Nope, never met a Communist like that. And I was once one of them.

Don’t tell me I don’t know how to hate, I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself, Do you really want that to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, asshole? I was fucking hating people before you were even born!

Or you can just become a misanthropist and hate them all.

Because that’s really something I can’t stand — when people refer to themselves as crazy. The truly crazy are labeled so on the grounds that they see nothing wrong with their behavior. They forge ahead, lighting fires in public buildings and defecating in frying pans without the slightest notion that they are out of step with the rest of society. That, to me, is crazy.

So, does he have a point?

Motherfucker, you haven’t got the fucking balls God gave a goddamned church mouse. You crawled out of your mama’s tattered old pussy, grabbed hold of her milk stained titties, and you ain’t never looked back, motherfucker.

You know who this reminds us of.
Still, let’s confirm it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is to tell the truth.” Howard Zinn[/b]

Hmm. Wouldn’t that then make Don Trump both the mother and the father of all reactionaries?

“Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” Howard Zinn

Among other things, sieg heil.

“The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Metaphorically as it were.

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

I know: Fuck them!

“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

Or: “You have your will to power, I have my will to power. As for the right will to power, the correct will to power, and the only will to power, it does not exist.”

“We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.” Rene Descartes

And that rhymes with dasein.
Sort of

[b]Elena Ferrante

If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.[/b]

Need some help?

May I point out something? You always use true and truthfully, when you speak and when you write. Or you say: unexpectedly. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than I that it’s all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don’t do anything truthfully anymore, Lenù. And I’ve learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen unexpectedly.

Or, he supposed, something like that.

Thus she returned to the theme of ‘before,’ but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation … And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.

Or, he supposed, something like that.
Before, during and after.

To write, you have to want something to survive you.

So, is that what we’re doing here?

There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.

Of course sometimes they leave you no choice.

How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.

And how absurd is that?

[b]Garry Kasparov

If you program a machine, you know what it’s capable of. If the machine is programming itself, who knows what it might do?[/b]

More to the point, does it know?

The phrase “it’s better to be lucky than good” must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.

Lucky for him, right?

This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.

He’s talking about Don Trump’s BFF of course.

The reality is that most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. If you know, you must act, so it is better not to know.

Didn’t Marx mention that?

Putin’s Russia is clearly the biggest and most dangerous threat facing the world today, but it is not the only one. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are (despite the latter’s name) stateless and without the vast resources and weapons of mass destruction Putin has at his fingertips.

Imagine them hooking up. And then with Trump.

Dictatorships must be feared to survive so they cannot bear to be mocked.

Cue the narcissists.

[b]tiny nietzsche

alone in the white house as christmas approaches, trump is visited by the ghost of richard nixon[/b]

Look for it on SNL.

we can be endless, just for one day

Does this sound logical to you?

It’s a Dildo, Charlie Brown

Hmm, I must have missed that one.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: i don’t exist
cop: you do now, pal. get out of the car

Now that’s down to earth.

my ptsd has ptsd

And it caught it from yours.

sesame street has introduced a nihilist puppet. it is made out of plastic and is in jail

How the hell does that follow?!

[b]Jose Saramago

News of the miracle had reached the doge’s palace, but in a somewhat garbled form. the result of the successive transmissions of facts, true or assumed, real or purely imaginary, based on everything from partial, more or less eyewitness accounts to reports from those who simply liked the sound of their own voice, for, as we know all too well, no one telling a story can resist adding a period, and sometimes even a comma.[/b]

Well, it was a miracle, right?

thoven was ugly too, and no woman ever loved him, and he was Beethoven! He didn’t need to be loved in order to do what he did. He just needed to love and he did.

of this actually true?

are so afraid of the idea of having to die, said the doctor’s wife, that we always try to find excuses, for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.

whats the idea of having to die next to your actual death?

trary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.

I know: Why is it always so goddamn complicated?!

This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames.

So, parenthetically, are plants less alive than we are?

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

Unless of course we are animals.

[b]Valeria Luiselli

Although it might seem paradoxical, growing up in a family of liberal-minded atheists, committed but never militant, tends to have devastating consequences. Being raised without a rigid backdrop of religious, political, or spiritual beliefs makes it hard to have a real crises later in life. There is no way forward if your point of departure is the comfortable passivity of someone who has been a self-professed agnostic since the age of twelve, without ever having considered those important - one might say grave - matters, such as God, death, love, failure, or fear. For a precocious agnostic, the virtues offered by skepticism become terrifying hands that strangle and suffocate the already rare capacity of an individual to question things. Conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believe is open to doubt - stark, brutal doubt - can truly enjoy a profound crises that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better.[/b]

Let’s decide: Which is worse?

Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sanchez.

Anyone recall how Sanchez responded?

There’s nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects.

metonymy: a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated
So, what do you think?

But rereading is not like remembering. It’s more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of reinventing our past through the twice-underscored words written by others.

If she says so.

But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces—it’s also the first draft of a future face… In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future reading.

With my face, I skipped all that.

Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut.

Let’s file this one under, “strange peace is better than none…most times”.

[b]so sad today

full of emptiness but it’s fine[/b]

If only until it’s not.

autocorrect “weekend” to “sitting alone in the dark”

Mind if I join you?

i taught myself at a young age that it was safer not to express any needs so i don’t open up to people and then secretly feel abandoned: the musical!

What, another one?!

when people say “how are you?” i never really know

Not to worry: They never really care.

it’s hard for me to reach out and tell people what i’m going through because then i have to talk to them

No, this is a real thing.

i only know how to express vulnerability with the whole internet

Or at least that teeny, tiny percentage of the whole internet that knows we exists.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.[/b]

So, is this clever or not?

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

Remember when that used to be ironic?

It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

They don’t call it the subconscious for nothing.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

Or awfully hard not to impeach.

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.

Fortunately even this is essentially meaningless.

No matter what kind of night you’re having, morning always wins.

Not that the night always loses.

[b]Pat Conroy

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.[/b]

On the other hand, that may be the least of what it is.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

On the other hand, that may be the least of what it is.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Though every once in a while it’s gain.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

For example, the syntax part.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

Nature’s way as it were.
Less all the exceptions of course.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

Did my own even notice?

[b]Nein

I fought the demise of the rule of law. And the demise of the rule of law won.[/b]

On the other hand, as some point out, it’s Mueller time.

A gentle reminder from Potemkin: It takes a village. And/or a battleship.

More than just a facade at any rate.

Remember, friends: if it isn’t worth deleting, it probably wasn’t worth writing.

Of course here that’s not really an option.

It’s starting to signify a lot like nothing.

I’d settle for a lot less something.

The shortest days. The darkest nights. The most wonderful time of the year.

And then a week from now it starts up all over again.

Freud. Come for the footnotes. Stay for the analysis.

That and [for some] the penis envy.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

Just because you can’t express your feelings it doesn’t mean they’re not deep.[/b]

As often as not, quite the opposite.

I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn’t mind at all. It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.

Though he’d swear it was love.

I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he doesn’t exist, really.

Sure, why not, right?

Why should people have money if they don’t know how to use it?

On the other hand, he pointed out, you need it just to subsist from day to day.

He has that selfishness – it’s not even an honest selfishness, because he puts the blame on life and then enjoys being selfish with a free conscience.

So, is your own selfishness honest?

We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

Among other things, he groused, fuck that.

[b]John Fowles from The French Lieutenant’s Woman

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.[/b]

Yep, there the ones I’m familiar with.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

Imagine then the reactions of others.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

Let’s pin down why that makes absolutely no sense.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it…fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

Let’s just say that some are considerably more adept at this than others.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.

And then to market it of course.

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

What’s the equivalent for women, he wondered? A bank account?

[b]Werner Twertzog

So, Frankenstein’s creature and Santa Claus meet in the arctic wastes, and each persuades the other to consider, alternately, existentialism and humanism, until the snow covers them both and the planet dies.[/b]

In post production hopefully.

Mr. Scrooge, choose any path you please; all of them lead to death. If you are not mocked or reviled, even your kindest deeds will be forgotten, as we all know.

He means as we all know now.

Most income for the top 1% is unearned, thus affirming the Protestant Work Ethic.

If only “in their heads”.

It is important for underpaid and disgruntled restaurant workers to read signs about washing their hands.

That and not spitting in the food.

Seinfeld: So, Krampus, what’s the deal with the claws and the fangs?
Krampus: [Silent]
Seinfeld: I mean, you are ugly enough already to scare children.
Krampus: [Severs Seinfeld’s jugular and gorges on his jetting blood, with a sly hint of jollity.]
Seinfeld: [Bloody and dead]

In a parallel universe perhaps.

With great power comes great need to conceal your revenue streams.

At least until the Democrats get hold of your tax returns.

[b]Bernhard Schlink

…So I stopped talking about it. There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.[/b]

Of course it goes without saying: for better or for worse.

Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.

The belly of the beast and then some.

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

Of course bearing it is hardly ever the point.

What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?

My guess: Yes.

What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

True, if you don’t count the real world.

…I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her.

But he had known nothing of what she had done. At least in the movie.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?[/b]

Because they can?

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.

He thought, We don’t call it the Third World for nothing.

Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle.

I hear that squared cubed.

I need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too.

On the other hand, none of us were ever in God’s league.

Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves.

With absolutely no exceptions of course.

To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.

So, get plenty of practice.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

…logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.[/b]

Though sometimes [in the either/or world] you’ll find it’s better than nothing.

…almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

Psst. Don’t take this too far.

And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: ‘Look at that fucker Dance’.

Al wrote a song about him: youtu.be/d99VYhXBt44

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.

So, Mr. Objectivist, how am I doing here?

I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I’m not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like “I’m shit and the world’d be better off without poor me” type that says that but also imagines what everybody’ll say at their funeral. I’ve met types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It’s all self-pity bullshit. It’s bullshit. I didn’t have any special grudges. I didn’t fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves. I didn’t want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don’t hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn’t want to play anymore is all. I wanted to just stop being conscious. I’m a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.

We know where this took him.

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between.

Unless of course [like me] you find something.

[b]Dave Eggers

There has not been a beautiful death in the history of mankind.[/b]

You know, so far.

There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana.

Faith and flood insurance.

Existing, period – that is what drives men to irrational acts.

It’s certainly an important start.

The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.

Not that it doesn’t happen all the time.

I often cannot believe the things I do.

And then I force myself to.

Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading.

Starting now, okay?

[b]Existential Comics

The bizarre reality of the human condition is that almost everyone is more bothered by being turned down for a date than the realization that life is meaningless.[/b]

Anyone here realize that life is meaningless? Or am I still the only one?

We need to do something about postmodernism being taught in our schools, corrupting our young people! Did your know that 1 in 3 students who encounter postmodern philosophy go on to write a terrible 600 page avant-garde novel with interweaving narratives and no real plot?

Well, it’s not like anyone can force you to read them.
Yet.

It’s important to learn your logical fallacies so you can give the same shallow argument in a more annoying fashion.

Of course that’s just another one.

Liberals think Russia flipped the election by buying $100k in Facebook ads, but the fact that Wall Street gives millions to their favorite candidate is just a normal functioning democracy.

Either that or [still] the best of all possible worlds.

Existentialism: life is despair.
Absurdism: despair is meaningless.
Pessimism: they’re is no way out of despair.
Nihilism: it doesn’t even matter that we despair.
Capitalism: can u sell despair? asking for a friend.

No wonder the capitalists won.

Ayn Rand read Nietzsche and thought to herself, “by Übermensch he must mean someone who owns property and becomes fantastically rich off the labor of their workers”.

Let’s try to imagine Nietzsche reading Ayn Rand.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “somewhere between ‘well said’ and ‘blah, blah, blah’”

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.

After you’re chosen sides of course.

Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.

In other words, not counting conflicting goods. Where both sides have access to facts.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

If only this were actually relevant to what did in fact happen.

The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

Anyone care to bring this down to earth?

Like Hitler, the president used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking, and presented journalism as a campaign against himself. The president was on friendlier terms with the internet, his source for erroneous information that he passed on to millions of people.

What president might that be?