a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.” James Joyce[/b]

Ouch! Right, Kid?

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Marcel Proust

You know, if you’re lucky.

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.” Theodor Adorno

Or what I call the objectivist.

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

See, I told you!!

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

Because other people tell them as likely as not.

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

Well, not counting the Deep State of course.

[b]Tori Amos

And is it right, butterfly, they like you better framed and dried?[/b]

My guess: The butterfly has no choice in the matter at all.

You’re just an empty cage girl, if you kill the bird.

Unless that’s the whole point.

I wanna smash the faces of those beautiful boys, those Christian boys.

Sure, if you have a good reason.

Girls you’ve gotta know when it’s time to turn the page.

Or even burn the book.

Somebody will come backstage and go, ‘You saved me.’ And I will have to say, ‘Stop right there. You saved yourself.’

Come on, why not a little or a lot of both?

The music is the magic carpet that other things take naps on.

I hear that.

[b]Neal Stephenson

That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.[/b]

In other words, for each of us, one by one, that’s either the good news or the bad news.

Maybe we should go back and get their guns, Marlon suggested.
That’s how it would work in a video game, Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing.

A Kid thing in other words.

But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.

My guess: Not just on this planet.

The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as ‘near-fatal.’ But it’s okay, he’d said, you’ll black out before anything really bad happens to you.

No, not always, right?

Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Meatverse, basically----who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.

History: The more things changed…

Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

Not all that different for some many most here, is it?

[b]Miles Davis

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.[/b]

You know, technically. The place I never, ever go listening to music.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

Of course we don’t call them that today, he noted.

Sometimes, if you ask people to “go downstairs and get me this or that,” they’ll say, “It’s rainin” or “It might rain,” or “There’s some bumpy roads on the road,” or bla-bla-bla. They give you all those excuses, so when they do something which is easy, you’re supposed to say, “Damn, you did that?”

In all the races of course.

I mean, it makes me sick when I see a white man sitting there smiling at me being entertaining, man. When I know what he’s gonna do after he gets through. You know, when you see that thing on their face - like: “Entertain me.” You know what I mean? Even the black guy that’s trying to be white - even he can have that crap on his face.

Athletes too of course.

Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren’t sweet.

If he says so.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it?

[b]Jodie Foster

All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn’t matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn’t. There is something kind of refreshing about that. [/b]

Either that or downright fucking infuriating.

Otherness is a big thing for me. I’m always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn’t lead.

You get to make-believe them as it were.

Where I have problems is when I am in the midst of doing something that I am completely focused on, and then I am asked to buy shoes or something.

Buy shoes?!

Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas.

Enough said in other words.

I love the way L. A. leaves you alone.

Works that way in Baltimore too.

I’m a technician. I don’t go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

Who’d a thunk it?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"When all else fails, philosophize.“ J. M. Coetzee[/b]

Serously, for example.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense.” Frank Herbert

And the deeper some go, the more logical it is.

“What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.” Julius Caesar

Objectivism in a nutshell, isn’t it?

“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.” Voltaire

And, increasingly, the science of government as well.

“How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.” Alfred de Musset

Any exceptions here?

“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not you though, right?