a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Harlan Coben

I said everyone looks happy. That was kinda my point. If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac.[/b]

Let’s judge the world by ILP.

My great-grandfather, Dad often told us, saved his best wines for special occasions. He was killed when the Nazis invaded Paris. The Nazis ended up drinking his wine. Lesson: you never wait. When I was growing up, we used only the good plates. We used the best linens. We drank out of Waterford crystal. When my father died, his wine cellar was nearly empty.

Like most things of this sort, it works for some but certainly not for others.

Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued.

Broken legs being considerably easier to pin down.

I have learned that human beings are all about incentives.

Not unlike all the rest of us.

Everyone looks happy on Facebook.
I know, right? What’s up with that?

Now, of course, we actually do know.

She said that if you hold on to hate, you lose your grip on so much more.

Unless of course it’s worth it.

[b]Bob Dylan

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. [/b]

Let’s get out our calculators.

Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.

Especially a silence that will last for all of eternity. And then some.
And even the great Bob Dylan is tumbling over into that.

You don’t write a song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it.

Let’s start singing the stuff we post here.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

And, occasionally, lie.

There are those who worship loneliness
I’m not one of them
In this age of fiberglass
I’m searching for a gem
The crystal ball up on the wall hasn’t shown me nothing yet
I’ve paid the price of solitude, but at last I’m out of debt

Indeed, his net worth now is around 180 million dollars.

Don’t matter how much money you got, there’s only two kinds of people: there’s saved people and there’s lost people.

I’m really, really lost of course. But at least I’m out of debt.

[b]Leonard Cohen

Well I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.[/b]

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite songs: youtu.be/vSk4XrhW8rM

Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.

Aside from this being complete horseshit, I couldn’t agree more.

There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

And then [eventually] we come to the indignities.

It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

Why not even help them? Then let them help you.

A heavy burden lifted from my soul
I heard that love was out of my control

He heard right.

We’re in a world where there’s famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it’s very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?

Certainly not to the stuff that we do here.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” Kurt Vonnegut[/b]

Why not?

“One eye sees, the other feels.” Paul Klee

Next up: testicles.

“One should use common words to say uncommon things.” Arthur Schopenhauer

You know, instead of unimaginably dumb things, Kids.

“Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” George Orwell

That and [for most of us] consciousness too.

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.” George Orwell

What?! Even the New York Times?!!

“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.” George Orwell

That’s always true until it’s not true. You know, like most things.

[b]Neal Stephenson

Did you win your sword fight?
Of course I won the fucking sword fight, Hiro says. I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.
And you wrote the software.
Yeah. That, too, Hiro says.[/b]

The new warriors.

I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.
There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

Yet another brutal fact of life.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

For some, even more than occasionally.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Dust? How the fuck does he figure that?

Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s us.

Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.

Or: Well, all noise looks like information until you break the code.
Or, sure, maybe not.

[b]Werner Twertzog

So then I said to Jimi, who was obviously freaked out, “Just play the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’”[/b]

He wondered if this was a true story.

Facebook is important for learning that you have less in common than you expected with your right-wing, racist, gun-nut, fascist relatives who would kill you for a case of Budweiser, but dearly love Jesus.

In that case, how far behind can Twitter be?

It is important for most real artists to die penniless so that billionaire financiers can upgrade their secondary toilets to even purer gold.

Though it may not be important to you.

Dear United States: You always were a dystopian nightmare; it is just more mainstream now.

And these days not just in the heartland.

Ignorance is more expensive than education. But not in the United States.

America. Always the fucking exception.

Men do not climb mountains because they are there, but because life is meaningless, as we all know.

Or, rather, as we all know now.

[b]Michelangelo Antonioni

You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters. [/b]

I must have missed that one.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

Not unlike working in the White House.

I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn’t advanced as far as science.

Let’s try to imagine one that did.

When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.

Like some of us posting here. And, for others, then some.

Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.

Fuck that: Let’s explain it.

People are always misquoting me.

Nope, not me.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

You cannot do more with less.[/b]

Let alone considerably more?

Every psychiatrist hated the irony that the best-paying specialty was cosmetic surgery, as if you could fix your psyche by changing your face.

Right, like they can fix your psyche.

I know that people get angry and I’m generally a fan of emotions. And to be real, it makes great television. A debate where everybody is yelling at each other is totally fun to watch.
Until you realize that’s how we choose a president.

That and Russian hacking.

My face is a mask. I hide my thoughts. My words are calculated to please, charm, or undermine. I can sound smarter or dumber, depending on what you expect to hear. My actions further my self- interest.

Not unlike, for example, everyone else.

Good people can’t imagine evil. It catches us by surprise, and it always will.

Good meaning “one of us” people.

You haven’t lived until you duct-taped a diaper on a dog.

The real challenge is still a cat though.

[b]Zoë Heller

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you’re a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don’t know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.[/b]

Sheba being considerably younger and a dead ringer for Cate Blanchett.

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

No, really, that’s all it takes.

…what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there’s nothing left.

True, but only in real life.

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.

Either that or be convinced you don’t mind at all.

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Or, rather, that’s what he convinced humself.

…elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid…

Unlike, for example, intelligence.

[b]Ted Chiang

My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn’t be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole.[/b]

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.

On the other hand, try having one without the other.

Dividing a number by zero doesn’t produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally “undefined.”

Lots of definers here, right? Sic it.

Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh’s work was indicated, and Yahweh’s work was concealed.

He means our Yahweh, not yours.

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I’m glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

No dumber than some of the posts here though.

Their devotion had never been put to any serious test, and might not have withstood one; their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.

That doesn’t surprise you, right?

[b]Mark Manson

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.[/b]

Indeed, and who is more avoided here than me?

In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.

Me? Too close to call.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

And lots of folks avoid me here, don’t they?

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

On the other hand, fuck nature.

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Right, and how hard can that be?

Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.

Trust me: It will fuck you anyway.

[b]God

What happens after you die is pretty funny actually.[/b]

I’ll let you know if that’s true. You know, if I can.

Abortion should only be permitted in cases of rape, incest, and when the woman chooses it.

Which then begs the question: Do the unborn dead go to Heaven?

If I had to pinpoint an exact moment when it all went wrong, I’d say Creation.

Not including Himself one suspects.

Just because the person on the other side of the argument is completely wrong doesn’t mean you aren’t also completely wrong.

He must spend a lot of time here then.

I love you unconditionally under certain circumstances.

Not unlike all the rest of us.

Happy birthday to President Trump, who is a fucking piece of shit.

I guess He shouldn’t have created him then.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

…what’s the point of a promise anyway? How can we expect people to stick to their word about anything when the world around us is so arbitrary, unreliable, and senseless?[/b]

Remember when that wasn’t true? Nope, me neither.

When Teddy died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything.

Today, of course, that’s just a fact of life.

You can be sorry about something and not regret it, Evelyn says.

On the other hand, he thought, nothing comes to mind.

We can’t say what we would do in other circumstances. We can only know what we will do with the ones we face.

No, really think that through.

It hurts to care about someone more than they care about themselves.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay.

In other words, some can actually look forward to feeling hollow.

[b]Joni Mitchell

All my battles were with male egos. I’m just looking for equality, not to dominate.[/b]

Of course that’s still around.

The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi’s mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.

I saw Bambi too. But nothing clicked.

All romantics meet the same fate some day. Drunk and cynical and boring someone in some dark cafe.

Either that or in a brightly lit bowling alley.

The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there, either.

Sure, go ahead, see if you can spot it: youtu.be/Wq2jhs19_V8

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn’t like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

Actually, no, it’s not Trump. It’s Dubya.

If you’re smart or rich or lucky
Maybe you’ll beat the laws of man
But the inner laws of spirit
And the outer laws of nature
No man can

Except you, right?

[b]Woody Allen

The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.[/b]

Now of course that means his prick. Just ask Mia and Ronan.

Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God, I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

For us it’s ILP.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

Though, at any point in time, everything does.

I’m afraid of the dark, and suspicious of the light.

As he should be.

You’ll live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to.

Thanks for reminding me.

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.

Of course no one has ever moved on to threeness.

[b]Daniel Kahneman

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.[/b]

And not just peacegirl. :wink:

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.

And, no, not just me.

…it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

We’ll need examples of course.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

In fact right now I am typing these words, chewing gum and listening to music.

To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

Well, sure, lots of things should be.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Science: This
History: This then that
Literature: This means that
Philosophy: This therefore that
Economics: I’ll give you this for that
Politics: I’ll keep this and take that
Psychoanalysis: Mother[/b]

Sure, maybe.

Kierkegaard teaches you how to write a tragedy, Beckett teaches you how to write a comedy, and Sartre teaches you how to write a philosophical treatise that people will assume you plagiarized from the internet.

Sure, maybe not.

Philosophy has been all downhill since
Aristotle: Plato
Spinoza: Plato
Locke: Plato
Hume: Plato
Schopenhauer: Plato
Nietzsche: Nietzsche

Either that or uphill.

Russian lit: It’s my father’s fault
French lit: It’s my king’s fault
English lit: It’s my landlord’s fault
American lit: I don’t know who you are, but it’s your fault

As long as it’s never ours, right?

Hegel: Read Kant. Respect Kant. Reject Kant.
Nietzsche: Read Hegel. Laugh out loud. Forget Hegel.
Sartre: Drink some coffee. Check your latest mentions in the newspaper. Find out who Kant and Hegel are.

If only in a parallel universe.

[b]How To Make Your Philosophy Tweet Popular

  1. Mention Spinoza or Wittgenstein
  2. Complain about Hegel
  3. Laud nihilism
  4. Type “Nietzsche” and “abyss” in the same sentence
  5. Delete it[/b]

Same for posts here, isn’t it?

[b]Edouard Manet

I paint as I feel like painting; to hell with all their studies. [/b]

Well, he was Manet after all.

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.

Or: The city only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.

Black is not a color.

Let’s try to pin this down: colormatters.com/color-and- … ite-colors

The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me… People don’t realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.

Just out of curiosity, what the hell is he talking about here?

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.

Imagine if that was true for philosophers too.

This woman’s work is exceptional. Too bad she’s not a man.

What did he mean by this? And what ought he have meant instead?

[b]Edgar Degas

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see. [/b]

Or: philosophy is not what you think but what you must make others think.

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.

Or: philosophizing is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

Any bores here?

The true traveler never arrives.

Great, he thought, one more thing I’m doing wrong.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

Of course we all know that for most of us it’s the other way around.

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

My guess: not nearly as sinister as it sounds.

[b]Existential Comics

Nietzsche: God is dead.
Everyone: wow cool.
Nietzsche: No, not cool you little shits. Now we have to be God ourselves. Can you replace God? No, because are all a bunch of idiots.
Everyone: oh shit.[/b]

Nietzsche in a nutshell.

Capitalism is quite literally going to destroy the planet in order to make more money for the small percentage of people who own production, so no, I don’t think it is “not perfect, but the best system we can have.”

Let’s vote on this.

British literature: I will die for duty.
French literature: I will die for love.
German literature: I will die for greatness.
Russian literature: Yeah I’m the one that killed the other three guys.

With the same axe as likely as not.

You are on the train, your eyes lock with a beautiful woman sitting across from you. The same thought goes through both of your heads at the exact same time: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

On the other hand, what if she wasn’t beautiful?

one time i stared into the abyss and i can confirm it was pretty fuckin lame

Okay, but no two abysses are the same.

When a medical company calculates that they could make twice as much money if they charge ten times more for their drug, even though 4/5 people who need it will die because they can’t afford it, that isn’t capitalism getting perverted, that is capitalism perfecting itself.

Sure, why not?