a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Angie Thomas

DeVante’s got a point. What makes his name or our names any less normal than yours? Who or what defines ‘normal’ to you? If my pops were here, he’d say you’ve fallen into the trap of the white standard.[/b]

More normal for some than for others.

Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people’s lives too. Saving them from their “wild African ways.” Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.

Well, in some ways, all of us need saving.

Don’t fall for that trap. That’s what they want. If you don’t wanna speak out, that’s up to you, but don’t let it be because you’re scared of them. Who do I tell you that you have to fear?
Nobody but God.

Unless, of course, God is the biggest trap of all. For example, by far.

I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang, some attitude, but not too much attitude, so I’m not a ‘sassy black girl.’ I have to watch what I say and how I say it, but I can’t sound ‘white’.

So, do I sound white?

But I realize that being real ain’t got anything to do with where you live.

Being real ain’t got nothing to do with it either.

They act like I’m the official representative of the black race and they owe me an explanation. I think I understand though. If I sit out a protest, I’m making a statement, but if they sit out a protest, they look racist.

Maybe even are racist.

[b]Andre Breton

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful. [/b]

Wouldn’t surprise me.

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

Let the lines be drawn!

Humor is the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

Let’s see what we can do with the Mueller report.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

Right, like that actually makes any sense. To me, for example.

…with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

If in fact that’s actually true.

Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.

Said Don Trump of the Mueller report. At least the AGs version of it.

[b]Lenny Bruce

Today’s comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an act and he told the audience, This is my act. Today’s comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he’s telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.[/b]

So? You turn that into a joke too.

You got to pay your dues to get the joke. Besides, laughter is cheap and very portable. If there’s a pogrom, or they’re blaming you for the plague, nothing is easier to pack than a sense of humor.

Well, if they’ll let you unpack it.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair.

Or: All my philosophy is based upon destruction and despair.

When you’re eight years old, nothing is any of your business.

That’s now down to five.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous.

Unless of course you believe they are.

I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.

He was 40.
Dope of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Or simply not abstract enough.

“It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit." Aristotle

Let’s call it next to impossible.

“There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Chinua Achebe

I wonder if that is applicable to our species?

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Winston Churchill

Him and all his detractors.

“The vice lies not in entering the bordello but in not coming out.” Aristippus

Who doesn’t come out?

“Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions.” Epictetus

How idiotic is that?!!

[b]Leonora Carrington

There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.[/b]

And not, for example, philosophy.

Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds.

I must have the wrong art then, he thought.

People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.

Of course that practically goes without saying. Though they’re far more likely to be dogs.

You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name.

Sounds very much like a personal problem.

The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

No doubt more so for women than for men. Whatever that means.

There are places I’d like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I’m trying to understand. And I’ve understood nothing.

Like that will actually help.

[b]Ray Brassier

Correlationism rejects metaphysical realism understood as the claim that the way the world is does not depend on how we take things to be. It also rejects the Cartesian corollary, i.e., the claim that the way the mind is does not depend on the way the world is. [/b]

We’ll need a context, right?

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

Even though we all know that it is both.

I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth.

He means “truth” of course.

Philosophy ought to be able to give an account of rationality that is not wholly detached from science’s account of nature, even if it is not straightforwardly reducible to it.

Let’s asign ourselves this task.

Psychoanalytic categories such as “neurosis”, “psychosis”, “mania”, and “fixation” have become part of our everyday psychological vocabulary and we now routinely interpret states of anxiety, excitement, or depression in terms of physiological factors involving levels of serotonin, adrenalin, or blood sugar. To say that the characterization of thinking has a normative function that is irreducible to neurophysiological processing is not to say that our extant classification of the forms of thinking is incorrigible.

Sometimes though it’s close enough.

Sellars’s “myth of Jones” is deployed against what Sellars calls “the myth of the categorial Given”: the idea that to be aware of something is to be aware of it as something. This short circuit between “awareness of” and “awareness as” inhibits the project of self-understanding because it perpetuates the assumption that there is a point where being and knowing coincide.

This thing: theeveningrednessinthewest.word … cal-fable/

[b]Nikola Tesla

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.[/b]

I can only think of 17 myself.

What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife… Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment…

Well, at least he was a great engineer.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success . . . Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Would that there could be the equivalent of that for philosophers.

One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

He wondered if he was living proof of that.

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.

Unless of course you’re dead and gone.

Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another’s point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields. The peril of a clash is aggravated by a more or less predominant sense of combativeness, posed by every human being. To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse.

Point taken. On the other hand, two words: conflicting goods.

[b]Jim Jarmusch

I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I’m not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.[/b]

For some reason this popped into my head: youtu.be/9C4uTEEOJlM

The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.

Works that way for me too. My own ideas go back centuries. Yet there is still this sense that I have reconfigured them in an entirely unique manner.

One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, “No input, no output.” Meaning, we’re going to hear a band, we’re going to go to a museum, or we’re going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We’re going to get some input, because if we don’t, then we have nothing. It’s a circle. It’s a respiratory thing.

Let’s make it that way here!
Starting tomorrow?

Now in the States if you look at the TV, you see the advertisements, the TV programmes, the pop videos, and the movies, they’re all the same style. I think it’s very condescending to the audience to assume they only have a three second attention span and so they don’t leave anything on the screen for any longer. I don’t understand that.

Really? It certainly seems rather clear to me.

When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? The English Patient is an independent film… Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I’m the Queen of Denmark. I don’t know what it means anymore.

Any truly bona-fide independents here?

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn’t have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

So, any place where that is still true?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth” Albert Camus[/b]

But, no, not that far.

“You can best reward a liar by believing nothing of what he says.” Aristippus

No collusion!

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.” Leo Tolstoy

What’s that make philosophers then?

“How perilous it is to free a people who prefer slavery.” Niccolo Machiavelli

For them and for us as likely as not.

“Politics have no relation to morals.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Not unlike logic.

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Epictetus

Objectively for example.

[b]Jim Holt

The total absence of humor from the Bible, Alfred North Whitehead once observed, is one of the most singular things in all literature.[/b]

Of course for some the whole thing’s a joke.

I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything. . . . To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable.

So, close enough?

Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.

Like me, right?

Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both.

Or, sure, something else entirely.

Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

Well, it doesn’t appear that way to me. Whatever that means.

It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.

Should that worry us?

[b]Nick Cave

The rock star is dying. And it’s a small tragedy. Rock stars have blogs now. I have no use for that kind of rock star. [/b]

Are there still rock stars around? I thought the last one was Bruce Springsteen.

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That’s terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

How exactly would a muse show up?

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.

Or just making it up as he goes along.

You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.

And he doesn’t even exist.

If I’m hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you go downstairs and start a new novel?’

Sounds like paradise to some of us.

I’ve never been interested in being relevant.

Of course they all say that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Socialism is a scare word they’ve hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.” Harry Truman[/b]

Explain that to Trump on Fox and Friends.

“An honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid … because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.” Bertrand Russell

Any stupid politicians still around today? Aside from him.

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Like any true believer will ever admit it.

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

More to the point: not even knowing it.

"Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

No, it’s other people too.

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” Sigmund Freud

And then there’s the part about dasein.

[b]David Bowie

Hitler was the first superstar.[/b]

How to take that, right?

People don’t get a chance to think, “Why am I a consumer?” Because the decisions come at them so fast and furiously, they’re not [even] given time to think, I am a consumer.

The morons maybe.

The world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It’s far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.

Sedate works for me. At least now it does.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

Anyone here actually doubt it?

Of course, we found out later Syd Barrett had mental problems. But there was something so otherworldly about him. He was hovering, like, six inches above the ground.

youtu.be/qqojcKJs6aU

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

Not so strange, the ones you don’t want to listen to.

[b]Iggy Pop

Nihilism is best done by professionals.[/b]

Or, occasionally, the exceptional amateur.

What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen.

That and die for our sins.

When it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge unimportant detail.

And when it comes to philosophy?

I kinda feel like everything comes full circle in life, even though that’s a cliche.

Full circle or a spiral down.

The future of rock n roll is Justin Bieber.

Wow, who would have thunk that?

What some people would call antics, I would just call a good show.

Unlike, for example, the antics here.

[b]Werner Twertzog

I have traveled the planet–in war zones, the jungle, in places beyond the reach of ordinary law: Only in the U.S. have I been shot.[/b]

This thing: youtu.be/HrRNM9cMBDk

Hell is other people.
Hell, also, is being alone.
Everything is hell.

I’ve never known it not to be.

Practice grieving, for that, as we all know, will not be replaced by machines.

Not anytime soon at least.

Now that I have made a film on every continent, I am working towards filming on another planet. The most likely candidate is Mars, as we all know.

Don’t bet on it.

I shall enjoy Hannah Montana’s gin-soaked reveries at the beginning of the remake of Citizen Kane directed by James Franco.

Don’t bet on it.

What your question misses is that no-one cares.

Ditto my answer.

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

Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.[/b]

You never really know whether to believe something like this.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out…

So, close enough?

In an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster), in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way), in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

Of course God knows better.

Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?

Well, me more than you of course.

Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?

So much for dasein, right?

…some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

Their piss in other words?

[b]Marie Curie

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. [/b]

Imagine actually believing this.

First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events.

Yes, including me here.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Of course you can’t have one without the other.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Not counting all the things that are taboo.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

Like the two aren’t inextricably bound.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

Well, he being a she here.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m one of those. We don’t bend anything.[/b]

Any benders of history here?

I never learn anything from listening to myself.

Well, at least she learned that.

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line… People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It’s a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

You being the exception, right?

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.

Or, for some, an empty syringe.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

Or the equivalent of that here.

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Marked and…scarred.

[b]Jackson Pollock

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you’re not painting.[/b]

Of course I have my own equivalent of that.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

And that narrows it down to almost nothing.

A real friend is someone you say a sentence to and they know ten thousand words behind that sentence.

Or at least a hundred.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

I use a slingshot myself.

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

Anyone like that here?

You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.

I suspect however that in some respects the two are indistinguishable.

“I shall enjoy Hannah Montana’s gin-soaked reveries at the beginning of the remake of Citizen Kane directed by James Franco.”

This made my day.