a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Joan Lindsay

As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.[/b]

That’s still the same of course.

Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.

They still are though.

Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world, said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.

Airily. The perfect description.

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

Of course their parents are filthy rich. Except for Sara.

Thinking’s all right if you have the time for it.

Much to our dismay here.

Where were they going? What strange feminine secrets did they share in that last gay fateful hour?

Though it’s not really based on a true story.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.[/b]

So they tell me.

I’m under absolutely no obligation to make sense to you.

Nor you to me.

Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

And it’s not like you can tell it to go fuck itself.

I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse.
I am not a muse.
I am the somebody.
End of fucking story.

I guess she told us.

It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.

Fascinating for starters.

Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.

Either that or [for some] a blowjob.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We are what we are because we have been what we have been.” Sigmund Freud[/b]

If only from the day we were born.

“Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Just what we need, another definition.

“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” Paul Rand

Simple: as complicated as it gets.

“A problem well put is half solved.” John Dewey

Not counting mine of course.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

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

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” Isaac Asimov

Of course that never caught on.

[b]Joan of Arc

All battles are first won or lost, in the mind. [/b]

Think about that, Kids.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

Like folks like me have a choice.

It is better to be alone with God. His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die.

More to the point [alone or not] is she with Him now?

I am not afraid; I was born to do this.

On the other hand, I wasn’t.

Hope in God. If you have good hope and faith in Him, you shall be delivered from your enemies.

Theoretically for example.

I die for speaking the language of the angels.

Which prompts one to wonder: What language prevails in Heaven?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Daniel J. Boorstin[/b]

Here, in other words, the Kids Stuff

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.” Friedrich Nietzsche

If the man of knowledge even has any.

“In certain matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.” Pliny the Elder

He wasn’t called the Elder for nothing.

“The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.” Avicenna

Roughly as it were.

“In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.” Theodor Adorno

You know, with or without God.

“To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” Theodor Adorno

Or sometimes, sure, the least recondite.

[b]Mort Sahl

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen. [/b]

Sound about right?

There’s a danger our fiscal bankruptcy might overtake our moral bankruptcy.

Nope, they’re are still basically neck and neck.

There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong.

Of course now it’s Trump and Pence.

In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you’ve got to be a girl.

Now it’s all dollars and cents. Girls or boys.

Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.

Where’s that put Trump then?

You know what I want you to do? I want you to blow out the candle and curse the darkness.

Done.

[b]Richard Rorty

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.[/b]

That and the stuff Marx suggested.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Let’s just say this: Some descriptions more than others.

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark.

That is until love reconfigures into hate.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Much to the dismay of some more than others.

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It’s like aspirin. You can’t use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

Then the next thing you know you’re an ironist.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition.

Not counting the objectivists of course.

[b]Nikola Tesla

I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.[/b]

We should all be so lucky.

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.

But only if you count women.

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

You may even be a part of them.

The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. My Mother had taught me to seek all truth in the Bible.

Another one bites the dust, he thought.

But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

Finer fibers. Never heard that before. But point taken.

Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.

Not that literally millions of them have much choice.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“People know what they want because they know what other people want.” Theodor Adorno[/b]

And how grim is that?

“People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.” Theodor Adorno

It starts with a C.

“The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.” Theodor Adorno

It starts with a C.

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” Bertrand Russell

Cue Trump and the wall. That and racism.

“The prison begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house – and even before.” Michel Foucault

If not [for some] all the way back to the day they were born.

“When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.” Voltaire

So, what do you think…is that still true today?

[b]Harlan Coben

Genius is a curse. That’s how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can’t. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.[/b]

Well, he thought, that explains it then: I’m a genius.

Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something.

Either that or not amazing at all.

I don’t regret the things I’ve done. I regret the things I didn’t do when I had the chance.

In other words, don’t we all.

That’s the problem with falling in love. It makes you start talking like a bad country song.

Like there actually are good country songs, he snickered.

For a short time, I hated them. But when you think about it, what good does that do? It takes so much to hold on to hate—you lose your grip on what’s important, you know?

Of course sometimes it’s still worth it.

It was one lesson he never forgot. You don’t sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted. And you don’t act like the government with their “proportional responses” and all that nonsense. If someone hurts you, mercy and pity must be put aside. You eliminate the enemy. You scorch the earth.

Anyone here not learned this yet?

[b]Jim Holt

Gödel’s taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard, he pronounced it furchtbar herzig—“awfully charming.”[/b]

I know: what to make of this?

She goes on to recount how she once found the philosopher Richard Rorty standing in a bit of a daze in Davidson’s food market. He told me in hushed tones that he’d just seen Gödel in the frozen food aisle.

I know: what to make of this?

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Let’s be the exceptions.

Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding. Therefore, there must be something. QED.

QED my ass.

Bertrand Russell recounts in his autobiography that as an unhappy adolescent he frequently contemplated suicide. But he did not go through with it, he tells us, “because I wished to know more of mathematics.”

Of course with us it was philosophy.

If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics.

And that explains what exactly?

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Sometimes, what stands between two people is the absence of a wall.[/b]

In virtual reality of course we don’t need walls.

You are only as smart as the number of people whom you’ve successfully convinced that you are an idiot.

Clearly, she’s go that back asswards.

Sometimes, ‘beauty will save the world’ sounds like a horrible threat.

Still, better beauty than philosophy.

I miss the times when proper Russian was mainly French.

Probably before we were born.

If you’re going to read a book on how to live a happier life, I suggest that you skip over all the chapters and move directly to your trash can.

That make anyone happier here?

I am not idle, I’m just passive-progressive.

Is one worse than the other?

Something, something, whatever.

Lol.

AAAAAAAhahahahahaha

[b]The two most vital philosophical questions of the Russian intelligentsia:

1. Where does money go;

2. Where does dust come from.[/b]

Nice catch, iam.

[b]Bob Dylan

All I can do is be me, whoever that is. [/b]

Of course he’s just paraphrasing me.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

And, if the highest purpose of philosophy is to inspire, well, that’s what we do here, right?

Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.

Or, sometimes, it’s other things.

The purpose of art is to stop time.

Does time know that?

I fought with my twin, the enemy within.

Not only that but it rhymes.

There is nothing so stable as change.

It just doesn’t seem so at the time.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Why can’t I be happy?
Because happiness does not exist.
Why can’t I be loved?
Because love does not exist.
What can I do?
Wait awhile, you’ll die eventually.[/b]

Let’s call folks like this the optimists.

God, if he exists, speaks to us in tweets of zero characters.

That’s true. I’ve been counting them.

I am bored with cinema. Does anyone need a 70-something warrior-poet?

Nope. But keep them coming.

Dear Americans: Your vote does not count; it never did, unless you can use a semicolon, which you can’t. And, even then, probably not.

Like that will stop them from re-electing Trump.

The more you already have lost, the more prepared you are for what is coming.

Let’s just say that I’ve lost more than you. But, sure, only if that’s true.

Generation X: your whole lives have prepared you for leadership in a crumbling civilization, while being ignored in favor of cynical opportunists.

Does that thing actually exist?

[b]Nick Cave

There’s an element to songwriting that I can’t explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can’t explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It’s like the origin of the universe. [/b]

Let’s pin down that dividing line here.

Death looms large I guess because it should. It’s the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It’s the only thing we’ve really got, and I don’t mean to sound bleak about this, but it’s a unifying factor amongst us all.

Things don’t get more natural than that.

I’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination.

Things don’t get more natural than that.

You don’t meet a lot of people that you really like. I don’t anyway.

Best to just stop meeting them, he thought.

There are methods to creating a mayhem that sounds different from your usual mayhem.

Of course that’s good thing, right?

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

“I” all tangled up [or deconstructed] in that brain thing.

[b]Iggy Pop

Sex may be a little more factual than love. You know whether it’s good or bad. You know whether you liked it or not. You’re not going to change your mind about it ten years later.[/b]

Sounds reasonable to me.

Onstage I’ve been hit by a grapefruit, beercans, eggs, spit, money, cigarette butts, Mandies, Quaaludes, joints, bras, panties, and a fist.

Mandies?

I’m not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don’t get “Iggy Sings.”

Sounds like he is though.
But point taken.

I became Iggy because I had a sadistic boss at a record store. I’d been in a band called the Iguanas. And when this boss wanted to embarrass and demean me, he’d say, ‘Iggy, get me a coffee, light.’

And it might actually be true.

How am I going to listen to that horrible noise I make without a gram of coke and a couple of double Jack Daniels?

You won’t hear me complaining.

My parents wanted to light my artistic candle. But over time, the definition of ‘the arts’ began to stretch. And as I got older, they suddenly realized, Oh, my God, we’re the parents of Iggy Pop.

Imagine then the parents of Tiny Tim. Or, sure, maybe, yours.

[b]Frans de Waal

The enemy of science is not religion. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.[/b]

Just not your own, right, Mr. Objectivist?

If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

Uh, animals too?

Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’

The first ironist. Or, perhaps, the first famous one?

Perhaps it’s just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.

Not quite sure how to react to that though.

Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.

Let’s just live with it.

We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.

We? We being who exactly?

[b]God

Age is just a number. A number that increases by one every year until you die.[/b]

Clearly, God is a fucking genius.

If Hell existed it would be inhabited exclusively by those who thought others were going there.

Next up: If Heaven existed.

If anyone ever tells you I talked to them, tell them you talked to Me, and I told you to tell them I wasn’t talking to them, and shut up.

Try this and get back to us.

The idea that you evolved from apes is disgusting.
Isn’t it nicer to believe you all descended from one couple and their incestuous children?

Uh, let’s not go there, right?

Male nipples are unnecessary. As are males.

So, why do men have nipples?

If you think the picture of the black hole is cool, wait till next week, when you get to photograph it from the inside.

Stretched out like spaghetti we’re told.