a thread for mundane ironists

[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?

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.[/b]

On the other hand, there’s how the objectivists study history. If you know what I mean.

…in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

I know: It better be yours.

Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable.

At least try to grasp the implications of this.

History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.

At least try to grasp the implications of this.

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.

On the other hand, he figured, if we didn’t eat them there’d be a hell of a lot less of them around.

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.

And then the part where it changes for all of eternity.

[b]tiny nietzsche

sometimes I can’t tell if I’ve done enough things or I should be doing more things[/b]

Time to flip the coin.

I’m here for nothing

Unless of course that’s something.

wicked beasts:
goats
crocodile
nic cage

And not just Ben Sanderson.

high on postmodernism

In other words not high at all.

tomorrow is take your sword to work day

Remember when that was actually true?

millennials are okay, i guess. I mean besides being hopelessly fucked

Let’s explain this.

[b]Russell Banks

Biology doesn’t matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn’t matter, they said, because God’s time is different and superior to man’s anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you’ve been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places.[/b]

Believe it!!

From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.

Though sometimes it’s a distinction without a whole lot of difference.

John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him.

One more rendition of half a loaf?

Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other concern and perplexity made them curious about him – for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.

It’s just more extreme around me.

One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

Been there, done that. Twice so far.

Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

Anger bgeing right around the corner from vengeance.

[b]David Sedaris

They’re hungry for something they know nothing about, but we, we know all too well that the price of fame is the loss of privacy.[/b]

Well, like you, I wouldn’t know about that.

I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings.

At least until Trump drains the swamp.

Three days after that, the funeral was held, and while riding from the church to the cemetery Ava looked out the widow and noticed that everyone she passed was crying.
Old people, college students, even the colored men at the gas station-- the soul brothers, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.
It was such an outdated term, I just had to use it myself.
How did the soul brothers know your father?
That’s just it, she said. No one told us until after the burial that Kennedy had been shot. It happened when we were in the church, so that’s what everyone was so upset about. The president, not my father.

That could actually be a true story.

I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in “How tall was” and I saw “How tall was Jesus,” and I’m like, “Sure,” and half an hour later you’re somewhere you didn’t expect to be. It doesn’t work that same way in books, does it? Even if you have an encyclopedia, the trail isn’t that crazy. I like that aspect of it.

Okay, but how tall was Jesus?

Use the word ‘ya’ll’ and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack french-kissing an underage goat.

And we know where they use that, don’t we?

It means ‘female dog,’ I’d explained to my sisters, but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself’.

Did the bitches buy it?

[b]so sad today

she died as she lived: feeling like she was about to die[/b]

I’m right behind her.

find what you love and let it ignore you

This is either not as easy or as hard as it sounds.

it’s not my fault i was born: the musical

Or, for others, the situation comedy.

just checking to see if everything is still fucking stupid and it is

She should just put that on automatic pilot.

search history:
how to love yourself
how to kinda like yourself
how to not totally hate yourself
how to begrudgingly keep existing

Or you can keep searching.

why does anyone do anything

More astonishing still: over and over and over again.

[b]Elena Ferrante

I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.[/b]

Given that, any mature folks here?

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

Or close enough?

People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.

Of course with the next election that will all change.

Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.

I’ll take my chances, he thought.

If you don’t try, nothing ever changes.

Which for some is ever as it should be.

…starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

Let’s exchange points.

[b]Garry Kasparov

I have written about what I call “the gravity of past success” in chess. Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Meanwhile, the loser knows that he made a mistake, that something went wrong, and he will work hard to improve for next time. The happy winner often assumes he won simply because he is great. Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake. It takes tremendous discipline to overcome this tendency and to learn lessons from a victory.[/b]

Or, if you’re lucky, the victories are few and far between.

Big branches in the decision tree require extra caution. These are the forks in the road that leave us with no way back.

My guess: the chessboard being the least of it.

Sometimes the best defence is the best defence.

My guess: the chessboard being the least of it.

I used to attack because it was the only thing I knew. Now I attack because I know it works.

My guess: the chessboard being the least of it.

One comforting thing about the Trump White House is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence.

The perfect observation!

The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s.

Can Don trump him?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Next up: Eternal recurrence.

“The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.” Rene Descartes

Especially their prejudices.

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Albert Camus

Or: “In the depths of summer, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible winter.”

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” Albert Camus

Or: “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be authentic.”

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

No, sometimes it really is what you look at.

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” Euripides

And, here, not just the Kids.