a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Tilda Swinton

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves.

Next up: great philosophy.

I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me.

Of course she's an alien.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

See?

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

Yeah, sure, fuck it, why not.

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.

Yeah, sure, fuck it, why not.

Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own.

Worse, some of them then come here.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

“In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we seldom allow someone to be of another opinion.” Immanuel Kant

See for yourself: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=196115

"In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is.” Arthur Danto

Well, that settles that!

"Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at” Arthur C. Danto

Or the occasional monkey spank.

"Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood." Friedrich Nietzsche

If you know what he means. And I certainly do.

“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Pick one:
God
Ideology
Nature
Or, sure, add to the list.

"Words aren't only bombs and bullets...no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!" Philip Roth

But still mostly bombs and bullets, right?

[iambiguous]

Marlon Brando

Only the one who walks his own way can't be overtaken.

Well, as long as you keep the weight off.

Never surrender to the momentum of mediocrity.

Let's not go there, right?

Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.

I do however fall back on it from time to time myself.

Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night.

Of course you all know my own rendition of that.

Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.

Or here the size of your post. And not just Turd's.

If we are not our brother's keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.

Fortunately there are always lots and lots of exceptions.

[iambiguous]

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a wood and I...I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Of course that doesn't always work out.

The best way out is always through.

Of course that doesn't always work out.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Start here: https://www.povertyusa.org/facts
Guess which half is here.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

And those three words now?

One of the hardest things in life to accept is a called third strike.

Next up: a swing and a miss.

The test is always how we treat the poor.

It would have to be that.

[iambiguous]

Nein

A gentle reminder. From ideology: Don't believe everything you think.

Let alone what you feel.

Thank you for calling reality.
To accept, please press 1.
To deny, please press 2.
To further your political agenda, please press 2 repeatedly. And hope it adds up to 1.

Let's exchange experiences.

What’s the German word for Schadenfreude?

Like there actually would be one.

Ctrl + Trump + Delete

It didn't work for me. Try it for Biden.

My advice: If you’re going to let some idiot on Twitter ruin your weekend, make sure it’s you.

And, of course, here.

Your reality check. It bounced.

And then dribbled all the way to a stop.

[iambiguous]

Seth MacFarlane

I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky'

Got a bunch of them here in fact.

The two symbols of the Republican party: an elephant and a big fat white guy who's threatened by change.

Next up: the skinny white guy on a donkey.

The only reason we die, is because we accept death as an inevitability.

That and all the biiological stuff.

I'm not a fatalist. I'm not a religious person. I'm sure there are close calls that we're not even aware of hundreds of times a year. You cross the street, and if you'd crossed the street two minutes later, you'd have been hit by a car, but you'd never know it. I'm sure that kind of stuff happens all the time.

The best depiction if this by far: https://youtu.be/E548-OkACkc

Believe it or not, I have about the same success rate as anyone else. Sometimes you hit, sometimes you miss.

Except he's him and we're not.

If something is shocking without being funny it's hard to justify.

And not just the Trump administration. Though surely a damn good example.

[iambiguous]

Ivan Pavlov

When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero.

Then on to the next dog.

Men are apt to be much more influenced by words than by the actual facts of the surrounding reality.

See, Mr. Intellectual Contraption, I told you.

Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.

And philosophy? Look at some of us here.

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.

Of course you know it's really definitions.

Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.

Is this going where I think it is?

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all.

Like that will stop them.

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

Yes, I am the moral authority here.

Here all of us are.

How long will this continue? Until a more virulent pandemic arrives, as we all know.

It's percolating out there right now.

When presidents show you who they are, believe them.

Then almost re-elect them.

Just remembering what Eric Clapton did to George Harrison.

Would you like me to tell you? Or, sure, you could tell me.

No, Peter Gabriel, if that is your real name, I shall not electrocute that primate. You are not the boss of me.

A little help with this one.

I am not the one who placed a monolith in the Utah desert.

This thing: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/utah-monol ... rs-desert/

[iambiguous]

Jean Cocteau

People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.

Or as Donovan once noted:

"Let me not hear facts figures and logic
Fain would I hear lore legends and magic"

The artist must know how far to go too far.

You know, like here, the Kids always go.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

Next up: bright, shiny plastic souls.

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism.

Let's assume that it is true though.

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.

As opposed to, say, Napoleon.

Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture...

Okay, but I'll still need to see it first.

[iambiguous]

Don DeLillo

Murray said, 'I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own.' Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence.

That explains me a lot. You just don't want to know why.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

Though not counting "antidisestablishmentarianism".

We need time to lose interest in things.

A lifetime for some.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

Not counting yours, Kid.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

My guess: him too.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong.

Or [more likely here]: Sometimes a thing that's easy is easy because you're doing it wrong.

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

Fear eats the soul. And sometimes fajitas.

Fear Eats the Soul: Yo, Supannika! Remember that!!
Oh, and sometimes Pad Thai.

What makes Americans different from nearly every other population is that so many of them believe their national propaganda.

Trumplings in particular. Though, sure, the Bidenling equivalents.

No, I shall not complete your short survey about why I am unsubscribing to your hourly emails.

I might complete it.

Dear America: In Germany we made the Nazi Party illegal.

Yeah, but only after the war.

Would a massive asteroid please just reset this planet, already?

You know, after we're all dead and gone.

America is a death cult.

You know, until January 20th.

[iambiguous]

Jasper Johns

I'm working in my mind.

On the other hand, with most artists, that doesn't translate into just a world of words.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

Me? Well, you know what that idea is, don't you? Only I never can get rid of it. Not that the particularly dim-witted ones here will ever understand why.

Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object".

Few things are more excruciating than artists talking about other artists. Unless it's them talking about art itself.

I am not strong on perfection.

As though any artist can be.

One works without thinking how to work.

What do you think...that this can be taken too far?

There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

Yo, phoneutria! Note an example from your own work.

[iambiguous]

Joy Williams

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

And then you stumble into Know Thyself.

We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.

God and darkness. Sounds about right.

Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness.

Go ahead, learn this the hard way.

That's what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.

Just ask the desert nearest you and see.

Children were quite disturbing really. It was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.

Probably not all of them.

What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?

Uh, nothing?

[iambiguous]

Existential Comics

Ohhhh, I see how it is, so suddenly the Democrats don't like right wing coups. I'll try to remember that the next time a socialist wins an election in Latin America.

Cue, among others, Phil Ochs.

What will a Biden Presidency be like? Well, under Obama:
- healthcare costs rose
- housing costs rose
- minimum wage fell (via inflation)
- wealth disparity rose
- union membership fell
- deported more people than Trump
- bombed more countries than Bush
Probably kinda like that.

See, I told you. Crony capitalism has always only had one party here in America.

No matter how far to the right the Democrats move, two things will happen:
- republicans will call them radical socialists.
- the media will blame underperformance on moving too far left.

See, I told you. Crony capitalism has always only had one media here in America.

Perhaps the Democrats' plan of promising to do absolutely fucking nothing was not as wise as they believed.

We'll know soon enough.

The history of Western philosophy is basically just one dude being like "what if everything was made of water" and then everyone being super pissed off about it for 2000 years.

You tell me.
Please.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but absolutely no one on earth needs a "vacation home".

Let alone a whole bunch of them.

[iambiguous]

Olga Tokarczuk

You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.

Of course I have my own version of that, don't I?

The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.

Of course I have my own version of that, don't I?

The best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.

, he thought.

I wasn’t in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it.

You know, after the bills are all paid.

Then you realize: night gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without sugar-coating it; day is a flight of fancy, light a slight exception, an oversight, a disruption of the order. The world in fact is dark, almost black. Motionless and cold.

Actually, not everyone does realize this.

The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.

And that's not even counting the prisons we create for others.

[iambiguous]

Tilda Swinton

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

Precariously, for starters.

I'm from the same planet as David Bowie.

You know, before he fell to Earth.

It's wonderful to actually have an opportunity to get real and show how complicated and fascinating sex is.

With David Bowie, perhaps.

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

Lots of us are really interested in that. As, once, were lots and lots of dead people.

You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes.

Next up: what they're thinking under their skull.

Sexuality is, of course, a great way of having a conversation between people.

Let's talk about it, Tilda.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Hahahahahaha omg you got 'em.

[iambiguous]

Existential Comics

"The Chinese Room" thought experiment, but as an kafkaesque novel about the existential despair of the man assigned to work in the room his entire life.

Gregor Samsa, for example.

What am I thankful for this Thanksgiving?
The inevitable victory of communism.

You know, given enough time. And then some.

You would think the fact that under communism there would be no ads on mobile websites would be enough to convince people to overthrow capitalism.

You know, if the state allowed mobile websites.

Young people always think old people are stupid, and old people always think young people are stupid. What neither of them realize is that both of these are correct. Everyone is stupid.

On the other hand, not all stupidity is created equal.

Why is it always "love is just a chemical reaction in the brain" and not "the Game of Thrones finale is just a chemical reaction in the brain".

Is this even explicable?

i hate to be edgy on twitter but pears are just shit apples.

No, really, you tell me.

[iambiguous]

Marlon Brando

Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.

You'll take that chance, right Kid?

It really don't matter what you're thinking about, as long as you're thinking about something.

He means it doesn't matter of course.

Hey, you wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.

Sure: maybe him, maybe a character he played.

Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.

By Hollywood, he means everywhere.
On the other hand, by success and failure...?

‎We only have so many faces in our pockets.

Not only that but we only have so many pockets.

Tell me, do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.

Tell that to Hank Rearden.

[iambiguous]

Robert Frost

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Or these days another man.

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

Not all afternoons of course.

If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.

Yo, Ayn!

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

And that obviously explains nothing.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

And the fences here?

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

He means irony of course.

[iambiguous]

God

If the pandemic has taught America one thing, I'd be stunned.

Actually, He got that cynicism from me.

Opinions were the worst idea I ever had.

About Him for starters.

Retweet this for a full pardon.

How about this: Repost this for no pardon at all.

The right to be stupid is the last refuge of the stupid.

And certainly the first.

The masked shall inherit the earth.

Well, now it's official.

It's always a small group of 7.8 billion assholes who ruin it for the trillions of others.

Or the Asshole who created us all.

[iambiguous]

Seth MacFarlane

'Family Guy' has this weird thing of attracting people. People either hate it or can't get enough of it. There's really no one in between.

Maybe. But I don't watch cartoons.

Nobody sets out to offend or shock for the sake of shocking. You set out to get laughs.

Not counting philosophers of course. Here anyway.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

Let's pin down the equivalent of that here.

There have to be people who are vocal about the advancement of knowledge over faith.

Unless of course you count the real world.

Sarah Palin is very pro-life of course, unless the life is that of an Iraqi civilian or a wolf running frantically from a roaring helicopter while being strafed with ribbons of automatic weapons fire.

Sarah Palin. That name sounds familiar...

...religion notoriously claims that they invented morality, they didn't. Morality exists in animals, ya know.

Let's file this one under, "nearly stupid things that atheists say".

[iambiguous]

Karen Horney

There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the last day we live.

Wow, he thought, I can think of dozens.

...a normal human being does not exist.

Not counting the godawful number that do.

Basic anxiety can be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted or endangered in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, humiliate, betray, envy...

Next up: more advanced anxiety.

Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.



We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.

Wow, does that take me way, way back.

If I couldn't be pretty, I decided I would be smart.

And, sure, fuck all those who are both.

[iambiguous]

tiny nietzsche

a group of voids is called an empty

Of course now we know it's the other way around.

I'm not even here right now

You wish, right?

I am attracted to:
men
women
the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless

No, seriously.

BREAKING: the abyss has been arrested. more to come

Perhaps, but we still all die.

other things that will tear us apart besides love:
the ocean
wolves
perforated edges

Well, here, the Kids of course.

shout out to retail workers who will receive the brunt of your unchecked materialism for the next four weeks

I know, how about this: bah humbug!

[iambiguous]

Jean Cocteau

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

He wondered if perhaps this might not also be applicable to him.

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

Back in the day, he grimaced.

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.

And how comforting must that illusion be, he figured.

The Louvre is a morgue...

You know, if that's what you need it to be.

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

Sure, in the best of all possible worlds.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

I do my bit here. Though, of course, the joke is invariably on you.