a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]José Saramago

It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again.[/b]

Actually, it is not well known enough.

There is nothing as sad, nothing as unutterably sad, as an old man crying.

And not a soul around who is bothered.

In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all.

Let’s make it one anyway, they said.

The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality. Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.

More of one then of the other. Then more of the other than of the one.

… time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.

Not a mistake so much as a delusion.

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.

Anyone here ever had one?

[b]Valeria Luiselli

Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you’ll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery.[/b]

This can’t possibly be true of course. But point taken.

The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.

Either that or the least important.

However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it.

We’re not going to take that, right?

He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, “I think I’ve become a terrible person. In fact, I’ve become a reptile. Do you know that reptiles are stupid because almost their entire brain capacity is used to feel fear?"

Of course that’s probably all genetic.

In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe.

What would you pay for it? Or: What would you pay for her sacred pubic hair?

I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself.

And how idiotic is that!

[b]Masha Gessen

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.[/b]

Of course it’s always their own damn fault.

The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.

And not just from Dannemora.

In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history – political history and art history – is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites – in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad – and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.

Think Stalin and Hitler and [now] Putin.
And, sure, someday, maybe Trump.

Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art – something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts – a great work of art is always a miracle.

No miracles here, are there?

The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.

Of course that can never happen here.
You know, if it hasn’t already started.

At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning.

One possible explanation: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

[b]God

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing with your life.[/b]

Really? I hadn’t noticed.

Don’t say “2019 can’t come fast enough”. I know what’s coming in 2019 and believe Me, 2018 can’t leave slow enough.

Either the Second Coming or the Fourth Reich.

My deepest hope is that one day there will be a world without war or hunger or injustice or human beings.

Doesn’t He call the shots here?

Sometimes I watch you in the shower.

God the pervert.

I admire the state of Alabama’s single-minded determination to be great at college football and bad at everything else in the world.

Make sure Mr. Reasonable sees this one. :laughing:

I make this resolution every new year and then don’t follow through but I SWEAR 2019 will be the year I kill you all.

Let’s come back to this a year from now.

:laughing:

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right. Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.
I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, No, it’s not like that. It’s not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.
In balance.
Really, it’s like the spirits have made a deal with us.
And what is the deal? I asked.
We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.
Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?
Exactly like that. Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.[/b]

Religion and the pragmatist? Or does it actually go deeper than that?

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

We’ll need a context of course.

This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

And autonomy enters into it not at all.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

Depending of course on where [and when] history touches you.

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

People think shit like this all the time. So there might actually be something to it.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

And then on top of that to judge you.

[b]Pat Conroy

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.[/b]

Let’s pin down the equivalent in the North.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

I’m with her actually.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

That’s once more than men like me.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

How absurd is this?

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

Unless of course it’s the other way around. However entirely unlikely.

I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

We know that all the ones here are.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Time is
Philosophy: an ideal construct
Economics: a real construct
Psychology: a material construct
Existentialism: a drag[/b]

Obviously: None of the above.

On Christmas we remember that
Marx: capitalism is a religion
Schopenhauer: God is gift wrapping
Nietzsche: gift wrapping is dead

Well, maybe next Christmas.

All I want for Christmas is
Leibniz: a perfectly rational language
Hegel: a perfectly determinate negation
Marx: a perfectly dynamic model of labor
Nietzsche: a perfectly good excuse to ignore all you clowns

Well, maybe next Christmas.

Idealism: I’ve understood your arguments and refuted them
Empiricism: I’ve understood your arguments and ignored them
Existentialism: I’ve completely misunderstood your arguments but have decided to steal them anyway

Which one is most likely to be the least misunderstood?

Email from a student who failed to turn in the final paper: “I got embroiled in a two-day debate on Reddit and had nothing left to give.”

So, is this even possible?

Psychology: Blame your parents
Political Economy: Blame your boss
Sociology: Blame your community
Philosophy: I’m logically, ontologically, epistemologically, ethically, and aesthetically innocent!

Clearly: We’ll need a fucking context!

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

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.[/b]

And that makes all the difference in the world sometimes.

His statement to himself should have been ‘I possess this now,therefore I am happy’ , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.

And that makes all the difference in the world sometimes.

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors’ isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

Maybe. Though just as readily maybe not.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

Lots and lots of pots like that for lots and lots of other things.

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.

On the other hand, what does that explain?

That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery.

Is that really worse than the opposite?

[b]Existential Comics

The worst crime for:
Utilitarianism: causing suffering.
Existentialism: going along with the herd.
Stoicism: being affected by what you can’t control.
Capitalism: trying to do things that benefit society instead of maximizing shareholder profit.[/b]

Let’s decide: Which is the best of all possible worlds?

Epictetus: “Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
Carnap: “Yeah but how do I verify that empirically?”
Epictetus: “God damn it, shut up, nerd.”

You know, hypothetically.

My New Year’s resolution is to not start a podcast. Wish me luck.

No, seriously, what on earth does this mean?

Okay, but have we completely ruled out the idea that postmodernism was created by Russian bots in order to undermine Western values??

Of course nothing really can be ruled out.

…we’ve been doing philosophy for like three thousand years, and not only have we not discovered the truth, but we still can’t even agree on what “truth” means.

No, but I’ll bet many here can define it.

Philosophically speaking, everyone’s tweets are bad. The only ethical thing to do is for us all to delete our accounts and never speak of this again.

Let’s apply that to here. You first.

[b]Bernhard Schlink

Or is there no such thing as ‘too late’? Is there only ‘late’ and is ‘late’ always better than ‘never’? I don’t know.[/b]

Actually, no one does.

People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy.

A hell of a lot easier.

We make our own truths and lies…truths are often lies and lies truths.

At least when it’s not the other way around.

She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn’t do.

For example, read and write.

I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.

Let’s just say that, eventually, we come to find out why.

What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?

And then of course there is each new generation of Nazis.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. [/b]

One pain in particular.

I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.

Of course how likely is that?

Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent.

Not counting immortality and salvation of course.

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both.

Well, maybe for a day or two.

We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

Or, eventually [for some], wanting to die.

Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.

Does anything make less sense than this?

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I…[/b]

I know: How ironic is this?!

… That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Yet, he meant.

Mediocrity is contextual.

Here for example.

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

As opposed to what…a white miracle?

…most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

Actually, when you think about it, it’s quite the opposite.

Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

Well, why not?

[b]Dave Eggers

You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?[/b]

It rhymes with dasein.

The author would also like to acknowledge makers of comic book villains and superheroes, those who invented, or at least popularized, the notion of the normal, mild-mannered person transformed into a mutant by freak accident.

Of course we know that’s not real.

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

Trust me: Washington has its own version of this.

Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.

Then keep your hand in your pocket.

That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.

The dumbing down further of what was already dumb to begin with.

Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.

Still, that’s closer than most of us have come.

[b]The Dead Author

Read less, but more.[/b]

You know, more or less.
But point taken.
More or less.

Is there hope?
Schopenhauer: No.
Nietzsche: No.
Cioran: No.
Camus: No.
Spengler: No.
Adorno: No.
Kafka: Yes, but not for us.

Update: Not for them either.

Thinking of Santa Claus and all other seasonal migrant workers.

Of course Santa Claus is white. At least aound here.

Just because God is dead doesn’t mean he wasn’t born.

Doesn’t mean he was either.

'Twas the night before Metamorphosis…

That and the Trial.

China landing on the dark side of the moon to own Pink Floyd’s tired liberal critique of authoritarianism.

That can’t be good. And not just for Pink Floyd.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. [/b]

Between the commercials of course.

Listen for dangerous words.

Dangerous to us in particular.

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.

He means you, Mr. Objectivist.

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.

Though not just our side.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

In other words, my fellow Americans, just look around you.

What is truth? Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.

Yeah, I once believed this was true too.

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

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

Hmm, why does that sound familiar?

Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

Hmm, why does that sound familiar?

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.

Talk about a commodity fetish.

Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.

Depending of course on who’s on top.

In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.

But not us, right?

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

This and the death of God.