a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Joe Abercrombie

Empathy? What’s that? Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.[/b]

He means chronic pain of course.

Mercy and weakness are the same thing in war, and there’s no prize for nice behavior.

Of course to the military industrial complex folks, all that shit is totallly irrelevant.

You are Shenkt? I expected more.
Pray to whatever God you believe in that you never see more.
I do not pray.
Shenkt leaned close, and whispered in his ear. I advise you to start.

So, which one are you here?

A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance.

Yeah, okay, sure, that’s probably more genes than memes.

The man is a monster. The worst I have ever seen, in fact, since I last looked in the mirror.

And the last time you looked in yours?

A choice between killing and dying is no choice at all. You have to be realistic about these things.

Amorally as it were.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“All things are subject to interpretation…whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

At times, in fact, even in the either/or world.

“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

About 90% of all jobs, I’m guessing. So, where exactly is the stark raving mad working class? Not in unions that’s for sure.

“At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.” Michel Foucault

Right, like that will ever happen.

“Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.” Michel Foucault

Intellectual bullshit, perhaps? You know, given that institutional, structured power is…everywhere?

“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

Face maybe, but ego?

“There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible — the new normal.” Michel Foucault

Pop culture for exanple.

[b]Thomas Ligotti

This whole city is most certainly a pitiful corpse, while the neighborhood outside the walls of this bar has the distinction of being the withering heart of the deceased. And I am a devoted student of its anatomy—a pathologist, after a fashion, with an eye for necroses that others overlook.[/b]

Songs of a dead dreamer indeed.

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business, the other man said to me during our initial meeting. Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires — show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there — he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, show business, show business, show business.
And what about dreams?’ I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such.
You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we’re fortunate enough to sleep?

My kind of intellectual.

The darkness of the grotesque is an immortal enigma: in all legends of the dead, in all the tales of creatures of the night, in all the mythologies of mad gods and lucid demons, there remains a kind of mocking nonsense to the end, a thick and resonant voice which calls out from the heart of these stories and declares: ‘Still I am here’.

My kind of intellectual.

Everything tears away at everything else … forever.

Not only that but, no doubt, violates its consent.

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing.

Yo, Mr. Capitalist! Rebuttal please.

We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.

Next to him, Emil Cioran is a goddamn Pollyanna.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?” Michel Foucault[/b]

Yes?

“Where there is power, there is resistance.” Michel Foucault

He noted grimly.

“There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.” John Stuart Mill

Or, perhaps, better still, if they are not actually forced to.
On the other hand, there are still the points I make.

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” George Orwell

My obvious, not yours, motherfucker!

“Not only is the self-entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.” Theodor W. Adorno

Methinks this can be taken too far.

“The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.” Karl Marx

Hell, how brutal is that truth.

[b]Fernando Pessoa

If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let’s at least decorate it as best we can. [/b]

Or…
If life has given us no more than a hole, let’s at least decorate it as best we can.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

Next up: to have opinions you insist that everyone else must have.

One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

No, really, Mr. Pinhead, scout’s honor.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Only for billiions and billions of us.

I look at myself but I’m missing. I know myself: it’s not me.

His own “hole” as it were.

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

Of course for you it might be something else.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.” Adam Smith[/b]

The part Marx missed perhaps?

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Adam Smith

You know what’s coming: genes more or less than memes?

“All money is a matter of belief.” Adam Smith

That and actually having it.

“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.” Theodor W. Adorno

And, for me, the task of philosophy?

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.” Theodor W. Adorno

Or, he suspected, quite the opposite.
You know, context wise.

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” Theodor W. Adorno

Not counting mine.
Or yours?

[b]Steven Pinker

Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.[/b]

Next up: our pheromones.

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they’re less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore.

Any of either one of them here?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky commented on Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, when unborn children were ripped from their mothers’ wombs and prisoners were nailed by their ears to a fence overnight before being hanged: “People speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals. No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. A tiger simply gnaws and tears, that is all he can do. It would never occur to him to nail people by their ears overnight, even if he were able to do it.

To wit: youtu.be/7HS8exsrBMM

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

Figures, right?

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence. Death becomes a mere rite of passage, like puberty or a midlife crisis.

The doctrine, maybe, but I still wouldn’t mind having one.

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

Great, another contraption!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!” Fyodor Dostoevsky[/b]

Right, merely dare to and it will happen!

“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” Martin Heidegger

Sieg Heil?

“Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” Martin Heidegger

Anyone here know?

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Martin Heidegger

Pick one:
1[ Dasein
2] dasein

"Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.” Martin Heidegger

Naturally, they had pinheads back then too.

“Understanding of being is itself a determination of being Dasein.” Martin Heidegger

Philosophically, as it were.

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict, or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb, or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.[/b]

Socialism!
Well, and capitalism of course.

We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.

Capitalism!
Well, and socialism of course.

To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.

Fortunately, that didn’t work for me.

Immediately after birth the calf is separated from its mother and locked inside a tiny cage not much bigger than the calf’s own body. There the calf spends its entire life – about four months on average. It never leaves its cage, nor is it allowed to play with other calves or even walk – all so that its muscles will not grow strong. Soft muscles mean a soft and juicy steak. The first time the calf has a chance to walk, stretch its muscles and touch other calves is on its way to the slaughterhouse. In evolutionary terms, cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.

Meat is murder: youtu.be/eviyEJRZX30

Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?

Yo, Maia!
Just kidding.

Thousands of years before our liberal age, ancient Buddhism went further by denying not just all cosmic dramas, but even the inner drama of human creation. The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That’s the truth. Get over it.

Ah, enlightenment!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.” Edgar Allan Poe.[/b]

Next thing you know, you’re just another episode on Dateline.

“The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.” Edgar Allan Poe

Wise and, for some, only wishing they were happy.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” Edgar Allan Poe

Wow, and all this time I thought that was Shakespeare.

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.” Edgar Allan Poe

Or, sure, a fucking nightmare.

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” Edgar Allan Poe

Anyone here know?
Demonstrably for example.

“Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.” Edgar Allan Poe

Let alone philosophy.

[b]Emile M. Cioran

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.[/b]

Not to worry: I would never expect you to understand it.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

Not to worry: I would never expect you to understand it.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Or, here, the names others call us.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

From, perhaps, a “bullet to the brain”?

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

If you understand this, knock three times.

We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

True, but: how many times is that actually an option?

[b]Werner Twertzog

The young seldom understand that the old were once breathtakingly attractive.[/b]

Let alone that, for many of them, youth is sorely wasted.

When a tree falls in the forest, it does, of course, make a sound, because, you need to realize, it is not all about you.

And millions and millions of trees have already fallen.

The truth is unspeakable unless you have nothing left to lose.

Or until you have nothing left to lose. And I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.

Dear America: It is important to vote so that the loser will win anyway.

The new democracy.

Death awaits us all, John Boy.

Either that or the network cancels you.

Meat Loaf is dead. But my memories are not.

Of course he’s no Klaus Kinski.

[b]Michael Stipe

My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.[/b]

Incredibly enough, I pick my own songs to listen to.

I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt Cobain out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t answer the phone.

Actually, I didn’t know that.

The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I’ve always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, ‘OK, that’s me.’

Next up: punk philosophy.

So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we’re kind of an international phenomenon.

Let’s make ILP a kind of international phenomenon. You know, before Know Thyself beats us to it.

And I don’t expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn’t - in the 1960s.

Now look at him: nytimes.com/2022/01/24/arts … 0disclosed.

I think my apocalyptic feelings went deeper than Reagan and AIDS. I’m really at peace with how afraid I am.

How about Trump and the pinheads? Anyone here at peace with that?

[b]Werner Twertzog

Dear America: You should be more alarmed by billionaire penis rockets than Chinese moon stations.[/b]

Chinese Moon stations?

Dear Academic Humanities: Stop predicting your own demise and simply shut down already.

Resolved: the sooner the better?

Why do American men lose their shirts before they are arrested?

You tell me.

Yes, I would go to the mars colony. It is of no consequence to me where my bones are scattered.

Scatter mine in a landfill.

Dear America: Refusal to debate is fascism. You are running out of time.

No, seriously. The Urwrongs are coming to take it all away.

The lower middle class is essential for an oligarchy.

Not that they know it.

[b]Amor Towles

After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.[/b]

You know, if that’s even possible.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

Again: genes more or less than memes?

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion…if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I’ve discovered in life. And you can have it, since it’s been of no use to me.

Next up: the wrong thing to post.

Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence–one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.

Next up: the dreaded semi-colon.

That’s the problem with living in New York. You’ve got no New York to run away to.

And then the problem with living in Baltimore.

To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?

The Dude’s just mysterious, right?

[b]Existential Comics

Biden: “look, I can’t believe I actually have to explain this, but it’s not my job to do anything useful. The federal government’s job is just to increase the military budget and relegate power to the private sector.”[/b]

The Deep State!!!

Keeping up with the latest internet memes is labor, and we need to start recognizing it as such.

Memers of the world unite!

Conventional physics: “magic doesn’t exist, everything is boring cause and effect.”
Quantum physics: “boring cause and effect doesn’t exist, everything is magic.”

And that’s just on this side of the grave.

Me, analyzing a problem from a Marxist perspective: “see, the problem here is we aren’t doing enough fuckin’ communism.”

Another fulminating fanatic objectivist. Though, sure, he might be one of yours.

The masculine urge to carry all the groceries from the car to the house in a single trip.

Even when no one is watching.

According to the moral theory of utilitarianism, as outlined by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, if you come up with a funny word in scrabble you have to play it, even if you get less points.

Next up: Kant plays scrabble.

[b]Iain McGilchrist

Ultimately, we have come to believe that, whatever I or anyone else may say – really – when the chips are down, when the rhetoric fades, and we have stopped trying to cheer ourselves up by believing in sentimental ideas such as virtue, love and courage, the possibility of truly unselfish behaviour, or a realm of spiritual value – really, we are nothing but blind mechanisms, the dupes of our equally blind genes, with no choice but to play out the sorry farce that the force of evolution, so much bigger and greater than we are, dictates. But at least now we have the dignity of knowing that we are not deceiving ourselves.[/b]

Or, if you’re Bob and Ierrellus, you’re own private and personal Christian God.

We cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence.

Well, not counting all of those that do.
And then this part…

The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.

Call it, say, the Christian God?

We don’t need a lot more quick fixes. We need a change in the paradigm.

Our paradigm, of course.

Right frontal damage impairs the sense of self over time – self with a narrative, and a continuous flow-like existence.

So much for the Real Me?

No single truth does not mean no truth.

Uh, no shit?

[b]Doth

Embracing my demons this year. French kissing them. Might fuck them.[/b]

How about you and your demons?

What you do at night is between you and the fucking moon.

Especially a fucking full moon.

Start off each morning with a cup of coffee, respect that time wants you dead, be good to each other & then disappear beyond the tree line.

Alas, not much of a tree line around here.

Be the reason why a priest clutches his bible when you walk by.

Either that or the reason he throws it at you.

Practice self-care like a vampire: sleep all day, eat all night & outlive everyone who has ever loved you.

Let’s just say, “I would if I could”.

Girls don’t want boys, they want to live in a Victorian estate & be the most feared witch in the village.

If not the whole fucking universe.

[b]Joe Abercrombie

We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and find that we are . . . this.[/b]

Or, for better or worse, that.

He would have liked to weigh his choices, but for that you need more than one.

Assumming of course he is even free to weigh them.

Everyone finds a way to make their side the right one, after all.

If only going back to Adam and Eve.

Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

Next up: the savage pinhead.

If there was a God, the world seemed exactly the way it would be if there wasn’t one.

That can’t be good, he winced.

“And Cracknut Whirrun?’ asked Drofd.
‘Straightforward. An old man up near Ustred taught me the trick of cracking a walnut in my fist. What you do is—’
Wonderful snorted. ‘That ain’t why they call you Cracknut.’
‘Eh?’
‘No,’ said Yon. ‘It ain’t.’
‘They call you Cracknut for the same reason they gave Cracknut Leef the name,’ and Wonderful tapped at the side of her shaved head. ‘Because it’s widely assumed your nut’s cracked.’
‘They do?’ Whirrun frowned. ‘Oh, that’s less complimentary, the fuckers. I’ll have to have words next time I hear that. You’ve completely bloody spoiled it for me!”

What have I completely spoiled for the cracknuts here?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Lit Crit 101: Death of the author
Lit Crit 201: Death of the text
Lit Crit 301: Death of death
Lit Crit 401: Reading makes me happy![/b]

Yippee!

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Or worse as the case may be.

Instagram: I love my pet.
Facebook: I respect my pet.
TikTok: I laugh at my pet.
Twitter: I gazed so long into the abyss that I forgot it was time to feed my pet.

I know, let’s call this “social media”.

Wittgenstein: A good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Heidegger: What’s a joke?
Nietzsche: What’s a good philosophical work?
Schopenhauer: I’m smirking because we’re all going to die.

After all, the joke is never not on someone.

"Define ‘ambiguity’
“The point of ambiguity is that it can’t be defined.”
This 12-year-old’s test answer suggests that the middle schools are teaching too much
a) Derrida
b) Quine
c) Sade

d) all and/or none of the above.

“If cats could philosophize, my guess is they’d do it for their own amusement.” John Gray, Feline Philosophy
“If humans could philosophize, they’d be cats.” Cats

Run this by your cat.