a thread for mundane ironists

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6421

[b]God

It’s easy to blame other people for your problems, so do that.[/b]

Wow, a tip from God.

Stop kissing My ass and start not raping kids.

Now He tells them.

The road to enlightenment always leads through the valley of morons.

No morons here of course.

Donald Trump will at some point die.

In other words, He [and His mysterious ways] are still working on it.

So this turned into kind of a fun day.

He means Manafort and Cohen.

To the man who just prayed to Me for a sports car and a big penis: sorry pal, but no one’s got both.

Does anyone here have both?

6422

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Strut said Ursula. One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.[/b]

Lots of strutting here of course.

Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion.

Neither will dasein.

She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one’s bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile.

Let’s file this one [for now] under, “a timeless truth”.

The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.

Beware of course when this is not just a state of mind.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans … read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

And what of the “high-brow Americans”? Or is that now just ludicrous?

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

Right, like that will ever stop them.

6423

[b]V.S. Naipaul

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.[/b]

Really? I hadn’t noticed.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Trust me: most find a way.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

On purpose, in other words.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

How clever [or idiotic] is that?

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

That and the possibilities allowed us by others.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling…

As well it should, Mr. Objectivist.

6424

[b]Herbert Spencer

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.[/b]

Our own for example.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Begetting, among other things, Trumpworld.

Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion…On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects.

So, what do you think…maybe?

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

Not counting the Kids of course. You know, if we’re lucky.

Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.

In other words, our peace, our civilization.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Makes you wonder how we have always managed to avoid that here. Once in a blue moon for example.

6425

[b]tiny nietzsche

freud: tell me about your mother
me: no
freud: want some cocaine?
me: sure[/b]

It’s either one or the other.
If not both.

to don’t list:
don’t @ me
don’t follow me
don’t taze me, bro

Hey, don’t get me started.

if this week feels like last week don’t worry, time is a construct

Not counting next week of course.

donald trump in the ballroom with the nondisclosure agreement

Again.

that feeling when the mayans were only off by six years

Or sure [soon enough] seven.

the only thing that can stop a bad person with an abyss is a good person with an abyss

At least theoretically.

6426

[b]Ferdinand de Saussure

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.[/b]

And, aside from myself, we all know what that means.

Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.

If not downright reactionary.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

If it is even coherent at all.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Naturally, Mr. Objectivist.

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

Sure sounds hopelessly scholastic to me.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

Sure sounds hopelessly scholastic to me.

6427

[b]Leon Trotsky

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.[/b]

Of course this can get tricky.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

Revolutions included.

Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

Of course then life can become too easy. Call it, say, the “one of us” syndrome.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Indeed, it went and drafted me.

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Of course some will see this as brutally ironic.

As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.

Like most things of this sort, you either get it or you don’t.

6428

[b]so sad today

me: i’m dying
me: you’re not dying
me: i’m dying
me: you’re not dying
me: i’m dying[/b]

Come on, we’re all dying.

in a committed relationship with insomnia

More likely insomnia is in a committed relationship with her.

public displays of fake empathy

And don’t forget: practice makes perfect.

people: just be yourself
me: who is that?

Just be like them of course.

crying in supermarkets is an art

Anyone here like to explain why?

not equipped to handle life and don’t really want to get equipped

How’s that working out for her?
[now that her star is rising]

6429

[b]Hannah Arendt

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.[/b]

Under conditions that are not tyrannical too.

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable.

Unless of course the new and the young are the cure that is worse than the disease.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.

Indeed, and here in America, we all but mass produce them.

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

Indeed, and here in America, we all but mass produce them.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

Torture maybe?

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

Marxism for example.

6430

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” Jean Baudrillard[/b]

Or certainly highly improbable.
On the other hand, there it is.

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems” Epictetus

Life’s bookends as it were.

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”. Epictetus

Like that might stop him from cramming it into the heads of others.

"If you’re afraid don’t do it, if you’re doing it don’t be afraid!” Genghis Khan

And look how that turned out for him.

“Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.” Jean-Paul Sartre

He should talk, right?

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre

We’re still working on that, aren’t we?

6431

[b]José Saramago

. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better. [/b]

Define “better”, he insisted.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have.

I know that I don’t.

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

Here are three: “don’t tell mama.”

I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.

Or: I think we are deaf. Deaf people who can hear, but do not hear.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

I know: Yours wouldn’t dare.

Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.

“What?” he asked.

6432

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.[/b]

Communism? Fascism? Lots of completely contradictory things can come from ideas.

But I don’t think of you.

Quite the contrary, she thought about him all the time.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

One word: context.

Do you mean to tell me that you’re thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?
Yes.
My dear fellow, who will let you?
That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Of course here that’s all scripted.

One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.

Anyone actually remember this line from the book? In “real life” she was all but contemptuous of it.

Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it - total passion for the total height - you’re incapable of anything less.

Some might even call it rape.

6433

[b]Dorothy Parker

If all the girls attending the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.[/b]

Of course back then this was considerably more risque.

You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.

Better to just move on to the next one.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

And then [from time to time] back again.

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman’s moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

Even to this day, not much.

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

You know, if you’ve got the dough.

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Still months away thank god.

6434

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Or what you choose not to do.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

Depends on what you think you know though.

“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

In other words, here you can quote God’s will. Either that or His mysterious ways.

“Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.” Thomas Carlyle

Not unlike weak minds.

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” Albert Camus

Either that or have one shoved down their throats.

“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.” Upton Sinclair

On steroids as often as not.

6435

[b]Asne Seirstad

When a man has everything and does not know what more to do, he tries to teach his donkey to talk.[/b]

Must be a Third World thing, he thought.

What the sounds and smells do not divulge, gossip supplies. It spreads like wildfire in the neighborhood, where everyone is watching one another’s morals.

Big little lies as it were.

War was a central theme in maths books too. School books - because the Taliban printed books soley for boys - did not calcualte in apples and cakes, but in bullets and kalasnikovs. Something like this: 'little Omar has a kalasnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels does he kill with each bullet?

See if you can spot dasein here.

Anonymity became a release, the only place to which I could turn.

I think I’ll join her.

To say nothing means to give one’s consent.

To say something though can be very, very dangerous.
We’ll need a context.

We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised.

We being some of us sometimes…most of us other times.

6436

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Ethics 101: Can you forgive the unforgivable?
Ethics 201: Can you forgive anything but the unforgivable?
Ethics 301: Can you forgive my student loan debt?[/b]

Let’s pin down Ethics 401.

Lit Crit 101: Death of the author
Lit Crit 201: Death of the text
Lit Crit 301: Death of “the”
Lit Crit 401: Death of “of”

Lit Crit 501: Death period.

What’s your cat’s name?
Plato: Aporia
Kant: Duty
Nietzsche: The Blond Beast
Wittgenstein: Mittens
Beckett: Nothing

Next up: What’s your dog’s name?.

Freud: It’s not you, it’s your id
Marx: It’s not you, it’s your alienated labor
Levinas: It’s not you, it’s your Other
Twitter: It’s you

What’s you or not you here?

Ontology: How can this be?
Ethics: How evil can this be?
Aesthetics: How ugly can this be?
Political Theory: What did you expect?

You know, in Trumpworld.

Humanity is doomed but at least we’re
History: studying why
Philosophy: doing a thought experiment
Politics: completely ignoring it all

At least in Trumpworld.

6437

[b]Erica Jong

Nothing human was worth denying. Even if it was unspeakably ugly, we could learn from it, couldn’t we? Or could we? I never questioned that at all.[/b]

As always, it comes down to context. And then to priorities.

I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone–the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married.

Let’s decide this once and for all: Genes more or less than memes?

Dorian Fairchester Faddington IV was a promiscuous poetaster of whom even his best friends declared that he “went from bed to verse.” Though he was sexually omnivorous and on occasion preferred camels, like nine out of ten doctors, ordinarily his taste ran to women. Hermione Fingerforth was a woman-or so she liked to assume-and whenever she ran into Dorian it was not long before their lips met in a succession of interesting poses.
The skin is the largest organ of the body, she once nonchalantly remarked to him as they were sunbathing in the nude together on the terrace of her penthouse in Flatbush.
Speak for yourself, he declared, leaping on top of her in a sudden paroxysm of passion.
Out, out of my damned twat! she yelled, pushing him away and shielding her much-vaunted virginity with a silver-foil sun reflector.
I take it you want me to reflect on what I’m doing, he quipped.
Jesus Christ, she said crossly, men are only interested in women in spurts.

Let’s decide this once and for all: Genes more or less than memes?

Is life much too long for an immortal?

Who can tell us?

Beware of the man who wants to protect you; he will protect you from everything but himself.

And don’t even think there are any exceptions.

Fame turns out to be a powerful instrument of grace because it humbles its chosen victims in a hurry. You sail into it, your canvas swelled with grandiosity, and when your fifteen minutes are over and you are becalmed, you realize that grandiosity cannot take you where you need to go.
Only then do you learn to row like hell, asking God for the strength to stay afloat.

Of course for some those 15 minutes can stretch on for years.

6438

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

I want to tell you what’s really happened.
Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.[/b]

In other words, he tells her what happened. With the twins, for example.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

So, how am I being here?

History has superseded the ten commandments of the Bible; for me they had never had any real meaning, that is, any other than a conformitant influence. But sitting in that bedroom, staring at the glow of the fire on the jamb of the door through to the sitting room, I knew that at last I began to feel the force of this super-commandment, summary of them all; somewhere I knew I had to choose it, and every day afresh, even though I went on failing to keep it. Conchis had talked of points of fulcrum, moments when one met one’s future. I also knew it was all bound up with Alison, with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain.

Like that in particular isn’t [often] just a point of view.

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. ‘You like it,’ she said. ‘You say you’re isolated, boyo, but you really think you’re different.’

Goddamnit, he thought, I really am!

Maurice once said to me – when I had asked him a question rather like yours – he said, “An answer is always a form of death” There was something else in her face then. It was not implacable; but in some way impermeable. “I think questions are a form of life.”

I know: what if it’s both?

I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

Of course if all is hazard then we ourselves are too.

6439

[b]Existential Comics

Liberal America’s plan for stopping the rise of fascism seems to be to invite them to give interviews on the news, be as polite as possible, and say that leftists are even more dangerous.[/b]

In other words, Phil Ochs’s liberals: youtu.be/u52Oz-54VYw

Stockholders have an incentive to drive wages down. Landlords have an incentive to drive rent up. These two groups own basically everything, and control most of our society and politics.
But yes, immigrants are to blame.

It’s all explained here: amazon.com/Irrational-Polit … 0961328967

How to become a smart person:
Step one: recognize how stupid everyone else is.
Step two: recognize how stupid you are.
Step three, and this is the real clincher: actually read some fucking books.

Starting with the fucking books that he reads.

Famous philosopher’s last words:
Buddha: “All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness.”
Marx: “Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”
Nietzsche: “Everyone…is a stupid idiot…except for me.”

What will your own famous last words be?

People think it’s in bad taste to make fun of a war hero, but my own dad was a war hero in Vietnam, so I know all about that. You see, he dodged the draft by telling them that he was a gay heroin addict, heroically saving the lives of countless Vietnamese.

In other words, fuck John McCain.

Before making fun of John McCain, remember that he was a true American. He put his life on the line for an imperialist war, then came back and spent his entire career serving the interests of the rich.

Of course there’s also a liberal rendition of that: John Kerry. Though he’s still around.

6440

[b]Colson Whitehead

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.[/b]

Of course evolution has nothing to do with success or failure…just random mutations.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

Depending, in other words, on who owns the shop.

[b]If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.

Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor–if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.[/b]

Moral nihilism in a nutshell. Well, one nutshell anyway.

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

Just don’t confuse them at the wrong time.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Let’s call this [of late] the John McCain Syndrome.

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

How fucking cynical is that?! Unless of course it’s true.