a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Brent Weeks

I was a bad child. Fortunately, I’ve come a long way since then. Now I’m a bad man.[/b]

Consistancy counts.

Her nudity is her armor. It blinded the drooling fools. They couldn’t see anything else while they saw her body.

Human nature, probably.

The intuition that had kept Kylar from Vi even from the first time she’d tried to seduce him at the Drake estate suddenly crystallized: You don’t share your life with a woman’s body, you share your life with a woman.

Tell that to, among others, Mr. Reasonable.

You got potential, Kip.
And you know what potential means? he replied.
Ain’t done nothing yet.

Care to respond to that, Kids?

Freedom isn’t the highest good. Power is. For without power, your freedom can be taken.

Things don’t get much more clearer than this.

I’ve taken lives, and I’ve taken my own life in my hands and trusted a friend with it. Yes, sir, I’d say that makes me a man.
Neither makes you a man. The first makes you a killer. The second makes you a fool. Either may get you killed.

Things don’t get much more clearer than this.

[b]Ernest Rutherford

Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery. [/b]

That would be me, he thought.

The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don’t.

One word: dasein.

Gentlemen, now you will see that now you see nothing. And why you see nothing you will see presently.

Let’s probe the equivalent of that here.

I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad and simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.

Simple: we all die.

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

A little help with this, please.

You know, I am sorry for the poor fellows that haven’t got labs to work in.

Do we have one here?

[b]so sad today

overwhelmed by nothingness[/b]

Next up: overwhelmed by somethingness, anythingness and everythingness too.

unfortunately i’m very self-aware

It’s practically a disease now.

whispers during sex am i problematic?

Obviously: before or after coming?

is life just a really long illness before death

Let’s just say it might as well be.

using anxiety to medicate depression

Tricky but possible.

deleting tweets is a basic human right

Just not objectively.

[b]Enrico Fermi

Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.[/b]

So, anyone confused on a higher level about dasein?

Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.

Unless of course it’s a value judgment.

Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know.

It’ll never happen here though. Or is that just me?

It is not good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Let’s note the clear exceptions.

Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven’t they come to Earth?

God knows.

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, ‘with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.’

A math thing let’s call it.

[b]Eugenio Montale

Too many lives are needed to make just one. [/b]

In other words, they’re all in there somewhere.

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

True, but no one really knows what it means.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

Sounds rather soothingly ominous.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

Not to be confused with opportunity.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Worms of thought. And, here, at times, they become particularly slimey.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Thank god for the internet!

[b]so sad today

fuck yeah i apologize for existing[/b]

Like, back at the beginning, she had any choice.

have trouble making decisions because i don’t want to do anything

Like that’s a bad thing.

listen, it’s not like i want to exist

Let alone to become nearly famous.

i need meaningless bullshit

So, thanks, Kids.

life is an uphill climb to death

And then it’s downhill all the way.

are you naturally judgmental or did you go to school for it

She means you, Karpel Tunnel.

[b]Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.[/b]

Or, where you live, around the puddle.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing me.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Well, he was a poet after all.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Less so here though.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

You know, other than nothing at all.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Trust me: there’s no end to it once you’re there. Well, not until the next one.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.[/b]

Ontologically as it were.

Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Politics in other wrods.

One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade.

That’ll do it.

I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.

That’s me here, right? But never you.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.

Cue Uncle Porky.
Nope, don’t ask.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

No, this time, really think about it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.” Ayn Rand[/b]

Of course, recall the fate of those who dared to choose other than as she did.

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” Ayn Rand

Talk about an intellectual contraption! Though, sure, that’s the reality alright. But: her reality or yours?

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

My guess: An enormously complex, problematic coalition and collision of both.

“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.” Victor Hugo

My guess: An enormously complex, problematic coalition and collision of both.

“We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.” Voltaire

Hmm, where do you suppose he is going with this?

"Historians are not by and large inclined to supernatural explanations, but they are addicted to a near equivalent - ‘inevitability’.” Eric Ives

So long as it doesn’t repeat itself.

[b]Kate Millett

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. [/b]

Sniggering for example.

I believe there’s a killer in all of us. I know there’s one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

Or not of course.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media’s diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

My sister said, You’re making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.

I wonder how that turned out.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

In other words, a revolution in la la land.

No one should be adored, it’s fundamentally immoral.

Tell that to this guy: youtu.be/4D2qcbu26gs

[b]Vladimir Putin

I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work. [/b]

As though autocrats have to be.

I believe that meetings at the top level in a relatively informal atmosphere are always useful, and there is reason to hope that we will make progress in resolving the matters we will be considering.

Hint, hint…

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

In other words, from “election” to “election”.

We didn’t have any relationship at all with Trump.

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist’s job is very interesting.

Of course journalists don’t have an army of thugs at their disposal.

The point is that in any country, including the United States, maybe in the United States even more often than in any other country, foreign policy is used for internal political struggle.

Let’s call it crony capitalism. Or, in Russia, state capitalism.

[b]Philosopohy Tweets

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein[/b]

Like there’s any other kind.

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems” Epictetus

Well, that’s certainly debatable.

“Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.” Euripides

True, but do you have the strength to then follow through?

“Habit to us is given from above: it is a substitute for happiness.” Alexander Pushkin

I know that mine is.

“Only he who already understands can listen.” Martin Heidegger

He’ll need a context of course.

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.” Martin Heidegger

He’ll need a context of course.

[b]Norman Mailer

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. [/b]

In that case, any writers here?

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn’t always enough.

In that case, any men here?

Dying can’t be all that difficult—up to now everyone has managed to do it.

Technically as it were.

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.

Which part is more idiotic? You know, if either of them are.

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic’s assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

And, with the subjunctive state, double it. At least.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.

On the other hand, we don’t invent distractions for nothing.

[b]Douglas Adams

Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind.[/b]

That even happens here, right Kids?

Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.

Or, sure, with no irony at all.

It seemed to me, said Wonko the Sane,'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

In French and Spanish too.

Oh dear, says God, I hadn’t thought of that, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

He was discussing dasein with me of course.

He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.

What, no philosophy?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Fuckin’ A, he thought.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Nothing in nature is by chance… Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.” Baruch Spinoza[/b]

Okay, but how far might this be taken if not to the conclusion that everything is only as it ever could have been.

“Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” Baruch Spinoza

Okay, but how far might this be taken if not to the conclusion that everything is determined.

“I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza

Not that he could have ever done otherwise.

“Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.” Alexander Pushkin

You get this or you don’t.

“… Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.” Max Weber

And a man of philosophy?

“Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.” Rene Descartes

A hell of a lot more.

[b]Brent Weeks

To be a man is to bring together that which you should be and that which you are. Deception is darkness.[/b]

[i]

Of course that’s just me.[/i]

I am the stupidest person I have ever met.

In that case, what’s that make you?

Delayed obedience is really disobedience.

We’ll need any number of contexts here.

It wasn’t a great question, but the real questions were so big that Kylar didn’t even know how ask them.

Enough said?

At some point, you have to decide not merely what you’re going to believe, but how you’re going to believe.

You do get the difference, right?

An oath you only keep when it’s convenient isn’t an oath at all.

Isn’t that all of them though?