a thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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?

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[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:

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[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?

9327

[b]Ernest Cline

I cleared my throat and recited my pass phrase. Each word appeared on my display as I said it. “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.[/b]

Want to know my pass phrase?

Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.

We’re part of that for sure.

…he appeared to have run out of shits to give sometime in the previous century.

Not unlike me then.

But over the past few months, I’d come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn’t exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in a cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.

Not unlike your own rig, right?

Re-creations of the Addams Family house, the abandoned shack in the Evil Dead trilogy, Tyler Durden’s flophouse in Fight Club, and the Lars Homestead on Tattooine.

Let’s pretend we’re on Jeopardy here.

What could possibly be worse? Cruz asked. A mission where you have to blow up a Death Star while being attacked by two Borg Cubes inside an asteroid field?

Worse? How about enduring the Kids and the fulminating fanatics here?

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[b]Werner Twertzog

We can do this the hard way, or we can do this the apocalyptic way. [/b]

I know: too close to call.

Thank you, pseudonymous “American” for thinking I am already dead and that “I was too badass for this world.”
One of those statements is true.

Was that anyone here?

Go ahead and believe that you will be in heaven an hour before the devil knows you are dead. I know too much about you already.

Santa Claus, right?

Dear Idiots: Stop hitting “reply all .”

Or pinheads as I call them.

It is important, in the U.S., to die of COVID to show how much you detest policies that would lift your family out of ignorance and want, but that might, incidentally, also benefit non-white people.

Unless, of course, it’s all a hoax. Right, Mr. Pinhead?

In the U.S. “hero” is a term applied to exploited front-line workers before they begin organizing.

Yo, Jeff!

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[b]Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Leonardo Da Vinci bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine.[/b]

Whoa, he thought!

I’ve spent my life making blunders.

So, he thought, does that explain the one above?

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

Black is beautiful for example.

There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more.

Let alone post them here?

I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child.

Don’t we all?

On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii…I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.

That explains something I suppose.

9330

[b]Sally Mann

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.[/b]

Me too. If I remember it correctly.

I’m so worried that I’m going to perfect my technique someday. I have to say its unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend upon some technical error.

Like my own philosophy here, right?

All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.

You know, like all your good posts here.

You can tell a good ruined lens, right from the get-go…That’s the kind of lens I’m looking for.

Next up: a bad ruined lens.

There’s always a time in any series of work where you get to a certain point and your work is going steadily and each picture is better than the next, and then you sort of level off and that’s when you realize that it’s not that each picture is better then the next, it’s that each picture up’s the ante. And that every time you take one good picture, the next one has got to be better.

As though with photography that’s an exact science.

There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don’t break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.

He wondered: What the hell can that possibly mean?

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YOU CREEP FUCK STOP REPORTING ME YOU FUCKING COMMUNIST CUNT

9332

[b]Werner Twertzog

This is an unfriendly reminder that your meaningless paperwork is late.[/b]

If you know what he means. And, sure, some here no doubt actually do.

John Waters is gay?
What does that even mean, anymore?

I once shook the man’s hand here at the Charles Theater.
Didn’t catch anything either.

The humblest prole in Germany lives amid culture, eats wholesome food, has free healthcare and education, and is loved by an extended family, but the American bourgeois lives amid ugliness, eats toxic garbage, is bankrupted by cancer or one child in college, and dies alone.

Of course Biden will change all that, right?

It is important for mentally ill white men to have semi-automatic weapons so that everyone else may live in a culture of fear, as we all know.

Wow, that sounds an awful lot like America!

Do not be distracted by bobcats. Bears, bears, bears, bears, bears, bears, bears . . . bears are the real menace, as we all know.

Gee, I wonder where that comes from.

This was a vile and debased decade.
But every decade is so.

True, but this one [so far] is clearly in the running to top the list.

9333

SHUT YOUR FUCKING FACE YOU WACKO CREEP. YOU ARE SUCH A LOWLIFE CREEP ITS UNBELIEVABLE, TALKING LUNATIC SHIT WHILST HAVING THE PRESENCE OF MIND TO PLOT TO GET RID OF PEOPLE YOU DONT LIKE…WHAT A FUCKING DISGUSTING DISTURBING FREAK CUNT. HAS THE ABILITY TO TELL NONSENSE FROM SENSE YET SELECTIVELY CHOOSES TO TALK INSANE SHIT AND PROOF HIMSELF AGAINST ANY SENSIBLE ACCUSATIONS WHILST USING HIS REASON ON THE BACKEND TO FUCK PEOPLE OVER!!!YOU FUUUUCK!!!

9334

Wow, irony doesn’t get more mundane than this, right?

You know, if mundane is the right word. :laughing:

Yo, Carleas, you’re up! :sunglasses:

9335

YOU THINK I GIVE A SHIT ABOUT BEING BANNED???HAHAHHAAHHAAHHAHAHAHA

9336

[b]Robert Mapplethorpe

I don’t think that there’s that much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone’s ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl.[/b]

Some might disagree of course.

I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.

Especially with a fist shoved up my ass, he thought.

My work is about seeing - seeing things like they haven’t been seen before.

You tell me: google.com/search?source=un … 66&bih=625

Beauty and the devil are the same thing.

Same meaning what exactly?

When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.

Must be a True Artist thing.

I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.

Imagine a philosopher doing that. And, no, not just me.

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[b]Werner Twertzog

I have been to more than 100 countries. The United States is the only one in which I fear being murdered for a minor traffic offense.[/b]

Or, here, offending one of the fulminating fanatic Kids?

Nothing against the whales, but I cannot even save myself.

They’ll understand.

I never speak of my relationship with Helen Mirren. And it is not merely because of the nondisclosure agreement, and restraining order, as we all know.

Well, we all know now. If it isn’t all just made up of course.

No, you do not get “to do what you love,” unless what you love is soul-grinding misery in an office.

Fortunately, we’re all doing what we love here, right?

It is important to ask subordinates to “speak freely” to identify the traitors.

You know, if you’re the boss.

Why make dystopian fiction when we live in a dystopian reality?

For the bucks?

9338

[b]Margaret Mead

We — mankind — stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device — our consciousness of the crisis — as our unique contribution.[/b]

Right, and look at us now.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

Unless it’s successful against Nazis of course.

The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.

So, what do you think…it’s only gotten worse?

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

So, what do you think…it’s only gotten much worse?

We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.

See, I told you.

Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.

Yo, Satyr!

9339

[b]Existential Comics

The neoliberal solution to climate change is to hope that somehow it will become profitable to save the planet.[/b]

Actually, it might, right?

just think about how much time you waste scrolling twitter when instead you could be learning the intricate lore of Middle Earth

Anyone here ever been there?

I wouldn’t have guessed it, but it turns out the best thing for my mental health during these trying times is for a big ass boat to get stuck in the Suez canal.

Me too, he thought.

Yes, we are only alive for a brief time, and we spend most of it working, and sleeping, and being sad, but, uh…well actually I forget where I was going with this.

My guess: to the grave.

American Newspapers right now are all like “Stop Asian Hate!” and then two days later run an five articles about how we have to destroy the Chinese economy or their evil influence will spread across the globe.

My guess: the media industrial complex.

We shouldn’t vilify our political opponents too much. For example, a lot of libertarians are genuine in their motivation for a political system that maximizes human freedom, they are just really, really dumb.

More or less how the libertarians feel about us.

9340

[b]Napoleon Bonaparte

If I were to give liberty to the press, my power could not last three days.[/b]

Well, that’s sort of true today. But only if you know what I mean.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

Wow, just like here! Right, Kids?

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Come on, death is almost never nothing. Unless of course you need it to be.

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.

A hell of a lot harder.

Once you have made up your mind, stick to it; there is no longer any ‘if’ or ‘but’.

Trust me though: for better or for worse.

Who saves his country violates no law.

On the other hand, there is a left wing and a right ring version of this. Not to mention all the others in between.