a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Edgar Degas

There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.[/b]

Work, right? Well, if you’re a gifted artist.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

I challenge you to explain that.

Taste! It doesn’t exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

I challenge you to explain that.

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there’s no point in working.

I challenge you to explain that.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn’t interest me.

He can’t possibly know what he means.

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.

Hitler had one of those, right? His own truth for example.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

The German word for there not actually being a German word for what you’re thinking about.[/b]

The German word for everything: Dasein.

You are born free but…
Rousseau: live in chains
Lacan: love in chains
Sartre: die in chains
Camus: chain-smoke

All of the above. You know, if we live in a wholly determined universe.

Ontology: Be it
Epistemology: Know it
Ethics: Judge it
Aesthetics: Love it
History: Live it
Politics: Break it

So, don’t forget to vote!

Aesthetics: You’re beautiful!
Ethics: You should be beautiful.
Psychology: You’d like to be beautiful.
Statistics: You’re probably ugly.

Actually, you’re probably not either one.

[b]Top Reasons To Become A Philosopher

1. The tranquil bliss of wisdom and insight
2. The joy of making the world a better place
3. The unlimited opportunities for self-delusion[/b]

No doubt about it: 3
And probably not just here.

British philosophy: You’re too young to understand
French philosophy: You’re too old to understand
American philosophy: You’re exactly the right age to understand, but you don’t

We’ll need a context of course.

[b]Harlan Coben

Survival is the thing. The mind will twist to survive. Anything can become normal.[/b]

Or, for some of us, almost anything.

The hunchback sees the hump of others—never his own.

For example, if they have one.

Well, if you did, you’d be wrong. It is much, much smaller. Try this: Imagine you’re still holding that tiny grain of sand. Now not just the beach you are on, but all the beaches all over the planet, all of them, all down the coast of California and the East Coast from Maine down to Florida and on the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Africa. Imagine all that sand, all those beaches everywhere in the world and now look at that grain of sand you’re holding and still, still, our entire solar system—forget our planet—is smaller than that compared to the rest of the universe. Can you even comprehend how insignificant we are?

He got that from me of course.

The rule of thumb in student files seemed to be, If you have nothing negative to say, don’t say anything at all.

That does work here, right?

When you’re young you don’t get how great it is to be loved unconditionally.

You know, if you can call that love.

Sitting for an hour without reading material meant he had to think.

A philosopher in other words.

[b]Bob Dylan

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it…[/b]

That’s what I call rubbing it in.

I believe that instinct is what makes a genius a genius.

But that’s all genetic, isn’t it?

Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours
I said that.

If only in a song.

What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.

Or, sure, for everything else, the other way around.

It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be.

Especially when you’re knockin’ on Heaven’s door.

I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn’t allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.

Hell, he might even mean it. On the other hand, any women here believe that it’s true?

[b]Blake Crouch

We’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.[/b]

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It’s terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches off into a new world.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.

This ever happen to you? Though maybe not as a fish.

We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.

Clearly, me more than you.

I wish we lived in a world where actions were measured by the intentions behind them. But the truth is, they’re measured by their consequences.

Worse [sometimes], when they are both.

Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.

Even you yourself are suspect.

[b]Existential Comics

people are out there saying stuff like “all we need is science, philosophy is useless” like some scientist discovered concepts like democracy, justice, and equality by looking in a microscope.[/b]

Let’s just say that you can take this too far.

people are really out there thinking we can stop fascism by pointing out that they made factually inaccurate statements somewhere along the way

Indeed: youtu.be/BCb2Le3wtIk

one cannot live on bread alone, we also need people to shut the fuck up once in a while

And here you can actually make them. You “foe” them.

Yes, philosophically speaking all tweets are bad, but to be fully human is to rebel against this fact – to send our terrible tweets out into the universe anyway.

Anyone here know where they actually end up?

God: dead.
Life: meaningless.
Death: inevitable.
Mood: eh, not too bad, at least it’s Friday.

That never works for me. Today for example.

philosophy was great until the fucking nerds took over and started putting math symbols every other sentence just to try to sound smart

On the other hand, how come that almost never happens here?

[b]Neal Stephenson

Which path do you intend to take, Nell? said the Constable, sounding very interested. Conformity or rebellion?
Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.[/b]

What say you, Mr. Objectivist?

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.

And let’s not forget women.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

Worse, when they think they know why.

But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard -to-pin-down striated pillow formation.

Of course that’s just common sense.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

Indeed. So, why doesn’t that ever come up here?

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

Fortunately, for them, majority rules.

[b]Michelangelo Antonioni

Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. [/b]

Uh-oh.

All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff — habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.

Like [some day] the new stuff will be.

I don’t want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society … these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.

That’s actually a boast, isn’t it?

I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.

Of course we’re philosophers, aren’t we?

I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn’t try to find out more, because then there’s the danger that he’ll become his own director.

Let’s decide: Is this a good thing or not?

The public buys “art” - but the word is drained of its meaning.

The money is still good though.

[b]PJ Harvey

I feel like the actual, the most beautiful thing about a song is that it is something that goes out there in the universe and people use it in the way that they need it in their lives. [/b]

Really well put.

I enjoy looking like a tart and thinking like a politician.

He thought, “Shut up and sing.”

Nothing fascinates me more than putting words together, and seeing how a collection of words can produce quite a profound effect.

Me too. If only the same words over and over and over again

You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.

Hear the same words too.

I would never feel confident enough to express my views and opinions as the right ones because I just don’t think that’s possible. There are so many sides to everything that nobody is right or wrong.

She got this from me either before or after I got it from her. Telepathy I think it was.

I try to see as much dance, theatre and films as I can because all of it feeds me in a way that I need feeding for what I do.

You know, when she’s not reading philosophy.

[b]Existential Comics

The “marketplace of ideas” is a great name because a tiny number of people monopolize the national conversation with the stupidest shit imaginable, while our real intellectual needs get ignored because it doesn’t generate profit for the people who own the media.[/b]

Thank God for ILP, right?!

Kant: “you should never lie.”
Person: “what if a murderer asks you where their victim was hiding?”
Kant: “even then!”
Person: “what if your ex is doing super well after they dumped you and they ask how your life is going?”
Kant: “alright, well, there are limits to everything…”

Let’s decide how facetious this is.

What authors put in their novel to shock you:
Russian novel: a murder.
American novel: a rape.
French novel: a suicide.
British novel: someone suggesting that their daughter marry below their station.

What say the Brits here?

Nietzsche described the “last man” as the most contemptible of all people, who live only for pleasure, who believe technology can invent happiness, while hiding their bitter resentment that they’ve become incapable of any act of self-creation.
Today we’d just call them “gamers”.

And, as we all know, gamers are Kids.

Joe Biden:
Do I work with racists? Absolutely.
Do I respect racists? Of course.
Do I like racists? Big time.
Do I admire racists? Heck yeah.
Do I pass racist legislation? All the time.
Am I a racist? First of all, how dare you…

What’s that make Trump then?

One time, as a joke, I tried to live a meaningful, authentic existence where I pursued my real passions in a genuine expression of my freedom.
It was pretty funny.

Anyone here ever try that?

[b]Ani DiFranco

If you want to challenge the system, don’t go to bed with it.[/b]

Let alone go down on it.

Freedom and democracy,
That’s the word from Washington every day.
Put America to sleep with warm milk and clichés
And people are expendable along the way.

You know the ones.

Every time I say something they find hard to hear
They chalk it up to my anger
And never to their own fear

Hell, that could be me here, he thought.

I sincerely believe patriarchy to be at the root of all of our social diseases and feminism, it’s antidote, to be a prerequisite to peace on earth. feminism provides an alternative way of thinking and structuring things that focuses on and prioritizes relationships and de-emphasizes hierarchy, separation and domination.

Are you man enough to accept that?

I envy your ignorance, I hear that it’s bliss.

Let’s just say that it can be.

I am 32 flavors and then some.

See for yourself: youtu.be/vVg7mtgEqGY

[b]Zoë Heller

The conclusion of Dowell’s narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist’s business to make a reader ‘see things clearly’, his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no ‘getting to the bottom of things’, no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.[/b]

Some [obviously] more darkly than others.

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.

Hell, even I wouldn’t go that far. Well, maybe on some days.

Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough - wanted them to be happy and so forth - but they had failed to inspire in her that mad, lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified. She was still in some shock regarding the servility of motherhood - the sheer, thankless drudgery of it. All the cleaning up of messes she had made and preparing meals she did not want to eat. She fed her girls regularly and diligently brushed their teeth twice a day and made sure they were more or less appropriately dressed for the weather, but beyond a dull sense of satisfaction at having fulfilled her maternal duties, she received no pleasure from performing these tasks. Try as she might, she she could not feel her daughters’ happiness and sorrows as her own.

You get this or you don’t. And that includes fathers too.

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?

Yeah, but with kids? And not just Sheba.

This is madness. You’re making it into something it’s not. It’s all in your mind.
Sheba was about to protest, and then she laughed. Isn’t that the worst place it could be?

Oh yeah…

If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.

Sure, why not? Everything else is.

[b]tiny nietzsche

love in the time of algorithms[/b]

In other words, no love at all.

dead inside, dead inside
every single one of us
dead inside

You know, being optimistic.

give me the dead of winter

If only in the dead of summer.

people who say “hot enough for ya” hide bodies under floorboards

Let’s explain why.

stay numb

He can count on me.

you swallow eight ghosts a year while you sleep

And not all of them are spiders.

[b]Bjork

I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.[/b]

Yeah, most would expect her to say this.

Iceland sets a world-record. The United Nations asked people from all over the world a series of questions. Iceland stuck out on one thing. When we were asked what do we believe, 90% said, ‘ourselves’. I think I’m in that group. If I get into trouble, there’s no God or Allah to sort me out. I have to do it myself.

Well, she is, after all, Bjork.

It takes a long time to fully become who you are.

Hell, you might even die first.

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.

Your job: to find electronic music with soul.

I don’t expect people to get me. That would be quite arrogant. I think there are a lot of people out there in the world that nobody gets.

Including every single one of us of course.

If I had a philosophy, it’s that I support the beautiful side of anarchy.

He wondered: Is that even a thing?

[b]Ted Chiang

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.[/b]

Or, perhaps, not tragically from their point of view.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. 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.

Who the hell really knows what that means, but, just for the record: “Heptapods are an intelligent, space-faring extraterrestrial species in Story of Your Life and the 2016 film Arrival.”

You see, the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate.

One man’s opinion?

If those scientists could come up with some way to turn off the jerk circuit in guys’ brains, I’d be all in favor of that.

Starting with the Kids of course.

No one relishes the prospect of humans being conceived artificially. But can you offer an alternative?

Let’s think up one.

Men are no different from your automata; slip a bloke a piece of paper with the proper figures on it, and he’ll do your bidding.

Even if that bloke’s a woman.

[b]tiny nietzsche

the worst children’s toy to step on is an imaginary friend[/b]

Actually deaths have been noted.

what’s eating søren kierkegaard

God knows.

there goes nothing

Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

tell that fuck camus he can find me at the beach

Yet another rendition of “famous last words”.

we need more bees, but not too many bees, okay?

Anyone here know how many more?

why am I just now hearing about my own death?

All the way back to, “why am I just now hearing about my own birth?”

[b]Mark Manson

People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.[/b]

Imagine if that happened here.

Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we’re willing to give. This is something called maturity. It’s nice; you should try it sometime. Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuck-worthy. As Bunk Moreland said to his partner Detective McNulty in The Wire: “That’s what you get for giving a fuck when it wasn’t your turn to give a fuck”.

So, should we give a fuck about this?

…the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.

Like that will ever stop it.

But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. And because entitled people always need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. After all, it takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn’t stink, especially when you’ve actually been living in a toilet.

At best, maybe.

Because here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.

At best, maybe.

Side Note: As a rule, people who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.

More like a footnote actually.

[b]Elin Hilderbrand

Women clearly felt things more deeply: they read sub-text where men saw only white space.[/b]

And, as we all know, there are absolutely no exceptions.

Some people don’t like being happy. They’re much more comfortable when they have a problem.

Never been one of those. But: Is that a good thing?

If everyone slept with the person he or she had secretly fallen in love with, the world would be chaos.

Let’s try futilely to explain this.

Every life contains a novel.

If not a plot.

And Margot should have made a rule about no cell phones. What was it about life now? The people who weren’t present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.

Not that they can’t actually be of course.

A garden is not a matter of life or death. It is far more important than that.

Personaly, I can’t even imagine why.

[b]Woody Allen

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. [/b]

Next up: to hate.

How does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?

See if you can spot the non sequitur.

I’m awash in self-contempt!

That makes one of us.

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

The near future for example. Especially tomorrow.

I want to return to the womb, anyone’s.

With the possible exception of Mia’s.

The curtain rises on a vast primitive wasteland, not unlike certain parts of New Jersey.

Why New Jersey? No, seriously.

[b]Joni Mitchell

Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release. [/b]

Yeah, sure.

During times like these, the wise are influential.

Maybe in la la land.

I had made all these rules for myself: I’m not writing social commentary, I’m not writing love songs.

In other words, blah, blah, blah. But point taken.

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

Where the fuck is this going?

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

Of course that’s now more or less normal.

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

Though not necessarily in that order.