a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Ferdinand de Saussure

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.[/b]

But then there’s the part about which comes first. About which counts more.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Let’s explain the reason.

Psychologically our thought—apart from its expression in words—is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Let’s explain the reason.

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

More or less clever.

In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.

Excluding the masses of course.

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

You know the ones.

[b]tiny nietzsche

killing time until I’m dead[/b]

Beats waiting for godot, he thought.

last exit to postmodernism

Until tomorrow of course.

use your suicide voice

Or, sure, your murder voice.

we’re all dying so put a little more effort into it

Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.

me: I’m afraid of postmodernism
doktor: are you sure?

After all, can anyone be?

humans killing humans since always

If not before then.

[b]Hannah Arendt

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.[/b]

They just sort of stumble into it. Or it just sort of stumbles into them. Not unlike most good.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

And not necessarily with a happy ending.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

Not counting Che of course.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Had she run this by Martin?

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Let’s just assume this no doubt explains Trumpworld too.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Let’s just assume this no doubt explains Trumpworld too.

[b]José Saramago

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.[/b]

Not unlike dreaming?
Or very much unlike it?

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

Either that or perhaps not.

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.

Wow, he may well have hit the nail on the fucking head here.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.

Great, another reflection in time.
You know, however brilliant it might be.

Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.

He means vagina of course.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

Here’s a question: Is that true?

Well the original word is probably vientre, but womb is just not as banal as vientre is, at the same time not nearly as sacred.

Less babying of a word. So technically belly might be a better translation. But a euphemism it is not.

Maybe, but “belly” is defined as, “the front part of the human trunk below the ribs, containing the stomach and bowels.”

On the other hand, at least he didn’t say “pussy”. :wink:

[b]so sad today

always feel like i’m bleeding psychologically[/b]

Welcome to the real world.

trust your heart…just kidding

I tried it once…just kidding

gave up on everything but then forgot to stay given up

Pay me to remind you.

i’m hungry but not sure if i deserve to exist: the musical

In production now way, way, way, way off Broadway

eating and masturbating

Let’s form a club.

i either think about you or think about death

Let’s form a club.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

My dear fellow, who will let you?
That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?[/b]

Of course that’s all scripted.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

Of course who among us doesn’t bitch about that?

Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you—except the things that count?

Oh, indeed.
On the other hand, he thought, what best friends?

Don’t fool yourself, my dear. You’re much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.

And, no, not just Mother Teresa.

But you see, said Roark quietly, I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

The irony of course being that for most in the workforce, capitalism is all but synonymous with alienated labor.

There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything.

Really, how idiotic is that!

[b]Dorothy Parker

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)[/b]

Define never, he insisted.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives’ tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.

But then there are also the brilliant, beautiful women like Natalie Portman. And [if I do say so myself] Supannika Rongsopa.

“So, you’re the man who can’t spell ‘fuck.’"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, ‘fug,’ in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

Remember Lyssa? She spelled it f­­__k, as I recall.

You think You’re frightening me with Your hell, don’t You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.

Let’s compare our own, okay?

Q: What’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?
A: You can’t hear an enzyme.

True, I’ve never heard one.

When I was young and bold and strong,
The right was right, the wrong was wrong.
With plume on high and flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
But now I’m old - and good and bad,
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say the world is so,
And wise is s/he who lets it go.

Of course you don’t need rhymes to figure that out.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.” Plato[/b]

Not that anyone like this has ever actually existed.

“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” Plato

I’ll cue [among other things] dasein.

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” Aristotle

The fucking liberals, right?

“It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.” Soren Kierkegaard

Of course we’ll need an actual path here.

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

And then take their leap to God.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” Soren Kierkegaard

What’s that say about me then?

[b]Angela Davis

I feel that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.[/b]

And, sure enough, we haven’t.

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Of course on the other side there is also a “what we must be”.

Of course, there’s a grave collective psychic damage that is a consequence of not being acknowledged within the context of one’s ancestry. Those of us of African descent in the US of my age are familiar with that sense of not being able to trace our ancestry beyond, as in my case, one grandmother.

Still, as some insist, we all go back to Adam and Eve.
If you’re white in other words.

Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

Communities are always political projects, political projects that can never solely rely on identity.

The we in me as it were.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.” Isaac Newton[/b]

Especially our truth.

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.”
Isaac Newton

Hmm, didn’t we get them from monkeys and apes?

“What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” Isaac Newton

And probably the Pacific Ocean.

“To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.”
Dogen Zenji

If only in the privacy of your own home.

"I know that I exist; the question is, What is this ‘I’ that ‘I’ know. “ Rene Descartes

Of course back then dasein didn’t even exist. Not mine anyway.

“An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?” Rene Descartes

How can you blow out what doesn’t even exist? Or is that the whole point?

[b]Mary Kubica

I know how betrayal and disillusionment feel, when someone who could give you the world refuses even a tiny piece of it.[/b]

And then [as often as not] blames you for it.

Momma used to say, “We don’t have much, but at least we have each other.” And then one day, we didn’t even have that much.

Thank God for Heaven then, right?

I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.

And then on to postmodern technology. To this shit.

As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.

You know, if you let it.

We fall into oblivion this way, into a world where nothing matters. Nothing but us.

You know, if they let us.

The weathermen warn us for days of the impending snowstorm that’s to arrive Thursday night. The grocery stores have run out of bottle water as people prepare to take shelter in their homes; my God, I think, it’s winter, an annual certainty, not the atomic bomb.

Cue the Eyewitless News team here!

[b]Erica Jong

God is not dead but missing in action, and we are destined to wander again for more millennia than there are undiscovered stars.[/b]

And that’s just in this universe.

The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees.

Well, as they say, you get what you vote for.

I loved Aphrodite from the first and steeped myself in her legends. My mother told me that in ancient times her rituals were bloody and cruel, but I only half believed it.

I guess we’ll never know.

And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

Unless, of course, you don’t.

Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion.

And to think I once believed that it was.

Is love freedom or is it bondage?

Yes.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Kant: Act as if you were free
Schopenhauer: Act as if you were never free
Nietzsche: Act as if freedom never existed
Beckett: Act as if you never existed[/b]

Hey, different folks, different strokes.

Capitalism is a religion that offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.
–Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is the belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the good of everyone.
–J.M. Keynes
Capitalism has worked very well.
–Bill Gates

Those and lots of other things no doubt.

I wanted to be a philosophy major, but I didn’t want to learn about
a) the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system
b) the meaninglessness of my existence
c) the infinite pain of thought
d) logical positivism

Obviously: e)

Is Twitter a waste of time?
Kant: What is “time”?
Bataille: What is “waste”?
Schelling: What is “is”?
Heidegger: What is “of”?
Wittgenstein: What is “a”?
Camus: Yes.

Yes works for me. Not counting Jan of course.

As you type, this website (t2i.cvalenzuelab.com ) translates your words into an image.

Try this: “dasein, conflicting goods, political economy”. I’m scared to.

Walter Benjamin: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Sure, where there’s a yin there is always a yang.

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.[/b]

No one ever thinks it will come to this, of course.

I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

No one ever thinks it will come to this, of course.

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

Do you dare then to pursue it?
Oh yeah.

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

Trust me: The dice are loaded.

There are three types of intelligent persons: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see that he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind.

I’m the fourth kind of course.

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects.

Just not all of them.

[b]Seneca

Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.[/b]

Back then maybe, but not so much today.

Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant.

Different folks, different fates. You know, if it works that way.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

If only going back [so far] to the Big Bang.

Often a very old man has no other proof of his long life than his age.

Of course we won’t go there, will we?

It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.

On the other hand: Huh?

The part of life we really live is small.’ For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.

That probably explains some of us then.

[b]Existential Comics

Philosophy began with Socrates corrupting the youth by telling them how the “wise” old men were full of shit. And philosophy is still important, because 2500 years later, the old men are just as full of shit as ever.[/b]

[i]And not just the assholes in Trumpworld.

I firmly believe that if we could get Samuel L. Jackson to do a dramatic reading of the Communist Manifesto, communism would be achieved within a year.

Let’s send this suggestion along to the Capital One folks.

Growing up means letting go of the childish dream that other people care what kind of music you like.

Two words: Fuck them!

Look, socialism just doesn’t work in the real world. I bet you can’t name a single socialist country that successfully defended itself from being violently destroyed by the imperialist capitalist powers.

Cue Phyllo. :wink:

Existentialism is for people who want to be free.
Absurdism is for people who want to be cool.
Nihilism is for people who want to piss off their parents.

Mine? They couldn’t have cared less.

[b]Philosophers generally fall into five categories:

  1. System builders.
  2. Puzzle solvers.
  3. Skeptics.
  4. Cultural critics.
  5. Old white dudes who came up with one vaguely clever thought experiment in the 70s, and have been milking it ever since.[/b]

Or, sure, 6.

[b]Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.[/b]

And them of us.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes–believes with all its heart–that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Practically running the world. At least for now.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It’s been years now for me.

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

Of course that doesn’t bode well for it.

Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

There must another Google then.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

Just not yours or mine.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.[/b]

A few bucks at a time though.

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

I’ll drink to that, he thought.

I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.

Duck!

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

I know, let’s change that.

I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.

And fucking you as often than not.

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.

Not counting Emmylou Harris and Nanci Griffith of course.