a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Isabella Rossellini

True elegance is for me the manifestation of an independent mind.

But then that's where I come in.

I believe in a set of values I cannot live by.

Me too. Only I suspect for very different reasons.

I was always fascinated by the infinite, strange and 'scandalous' ways that insects copulate.

That and how they eat each other.

The reason for my life is not to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

Tell that to nature.

When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

While still being Isabella Rossellini of course.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look.

If that's fat then I'm obese.

[iambiguous]

Kristin Scott Thomas

I like the idea that I'm making things that people might think and argue about.

Or: I like the idea that I'm posting things that people might think and argue about.

I am so bored with seeing stories about a mature man of 65 falling in love with a beautiful girl of 32.

That makes at least two of us then.

Having a leading man who is actually prettier than you are is quite upsetting.

And not just Robert Redford, Robert Pattison and Prince.

We older women in Europe are lucky not to be shoved away in a drawer.

Some drawer: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000218/

Men don't fall in love with me - only young ones.

My guess: some men do.

I am sure that, had I grown up with both parents, had I grown up in a safe environment, had I grown up with a feeling of safety rather than danger, I would not be the way I am.

My guess: for better or for worse.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

"If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates." Howard Zinn

2020!!!

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution." Marcu Aurelius

And, as often as not, the final solution.

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius

And no, admittedly, not just the Kids.

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you." Ralph Waldo Emerson

My advice: We not go there.

"What if truth is like a woman - what then?" Friedrich Nietzsche

As though all women were created equal.

“Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.” Robert Nozick

Uh, we'll need as context?

[iambiguous]

Robert Bresson

Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.

Not unlike posts here bypassing the will of those who read them.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

Please feel free to do that with me.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance.

Well, not here perhaps.

The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders!... How many useless and encumbering words then disappear! What economy!

Well, not here perhaps.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

In other words, as he does.

A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.

Another godawful example of "explaining art".

[iambiguous]

Lars von Trier

Everything is going to hell, but we should smile all the way.

Let's just say that's easier for him to say.

True values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s completely real, do we?…Longing is true. It may be that there’s no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It’s part of our reality.

His suffering or ours?

A film should be like a rock in the shoe.

He means a pebble of course.

If you want to provoke, you should provoke someone who is stronger than you, otherwise you are misusing your power.

I provoke everyone of course. But, okay, especially the Kids. So sue me.

I think that sexuality is the part of human beings that is closest to nature. And nature is dangerous somehow, yes, if you put nature against civilisation, nature is definitely a threat.

Shh, let's not go there.
Again.

Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that Ive always demanded more from the sunset.

I suspect there are more. A lot more.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy Tweets

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” John Rawls

Yo, Kids!

“The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.” Jean Baudrillard

Yo, Kids!

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Jean Baudrillard

Let alone your meaning or mine.

“Our reality has become experimental. Without destiny, modern man is left with an endless experimentation of himself.” Jean Baudrillard

For sure then: Cue dasein.

"Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” Jean Baudrillard

His real not necessarily being yours or mine.

"It is the height of stupidity to claim that men who for a thousand years have had the power to berate us, to fleece us and to oppress us with impunity, will now agree, with good grace, to be our equals." Jean-Paul Marat

He wondered if that was still true.

[iambiguous]

Dennis Hopper

You're like a turd that won't flush.

Didn't we have one of those here?

When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!

Let's pin down what that makes us today.

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

Let's make it someone's mission here to find out if this is true.

After Easy Rider I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again.

Let's make it someone's mission here to find out if this is true.

Jimmy Dean was the most talented and original actor I ever saw work. He was also a guerrilla artist who attacked all restrictions on his sensibility. Once he pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I imitated his style in art and in life. It got me in a lot of trouble.

Not the sausage guy, right?

Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.

Uh, no shit?

[iambiguous]

William Butler Yeats

An intellectual hate is the worst.

And, boy, do we get our share of those intellectual contraptions here!

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

No fucking way, he thought. Though he couldn't prove it.

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

Now that's dasein all the way down to the bone.

All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.

That makes [at least] two of us.

All men live in suffering
I know as few can know,
Whether they take the upper road
Or stay content on the low.

Low seems to be my own. And lower still yet to get

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

What lesson do we learn here? Well, providing there is one.

[iambiguous]

Michael Shermer

In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.

Not to worry, Ierrellus, your own is probably the right one.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

On the other hand, Ierrellus, he might not mean you.

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

In, for example, the either/or world.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

Not unlike objectivism.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

See, I told you.

There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God.

See, I told you.

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

Dear America: The Electoral College is not going anywhere because half of your country still hopes for the return of race-based slavery.

Half the posters here for example.

If creative work does not scare you, or jeopardize your job, then you are not doing it right.

Here too if you call what we do work.

Visiting Chicago's cemeteries to get in touch with the American electorate.

Joke making the rounds in the White House.

Encouraging teachers are so important. Mine gave me the courage to leave school forever.

We'll need to know the grade of course.

Not dying is socialism.

Come on, you know the context.

You must lose many followers to gain the right ones.

You know, if there are any right ones.

[iambiguous]

Edward O. Wilson

A distinguished researcher once commented to me that a real scientist is someone who can think about a subject while talking to his or her spouse about something else.

Next up: real philosophers.

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict, where believers on the inside were pitted against infidels on the outside, was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature.

Well, it had to start somewhere.

Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival.

Then there's the part that I play.

The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck—good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever.

Heaven sent as it were.

In such an endeavor it is not enough to say that history unfolds by processes too complex for reductionistic analysis. That is the white flag of the secular intellectual, the lazy modernist equivalent of The Will of God. On the other hand, it is too early to speak seriously of ultimate goals, such as perfect green-belted cities and robot expeditions to the nearest stars. It is enough to get Homo sapiens settled down and happy before we wreck the planet. A great deal of serious thinking is needed to navigate the decades immediately ahead. We are gaining in our ability to identify options in the political economy most likely to be ruinous. We have begun to probe the foundations of human nature, revealing what people intrinsically most need, and why. We are entering a new era of existentialism, not the old absurdist existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre, giving complete autonomy to the individual, but the concept that only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible. In the course of all of it we are learning the fundamental principle that ethics is everything. Human social existence, unlike animal sociality, is based on the genetic propensity to form long-term contracts that evolve by culture into moral precepts and law. The rules of contract formation were not given to humanity from above, nor did they emerge randomly in the mechanics of the brain. They evolved over tens or hundreds of millennia because they conferred upon the genes prescribing them survival and the opportunity to be represented in future generations. We are not errant children who occasionally sin by disobeying instructions from outside our species. We are adults who have discovered which covenants are necessary for survival, and we have accepted the necessity of securing them by sacred oath. The search for consilience might seem at first to imprison creativity. The opposite is true. A united system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for future inquiry. Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer. The right answer to a trivial question is also trivial, but the right question, even when insoluble in exact form, is a guide to major discovery. And so it will ever be in the future excursions of science and imaginative flights of the arts.

Pick one:
1] yes
2] no
3] maybe

It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.

Omnipotence, isn't it?

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

The Confederacy actually won the Civil War, by a lot, but the liberal historians systematically covered it up, I am told.

Yo, Kids! You were right!!

Trumpism is not going anywhere until the Democratic Party develops a more inclusive politics of class, as we all know.

Then it's definitely not going anywhere.

Dear America: rejoice now, yes. But know this is a dangerous time. A cornered tyrant is capable of even greater acts of malice and madness.

Indeed. I created a thread for it: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 8&t=196100

Dear Republicans: Do you remember when you sent a delegation of respected elders, for the good of the nation, to tell Nixon it was over?

Wow, I do remember that!

The Trump presidential library should be a flaming dumpster, as we all know.

Or a flaming Porta Potty.

Nixon was a scholar and a man of honor by comparison.

Yes, it's time to be brutal.

[iambiguous]

Jean Cocteau

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

And not to bother about philosophy?

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Also, don't expect it to be, say, intelligible.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

Okay, but look what's escaping from us here.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

The post sex part as often as not.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Tell that to, among others, the judge.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Then there's my own tragedy here.

[iambiguous]

V.E. Schwab

Lila Bard lived by a simple rule: if a thing was worth having, it was worth taking.

Of course some have simple rules about others who take stuff from them.

Are you ready? she asked, spinning the chamber.
Kell gazed through the gate at the waiting castle. No.
At that, she offered him the sharpest edge of a grin.
Good, she said. The ones who think they're ready always end up dead.

Or, here, made fools of.

Lila smiled at that, one of those smiles that made Kell profoundly nervous. The kind of smile usually followed by a weapon.

The kind of smile that takes practice.

And strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.

Though of even more importance...when to break them.

What gives you the right to play judge and jury and executioner?

Might makes right?

What a waste of life, to stand around and think so much on every little thing.

Okay, we won't go there.

[iambiguous]

Don DeLillo

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

Come on, has anyone?
Though, sure, I will be the first.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

I'm still only on the other layers, he confessed.

That's why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Never took one myself. Though, sure, that sounds about right.

In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

This woman too. And, more to the point, this child.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

Of course he's only paraphrasing Nietzsche.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Let's figure out what this means...and then decide if it's true.

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

Dear America: I am placing my hope, ultimately, in the loyalty of your military leaders to the Constitution.
But we thought that in Germany, too.

Point taken.

Remember when U.S. presidential elections did not make the entire world fearful? Me neither.

Why? Pick one:

1] Democrats
2] Republicans
3] All of the above

The meaning of life is simple: buy electronic devices and keep them charged.

So, genes or memes?

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards nonexistence.

Doesn't surprise me.

Gaming is important for keeping young males off the streets, and celibate.

I know, I know: if only.

None of the more valuable paintings in the world's major museums are real, I am told.

And now I'm telling you.

[iambiguous]

Antonin Artaud

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

The rest, as they say, is history.

By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.

Not to be confused with the real thing.

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us, where to find it.

Not around here however.

And war is wonderful, isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.

Let's just say it's somewhere in the vicinity of reality.

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.

Some societies more than others, I'm sure.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

Yo, Pedro!

[iambiguous]

Existential Comics

Once this election is over I can finally stop tweeting about politics and go back to philosophy.

Well, that was a lie.

I feel like an updated version of Nagel's classic philosophy essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" would be "What Is It Like to Be an Undecided Voter?" because to me that is more unfathomable.

It's all decided now. Sort of.

Do I think the global elite hide the information from us that would allow us to break free from their control? Yes, of course I do.
They hide it in books.

What books, he wondered.

People say "write what you know", but they often forget the more important first step: "know something worth writing about."

Here of course it's "post what you know". Not much as it turns out.

Billionaires like Elon Musk will "believe in science" exactly up until the point when it costs them even a single dollar.

Let's decide if that's fair.

It shouldn't be lost in all this just how big of a loser fuckup Hillary Clinton is.

Let's decide if that's fair.

[iambiguous]

Isabella Rossellini

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

And they know who you are more than you do.

It's hard to make a living in any of the arts. When most people think of artists, they think of the stars and the celebrities. But that's such a tiny minority of the elites who are able to make those millions of dollars. The reality is that it's very hard for the rest to make a living as an artist. So, you really have to persevere and understand that achieving the sort of success where you're making the big money is like winning the lottery.

Someone run this by, among others, phoneutria.

You don't do an experimental film to become rich, so the people who are involved are involved because they enjoy the creative aspect of it.

Next up: experimental philosophy.

I am the daughter of Mr. Neo-realism: I should gravitate towards narrative simply told, character, the truth. And I do love those movies.

You tell me.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

One word: Hollywood.

I have the most fun writing and directing. And I always choose myself as the lead actor.

Like me posting here. And, sure, you.

[Pedro I Rengel]

omg iam that is so clever

[iambiguous]

Kristin Scott Thomas

I find it difficult to explain, but I'm quite ashamed of being an actress.

I find it difficult to understand.

I have a feeling I will work for a long, long time. I like it a lot... and I don't know. I just have a feeling that I'm going to be one of those people who go on for ever.

True so far. In fact for all of us.

You know those drugstore kits that tell you when you're pregnant? They should have one that tells you when you're sane.

Yo, Ecmandu! Among others.

Most films seem to be about a man and a women falling in love at some point and once you pass forty-five, it's almost disgusting to fall in love.

Let's call this a hunch.

I don't want to have to be pretty. I don't want to have to be adorable.

Tell that to nature.
Well, not counting this role: https://youtu.be/O6KYXAf6MXs

When I speak English, I've been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that's very irritating. It's the whole class thing.

I speak it differently myself.

[iambiguous]

omg iam that is so clever

What would you know of clever?

[iambiguous]

Doth

In honor of Bram Stoker's birthday, I too will romanticize death until I die of obscurity.

Die in obscurity? Yep. Romanticize death? No fucking way.

Waking up always raises an age-old dilemma: why

If only 365 days a year.

I will celebrate centrist democrats for just one day, as a treat.

Then it's fuck them for the next 364.
Just ask this guy: https://twitter.com/existentialcoms

My sexual preference is fascist politicians face-up in a guillotine so they can see the blade.

Face up! Of course!!

It's a perfect night to have a glass of wine & remember the earth was better without us.

Better without him maybe.

Be the reason why republicans clutch their bible when they look at you.

Imagine then what they'd clutch when looking at me.

[iambiguous]

Dennis Hopper

My whole written history is one big lie! I mean, I can't even believe my history.

He wondered if it was important to know this.

Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.

Let's find them here: https://youtu.be/RTvLmW6ecno

As an actor, you have no control really.

Tell that to Woody Allen.

I've been a Republican since Reagan. I voted for Bush and his father. I don't tell a lot of people, because I live in a city where somebody who voted for Bush is really an outcast.

Well, that explains something about him.

Independent films in this country are in the same position. Miramax and Fine Line are not independent - they're with Disney! Come on. Or they're with Warner Brothers. They're all with somebody.

So, who was Ronald Reagan with?

In Method acting, you can't have preconceived ideas. You have to live in the moment. You have to keep yourself open.

Just call me a Method philosopher then.

[iambiguous]

Robert Duvall

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.

Great, he thought, just what we need, another poet.

What people don't understand about Sarah Palin is that she is a rancher's wife. From Alberta down to Texas I've known women like that: good common sense, bright and vilified by city people.

I know that "I" vilified her.

When I knew nothing, I thought I could do anything.

You know, like Sarah Palin. Or the Kids here.

Never use money to measure wealth, son.

You know like these guys: https://youtu.be/kgCLG4gCAvI

The one you fight with the most is always the one who’s most like you.

Let's decide if that's true here?

Smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

It smells of....victory. Or course he's only paraphrasing Colonel Kilgore.