a thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
9621

[b]Greta Garbo

I’m not always sincere. One can’t be in this world, you know.[/b]

Besides, being sincere is just her side of it.

I wish I were supernaturally strong so I could put right everything that is wrong.

Next up: being supernaturally moral.

It is bitter to think of one’s best years disappearing in this unpolished country.

Or, here, one’s posts.

I always look well when I’m near death.

Imagine then what she looks like now.

It’s difficult in Hollywood to be allowed to try anything. It’s all a terrible compromise. There is no time for art. All that matters is what they call box office.

Of course that’s all changed now. :laughing:

I don’t like writers. They’re dangerous people.

Among other things, they put words in her mouth.

9622

[b]Werner Twertzog

Practice suffering, for that will not be taken over by machines.[/b]

That’s still true, right?

Every totalitarian regime tells its subjects that they live in the greatest nation on earth, ever.

This and that they are a part of the Coalition of Truth.

Dear American Blue States: I propose a $10,000 bounty for informants on illegal gun owners and the unvaccinated.

For American Red States better make it a $100,000.

Dear HP: Thank you for the $49.99 printer. How long before I need the $3,999 ink cartridges?

You know, when the price goes down.

Out of an abundance of caution, I have a funeral director on retainer.

The new normal we’ll call it.

Bears do not kill people. Underestimating the indifference of nature to our pain kills people.

Yo, Maia! You’re up!!

9623

[b]Tallulah Bankhead

I’ve tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic, and the others either give me a stiff neck or lockjaw.[/b]

Let’s just leave it at that.

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

Imagine me then.

I’m not childless, darling. I am childfree.

I came close. If you know what I mean. And even I don’t.

Bette Davis and I are good friends. There’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her face - both of them.

Imagine if Twitter were around back then.

I have enemies I’ve never met - that’s fame.

Not unlike the equivalent of that here. The pinheads for example.

Cocaine isn’t habit forming. I should know - I’ve been using it for years.

So, does she have a point?

9624

[b]Werner Twertzog

Dear Fitbit: How many calories are burned by despair?[/b]

Let alone a full blown depression.

By the time you finished saying, “With all due respect,” I already had considered two ways of killing you.

And, no, not just here.

Do you sincerely apologize, Customer Service Representative, Ron? I am coming to your house now to find out.

Ron from Comcast no doubt.

Capitalism, as we all know, means governance by sociopaths.

See, didn’t I tell you?

No, Peter Gabriel, if that is your real name, I shall not electrocute that primate. You are not the boss of me.

This? youtu.be/CnVf1ZoCJSo
Or, sure, something altogether different.

Be the misery you wish to see in the world.

You know, on your very own One True Path.

9625

This is truly strange [to me].

On most days this thread will attract around 40 to 50 views. Today however it has attracted literally thousands. In just a few hours. And this has happened before. Same with my music thread. It is almost as though there is a search engine/bot “out there” that bumps into it and then creates an explosion of views. But views for who exactly?

Anyway, now it seems to have stopped. Back to the normal 2 to 3 views an hour.

9626

[b]Norm Macdonald

Death is a funny thing. Not funny haha, like a Woody Allen movie, but funny strange, like a Woody Allen marriage.[/b]

And funny now?

She said she could no longer live in New York, that she was being tormented day and night by some obsessive stalker. This caught me completely by surprise, as I had taken to hanging around Sarah’s apartment, hiding in the bushes day and night, watching her come and go, and I had never seen any signs of a stalker.

Funny, ha ha?

Earlier this week, Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on Larry King Live, among them that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology and announced that Brando is now free to work again.

Funny, ha ha?

As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.

Of course eventually they land.

Well, the results are in, and once again Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is the richest man in America. Gates says he is grateful for his huge financial success, but it still makes him sad when he looks around and sees other people with any money whatsoever.

I know, I know: kill the rich.

Now that all hope is gone, a deep relief has taken its place, and I allow myself to enjoy it before the despair sets in.

Of course not much isn’t all gone now.

9627

Registered users: aniceguy, Bing [Bot], derleydoo, Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot], Motor Daddy, pood
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

9628

The above, however, is more or less typical. And I know this: that in the past 24 hours there have been more than TWENTY TWO THOUSAND views to this thread. It’s got to be either a glitch or, from time to time, someone or something goes absolutely bananas for the quotes I post.

9629

[b]Existential Comics

Capitalists are like “no communist state ever achieved a perfect utopia!! On the other hand, due to wonders of capitalism, only 15% of workers in the wealthiest countries can’t afford rent, which is somewhat down from the 1850s…”[/b]

Will you settle for “close enough”?

What’s incredible about capitalism is that many of its ardent defenders literally don’t know what it is. They think it is just “trade” or “freedom”. Capitalism is when some people owns everything necessary to produce modern society, and we have to sell our labor to them to live.

Will you settle for “close enough”?

Having studied philosophy extensively, I can assure that despite the American propaganda machine telling you otherwise, the concept of “freedom” is in fact quite distinct from the concept of “profit motive”.

Will you settle for “close enough”?

Me, before studying philosophy: “I’ll study philosophy so understand the world more.”
Me, after studying philosophy: “I understand the world less.”

Not only that, but objectively.

I honestly don’t understand how anyone can not study philosophy. Imagine going through life without being deeply uncertain whether or not chairs exist? Is such a life even worth living?

Worse, that they only exist in your mind.

“Labor day” is the most American holiday there is.
They deliberately didn’t put it on May 1st so as not to imply solidarity with actual workers movements, and large corporations celebrate it by making their workers come to work so they can have a sale.

Yo, Wendy! :laughing:

9630

[b]Jordan Ellenberg

There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about.[/b]

Either that or mistaking the either/or world for the is/ought world.

If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don’t worry—probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else’s. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That’s how conspiracy theories work.

Just out of curiosity, who designs them?

We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study if things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.

Next up: we tend to teach ethics as…

Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying “huh,” but rather making a firm assertion: “I’m not sure, this is why I’m not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.” Or even more: "I’m unsure, and you should be too.

Hint, hint, Mr. Objectivist.

Excellence doesn’t persist; time passes, and mediocrity asserts itself.

Well, unless you’re in the Coalition of Truth.

Mark Twain is good on this: It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.

That sound you hear is Ayn Rand spinning ferociously in her grave.

9631

[b]Existential Comics

Me, solving Zeno’s paradox once and for all: “obviously it can go more than halfway there. Stupid.”[/b]

You know, “for all practical purposes”.

Normalize basing your entire philosophical outlook on a misreading of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Or, for some pinheads here, Nietzsche.

…democracy is when you evict people in the middle of a pandemic because nine unelected judges think some dead guys from 200 years ago would have wanted that.

Hey, the rule of law, right?

Lord of the Rings is considered a fantasy because the trees win the battle against industrialization.

Or was that Harry Potter?

It’s not that “nothing matters”, it’s just that 99% of things you are forced to pay attention to are basically stupid bullshit that no one actually cares about, and everyone knows it.

Yeah, that.

I know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but if you consider yourself to be on the left politically, you are actually not required to be obsessed with every little thing AOC does.

On the other hand, he insisted, she is drop dead gorgeous.

9632

[b]Eugene Ionesco

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.[/b]

[i]I’ll try to imagine pood and his ilk understanding this.

Nope, nothing yet.[/i]

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Spiritual needs. Right.

I am not capitulating.

Me, I’ never stop thinking about it.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

To the best of my own recollection, I never read an entire play of his. Though not for the reason most will suspect.

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers…

Some just funnier than others.

It’s not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it’s mankind.

That and Wendy Darling.

9633

[b]Doth

Give Britney the beating hearts of all those who have wronged her.[/b]

Or chop off their dicks?

I reject the notion that we have free will. None of us decided to be here.

You know, to the best of our recollection.

Ask your doctor if being perceived is right for you.

Or your BFF.

I just want to be rich enough where I never have to be seen in public again.

Welcome to the club?

In honor of Mary Shelley’s birthday, rise from the dead each morning and be the monster you’ve always wanted.

Not unlike I am here.

If someone asks how you’re doing, just say “we live in an endless hell” and then they’ll leave.

Or “foe” you.

9634

[b]Petrarch

Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.[/b]

Something that people actually believe!

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

Women too.
On the other hand, here, that’s where I come in.
Just ask the Stooges.

Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence…

Perhaps in here too.

Man has not a greater enemy than himself.

Let’s note all the exceptions.

You keep to your own ways and leave mine to me.

You know, in the best of all possible worlds.

For though I am a body of this earth, my firm desire is born from the stars.

Little did he know!

9635

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

French literature: The devil wanted me to do it
British literature: The devil begged me to do it
German literature: The devil paid me to do it
Russian literature: I am the devil and I didn’t do it![/b]

American literature: nytimes.com/books/best-sell … r-fiction/

Your philosophical hero at age
12: Ziggy Stardust
16: Zarathustra
20: Foucault
24: Deleuze
28: a bot that retweets every tweet with the word Deleuze

At my age: godot.

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

In 280 characters or less.

Volume 1 of Marx’s Kapital was published 154 years ago today in Hamburg. You can buy the first edition from an Austrian Antiquariat, but it’ll cost you US$ 304,095.11.

If only promethean75 were still around to take advantage of it.

Plato: Leave the cave
Heidegger: Leave the metropolis
Nietzsche: Leave me alone

iambiguous? You tell me.

Philosophy begins
Plato: in confusion
Aristotle: in wonder
Kierkegaard: with dread
Sartre: when Che lights your cigar

Really, Che lit his cigar.

9636

[b]Peter Watts

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.[/b]

Or, here, in dealing with the fulminating fanatic pinheads.

If you can see it, chances are it doesn’t exist.

And, no, not just your own “personal experiences” with God.
Well, unless of course you can actually prove them.

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

Unless they’re, what, defective?

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune’s orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon’s touch.

Of course you and your abyss might be different.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view’s distorted.

And, no, not just in Flatland.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can’t imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn’t even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can’t quite put your finger on.

Let’s call them Kids then.

9637

[b]God

I’m out of ideas.[/b]

Again in other words.

I care more about the outcome of sporting events than any other aspect of human existence.

So, by all means, pray for the home team, chump!!

Spoiler alert: everyone dies at the end.

Of course it’s the spoiler after this that the faithful cling to.

It’s a fucking mask, people.

Think of it as Halloween 365 days a year.

There’s only one answer to the question “Can people really be this dumb?”, and that answer is yes.

If not definitely.

9/11 takes Me back to a simpler time when America fought terrorists instead of electing them.

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

9638

[b]Garry Winogrand

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.[/b]

Their facts not ours.

I photograph what interests me. I’m not saying anything different.

Another mysterious fact clearly described?

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

You tell me: google.com/search?source=un … =615&dpr=1

I have no expectations. None at all.

I do have a few myself.

I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

Whatever that means.

In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.

Or even something else altogether.

9639

[b]God

Human history’s great if you like true crime.[/b]

On the other other hand, when it comes to crime, He did create us.
Cue Rabbi Kushner?

One day no one will be left to look back on all this and laugh.

That works for me.

You really are just a total disgrace as a species.

And He should know.

When does life begin?
When you leave Texas.
Except Austin.

You tell me.

“Working in mysterious ways” is functionally indistinguishable from “fucking up”.

See, I told you.

When you do it it’s a murder. When I do it it’s a miscarriage.

See, I told you.

9640

[b]Charles Baudelaire

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?[/b]

If he were still around, we’d tell him.

The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

You know, if you’re foolish enough to believe in the devil.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

So, how’s that going for you?

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.

So, sure, why not just call them that.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

He suspected that there might be exceptions.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

He suspected that there might be exceptions.