a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Ernest Cline

Maybe it isn’t a good idea to tell a newly arrived human being that he’s been born into a world of chaos, pain, and poverty just in time to watch everything fall to pieces.[/b]

Let them find out the hard way…like some of us did.

I knew Knotcher was trying to push my buttons. Unfortunately, he’d pushed the big red one first.

Let’s all imagine Knotcher’s ghastly fate.

I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked.

Said the gamer shooting heroin.

You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

Or: You’d be amazed how much you can post here when you have no life whatsoever.

Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now.

One possible future let’s call it.

When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it.

youtu.be/W6MkESn1v1w

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.” Doris Lessing[/b]

No, that’s actually a real thing.

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” Doris Lessing

Challenge me to explain why.

“Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it.” Salvador Dali

Yo, Mr. Objectivist! Set him straight.

“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.” Salvador Dali

Next up: regressive art.

“Let my enemies devour each other.” Salvador Dali

As mine do here for example.

“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.” Salvador Dali

Wow, he thought, does that take me back!!

[b]Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.[/b]

Where’s phoneutria when we need her to either confirm or to debunk this?

What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.

Quite the opposite of philosophers. Well, this one anyway.

I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.

Next up: all the other colors.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

You know, if there are any ideas at all.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art’s greatest enemy.

Yo, Howard Roark!

Why should beauty be suspect?

I suspect we’ll never know.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Words are loaded pistols.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Or, for the Kids here, pea shooters and squirt guns.

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” Diogenes

Tell me that doesn’t explain a lot.

“The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.” B. B. King

Not counting those who just give it away. If you know what I mean.

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?” Diogenes

So, my Stooges, how am I doing here?

"The mob is the mother of tyrants.” Diogenes

Not to mention tyrants being the mothers of mobs.

“In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.” Diogenes

Da f?

[b]Sally Mann

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.[/b]

That’ll have to do, right?

If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

Fuckin’ a, he thought.

I have nothing but respect for people who travel the world to make art and put exotic Indians in front of linen backdrops, but it’s always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary.

What, here, I call bringing it down earth.

The earth doesn’t care where death occurs…It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.

Next up: the earth responds.

What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.

Well, more or less different anyway.

It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.

Nope, no bathrooms here: google.com/search?source=un … 66&bih=625
Lots of barely legal shots of kids though.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

That and how to die.

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Allan Bloom

Including this one?

“Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man’s problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.” Allan Bloom

You know, before shuffling off this mortal coil.

“Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Yes, the pragmatist.

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau

And how scary can that be when, well, you know when.

“Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it — on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.” Julia Kristeva

Not all abjections created equal of course.
That and this thing: cla.purdue.edu/academic/english … bject.html

[b]Margaret Mead

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.[/b]

Of course that will never catch on.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Next up: that and the real world.

Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.

In theory for example.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Way, way, way, way different things for example.

For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.

Or, to put it another way, we’re doomed.
And, no, not just here.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

Yo, America!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.” Julia Kristeva[/b]

You think that means me and, sure you might be right.

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.” Michel Foucault

Sounds like something he’d say, right?.

”The strategic adversary is fascism…the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” Michel Foucault

Sounds like something he’d say, right? Though, sure, this time, point taken.

”…if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.” Michel Foucault

Sick works for me.
You know, if that’s what I am.

“Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso

Cubically as it were.

“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself…” Pablo Picasso

Groots let’s call them.

[b]Napoleon Bonaparte

The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense; he is always satisfied with himself.[/b]

Pick one:
1] the objectivist
2] the Kid
3] the fulminating fanatic
4] ALL OF THE ABOVE

There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.

I know: What if he’s right?!

A woman laughing is a woman conquered.

Anyone here know what prompted this?

The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.

Let alone over and over and over again.

In politics… never retreat, never retract… never admit a mistake.

Hard to Trump that, right?

You can not lead a battle if you think you look silly on a horse.

Or the modern day equivalent: google.com/search?source=un … 66&bih=625

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Gustav Jung[/b]

I’ll share mine if you’ll share yours.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” Pablo Picasso

Actually, I wouldn’t go that far myself.

“There is nothing more disgusting than popular ‘artists’ who become nothing but the pets of the upper class.” Pablo Picasso

Let’s name names!!

"‘Nationalism,’ John Le Carre once said, ‘is quite different from patriotism. For nationalism you need enemies.’

Sieg Heil?

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.” Karl Marx

Cue dasein, he grumbled.

“Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.” Orson Welles

Damn, it would have to be that way, wouldn’t it?

[b]Kazuo Ishiguro

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.[/b]

Wow, me too!

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

I’ve actually perfected this myself.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

It’s actually the other way around of course.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.

About twenty times a game, right Pedro?

You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.

Let’s just say I understand this a hell of a lot better than you do.

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that.

Exactly: A thing like that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” Thucydides[/b]

All of them so far, right?

“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Next day, same thing.

“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality.” Martin Heidegger

No getting around time.

“I discovered to my joy, that it is life, not death, that has no limits.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And how idiotic is that, I asked.

“No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the other hand, what if it is?

"I know that I exist; the question is, What is this ‘I’ that ‘I’ know. “ Rene Descartes

He just didn’t take it as far as “I” do.

[b]Holly Black

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That’s why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.[/b]

Or, sure, as likely as not, somewhere in the middle.
In the muddle as it were.

If he thought I was bad, I would be worse. If he thought I was cruel, I would be horrifying.

And so on.

That’s what comes of hungering for something; you forget to check if it’s rotten before you gobble it down.

And look at us now.

Yeah, the whole family knows. It’s no big deal. One night at dinner I said, ‘Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.’ It was easier for her to understand that way.

Let’s explain this.

No trouble ever got fixed late at night, he said. Midnight is for regrets.

Or that other thing.

There’s always something left to lose.

And then something after that as likely as not.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I have always hated that damn James Bond. I’d like to kill him.” Sean Connery[/b]

He bitched all the way to the bank.

“Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that.” Sean Connery

That dasein thing again.

“I know what I mean by the term I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound.” George Berkeley

That brain thing again.

“Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.” David Hume

Or, sure, less surprising.

“It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.” Claude Bernard

Or, for most here, what they think they know.

“I thought one should have the attitude of ‘What do you care what other people think!’” Richard P. Feynman

Or, here, why on earth anyone would think it.

[b]Emily Dickinson

Beauty is not caused. It is.[/b]

What caused this then?

[b]A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.[/b]

Here’s one: dasein.
You know, for today.

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

Maybe. But, just to be on the safe side, make sure you’re packing.

Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.

Okay, but what’s that make cats then?

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.

Well, at least it rhymes.

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

Clifford Stern: “He kindly stopped for me - " The word ‘kindly’ - right?”
Yeah, right.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“What one fool can understand, another can.” Richard P. Feynman[/b]

Pick one:
1] Kids
2] fulminating fanatics
3] objectivists
4] ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!

“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Pick one:
1] Kids
2] fulminating fanatics
3] objectivists
4] ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Mark Twain

I’m sorry but how idiotic is that?!! The more fully you live the more you love life. The more you love life the more you have to lose when it’s over.

“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” Mark Twain

Now that’s more like it, Sam.

“Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows." Friedrich Nietzsche

Me in particular, he insisted?

“The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Let’s explain that.

[b]Ruth Benedict

Racism remains in the eyes of history…merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.[/b]

Or, here, for the pinheads.

The peoples of the earth are one family.

:laughing:
But point taken.

…liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.

:laughing:
But point taken.

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

I know that mine did.

What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

Then cue, among others, the postmodernists.

…oh, I long to prove myself by writing!

A world of words let’s call it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Arthur Schopenhauer[/b]

Well, every pinhead, anyway.

“After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.” Arthur Schopenhauer

That can’t be good, he thought.

“I am rooted, but I flow.” Virginia Woolf

Of course we know how that ends for her.

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Remember when it used to be philosophy? Me neither.

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Yo, Mr. Objectivist! Rebuttal please.

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Fortunately, here, that’s never a problem. Right, Kids?

[b]Theodore Roethke

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.[/b]

Like, say, ridding ILP of the Kids?

Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.

The mountain here for example.

May my silences become more accurate.

Timing, right? Or when not to post at all.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.

Cue phoneutria?

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

If not in pitch black.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

:sunglasses:

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

British humour – the only excuse for Brexit.[/b]

That and a few pinheads here

I know I may sound blasphemous and will probably get unfollowed by some or even many of you, but every time someone tells me I’m like Mother Theresa, I really want to punch them and watch them suffer - pretty much like she did.

Cue Christopher Hitchens?

A translator’s dilemma: should I keep this extremely rare word, known to very few people, but bearing a fantastically vivid image and power, or should I replace it with another one, that is lifeless and bleak, but commonly used and understood?

Cue Anton Chigurh?

Silence is a foreign language most difficult to learn.

Like not posting here.

Just saw a teenage couple on the street, wearing masks, and dancing to the Shostakovich Waltz No. 2, playing on their phone. So far – the highlight of the year.

You know, in Russia.

In space, no one can hear you scream.
On earth, no one wants to hear you scream.

How about here?