a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Dashiell Hammett

I haven’t laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.[/b]

Actually he fed him to them.

The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they’re easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You’d think they’d be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.

Not only that but no one knows why.

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.

And isn’t that pretty much what I do here, Mr. Objectivist?

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.

Yeah, but he’s Sam Spade.

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

Or, here: The dumber the philosopher…

I couldn’t be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There’s only one Maltese Falcon.

And, after all, it is a material world.

[b]so sad today

sexually transmitted anxiety[/b]

I’ll take my chances, he thought.

take my feelings out with the trash

You know, along with the thoughts.

can’t tell if people know they are full of shit or have no clue

Like [for all practical purposes] it makes any difference.

we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head

Better mine than yours.

why does everyone have to make everything so stupid

My guess: they’re stupid.

wish i could retire from thinking about big beautiful dicks

Let’s help her.

[b]Tara Westover

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.[/b]

And how many can say that?

There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them.

Would that this might happen to me.

To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.

Right, like this makes my points go away.

Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

Of course that’s perfectly normal. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

Then you go on to discern other things.

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.

Could anything be more absurd? But point taken.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.[/b]

Okay, but who can actually afford to believe it?

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Is this an actual thing?

…the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.

Well, it is after all the new religion.

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

In fact, in the world today, figure out both.

Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

Let’s keep it that way.

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

Sure, but look at all the fantastic things that we’ve gained. Let’s list them.

[b]Pat Conroy

Time moves funny and it’s hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.[/b]

Time: Don’t forget to seize it.

. . . I have come to revere words like “democracy” and “freedom,” the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America’s flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. . . . I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong.

Among other things, he thought, fuck that.

…I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

And then the equivalent of that when we post them here.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

In other words, you can forget arithmetic here.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

The whole fucking South for that matter.

My mother’s voice and my father’s fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.

One way or another we’ve all got a slice of that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith”. William Faulkner[/b]

My guess: More or less blind.

“Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” William Faulkner

How can this not be ironic? Or perfectly natural.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” Plato

Tell them that.

“It is fatuous to apologise for the bad behaviour of our ancestors. In fact, it is impossible.” Mary Warnock

That never stops most of us though.

“Philosophy seems to stop being interesting just when it starts being professional.” Mary Warnock

Analytically as it were.

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. David Hume

Three words: Context. Context. Context.

[b]Zhuangzi

To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders.[/b]

Let’s prove this.

To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.

How profound is this? No, really.

During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.

Imagine the implications of this if it’s actually true.

The sound of water says what I think.

On the other hand, is it a trickle or a torrent?

I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.

What we call the “American Dream” here.

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening.

My guess: Whatever that means.

[b]Werner Twertzog

No one even bothered to shoot Lawrence Welk.[/b]

That’s actually true.

You are not good enough. You are not smart enough. No one likes you. But you will endure nonetheless. Why? Because I will it.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Klaus Kinski.

Better to be a dissatisfied director than a pig bloated on swill, soon to be eaten.

And he means it.

Count yourself lucky if you merely die penniless and insane.

Let’s decide if that makes sense.

You have little to fear if I follow you. But you do not have nothing to fear.

And, if he’s lying, you’d better run for your life.

Remove all the motivational, wood signs in your house if you want me to take you seriously.

Are those a real thing?

[b]Russell Baker

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong. [/b]

Not unlike an uneducated person.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

Of course we know better, don’t we? Or certainly some of us.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

On our smart phones no less.

The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it.

Consider it not done.

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Fortunately, my daughter didn’t even come close. And turned out fine.

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.

What’s the equivalent of that here?

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.[/b]

You know, if that’s actually an option.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

24/7 sometimes.

Better never means better for everyone…It always means worse, for some.

Some of them in particular.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

That’s how it works alright.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

That’s probably applicable to people too.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

That can get tricky of course.

[b]God

This year I’m going to be more of the kind of God that you deserve. Yes, that’s a threat.[/b]

That OT Dude.

Retweet this and you’ll go to heaven. Yes, the standards are now that low.

It’s a trick, I’ll bet.

This is the alternate universe.

Great, the alternate God.

HOW I MADE IT VS. HOW YOU SEE IT
Animals: Meat
Birds: Poultry
Fish: Sushi
Vegetables: Potato Chips
Fruit: Fanta Blue Raspberry Slurpee
Trees (living): Lumber
Trees (dead): Coal
Gold: Happiness
Land: Property
Ocean: Dumpster

Of course we were made in His image.

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be all alone?
With your cover blown?
Your collusion shown?
A complete self-own?
Like a Roger Stone.

Anyone here know Don Trump’s nickname for God?

Why don’t poor people just have more money?

So much for being omniscient.

[b]Bernhard Schlink

She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling.[/b]

More or less, she’s me.

Did my moral upbringing somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing—then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn’t stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.

On the other hand, there’s the moral majority.

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks-understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

Would that life wasn’t always confronting us with things like this.

Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

At least before she hung herself.

It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.

Like the dead give a shit.

In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement.

Actually, not even here.

[b]Lenny Bruce

If you can’t say “Fuck” you can’t say, "Fuck the government.” [/b]

Let alone “fuck censorship”.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

One of those things that, sure, might be true.

The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.

What a bummer, he thought.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it…try to fake three laughs in an hour – ha ha ha ha ha – they’ll take you away, man. You can’t.

What’s funny about that?

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Wasn’t that Lester’s point?

Liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

Same with conservatives, only double it.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Plato: Know the form of X
Aristotle: Analyze X
Spinoza: Intuit why God loves X
Leibniz: Learn how God integrates X
Nietzsche: Y?[/b]

Nietzsche, right?

Parmenides: Being
Heraclitus: Becoming
Plato: Being or Becoming
Aristotle: Being and Becoming
Spinoza: Being is becoming
Hegel: Being is becoming nothing
Nietzsche: Nothing is quite so unbecoming as philosophers’ thoughts on being

Nietzsche, right?

Civilization is a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness, Charlie Brown.

As for Lucy, fuck her.

Philosophy has no solution for
Rousseau: tyranny
Kant: the finitude of knowledge
Nietzsche: our devotion to guilt
Camus: high cigarette taxes

With Jan, you’d think all Camus ever did was smoke.

Read Hegel to laugh, Kierkegaard to cry, and Nietzsche when you’re not sure you want to be able to tell the difference between laughing and crying.

Instead, let’s pin down why you read me.

Philosophy 101: Everything you believe is false
Philosophy 201: Everything you believe is true and false
Philosophy 301: Truth and falsity don’t believe in anything, especially you

Philosophy 401: And then you die.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.[/b]

Any secrets here?

I don’t want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

Me, I’m still working on it.

…life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.

Let’s just say that some go here more often than others.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This can be tricky.

In the Oval Office for example.

The man who knows his limitations, has none.

How dumb is that, he thought.

That 99 of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100 of the things they spend 99 of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99 of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the ever living shit out of itself.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] this is only 99 percent true.

[b]Dave Eggers

It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.[/b]

But not you, right? And definitely not me.

The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.

On the other hand, his junk did.

If a boy became sick he walked alone; the others were afraid to catch what he had, and did not want to know him too well for he would surely die soon. We did not want his voice in our heads.

Over there and back then from our point of view.

None of this I’d mine. My father is not mine- not in that way. His death and what he’s done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing not my town nor its tragedies. How can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous. I was born into a town and a family and the town and my family happened to me. I own none of it.

See how far that gets you.

Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table - Nicaragua!

Tell that to the CIA.

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.

And around and around we go.

[b]Klaus Kinski

The ultimate acting is to destroy yourself.[/b]

Let’s run this by Herzog.

Where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent.

Let’s run this by Herzog.

What do you think, that a dollar in a savings account is freedom? Maybe you have understood nothing I have said.

How about a million of them?

Whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can’t explain this.

Not to worry, it can’t be understood.

Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets.

And lots and lots and lots of other things too.

You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

Here we need a context. Not that we’re likely to ever get many.

[b]Timothy Snyder

The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that ‘only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate’.[/b]

Run that by the young today. And not just over there.

Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.

Unless of course you’re convinced that it is.

Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.

Any of you Americans here?

If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, wrote Havel, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.

Let’s run that by Roger Stone.

When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading.

Welcome to the media industrial complex.

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.

Welcome to the media industrial complex.

[b]James D. Watson

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.[/b]

Has any philosopher ever felt that?

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

For example, why something and not nothing?
No thrilling answers yet.

I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn’t have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don’t bother.

Let’s pin down the point here.

A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

His very own rendition of “one of them”.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

Even worse: the right-wing nuts.
If I do say so myself.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

Let’s guess who.

[b]so sad today

we could wait for death together[/b]

She means godot of course.

for fun i like to break my own heart

For fun I like to watch her.

i’m aware of what i’m doing but not enough to stop

Why? Just lucky I guess.

you can’t make someone love you but you can pretend they do

You know, if that’s your thing.

it’s my body and i’ll shame it if i want to

Apologies to Lesley Gore.

fuck yeah i apologize for existing

Like we ever asked to be born.