a thread for mundane ironists

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9381

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” Soren Kierkegaard[/b]

You know, whatever that might possibly mean. Though point taken of course.

“Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.” Philip Roth

Either that or not at peace.

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
Gilles Deleuze

Yo, Mr. Fulminating Fanatic. Explain this to Mr. Objectivist.

"The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?” Gilles Deleuze

Or, if you dare not to write, to read.

If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.” Gilles Deleuze

Fucked it is then, he chortled.

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!” Gilles Deleuze

Yo, Meno! :sunglasses:

9382

[b]Holly Black

I love my parents’ murderer; I suppose I could love anyone.[/b]

Doesn’t get more grimmer than that, he winced.

I hate you, I breathed into his mouth. I hate you so much that sometimes I can’t think of anything else.

Doesn’t get more ominous than that, he winced.

I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.

No, really, it can actually come to that.

Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.

And, sure, to burn others.

Pain makes you strong, Madoc once told me, making me lift a sword again and again. Get used to the weight.

Or just switch over to a Saturday night special?

Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go.

For some, even farther than they need to go.

9383

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Gilles Deleuze[/b]

For Reich it all revolved around sexual repression; not sure about Spinoza though.

“I measure the strength of a spirit by how much truth it can take.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Not much, right Mr. Objectivist?

“The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.”
Jackson Pollock

Nope, not yet. You know, if you’re me.

“Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” Vladimir Nabokov

He’s kidding, right?

“The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski’s style.” Vladimir Nabokov

He’s kidding, right?

"Words without experience are meaningless.” Vladimir Nabokov

See, I told you, Mr. Intellectual Contraption.

9384

[b]Emily Dickinson

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.[/b]

Things that poets say. And some actually believe.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Things that poets say. And some actually believe.

An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.

You do grasp this, don’t you?

I must go in, the fog is rising.

But: into the fog itself?

Parting is all we know of Heaven,
and all we need of Hell.

Or something like that.

A wounded dear leaps the highest

I know, I know: and then what?

9385

[b]Matthew McConaughey

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.[/b]

Sounds like something he would say.
Depending on the movie.

I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.

Great! Another goddamn fool, he grumbled.

I don’t mind assholes. It’s the dork I don’t trust. The dork is the one who’s trying to be whatever he thinks you want him to be. I trust the asshole cause you know where he’s gonna stand.

Where the assholes do.

First off I want to thank God, because he’s the one I look up to, he’s graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human kind. He has shown me that it’s a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late British actor Charlie Laughton, who said, ‘When you got God, you got a friend and that friend is you.’

Let’s just say that Texans well deserve him? Unless of course I’m missing his point.

Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.

Acting?
Asked the philosopher.

I think ‘unbelievable’ is an unbelievably stupid word.

I won’t ask him why if you don’t.

9386

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” Lord Byron[/b]

Ah, the Big Three: fulminating fanatics, Kids, objectivists. Though not necessarily in that order.

“Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.” Gilbert Ryle

You know whatever that means. Like, say, for all practical purposes.

“I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die.” Bertrand Russell

Finally, another hopelessly subjective opinion.

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, ‘I am suffering,’ than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly’”. Simone Weil

In other words, you tell me.

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Simone Weil

Nope, still haven’t found where mine is rooted. But you’ll know when I know.

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.” Simone Weil

Yo, Mr. Reasonable. Explain this please.

9387

[b]Theodore Roethke

I learn by going where I have to go.[/b]

Or where others send you.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

Right up until August 1, 1963.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

Occasionally moving on to the major organs.

Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?

But I repeat myself: you can say anything. And, sure, even believe it.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

And perhaps even more.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

I once understood this so much better than I do now.

9388

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Art is an attempt to integrate evil.” Simone de Beauvoir[/b]

That tells us almost nothing, he snorted.

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.” Simone de Beauvoir

None of us do. And then what?

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” Alfred North Whitehead

Objectively, right?

“It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.” Alfred North Whitehead

We’ll need a context of course.

“Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.” Alfred North Whitehead

The rest, shudder to think, being history.

“What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?” William Lindsay Gresham

Yours perhaps?

9389

[b]Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.[/b]

And then it’s now all the way down. Or all the way to the grave.

Each moment is a place you’ve never been.

Although some do come awful close to feeling the same.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Weird isn’t it?

These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing
This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing
I am the same boy my mother used to kiss

Or smack around. But point taken.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

Well, it is after all a world of words.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I’m guessing not always.

9390

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Stupidity is much the same all the world over.” John Stuart Mill[/b]

Only so much more here.

We need not destroy the past. It is gone." John Cage

Though, come on, how we know better!

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.” John Cage

Either that or the wrong reason.

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage

Here, I refuse to discriminate. Both can floor you.

“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” Lewis Carroll

That and the physics.

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” Lewis Carroll

That and plain old stupidity.

9391

[b]Ernest Cline

No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway.[/b]

And definitely not here, right?

I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

Wouldn’t bother me in the least.

Going outside is highly overrated.

You know, for some of us.

People who were cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, that’s who. Cats with a serious marble deficiency.

I mean, obviously.

Besides, now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

Right around the corner in other words.

I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer’s tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer.

Again, in other words.

9392

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” Lewis Carroll[/b]

Street logic as it were.

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Ernest Hemingway

Of course, for some, that’s actually troubling.

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Ernest Hemingway

Tell that to, among others, the Grim Reaper.

“When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” Jonathan Swift

Or, here, the Kids.

“No wise man ever wished to be younger.” Jonathan Swift

:laughing:

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Or, yeah, to destroy one.

9393

[b]Paul Gauguin

Art equals a mad search for individualism.[/b]

Or the search anyway.

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn’t follow anybody!

Now that’s a good point.

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.

Now that may or may not be a good point.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. And who you are thinking it about.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Actully, it’s closer to 2,400,000,000 seconds. But still, no doubt, considerably less then all of the seconds in eternity.

9394

Thanks, everybody. See you next pandemic.

The final Nein apparently…

[b]Nein

Magical Brutalism. Your time has come.[/b]

Yep, that’s what it’s come to.

Somewhere they’re covering something with chocolate. And calling it religion.

Or cyanide.

Monday. Marx said there would be days like this.

Right, like Tuesday and all the rest of them don’t follow right in order.

Gentle reminder: Don’t believe everything you think.

He means brutal reminder for some.

Yes, we’ll say, before social media we had to endure lives of isolation and ignorance.

:laughing:

What’s the German word for Schadenfreude?

Obviously: dasein.
Or, if you’re a fool, Dasein.

9395

[b]Robert Mapplethorpe

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.[/b]

Is it possible to really understand this?

I would never have done what I’d done if I’d considered my father as somebody I wanted to please.

Let’s just say I get this more than you do.

My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is.

Probably the only thing you want to know.
On the other hand…

I don’t believe in dogmas and theologies. I just believe in being a good person.

If bizarrely.

I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You’ll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

And the equivalent to that here is…?

I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It’s always little altars.

I was a Protestant boy myself. Went to church every Sunday and then some. Does that show here?

9396

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

I think, therefore I am. I think.[/b]

And then for sure it’s turtles all the way down.

Reading the news always makes me wonder whether Pandora’s box is half full or half empty.

Tell me that’s not clever.

In the beginning there was Beauty. Then we tried to define it.

Unpinned as it were. If you know what I mean. And why she unpinned it.

The only truly terrifying sanctions you could impose on Russia are linguistic ones. Make us give back all the foreign words we once borrowed and have been using for ages ever since, and we’ll shut the hell up.

Yo, Biden!

If you constantly wake up on the wrong side of the bed, I suggest that you make sure you’re not sleeping on a Möbius strip.

Anyone here sleep on one?

We’re all just Schrödinger’s cats dying to learn whether we’re dead or alive.

On the other hand, there is how we all end up.

9397

[b]Margaret Mead

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.[/b]

Imagine her being brought up today.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

Cowardly of course.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

And look at us now.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.

Next up: for better or worse.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

Okay with all the other stuff though.

Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people.

No, really, think about that.

9398

[b]Werner Twertzog

Grand Canyon eventually to be renamed “Comcast Canyon.”[/b]

Unless it’s the Comcast White House first. Or, sure, why not both.

Dear Americans: When will you acknowledge the existence of social class?

Who knows, but surely long after we are all dead and gone.

I can no longer distinguish between the beards of hipsters, the orthodox, the homeless, the simply mad, and English professors.

On the other hand, it might not be important to.

Church is important for making introverts, the autistic, the depressed, and otherwise socially traumatized people resign themselves to hell.

I know, I know: not your church.

Extended life expectancy just means more time to contemplate the futility of our existence, as most of us know.

Yo, Satyr: genes or memes?

You can lose so much more than you ever imagined.

Everything for example.

9399

[b]Napoleon Bonaparte

Nature intended women to be our slaves. They are our property.[/b]

Hey, times change, right? You know, for some of us.

To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war.

Some things never change. Given, for example, the military industrial complex. And the war economy.

God is on the side with the best artillery.

Back then maybe. Now it’s more likely to be nuclear bombs.

The greatest general is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

Wow, who would have figured that?

How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares ‘God wills it thus.’ Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Then Marx came along to make it all more “scientific”.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

Not to mention the other way around.

9400

[b]Werner Twertzog

We shall never be truly unmasked.[/b]

You know, being philosophical.

There is no difference between truth and lies but power, I am told.

In fact, I told him. Just not literally.

Dear America: it is important for Jeff Bezos to have a super-yacht so that you fully understand that you live in a meritocracy and that your life has no value.

Doesn’t Jeff own and operate the liberal Washington Post?
I know: what ruling class?

The Ostrogoths made the Visigoths look like Vestal Virgins, as we all know.

A little help with this one please.

In order to teach literature, professors must first learn to hate it.

Or at least refuse to tolerate it.

Teach a man to fish, and you have condemned him to labor in a dying industry.

With the best of intentions anyway.