a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jonas Mekas

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.[/b]

In reality [he suspected] not a single one.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.

Right, like they actually exist.

I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains.

At least he’s doing it right.

Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.

In other words, our education not theirs.

Don’t we have enough ugliness already? And don’t we know these things already? Why always fight ugliness with ugliness, stupidity with stupidity, displaying still more and more of it?

And who hasn’t thought this? Not that anyone really knows what it means.

I do not understand, I never really understood, never really lived in the so-called real world. I lived… I live in my own imaginary world, which is as real as any other world, as real as the real worlds of all the other people around me.

He learned that from me. Or might as well have.

[b]God

It’s important to remember that not every Catholic priest is a pedophile. Some of them are xenophobic racists![/b]

Small comfort?

[Money can’t buy happiness, but love can’t buy a Ferrari either.

Unless you’ve got yourself a sugar daddy.

The reason I’m not sending a giant asteroid to destroy you is it wouldn’t be fair to the asteroid.

That’s the God we know and love.

I did not want Donald Trump to be president. I can’t believe I have to say that.

Noted. But so much for omnipotence.

The last people I legitimately wanted to perform a mission for Me were named Jake and Elwood.

Going all the way back to Second City.

Fuck her, and fuck him, and fuck them all.

God has a shitty day.

[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]

Let’s just say he took this to the grave.

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

Maybe in the next life.

No matter how powerful a computer you have, if you put lousy data in you will get lousy predictions out.

Lousy data here too.

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.

Some can believe this, some cannot.

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.

Some can believe this, some cannot.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

We can just leave it at that and move on. Or take the fucking leap and be done with it.

[b]Zhuangzi

The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental hygiene.[/b]

Any babies here to confirm that?

If you have insight, you use your inner eye, your inner ear, to pierce to the heart of things, and have no need of intellectual knowledge.

How’s that working out for you?

A frog in a well cannot discuss the ocean, because he is limited by the size of his well. A summer insect cannot discuss ice, because it knows only its own season. A narrow-minded scholar cannot discuss the Tao, because he is constrained by his teachings. Now you have come out of your banks and seen the Great Ocean. You now know your own inferiority, so it is now possible to discuss great principles with you.

People not only think stuff like this up, but actually believe it.

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value.

Words about words not being worth yet more words still.

Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

Fortunately, for some, they don’t have to be.

The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.

Of course that’s still going on.

[b]Existential Comics

I’m certain that the liberals who have been completely obsessed for the last two years about Russia buying some Facebook ads will be equally passionate in calling for an investigation into the CIA to see what they’ve been up to in Venezuela.[/b]

But that’s our imperialism.

…using my knowledge of various ethical theories to get out of an ethical bind by selecting which theory the shady shit i’m doing would be totally fine in…

Nihilism is still number one, he suspected.

Does philosophy make progress? Of course! We don’t understand far more than the Greeks ever could have imagined not understanding.

And then some.

Science is important because we have to understand what the world is like. Art is important so we understand that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Not your art though.

What people don’t bring up enough about racism is just how pathetic it is. You have one life, and you spend it trying to keep people with different skin tones out of America? That’s it? That’s your dream?

Yep some will say.

Remember metaphysicians: do not admit anything into your ontological framework which does not bring you joy.

Right, in this world.

[b]Russell Baker

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.[/b]

Still, I won’t insist on yours if you won’t insist on mine.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Worse than the theory of course is the practice. At least in the corporate media complex.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

And not just electronics.

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

If only in the real world.

A solved problem creates two new problems.

Let’s test this.

I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God.

And now he can thank God in person. If you believe in that stuff.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.[/b]

Perspective. And let’s start with yours, right?

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

Unless of course you betray them first.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

And I don’t call some objectivists for nothing.

We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

He wondered: Is this even possible?

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

Starting now, let’s change that.

I am not your justification for existence.

And you sure as shit aren’t mine.

[b]The Dead Author

Procrastination is the antidepressant that gives you panic attacks.[/b]

Heads they win, tails you lose.

As C.G. Jung teaches us, the groundhog can’t see its shadow because it contains everything that it has forgotten about itself.

That and climate change.

If it doesn’t spark joy, it won’t make you unhappy later.

And what’s one without the other?

Not caring is self-care.

For example, in a cynical world.

Ghosts are only as real as your depression.

Not counting Casper of course.

Camus taught me that it’s ok to be single.

Hell, almost anyone can teach you that.

[b]Tristan Tzara

You’ll never know why you exist, but you’ll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.[/b]

For example, you have bills to pay.

In principle, I am against principles.

Let’s make sense of this.

Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.

Next up: Bada Bada Bing.

To make a poem, take one newspaper, one pair of scissors, snip the words one by one and put them in a bag. Shake gently, draw them out at random, and copy them conscientiously…

Either that or the dictionary.

Everyone dances to his own personal boomboom.

Once again, I’m the exception.

Let us try for once not to be right.

Including you, Mr. Objectivist.

[b]Andre Breton

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself. [/b]

That’s better than most, right?

Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you’re settling.

Worse: You marry them.

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

This may well be the most god-awful intellectual contraption of all.

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

Mine just keeps beating.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

And how idiotic can that be?

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.

I must have lost mine.

[b]Lenny Bruce

If you live in New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish.[/b]

Maybe back then, right?

There is only what is and that’s it. What should be is a dirty lie.

There are however other ways to point that out.

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I’m Going to be If I Grow Up”.

At least he could joke about it.

You are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don’t think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you’re not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let’s really get basic and persecute ugly people!

There’s a kernel of truth in there somewhere. Let’s find it.

People are leaving the church and going back to God.

Is this better or worse?

Communism is like one big phone company.

Of course we’ll need Phyllo to confirm this.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

I am not what you see and hear.[/b]

Let alone what he writes.

…morning is the soul’s night.

Or would be if you had one.

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.

Let’s just say it’s probably not exceptionally good.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly.

See? Haven’t I been pointing that out for months now?

Yes, I’m paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?

Apparently not.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

You can’t help but wonder what he feels now.

[b]Dave Eggers

What he had was a sense that few things mattered much. That few people are to be feared. And so he now faced all such situations with a sense of exhausted resolve, and he dealt with everything head-on.[/b]

We should all be so lucky.

The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.

Nature goes down for the count and we follow. When it’s not the other way around.

Not many songs can fend off evil. But the right song with the right voice can be a weapon; anyone who’s listened to music through headphones while riding the subway or plowing angrily through a rush-hour sidewalk knows how it can and separate you from them, allows you to say to the teeming masses that you are this and they are that.

Me, I’ve got a million of them.

Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.

Predators more often than prey of course.

What can one do with one’s hands when the camera is interested in other things?

Well, there’s that other thing, right?

His mind seemed barely tethered to his body, much less the earth.

And they were all three lost in space.

[b]so sad today

i enjoy penetration but it doesn’t make me cum: the musical![/b]

Wrong hole.

i love you but i’ve chosen masturbation

Postmodern sex as it were.

take my feelings out with the trash

Or dump them right on the landfill.

i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by not getting texted back

Guess who is tumbling in his grave.

honk if you’re sick of your own bullshit

We need an emoji for that.

it’s rare when something isn’t a piece of shit

Not unlike easy getting harder everyday.

duplicate

[b]Timothy Snyder

Be reflective if you must be armed.[/b]

If that is actually necessary.

Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same.

We meaning them in particular.

But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

Them and the objectivists. And, okay, the nihilists.

Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Yeah, maybe once, he thought.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.

And not just among the Ayn Randroids.

An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.

Let’s look for that here.

[b]James D. Watson

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles. [/b]

Either/or world, meet the neither/nor world.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

Some clearly being more complex than others.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

Tossing all the losers out on their asses.

As a young man I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

Of course that’s only anecdotal.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

Or [around here] a successful philosopher?

I’m basically a libertarian. I don’t want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it’s going to harm me. I don’t want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It’s just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society.

Two words: secondhand smoke.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.” Octavio Paz[/b]

So, sure, some conclude, let’s be done with it once and for all.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Andy Warhol

Or get others to.

“If you have selfish, ignorant citizens you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.” George Carlin

Probably true, isn’t it?

“Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.” Diogenes

Not only that but they don’t even exist.

“Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.” Voltaire

And what if it all turns out to be just human nature?

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” Voltaire

Or [sometimes] to keep them from coming after you.

[b]David Sedaris

…a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.[/b]

That or smoke.

Neither were we allowed to choose what we ate. I have a friend whose seven-year-old will only consider something if it’s white. Had I tried that, my parents would have said, “You’re on,” and served me a bowl of paste, followed by joint compound, and, maybe if I was good, some semen.

And it’s not like we get to choose them.

The nice thing about crowds is that someone can throw a bottle and you don’t take it personally.

Well, unless you catch them.

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

As it should be.

Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream.

I hear that.

I am optimistic that things will fall into place, and one day I’ll be sitting in New York City with correct bus fare in my pocket.

Go ahead, shoot for the moon.

[b]David Bowie

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.[/b]

Unless of course he’s wrong. Though how likely is that?

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.

Then gives you cancer, then kills you.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means.

Music. That’s as close as anything I have ever come up with.

I re-invented my image so many times that I’m in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.

From the fifth dimension.

Rock has always been the devil’s music… I believe that rock & roll is dangerous… I feel that we’re only heralding something even darker than ourselves.

And he may even actually believe it.

I never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you’re a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don’t see so much of that anymore.

My guess: we’ll see it even less and less.