a thread for mundane ironists

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7661

[b]Existential Comics

Why can you be unkempt but not kempt?
Why can you be disturbed but not turbed?
Why can you be overwhelmed and underwhelmed but not whelmed?
Why do a small number of capitalists control all the productive capacity of society, and the workers have no say in how or what is produced?[/b]

The really Big Questions in other words.

philosophy is funny because half the ideas are just so dumb. but we make progress because they are still slightly less dumb than the ideas people have who don’t do philosophy

Of course we all know they are slightly more dumb. And that’s before we get to the Kids.

Greatest moment of enlightenment for philosophers:
Aristotle: reads Plato
Descartes: reads Aristotle
Hume: reads Descartes
Kant: reads Hume
Hegel: reads Kant
Marx: reads Hegel
Foucault: takes acid in the desert and is like “whoa dude, what if…like…everything is a prison??”]

And that [so far] is where it still stands.

We are told we have to go to college to get a job.
We are told we have to go into debt to go to college.
We are told we have to work for the rich to pay off our debt to the rich.
We are told this is freedom.

You know, if you’re a capitalist.

through the miracle of science, we can achieve existential despair twice as fast as we could in the 1800s

Or, for some of us, triple as fast. At least.

thinking about making a list of the hundred greatest philosophers just to get absolutely everyone pissed off about the order i choose

Have there even been 100 philosophers?

7662

[b]Bob Dylan

I’m determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not. [/b]

If it’s even the right God.

He’s hell bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused, and his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.

Five will get you ten he’s a Kid. And an objectivist.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.

Not likely that it thinks about us at all.

Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.

Never had that problem, have you?

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

ILP is a sort of stage too, isn’t it?

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie
Then you’re all the time defending what you can never justify

For example, in the Oval Office.

7663

[b]Blake Crouch

It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.[/b]

In other words, fuck the details. And none of us are more than that.

He also carried that whiff of unearned arrogance that seems to cling to those who crave authority for the sheer sake of power.

Let’s name names.

In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies. I would think a former employee of the federal government could grasp that concept.

State and local employees too around here.

And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isn’t just the inverse of who I am. It’s an infinitely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life…

I know: Let’s not go there.

You know how a dream feels the farther you get from it? It loses its color and intensity and logic. Your emotional connection to it fades.

Not unlike reality itself.

You believe in God, Ethan?
No.
Many did. Adopted moral codes. Created religions. Murdered in the names of gods they’d never seen or heard.
You believe in the universe?
Sure.
Oh, so you’ve been to space. Seen those distant galaxies firsthand?
Point taken.

Sophistry, right?

7664

[b]tiny nietzsche

area 51 plus one[/b]

The deeper state still.

objects in the mirror are dirtier than they appear

So, go and wash them.

my aesthetic is a kitchen fire

Electrical to boot.

my body is revolting against me and I couldn’t agree more

Trust me: No one says that when it’s actually true.

why do I have to suffer for your art?

Of course here it’s “philosophy”.

what’s ketamine is ketayours

how depressing is that?

7665

[b]Tori Amos

So, you can make me come, that doesn’t make you Jesus. [/b]

It’s not nothing though.

I call that god the Little G. Because the god that we’ve been worshipping is not to me the Supreme Creator. Anybody who needs to control and make people feel ashamed. . .It’s like, ‘I send my only begotten son. . .’ Well you know, that concept of sending a son where we as women could, like, breastfeed him and give him milk, but he’s not gonna soil his dinky with us? What’s that all about?

Someone tell her.

I call that god the Little G. Because the god that we’ve been worshipping is not to me the Supreme Creator. Anybody who needs to control and make people feel ashamed. . .It’s like, ‘I send my only begotten son. . .’ Well you know, that concept of sending a son where we as women could, like, breastfeed him and give him milk, but he’s not gonna soil his dinky with us? What’s that all about?

Sure, maybe.

I’m not somebody that gets played a lot at parties and weddings. I mean, you know, you mention my name and you get an eye roll, until, of course, you’re jumping off a bridge.

She said it.

Robert Plant asked me to marry him, but I said ‘no.’ I mean, you just don’t want to marry someone you’ve wanted to do it with since you were thirteen, because, well, if he farts, I would, like, die!

So, what do you think, true story?

Womanhood is a whole different thing from girlhood. Girlhood is a gift…Womanhood is a choice.

You know, if men let them.
You know the ones.

7666

[b]Neal Stephenson

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.[/b]

Who cares…just show me the money.

If she screws up this delivery, that means she’s double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience.

I actually get that.

He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror.

Just another day, right?

If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics – it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.

And, boy, does that ever apply here!

Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.

Except around matches.

Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god’s wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him–the helpless, innocent victim, that is–into let’s say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

Any truth to this?

7667

[b]tiny nietzsche

happy birthday nietzsche! you fuck[/b]

Said with great affection of course.

go pet a dog. I’ll wait

Go buy a dog? Maybe he’ll wait, maybe he won’t.

this whole time I thought you were an artist, but it turns out you’re just not happy

Or: this whole time I thought you were a nihilist, but it turns out you’re just not happy

If you really loved me, you would watch me from afar, writing poems in blood, and burning them on my grave when I’m dead.

Now that’s love, Mr. Goatman.

wake up and smell the nihilism

Or, sure, the napalm.

resets feelings to factory settings

It’s in the Bible somewhere.

7668

[b]Miles Davis

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.[/b]

Well, there you go.

The way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play.

Is that possibly applicable here?

What’s swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don’t have to ask anybody if that’s good music or not. You can always feel it.

Is that possibly applicable here?

You have to practice for a long time before you can learn to sound like yourself.

At least a couple hours.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

Or: There are no wrong words in philosophy: only words in the wrong places.
Actually both one suspects.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?

Any white folks here who don’t?

7669

[b]Jodie Foster

I’d like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young. [/b]

Your challenge: to make sense of this.

I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.

What’s that make our responsibility then?

Ninety-five percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive… women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.

Not counting Ann Coulter perhaps.

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

Works that way for many outside the business too. That and Taxi Driver.

When I go into the stores, I pet the saddles. Until security comes and takes me away.

Saddles meaning…what exatly?

If I make two movies my entire life, and they’re two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don’t need to be Steven Spielberg.

And on rare occasions neither does he.

7670

[b]so sad today

honestly can’t believe time is just gonna like keep going[/b]

Or: honestly can’t believe that one day time is just gonna like stop

when my soul is feeling tired, parched, weak, i come here to have it totally destroyed

Here too, right?

i should be back in therapy but i’m tweeting instead

Better that than Facebook.

oh fuck i’m still me

And getting more me all the time.

my tits disappoint me more and more with each passing day

I’ll be the judge of that, he thought.

you need to love yourself
listen, if i knew how to love myself i’d be doing it

The part they always forget.

7671

[b]Michael Moore

It really is disgusting when a guy in a ball cap with a high school education is the one asking the tough questions. [/b]

And an obese guy to boot.

I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America with genocide, then built it with slaves. The shootings will continue. It’s who we are.

Then why bitch about it?

Jesus told us that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us.

And look where that got him.

I’m a millionaire, I’m a multi-millionaire, I’m filthy rich. You know why I’m a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do.

Let’s decide if it is okay for hum to say this.

If the Founding Fathers could have looked into a crystal ball and seen AK-47s and Glock semi-automatic pistols, I think they would say, you know, ‘That’s not really what we mean when we say bear arms.’

One man’s opinion as it were.

Hope for the best is what we do, right from the moment we’re born.

Actually, I don’t remember that far back myself.

7672

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.[/b]

For example, when they are not.

We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes.

Yep, that’s been my experience too.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

For some, that’s always the bottom line.

You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

Well, Kid, at least you’ll be safe.

Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

Let’s call this “the other side of the coin”.

All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.

Even more lethal [as often as not], a dick.

7673

[b]so sad today

obsessive thinking just feels right[/b]

Let’s obsess on that, okay?

my paranoia feels swollen

As well it should in this world.

everything feels like a burden and nothing is even happening

That can be unnerving no doubt.

my anxiety will always be here for you

When it’s not actually stalking you.

i’d rather be liked than respected, but i’d rather be asleep than liked

And how far can that be from death itself.

make my ass great again

Sure, I’ll give it a go.

7674

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.[/b]

Buddha proper as it were.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

Unless, of course, you’re a Desperate Degenerate.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

The real world for example.

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Only if you’ll settle for their answers.

What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness.

You know the ones.

The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

Tell me that’s not a good point.

7675

[b]Ralph Nader

All empires eventually destroy themselves. That’s the record of history. [/b]

Will America be the exception?!

The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.

Trust me: Not just our progress.

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

What’s that make Trump then? No, seriously.

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn’t even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.

Sure, I once actually believed that myself.

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.

Either theirs or ours, for example.

That’s why I call the Senate the graveyard of democracy, because even when you have 58 senators, they can block it and block it and block it.

Unless of course it is something that you want to see blocked.

7676

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.” Jonathan Franzen[/b]

Genes or memes, right?

“The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.” Plutarch

Yep, that’s still around.

“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Yep, that’s still around.

“Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

That makes at least two of us.

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” James Joyce

He wondered if anyone had ever thought of Baltimore in that way.

“People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.” James Joyce

Embrace a cactus? Is that just a figure of speech?

7677

[b]Pythagoras

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.[/b]

Say what, right?

A thought is an idea in transit.

Needless to say: for better or worse.

Above all things, reverence yourself.

Not counting the assholes of course.

Wealth is a weak anchor, and glory cannot support a man; this is the law of God, that virtue only is firm, and cannot be shaken by a tempest.

They just said things like that back then.

A blow from your friend is better than a kiss from your enemy.

We’ll need a context of course.

Don’t disarrange my circles!

Let’s put this in context.

7678

[b]Lynda Barry

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it’s there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories. [/b]

Then the part about dasein.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don’t sit around and go “I need to write a book. What’s a good question?” It will be a question that’s just clanging around in my head.

Or, here, “when I work on a thread.”

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can’t control.

Here of course you’ll only get warned.
There’s no dungeon to send you to.

When an attractive but aloof (“cool”) man comes along, there are some of us who offer to shine his shoes with our underpants. There are thousands of scientific concepts as to why this is so, and yes, yes, it’s very sick but none of this helps.

For men and attractive women, double it at least.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

Until you’re the butt of it perhaps.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

Buddha?

7679

[b]Pete Seeger

The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.[/b]

So, how far is that from the “noble savage”? Or, how far is that from the actual truth?

And there’s a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

My seeds? Or, sure, your seeds.

Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.

And that’s still too close to call.

According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God.

Great, that again, he thought.

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can’t save the community you have seen?

Uh, you can’t?

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.

Well, I’m practically that.

7680

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Man is the microcosm: I am my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein[/b]

What’s that make “I” then?

“One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not much that this isn’t. Right, Kids?

“The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.” Jean-Baptiste Say

What’s that make us postmoderns then?

“Lived experience can never be fully resolved into concepts, but its dark tonality accompanies all conceptual thought.” Wilhelm Dilthey

Mine being particularly dark of course.

“The knife of historical relativism…which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.” Wilhelm Dilthey

Well, I’m doing what I can here.

“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.” Vladimir Nabokov

Ever getting smaller all the time.