a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Hans Arp

While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. [/b]

And look at us now.

Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.

Fortunately for them [and still for us] that can mean practically anything.

Often the hands grasp more quickly than the head.

Still, imagine one without the other.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

Sounds like “cha ching”.

The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.

Okay, but is that light enough?

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

Though it still manages to be most of us.

[b]Existential Comics

Once you read enough philosophy you start to question every ordinary thing. For example, the other day I woke up and I was feeling really energized and refreshed and I was like “this can’t be right.”[/b]

It certainly wouldn’t be with me.

Economists: “okay, first of all assume society is made up of rational actors.”
Dostoyevsky, as he drives an axe through the economist’s skull in a convoluted plan to become like Napoleon: “okay then what.”

Exactly. Then what?

Yes, billion dollar corporations own all of our media, but they are surely kept honest by their billion dollar corporate advertisers.

You gotta love democracy.

Philosophical skepticism is important to learn because then whenever you have a problem you can be like “yeah but philosophically speaking this problem probably doesn’t even exist.”

Not counting conflicting goods of course.

How to be popular in:
Elementary school: be nice to people.
Middle School: own a game console.
High school: brutally enforce a ridged social hierarchy via cruel mockery of those beneath you and deferential tribute to those above you.
College: be nice to people.

Let’s figure out why.

Imagine a society that cared as much about intellectuals as they do athletes, and every year millions tuned into the PHILOSOPHY bowl, where our greatest thinkers debated ideas.
Yeah I know…that would be boring as shit, right? Good thing it isn’t the case.

Unfortunately [as it were] he has a point.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.[/b]

Either that or off.

I feel like the word shatter.

So, what word do you feel like?

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

And that’s just in the either/or world.

If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending…
But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.

Of course that’s a story in and of itself.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

And what might they be here?

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.

Fortunately, for some, they already are.

[b]Andre Breton

I am the soul in limbo.[/b]

Aren’t they all?

The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.

Either that or putting Trump in the White House.

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

One may so speak of many things.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

That explains something I suppose.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

Everything but the only thing that really matters: demonstrating it.

At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters.

Some never understand at all of course.
He thought bitterly.

[b]tiny nietzsche

Let’s get this postmodernism[/b]

Like, if we’re lucky, once and for all.

too busy to care is the new everybody is going to die

You know, for better or for worse.

I dreamt I was the last void on earth

That is until I bumped into you.

you can live in a t-shirt for three days. that’s it. after that, everyone around you is uncomfortable with what you’ve become

Anyone here actually try that?

bert needed ernie for the rent

Oh, and one other thing.
It’s rumored.

death by radiation in space seems fair. death by radiation on earth is fucked up

Well, obviously.

[b]Lenny Bruce

There’s a lot of money in wars, except in the war on poverty. Can’t make any bread helping the poor.[/b]

You know, back when there actually was a war on poverty.

It’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.

Here we can start with dasein.

Freedom of speech is a two way street, man. You have the right to say whatever you want and the Boss has a right to tell the police to arrest you.

Is that still going on?

Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a christian.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Jesus Christ.

Every group, every system has a set of values and morals and when you get outside those, then the alarms ring. I was politically incorrect to 95% of the country; luckily my 5% had the bread to come see me.

By bread he means dough.

Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich.

That’s probably true. But only if you know what he means.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

The man who knows his limitations, has none.[/b]

If not out in the real world.

…loneliness is not a function of solitude.

Though, sure, for some, it can be.

…perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

Let’s think of examples.

I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.

Now that’s ironic.

I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?

Among other things, no.

When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.

What should it be called then?

[b]Dave Eggers

He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.[/b]

Of course we don’t exactly live in the best of all possible worlds.

Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn’t it eliminate much of Washington?

The will of the people. Now that’s a scary thought.

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

Another sad reminder of the way things are.

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.

My guess? Not all children.

And the only thing worse than the silencing of a martyr, a real martyr – someone with dangerous ideas – is silencing someone who has nothing at all to say.

We’ll need a context of course.

You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except for some numbers that won’t exist or be remembered in a week. You’re leaving no evidence that you lived. There’s no proof.

You being who exactly?

[b]Timothy Snyder

Like Hitler, the President used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking and presented journalism as a campaign against himself.[/b]

And he all but owns “fake news”.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission.

Here of course it’s 9/11.

It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east.

And now they’re in cahoots with Don Trump.

When exactly was the “again” in the president’s slogan “Make America great again”? Hint: It is the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”

Let’s deconstruct this.

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.

So, is this actually true?

We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy…We imbibed the myth of an “end of history”. In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

And so together let’s weep for the future.

[b]James D. Watson

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.[/b]

Anyone know when he predicted this?
Anyone now what it means?

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

Then one day you’re dead and gone. And, No God, forever and ever and ever.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

I hear that, he winced.

I wish there would be more movies about scientists.

Let’s run this by Hollywood.

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

And lots of folks here still are. And so, one supposes, will their children be.

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.

With the possible exception of America of course.

[b]so sad today

i was fine till you gave me hope[/b]

Me? Don’t even think about it.

i came, i saw, i hid in the bathroom

Sitting on the toilet to boot.

you need to learn how to be fake better

In this world absolutely.

i’d rather get an unsolicited dick pic than an unsolicited piece of writing

Dick pics apparently are all the rage. Unsolicited or not.

i thought you were deep but you were just hot and quiet: a love story

And not only in Hollywood these days.

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

For starters, define “best”.

[b]Francis Crick

There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.[/b]

Mystery matter on steroids as it were.

Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.

Or, if you’re like most folks, you avoid both.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

Especially yours, right, Mr Objectivist?

My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.

And then there’s Ayn Rand: “form follows function”
Of course we’ll need a context.

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

In theory as it were.

Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.

Providing of course that any of us do.

[b]David Sedaris

People in trailers were canned and labeled much like the apple juice down at the plant, stamped with ingredients for all the world to see: chicken fried steak, overcooked vegetables, no working knowledge of any major Italian movie directors–the list went on and on. [/b]

Or “trailer trash” to some.

The thing to remember is that more than anything in this world, these colored people wish they were white.

He insisted in the tanning salon.

Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shakey ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

I know what he means. But so far I’ve been lucky.

In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.

Is it even possible to explain this?

It was the artist’s duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

Same with your posts here, right?

Leeches are singing in my asshole.

That can’t be good.
If it’s actually true of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Anyone here believe that?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Werner Heisenberg

And how uncertain might that be?

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour." Euripides

And who can’t understand that?

“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” Martin Heidegger

Very existential, right?

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

Especially when those selfish, ignorant citizens are assholes.

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

Which one is this then?

[b]David Bowie

I haven’t changed my views much since I was about 12, really, I’ve just got a 12-year-old mentality.When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That’s still been a big influence.[/b]

So, is that something to boast about?

I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.

Right, like he actually believed that.

People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.

And not, for example, Marx and Engels.

I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.

Doesn’t surprise me.

I hate albums that are really happy. When I am really happy, I don’t like to hear happy albums, and when I am really sad I don’t wanna hear happy albums… and I tend to gravitate towards the lonely and isolated anyway when I write.

One more reason to like the guy.

I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

Still, better that than entrenched positive thinking. In this world anyway.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.” William Faulkner[/b]

Is this as ludicrous as, say, Satyr will insist?

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

And, perhaps, going all the way back [at least] to the Big Bang.

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

How insightful is that? No, really.

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future”. Frank Herbert

Lots of concepts do that. Right, Mr. Abstractionist?

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” Frank Herbert

Or even miles beyond it in the multiverse.

“In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death. I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.” Albert Camus

Well, not that weeping at your mother’s funeral is all just a game.

[b]Neil deGrasse Tyson from Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.[/b]

No, not even you, Mr. Objectivist.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

The last part certainly.

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Think about that though. If our opinions are less subsumed in the physical laws.

Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

Piss in other words.

Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.

Though not in English I suspect.

The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.

Mote actually doesn’t even come close to describing that relationship.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

If you stand in front of a mirror at midnight and say ‘Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft’ three times, no one will appear, but your jaw will be broken.[/b]

No one has ever said it four times.

When you look in a mirror, the only question you should ask yourself is who’s behind all this.

Starting with the Big Bang of course.

Poets have dreams. The rest of us - plans. Of becoming dreamers.

As you might well imagine, I skipped that part.

Hello future, my old friend.

One of them for example.

Love is the only language with grammar so unpredictable that any rule may suddenly become an exception and vice versa, and with just one grammatical voice — passive-aggressive.

This might actually pin it down. Either that or not.

My body is composed of 80% caffeine. The rest is tremor and insomnia.

Of course that goes without saying.

[b]Tara Westover

Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.[/b]

So, what do you think, of the nature of men too?

I had decided to study not history, but historians.

Let’s explain the difference.

Tyler stood to go. There’s a world out there, Tara, he said. And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.

And not just Dad of course.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. 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.

On the other hand, there’s always this: That maybe it shouldn’t be.

This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.

And, on some days, for me, dasein being the least of it.

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

For philosophers of course that’s just a trick of the trade.

[b]Werner Twertzog

The humblest prole in Germany lives amid culture, eats wholesome food, has free healthcare and education, and is loved by an extended family, but the American bourgeois lives amid ugliness, eats toxic garbage, is bankrupted by cancer or one child in college, and dies alone.[/b]

Of course we’re freer than they are.

I have a cat:
From time to time,
I change his name.
He does not care.
He knows that identity
Is a human construct
And is content Just being.

Unlike most dogs.

Life is a parade of absurdities and pain, and then we die, alone, in filth. So, yes, little girl, I shall buy a box of Thin Mints.

First, prove to me that this is not a true story.

Bats cannot fly through solid lead using echolocation waves, as we all know.

But that’s just on this planet.

There is a nihilism gap in America. There are entire elementary schools with little or no access to Nietzsche.

Next up: Day care centers.

America, listen to me: you are tattooed enough.

Believe it or not, not a one on me.