a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.[/b]

Sounds like it might be true.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

This time really think about that.

It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Though it is almost always going to be a little [or a lot] of both.

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

And not just the Christians.

People ask without wanting to know.

Starting now, let’s be honest about that.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

And that includes ourselves as well. And, for some, especially ourselves.

[b]Charles Krauthammer

Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.[/b]

Of course now they’re in the White House.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

And we all know what can be rationalized from this frame of mind.

Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon—my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

The angry white man rant.

Religion—invaluable in America’s founding, forming and flowering—deserves a place in the schools. Indeed, it had that place for almost 200 years. A healthy country would teach its children evolution—and the Ten Commandments.

Right, and not necessarily in that order.

‘Know thyself’ is a highly overrated piece of wisdom. As for knowing the self of others, forget it. Know what they do and judge them by their works.

Well put. If only for all practical purposes.

History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with the linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it ‘racist’.

So, is this racist?

[b]God

It’s not that people use only 10% of their brains, it’s that only 10% of people use their brains.[/b]

He means us, right?

I created mankind to spend half its time praising Me and the other half killing each other over who praised Me better.

Okay, but on purpose?

It’s rare to see a national emergency declared by a national emergency.

I wonder if He means Trump?

Everything happens for a reason you make up afterwards.

If you think up one at all.

Overwhelming evidence suggests many people choose to ignore overwhelming evidence.

Of, for example, collusion.

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin, who would have been 210 today.
210, and extremely disappointed.

Let’s list all the reasons.

[b]Edward P. Jones

We are all worthy of one another.[/b]

That and unworthy.

A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.

Up on the pedestal she goes. But, sure, point taken.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

I’ll leave if you will.

He went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier, but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so ‘you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin’ and whatnot.

And this ain’t no small thing either.

He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven’s back door.

Or for people so stupid they’d believe something like this.

The wonderful thing about writers like James Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

That ever actually happen to you?

[b]Hans Arp

Zurich in 1915. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times. [/b]

Clearly, no one has ever found that.

All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure.

Just short of complete chaos if we’re lucky.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

Sounds about right to me.

Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster mankind’s ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

Sounds about right to me.

Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.

Paint by numbers in particular. That and tracing.

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

What exactly is a perfectly cut paper?

[b]Existential Comics

It is very easy to hate everything, and very hard to understand anything.[/b]

And how problematic is that?

[b]All great literature belongs to one of four types:

1. Stories of tragic love.
2. Criticisms of society.
3. Examinations of the human condition.
4. Heavy handed metaphors about nineteenth century whaling expeditions.[/b]

Not sure about the first three, right?

A rigged election is one where the Russians buy influence.
A free election is one where multi billion dollar international corporations buy influence.

Of course he’s a Commie, isn’t he?

Probably the weirdest thing about capitalism is how a tiny cabal of billionaires own our sports. Sports fandoms are an integral part of the culture of cities, and one dude can just be like "sorry lol I can make 12% more money if I move to LA.

Here it was Robert Irsay. And in the middle of the fucking night.

I’m declaring a State of Emergency: no one understands Hegel.

Not counting those who think they do.

[b]How to make a romantic meal this Valentine’s Day:

1. Make a normal meal.
2. Go to Google translate and translate all the components into French when you describe it.
3. Serve with wine.[/b]

Maybe next year…

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion…Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.[/b]

Of course mine now comes and goes.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.

And now you know this.

You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.

Sometimes anyway.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Of course that in and of itself is beside the point.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.

They say that can never happen here.

They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.

Undone. Now that’s a tricky word.

[b]Andre Breton

Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.[/b]

I’ll buy yours if you’ll buy mine.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

Not counting what we buy and sell from our dreams.

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

Or, for some, more desire.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.

On the other hand, how far into the future?

Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.

Or here [sometimes] fucking.

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

Still, let’s not dismiss the part about reality altogether.

[b]The Dead Author

Drafts, the dick pics of literature.[/b]

What am I missing here?

Depression is just your body’s way of telling you to give up.

The brain in particular.

Send nudes but never your unfinished writing project.

Has it come to this for you?

Me:
Kafka: The meaning of life is that it ends.

We’re all “Me” here.

Valentine’s Day is like reading Sartre: unnecessary because most people already know that they will die alone.

Just in case though, buy the flowers and the chocolates.

Capitalism alienates you all year, and on Valentine’s Day makes you feel guilty for it.

When is Valentines day this year?

[b]Lenny Bruce

You know there’s no crooked politicians. There’s never a lie because there is never any truth. [/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trump!

You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person - you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it.

Moms and dads? Brothers and sisters? Pets?

Koolaid is goyish. All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish, and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes - goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish - very Jewish cake. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won’t go near them.

What’s that make philosophy then?

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Or, these days, William Barr.

Alright, let’s admit it, we Jews killed Christ – but it was only for three days.

We can run this by Jesus when he returns.

Never trust a preacher with more than two suits.

And that now includes pant suits.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.[/b]

No, really.

It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

Well, after all, he is Hamlet.

I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Though more easily crushed.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

Here? Let’s make it the Kids.

…his own father told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Anyone talented here?

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

And then one day it all becomes too much.

[b]Daniel J. Levitin

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.[/b]

Plus they could dance to it.

As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.

Imagine then the man with 5 or more.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

He means on this planet of course.

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects.

Proving yet again that’s it’s always never nothing.

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn’t have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

A distant cousin to the tree falling in the forest.

…people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

Totally agree. At least I think I do.

[b]Timothy Snyder

We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.[/b]

Of course here democracy in the modern world is all about the survival of the middle class.

The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.

Not counting the parts that actually are inevitable.

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

I know that I wouldn’t. Well, hypothetically.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

Let’s pin down why they didn’t.

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning.

That’s how it works all right. Some might even call it logical.

The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps.

Of course here you “prove” only what you already believe. Not unlike all objectivists.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it’s friday. fuck the abyss[/b]

Right, like no one falls into it on Fridays.

you can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep

Not only this but you cannot die if you were never born.
Go ahead, try to.

I’ve ruined me for anyone else

Just as I intended.

you, an art critic: michelangelo’s david is sublime genius
me, an art lover: this dude’s junk is hanging out

On the other hand, as Loudon Wainwright pointed out, “Michelangelo gave him such a tiny pee-pee.”

roses are dead
nothing to do
alone on the beach
with albert camus

As Captured in song: youtu.be/SdbLqOXmJ04

my nihilism is flaring up

Like a hemorrhoid in my brain.

[b]Francis Crick

Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It’s the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra.[/b]

All autonomically perhaps.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

All the while concluding, “It’s alive!”

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Including Heaven and Hell?

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

How else are they going to become consenting adults?

A busy life is a wasted life.

Like, for example, busy doing the thing that we do here?

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Unless of course he’s a Scientologist.

[b]David Sedaris

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.[/b]

Unless of course the rest of us figure that out.

Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat.

And not just in Mississippi.

…never fall asleep in a dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating.

Never get old? Good luck with that.

Me: Did you get your tree yet?
Ken: I’m a Jew, I don’t decorate Christmas trees.
Me: So you’re going to go with a wreath instead?
Ken: I just told you, I’m a Jew.
Me: Oh, I get it. You’re looking for a cheap wreath.
Ken: I’m not looking for a wreath at all. Leave me alone, will you.
Me: You’re probably just tense because you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping.
Ken: I don’t Christmas shop.
Me: What are you telling me? That you make all of your presents.
Ken: I don’t give Christmas presents period. Goddamit, I told you, I’m a Jew.
Me: Well, don’t you at least need to buy something for your parents?
Ken: They’re Jews, too, idiot. That’s what makes me one. It’s hereditary. Do you understand?
Me: Sure.
Ken: Say the words “I understand.”
Me: I understand. So where are you going to hang your stocking?

Same with Barbie.

If you see devils, they lock you up, but in America, if you see angels, they put you on morning TV.

If not the late night shows.

We’d all turn our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.

Nope, never had access to that. Comfortably or otherwise.

[b]David Bowie

It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I’ve never bought into - with any artist. It’s just not a real thing.[/b]

How about philosophical integrity?
Not here of course.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

For me it was the Rolling Stones.

I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human.

My guess: that’s not even possible.

I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

That’s me here, right? No, I admit it.

I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.

I hear that. Not counting Emmylou Harris of course.

I’m really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine.

Let’s just say I’ve never not been there myself.

[b]so sad today

just checking to make sure you’re still not in love with me[/b]

Actually, I might be.

due to personal reasons i will be ignoring you

Fortunately, that can be anything.

i hate everything in a nice way

I tried that once. But now things are back to normal.

fuck everything kind of

Also, everyone sort of.

horoscope: just don’t do anything

And that’s not always easy to accomplish.

studies confirm i’m my own worst enemy

Still, other studies confirm that you are.

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

An artist coworker of mine once asked whether alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans. The absence of any other plausible answer forced me to say yes.[/b]

Let’s hope that never becomes a problem.

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

Not that we ever really had a choice of course.
Whatever that means.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

Let’s thank the Lord for that.

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.

How about our brains then? And that part we call “mind”.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Right, like someone actually counted them.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super intelligent alien species? These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

For some philosophically fun, for others philosophically disturbing.