a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Malcolm McDowell

The definition of insanity in Texas is so insane that it’s impossible to be insane in Texas.[/b]

And he would know this…how? Though, sure, point taken.

One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.

Hint, hint?

The most dangerous people are always clever, compelling, and charismatic.

Here? Let’s name names. You know, if there are any.

I am a professional actor and I don’t go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You’re not making some kind of social statement. That’s not what actors do. They may inadvertently do it, but it’s because of the script, not the acting.

Technically as it were.

Let’s not get too precious about it: actors are not heart surgeons or brain surgeons. We are just entertaining people.

So, what’s that make us then?

The great thing about Burgess’s work is the dichotomy of making the hero or anti-hero an immoral man. And that’s what makes it interesting. Because, you know, you are sucked into kind of liking this guy.

For others of course it’s Hannibal Lector.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Truth is subjective.” Soren Kierkegaard[/b]

This one in particular.

"Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

See, I told you.

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Or: There may be uglier times, but this one is ours.

“You are – your life, and nothing else.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Or: You were – your life, and nothing else.

“I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” Philip Roth

You know, if you’re a fucking cynic.

“You have to teach your children that bullshit is coming.” George Carlin

Including your own of course.

[b]John Sayles

There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, How can you make a movie during an election that’s about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people’s lives? To which my response was, Well, I hope so.[/b]

You’d think that would be obvious.

Michael Moore, whether you like him or hate him, has done something very important.

Let’s finally pin down whether one ought to either love or hate him.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

Next up: Henry Kissinger.

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.

What do you say, the media industrial complex?

I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it’s true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

And not just from Covid.

America is a very divided country now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts.

Ours are true though.

[b]John Cage

All great art is a form of complaint.[/b]

And, let’s be honest, here all philosophy.

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

If only in the either/or world.

I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

It only took me 50 years to learn that.

It’s useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

That’s why we invented Brandy.

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

After all, here we are.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

In our audience too.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky[/b]

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

“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.” Philip Roth

So, instead, he learned to take advantage of that.

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” Will Durant

Fortunately, only all the way to the grave. Or, for some, unfortunately.

“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.” Will Durant

Don’t even pretend to know what this means.

"Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.” Frank Herbert

You know, to paraphrase Orwell.

[b]Terry Eagleton

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.[/b]

Tell that to this guy: youtu.be/5y2FuDY6Q4M

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already ‘in place’, waiting to assign us our places within it.

And not only historically and culturally.

Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.

Yep, the educational industrial complex too.

I attacked Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

Let’s figure out if this is true.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

Let alone conviction.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Him not being, among other things, a slave or a woman.

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

Anyway, I don’t trust those people who poke around sad people’s minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It’s not interesting.[/b]

Actually, it can be.

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things - held down a job, for example - I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.

Only one thing for that, right?

Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose.

Of Kids, too.

The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident? It seemed implausible.

Of course the bills have still got to be paid.

I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me—they didn’t—but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s.

You get this or you don’t.

I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.

You get this or you don’t.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky[/b]

How about a 1,000?

“If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male’s arrogance made it ‘a discussion’" Simone de Beauvoir

Yo, Mr. Yoho!

If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet." Keith Richards

He means “in the balls” of course.

“It is quite possible–overwhelmingly probable, one might guess–that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” Noam Chomsky

I know that I have. On the other hand, look at me now.

“One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.” Claude Lévi-Strauss

See, I told you.

“Better to have an open enemy, than hidden friends.” Napoleon Bonaparte

If you know what he means.

[b]Karl Kraus

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.[/b]

Or, today, wikipedia.
On the other hand, what the hell is he talking about?

To be human is erroneous.

Like that makes any difference.

Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

Let’s make a list.

He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.

Jesus, what if that’s actually true?

I don’t like to meddle in my private affairs.

Unlike, say, ours.

Sound opinions are valueless. What matters is who holds them.

Exactly: Contexts!

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.[/b]

A philosophy to die for as it were.

Emotions, in my experience aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” … I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life.

Let’s get started on this, okay?

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Probably not literally.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That’s what inspiration is. You don’t get it from the gods. You make it.

Trust me: Not all of us.

She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

Only now she can’t pay the bills.

Don’t waste your time on life.

That’s not as easy as it sounds though.

[b]Shirley Jackson

Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.[/b]

Fate again. Go figure?

I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.

Luck again. Go figure?

To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.

Horror again. Go figure?

Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.

He figured twice as much as friends. Or, for some friends, half as much.

All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.

So, what’s the equivalent of that here?

You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?

I can guess where this is going.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” Fyodor Dostoevsky[/b]

Anyone here understand me?

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.” Claude Levi-Strauss

Let’s decide if that’s still true.

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only passion for life.” Federico Fellini

Well, not counting birth and death of course.

“Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.” Søren Kierkegaard

And even then hardly ever.

“As soon as it has come to the point that the crowd is to judge what is truth, it will not be long before decisions are made with fists.” Soren Kierkegaard

Of course that hasn’t changed.

“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.” Soren Kierkegaard

I know that I do.

[b]John Dos Passos

People don’t choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.[/b]

But only if you have one.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

Or take a sledgehammer to it.

The world’s becoming a museum of socialist failures.

And that was way back then.

Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

If that’s actually an option of course.

Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.

Ask me to explain this.

In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don’t fall out they let them live another year.

Go ahead, Google it.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

I don’t trust people who don’t have myopia.[/b]

Good call.

Classical Russian literature is your nearest emergency exit in case of insufferable happiness.

Good call.

2020 feels like one giant leap for mankind towards 1984.

And not just in Portland.

You can only feel truly divine when you know that you’re someone else’s personal demon.

You know who you are, don’t you?
Here, I mean

How many Americans does it take to change a light bulb in November and not screw up like in 2016? Asking for humanity.

Let’s answer for humanity.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would still be one of the greatest songs ever even if it were shortened to ‘any way the wind blows’ at the end. Which is about 5 seconds.

Let’s put this in context: youtu.be/thyJOnasHVE

[b]Bell Hooks

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.[/b]

A class thing no doubt.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

Wow, we see a lot of that here, don’t we?

All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions-and society—so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.

Talk about a “general description intellectual contraption!”
One of ours though.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain… and wanting to do something to change it.

You know, instead of just inflicting it on others.

As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.

And now there’s that other thing.

The intellectual tradition of the West is very individualistic. It’s not community-based. The intellectual is often thought of as a person who is alone and cut off from the world. So I have had to practice being willing to leave the space of my study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community.

You know, if that’s still actually an option.

[b]Malcolm McDowell

It’s always a fascinating subject - a serial killer let loose on a small community. It always holds, it’s always scary.[/b]

Let’s try to explain this.

The thing is, I’ve never been a handsome leading-man type, so let’s not kid ourselves.

Let’s try to explain this.

I like to razz the Trekkies a little bit. Who doesn’t? It’s trainspotting, isn’t it? But they are very well-meaning, actually. I’ve done a couple of Star Trek conventions, and they’ve only been really welcoming.

He means the Trekkers of course.

An actor cannot be a censor. I’m there to interpret.

Not unlike the director.

I never feel I repeat myself. I really go out of my way to amuse myself. I would be bored stiff. If I feel the déjavu when I’m doing something, I stop and rethink and rework it.

How intriguing!

Different directors offer you different things, and it’s not necessarily the most obvious things.

And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Farewell, Keith Richards, guitar virtuoso, legendary hedonist, and bog body. May your leathery skin someday provide a jerkin for a downtrodden, Labour Party blacksmith.[/b]

You tell me.

No, cashier, I did not “find everything I am looking for.” But you did not mean it as an existential question. I absolve you.

This ever happen to you?

Dear America: I am tired of your insanity. I am not a “Man of the Left.” I merely hate vulgarity, stupidity, and cruelty. Unfortunately, there is no refuge on this planet but death. And New Zealand.

Yep, that’s what it’s now come to.

Dear Twitter pedants:
I do not make punctuation “errors.”
I make aesthetic choices.
That subsequently change the rules.

Next up: ILP pedants.

Dear American gun fanatics: we all know you will side with tyranny.

Sieg Heil?

Dear America: I shall not accept the outcome of your November election as legitimate unless the United Nations is involved.

Let’s debate this.

[b]Erich Maria Remarque

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel![/b]

Clearly, not here. Or am I missing the point?

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

Let’s make this one.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Not much that can’t be these days though.

It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

If only until the day you die.

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

Let’s reconstruct this into reality.

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

Sure, if you’re an optimist.

[b]Daniel Day-Lewis

The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.[/b]

My guess: you can take this too far.

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you’re not acting, you’re doing monologues.

Like me, posting here, right?

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves…I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.

Fortunately, in being philosophers, that’s not a concern of ours.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

Can you say that?

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it’s no problem for me to believe that I’m somebody else.

Some are just lucky that way.

I didn’t like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Yo, Kids!

[b]Werner Twertzog

In the US one has no right to healthcare or freedom of expression if it displeases your employer.[/b]

You know, the capitalists insist, for the good of society.

The Germans have no word for Schadenfreude, I am told.

Luckily, they have one for Being There. Or, for some, “being there”.

God, grant me serenity, and thirty-seven million dollars.

Most would settle for thirty seven thousand. You know, right about now, Mr. McConnell.

The self is a myth and happiness is an illusion, as we all know.

It’s actually the other way around.

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.

Of course your fraction may vary.

I know little about Ted Nugent, but I would like to know even less.

Just let me know when the bastard is dead.
Also, Henry Kissinger.