a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Woody Allen

Standing in a garage no more makes you a car than standing in a church makes you a Christian.[/b]

Wow, he figured that out.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

That’s actually the equivalent of two or more regrets for most of us.

Skeptic that I was as an adolescent, I had recently come to believe in a Supreme Being after thumbing through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

As God intended no doubt.

I carry a bullet in my breast pocket. Once, a crazy evangelist threw a bible at me, which would have gone through my heart if it wasn’t for the bullet.

Not only that but I wasn’t there to witness it.

I’ve become the person I’ve always hated, but I’m happier.

Not in a million years, he thought.

I see the glass half full…but of poison.

Or: I see the glass half full…and of poison.

[b]Daniel Kahneman

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.[/b]

Imagine then how strange it is to me.

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Cue my groots, right?

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

And, sure, especially when they see a lot.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

And then objectivists among us who know everything. Claiming there was never any chance that they wouldn’t.

…we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

In other words, blindness all the way down.

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

But, if your mind works wholly in sync with nature, it doesn’t have to make sense at all.

[b]Nein

Your own. Personal. Complete and utter loss of faith in anything you still might have somehow been naive enough to believe in.[/b]

On the other hand, what else is new?

We regret to inform you that we will not be informing you.

Again in other words.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Monday to Friday.

Only now it includes the weekend.

If we could signify nothing, we would. If we could. But we can’t. So we won’t.

Unless we can but choose not to.

May. Turning ever so slowly into What Might Have Been.

Then cue all the other months.

Congratulations, graduates. We regret to inform you that your alma doesn’t mater.

Unless of course it actually does.

[b]Claude Monet

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.[/b]

Would that I had this problem, he thought.

It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.

Today, of course, it’s the Republicans. You know, if you believe Rachel Maddow.

Everything changes, even stone.

So paint it while you can.

The critic asks: And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?
The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

The critic asks: I mean the subject matter after that.

It is better to have done something than to have been someone.

He wondered if both were possible.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

Of course we have our own rendition of that here too.

[b]Harlan Coben

Rumors always hardened to facts. Accusations are convictions in the public mind. You are guilty until proven innocent.[/b]

Sex crimes in particular. As we all know.

It’s not the dead even. They’re gone. Nothing you can do about that. It’s what’s left behind - the echo.

Some considerably louder [and longer] than others.

There was an old joke about being left on a deserted island with an editor. You are starving. All you have left is a glass of orange juice. Days pass. You are near death. You are about to drink the juice when the editor grabs the glass from your hand and pees into it. You look at him, stunned . “There,” the editor says, handing you the glass. "It just needed a little tweaking.”

Let’s pin down how funny it is.

Grief is devastating, all-consuming. But grief merely visits friends, even the closest. It stays much longer, probably forever, with the family, but that was probably how it should be.

Trust me: Not all families.

They - bliss and fear - are constant companions. Rarely does one venture out without the other.

Unless you take them off the leash.

We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread.

I know that I am.

[b]Claude Monet

You’ll understand, I’m sure that I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. It’s my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most.[/b]

No as matter of fact I won’t understand.

Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things.

Just don’t expect that to always be true.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

Which, of course, can be almost anything.

I’m not performing miracles, I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint.

A bad day let’s call it.

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.

A really bad day let’s call it.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

There must be the philosophical equivalent of that.

Krafman Lugo

Postmodernists confuse indolence for extravagance.

Still, sometimes it is quite beautiful.

If introverts didn’t envy extroverts so much, they would realize that the distance between them is the difference between theory and application.

But then, if they didn’t, they would have to look at all that sweat straight in the face.

Corporations want to run every aspect of your life, but they don’t mean anything by it.

So why are we so angry? Or, alternatively, why are we so in favor of them?

On a good morning, P Diddy will wake up feeling like me.

Surely, as our deepest thinkers of the day tell us, this is constitutively impossible.

It wasn’t the joy of having Lazarus back that converted the people, or even the joy of there being life after death. It was the perplexing weirdness of it.

Jesus was a show-off.

If you are looking for the ultimate meaning of life, you are already asking the wrong questions.

This dude totally read Nietzsche.

[b]Bob Dylan

People are crazy and times are strange
I used to care but things have changed[/b]

Going on twenty years now for me.

No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

Going on twenty years now for me.

Music can save people, but it can’t in the commercial way it’s being used. It’s just too much. It’s pollution.

Unless your idea of being saved is tuning into American Idol.

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I’m not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I’ve never thought about that before! He said, When you’re not following me, you’re resisting me.

Wow. Anyone know if this is a true story?

Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid

Sundown on the union.
[if not the ruling class]

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

Right, I’m sure that’s what he actually did.

[b]Werner Twertzog

And then I told the obviously drunken Norman Mailer that I had six bullets in my revolver, and it was a mark of my respect for him that I would use at least three.[/b]

Probably a true story?

“Okie Dokie,” as we all know, started as a watch-word among white nationalists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1920s.

Might be a true story?

Kermit, “the frog,” was, as we all know, named for the suicidally depressed son of the imperialist president Theodore Roosevelt.

Probably not a true story?

It is important to take your children to Disney World to teach them that they will never be happy.

On the other hand, what if that doesn’t work?

If you really want a revolution in the United States, double the price of box wine.

Let’s decide if this makes sense.

I am exhausted, irretrievably, by the loathsome white-male decency of “Tom Hanks.”

Let’s decide if this makes sense.

[b]Leonard Cohen

My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn’t write
What the night pencilled in[/b]

Works that way here too. Only the technology has changed.

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it’s overturned the order of the soul.

On the other hand, for most of us, how hard is that.

I couldn’t feel so I learned to touch.

For me that comes naturally. But point taken.

I’ve often said if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.

Though few have been there more often than him.

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.

So, any real masterpieces here?

Dream after dream we all lie in each other’s arms.

A double entendre if there ever was one.

[b]Neal Stephenson

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.[/b]

Fucking Kids! However old they are.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

Some [believe it or not] can even handle ambiguity.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.

Now it’s up to 99.9%

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

Of course here some wrestle for possession of the word. The handle being its definition.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.

Or, for the lucky ones, a drafting compass.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

And then there’s how things get done in la la land. And, no, not just here.

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.

In some parts more than others let’s say.

[b]Michelangelo Antonioni

If an actor tries to understand too much, he will act in an intellectual and unnatural manner.[/b]

Here? If the shoe fits, right?

A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.

Which tells us almost nothing at all.

It’s obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don’t want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can’t explain. It’s like painting: You don’t know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that’s how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don’t want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can’t help it; that’s just the way it is.

No, really, that is how it is.

A woman’s sex appeal is an inner matter. It stems from her mental make-up, basically. It’s an attitude, not just a question of her physical features - that arrogant quality in a woman’s femininity. Otherwise, all beautiful women would have sex appeal, which is not so.

Next up: A man’s sex appeal.

I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.

My guess: Going back to an understanding of existence itself. :wink:

I can’t give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.

Not much that doesn’t cover.

[b]God

One abortion 2,000 years ago and this whole problem is solved.[/b]

Let’s decide: Has God gone too far?

I created the entire universe for the sake of one subgroup of one species on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy.

Okay, that settles it!

If you think life has no meaning, wait till you try death.

Yeah, but that’s only for all of eternity.

Donald Trump is an asshole’s asshole. He’s the kind of asshole other assholes look at and say, “Now there’s an asshole.”

So, don’t forget to vote!
Again.

Once you realize nothing makes sense, everything makes sense.

Yeah, that is one way to look at it.

Praying for something implies that, despite My omniscience, I don’t already know what you want.

That’s my own point of course.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

Natural law says that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but that was pre-spanx. [/b]

Believe it or not, this stuff: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanx

It’s fun to do something dumb. Not something really dumb, like my second marriage. That was really really dumb.

So, what really, really dumb things have you done?

Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart.

Suddenly. The key word of course.

Harry Truman never said ‘Give ’em hell.’ He said, ‘I just told him the truth and they thought it was hell’.

Next up: Where the buck really stops.

Great griefs are mute.

And nothing gets louder than that.

No one’s paying any attention to sociopaths, or they think we’re all killers, which is a misconception.

Anyway, the good [or at least better] sociopaths.

[b]Existential Comics

It’s unfair to call the Marvel movies “kid’s movies”, they also have serious political messages, such as:

  • America is good
  • the military is good
  • military contractors are good
  • billionaires are good
  • heroes protect the existing power structure, villains try to change society[/b]

Not unlike the idiotic DC Comics movies.

Yes, I am a highly rational Rationalist, and using my rational rationality I have determined, in a totally unbiased rational way, that feminism is bad. Also I don’t like immigrants. Rationally speaking, of course.

He’s being ironic of course. Though others clearly are not. And not just in the White House.

Her: “what is your fantasy?”
Me: “it’s pretty weird…”
Her: “just tell me.”
Me: “I want to act only according to that maxim whereby I can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

Her: “Hey, me too!!”

Whenever I’m feeling down on myself, I remember the wisdom of Socrates: “everyone is a god damn idiot.”

And, nowadays, more than ever.

…everyone always thinks philosophy is all about making arguments and trying to find the truth and shit, but that’s not true it’s about pissing off your dad who wanted you to major in engineering…

Trust me: He gets the last laugh.

Saying that we need to unite behind literally any Democrat no matter what their ideas are isn’t how to beat Trump, it’s how we got Trump in the first place.

So? That doesn’t make it any less true. At least next time.

[b]Delia Owens

Please don’t talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation, Kya whispered with a slight edge.[/b]

He thought: Only here am I not.

Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was, and she could see him there.

He wondered about his own eyes then.

Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.

You know, for better or worse.

Death’s crude pluck, as always, stealing the show.

On the other hand, it all comes natural.

His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.

Well, that’s one definition, sure.

Life had made her an expert at mashing feelings into a storable size.

Life does things like that. But only for some of course.

[b]Existential Comics

Rent is basically just a tax that poor people pay to rich people in order to live in society.[/b]

On the other hand [believe it or not] others don’t see it that way at all.

[b]Handy financial tips to help you save:

  1. Pay off your credit cards.
  2. Cook at home.
  3. Use coupons.
  4. Encourage the peasants to rise up against their landlords and sieze the land for the masses to abolish rent.[/b]

Which one is least likely to work?

It’s hilarious how Twitter is trying to makes features to “foster debate”. As if anyone on Earth wakes up in the morning and says to themselves “I’m really in the mood for some good thought provoking discussion today, so I’ll log on to my favorite debate site, Twitter dot com.”

My guess: He’s being sarcastic.

What do women want? More or less the same thing as men: to guillotine the rich.

My guess: not all of them.

me, in the throws of a profound existential crisis: “life is meaningless! we are naught but specks of dust in a barren universe.”
me, 10 minutes later after a snack: “eh…actually life is kinda alright.”

Nope, tried that. Didn’t work. But, every once in a while, music does.

It’s important to read French novels to know that despite the inherent absurdity of it all, we can still live a life worth living.
It’s important to read German novels to know that, actually, no you can’t.

Anyone here doubt that?
[also, Russian novels]

[b]Ted Chiang

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.[/b]

And then the “I’ll be back” cyborgs among us.

If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?

My guess: You’d have to see it first.

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all.

They who?

Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like “optics” or “thermodynamics” are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.

Let’s just say that most of us go too far in the other direction.

The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.

That’s how it works alright. But how far to take it?

Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there’s actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced.

Think for example [lately] of dragons.

[b]Mark Manson

You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.[/b]

On the other hand, you’re going to get fucked anyway.

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

Abstractly as it were.

Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.

Of course some will have a problem with that.

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.

Of course some will struggle more with that than others.

Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.

Not counting the tens of millions who barely subsist from day to day.

Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.

Like, for example, understanding existence itself. :wink: