a thread for mundane ironists

[b]God

The next time I create mankind I’ll conduct an environmental impact study first.[/b]

And it’s not like He doesn’t have billions of planets to choose from.

Most homophobes are secretly gay. However, most arachnophobes are not secretly spiders.

Hmm, a category mistake?

The Easter Bunny is a ridiculous myth that completely detracts from the factual reality of the Son of God rising from the dead.

What’s that make Santa Claus then?

Human beings are the only species on earth who are all a bunch of morons.

Created in His image to boot.

It wasn’t a Good Friday for Jesus, I can tell you that.

Well, He did die for our sins.

It’s weird being an atheist when you have My job.

Really, I can’t even imagine it.

[b]Janis Joplin

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time. [/b]

Next up: the Yippies.

All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik. Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time. That’s all I ever wanted. Except I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock ‘n’ roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me. And I decided then and there that that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that’s the trouble.

Among other things, they should put this on her tombstone.

I’m not really thinking much…Just sort of, trying to feel.

Not unlike everyone else. Eventually.

It’s hard to be free but when it works, it’s worth it.

Providing of course you have nothing left to lose.

I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV.

So, how superhypermost are you? You know, if that’s even an option.

Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.

If not anymore.

[b]Woody Allen

Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.[/b]

I was once this optimistic myself.

I didn’t believe in reincarnation in my past life, and I still don’t.

Let’s see if we can spot the flaw here.

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

One wonders if he ever did.

Error, no keyboard. Press F1 to continue.

Is this even possible?

Existence for eternity could get a little boring…especially towards the end.

Is this even possible?

The universe is haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

And not just in September.

[b]Richard Rorty

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of “knowingness”- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.[/b]

No, not just you, Kid. But, here, especially you.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

Let’s explain this to, among others, me.

The difference between people and ideas is…only superficial.

If not profoundly superficial.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

A classic general description.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

Worse [far worse] is the philosophical equivalent.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

On the other hand, who wouldn’t abjure that?

[b]Rene Magritte

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world. [/b]

Besides, it just makes you all the more miserable still.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Here we do that with words.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!

Let’s analyze this to shreds.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

Or, sure, both.

Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.

So, what’s invisible here?

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Up next: the nightmares.

[b]Harlan Coben

…desperation can toy with you and if you give desperation any wiggle room, it will find alternative answers…[/b]

The creepier the better he thought.

Do you believe in love at first sight? Neither do I. I do, however, believe in major, more-than-just-physical attraction at first sight. I believe that every once in a while—once, maybe twice in a lifetime—you are drawn to someone so deeply, so primordially, so immediately—a stronger-than-magnetic pull.

Let’s just say that some of us are running out of time.

Every person has hopes and dreams.

And two to take them.

This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.

And just on their arms.

There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.

Hmm, never tried that before.

We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don’t put it in those terms. But we do.

Maybe one in a thousand get around to this. And even less in America.

[b]Bob Dylan

…the only thing i knew how to do was to keep on keeping on…[/b]

Not much gets done without that.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

Though I suspect that he’s fared better here than most of us.

You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more.

Needing it. And then what?

Dealing with my own life takes priority over other people dealing with my life.

Right, like that will stop them.

People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.

I know that I do.

… we’re living in a Machiavellian world, whether we like it or we don’t.

Next up: Machiavelli meets dasein.

[b]Leonard Cohen

You live your life as if it’s real…[/b]

You might even say you’re determined to.

The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.

Though even less that God is.

You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.

Just a few of us of course.

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.

That actually happen to anyone here?

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

Trust me: Speaking it is one thing, living it another.

Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.

I’ve never been less empty than when alone. But I am a very strange person.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Age 20: I want to write the great American novel
Age 30: I want to write a brutal satire of popular culture
Age 40: I want to write a tweet[/b]

Let’s imagine Age 50.

English philosophy: I feel that the world is beautiful
French philosophy: I think that my soul is beautiful
German philosophy: I’m a monster

And not just the Nazis.

Favorite Punctuation Marks
Aristotle: period
Kant: semicolon
Hegel: dash
Sartre: exclamation point
Heidegger: question mark
Beckett: asterisk
Lacan: slash
Deleuze: backslash
Derrida: scare quotes

Imagine mine then.

The Long Eighteenth Century: 1688 – 1815
The Long Nineteenth Century: 1789 – 1914
The Long Twentieth Century: 1870 – 2012
The Long Twenty-First Century: 2019

In a word: Trump.

Friday is a friendly reminder that
Kierkegaard: your thoughts will never be your own
Marx: your labor power will never be your own
Beckett: your life will always be your own, but it’s the one thing you don’t want

Beckett by a nose. Or two.

May 5th: Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard share a birthday today. Marx has the snazzier grave, but it will cost you £4 to see it.

True, but the workers of the world get a discount. Or they certainly ought to.

[b]Federico Fellini

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life. [/b]

No beginning? No end? Well, what then of birth and death?

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

Autonomically as it were.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

How about this: I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a philosophy.

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

That and almost anything else.

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don’t want free men who can think for themselves and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Next up: Real philosophy.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train…But we must at least take them to the station…to a point of departure.

Let’s make ILP the station, he quipped.

[b]Frans de Waal

We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them.[/b]

On the other hand…

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Indeed, what could possibly be more obscure?

The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

Or not of course.

This book demonstrates something we had already suspected on the grounds of the close connection between apes and man: that the social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true.

Except we have the internet.

Our vaunted imagination is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it causes desperation in a situation in which an ape might remain unworried, but it also gives hope as it allows us to envision a better future. We look so far ahead, in fact, that we realize that our life will come to an end. This realization thoroughly colors our existence, leading to a permanent search for meaning as well as bitter jokes along the lines of “Life’s a bitch, and then you die!” Would we have developed a belief in the supernatural without this cloud hanging over us? A partial answer comes from research showing that the more aware people are of their own mortality, and the more they think about it, the more they believe in God.

Well, imagine that!

…the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.

Or think Wag the Dog on a bigger scale.

[b]Existential Comics

The funniest thing about people who complain that “postmodernists” are destroying society is that they can never name a single living postmodernist and describe accurately what they believe.[/b]

And not just Americans.

so far as i can tell people of all political ideologies agree that wolves are cool as shit

He means dragons of course.

[b]Ways to overcome your existential dread:

1. Try to create great art.
2. Throw yourself into politics.
3. Take a leap of faith into religion.
4. Just sort of stop thinking about it and watch TV or something instead.[/b]

Obviously: Not necessarily in that order.

Young people these days spend all their time hooking up on tinder when they should be spending time forming a revolutionary socialist party and then splitting the party over minor ideological differences,

Indeed, that’s what I once did.

have to admit, people in real life are not as impressed with how many twitter followers you have as I had been anticipating

He still has 269,900 more than I have.

[b]Likely reasons you can’t get a girlfriend:

• You are an asshole.
• You have poor hygiene habits.
• You are too scared to even ask girls out.

Unlikely reasons you can’t get a girlfriend:

• postmodern neo-marxists have infiltrated the universities.[/b]

Let’s prove this.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

I’m a sociopath. I look normal, but I’m not. I’m smarter, better, and freer, because I’m not bound by rules, law, emotion or regard for you.[/b]

Something to strive for, perhaps?

I’ve read that one out of twenty-four people is a sociopath, and if you ask me, the other twenty-three of you should be worried.

So, which one [or two] of us here is one?

I don’t really like you, but I’m so good at acting as if I do that it’s basically the same thing.

Basically and [sometimes] then some.

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave.

Let’s run this by Tom Cruise.

They never see me coming.
Know why?
Because I’m already there.

That’ll do it.

You need somebody to stand up for you. You’re the little guy, you just don’t realize it yet. The Commonwealth has all the aces, and you don’t even know you’re playing cards.

At least until Trump drains the swamp.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Most people of my grandparents’ generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics … This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn’t too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools … A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids’ attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt–two undeniable ingredients of farming. It’s good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.[/b]

Yep, that’s how it works all right.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

Yep, that’s how it works all right.

What do you think people want, if it’s not greatness and to be remembered for all time?
Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.

That and philosophy.

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn’t really want to eat 700 more calories a day.

She means 700 more calories a meal of course.

So you make a deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.

Lucky for us though there’s prayer.

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.

And who doesn’t have their own rendition of that?

[b]Existential Comics

The most important attribute of a philosopher is:
Socrates: humility.
Russell: rigor.
Nietzsche: courage.
Hegel: writing down as many words as possible.[/b]

Also, words no one could possibly understand.

Nietzsche is basically your stereotypical bitter, lonely loser who thinks the reason they didn’t succeed in life is because they are too deep for everyone around them to understand.
The difference is he was the only one in history who was actually right about that.

Could I be the second?

Joe Biden is the liberal dream for defeating Trump because he is an old, racist, sexist white guy who will 100% serve the rich and powerful while offering as little as possible to working Americans – but he promises not to say most of that stuff out loud.

Let’s file this one under, “anyone but Trump”.

The cleverest thing the capitalist class does is conceal information from us. All the inner working of how society truly functions is hidden in the one place they know no one will ever look: books.

Does that include Kindle?

[b]There are four basic ways of doing philosophy:

1. Criticizing commonly held beliefs.
2. Advancing novel ideas about reality.
3. Working on philosophical puzzles.
4. Whatever the fuck Nietzsche was doing.[/b]

Clearly, the first four.

Republicans: “corporations should rule over every aspect of society.”
Democrats: “yes, but they should be more polite about it.”

Too close to call?

[b]Patricia Churchland

If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought ‘experiments’, that is another thing. I am not so interested in the latter, though I do appreciate that it can be fun, however unproductive. [/b]

Of course some things don’t really lend themselves to a “nature”.

Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discussions of morality. It may help us all to think a little more carefully and rationally.

Either that or lead us to blows.

In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.

Not for the “know-it-alls” here, right?

If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

Well, what do you know, another “general description”.

I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.

Right of course.

It is surely important that the differences between coma, deep sleep, being under anesthesia, on the one hand, and being alert on the other, all involve changes in the brain.

Absolutely important is my best guess.

[b]Martin Gardner

Consider a cow. A cow doesn’t have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems. [/b]

Any cows here?
Also, am I the only chimp?

Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.

A few examples please.

In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.

Wow, what were the odds of that?

Let the Bible be the Bible. It’s not about science. It’s not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

The good news? It’s not just your Bible.

One day, when I was doing well in class and had finished my lessons, I was sitting there trying to analyze the game of tic-tac-toe… The teacher came along and snatched my papers on which I had been doodling… She did not realize that analyzing tic-tac-toe can lead into dozens of non-trivial mathematical questions.

Really? Name one.

If present trends continue, our country may soon find itself far behind many other nations in both science and technology nations where, if you inform strangers that you are a mathematician, they respond with admiration and not by telling you how much they hated math in school, and how they sure could use you to balance their checkbooks.

In other words, there’s the human condition and then there’s America.

[b]tiny nietzsche

you might be a postmodernist if you don’t actually believe the things you are saying[/b]

Or, far more likely, if you can’t actually believe the things you’re saying.

nothing tastes as good as nothing feels

As opposed to something tastes as good as something feels.

waiting for the detachment to kick in

More than a decade so far.

no shirt, no shoes, no postmodernism

Here though you can be a buck naked Platonist.

trump will probably trip on a staircase or choke on some kfc. that’s how this ends

That it ends is the point though.

you can’t make me exist

I know: Like you would ever want to.

[b]Greg Iles

Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he’d never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time … the school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran – none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action Life from death.[/b]

Finally, it’s almost close to being cleared up.

The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what’s behind it comes out under its own power.

Let’s confirm this. You first.

When you start talking to yourself in a graveyard, it’s time to go home.

Until one day it is home.

Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they’re paralyzed by fear.

Bullshit!
Right?

A man’s biggest enemy is his mouth.

Unless he is armed and dangerous.

There’s no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it.

Unless of course there’s no meaning in that either.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.[/b]

Come on, who can ever really know that?

It’s a hard business, reconciling what the truth used to be with what the truth is now.

Next up: reconciling both with what the truth will be.

If she knew how often I was thinking about her, she wouldn’t feel lonely.

If only it really worked that way.

You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

And you can take that to the grave.

It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.

Been there, done that. Once, it was twice in the same day.

The sun will rise no matter what pain we encounter. No matter how much we believe the world to be over, the sun will rise.

Until eventually, expanding, it swallows the Earth whole.