a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.[/b]

Though hardly ever literally.

Give me inspiration over information.

And we know all about that here, don’t we?

The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute.

And, by and large, we’re just along for the ride.

I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.

Does eternity know that?

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

Not unlike your very life itself.

Of course it’s all luck.

If only from birth to death.

[b]Werner Twertzog

It is important to read comments sections to learn that most cranks don’t read past the first paragraph.[/b]

Or here, the OP. If even that.

My friends who are professors think quitting is a statement. Why do you not understand that the administration wants you to leave? You are entirely replaceable at a much lower cost. Also, no one cares about your sad, little publications.

True stories no doubt.

Is important for the academic humanities to make strident truth claims that are manifestly false.

Any that you’re familiar with?

Everyone remembers what Laplace said to Napoleon when he produced his orrery.

Actually, I don’t.

If Jesus follows me on Twitter, should I follow him back?

Yeah. Unless you want to burn in Hell for eternity.

Before you die, alone, your most cherished beliefs, for which you have sacrificed everything, will be discredited, and your remote descendants will think of you with shame, if they have not obliterated your memory, and changed their names. That’s progress.

I guess I was wrong then.

[b]Charles Baudelaire

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.[/b]

How dumb is that?
You know, if it is dumb.

The habit of doing one’s duty drives away fear.

Unless, of course, it brings the fear on.

I am the vampire at my own veins.

slurp slurp slurp

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

Men? Double it. At least.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

And how I do so nail the bastards here.

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

Next up: certain other individuals.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.[/b]

Our very own First Reich!

I have received your statement of concern. It will be considered by my Statement of Concern Committee. The current wait time is 377 years.

You know, like complaining to Comcast.

Help me build a bridge to the 11th century.

Back to God in other words.

There are more potential variants than grains of sand. And they are coming for you.

Unless of course it’s all just a hoax.

When one door closes, another door opens, dropping you into fiery pit of hell.

If not into the frozen expanse of oblivion itself.

It is a nice day for a Götterdämmerung.

This thing: merriam-webster.com/diction … %A4mmerung
Or, here, what we call Trumpworld.

[b]Joe Abercrombie

A man who doesn’t want opinions should keep his own mouth shut.[/b]

Yo, pood!

You may need two hands to fight someone, but only one to stab them in the back.

Or, if distance is more suitable, pull the trigger.

You don’t have to be ready. You just have to go.

Famous last words, let’s call them.

If you have a plan, hissed Sumael from the corner of her mouth, now would be the time.
I have a plan, said Nothing.
Does it involve swords?
A pause. All my plans do.
Do you have a sword?
Another. No.
How will you succeed without one? Muttered Sumael.
A third. Death waits for us all.

Covering all the bases.

He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor. Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.

Or, if you’re Mr. Reasonable, poop.

Death waits for us all. Nothing’s forever. Life’s about making the best of what you find along the way. A man who’s not content with what he’s got, well, more than likely he won’t be content with what he hasn’t.

My guess: All the exceptions.

[b]Existential Comics

What’s great about capitalism is that the very people tasked with ending the pandemic through the creation of a vaccine have a massive financial incentive for COVID-19 to stay around forever so they can keep selling us boosters.[/b]

I know, let’s call this the medical industrial complex.

The masculine urge to build a trebuchet.

A little help with this one please.

I do believe that one day mankind will finish the project of the enlightenment, and finally vanquish the three great enemies of Reason: tribalism, superstition, and horny.

Yo Andrew! Yo Chris!
And Mario once he stops spinning in his grave.

How anyone can confuse capitalism with a “meritocracy” is beyond me. Capitalism is based solely on property relations. Your boss isn’t better than you because they own the business. Your landlord isn’t better than you because they own the building. They just own things.

Anyone still confused here?

Me, angrily staring at the screen as I see that someone has copied one of my tweets: “how dare you, that’s my communist propaganda!!”

On the other hand, you have my expressed permission to copy my posts here.

We all like to think of ourselves as rational human beings, and yet, we keep logging onto this website…

Need I say more?

[b]Thomas Ligotti

It’s strange how you’re sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.[/b]

Bitterly strange for example.

We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.

You know, being optimistic.

What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?

Though, for some, only on the good days.

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.

Next up: you see how I die.

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that the customer 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 of our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything.

Let’s call this capitalism, okay?

Man is a self-conscious Nothing.

You know, approximately.

You’ve lost your context.
Find one.

Well, actually, during this festive holiday season, here at ILP, you are the context.

Over and again I make a fool out of you and over and again you come back for more.

It is what, apparently, you call fun?

[size=50]This time, try really, really extra hard to be clever.
And all on your own.
Not by ineptly imitating me.[/size]

[b]Doth

Due to current world events, I need to find a witch that can turn me into an ancient moss-covered tree.[/b]

Yo, Maia! Any recommendations?

Oh no, my tabula, it’s rasa.

Quick! Find a font!!

In honor of Charles Dickens I am also going to be poor this Christmas.

Fuck that, he snorted.

Me: I think I’m a sane, normal person.
My spotify wrapped: you absolutely are the fuck not.

Spotify wrapped?

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

You know, if that’s a real thing.

Be the reason why she speaks a dead language in bed.

Or, sure, posts in a dead language here.

[b]Fernando Pessoa

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.[/b]

Me too. But it took a lot of practice.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing, well, hundreds by now.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.

So, sure, take comfort in that while you still can.

Oh salty sea, how much of your salt is tears from Portugal?

Come on, it can’t be all that much. But point taken. His anyway.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

Mine too. And not unlike my hopes.

I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

Of course that’s why you’re here.

[b]God

My son’s middle name is Fucking.[/b]

Ouch?

In hindsight, a Small Bang would have been more manageable.

Less pinheads for example.

The reason evolution doesn’t make sense is that it led to you.

Wow, how grim is that?

I wish I’d followed a different career path.

Don’t we all.

I never tell anyone to do anything, except, in the case of those who claim I did, to fuck off.

So, did you?

No. No more God. I’m sick of this shit.

Looks like we’ll need another one then. Yours perhaps?

[b]Nawal El Saadawi

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.[/b]

You know, once you grow a pair.

When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems. If you are beautiful and stupid then it’s easy.

Why is this not self-explanatory?

To be creative means to connect. It’s to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

Or, for some of us, to disconnect.

She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.

Though not necessarily able to tell the difference.

All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.

Yo, Gib!

To have arrived at the truth means that one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them.

What I would give just in order to figure out how some people are able to actually believe things like this.

Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

Or truth in a world of pinheads.

Back up on the skyhook of objectivist clap-trap.

Note to Others
What does she even mean?

Note to zinnat:

His very own groot, right?

Note to everyone else:

Is it even possible to be more dimwitted than this? Over and over and over again with the same lame “comebacks”.

But at least it’s not in a philosophy thread. Also, Lyssa once sent me a PM admitting that inventing him was one of the most embarrassing mistakes she ever made. True story.

Note to Joker
Thought you were cumin.

Note to everyone
i win…again.
It is fate.

Note to Philosophy
I nullified you. I win.

Note to Mary
We are both innocent.
They are all guilty.

Seriously, though…

Go through his “notes to” above.

You tell me: How on earth is it possible to imagine that they are…clever? They neither make you think nor smirk.

They’re just plain…dumb.

I don’t get why he insists on posting them over and over again. It’s like his whole point is to be embarrassed.

A little help with this, please.

What real philosophy is about.

Note to Reality
Do you exist?

Note to Existence
I am reality.

Huffing-Puffing
Good point.
Que shit-Stain, for some real failospohizing.
You’re up.
I was a born a hustler to a crooked ghetto blaster. The more I go one way I stop, scratch my arse and realize I could have gone the other way.
Pimpin’ my way through the world.
Fractured and fragmented, furiously fuming as filamenting fanatics.

A MIRROR IS RAISED ON SKYHOOKS, REFLECTING THE REALITY OF YOU.

His solution? Of course: more of the same.

He has absolutely no access to wit.

But he simply refuses to be embarrassed by it. And, with him, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it is completely genetic.

You know, given the real deal free will world.

[b]God

When someone says “I have a right to my opinion” they mean “I have a right to someone else’s opinion I found online.”[/b]

Feel free to have the right to mine.

I’m afraid the new variant is even more reason-resistant.

Uh, oh, Mr. Pinhead!!

Don’t use drugs or alcohol to solve your problems.
Use them because they’re fun.

In Heaven, for example.

I’m sorry I keep putting out new COVID variants but sometimes perfectionism gets the better of Me.

Oh well, so much for the loving, just and merciful God.

The great thing about Covid is it’s willing to change if that’s what it takes to be part of your life.

Almost as though He made it that way.

This Thanksgiving Christmas I’m grateful to those who don’t believe in Me for trying to protect the world from those who do.

I’m doing my bit here, right Bob?