a thread for mundane ironists

[b]tiny nietzsche

2019: new chances to fuck everything up[/b]

And everything else too.

what’s your favourite short story about a cask of amontillado?

The one I’m writing now.

me: no
doktor: I didn’t say anything
me: you had that look

In other words, no fucking way.

schrödinger’s birdbox

An ostrich for example.

the enemy of my enemy is taking forever

And not just in Congress.

lol existence

He means Roflmao, of course.

[b]James D. Watson

Knowing “why” is more important than learning “what”.[/b]

Why what?

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

Of, for example, mere mortals.

We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.

And we know where this will take him.

Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.

Not that some of us ever will.
Right?

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

Not that existence itself isn’t spooky at times.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?

Cue [among others] the racists.

[b]Stephen Hawking from Brief Answers to the Big Questions

When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race.[/b]

I mean, come on…

The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.

Who says it has to?

I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Sure, why not?

People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

I guess that settles it then. Though, sure, maybe not.

I have spent my life travelling across the universe, inside my mind.

Not really quite the same though, is it?

When you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realise that there are lots of things you want to do before your life is over.

Wow, who would have ever thought that?!

[b]David Sedaris

Real trouble doesn’t walk around with a ponytail. It doesn’t have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.[/b]

Probably less applicable here though.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you what you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea of how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
Her maybe?

I’m not a misogynist. I’m a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally.

Don’t be fooled by this, right?

My sister’s the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline…Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it’s not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it’s certainly under investigation…

He means Eyewitless News of course.

My sister Amy lives above a deaf girl and has learned quite a bit of sign language. She taught some to me and so now I am able to say, “SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON’T THINK SO."

Let’s file this one under, “lost in translation”.

Six months earlier, my ice breaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation.

I know I’ve never tried it.

[b]Elena Ferrante

Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.[/b]

Maybe you, in particular.

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

Okay, then what?

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

What then of the posts we create here?

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

Well, in the Bible of course.

No, to produce ideas you don’t have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.

I know we do that here.

Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.

It must be the institution itself then. So, no doubt about it?

[b]so sad today

is being alive a meme?[/b]

She means more or less than a gene.

reasons i eat:
☒ boredom
☒ felt a feeling
☒ attempt to fill hole in soul
□ hunger

Or: reasons I fuck.

i don’t like anything related to reality

Well, not counting her potential for fame and fortune of course.

being my own worst enemy is going ok

Though not nearly as good as being yours.

i’m annoyed, therefore i am

Or [especially] really, really pissed off.

oh god the fucking future

And you can’t have that without the fucking past.

[b]Garry Kasparov

Good riddance, you might imagine. But the worries about operator-less elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars. In fact, I learned something surprising when I was invited to speak to the Otis Elevator Company in Connecticut in 2006. The technology for automatic elevators had existed since 1900, but people were too uncomfortable to ride in one without an operator. It took the 1945 strike and a huge industry PR push to change people’s minds.[/b]

Just in case you didn’t know that.

Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim!

We have our own rendition of that here too.

In a 1959 speech in Indianapolis, John F. Kennedy famously observed that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. It turns out that this is not literally true.

As a matter of fact, he insisted, it is.

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

Of course that may well be what your opponent is thinking too. So defending yourself works too.

Grandmasters play chess by combining experience with intuition, backed up with calculation and study. Computers play chess by brute calculation; their “study” consists of a gigantic database of opening moves.

Still, you either win or lose. That or [with chess] no one does.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.” If we err and must begin again, we must.

You know, if, in some cases, they let you.

[b]David Bowie

Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.[/b]

Let’s confirm it.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

That might explain none of his lyrics.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

Though we can only try to imagine what he is hearing now.

One day I realized that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can’t even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life. That’s when you can begin really looking for a relationship. When you can appreciate the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking.

Naturally this can mean practically anything.

You can neither win nor lose if you don’t run the race.

Unless of course you bet on it.

If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.

I don’t think anyone will doubt that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.” Benjamin Franklin[/b]

I know: Let’s not go there.

“…the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.” Eckhart Tolle

And how far can that really be from delusions.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Chinese Proverb

Is this as deep as some imagine it to be?

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut

That line does get tricky at times.

“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” William of Ockham.

Let alone divided.

“Language is wine upon the lips.” Virginia Woolf.

Or here [sometimes]: Wine going in, vomitus coming out.

[b]José Saramago

…we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people…[/b]

Me? Quite often to other people.

Without a future, the present serves no purpose, it’s as if it did not exist. Perhaps humanity will manage to live without eyes, but then it will cease to be humanity, the result is obvious, which of us think of ourselves as being as human as we believes ourselves to be before, I, for example, killed a man.

So, does this make sense to you?

What torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.

I think that once described me, he thought.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand…

Time and, with any luck, luck.

I still have the strength to carry the bread I eat, What always weighs more is the bread of the others.

You know, of that even matters to you.

Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil. Less is said about the evil that can come out of good.

Of course sometimes we get them mixed up.

[b]Masha Gessen

A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen.[/b]

Don’t worry, they’ll get it right next time.

‘Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,’ Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin.

Sort of as it were.

But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs.

Just one more rendition of the ruling class.

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent. At least, that was what Freud might say. At least Arutyunyan had read him. Future generations of Russians might not be so lucky—if there were any future generations of Russians, that was. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

At least until Vladimir Putin drains the swamp.

Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively…

Still, remember when we [not to mention they] belived in it?

…adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions’ general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children’s forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words.

Suffer the little children…over and over and over and over and over again.
What say you, God?

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

But Anatole said suddenly, Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I’m warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.
What are you telling me?
I am telling you what I’m telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky. [/b]

What actually is beyond God’s dominion?

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

Has there ever been even one exception?

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.

And then, after dinner, pick up the tab.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Like there aren’t times we have no choice.

…you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece…

She means lots and lots of them of course.

One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Point taken though.

[b]Pat Conroy

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.[/b]

Imagine then the plight of philosophers.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

With the possible exceptions of all the ones that are.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

That’s still around.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’

Doesn’t surprise me.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

And then one day as an old man, he lives with the terrible knowledge that he will die.

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

For some that can be practically anywhere.

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

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.[/b]

Memetically more than genetically of course.

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

Should we go there or not?

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

Is this a compliment more or less than a slight?

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

Or, for some, if they set their sights low.

You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.

In other words, if it deserves to be acknowledged at all.

…if you knew the mess my life was in…the waste of it…the uselessness of it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything.

Some figure that out while others just stumble into it.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Dear Apple – your cookie-cutter minimalist stores are already fodder for satire.[/b]

Do they deserve it?

Money and power do not bring happiness. Nothing brings happiness.

Unless you count Don Trump getting impeached, indicted and then thrown in jail.

This suicidal ideation is making me thirsty.

Coke or Pepsi?

No, John Denver, West Virginia is nowhere near heaven. If you doubt me, I shall show you the graves of countless child-miners.

A blast from the past. You know, for cynics.

It is important for the Democrats to run candidates for president to passive-aggressively prove a point, as we all know.

Trust me: You don’t want to hear the point.

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to political power.

And it’s not just a postmodern thing.

[b]Bernhard Schlink

Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him - do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there’s an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anesthesiologist - do you talk to the anesthesiologist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn’t admit to being left handed - do you tell the judge what’s going on? Imagine he’s gay, and could not have committed the crime because he’s gay, but is ashamed of being gay. It isn’t a question of whether the defendant should be ashamed of being left-handed or gay — just imagine that he is.[/b]

Imagine instead that you are.

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile.

If only from the cradle to the grave.

When she had fallen asleep on me, and the saw in the yard was quiet, and a blackbird was singing as the colors of things in the kitchen dimmed until nothing remained of them but lighter and darker shades of gray, I was completely happy.

Gray works for me too.

The truth of what one says lies in what one does.

And ain’t that a bitch, he thought.

…why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?

Just accept it and move on.

It is hard for me to imagine that I felt good about behaving like that. I also remember that the smallest gesture of affection would bring a lump to my throat, whether it was directed at me or at someone else. Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.

And yet genetically there it is.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died.[/b]

So, just how important is this?

Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.

One of those claims you are not quite sure is bullshit.

Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made.

From one or another manifesto. A world of words. Hot or cold.

While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.

Clearly not always.

Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks.

And those that feed them.

The more logical conclusion was that the General had bolstered the Vietnamese tendency for conspiracy with the American trait of paranoia, admittedly with my help.

Off the charts as it were.

[b]Werner Twertzog

In the political culture of the United States, “grossly unqualified for the job” is a job qualification, as we all know.[/b]

Let’s think of an example.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I come for you, in the night, when you least expect me.

It’s about time that was updated.

All of your plans are ruined. And then you die. Also, no one cares.

On the other hand, who asked him?

The earth will be swallowed by the nuclear fires of the sun. Later, the universe will fade into cold, infinite blackness. It is Saturday.

My guess: It could actually be any day.

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

You be Putin and I’ll be Trump.

The heart wants what it wants. And sometimes that is total world domination.

Up to and including genocide. If only historically.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.[/b]

You know, if He exists.

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really.

Bingo: 09/11.
Then: What would you do?

I am not what you see and hear.

Especially now of course.

…morning is the soul’s night.

What does that tell you? Providing it’s true of course.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing comes to mind.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

Actually, of any generation, right?

[b]God

Being gay is not a choice but being an asshole is.[/b]

Unless there’s an asshole gene.
But He’d know that, right?

[b]THE FIVE STAGES OF GLOBAL WARMING

  1. Denial
  2. Guilt
  3. Depression
  4. Acceptance
  5. Drowning[/b]

Another ark?

It’s humiliating to know you’re the best I could do.

And of course the other way around.

If ignorance is bliss, why is everyone so unhappy?

Now that’s a good point!

I am shutting down the universe until you pay to build a wall around it.

Unless of course Mexico volunteers.

Seriously though, we kid around a lot here on Twitter, but impeach the motherfucker.

Next up: Facebook.