a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Jack Nicholson

I envy people of faith. I'm incapable of believing in anything supernatural.

Let's figure out a way how to.

With my sunglasses on, I'm Jack Nicholson. Without them, I'm fat and 60.

Now he's fatter and 83.

When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!

Yep, that's still going on.

I have never lied to you, I have always told you some version of the truth.

My guess: his own.

Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.

And in the least sophisticated person?

I'm very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because I'm positively against it. I don't have the right to any other view. My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life.

On the other hand, when's the last time he was saddled with an unwanted pregnancy?

[iambiguous]

Elena Epaneshnik

Noticed how we forgot our obligatory annual whining about "Autumn anxiety" or "September blues"? That's because we've been experiencing all the symptoms since March.

Must be a Russian thing. Or, sure, a global pandemic.

My three main perceptions of my own tweets:
1. I could have written it better.
2. I shouldn't have written it at all.
3. I think I'm gonna hate myself for a couple of weeks which has nothing to do with my tweets.

On the other hand, she is drop dead gorgeous.

If you're not part of the problem, then there's something really wrong with you.

Yep, it's reached that point now.

If you're happy and you know it, keep it to yourself.

Oh, and if you're miserable too.

I miss going to museums and looking at people looking at art.

And they miss you missing them.

If you suddenly experience such conditions as diabetes, unusual rage, uncontrollable laughter, anaphylactic shock, coma and possibly death – all at the same time, then you're probably watching political debates.

Either that or town halls.

[iambiguous]

Charles Yu

For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in this same little pocket, the most uneventful piece of time I could find. Same exact thing every night, night after night. Total silence. Absolutely nothing. That's why I chose it. I know for a fact nothing bad can happen to me in here.

Don't ever underestimate this, okay?

I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process.

Of course most times you hardly notice this at all.

Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren't the one saving the galaxy, you might as well be eight feet tall and covered with hair.

Hey, race matters.

Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.

Let alone when it's going around and around in circles.

There is a sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don't know where this is going. I don't know how it ends.

In death, dummy.

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.

How about it, a context maybe?

[iambiguous]

Edward O. Wilson

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before 10 or 20 thousand years ago, life hit a peak of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

I knew it!

In modern industrialized countries, networks grew to a complexity that has proved bewildering to the Paleolithic mind we inherited. Our instincts still desire the tiny, united band-networks that prevailed during the hundreds of millennia preceding the dawn of history. Our instincts remain unprepared for civilization.

I knew it!

I don’t believe I can let this subject pass by leaving my own conflicted emotions unconfessed. When Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978, I dismissed it as a minor achievement for a scientist, scarcely worth listing. When I won the same prize the following year, it wondrously became a major literary award of which scientists should take special note.

Go figure?

...innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.

Nope, not yet.
Right?

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

Someone here run this by God.

Obviously no two creation stories can both be true. All of those invented by the many known thousands of religions and sects in fact have certainly been false. A great many educated citizens have realized that their own faiths are indeed false, or at least questionable in details. But they understand the rule attributed to the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger that religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Set him straight, Ierrellus!

[iambiguous]

Werner Twertzog

Dear America: Your center cannot hold. You should be two countries.

In other words, the Kids and the rest of us.

Genius is a myth. There is only hard work.

Nope, genius really is an actual thing.

People do not
Climb mountains
Because
"They are there."
They climb them
Because
Life is meaningless.

Not unlike getting out of bed in the morning.

No, the candy man cannot, as we all know.

My guess: some can, some can't.

Dear America: I was a fatherless boy in the ruins of Germany, and I remember when your flag was not a global symbol of hatred.

Let alone stupidity.

I declare a 50-year moratorium on “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

That and "Wayne's World".
Still, one last time: https://youtu.be/thyJOnasHVE

[iambiguous]

Jean Cocteau

The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.

Let's change it and go the other way.

Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.

What's that leave in then?

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

Hmm. What might that be like here?

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

Okay, what does he mean then?

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

You know, when you can tell them apart.

Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.

Playing God for example.

[iambiguous]

V.E. Schwab

I'm not going to die, she said. Not till I've seen it.
Seen what?
Her smile widened. Everything.

You know, that might not even be possible.

I apologize for anything I might have done. I was not myself.
I apologize for shooting you in the leg, said Lila. I was myself entirely.

It can work both ways.

But these words people threw around - humans, monsters, heroes, villains - to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.

Didn't I tell you?

She bent most of the rules. She broke the rest.

Well, you know what they say about rules.

Scars are not shameful, not unless you let them be. If you do not wear them, they will wear you.

I'm still ambivalent about mine.

You know so little of war. Battles may be fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out.

And not just between nations.

[iambiguous]

Existential Comics

I dont care what you do with my body after I die, just please, overthrow capitalism.

On the other hand, how about right now?

It's always "run the government like a business" until huge corporations need a bailout, and then the government is suddenly happy to give them the cash without doing what every business does in that scenario: takes over ownership of the bankrupt company.

Yeah, but only if they are too big to fail.

The biggest mistake the Bolsheviks made was sending Ayn Rand to University and letting her read Nietzsche.

Let's confirm this.

One has to wonder why the United States government is so much more prepared to quickly mobilize to crush a protest than to fight wildfires.

Well, it must be in the Constitution somewhere.

The free market pays people based on how much value they contribute, which is why nurses, grocery store workers, farmers, and other essential workers have all gotten around a $0 raise during the pandemic, and the richest people on earth who own everything have gained billions.

Yo, Wall Street!

...what i don't understand is if Sisyphus hated his job so much, why didn't he just learn to code??

Or flip hamburgers.

[iambiguous]

I. F. Stone

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.

Boy, does that take me back.

All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.

Okay, but there is still the level that Trump takes it to.

If you expect to see the final results of your work, you simply have not asked a big enough question.

You know the one.

Rich people march on Washington every day.

They've even got their own street for it. It starts with a K.

When war comes, reason is regarded as treason.

But only the wrong reasons of course.

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news...Their main concern is advertising.

And the New York Times is only sort of an exception.

[iambiguous]

Antonin Artaud

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

Do you need me to explain why?

The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.

Do I need you to explain why?

I myself am an absolute abyss.

So am I. Relatively speaking.

There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others.

Let's call them Kids.

I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

He failed. He must have. Why? Because by the 20th Century this was no longer even possible.

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.

Okay, but that doesn't make the dice any less loaded.

[iambiguous]

Lydia Millet

Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being. Into that gap civilization fell.

Just between you and me, brother, how insightful is this?

The parents had been close in college but hadn’t gotten together as a group since then. Until they picked this season for their offensively long reunion. One had been heard to say: “Our last hurrah.” It sounded like bad acting in a stupid play. Another one non-joked, “After this, we’ll see each other next at someone’s funeral.” None of them cracked a smile.

The Bigger Chill.

To hear Chip talk you’d think every Nebraskan male knows how to put a horseshoe on a mule. They know how to bring forth grain from dirt, or what a combine harvester is. They get what happens to that brought-forth grain, the steps before the Cheerios. The women knit long underwear and are adept at fruit canning.

And of course they all vote for Trump.

For him freedom meant doing exactly what you wanted all the time. Was that freedom for everybody?

In America, sure.

Fear could turn you into a statue. Some people were statues all their lives. They feared the freedom of others, that others’ freedom could end up hurting them. A person might want to be free to do something to you, often. One man’s freedom was another man’s aggravated assault.

In America, sure.

He hated the American way of thought that said all things could be repaired, all things surmounted by a trick of attitude. History is trivial in this country, he said. Forgetting is the way to bliss. Ignorance is a badge of honor.

A good thing to hate, right?

[iambiguous]

Doth

Normalize sending politicians to the guillotine.

I know one we can start with. Or two if you count Mitch.

In honor of Friedrich Nietzsche’s birthday, I too will stare into the abyss & slowly go insane.

Missed it again. Maybe next year.

I respect the moon because it controls two of our most precious elements, oceans and wolves.

And, from time to time, Fixed Jacob.

Be the reason why your local woods are haunted

Or your local urban jungle.

Someone Trump contacted is about to die

Yo, Rudy!

Everyday I don’t live in abandoned greenhouse with a horrifying backstory is a day lost.

Who wouldn't be.

[iambiguous]

Joey Lauren Adams

I am one of the few actresses who isn't recognized by the way she looks. I'm recognized by the way I talk.

You know, like Jennifer Tilly. At least in Bound.

Bankruptcy is a legal proceeding in which you put your money in your pants pocket and give your coat to your creditors.

It works other ways as well.

A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

Not that she knows this.

It's not like you can wake up and realize, 'Oh, I want intimacy,' and then it happens that day.

The solution then [one of them] is to not want it.

Definition of an independent film is torture with less money and time.

Fortunately, the definition means different things to different people.

The toughest thing about homework was getting mom and pop to agree on the same answer.

It never occurred to me to ask my mom and pop.

[iambiguous]

Jan Mieszkowski

There is no right life in the wrong life. (Adorno)
There is no right or wrong life. (Nietzsche)
There is no right or wrong. (Thrasymachus)
There is no life. (Beckett)
There is no. (Hegel)
No. (Camus)

We'll need a context. (iambiguous)

Kant: tested positive for Platonism
Hegel: tested positive for Spinozism
Sartre: tested negative for philosophy

Of course they're all tested positive for oblivion.

If Kafka was a dandy, then
a) fashion is stranger than fiction
b) void makes the man
c) there is plenty of style, infinite style, but not for us

Any dandies here care to tell us?

Age 18: I've never read Hegel!
Age 20: I've never read Heidegger!
Age 22: I've never read Žižek!
Age 24: Why did I read Hegel?!?
Age 26: Why did I read Heidegger?!?
Age 28: Why did I read Žižek?!?

For you though it might be others.

English lit: Why does beauty make me happy?
French lit: Why does beauty make me sad?
German lit: Why does power make me happy?
Russian lit: Why do I have an axe in my head?

American lit:

"From the true opponent, a limitless courage flows into you." Kafka

Nope, no one like that here.

[iambiguous]

Maggie Smith

People say it gets better but it doesn't. It just gets different, that's all.

And that's not even counting all the times it gets worse.

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.

Then it's the same performance over and over and over and over again. Not that it ever gets old of course.

We can't escape the shadow, so the best thing we can do is notice the light and be open to it.

On the other hand, not all shadows are created equal.

Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle class.

Tell that to the folks in the working class. These days especially.

It's true I don't tolerate fools but then they don't tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that's why I'm quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.

Always suspected that.

An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.

None of that here, right?
For better or for worse as it were.

[iambiguous]

Francois Truffaut

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

I call them distractions. If you know what I mean.

There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.

I know: if only that very actually true.

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

Here, of course, all we have are posts.

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

Here, of course, all we have are posts.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

I would too if I knew what it means.

The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

Either that or start a revolution.

[iambiguous]

God

One religion is right and the rest are wrong and you have to figure out what the right one is or you go to hell.

Just as I've been saying all the time.

Rudy Giuliani was the hero of 9-11, but nowadays he likes ‘em 14-16.

And, come on, admit it, so does his buddy Trump.

Is the Pope Catholic?
Seriously. I'm asking.

Let's start a new thread about this.

Retweet this if you can look Me, the Lord thy God, in the eye and honestly say you don't have a previously unrevealed Chinese bank account.

Yo, obsrvr524, let's start a new thread about this.

How can the Pope come out in support of same-sex unions when in the Bible Jesus specifically says absolutely nothing against it?!?

That can't be true, right?

If I could do it again, bacon would be a plant.

Let's call it one anyway.

[iambiguous]

Jack Nicholson

If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women.

Straight men in particular I'm guessing.

You look at someone long enough, you discover their humanity.

You know, if they have any.

Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created woman?

Or, sure, man.

You are more thoughtful because you don't act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks - there is something about that number - but when 70 came along I felt good about it.

How about 80?

I don't want people to know what I'm actually like. It's not good for an actor.

Like that's even possible.

In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.

And this tells us what exactly?

[iambiguous]

Charles Yu

The path of a man's life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn't anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man's ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history.

Yeah, probably.

But really, it’s probably just easiest to keep doing what I’m doing. You know how it goes. At first it’s just for the time being, until you can get your own story together, be the hero in something of your own. You tell people it’s your day job, you tell yourself it’s your day job, and then, at some point, without you noticing, it stops being your day job and just becomes your job.

Me? 27 years.

Ever catch yourself in the middle of saying something you know you'll regret? Something so mean you know you should stop immediately but some part of your brain kicks in and won't let you stop?

Only all the time here, right?

If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.

Anyone ever have one of them here?

The only free man, he would say, is one who doesn't work for anyone else.

Any free folks here?

It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

And that's only if you can figure out how to use it.

[iambiguous]

God

Sometimes it feels like you don't even know I don't exist.

Still, some more than others I suspect.

You're the alternate universe other universes warn their kids about.

Well, at least we know they do exist.

If Trump wins I’m leaving the universe.

So much for omnipotence, eh?

Chimps share 99.2% of their DNA with human beings, and they want it back.

This chimp in particular.

A lot of people are regretting not wearing a mask in the mistaken belief I'd protect them.
That's what they're telling Me, anyway.

On the other hand, why would anyone have regrets in Heaven?

You can no longer use Facebook to deny the Holocaust.
You can only use it to start a new one.

Yo, Mark!

[iambiguous]

William Butler Yeats

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Among others, the Nazis couldn't agree with this more.

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.

And now women too.

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

Let's just say that, either way, you can take it too far.

There is another world, but it is in this one.

Let's find it.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Empty heads too.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

That can't be good anymore than that can't be bad.

[iambiguous]

Edward O. Wilson

Scientists by nature tend to be cautious in anything they say about religion, even when expressing skepticism. The distinguished physiologist Anton (Ajax) J. Carlson, when asked what he thought of the 1950 ex cathedra (that is, infallible) pronouncement by Pius XII that the Virgin Mary ascended bodily into heaven, is reported to have responded that he couldn’t be sure because he wasn’t there, but of one thing he was certain, that she passed out at thirty thousand feet.

Those Catholics!

In America it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality—including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth—the faith—of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else’s sacred creation myth is “religious bigotry.” It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat.

For example, in presidential elections.

The advances of science and technology will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham: how much to retrofit the human genotype.

This part in particular: $$$

...religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Yep, that's still the same.

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

And thus was born the expression, "it's beyond my control."

For most of history, organized religions have claimed sovereignty over the meaning of human existence. For their founders and leaders the enigma has been relatively easy to solve. The gods put us on Earth, then they told us how to behave. Why should people around the world continue to believe one fantasy over another out of the more than four thousand that exist on Earth?

Spend a few months with Zinnat and find out.

[iambiguous]

Jean Cocteau

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

Or at least make it coherent.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

No, it's not. But point taken.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

We all think that of our own work, of course. I know that I do.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Let's translate this into English. You know, for the Kids.

The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

You tell me: https://youtu.be/xePiUZU-VQc

When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.

"Wow!", he thought.

[iambiguous]

tiny nietzsche

"religious cult" is redundant

Not only that but there are hundreds of them.

other trials besides fire:
trial by dogs
trial by sand
trial by clouds

Or, here, trial by Kids.

moderator: what's your favorite prog rock album?
biden: lamb lies down on broadway
trump: saturday night fever

Well, it might as well be true.

the day doesn't officially start until things start falling apart

The night too.

it turns out the wasteland was inside us the whole time

Indeed, imagine doubting it.

occam's toothbrush

Let's go there and explain it.

[iambiguous]

James Randi

Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.

Yo, Kids!!

No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.

Anyone here not figured that out yet?

A lot of people hate my skepticism, and I think I understand why. The psychics offer wonders and endless possibilities in a world that often seems difficult and mundane. They promise health, wealth, wisdom, eternal life. But if you examine the record, it's not the psychics but the hard-nosed scientists who have actually delivered the things that improve human life.

Anyone here not figured that out yet?

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized.

Let's take this, oh, I don't know, here: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 5&t=185296

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

Critically, for example.

Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand.

You know, after you bend all his spoons.