a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Vladimir Putin

25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?[/b]

He does have a point. Though not necessarily yours.

Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.

He does have a point. Though not necessarily yours.

It’s not considered polite in Russia to count the money in someone else’s pocket.

That’s what you hire the thugs for.

Political populism always poses a great danger because it disorients people, creates excessive expectations or, on the contrary, prioritises objectives that are clearly not priorities or are simply impossible to achieve.

In other words, populism there, populism here.

I consider it to be the meaning of my whole life and my obligation to serve my fatherland and our people.

Wow, an idealist!

Russian police force, fortunately, so far, do not use batons, tear gas or any other extreme measures of instilling order, something that we often see in other countries, including in the United States. Speaking of opposition, let us recall the movement Occupy Wall Street. Where is it now? The law enforcement agencies and special services in the US have taken it apart, into little pieces, and have dissolved it.

Let’s just say this is not altogether exagerated.

[b]Norman Mailer

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.[/b]

And twentieth-century women? You know, with men like him around?

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can’t stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves.

And that was back then!

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

I guess you had to be there.

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

You know, if we could live in the best of all possible world.

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word.

Here? Cue the skyhooks.

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

And was I ever smack dab in the middle of that. And for years!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.” Rem Koolhaas[/b]

And not just buildings.

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Gustave Flaubert

And, some day, to other planets.

“Accuracy is the politeness of kings. “ Louis XV of France

Sounds about right. If only back then.

“The little wisdom that the world possesses, was introduced by lunatics.” Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

And then: Off with their heads!

“Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

And then eventually what we are not going to do. If for no other reason, we no longer can.

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I can still remember that far back, he thought.

[b]Douglas Adams

His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn’t got anything to say yet and shut it again. His brain then started to contend with the problem of what his eyes told it they were looking at, but in doing so relinquished control of the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control of his left hand which then wandered around in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and simultaneously tried to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground.[/b]

Actually, we may never know how it really works.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.

My guess: every planet in the universe.

You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.
Er, five, said the mattress.
Wrong, said Marvin. You see?

The mattress?

You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, "You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

From “The Learning Experience For Dummies” no doubt.

In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.

Of course he is a Pisces.

…they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

Lying about what though?

[b]Brent Weeks

Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justice. Durzo Blint[/b]

Is it more that this is true or more that this is false.

It is better to suffer evil than to do evil.

Among other things, he thought, fuck that.

I am of you, said Kip. I am Guile as much as you are. True, I have a scrap of decency, but only a scrap. How do you think you can treat a Guile with such disregard and get away with it? Because I am you. I’m as cold as you, I’m as smart as you, and when you push me, I’m as evil and cruel as you. I have a thin film of goodness floating on the top of my Guile, grandfather, but I don’t know how senile you must be to miss just how thin it is.

Any Guiles here?

Idealists mature badly. If they can’t outgrow their idealism, they become hypocrites or blind.

On the other hand, tell them that.

After a while, with nothing to lose, I’ll only able to win.

If only theoretically.

Dangerous knowledge is often hidden under ponderous grammar and obscurantist vocabulary.

Though most of it is just intellectual bullshit.

[b]Werner Twertzog

The average Bavarian thinks of death every seven seconds, as we all know.[/b]

Any average Bavarians here?

Existential-nihilist auteur directing is preeminently a position of moral leadership, as we all know.

Unless of course that’s a contradiction in terms.

But if we un-unbuild it, will they come again?

Let’s unbuild something here and see.

“Not only were the American streets not ‘paved with gold,’ they were not paved at all. And you had to purchase an outrageously expensive and mediocre healthcare plan to help pave them.” Israel Zangwill, as we all know

Of course that was a hundred years ago. But point taken.

The death of cursive writing is yet another signifier of toxic masculinity.

Indeed, something I have long suspected.

I did not make Fitzcarraldo to impress Jodie Foster.

Someone Google this please.

[b]Niels Bohr

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature.[/b]

Concepts by the hundreds here of course.

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

What say you to that, Mr. Objectivist?

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

In other words, for all practical purposes, it’s hopeless.

An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

Among other things, don’t try to either underthink or overthink this.

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.

Okay, how about your great truth?

Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it.

Gee, I wonder what subject that might be?

[b]Ernest Rutherford

All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial. [/b]

And all philosophy?

Never say, “I tried it once and it did not work.”

Until: “I tried it hundreds of times and it did not work”.

When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.

He means [by far] the self-conscious human brain.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Except life?

Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.

Okay, so what’s your excuse, Kid?

It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

That would qualify.

[b]Doth

Name a more iconic duo than fog-covered woods & that spooky Edgar Allan Poe bitch. I’ll wait.[/b]

Laurel and Hardy?

Remember, it gets worse before it gets worse.

And forget about why.

Sex is cool but have you ever had a wooden stake stabbed into your heart in a fog-covered cemetery.

By your lover, no less?

I am fully prepared to die trying to pet a wolf.

A whole pack of them.

Sacrifice me to a ancient pagan cult or don’t waste my fucking time.

And his wife and kids too.

Be the reason why you need two priests at your exorcism.

Or be the reason you need the Pope. Both of them.

[b]Natalie Clifford Barney

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.[/b]

Let’s exchange contexts.

I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it.

Virtually, for example.

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

Unless, like me, you fuck it all up.

I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

On the other hand, who the hell does that?

To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.

As you might imagine, that’s no longer a problem for me.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

Here? Should I name names?

[b]Luigi Pirandello

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart. [/b]

Here? I’ll dispense with your dignity if you’ll dispense with mine.

As soon as one is born, one starts dying.

He means conceived of course.

If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

Right, like that will ever stop me.

The facts are to blame, my friend. We are all imprisoned by facts: I was born, I exist.

And, in fact, without our consent.

It is much easier to be a hero than a gentleman.

We’ll need a context, of course.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

We’ll need a context, of course.

[b]tiny nietzsche

do people still exist after you mute them?[/b]

Or, here, foe them?
[size=50]let’s hope so[/size]

a caucus in the streets, but a primary in the sheets

Sure, I can live with that.

parasite won iowa

Again, in other words.

a large abyss the size of a small abyss

That’s postmodernism for you.

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from damn lies

Starting with the microwave oven.

they took my blood pressure and I don’t have any

That can’t be good.

[b]Randall Munroe

Actually, what I’m confused about is how.[/b]

It’s either that or why.

If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.

A little help with this one, please.

If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?

A little help with this one, please.

…computers are limited by our ability to program them, so we’ve got a built-in advantage.

Up next: the tipping point.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

You know, hypothetically.

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth’s atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas’s volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct.

So don’t forget to pass this along.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Zen is the “spirit of the valley,” not the mountaintop.[/b]

So, is that a good thing more or less than a bad thing?

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them has to forego closeness with the people around him.

So, is that a good thing more or less than a bad thing?

But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.

The top of what you might ask.

Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate.

Yes, this is an actual condition.

There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Of course that’s only natural.

Chris asks, What are you going to stick to?
Mah guns, boy, mah guns, I tell him. That’s the Code of the West.

And, here in America, the North, South and East too.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I just pardoned this toilet[/b]

More to the point, here, should σάτυρος be pardoned?

send fruit loops

He means frosted flakes of course.

all presidents are bad, but especially the ones who owned people

Is that even possible?!

all fate, no future

Making no sense at all?

careful with that axe, eugenics

As if the whole point wasn’t not to be.

Happy birthday Galileo! you telescoping motherfucker

Should we [still] run this by the Vatican?

[b]Kate Millett

In sex one wants or does not want.[/b]

And then one gets or does not get.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Naturally, as some say?

Isn’t privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

Cue dasein. You know, among other things.

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

On the other hand, huh?

To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one’s wheels deeper in sand.

Yep, that was me alright.

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours.

Men too more or less.

[b]Vladimir Putin

There is no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died.[/b]

He actually said that. Anyone here know why?

Homosexuals in Russia live in peace, work, are promoted, receive national awards for their achievements in science, art or any other sphere, medals are awarded to them, I have awarded them myself.

Of course here we have Pete Buttigieg.

If you aspire to be a leader of your own country, you must speak your own language, for God’s sake.

So, what’s behind this?

How can I be a gangster, if I worked for the KGB? It is absolutely ridiculous.

There, that settles that.

Donald Trump is a brilliant and talented person, without a doubt.

There, that settles that.

There is no uniform, global model for democracy.

Let’s think up one.

[b]Norman Mailer

There are days when I’ll wake up and think, oh, I’ve really been something. You know, it won’t be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, ‘Don’t kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered’.[/b]

And then the day you don’t wake up at all.

As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

It’s not called a “leap of faith” for nothing.

There are four stages to marriage. First there’s the affair, then there’s the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

I suspect that women have their own version of this.

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

So, any murderers here to confirm this?

It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

Right, like the two are completely unrelated.

Writers don’t have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

Well, not counting the ones that do.

[b]Douglas Adams

Do you find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?[/b]

Trust me: There’s no one right answer.

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions.

No, really think about that this time.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

And getting flatter everyday.

In an infinite Universe anything can happen.

Whatever that means.

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

And not just The Bomb.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or 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 movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.

Just what I need, another optimist.

[b]tiny nietzsche

sartre in a coma, I know I know, he’s condemned to be free[/b]

sartre in a coffin…?

my own private I dunno

I’m still working on it.

the girl with the bernie tattoo

On both cheeks.

the boy who cried nietzsche

Next up: the man who cried dasein.

my chemical divorce

And wasn’t that inevitable.

what a time to be dead

Of course there may well never be a good time.