a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Dave Eggers

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.[/b]

Anyone here actually seen that happen?

The truth is that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more. Or perhaps it’s that I survived to do more. I have a low opinion of this expression, "Hang in there.”

Okay, but, for all too many, that doesn’t make it go away.

Money is ephemeral, moving from person to person, it’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or soul.

You know, after you’ve paid all the bills.

But while Sasha told us that in America even the most successful men can have but one wife at once–my father had six–and talked about escalators, indoor plumbing, and the various laws of the land, he did not warn us that I would be told by American teenagers that I should go back to Africa.

And that was before Trumpworld.

The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn’t see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing and we didn’t think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.

Of course in the Milky Way galaxy alone there are 100 billion of them. On the low end. And up to 400 billion on the high end. And over a trillion in Andromeda.

When I was very young I couldn’t watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust.

How to react to that, right?

[b]Timothy Snyder

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of political parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. DO NOT FALL FOR IT.[/b]

Of course 30% of the American people already have.

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.

Not that some really fucked up things aren’t.

What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop’s proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.

On the other hand, it may well be one of many other single crucial facts.

Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which it has been.

And now it’s our turn?

Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

Or, to put it another way, “Make America Great Again”.

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.

Here for example. If only in a world of words.

[b]Existential Comics

You’ve got to hand it to capitalism, convincing everyone that “freedom” meant obeying your boss or starving was a pretty incredible achievement.[/b]

So, what have we got to hand it to socialism?

The real reason famous intellectuals never married:
Newton: was gay.
Kant: was gay.
Plato: was gay.
Spinoza: was gay.
Thoreau: uh, well it was probably because of his weird neckbeard, to be honest.

Uh, really?

Learning philosophy is cool because whenever anyone says anything you can be like “actually, you are dumb as shit, philosophically speaking.”

I know, what if that was really true.

[b]Immanuel Kant fun facts:

  1. He took his walk at the same time every day.
  2. He pretty much never left his home town.
  3. He never married.
  4. He was incredibly racist, even for the time. Like, super racist.[/b]

If not categorically and imperatively? tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. … ode=rppa20

What’s cool about subjectivity is that all of my opinions are right and all of everyone else’s are wrong.

Objectively as it were.

Libertarians will justify private property by saying something like “imagine if you planted trees to grow an orchard, you would own it right?” Then they used that to justify a society where orchard trees are planted, harvested, and sold by people who do not own the orchard.

Either that or they just shoot you for trespassing.

[b]James D. Watson

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.[/b]

So, should we start with white…or yellow?

Our goal should be to understand our differences.

If only to exacerbate them.

Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.

Any possibility this isn’t true?

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

Any possibility this isn’t true?

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

Idea for a new thread: “I never dreamed that in my lifetime…”

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

Not counting Scientology of course. Or, perhaps, counting it all the more?

[b]David Sedaris

I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he’s unable to stand. “If only I’d paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,” he says. I see Hugh, drying his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket, then crying even harder when he remembers I bought it for him.[/b]

They can just throw me in a dumpster.

Drawing attention to Gretchen’s weight was the sort of behavior my mother referred to as ‘stirring the turd,’ and I did it a lot that summer.

So, what’s the equivalent of doing that here? With the Kids I mean.

The word ‘phobic’ has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than good old-fashioned loathing.

They’d never fool me.

Everyone had taken their places, when I excused myself to visit the bathroom, and there, in the toilet, was the absolute biggest turd I have ever seen in my life - no toilet paper or anything, just this long and coiled specimen, as thick as a burrito.

Come on, was that absolutely necessary?

Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.

In other words, even if they don’t know it.

If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Not really though, right?

[b]tiny nietzsche

your pet loves you, but your pet would probably love anybody[/b]

So?

if a place only exists due to force of will, is it actually there?

Let’s go there and find out.

I love it when a plan falls apart

And not just yours.

I don’t smoke weed a lot, but when I do, it’s everyday

Sounds like a lot to me.

ladies and gentlemen, we are masturbating in space

Why don’t you google this one.

the mouth wants what the mouth wants

Not unlike the other holes.

[b]David Bowie

I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them…The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey.[/b]

Among other things, they boggle the mind.

Turn and face the strange.

If not the stranger still.

I’m a born librarian with a sex drive.

And who [beside you] wouldn’t want to be that?

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.

Or not to.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

Or sort of the truth.

For me a chameleon is something that disguises itself to look as much like its environment as possible. I always thought I did exactly the opposite of that.

Of course it helps if they let you get away with it.

[b]Elena Ferrante

When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there’s nothing that can keep us from completing it.[/b]

Does anyone here actually believe this?

When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.

Not much love here of course.

I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.

Of course after a while it all gets a little repetitive.

Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.

Even if this were true would you want it to be?

I had never seen her naked, I was embarrassed. Today I can say that it was the embarrassment of gazing with pleasure at her body, of being the not impartial witness of her sixteen-year-old’s beauty a few hours before Stefano touched her, penetrated her, disfigured her, perhaps, by making her pregnant. At the time it was just a tumultuous sensation of necessary awkwardness, a state in which you cannot avert the gaze or take away the hand without recognizing your own turmoil, without, by that retreat, declaring it, hence without coming into conflict with the undisturbed innocence of the one who is the cause of the turmoil, without expressing by that rejection the violent emotion that overwhelms you, so that it forces you to stay, to rest your gaze on the childish shoulders, on the breasts and stiffly cold nipples, on the narrow hips and the tense buttocks, on the black sex, on the long legs, on the tender knees, on the curved ankles, on the elegant feet; and to act as if it’s nothing, when instead everything is there, present, in the poor dim room, amid the worn furniture, on the uneven, water-stained floor, and your heart is agitated, your veins inflamed.

Rendered beautifully in the film?

She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.

Even publically decapitated.