a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]so sad today

i’m not dead inside but it sounds so beautiful[/b]

Now that I think about it…

i’m alive in a dead way

And getting deader all the time.

i don’t care what anyone thinks about me except i totally do

Not only that but is it really a contradiction?

oh that? it’s just my emptiness

No, that other thing beside it.

fuck the meaning of life

Right, like that will make any difference.

stop not loving me

Me? Don’t even start.

[b]Dashiell Hammett

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.[/b]

That’s why we call them contexts.

Who shot him? I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.

To be or not to be a smartass.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

Seems worth tell to who though?

You always have a very smooth explanation ready.
What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

The one and only Sam Spade meets the one and only Humphrey Bogart.

We didn’t exactly believe your story.
Then…?
We believed your two hundred dollars.
You mean… She seemed not to know what he meant.
I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth, he explained blandly, and enough more to make it all right.

The key of course is to tell it blandly.

I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

Or here [perhaps] a reasonable amount of stupidity.

[b]Masha Gessen

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed.[/b]

Okay, so what explains Trump?

Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows.

Cue the hackers. And Don of course.

They are just doing their jobs, said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.

Really, don’t be surprised if this is actually true.

There was a game called “Work.” and on of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”.

Tell that to some government workers here.

…every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime’s explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime’s ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.

And around and around they go. And not just there.

Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.

And around and around they go. And not just there.

[b]Tara Westover

First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.[/b]

Though [as often as not] not necessarily in that order.

My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

And, for some, not just as a kid.

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.

Tell them that. Or just say fuck it and move on.

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.

You know what I call it.

The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

I tried that a few times myself.

I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

A few assholes here might consider that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” Aristotle[/b]

Okay, but why do some repeatedly do things that others repeatedly insist they should not do?

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Picasso

So, is that something to be proud of? You know, whatever it’s supposed to mean.

“War remains the decisive human failure.” John Kenneth Galbraith

Tell that to the folks who own and operate the military industrial complex.

“The creature born is the creature dying.” Zhuangzi

I think that means all of us.

“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” G. W. F. Hegel

Though sometimes it’s the other way around.

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” F Scott Fitzgerald

Though not always.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.[/b]

Hoped for it long, long, long ago. Nothing yet though.

The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.

Especially able-bodied ubermen. You know the ones.

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’.

Don’t expect this to actually work.

Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

If only until death do they part.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

Tradition?

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.

Yeah, I tried that too.

[b]Pat Conroy

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.[/b]

Why, he wondered.

Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.

Fortunately, there appear to be no great writers here.

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.

They don’t call them the lords of discipline for nothing.

The human soul can always use a new tradition.

Let’s start one here.

I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win.

He must mean something else, she thought.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

That makes [at least] two of us.

[b]Nein

A gentle reminder that social media has not destroyed civilization. But I’d like to think there’s still time.[/b]

Unless of course you die first.

For best results: never remove the plastic wrap.

Better still, never take it out of the box.

A gentle reminder that it’s not your Wednesday that feels like a Monday. It’s your 2019.

Not unlike all the other years.

The good news: the year is ending. The bad news: I’m told there will be another.

With any luck though, your last.

Monday. The cruelest month.

And then every once in a while the cruelest year.

It was the casual Friday. Of our discontent.

If only 52 times a years. Or 365 if you count the other days.

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

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 flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.[/b]

The real reality? Right.

I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman’s house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.

You tell me your real color and I’ll tell you mine.

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.

Talk about an intellectual contraption!!

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.

Let’s elaborate. You know, if that’s even possible.

But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.

And not just wolves for most of us.

When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear a healthy agnostic. What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would’ve been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist.

And a hundred years later…?

[b]Werner Twertzog

The 5-second rule is not applicable to foods that are sopping wet.[/b]

Unless, of course, you are starving.

Vacations are important for relearning that you will never be happy.

That’s why I never took them.

Be the corpse at every wedding and the bride at every funeral.

Indeed, rub their faces in it.

When people show you who they really are, run like hell.

Here, of course, we just log out.

Postmodernism will be appropriated by reactionary conservatives to destabilize commonly-held notions of evidence.

When Trump is impeached for example.

Dance like you are being surreptitiously recorded, and the video will be posted to YouTube, so that you will be publicly humiliated, daily, for the rest of your life. Even your great-grandchildren will speak of you with shame.

Or, if you’re Jacob, philosophize. :wink:

[b]Zhuangzi

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?[/b]

No one like that here, right?

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Is this profound or not?

A path is made by walking on it.

Not counting where it takes you.

Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.

Tell that to Skinner’s behaviorists.

The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.

Maybe back then, right?

Happiness is the abscence of the striving for happiness.

Maybe back then, right?

[b]Bernhard Schlink

To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting on the reader, and Hanna didn’t need that and neither did I.[/b]

I’m with them here.

The value of being brave, working hard, saving money keeping order depends on what it’s for.

On the other hand, isn’t everything?

I wanted reality to drive out the clichés.

Or at last come up with new ones.

All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life’s functions are reduced to minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators , too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenary, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk.

Fortunately, I can’t even imagine it.

I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers.

And then some grow up to be Kids.
Don’t they?

When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.

If you know what he means.