a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Tori Amos

So, you can make me come, that doesn’t make you Jesus. [/b]

It’s not nothing though.

I call that god the Little G. Because the god that we’ve been worshipping is not to me the Supreme Creator. Anybody who needs to control and make people feel ashamed. . .It’s like, ‘I send my only begotten son. . .’ Well you know, that concept of sending a son where we as women could, like, breastfeed him and give him milk, but he’s not gonna soil his dinky with us? What’s that all about?

Someone tell her.

I call that god the Little G. Because the god that we’ve been worshipping is not to me the Supreme Creator. Anybody who needs to control and make people feel ashamed. . .It’s like, ‘I send my only begotten son. . .’ Well you know, that concept of sending a son where we as women could, like, breastfeed him and give him milk, but he’s not gonna soil his dinky with us? What’s that all about?

Sure, maybe.

I’m not somebody that gets played a lot at parties and weddings. I mean, you know, you mention my name and you get an eye roll, until, of course, you’re jumping off a bridge.

She said it.

Robert Plant asked me to marry him, but I said ‘no.’ I mean, you just don’t want to marry someone you’ve wanted to do it with since you were thirteen, because, well, if he farts, I would, like, die!

So, what do you think, true story?

Womanhood is a whole different thing from girlhood. Girlhood is a gift…Womanhood is a choice.

You know, if men let them.
You know the ones.

[b]Neal Stephenson

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.[/b]

Who cares…just show me the money.

If she screws up this delivery, that means she’s double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience.

I actually get that.

He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror.

Just another day, right?

If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics – it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.

And, boy, does that ever apply here!

Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.

Except around matches.

Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god’s wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him–the helpless, innocent victim, that is–into let’s say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

Any truth to this?

[b]tiny nietzsche

happy birthday nietzsche! you fuck[/b]

Said with great affection of course.

go pet a dog. I’ll wait

Go buy a dog? Maybe he’ll wait, maybe he won’t.

this whole time I thought you were an artist, but it turns out you’re just not happy

Or: this whole time I thought you were a nihilist, but it turns out you’re just not happy

If you really loved me, you would watch me from afar, writing poems in blood, and burning them on my grave when I’m dead.

Now that’s love, Mr. Goatman.

wake up and smell the nihilism

Or, sure, the napalm.

resets feelings to factory settings

It’s in the Bible somewhere.

[b]Miles Davis

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.[/b]

Well, there you go.

The way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play.

Is that possibly applicable here?

What’s swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don’t have to ask anybody if that’s good music or not. You can always feel it.

Is that possibly applicable here?

You have to practice for a long time before you can learn to sound like yourself.

At least a couple hours.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

Or: There are no wrong words in philosophy: only words in the wrong places.
Actually both one suspects.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?

Any white folks here who don’t?

[b]Jodie Foster

I’d like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young. [/b]

Your challenge: to make sense of this.

I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.

What’s that make our responsibility then?

Ninety-five percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive… women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.

Not counting Ann Coulter perhaps.

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

Works that way for many outside the business too. That and Taxi Driver.

When I go into the stores, I pet the saddles. Until security comes and takes me away.

Saddles meaning…what exatly?

If I make two movies my entire life, and they’re two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don’t need to be Steven Spielberg.

And on rare occasions neither does he.

[b]so sad today

honestly can’t believe time is just gonna like keep going[/b]

Or: honestly can’t believe that one day time is just gonna like stop

when my soul is feeling tired, parched, weak, i come here to have it totally destroyed

Here too, right?

i should be back in therapy but i’m tweeting instead

Better that than Facebook.

oh fuck i’m still me

And getting more me all the time.

my tits disappoint me more and more with each passing day

I’ll be the judge of that, he thought.

you need to love yourself
listen, if i knew how to love myself i’d be doing it

The part they always forget.

[b]Michael Moore

It really is disgusting when a guy in a ball cap with a high school education is the one asking the tough questions. [/b]

And an obese guy to boot.

I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America with genocide, then built it with slaves. The shootings will continue. It’s who we are.

Then why bitch about it?

Jesus told us that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us.

And look where that got him.

I’m a millionaire, I’m a multi-millionaire, I’m filthy rich. You know why I’m a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do.

Let’s decide if it is okay for hum to say this.

If the Founding Fathers could have looked into a crystal ball and seen AK-47s and Glock semi-automatic pistols, I think they would say, you know, ‘That’s not really what we mean when we say bear arms.’

One man’s opinion as it were.

Hope for the best is what we do, right from the moment we’re born.

Actually, I don’t remember that far back myself.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.[/b]

For example, when they are not.

We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes.

Yep, that’s been my experience too.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

For some, that’s always the bottom line.

You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

Well, Kid, at least you’ll be safe.

Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

Let’s call this “the other side of the coin”.

All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.

Even more lethal [as often as not], a dick.

[b]so sad today

obsessive thinking just feels right[/b]

Let’s obsess on that, okay?

my paranoia feels swollen

As well it should in this world.

everything feels like a burden and nothing is even happening

That can be unnerving no doubt.

my anxiety will always be here for you

When it’s not actually stalking you.

i’d rather be liked than respected, but i’d rather be asleep than liked

And how far can that be from death itself.

make my ass great again

Sure, I’ll give it a go.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.[/b]

Buddha proper as it were.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

Unless, of course, you’re a Desperate Degenerate.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

The real world for example.

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Only if you’ll settle for their answers.

What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness.

You know the ones.

The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

Tell me that’s not a good point.

[b]Ralph Nader

All empires eventually destroy themselves. That’s the record of history. [/b]

Will America be the exception?!

The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.

Trust me: Not just our progress.

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

What’s that make Trump then? No, seriously.

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn’t even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.

Sure, I once actually believed that myself.

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.

Either theirs or ours, for example.

That’s why I call the Senate the graveyard of democracy, because even when you have 58 senators, they can block it and block it and block it.

Unless of course it is something that you want to see blocked.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.” Jonathan Franzen[/b]

Genes or memes, right?

“The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.” Plutarch

Yep, that’s still around.

“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Yep, that’s still around.

“Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

That makes at least two of us.

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” James Joyce

He wondered if anyone had ever thought of Baltimore in that way.

“People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.” James Joyce

Embrace a cactus? Is that just a figure of speech?

[b]Pythagoras

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.[/b]

Say what, right?

A thought is an idea in transit.

Needless to say: for better or worse.

Above all things, reverence yourself.

Not counting the assholes of course.

Wealth is a weak anchor, and glory cannot support a man; this is the law of God, that virtue only is firm, and cannot be shaken by a tempest.

They just said things like that back then.

A blow from your friend is better than a kiss from your enemy.

We’ll need a context of course.

Don’t disarrange my circles!

Let’s put this in context.

[b]Lynda Barry

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it’s there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories. [/b]

Then the part about dasein.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don’t sit around and go “I need to write a book. What’s a good question?” It will be a question that’s just clanging around in my head.

Or, here, “when I work on a thread.”

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can’t control.

Here of course you’ll only get warned.
There’s no dungeon to send you to.

When an attractive but aloof (“cool”) man comes along, there are some of us who offer to shine his shoes with our underpants. There are thousands of scientific concepts as to why this is so, and yes, yes, it’s very sick but none of this helps.

For men and attractive women, double it at least.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

Until you’re the butt of it perhaps.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

Buddha?

[b]Pete Seeger

The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.[/b]

So, how far is that from the “noble savage”? Or, how far is that from the actual truth?

And there’s a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

My seeds? Or, sure, your seeds.

Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.

And that’s still too close to call.

According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God.

Great, that again, he thought.

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can’t save the community you have seen?

Uh, you can’t?

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.

Well, I’m practically that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Man is the microcosm: I am my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein[/b]

What’s that make “I” then?

“One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not much that this isn’t. Right, Kids?

“The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.” Jean-Baptiste Say

What’s that make us postmoderns then?

“Lived experience can never be fully resolved into concepts, but its dark tonality accompanies all conceptual thought.” Wilhelm Dilthey

Mine being particularly dark of course.

“The knife of historical relativism…which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.” Wilhelm Dilthey

Well, I’m doing what I can here.

“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.” Vladimir Nabokov

Ever getting smaller all the time.

[b]Douglas Adams

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.[/b]

Hell, that could be our planet, right?

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

Plus you’ve been clawed to bits.

“O Deep Thought computer," he said, “the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us…” he paused, “The Answer.”
“The Answer?” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to what?”
“Life!” urged Fook.
“The Universe!” said Lunkwill.
“Everything!” they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment’s reflection.
“Tricky,” he said finally.
“But can you do it?”
Again, a significant pause.
“Yes,” said Deep Thought, “I can do it.”
“There is an answer?” said Fook with breathless excitement.
“Yes,” said Deep Thought. “Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But, I’ll have to think about it.”
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
“How long?” he said.
“Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
“Seven and a half million years…!” they cried in chorus.
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I?"

So much for AI. Oh, and the answer was 42.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: I refuse to prove that I exist, says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
But, says Man, The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.
Oh dear, says God, I hadn’t thought of that, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

I know, if only it were that simple.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer.

I know, if only it were that simple.

Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.

Next up: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” Vladimir Nabokov[/b]

Of course, if you’re a cat, it can get you killed.

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” William Faulkner

On the other hand, when you die, only for all the rest of us.

“Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.” Gottfried Leibniz

It’s like a fucking tornado here.

“Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.” Gottfried Leibniz

After all, who hasn’t?

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” Bertolt Brecht

What’s that make philosophy then? Serious philosophy of course.

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” Marcel Proust

Now that’s a hard truth, isn’t it?

[b]Bob Dylan

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself. [/b]

Of course that doesn’t work for the likes of you and I.

Black is the Color and none is the number

Yep, that’s still the same.

Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can’t make up their minds and neither can I.

Not much more perfectly normal than that.

Don’t know which one is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool.

Never been cool myself. Why? Just lucky I guess.

Everybody’s wearing a disguise
To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes

If you’ve got anything left there at all.

It’s not a house, it’s a home

But then it burned down.

[b]Blake Crouch

We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.[/b]

Of course this gets really, really old after a while.

We see it macro, like one big story, but when you’re in it, it’s all just day-to-day, right? And isn’t that what you have to make your peace with?

Of course this gets really, really old after a while.

The endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.

Anyone know if that’s a real thing?

Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

Which brings me back to Michael Crichton. He didn’t just play with big ideas in his books. He used those ideas to explore questions that felt immediate, meaningful, emotionally powerful—to everyone. You didn’t have to be a sci-fi reader to understand what he was talking about, or to care, deeply, about the suspenseful tale he was spinning.

Anyone here dare to disagree?

They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.

You’ve either been there or you haven’t. Me, I’ve sort of been.