a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Iris Murdoch

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.[/b]

Imagine then our own plight.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

Uh, whatever that means?

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

My guess: Here but not there. And then there but not here.

Marriage isn’t a tram. It doesn’t have to get anywhere.

Until it goes to the lawyers.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

Lots and lots of them these days.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Sunny today. Then sunny through next Thursday.

[b]Yogi Berra

I can see how Sandy Koufax won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five. [/b]

Now that’s a compliment.

You have to give 100 percent in the first half of the game. If that isn’t enough, in the second half, you have to give what’s left.

Unless they bench you.

I just want to thank everyone who made this day necessary.

Not many days that aren’t though, right?

50% of all married people are women.

You know, back then.

You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.

Definitional logic let’s call it.

I didn’t say the things I said.

You know, if he does say so himself.

[b]Colum McCann

An optimist is a braver cynic.[/b]

Let’s parse that.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

Uh, let’s parse…that?

Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There’s the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

See, what did I tell you? A context!

If you think of the world without people it’s about the most perfect thing there ever is. It’s all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It’s like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom and she’s just giving it her all, she’s singing just for you, she’s on fire…and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains.

Or, here, the God awful Kids!

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.

This or just fast forward to the grave.

The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.
The person we know at first, she thinks is not the one we know at last.

Sure, why not, he thought.

[b]Werner Twerzog

Hell is other people.
Hell, also, is being alone.
Everything is Hell. [/b]

Not only that but, these days, everything else too.

Time is running out for me to become a “honky tonk man.”

Me too. Why? Just lucky I guess.

The rich get richer, while the super-rich redefine reality.

But then like all the rest of us…they tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion. At least I think they do.

100,000 people died in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Thanks Obama.

Next up: Obama in the Garden of Eden.

“Nazis” are everywhere, like stupidity in chickens.

Genes and memes, right?

It is important to repress your feelings in order to build towards an explosion of creative destruction.

And then, after that, post it.

[b]Banksy

All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw? [/b]

And we all know the equivalent of that here, don’t we?

You can win the rat race but you’re still a rat.

Wow, that’s actually true, isn’t it?

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.

Come on, you only die once.

I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.

Just what we need, another theory.

Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.

Again, theoretically.

The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.

Of course no one ever really knows if shit like this is true.

[b]Existential Comics

Fact: if you went back in time and killed Bill Gates to prevent Microsoft from ever existing; personal computers, software, the internet, and technology in general would have advanced at a much more rapid pace. He made his billions by impairing progress, not creating it.[/b]

Let’s finally settle this once and for all.

The funniest thing about Elon Musk in the last few years is finding out that he’s just a stupid person. Like he’s just dumb. He isn’t even smart at one thing and dumb at others, he’s just pure dumb.

Let’s finally settle this once and for all.

Is existentialism still relevant today?
Well, a lot of people seem to think the meaning of their lives consists of getting haircuts, eating hamburgers, and shopping for toasters, to the point where they’ll sacrifice everyone’s grandparents rather abstain for a couple months.
So…

Wow, I guess it still is.

This pandemic has shown clearly that Americans are the most brainwashed people on earth. Not only do half of us literally not believe in science, but now people think “freedom” is…intentionally not wearing a mask to help a disease spread faster?

Any brainwashed folks here?

The strangest thing about the people who say there is no free will is that they can’t coherently say what exactly is missing.

Come on, that’s not even close to the strangest.

The American system of propaganda is so powerful it has even convinced people that we don’t have propaganda here.

Let’s explain how.

[b]Simon Critchley

There are lots of stories about how philosophy begins. Some people claim it begins in wonder; some people claim it begins in worry. I claim it begins in disappointment. [/b]

My guess: It didn’t begin here.
Next up: Where philosophy ends.

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.

You know, aside from it being true.

Philosophy isn’t programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.

You know, aside from it being true.

We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.

Or, sure, we might not.

I think that when people are at their best, when they are thinking, reflecting, cogitating, then they are doing philosophy. So I don’t see philosophy as an academic enterprise.

Unless of course you take it seriously.

Humor is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.

Yo, Ayn!

[b]John Lydon

Freedom isn’t to do what you want at somebody else’s expense.[/b]

On the other hand, he didn’t always think that way.

If you are pissing people off, you know you are doing something right.

Now that’s more like it.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Only since the day I was born, he fumed.

You should never, ever be understood completely.

Uh, fat chance?

I’m not here for your amusement. You’re here for mine.

Only now [apparently] it’s the other way around…

I don’t believe in anarchy, because it will ultimately amount to the power of the bully, with weapons. Gandhi is my life’s inspiration: passive resistance. I don’t want to live in the Thunderdome with Mad Max.

Where’s punk philosophy when we need it!

[b]Doth

It’s a perfect night to get lost in the woods & change your name to something only the wolves can pronounce.[/b]

Let’s think of some.

Start off each morning with a cup of coffee & remember that time wants you dead.

If, for example, time could talk.

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

And, no, not the one at the zoo.

The monster isn’t under your bed or in the woods, it’s you. The monster has always been you.

If only one of millions.

We should be able to chose our afterlife after living through this bullshit.

Yo, Buddha!

Waking up always raises an age-old dilemma: why

That’s what the snooze button is for.

[b]Simon Critchley

My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can’t breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction.[/b]

My guess: You may not agree.

In the US, what passes for Christianity - and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ’s messianic ethical communism, to say the least - is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom.

Your guess: I may not agree.
With the second part.

Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he later calls the super-ego. And that can be lacerated - if you think of the anorexic who sees themselves from the perspective of the image they have, of the image they have of themselves in the mirror which is false - that would be the super-ego. Super-ego is what generates depression and it is what has to be dealt with in psychoanalysis.

Next up: Melancholia for the rest of us.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that’s an anxious atheism. It’s an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.

Let’s at least try to make sense of this.

Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

Mr. Bilderberg? I mean give me a break!

Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek’s position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville’s Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man’s hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.

What can I say…intellectuals.

[b]A. S. Byatt

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books. [/b]

Maybe on the other side, she mused.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Be the first?

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction—it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Right, like that settles it.

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

Let’s call that progress.

I’m more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they’re not.

Neither one nor the other suits me.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Not counting the posts here of course. Or they better not.

[b]God

Good to see so many people back at church service today.
Many of them will be back for another church service in two to three weeks.[/b]

You know, if He really is omniscient.

I love you unconditionally but at the same time fuck you.

How’s that for “mysterious ways”?

I have a plan to save the world but it requires borrowing money from Jeff Bezos.

Any update on this?

I got a new guy up here and he’s rambling. Does anyone know what “Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Lop-Bam-Boom” means?

The same thing as “tutti frutti”.

You’re just all so fucking stupid.

Like He didn’t make us this way.

You people are the worst people I’ve ever peopled the earth with.

Like He didn’t make us this way.

[b]Karl Kraus

There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.[/b]

Well, there may be a few less fortunate. But point taken.

I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.

Perhaps then it’s time to plug it.

An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time.

Yo, Kids!

I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.

Yo, iambiguous!

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

Yep, Reich again.

Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.

You know, if yours is even open.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I don’t know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood. [/b]

Yes.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

He didn’t know what that meant back then either.

Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It’s not really random at all.

He wondered, Does this explain nothing more or less than it explains everything?

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

There’s always that, sure.

As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It’s really simply to do with refusing new experience.

Yo, options!

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.

Unless it actually makes things worse.

[b]tiny nietzsche

me: do you guys have corpse paint?
7-eleven dude: aisle three[/b]

Wawa too. Aisle 8.

you can lead a horse to disinfectant

You know, if you can find any.

existence is buffering

Nope, not around here.

it’s okay. I didn’t have any plans this year

Or, if you’re from New York, next year.

if I only knew what I was thinking

For example, the way that you do.

the box that holds my collection of boxes

Well, if there’s one big enough.

[b]Nikolai Gogol

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book. [/b]

Let’s think of something even more pleasant than that.

The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

After all, humor is often at the expense of someone.

You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.

Can this be trumped?

I am who I am and that’s who I am.

What’s that make you then?

However stupid a fools words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.

Especially if he has a “condition”.

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

Though now of course we have other ways.

[b]Nassim Nicholas Taleb

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words! [/b]

By all means, just try to.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

Actually, that’s not even close. Unless, of course, I’m wrong. Anyone here know for sure?

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.

On the other hand, it takes one to know one.

It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.

If only you are “one of us”.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don’t confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Starting, say, now.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

For example, if you believe in sin.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I wish the moon was closer[/b]

Nope: bbc.com/news/science-environment-12311119

bury me in the ocean

Six fathoms under, say.

in these trying times, weed

You know, for starters.

it’s too bad we never met. we could have ruined our lives together

Does online count?

why yes, I would like to join your marxist collective of inner earth humans fighting late stage capitalist robots

Wouldn’t surprise me, he thought.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: I haven’t left this building in months

Could this happen to you?

[b]Iris Murdoch

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling. [/b]

Next up: the very greatest philosophy:

Yes, of course, there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It’s really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like “pass the gravy” is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and… pass the gravy.

Take that, Mr. Objectivist!!

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

Let’s file this one under, “blah, blah, blah”.

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

Let’s file this one under, well, you tell me.

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.

Tell that to, among others, the Nazis.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

Essentially, as it were.

[b]Mikhail Lermontov

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.[/b]

I taught him that.

He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace.

He taught me that.

An unusual beginning must have an unusual end.

Uh-oh, he thought.

We almost always forgive those we understand.

If only after they’ve forgiven us.

I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectator.
Of my triumph or my doom.

Sure, maybe even here.

In the first place, his eyes never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow.

Next up: in the second place.