Thread for mundane ironists

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Identity

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” Patrick Rothfuss

Pick 3
1] historically
2] culturally
3] experientially

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” Ralph Ellison

Though still invisible.

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.” Coco Chanel

So, how’s that working out for you?

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.” Chuck Palahniuk

So, how’s that working out for you?

“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.” Chuck Palahniuk

Unless, of course, you are.

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” Gabriel García Márquez

However fractured and fragmented that might turn out.

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Absurdity

“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.” Albert Camus

If, like me, you get his drift.

“In Britain, a cup of tea is the answer to every problem.
Fallen off your bicycle? Nice cup of tea.
Your house has been destroyed by a meteorite? Nice cup of tea and a biscuit.
Your entire family has been eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex that has travelled through a space/time portal? Nice cup of tea and a piece of cake. Possibly a savoury option would be welcome here too, for example a Scotch egg or a sausage roll.”
David Walliams

Someone run this by Maia. 8)

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.” Criss Jami

If only up in the clouds.

“He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them.” Douglas Adams

Next up: lunch and dinner.

“The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.” Andre Breton

New thread?

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.” Julio Cortázar

You tell me.

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Intellectuals

“The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg[

If only down out of the didactic clouds.

“Too much elite education renders a person unpractical. And tell you what? The highly educated people are further away from reality than the less educated ones. I would rather rely on the opinion of a less educated poor person who constantly deals with people, than an overly educated idiot who views this world only through an academic lens while sitting alone on his comfy couch.” Abhaidev,

Of course: Will Durant’s “epistemologists”.

“Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.” Perry Anderson

Enough said?

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.” Roy Blount Jr.

The fool!

“Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.” Christopher Hitchens

You know, in a No God world.

“What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the “life of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.” Gary Gutting

What, for example?

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Nikola Tesla

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

Let’s note the multitude of exceptions.

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.

And this explains what exactly?

Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another’s point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields.

Ignorance for some, perhaps, but for others it revolves more around a fractured and fragmented sense of futility.

What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.

Click, of course.

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe.

You tell me.

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

On the other hand, for some, the whole point is to create them.

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Stupidity

“If you’re gonna be stupid you gotta be tough.” John Grisham,

Let’s run that by all the stupid people here.

“Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” Frank Zappa

Bears repeating.

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” Robert Heinlein

Even I wouldn’t go this far. Well, except for all the times I do.

“Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others.
The same applies when you are stupid.” Ricky Gervais

Right, like that makes being around them any more bearable.

“I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.” George Bernard Shaw

Let’s take that down out of the clouds.

“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”
Orson Scott Card

Let’s run that by all the idiots here.

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Identity

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice." Steve Jobs

Imagine then his reaction to me.

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…” George Bernard Shaw

And how ridiculous is that?

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” Emily Dickinson

Unless, perhaps, you find me first?

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.” Jeanette Winterson

Don’t you hate that?

“I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.” Chuck Palahniuk

So, does virtually count?

“I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.” Beatrice Sparks

Or from posts here?

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Abortion

“Here is the trap you are in… And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.” John Irving

Next up: the trapped fetus?

“My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.” Camille Paglia

Someone run this by Maia.

“It seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.” Mahatma Gandhi

Not counting the storm clouds swirling all around it.

When you say you can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a good thing. When you say I can’t do something because YOUR religion forbids it, that’s a problem.” Jodi Picoult

Tell that to the Supremes

“If we lived in a culture that valued women’s autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot.” Christiane Northrup

Define moot?

“The “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” begins with “life”, and “life” begins at conception.” A.E. Samaan

I agree. Well, in a fractured and fragmented manner.

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Absurdity

“There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Me, right?

“The words kept coming back to him, a statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.”
George Orwell

Let’s change that.

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.” Albert Camus

Distractions I call them.

“Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation
to death—and I refuse suicide.” Albert Camus

Whatever works?

“I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

See, I told you.

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Intellectuals

“Even in the most favourable periods for cultural development, Intellectuals tend to have uneasy relationships with the status quo.” Frank Furedi

Your status quo for example.

“Atheism or similar charges was not unusual among intellectuals, nor condemned by the masses. The prize-winning plays of Aristophanes were not merely atheist, but made fun of the gods and their prophets and oracles.” Benjamin Jowett

Good for them!

“In the most secret heart of every intellectual … there lies hidden … the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.” Lionel Trilling

Yo, AJ and Satyr!
You’re up?

“He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.” Ursula K. Le Guin

Me? Yeah, sometimes.

“Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage.” Luis Fernando Verissimo

Up in the clouds here. Those dueling definitions and deductions.

“What never fails inside the mind of an intellectual never works outside the confines of his head. The world’s stubborn refusal to vindicate the intellectual’s theories serves as proof of humanity’s irrationality, not his own." Daniel J. Flynn

See, I told you.

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Nature

“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.” Charlotte Brontë

On the other hand, what are the odds that He does actually exist.

“You will manage to keep a woman in love with you, only for as long as you can keep her in love with the person she becomes when she is with you.” C. JoyBell C.

You first.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” William Blake

In other words, whatever that means.

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” Winston S. Churchill

Hint, hint.

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” Henry David Thoreau

Actually, I didn’t know that. And I still doubt it.

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Uh, one mighty oak at a time?

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Nikola Tesla’

Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Yeah, and look where we are now.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Like going from cloud to cloud here.

The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. My Mother had taught me to seek all truth in the Bible.

The fool?

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.

That and the Bible?

What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

That and the Bible?

Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.

Why? Just lucky, I guess.

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Absurdity

“One is always willfully absurd… If one does not say silly things with a purpose, then he is merely an idiot.”Galen M. Beckett

Let’s run this by the idiots here.

“It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one’s life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence.” Ashim Shanker

Heads life wins, tails we lose.

“There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark.” Jacques Rigaut

I could go there, sure, but for the most part it’s just not worth the time.

“Mom said she didn’t want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. “Isn’t that a sin?” I asked Mom. “Not exactly,” Mom said. "God doesn’t mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It’s sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.” Jeannette Walls

Loopholes. Thank God for them?

“The feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.” Albert Camus

You tell me.

“Christianity would be helpless without the idea of free will and the idea of
free will would be helpless without incongruity.” Kedar Joshi

Let’s go up into the clouds and refute this theoretically.

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Identity

“When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who’s broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don’t know where we come from … we don’t know where we are. ” Laurie Anderson

Cryptic enough for you?

“I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.” George MacDonald

Can you say that?

“I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.” Orson Scott Card

Pick Two:
1] somatic anguish
2] mental anguish

“Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets.” Joseph Conrad

The horror! The horror!

“Through others we become ourselves.” Lev S. Vygotsky

Historically, culturally and experientially, for example.

“All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.” David Sedaris

He means DNA, of course.

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Abortion

“Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.” Hemant Mehta

Let’s put them in the correct order.

“In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.” David Sedaris

Let’s run that by Vincent Vega.

I am not a one-issue voter in the sense that indicates I am an ignorant fundamentalist who only cares about one thing. I believe in protecting the environment. I believe in caring for the poor, the orphan, the widow in her distress. These are some of the so-called “issues” that many of us use to justify voting for Obama. How can we possibly claim it is Christian love for the poor and helpless that motivates us to vote for such a man when he is so committed to the killing of the most helpless among us?” Joseph Bayly

Next up: all those miscarriages and still births. If you get my drift.

…life is just the misery left between abortion and euthanasia…” Sebastian Horsley

You know, being optimistic.

“The lie that abortion is murder is right-wing propaganda designed to demonize Democrats. Abortion is legal all over the world because a fetus without a cerebral cortex cannot think or feel before the 27th week. According to the CDC almost all abortions happen before the 13th week.” Oliver Markus Malloy

A rationalization some will call it.

“All you Trump fans are gonna be really pissed off when your condom breaks and your sister can’t get an abortion.” Oliver Markus Malloy

You tell me.

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Intellectuals

"I take umbrage at the lionization of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi. Who couldn’t carry my book bag. He hasn’t read a fucking thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said, he would have no idea. He’s an unserious, superficial, empty-suited, lightweight - he’s not our equal, not even close.” Glenn C. Loury

Umbrage here. Virtually, as it were.

“I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he’d masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual’s constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.” Leonid Borodin

If the shoe fits…?

“I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.” Mary Rose O’Reille

If both shoes fit…?

“Man who does not manage to satisfy himself through Action in and for the World in which he lives flees from this World and takes refuge in his abstract intelligence…”
Alexandre Kojève

Here? Let’s name names.

“Intellectuals are the trickiest nuts to crack. They are so eager to impress you with their own understanding of their condition that they tend to carry on their own commentary as they are talking.” Graeme Macrae Burnet

Here? Let’s name names.

“Ah, intellectuals. And you wanted me to sign one up. What is it that the less one has to say the more one says it, and in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?” Corelli asked. “Is it to fool the world or to fool themselves?” Carlos Ruiz Zafón

See, I told you.