a thread for mundane ironists

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6441

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking.[/b]

Cue [among others here] ecmandu.

She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.

Remember when she was here?

Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.

Just out of curiosity, what are they now?

Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.

Most here for example.

Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.

Without a single solitary exception, right?

All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead.

And not just statistically one suspects.

6442

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” Democritus[/b]

Well, almost everything else.

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” Albert Camus

Next up: Sartre and Mao.

“You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Albert Camus

Worse [for others]: When you think that you’ve found it.

“Where there is no hope, we must invent it.” Albert Camus

He means in a No God world.

“Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.” Pythagoras

And then repeat them over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. :wink:

“If thou will make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.” Epicurus

Trust me: At your own peril.

6443

[b]Neil Gaiman

Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you’ve forgotten the name of the person you’re introducing them to as well?
No.[/b]

There’s lots of words like that that don’t exist.

‘The world is always ending for someone’. It’s a good line. I give it to the father of the child. He says it to his wife. ‘The world is always ending for someone,’ he says. She is trying to quieten the baby, and does not hear him. I doubt that it would matter if she did.

It’s still a good line. You just have know when to say it.

There were things Thor did when something went wrong. The first thing he did was ask himself if what had happened was Loki’s fault. Thor pondered. He did not believe that even Loki would have dared to steal his hammer. So he did the next thing he did when something went wrong, and he went to ask Loki for advice.

Of course that’s just their myths.

You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.

Hold on, I’ll ask mine.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

Either this or that. Or, sure, neither this nor that.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

Not many cities that doesn’t describe these days.

6444

[b]Spike Lee

I think it is very important that films make people look at what they’ve forgotten.[/b]

In other words, what he doesn’t want you to forget.

I think people who have faults are a lot more interesting than people who are perfect.

Our kind of faults in particular.

When you love something it’s not a job anymore.

About 1 in a 1,000 jobs these days.

When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it’s all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum.

A wage-slave nation is what we are now. In other words, a little reading, a little writing and a little arithmetic.

We’ve got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A’s and speaking proper English: that’s criminal.

Nope, not so far. It’s still just one or another rendition of The Wire one suspects.

I wouldn’t be doing motherfucking films for almost three decades if every time I did something that someone didn’t like I went in a fucking cocoon and just hid there and didn’t make my art.

Also, he gets paid to make them.

6445

[b]Leslie Feinberg

I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn’t this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.[/b]

So, is this reasonable or unreasonable? You know, being that we’re philosophers.

The sky was black and strewn with stars. I felt alone on the planet. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I strained to look into my future, trying to picture the road ahead of me, searching for a glimpse of who I would become. All I could see was the night sky and the stars above me.

On top of that, he may well be seeing only the light from stars that no longer even exist.

I’ve been going to the library, looking up our history. There’s a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven’t always been hated. Why didn’t we grow up knowing that?

Let’s ask the conservatives. Here, for example.

…wishing I could do everything in my life once as practice, and then go back and do it again.

Maybe in the next life.

But if theory is not the crystallized resin of experience, it ceases to be a guide to action.

That’s sort of my own point here, isn’t it?

I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar.

My advice: Keep them closed.

6446

[b]tiny nietzsche

killing time until I’m dead[/b]

That makes [at least] two of us.

what doesn’t’ kill you is just getting warmed up

Now that’s more like it.

Seize the Means of Production, Charlie Brown

Yeah, he thought, maybe in a comic strip.

all the best nihilists have vacant eyes

Them and vacant ears.

the first day of the rest of your death

Count on it.

people that are dead:
god
bela lugosi
ed

In fact, lots and lots of Eds.

6447

[b]C.G. Jung

Is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon him and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more personal vocation?[/b]

That’s probably not even the half of it.

Wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil’s own seed. But do not forget to wait.

Decades now and counting for some of us.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

Either that or they’d come here.

That we are bound to the earth does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary it is the sine qua non of growth. No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots, for it grows not only upward but downward as well.

Unless of course you’re now beyond good and evil.

My intellect would wish for a clear-cut universe with no dim corners, but there are these cobwebs in the cosmos.

There certainly are down here in our neck of it.

All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not.

Must be the soul, right?

6448

[b]so sad today

i think i have, like, extra feelings[/b]

How about I give them to you.

we should lose hope together

Come on, you’ll never catch up.

by relaxed i mean very anxious

If no longer suicidal.

i never know what i’m feeling because i don’t want to

I know: Why can’t that work for the rest of us?

oops, the reasons i created for staying alive are trying to kill me

This time let 'em.

curing loneliness with isolation

Is there any other way?

6449

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization.[/b]

And, of late, more and more women.

Oh God, if the mechanism of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it all, one did one’s bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?

If you count death, sure.

I think, said the Major, taking his pipe from his mouth, that desire is the most wonderful thing in life. Anybody who can really feel it, is a king, and I envy nobody else!

Next up: The other side of that coin.

My shoes are made of Spanish leather, My socks are made of silk; I wear a ring on every finger, I wash myself in milk.

I know: You thought that you were the only one.

He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.

Double that and you’re still no where near close to me.

The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax.

In other words, why can’t it be like that here!

6450

[b]V. S. Naipaul

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.[/b]

Or here with everything he posted.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

And then one day, it’s not strange at all.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Only all the time, he thought.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.

Worse: no wrong.

She had a great many opinions, but taken together they did not add up to a point of view.

I suspect she begs to differ.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

Like things are really better for those with words.

6451

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.” Theodor Adorno[/b]

Let me guess, Mr. Objectivist: You’ve solved it.

“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.” Theodor Adorno

Cue, among others, Heidegger.

“Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.” Theodor Adorno

Cue, among others, the definitionists

“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.” Theodor Adorno

Or, if your me, the task of philosophy.

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

In other words, fuck Kant.

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

That and the consumption of mass quantities.

6452

duplicate post

6453

[b]Herbert Spencer

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.[/b]

Not counting all the parts we’re still missing.

No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.

Here however many really are the equal of the shit they post.

And yet, strange to say, now that the truth [of natural selection] is recognized by most cultivated people…now more than ever, in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further the survival of the unfittest.

Let’s poll the ubermen.

We too often forget that not only is there a soul of goodness in things evil,'but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.

You know, up in the clouds.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

By dividing up all the rest.

No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

How dumb is that, he thought.

6454

[b]David Sedaris

If you’re looking for sympathy you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.[/b]

I looked it up. It’s true.

Sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have left to hold onto.

I’m working on them.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

Sounds retarded too.

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.

Not to worry, we all do.

If you aren’t cute, you may as well be clever.

You know, if you actually can be.

Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?

Nope.

6455

[b]Leon Trotsky

Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.[/b]

Not to mention a legacy of lots of other things too.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.

Provided of course you live that long.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

A sentimental fool let’s call him.

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies.

In other words, when they’re no longer your comrades.

The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.

Yeah, but that was before we won.

The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.

Pretty much what they were thinking about him.

6456

[b]GOD

This is not a “joke” account. I am God. Fuck you for doubting Me.[/b]

The Twitter God as it were.

I’ve been ordering Trump’s penis to half-staff since 1979.

He is after all omnipotent.

Donald Trump is an asshole’s asshole. He’s the kind of asshole other assholes look at and say, “Now there’s an asshole.”

And that was God six years ago.

I created the entire universe for the sake of one group of one species on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy.

Or, as Karpel Tunnel might note, “So what?” :wink:

By this age I thought I’d be more successful.

And, going back to the Big Bang, that would make Him billions of years old.

Stop breeding, the lot of you.

Why doesn’t He just order up more miscarriages?

6457

[b]Hannah Arendt

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.[/b]

Let’s figure the masses and Trump in all this.

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

So, are we heading there again? Only here this time?

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

Wow, who does this remind you of?

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

If only in theory. At least around here.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Really, think about how preposterous this can be.

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

They don’t call it the class struggle for nothing. Or back when they didn’t.

6458

[b]Existential Comics

Plato: we have to force people to be educated.
Rousseau: we have to force people to be free.
Bentham: we have to force people to be happy.
Bakunin: we have to force people to stop forcing people to do things.[/b]

Or, sure, not force them.

The funny thing about saying “you are your brain”, is that the sentence would be incoherent, if true.

Okay, but how funny?

Italian food culture: “my grandmother taught me how to make the perfect Gnocchi, as her grandmother taught her.”
English food culture: “yeah so we basically just throw whatever’s lying around in here, and call it Shepard’s Pie.”

American food culture: “Burger King or McDonalds?”

Growing up, my teachers always told me that smoking cigarettes was not cool. Later, when I found out this was a lie, and cigarettes are in fact cool, I started to question everything else they taught me.
Anyway, long story short, now I’m a revolutionary Marxist Leninist Maoist.

More to the point: Why isn’t everyone? And what’s smoking got to do with it?

Utilitarians are going to be pretty pissed when the results of the ethical calculus tell us that the best result is achieved by teaching children that utilitarianism is false.

Not if they’re down in the hole that I’m in.

Eventually the Trix Rabbit realized that it wasn’t the children who kept him from eating Trix cereal, it was a structural system of discrimination codified into every level of society.

Not unlike what Roger Rabbit realized. And he was first.

6459

[b]José Saramago

Don’t be afraid, the darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you’ve never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn’t frighten you…my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside.[/b]

You know, if this works for you.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

On the other hand: chronicle.com/blogs/percola … cher/32709

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

Ours especially.

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…

Among other things, pointless. Though, by all means, point taken.

If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

Not that anyone ever does.

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

Unless of course it does.

6460

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.[/b]

That’s probably the last thing art is.

I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it.

That’s probably the last thing immortality is.

Every form of happiness is private.

Just as [no doubt] every form of unhappiness is collective.

He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again.

Paint by number love as it were. Or love by the book.

Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.
But I don’t think of you.

Quite the contrary, the Ellsworth Tooheys were all she every thought about.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Let’s pin down the irony here.