a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Douglas Adams

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.[/b]

The definitive history of, well, something.

Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.
Ah, well, I’m not sure I believe that.

Challenging an objectivist…

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

Death and the puddle. Anthropomorphically as it were.

What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?
Ask a glass of water!

Does this make sense?

Life is wasted on the living.

Remember when it used to be just the young?

Life, said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it."

Of course some of us don’t make it this far.

[b]Bob Dylan

I do know what my songs are about.[/b]

On the other hand…

The best songs are the songs you write that you don’t know anything about.

More contradiction, eh Ecmandu.

If ever asked to look at yourself, don’t.

After all, look what it did to me.

I used to think it’s better if you just live and die and no one knows who you are.

In other words, no one that counts.

He hands you a nickel
He hands you a dime
He asks you with a grin
If you’re having a good time.

And not just on Maggie’s farm.

You will find God in the church of your choice.

You know, if He actually does exist.

[b]so sad today

no of course i wasn’t honest about how i feel[/b]

After all, it may not even be possible.

listen, don’t make me regret pretending i have no needs

Now that gets tricky.

i have no self-esteem but i do have an ego

Now that gets tricky.

you’re never alone with fear of abandonment

Next up: fear of attachment.

when i’m simultaneously trying to get attention and hide from the world that’s the real me

Some of us here, right?

watching myself fuck up in slow motion

Then rewinding it again and again and again.

[b]Jack Finney

If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.[/b]

Well, then that’s what we are. You know, if that is what we are.

Would you have references?
I’m awfully sorry but I haven’t. I just arrived in New York, and don’t know a soul. Except you. I smiled but she didn’t smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, It’s true that I’m an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I’m neat.

And neat ain’t nothing, right?

The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing, he said reflectively, but I’m not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe—from sub-atomic particles to the universe—except itself.

Let alone the mind of a body snatcher.

I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician’s who made a decision of profound consequence.

Damned if I didn’t learn this in Vietnam too. Not only that but while I was there.

Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it’s your function, your reason for being. There’s no other reason, and none needed.

And, as likely as not, in an essentially meaningless world.

Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well.

Let’s go so far is to actually name the sociopaths among us here. Starting with the most obvious.

[b]Kristin Cashore

When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else? [/b]

Or here: When Kids stopped behaving like Kids, did they stop being Kids? Did they become something else?

The only way for you to keep your mind straight is to run from those who would confuse you.

Of course that can never work for me. And for both reasons.

I don’t want to love you if you’re only going to die.

No getting around that though, is there?

Every configuration of people is an entirely new universe unto itself.

Sort of she means.

Perhaps I can stay by the fire and mend your socks and scream if I hear any strange noises.

We know where this is going. Straight to bed.

She groped forward, hands and feet, in search of darkness, distance and solitude.

Trust me: It can be done.

[b]so sad today

wakes up
remembers i’m a powerless speck of dust in an uncontrollable world
goes back to bed[/b]

Repeat as necessary.

i’m an organ donor and it might be time

I’ll take anything, he pleaded.

if you need me i’ll be trapped inside myself

Reading Philosophy For Dummies.

i like pics of me where you can’t see my body or face

I like taking them.

why does anyone do anything

Let alone over and over and over again.

theoretically i’m totally over you

That works here, right?!

[b]Neal Stephenson

Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.[/b]

The rest is history. Human history anyway.

…there is no honour among consultants.

If only out in the real world.

The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.

Time. The 16,738th take on it.

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

Soul. By coincidence, the 16,738th take on that too.

a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.

Obviously?

He is just not your type, Uncle Meng said gently. Please, do try not to fuck him.
How come it’s okay for James Bond?

My guess: he’s just a character in a book?

[b]Miles Davis

Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox. And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face - and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall.[/b]

Now we know.

Some musicians play with their heart, you know what I mean? I don’t know what to tell a person that can’t - if you can’t tell a person what you’re talkin’ about when they’re rushin’ or droppin’ the tempo, you get somebody else.

Not to worry, it’s a technical thing.

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.

Not to worry, it’s a personal thing.

I said to Lionel Richie, “Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs.”

My own [and most everyone else’s] favorite: youtu.be/UBYnT8JY7sE

When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you . . . their spirits are walking around in me, so they’re still here and passing it on to others.

When you work with great philosophers?

I would never try and play like Harry James, because I don’t like his tone - for me. It’s just white. You know what I mean? He has what we black trumpet players call a white sound. But it’s for white music … I can tell a white trumpet player, just listening to a record. There’ll be something he’ll do that’ll let me know that he’s white.

More “white man” stuff.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Martin Heidegger[/b]

Even he didn’t really understand that, did, he?

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” Francis Bacon

And, now, women.

“Man is free at the moment he wishes to be free " Voltaire

In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is not unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse." Robert Fripp

“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” Leonard Bernstein

Or even less time than that.

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live." Gustave Flaubert

Let’s file this one as well under, “it’s so deep it’s meaningless.”

[b]Sharon Stone

The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men.[/b]

Not to mention the other way around. Well, for most of us.

People are afraid of changing; that they’re losing something. They don’t understand that they are also gaining something.

Guess what? We’ll need a context.

…until he looks for you, he’s not the one.

She stopped looking for me a long time ago.

I’m not trying to make myself look like a girl because I’m not a girl anymore. I’m very happy about being a grown woman.

I know: Does she still believe that?

Realize when you are ‘middle aged’ you have a chance for a whole second career, another love, another life.

Next up: Realize when you’re an ‘old lady’…

The worse that could happen has already happened to me.

Of course no one can really know that for sure.

[b]André Aciman

I wish I had one friend I wasn’t destined to lose.[/b]

Two words: Mere mortal.

Think of the pain before the pain.

How dumb is that, he thought.

This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them.

With or without regret.

I began reluctantly to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future.

Well, until you run out of future of course.

What did one do around here?
Nothing. Wait for summer to end.
What did one do in the winter, then?
I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, ‘Don’t tell me: wait for summer to come, right.’

In other words, thank god for the spring and the fall.

You are the only person I’d like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense.

Never met anyone like that myself.
You?

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

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. You’re a judge, so you are the educated, like it or not. They won’t want you around.[/b]

Let’s look for it here, okay?

We can’t always do what we want, said Zilla gently. Even you.
And sometimes we have to do what we hate, said Vera. Even you.

Coming and going, they gotcha.

The ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.

Well, not always anyway.

…you could believe you were living virtuously and also murder people if you were a fanatic.

By, for example, calling them terrorists.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.

Which birthday for you?

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated.

It’s almost a necessity these days.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.” Billy Wilder[/b]

Anyone here actually have one?

“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.” Leonardo da Vinci.

On both sides of the revolution let’s say.

"I know that I exist; the question is, What is this ‘I’ that ‘I’ know. “ Rene Descartes

He just didn’t pursue this far enough, did he?

“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And that’s before you get to the Kids.

“Before Elvis there was nothing.” John Lennon

He means Bob Dylan of course. If not himself.

“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” Edgar Allan Poe

Unless of course it is exactly the opposite.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.[/b]

And not just motorcycles.

One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.

Let’s run this by Native Americans.

I’ve wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it, and yet we didn’t see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away. I’m looking for the truth.” And so it goes away. Puzzling.

Are you puzzled?

If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.

Does Nature know that?

Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.

The forest for the trees, the trees for the forest.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.

Not counting the objectivists. Right, Kids?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel[/b]

Trust me: not all limitations.

“He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.” Homer

That’s practically obligatory now.

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

Or surely something like that.

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

Well, maybe someday.

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” C.G. Jung

They must have had Kids back then too.

"Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.” Homer

Your words, not mine. But their words especially.

[b]Julian Assange

What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be. [/b]

What’s that say about everything we don’t know. Or even can’t know.

If you see the rhetoric from coming out of the Democrats is that they’re pro-civil liberties, and an important part of civil liberties is respect for the First Amendment and the rule of law, and that has broken down under the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton was part of that process.

Like they can’t rationalize it.

That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards.

Mine too. Well, without the platform of course. Unless you count here.

Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism.

And that’s a good thing, right?

There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation.

What’s that tell us about the deep state then? The real one, not the one from Fox News.

The best type of government comes from a government that is scrutinized by the people when they have true information about our governments, major corporations, other power actors in society.

Like one will ever actually exist.

[b]Heraclitus

Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears. [/b]

Hear! Hear!

It is by disease that health is pleasant; by evil that good is pleasant; by hunger, satiety; by weariness, rest.

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

Knowledge is not intelligence.

Let’s prove that, Kids.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

We’ll need a context, of course.

Nothing is, everything is becoming.

Then you die. And just be nothing at all for [some suspect] all of eternity.

The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself.

Going all the way back to…what exactly?

[b]Werner Twertzog

So woke that I am cancelling myself.[/b]

Not to worry, I’m getting there myself.

The planet Venus once had an advanced civilization, I am told. But it was lost to climate change.

Hint, hint.

Professors and students encouraged to check out more library books, permanently, to make room for larger food court.

How about a food court here?

Academic freedom is a great privilege of the unemployed, as we all know.

Of bums and hobos too.

So then Mr. Churchill bowed to me, even though I was but a child, from Bavaria.

I guess it’s possible.

Exercising in the gymnasium of the sublime. Before I die, my six-pack abs will become eight-pack abs.

I guess it’s possible.

[b]Lynne Tillman

I think it’s true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don’t understand what people are going through.[/b]

You know, when that’s even possible.

That’s why our comics are important: they’re pointing things out and laughing at the same time. There have been horrible, horrible times in history. They’re mostly horrible times. But not to laugh? Not to find humor in something like dark optimism/bright pessimism - I think that’s sad, frankly.

Let’s just say there are lines to be drawn.

I don’t think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, “Your characters aren’t likeable.” It’s not about your character winning a popularity contest. That’s not the writer’s job.

The more unlikeable the better I always say.

Desire is a word I’m tired of. I’ve been living with that word for years. Yes, of course, we’re all desiring machines. I have sometimes wondered what people would want, if there were no advertising. And death, what other subject is there? It’s the subject. It’s our subject. It’s the great human dilemma, that we die and know we will.

And then those who desire to die.

I’m the author of my own misery.

Unless of course you count all the others.

Ulysses pissed me off. When Molly Bloom just says, “Yes I said yes I will Yes.” And I’m thinking, You should be saying no, Molly. How about no? Saying no is great.

Imagine then being able only to say maybe.

[b]Abbie Hoffman

It’s too late. We can’t win, they’ve gotten too powerful. [/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.

Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.

I know that mine is.

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

Then came the greatest legacy of all the decades that followed.

Action is the only reality; not only reality, but morality as well.

You know, if there is one.

Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps.

Well, maybe a little more.

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

For example, back when that really meant something.