a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Noel Coward

He’s completely unspoiled by failure.[/b]

Take comfort in that, Kids.

I never cared who scored the goal, or which side won the silver cup. I never learned to bat or bowl; but I heard the curtain going up.

And that’s before the applause. Or, from time to time, the standing ovations.

She stopped the show — but then the show wasn’t traveling very fast.

Is there the equivalent of that here?

Bed is the perfect climate.

Not to worry: Someday you’ll know what that means.

Conceit is an outward manifestation of inferiority.

Just not your own, right?

It’s like this, dear boy, the one in front is blind and the kind one behind is pushing him.

This actually goes deeper than you think it does.

[b]so sad today

the will to live gets on my nerves[/b]

Even worse, the will to power.

torturing myself over things that don’t matter is going ok

Or, for some, actually, not okay at all.

i have trouble making decisions because i don’t see the point in anything

That will do it.

ask your doctor if 23 hours a day of alone time is right for you

Or, sure, your psychiatrist.

nothing good happens out of bed

Well, maybe once in a while.

it’s important to give up on everything first thing in the morning

Or even before you fall asleep.

[b]Edith Piaf

I’d like to see one person - just one - who would own up to having been a coward. [/b]

How about it, anyone here?

I can die now. I’ve lived twice.

Me, I’ve sort of lived once.

I’ve been thinking about Jesus. Don’t you find it a bit strange that, since He was living with His family and all, He up and left them just when they needed him most?

Well, His life was scripted by the Creator Himself.

For me, sleeping is a waste of time. I’m afraid to sleep. It’s a form of death.

Not counting the wet dreams of course.

I want to die young. I think it’s awful to get old, and sickness is ugly.

Does 47 count?

To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.

Sure, it’s possible she really meant it.

[b]Daniel Silva

I can be whoever you want me to be: CIA, FBI, DIA, an agency so fucking secret you’ve never heard of it before.[/b]

They don’t call it the deep state for nothing.

So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?
Develop a drinking problem. More Scotch, please.

Cheers.

The secrets of survivors are not easily surrendered. They are locked away behind barricaded doors and accessed at great risk to those who possess them.

Don’t even think of coming after mine.

It seems difficult to imagine, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers. If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site; and if one made a fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive for all eternity. But now, in the era of lost inhibition, it seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share. In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity. Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality. Were Descartes alive today, he might have written: I tweet, therefore I am.

Tell me this has nothing to do with dasein as an existential contraption embedded historically and culturally in a particular world.

The best way to win at a game of chance is to remove chance from the equation.

My guess: By any means necessary.

“If you live to seek revenge, dig a grave for two". Ancient Jewish Proverb.

Or more as the case may be.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely is not universality but circularity.” Willard Van Orman Quine[/b]

Let’s file this one under “definitional logic”.

“A hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one.” Heraclitus

Cue [among other things] dasein.

“To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future”. Simone de Beauvoir

Just clear enough perhaps to be plausable.

“Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.” Bob Dylan

Let’s start with this.

“When one’s ideas are not challenged, one’s ability to defend them weakens.” John Stuart Mill

Not counting you Mr. Objectivist.

“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Never have been. And, I suspect, never will be.

[b]Oswald Spengler

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.[/b]

You know, even though, in all likelihood, we live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort – “happiness.” He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering.

Yep, sounds about right.

Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.

Indeed. And if you don’t believe him, run it by Satyr.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

And that’s probably applicable to our posts here, right?

History is direction—but Nature is extension—ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.

Well, so far, not me.

Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.

He means state capitalism of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Do everything like someone is gazing at you.” Epicurus[/b]

In other words, not just God.

“All knowledge degenerates into probability.” David Hume

Or, here, futility.

“People know what they want because they know what other people want.” Theodor Adorno

You know, being, among other things, fucking sheep.

“In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.” Theodor Adorno

When, for example, you come down out of the clouds.

"The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness” Theodor Adorno

Actually ideology itself is no match for the postmodern gods: pop culture, consumerism and the worship of celebrity.

“Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?” Isaac Bashevis Singer

Rather a quandary, isn’t it?

[b]Bob Dylan

People think they know me from my songs. But my repertoire of songs is so wide-ranging that you’d have to be a madman to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs.[/b]

And here: People think they know me by my posts…

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

Yeah, sure.

The song was there before me, before I came along. I just sorta came down and just sorta took it down with a pencil, but it was there before I came around.

Noted. But let’s move on.

I never wanted to be a prophet or a saviour. Elvis maybe.

You know, like Phil Ochs.

I just try to understand that tomorrow is another day.

Next up: the day after that.

I’ll stand over your grave 'til I’m sure that you’re dead.

The sound you hear is [still] the masters of war snickering. And not just all the way to the banks.

[b]Blake Crouch

It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. [/b]

And then some of them grow up to be Kids. Here for example.

There’s a theory in the field of aesthetics called the uncanny valley. It holds that when something looks almost like a human being—a mannequin or humanlike robot—it creates revulsion in the observer, because the appearance is so close to human, yet just off enough to evoke a feeling of uncanniness, of something that is both familiar and alien.

For some like their reflection in the mirror.

Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse?

Let’s think of something.

On my own, the ordinariness of the moment is almost too much to stand. I glance around the restaurant, taking in the faces of the waiters, the customers. Two dozen noisy conversations mixing into a kind of meaningless roar. I think, What if you people knew what I knew?

Or, here, think like I thought?

Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Next up: What is dasein?

My reality—more and more every day—is this world. Where I have nothing. Where I’m a homeless, filthy creature whose existence evokes only compassion, pity, and disgust. Nearby, another homeless man is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, having a full-volume conversation with nobody. I think, Am I so different? Aren’t we both lost in worlds that, for reasons beyond our control, no longer align with our identity?

Worse [for some] felling that and not being homeless.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

To make a long story short: Russian classical literature is not allowed to walk into a bar.[/b]

Meanwhile modern American literature owns it.

How many eternal loves have you had so far?

Me? Less than zero.

Shouldn’t it be ‘Things That Don’t Give Me Anxiety’? Much shorter.

If in fact there is anything at all.

How to sound sexy in any language: just lower your voice and say it in French.

Anyone here actually tried that?

My conscience: We need to talk.
Me: I want to see my lawyer.

Or, for some, their priest.
Unless, of course, you don’t have [or want] a conscience at all.

Relationship: I choose the bridge, you choose the river.

Next up: did he jump or was he pushed?
Or she as the case may be.

[b]Ani DiFranco

Maybe you can keep me from never being happy, but you’re not going to stop me from having fun![/b]

We’ll need a context of course. Or two of them.

When you sit right down in the middle of yourself you’re gonna wanna have a comfortable chair.

And whatever your drug of choice.

Like how could you do nothing,
and say, ‘I’m doing my best.’
How could you take almost everything,
and then come back for the rest?
How could you beg me to stay,
reach out your hands and plead,
and then pack up your eyes and run away
as soon as I agreed?

Yeah, how could you?!

People need something or someone to fasten themselves to in order to reassure themselves that they are real.

So, sure, why not an infantile philosophy.

What bugs me is that you believe what you’re saying
What bothers me is that you don’t know how you feel
What scares me is that while you’re telling me stories, you actually believe that they are real

Of course it doesn’t bother you a bit. Let alone scare you.

Then I show up steady ready and proud
and I find I’ve forgotten how to talk out loud
Isn’t it just like you
to bring me to my knees?

My advice: steer clear.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

I’m like an open book. You can ask me anything!
Do you mind if I close you and shove you in the deepest corner of my bookshelf?[/b]

If not in the trash can.

Society: In this greatest age of freedom and tolerance, you can and you must be your true self!
[me being my true self]
Society: Well, maybe not this much.

Imagine society reacting to mine. You know, if I ever find it.

If you find yourself in a difficult situation with no way out, use the door that has a sign ‘Brechtxit’ on it.

You know where.

Who’s your favourite philosopher?
None of your foucault business.

Uh, get it?

Every time the future starts now, I feel slightly awkward.

Wait until you feel really nauseous.

Reading The Divine Comedy.
Shadow on paper.
Selfie.

It’s gorgeous of course.

[b]Neal Stephenson

If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?[/b]

A gruesome reminder perhaps that some don’t.

In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.

He’s talking about our own species of course.

BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements – this is how they convince themselves they didn’t get ripped off.

So, is this actually true?

Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You—Rudy—and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us—it’s not that we’re smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he’s a farmer who didn’t get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.

Now this might reflect real philosophy, right?

The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry’s computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn’t working were not as interesting to him.

Cue, among others, Maximillian Cohen.

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.

He wondered if that was a good thing.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Jesus wept. But also liked to party.[/b]

Okay, but how do we know that?

The purpose of your life, as we all know, is to purchase electronic devices, and keep them charged.

Or, if you have the wherewithal, to hire someone else to.

When the last Boomer dies, perhaps all of the rest of us shall no longer have to hear about Woodstock every goddamned day.

Right, like it’s not the 50th goddamned anniversary!

I think, accidentally, by internet gambling, I just won Greenland.

Which reminds me: Greenland is mostly ice, and Iceland is mostly green.

So then I said to Beckett, “Sammy, you know that allegory is over, right?” Of course, I had not yet made Fitzcarraldo.

Anyone here know Sammy’s take on this?

Why can’t I be happy?
Because happiness does not exist.
Why can’t I be loved?
Because love does not exist.
What can I do?
Wait awhile, you’ll die eventually.

Yet another rendition of birth school work death.

[b]Luis Bunuel

If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence. [/b]

Sounds rather despairing to me. But I’ll flip a coin to decide.

Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

So, does that mean there is one?

I find science analytical, pretentious and superficial-largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox-in other words,-all the things I love the most.

All possibly true. But I’m sticking with it myself.

A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made.

On the other hand, what the fuck does that mean?

Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than receiving an Oscar.

And, it goes without saying, a Golden Globe.

Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I’d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers.

I wonder if he’d still want to.

[b]Marianne Faithfull

Never apologize, never explain - didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t. [/b]

After all, you can never be too arrogant these days.

Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I’ve had lots of shocks because it’s as though I don’t learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.

You know, like having one foot in the grave.

I don’t talk about my private life.

That works for me, he snorted, because I don’t want to hear about it.

I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.

Let’s file this one under, say, dasein?

I do have a strong sense of God. It’s impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.

Or: I do have a strong sense of No God. It’s impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.

I’d really like people to see me as a real actress, which I am, but they don’t. It’s hard to get them to see me as a musician, they just see me as a hanger-on to the Stones, which is not what I am at all.

The acting part I don’t know about, but the music part is all hers and out of this world.

[b]Billie Holiday

When you sing, always tell the truth.[/b]

And start, for example, by writing your own songs.

People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

Back them for sure.

Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose.

Think the battle and the war.

I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.

Of course that’s not a problem for her now.

You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.

And even then fuck them. Providing you can.

And when you’re poor, you grow up fast.

But only if they’ll let you.

[b]God

Saying “guns don’t kill people” is like saying “defibrillators don’t save people”.[/b]

You think?

If you pray hard enough, nothing happens.

Okay, then pray harder still.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth with the potential to make themselves the only creatures on earth.

Not counting cockroaches of course.

I’m not the fake account, the Bible is.

He means their Bible, right?

You really have no fucking idea what you’re doing down there, do you.

Look who’s talking!!

[b]THE FIVE STAGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

  1. Denial
  2. Guilt
  3. Depression
  4. Acceptance
  5. Drowning[/b]

You know, by the end of the century.

[b]Brad Thor

Anything that grows is, by definition, alive. Washington, D.C. was no exception. As a living organism, the Federal Government’s number one job was self-preservation. Any threat to its existence had to be dealt with.[/b]

Especially now with Koch dead.

People who took themselves too seriously not only were no fun, but could also be very dangerous.

Of course here they’re only Kids.

He had the three ingredients to happiness right in the palm of his hand and he knew it—something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.

Or four if you count a ton of cash.

The worth of a culture, in his opinion, could be boiled down to one thing—how well that culture took care of its weakest members, particularly its women and children.

You know, in theory.

As the old saying goes, you can’t spell unprofessional, unethical, or unaccountable without the UN.

Okay, okay, let’s burn it to the ground, Mr. Reactionary.

To tell you the truth, Father, I don’t think God has a favorite football team, or a favorite religion.

Anyone here know for sure?

[b]Nina Simone

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.[/b]

Nope, with me, it never sunk in. And god knows I tried.

There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

In this day and age, trust me: For better or for worse.

Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.

Abolished is the last thing it is for some these days.

I know I’m different, but I don’t think about it.

Of course she did just then.

I do not believe in mixing of the races. You can quote me. I don’t believe in it, and I never have. I’ve never changed. I’ve never changed my hair. I’ve never changed my color, I have always been proud of myself, and my fans are proud of me for remaining the way I’ve always been. I married a white man one time, but he was a creep.

Nothing racist to see here, folks.

You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality

Right, like that would ever happen.