a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Kelley Armstrong

The guy can make me feel stupid even when he’s telling me I don’t have to let him make me feel stupid. [/b]

So, how stupid is that?

Life experience. I can talk it up, vow to broaden my horizons, but I’m still limited to the experiences with my life. How can a person understand an experience that lies completely outside her own? She can see it, feel it, imagine what it would be like to live it, but it’s no different from seeing a movie on a screen and saying, “Thank God that’s not me”.

My point exactly. Or as exactly as it can be.

That’s what being crazy was, wasn’t it? You thought you were fine.

Indeed, and we’ve got a few of them here.

Dearly departed, scarcely lamented, deeply demented.

That works for me.

That’s what we all want, isn’t it? Power without price.

You know, just once before we die.

If you say ‘we’re in this together,’ I’m going to hurl.

Hurl then.

[b]Sad Socrates

I am feeling my best depression.[/b]

So far in other words.

Death is the old normal.

On the other hand, nothing has changed.

There are better ways to die than living.

How about the other way around?

Please don’t confuse me with myself.

After all, I never do.

Only rocks can be sexy.

He means boulders of course.

[b]How to Exist in the 21st Century:

1. Look at your government
2. Now cry[/b]

Or, sure, .

[b]Morgan Spurlock

To strip yourself from a lot of the things around you that make you comfortable is a really challenging thing that most of us don’t do or don’t get a chance to do.[/b]

First, Mr. Objectivist, why would you ever want to? Right?

I was starting to become impotent through this diet and couldn’t perform. How many people who are taking the little blue pill, if they started to change what they are eating most of the time, could change the way their sex life is?

Hey, why take chances, he thought.

The food is absolutely atrocious, and parents have no idea. Parents are giving their kids three dollars and saying, ‘Okay, see you later. Go off to school and have a good lunch.’

The food industrial complex let’s call it.

I think people need to see on both sides. Seeing how the people in the Palestinian Territories can’t move around - it’s a maze now, with the wall, the road blocks and everything else. It takes you hours to get from one person’s house to your job or to a friend or even to the hospital if someone’s hurt. Then you go into Israel and see in Tel Aviv, where they have 12-18 bomb threats a day, which are real. It completely disrupts their life. Or Sderot where bombs are falling daily from the sky fired by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

Right. Both sides here are in exactly the same boat.

In the U.S., we’ve given corporations all the powers and freedoms of an individual but with none of the responsibility. Corporations need to be giving back to their communities just as much as they’re taking away.

It’s less what we give and more what we let them take.

I couldn’t open up a magazine, you couldn’t read a newspaper, you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about the obesity epidemic in America.

We are rather remiss about it here though.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

Totalitarianisms may crumble from within, as they fail to keep the promises that brought them to power; or they may be attacked from without; or both. There are no sure-fire formulas, since very little in history is inevitable.[/b]

Aside perhaps from that.

I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

The children of course have their own rendition.

How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.

Well, up until Trump.

…underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it.

Let’s file this one under “revenge is mine!”

No one wants to die, said Becka. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.

Yep, I’m closing in on that alright.

How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

No, actually think about it this time.

[b]tiny nietzsche

a chicken in every porno[/b]

No roosters please.

day 57: we had promised not to eat the young

Situational ethics, right?

we can be backwards, just for one day

Or, for others, all the way to the grave.

mean something to somebody else

Let us know if it’s you.

robots killing humans while repeatedly saying “it isn’t personal”

Well, it isn’t, right?

postmodernism is in retrograde

Not around here it ain’t.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.[/b]

Needless to say, for better or for worse.

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, “The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,” is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.

Let’s just split the difference, okay?

Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

Wow, what does that say about philosophers then?

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

Well, until one bumps into another’s moral space.

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

Of course it never works that way in reality. Though, here, sure, I’m only guessing.

[b]I like the word ‘gumption’ because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.

If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.[/b]

Can a philosopoher even have gumption?

[b]tiny nietzsche

happy birthday camus! got a smoke?[/b]

How about a new novel?

a scar is born

Psychologically. The worst kind.

is it unethical to feed leftover chicken to your chickens?

Watch them complain, right?

to do list:
dishes
laundry
stare listlessly into space

Not necessarily in that order of course.

the abyss has announced that it is now the ABYSS

Next up: the ABYSS!

so many bad cults right now. cult leaders need to step up their game

Or here: so many bad objectivists right now. objectivist posters need to step up their game

[b]Julian Assange

Where they couldn’t pick holes in our arguments they would drive horses and carriages through my character. [/b]

Speaking of impeaching Don Trump…

The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

After all, just look at the assholes here.

There is nothing new in this world other than the history that you don’t know yet.

And it’s always their history, not yours.

Hillary Clinton is the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citi Bank. This is quite amazing.

The real Deep State. Bilderberg Inc.

This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.

You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.

At least think about it.

[b]Pythagoras

There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman.[/b]

Would he still say that today?

You should help a man to take up a burden, but you should not help him put it back down.

We’ll need a context of course.

Don’t eat your heart.

Let alone your brain.

Abstain from animals.

Of which he was one himself.

It is required to find the infinitely big inside what’s infinitely small to feel the presence of God.

That actually work for anyone here?

It is difficult to walk at one and the same time many paths of life.

I’ve often found it impossible.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I should have logged off in 2015[/b]

What, and miss all the fun?

the sun doesn’t care about your interpretation of time

Next up: the Moon.

honk if you are filled with nausea

Or here: post if you are filled with nausea.

when drugs open a door, somebody jumps out of a window

Obviously, this makes sense only if you are high.

you remind me of a color I once knew

Pitch black, right?

now that halloween is over I can get back to wearing black everyday

Was it Halloween already?

[b]Lynda Barry

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you’re not. That’d be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the ‘hello’ is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya? [/b]

Not as much as coming here of course.

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves.

Of course we often overthink these things.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

Uh, nope?

In health we’re doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.

After all…

As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintegrating.

Oh, shit?

The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?

Splattered with all that blood.

[b]Pete Seeger

There is an old Arabic proverb, ‘When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet’, so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music… [/b]

Hell, just look at the “Hot 100”.

Did you ever want something really bad and then when you finally got it all you could do was stand there and grin at it?

Let’s trade anecdotes.

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

Fuck that, said the philosopher.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

They make them wage slaves is what they do.

The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.

No shit?

Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.

Let alone philosophy departments.

[b]so sad today

oh fuck i woke up[/b]

Don’t you just hate that?

if there’s one thing i don’t like it’s the consequences of my actions

Let’s put an end to that. At least here.

i hate when reality interferes with my imaginary world

This is actually a real thing.

can’t decide if i’m dying

If you were born, you’re dying.

i can’t wait to tell you about my suffering

And, sure, eventually, we’ll get around to yours.

ranting about capitalism on my iphone

I mean, who doesn’t?

[b]Douglas Adams

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.[/b]

Still, it’s okay to pray for one.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport’.

Let’s explain why.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Like that’s even possible.
His point, perhaps?

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

Just not yours, Kid.

There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

Theology 101.

There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.

Like that will stop some here.

[b]Bob Dylan

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I’ve got nothing, Ma, to live up to[/b]

That makes two of us, Bob.

I’m looking for a woman who’s head is mixed up like mine.

I found one. For about 20 minutes.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

If not the whole fucking universe. And not just ours.

Call me any name you like I will never deny it.

If you get his drift.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

Though, believe it or not, some still do.

I’m good with songs I haven’t written, if I like them. I’m glad I didn’t write any of them. I already know how they go, so I have more freedom with them. I understand these songs. I’ve known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I’m not coming to them like a stranger.

Let’s make that applicable to posts here.

[b]so sad today

everything is getting worse in a boring way[/b]

The deadliest combination.

the subtle art of everything being annoying

Soon to be an actual science.

no of course i’m not going to relax and enjoy life

Is that still even possible, he pondered.

if you need me i’ll be hunched over my phone

In the missionary position.

thought of the day: no

She means “no fucking way!” of course!

that which does not kill you but makes you sleep all day

And then on into the night.

[b]Blake Crouch

Do you hear that? Ethan asked.
Hear what?
For five seconds, Ethan was silent on the line. That’s the sound of me not giving a fuck. [/b]

Let’s come up with the equivalent of that here. Only no time limit.

The world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely.

Or, as the case may be, barely.

I hate clowns!
That’s not a real clown, another boy said. That’s just some guy dressed up like a clown!

Can YOU tell them apart?

I am not allowed to think I’m crazy. I am only allowed to solve this problem.

For example, consent violation.

Look, I say, I’ve tried to explain to you how the box works, but forget all that for a minute. Here’s the thing. The box isn’t all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you’ll find.

Fear being the least of it.
Right?

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. — C.S. Lewis

Clever if nothing else.

[b]Jacqueline Woodson

I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.[/b]

Just not in this really, really imperfect Now.

Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

Trust me: not all time.

You can’t always be pushing people away. Someday nobody’ll come back.

Unless of course that’s actually the whole point.

When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.

Unless of course this is the only world there is.

In all your getting, get understanding.

Just don’t expect to get understood.

Sometimes…you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

They see to that, don’t they?

[b]so sad today

just checking to see if everything is still fucking stupid and it is[/b]

I’ve put that on automatic pilot myself.

i need so much shit i don’t need

On the other hand, I want so much shit I don’t have.

she died as she lived, feeling like she was about to die

Well, that’s the end of that.

it’s a beautiful day to be in denial

Or an ugly day not to be.

fears:
-disappearing
-not disappearing

Or, sure, the other way around.

i would consider getting out of bed if the world was another bed

Maybe in Heaven?

[b]Neal Stephenson

But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.[/b]

No getting around the scum part though.

Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.

Once again: genes or memes?

…he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it – say, in a nice stained-glass window – not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.

You know, if transcendence is even a thing.

Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead.

He left out objectivist. Right, Kid?

In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

Too close to call, isn’t it?

If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer’s ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

Could be ketchup, mustard or mayonnaise, right?