Thread for mundane ironists

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582

Stupidity

“The enemy isn’t men, or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no one has the right to be stupid.” Terry Pratchett

Of course, most of them are men and women.

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.” Bertolt Brecht

Pick three:
1] the Deep State
2] the Dumb State
3] the Deep, Dumb State

“I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.” Dorothy Parker

Not unlike Julie Brown: https://youtu.be/pvvGR09P5XI?si=UuDSIu23QNo6MEe4

“You’re mad,” I said. “You know what he can do. No prize is worth that.”
Sturmhond grinned. “That remains to be seen.”
“The Darkling will hunt you for the rest of your days.”
“Then you and I will have something in common, won’t we? Besides, I like to have powerful enemies. Makes me feel important.”
Mal crossed his arms and considered the privateer. “I can’t decide if you’re crazy or stupid.”
“I have so many good qualities,” Sturmhond said. “It can be hard to choose.” Leigh Bardugo

Like with me here.

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” Howard Zinn

Imagine then his reaction to Elon Trump?!

“A person can be educated and still be stupid, and a wise man can have no education at all.” Jennifer A. Nielsen

On the other hand…

583

Rachel Cusk from Outline

“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.” Rachel Cusk.

Let alone the fucking bots.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

MAGA and DOGE being just the latest.

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

Not to mention all the suckers.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

Here? Considerably less than that, for starters.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Let’s explain that.
Again.

‘You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes’.

Or God’s.

584

Marshall McLuhan

“Some days, I wish the whole fucking world would just ‘phone in sick’.” Marshall McLuhan

Then going all the way back to the Big Bang.

Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?

Kind of, sure.

Our permanent address is tomorrow.

And how about now, Marshall?

There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not linearity. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for “content” are illusioned.

I suspect some more than others.

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.

So, how close to that have you ever gotten?

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.

Really? Imagine then his reaction to Donald Musk.

585

Why not Elon Trump?

1 Like
586

Yuval Noah Harari

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

For example, fascism in America.

We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans.

Good thing there’s a God then, right?

So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

White men, anyway, back then.

What some people hope to get by studying, working or raising a family, others try to obtain far more easily through the right dosage of molecules. This is an existential threat to the social and economic order, which is why countries wage a stubborn, bloody and hopeless war on biochemical crime.

Let’s run this by, among others, the folks who make hot dogs:

Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature.’ But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

Tell that to the Grim Reaper.

In fact, as time goes by, it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms, not merely because the algorithms are getting smarter, but also because humans are professionalising. Ancient hunter-gatherers mastered a very wide variety of skills in order to survive, which is why it would be immensely difficult to design a robotic hunter-gatherer. Such a robot would have to know how to prepare spear points from flint stones, how to find edible mushrooms in a forest, how to use medicinal herbs to bandage a wound, how to track down a mammoth and how to coordinate a charge with a dozen other hunters. However, over the last few thousand years we humans have been specialising. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specialises in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI.

Something to think about. Or not, of course.

587

Richard Yates from Revolutionary Road

She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone

.
Define alone?

Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say.

That’s how some here feel about…me?

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.

On the other hand, there they are: bills that have to be paid.

Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time—this was the hell of it—who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was as ludicrous and as simple as that.

And, of course, posting here.

…you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite … and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that?

Click, of course.

That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion—because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion—this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families.

Let’s exchange our very own enormous delusions.

588

The Turd would call me delusional often… how ironic did that turn out to be.

…because I have neither no reason nor any need to be of such character as that… now him on the other hand. :smirk:

589

Materialism

"When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” H.L. Mencken

How much though?

The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.” Confucius

Of course, that takes us all the way back to…the White House?

“Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the ‘soul’ or the ‘spirit’ ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.” Nikola Tesla

To click or not to click?

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.” James Baldwin

That certainly explains, well, almost everything nowadays.

“How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.” Barbara Kingsolver

You first.

“Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.” Jess C Scott

Imagine then her reaction to me.
[/quote]

590

Luigi Pirandello

We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Of course, that Includes understanding this.

You should show some respect for what other people see and feel, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see and feel.

So, how’s that working out for you?

If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.

Tell me that doesn’t get tricky.

Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me.

Personas. Don’t leave home without them.

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

A new thread?

It is much easier to be a hero than a gentleman.

Anyone here happen to know how much easier?

591

Words

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape." Michael Ondaatje

The right words, anyway.

Some people have a way with words, and other people…oh, uh, not have way.” Steve Martin

See what he means?

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” Carl Sagan

Books. Remember them?

“Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” Roald Dahl

A made-up word sure. But arern’t they all originally.

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.” M.L. Rio

Every other one on some posts.

“We live and breathe words.” Cassandra Clare

When we’re not choking on them.

592

Stupidity

“When you will not fly into a [rage] people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn’t said afterward. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in–that’s stronger. It’s a good thing not to answer your enemies.” Frances Hodgson Burnett

Unless of course the fools deserve it.

“Many people could say things in a cutting way, Nanny knew. But Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it.” Terry Pratchett

If you get his drift. And I think I do.

“‘I had no illusions about you,’ he said. 'I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. It’s comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn’t ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you’d only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn’t care. Most people, as far as I can see, when they’re in love with someone and the love isn’t returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn’t like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn’t see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn’t afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favor.” W. Somerset Maugham

Let’s run this by Charlie Kauffman.

“Irony is wasted on the stupid” Oscar Wilde

Not unlike philosophy, he chortled.

“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” Victor Hugo

Anyone here know for sure?

“There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Let’s name names. You first.

593

Rachel Cusk from Outline

I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?

Eureka!

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

So, what often doesn’t show up here? I mean, besides philosophy.

‘Music,’ she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. ‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.’

Like that will ever stop me from listening to it from dawn to dusk. Even if they are true.

I would like, she resumed, to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.

Some, of course, came here.

I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

So, where are you?

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes.

That’s me now. well, more or less.

594

Not trolling… :woman_shrugging:
.

So you’ve gotten off your paternoster, I see…

595

Marshall McLuhan

…if it works it’s obsolete…

Every once in a while I understand this.

…they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing…

Imagine his reaction then to the exchanges between the objectivists here.

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

In other words, whatever that means.

Advertisements constitute the only ‘good news’ in the newspaper.

And which newspaper might that be?

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

You tell me.

All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime…

Actually, it was more the other way around.

596

Richard Yates from Revolutionary Road

Oh, you’ll what? You’ll leave me? What’s that supposed to be—a threat or a promise?

Providing, of course, you can actually tell them apart.

It depressed him to consider how much energy he had wasted, over the years, in the self-denying posture of apology. From now on, whatever else his life might hold, there would be no more apologies.

Allowing others to apologize for him. At least in theory.

The hell with this aching, suffering, callow, half-assed delusion that he was in “love” with her. The hell with “love” anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

Click, of course.

As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn’t it simple logic to expect that he’d be limited to intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of Women?

Well, one for sure.

Wish I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow, he said.
Don’t, then. Stay home.
No. I guess I’ve got to go.

After all, the bills aren’t going to pay themselves.

Don’t worry, I can’t be bothered! You’re not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You’re not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. I mean, what the hell are you doing in my house if you hate me so much? Why the hell are you married to me? What the hell are you doing carrying my child? I mean, why didn’t you just get rid of it when you had the chance? Because listen to me, listen to me, I got news for you - I wish to God that you had!

So, are her answers more or less impressive than his questions?

597

Materialism

“Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.” John Ruskin

If only all the way to the grave.

“The more things we accumulate, the more cluttered our lives become, and the more stressed we feel as we are compelled to think about them. Life is about people not about things.” Natalie Vellacott

So, how’s that working out for you?

“The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.” Steven Pinker

Anyone care to rebut this?

“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?” Leonard Ravenhill

Let’s make a list.

“The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.” Benjamin Disraeli

I do that all the time.

“Earn, consume, and enjoy life. Offend no one; don’t get offended. Don’t take sides; don’t take a stand. Don’t interfere; don’t get affected. Just earn, consume, and enjoy life.” Abhaidev

And it happens to be in that exact order.

598

Intellectuals

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play." Immanuel Kant

Come on, it all comes down to God in the end.

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” Albert Einstein

Next up: intellectual growth in Heaven.

“The colour of the skin is in no way connected with strength of the mind or intellectual powers.” Benjamin Banneker[/b]

The fool! Right, AJ?

“It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.” Nikola Tesla

Hogwash shriek the objectivists!

“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.” E. O. Wilson

Meaning what? Say, for all practical purposes.

“An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” Aldous Huxley

First let’s establish if that is even possible.

599

Luigi Pirandello

Woe to him who doesn’t know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!

Let’s explain that to the ladies.

Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Six plots too.

In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.

And, with any luck, I’m dreaming now.

As soon as one is born, one starts dying.

Actually, as soon as one is conceived.

A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his special characteristics; for which reason he is always “somebody.” But a man – I’m not speaking of you now – may very well be ‘nobody’.

That’s Mr. Nobody to you by the way.

There is someone who is living my life. And I know nothing about him.

That’s still plenty more than you do.

600

Words

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.” John Green

Of course, here the scratches are virtual.

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go” F. Scott Fitzgerald

In other words, back up into the clouds.

“Because even the smallest of words can be the ones to hurt you, or save you.” Natsuki Takaya

Uh, dasein?

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” Stephen King

On the other hand: 52 Synonyms & Antonyms for EXCEPTION | Thesaurus.com

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”Cornelia Funke

You first.

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” David Foster Wallace

And how fucking applicable that is here!
Right?

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” Richard Wright

Actually, I suspect it is only gnawing at a tiny percentage of us all.

601

Stupidity

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.” Philip Pullman

Of course, the real crux here is that over and again, what some call wisdom others call stupidity.

“Fourth Doctor: You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views.” Chris Boucher

]Pick two [and only two]:
1] Elon Trump
2] Donald Musk

“To generalize is to be an idiot.” William Blake

Let’s cite examples.

“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” Frank Zappa

I’m prepared to defend that. How about you?

“Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all.” Jane Austen

Start here: https://youtu.be/pvvGR09P5XI?si=GQx--vhupkYftZ8d

“Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.” Brandon Sanderson

New thread?