Nihilism is the philosophical belief that life and the universe have no meaning. In general, nihilists are considered to be wanton hedonists since their life has no meaning, yet the concept is also commonly associated with the opposite extreme of suicidal depression.

Classical Russian nihilism concerned itself primarily with trying to destroy pretty much everything (because nihilism here meant "annihilating" everything old, so it makes way for the new way). Things would start over ex nihilo, from nothing... supposedly. In reality it was a philosophical and socio-cultural movement against the socially extremely backward Czarist Empire at an age of secularism and growing religious apathy. For the Russian nihilists, the term meant the complete destruction of an antiquated, oppressive world that in their view could not be reformed without being destroyed. Their references were the French Revolution and French early socialism, British utilitarianism and German materialism.

For some reason, despite the number of atheistic philosophies that still find purpose and joy in life, many religious people consider nihilism the logical extension of atheism. This is despite the fact that the most eloquent expression of nihilism is actually found in a holy book:

On the other hand, secular atheists, particularly intellectuals and philosophers, have also thought of nihilism, in the sense of 'urge to destroy indiscriminately' as a precursor to Nazism and totalitarianism,[1] probably because they are evocative of images of unethical practices and wholesale atrocities. But these were carried out in the name of social, political and racial purposes, i.e. in the name of moral values like race or class. No historically attested totalitarian is known to have had nihilistic views in the philosophical sense. Quite the opposite. It is reasonable to think that such views would be highly counter-productive to their power and the moral beliefs underlying it.

Sren Kierkegaard was one of the first modern philosophers to discuss nihilism. He posited a philosophy of nihilism known as leveling, -- a process of suppressing and removing individuality to such a point where an individual lacks the traits that make him unique. Without being an individual, life and one's very existence becomes void of any meaning. This philosophy is not the fully developed nihilism that was to come because Kierkegaard believed leveling created a life without meaning or value, but that life itself has inherent meaning and value.[2] Modern nihilism, beginning with Nietzsche, would claim life has no inherent meaning period. If however nihilism is defined as the doctrine of negation in reference to religion of morals then Marquis de Sade, Julien Offray de La Mettrie or Max Stirner deserve the label just as much as (if indeed not more than) Nietzsche.

But Nietzsche remains the philosopher most popularly identified as a nihilist and the first philosopher popularly thought of when nihilism is mentioned. He generally describes nihilism as "a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the world appears to operate." Nietzsche, however, is mainly associated with the philosophical statement "God is dead", which holds that the Christian God is no longer a viable source of any moral principles, therefore leading to a rejection of an objective and universal moral law, with a lack of moral basis ultimately turning into nihilism. However he also states that with God out of the way, human creative abilities could fully blossom and without turning an eye toward a spiritual realm, humanity could begin to acknowledge the value of the world. Nietzsche was thus not a nihilist himself (at least in his later years) but rather dedicated to combating nihilism, which he feared was overtaking the West. He is usually identified as an existentialist. In fact, both he and Kierkegaard are sometimes labeled the "father of existentialism" though obviously they had very different positions, especially on Christianity.

However, other modern-era figures that could be called 'nihilists' too like Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume or Albert Camus have distinct positions as well. As such nihilism cannot unequivocally be connected with a single person unlike most philosophical schools of thought and is not very useful when it comes to grouping different thinkers. Its rarity and looseness as a doctrine is perhaps due to an innate 'senselessness' or 'meaninglessness' or its flirtations with philosophical irrationalism and just plain irrationality. Or it could be due to a certain supra-historical dimension reflecting the social domination throughout history of value-based systems of thought, religious or otherwise.

On an unrelated note, nihilism is not just the most ludicrous or comical but the most metal and 'grim' and 'brutal' of philosophies, being propounded by both Toki Wartooth and Skwisgaar Skwigelf. ANUS (American Nihilist Underground Society) is also one of the first heavy metal databases (founded back in 1987), who like to use big, complex words to daze the reader into believing they are accomplished intellectuals, as well as finding ways to draw correlations between nihilism and any metal band whatsoever.[3] Making Sense? Ha!

When taken to extremes, one can then state that life itself is meaningless, and that everyone around them is meaningless, you can then justify murder or suicide based on the fact you think all morality has no meaning. Luckily, most nihilists do not go to this extreme.

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Nihilism - RationalWiki

I. Definition

What do you believe in? What gives your life meaning? How do you know whats true? If you can answer these questions without saying nothing, youre not a nihilist. Nihilism, most simply, means believing in nothing. The word is derived from Latin, nihil, which means nothing.

Nihilism can mean believing that nothing is real, believing that its impossible to know anything, believing that all values are based on nothing, especially moral values, or believing that life is inherently and utterly meaningless. We will discuss these different kinds of nihilism through its history and in section five.

Most philosophers have feared nihilism, believing that it leads to hopelessness, immorality, weakness, and destruction. Nihilism has probably been the most universally demonized philosophy in the Western world. In the East, its quite different, because, Buddhism is considered nihilistic by many philosophers, but is thought to lead to compassion and peace. We will discuss this too in the following sections.

Although many philosophers have considered nihilism almost synonymous with amorality and the idea that life has no meaning, this point of view may be outdated. Nihilism gained its fame during the years when people in the Western world were just beginning to cope with the idea that there may be no God, or that all value systems are relative to culture, and they couldnt imagine living a moral or meaningful life without God and traditional culture to fall back on. However, more recent generations have seen more optimistic versions of nihilism (see section seven).

Nihilism was named by the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi in the early 19th century; Jacobi believed that Immanuel Kants transcendental idealism implied what we will call metaphysical nihilismthe idea that nothing is real. Although this was not to be the most famous and supposedly dangerous form of nihilism, it was a criticism of Kants philosophy. Jacobi was not a nihilist. However, this motivation for nihilismthe analysis of reality as a subjective construction of minds, is a central reason for most forms nihilismthe recognition that in one way or another all meaning in the universe is created by the minds of those that perceive it.

The roots of nihilism in the Western world go back to the Greeks (like everything in philosophy!) The ancient Greek Skeptics believed that one should doubt, question, and examine all beliefs. Whether there would be any truths left afterwards remained an open question. The skeptical attitude became a crucial element of science and reason, but did not bear the fruit of nihilism in the West until after rationalism and materialism became major philosophies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Together, rationalism and materialism implied to many people that the universe was a soul-less machine, therefore devoid of real meaning.

The first famous nihilist was a fictional character in Russian author Turgenevs novel Fathers and Sons. And this reflected a reality; nihilism was growing rapidly in Russia at this time and in the late 19th century, it became political nihilism, a movement against both the church and the Russian governmenta rejection of all traditional authority. Rationalism, materialism, atheism, anarchism, nihilism, and the possibility of violent revolution all seemed closely related at that timewhich is also why nihilism is still associated with violence and destruction in many minds.

At the same time, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the most famous theorist of nihilism, argued that the world at that time was bound to become increasingly nihilistic for many years, and therefore full of despair, immorality, and pointless destruction. But, he also claimed that it was probably necessary for humanity to go through such a period in order to wipe away the irrationality of age-old traditional beliefs and eventually create a better basis for ethics and life-meaning. Of course, Nietzsches superman, the perfection of humanity, would be a nihilist, not bound by inherited ideas, creating his or her own meaning, according to their will.

Nietzsche recognized that developments in philosophy were going to encourage all of us towards nihilismrationalism, materialism, skepticism, science, and the recognition of cultural relativity. Many philosophers saw this problem and many agree that Nietzsches predictions were correct, that we have been living through the horrors that he foresaw resulting from nihilism. It would be easy to argue that much of the immorality and pointless violence we see in the world today is partially rooted in nihilism; but, we must then also note that a lot of violence is also caused by the opposite of nihilismfaith in traditional beliefs.

If 19th century philosophers saw nihilism as an approaching demon, 20th century philosophers saw it as a fact of life and searched for ways to cope with it. Existentialism, the central philosophy of the 20th century, was certainly nihilistic. And depressingly so for many; existential nihilism focuses on the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. Existentialism taught that there is no objective meaning; but, existentialists also emphasized our freedom to create meaning. And this is where nihilism began to move in a better direction. The existentialists, although often depressed, promoted the idea that we can (in fact must) give life our own meaning.

In the second half of the 20th century, new philosophies developed carrying nihilism in another directionwhich many philosophers find at least as distressing as any previous versions! Those are the philosophies / art movements of deconstruction and post-modernism. Deconstruction was a method of analysis which showed in many ways how meanings are constructed, supposedly with no ultimate foundationno solid reality behind them. And post-modernism consisted mainly of artists playing with the consequences of deconstruction and trying to create new human meaning out of this nihilistic world-view.

Every version of nihilism (see section five) has been feared by people who felt that without a foundation in objective truth or faith, it is impossible to have morality, life-meaning, or knowledge. However, there are many philosophies, such as secular humanism, Buddhism, and post-modernism which claim that it is possible to develop new and better forms of morality, knowledge, and life-meaning, without reliance on faith, which may be seen as deceptive and limiting. Buddhists base their morality on the recognition that all living things suffer and depend on each other. Post-modernists use new artistic techniques that recognize the artificially constructed nature of meaning, such as when characters in movies speak directly to the audience. So, it seems that nihilism can also lead to new and valuable forms of morality and meaning-making.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilisms] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength Friedrich Nietzsche

As remarked above, Nietzsche is known for sounding the alarm about nihilism in Western philosophy. More interesting is that he saw nihilism as an opportunity for humanity to master itself, and a test of our strength. It can be inferred from his other writings that Nietzsche though human beings could and should create positive meaning, if they could free themselves from the limitations of irrational traditions.

But todays society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individuals value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitlers program, that is to say, mercy killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Viktor E. Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning

In this quote, Victor Frankl claims that our society values people only for their usefulness, and blames this attitude on a kind of nihilism, which he associates with academics, and psychotherapy. He is talking about the reduction of human meaning, by reason, to materialism and functionalismthat the only things that matter are materials and what things (or people) do, practically. He argues that if you really believe in this world-view you should support the idea of killing off all useless members of society, as Hitler wished to do. Frankls fear that nihilism could support Nazi-like policies was a common fear among philosophers in the mid-twentieth century.

Here, we define each type of nihilism, most of which are also discussed in sections I and II.

The philosophy that we cannot know anything for sure. Also known as radical skepticism. This might be considered the gateway philosophy for nihilism. It seems to be a consequence of rationalism.

The belief that nothing is real, or that nothing really exists. Historically, based on idealismthe philosophy that everything is made of either ideas, or consciousness. Buddhism could be considered a kind of metaphysical nihilism.

The rejection of faith in traditional authorities including the government and the churchalso specifically a movement of this sort in late 19th century Russia.

The philosophy that existence ultimately has no meaning, including no God, no afterlife, and no transcendental domain of any kind. Often thought of as a philosophy of despair.

The belief that there is no solid basis for morality or any ethos, and therefore, that anything is permitted. Many people have felt this is a necessary consequence of atheism, but most atheists disagree.

Methods of literary analysis and art based on the idea that all meanings are constructed by minds and culture, and have no real basis.

Buddhism teaches a form of idealismthat consciousness is the fundamental reality, and that all conceivable objects and thoughts are temporary, illusory, and ultimately emptylike thoughts. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form is a major Buddhist quote. However, in Buddhism, this realization is supposed to lead to compassion and peace.

Historically, nihilism has been closely associated with atheismthe belief that there is no God. Because traditionally, people were raised to think of God and religion as the ultimate source of meanings and morality. However, although atheism, or at least agnosticism, would seem to be a necessary part of nihilism, they are not the same. An atheist may still believe in meaning, morality, or even spirituality. For example, nature-worshipper can be atheists but still believe in nature. And some atheists, such as Buddhists, believe in the goodness of human nature and the value of compassion.

Popular film has been full of nihilistsTyler Durden of Fight Club, Agent Smith of the Matrix, Heath Ledgers Joker in The Dark Knight all express nihilistic world-views. Fight Club seems to examine the causes and consequences of contemporary existential nihilism, but not necessarily to promote it; although the urge to burn it all down has a cathartic appeal to many viewers, in the end, the protagonist tries to save lives, perhaps showing that he is not a total nihilist.

And now, for something completely different:

Eric Idles Always Look on the Bright Side of Life from Monty Pythons film The Life of Brian:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlBiLNN1NhQ

The setting for this musical number makes the main lyrics of this song bitterly absurd; in this context, they express the meaningless absurdity of life. You will notice though, that as the song goes on, the lyrics more and more directly express a philosophy of existentialist nihilism. The Life of Brian was banned in Britain for years, due to its implicit atheism.

Originally posted here:

Nihilism: Examples and Definition | Philosophy Terms

How about crowd sourcing a timeline for all of Trump's enablers?

Kingdaddy Monday, July 20, 2020 12 comments

Steven Taylors concise summary of Trumps mishandling of the pandemic is extremely useful. I would propose that we need the same type of timeline for his enablers. Not only must Trump go, but so too all of the people who gave him the gas can and matches, then stood by as he burned down the country. What were they doing at key moments since January 2017?

While the list of enablers is quite long, perhaps it would be sufficiently manageable if we were to limit it, for starters, to the US Congress. Take, for example, US Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colorado). As the screenshot shown above from his web site suggests, he is a very typical Republican senator who, among other typical behaviors, trumpets his ability to bring federal benefits to his state, and enjoys being photographed with the troops, a folksy shorthand to young men and women who have committed to putting themselves in harms way in defense of the rest of us.

Just a couple of weeks ago though, due to the Trumpian time dilation effect, it feels like months a major story concerning the troops broke. Russian agents were paying the Taliban bounties for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan, and the current regime had done nothing about it. After the story appeared in The New York Times, Trump and White House officials focused on defending themselves against accusations that presidents should read their daily intelligence briefings. They did not state whether would be any action against Russia.

What was Cory Gardner talking about in the days after the story broke? In his Twitter feed and his Facebook posts (pretty much the same content), Gardner said nothing about the Russian bounties. Gardner did continue to promote his earlier idea to label Russia a sponsor of state terrorism. To his credit, Cory Gardner after the Times published the story did not undercut past Cory Gardner. Unfortunately, he also let Trump off the hook, saying that Congressional Democrats had the same information. Of course, if that were true, he is implicitly assuming that they had the obligation to read it, and paid them the backhanded compliment that they probably lived up to that high standard. He is also implying that the President of the United States has no more obligation to review intelligence and act on it than a member of the House or Senate.

It did not take me long to unearth how Gardner enabled Trump through the painfully familiar pattern of first ignoring something horrible that Trump did, then attempting to shift blame when confronted with that fact. It would not be hard to expand that effort to more senators, and more moments like these. Imagine if there were a crowd-sourced effort to map every senators response or non-response to a terrible Trump action or statement. Children in cages, betraying the Kurds, hawking hydroxychloroquine, violating the Hatch Act on the behalf of a Trump-friendly bean tycoon, pardoning Roger Stone, saying that white supremacists included some very fine people, chasing non-existent election fraud in a transparent effort to suppress voting, firing the FBI director for not swearing loyalty to Trump personally, forcefully clearing Lafayette Square of peaceful protesters so that he could hold a Bible for the camerasWhat was the senator from the great state of [fill in the blank] doing that day, and in the days afterwards?

If it were not for this group, Trump would be a toxic clown, instead of an active threat to public health, the economy, Americas standing in the world, and our political system. They deserve just as much scrutiny of their cynical and pointless efforts to stay in office, in lieu of what they could have done to prevent these calamities, as does the Current Occupant.

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A Timeline Of Nihilism And Fecklessness - Outside The Beltway - Mobile Edition

When I was a senior in high school, I noted one day that my nemesis was carrying a compact little tome called 14,000 Things to Be Happy About, which she conspicuously read between classes.

Because I was at a time in my life when I thought I should be reading stuff like The Dharma Bums and Naked Lunch two books Ive yet to finish because land the plane already, Jack Kerouac, and WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT, WILLIAM BURROUGHS??? I sneered at her simple-minded literary choice.

I did, however, surreptitiously sneak a peek at Barbara Ann Kipfers obsessive opus the next time I was at B. Dalton in Mesa Mall.

What I remember is being underwhelmed by suggestions that I be happy about the purest potato taste imaginable and bean lovers, as well as a reflective turn of mind and a special spirit of enjoyment found in New England. Since that time, Ive had the opportunity to be screamed at by enraged drivers in Boston, so I guess Ms. Kipfer can take that reflective turn of mind and stick it in the yacht supply stations shes so happy about.

But Ill confess, Ive been harking back to those 14,000 things lately because, well, I think many of us can agree that 2020 hasnt exactly been an explosion of Dilly Bars and winning lottery tickets. I believe the term most often used to describe this year is Dumpster fire, to the point that its clich and I spend a lot of time pondering what could replace it. Diaper failure? Check engine light? Robo-spam calls?

While Im not saying cock-eyed optimism is the answer, I dont think an Eeyore-ish wallow in nihilism is, either. Im just flailing around with all the grace of a newborn giraffe on roller skates, trying to figure out a livable balance. So, Im keeping a running mental tally of Stuff I Feel Pretty OK About.

It may not be blissful joy, but neither is it a live reading of The Bell Jar. Its pretty OK, and Im pretty OK with that. In no particular order, then, some Stuff I Feel Pretty OK About:

Learning that Id accrued enough grocery store points to get 20 cents off per gallon of gas. Granted, that means Id spent $200 at the grocery store and $183 of those dollars went toward sour cream and cheddar Baked Ruffles, but still: 20 cents off per gallon!

Eating sour cream and cheddar Baked Ruffles.

Walking barefoot to get the mail, across the concrete front steps and driveway, and the concrete is hot but falls just short of being unbearable. Its pretty OK when my lazy refusal to put on flip flops is rewarded.

Stopping my cats just before they eat something weird off the floor.

Reaffirming that I remember all the world capitals. Its one of my party tricks: I know all 197 world capitals, so probably you should never play Categories with me because I WILL choose world capitals and I WILL get full points on every single one. Anyway, every so often I go to sporcle.com and take the world capitals quiz, just to reaffirm that yep, I know em all.

Getting everything to fit in the dishwasher even though some of it probably wont get clean.

Harmonizing with Johnny Cash on Streets of Laredo (the version from American IV). Why this particular song? Couldnt tell you, but Johnny and I sound pretty OK together.

Checking Instagram for new items tagged #catsareweird or #babyhippo.

Emptying the change out of my wallet and into the gallon glass jar in which I save it, and saying the word plink as I drop coins individually through the narrow neck.

Informing my morning glory tower that its creepy. I planted morning glories in a big pot and built a tower out of chicken wire for them to climb, which they have and now theyre twisting and knotting all over each other at the top. I tell them its creepy, but secretly I think its neat.

Sitting in my adult-size beanbag chair and calling it exactly that: adult-size beanbag chair.

Lying in bed and making arbitrary mental lists as I drift to sleep: The 10 best things Ive ever eaten. My top five Bob Dylan albums. Seven literary characters I wish were real and I could be friends with them.

Reminding myself that for now, pretty OK is actually pretty darn good.

n

Rachel Sauer is at rs81501@gmail.com and would love to hear what you feel pretty OK about.

Continued here:

Finding livable balance: It's 2020 and I'm pretty OK - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

Mugees ul Kaisar

Modernist Muslims who cut themselves off from tradition, thinking that with the passage of time we develop better understanding of things, are putting themselves in a quite vulnerable position. Their actions suggest that modernity and post-modernity are closer in conformity to truth than Prophet Muhammad was, 14 centuries ago.Religion is based on metaphysical intellect which is trans-temporal and trans-historical. Truth is one and the same since primordial man and will remain so till the day of apocalypse. It is modern (western) mans arrogance to assume that all tradition, all humankind, everywhere in all ages got it all wrong. This man assumes that only recently, post the enlightenment in Europe, we have finally been able to crack the mystery of existence. Although modern physics particularly quantum physics has successfully restored the scent of mystery back into our lives, upsetting modern rational mans expectation on how the universe should behave, and the two world wars in the 20th century have shattered the myth of scientific progress and enlightenment, the two great rallying points for the project of modernity.A striking similarity between modernity and modernist liberal Muslims is the divorce from tradition and a radical emphasis on the individual. We see many modern Muslim scholars stepping outside of tradition and relying on their own individual capacities and capabilities. We need to have an estimate of what this radical emphasis on the individual has brought forth in western arts, sciences, and cultures. Cartesian Cogito (individual thinking ego) which was the central point of division between physics and metaphysics formed the departure point of Humanism and Individualism. It failed to comprehend reality and thus hit a dead end in Nihilism and Absurdism. This is because reality is about a whole while a ripped off individual is not.This problem gradually became prominent with the advent of post-Nietzschean western era. The subjectivity of modernity (with its polar objectivity) became over-subjectivity in post-modernity and finally dissolved into absurdity. The human subject defined by evolutionism, psychologism and neuroscience was severed from transcendence, and put at the centre of the knowledge enterprise. This individual human which was supposed to be the sole decipherer of the mystery of existence stands deconstructed in the post-modern abyss. Devoid of dimensions, immersed in physicalism, cut off from tradition, separated from a larger metaphysic, the western man (and his narrative) is left alone and dejected.Any Muslim attempt to digress or deviate from Islamic tradition, with the sole trust on individual, is dangerous and a recipe for their destruction.Lets delve into Muslim attempts of reconciling tradition with modern liberalism and secularism. Many Muslims naively think that liberalism is some kind of universal human sensibility, with reference to which we should evolve all our narratives including religion. All demythologising, de-sacralising, liberalising and secularising attempts are product of this mentality. When in fact the truth of the matter is that liberalism and liberal attitude is nothing but white man-centric sensibility. Cutting off hands of a thief is barbaric, crude and disgusting, but homosexuality, incest, bastard children are normalised. We need to see through the facade and ask pressing critical questions.One of the main arguments that secularists & liberals employ against Islam is that many Islamic laws are against human rights. Although this claim is contentious, let us for the sake of argument accept it. The question that arises is how modern liberals (most of whom are moral nihilists & relativists) can even make objective moral judgments in the first place? Who gives them the right to make moral judgments when according to them there are no true objective morals at all? In the post-Nietzschean western world, where God is Dead, there are no objective moral standards that can be referred to. As for human rights, we need to ask what exactly are they?A fluid, contingent, destabilised, Eurocentric, made-up list of rights of man is not a universal standard at all. In 1948 some white men got together and wrote down the charter of human rights. It is not a god-given document. In the Muslim world there is the concept of mothers rights, whereby a son has to be good to his mother. Such a right is not entertained at all in human rights. It is not even conceived. These are two different ontic worlds with contrasting epistemologies. Why should Islam be held accountable to white mens sensibility which has no ontological grounding and is a product of ever evolving convention? Since when did the wests moral sensibility become the objective norm and the universal standard?All liberalising and secularising attempts of religion are nothing but infatuations left over by colonialism. It is the disease of Eurocentrism that continues to haunt us.Muslims need to understand that religion is a trans-temporal reality at its core. Liberalism is a sub-human discourse which mutates every now and then. Yesterday, homosexuality was a crime, today it is a human right. This is what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as Liquid Modernity. No doubt that religion has the aspect of mutagayaraat, the variables, but their functioning (how they play out) is dictated by the static foundation of religion itself and not whimsical progress of fluid human sensibility. This is the reason Ahmed Javed does not consider modernity (and its liberal outgrowths) as any kind of static worldview that could define or regulate human behaviour, because it sees the individual man as the measure of all things (homo mensura) who decides not in reference to any metaphysic but is rather like a clever animal (thanks to Darwin) who only acts according to a particular problem/ situation at hand, as John Dewey would say.Therefore, our youth should shun this false idea that liberalism is some kind of objective, collective treasure of mankind that we should conform to. Any attempt to conform and reconcile religion with liberalism or for that matter any other modern ism, uncritically assumes that liberalism (or these isms) are somehow objectively true standards with reference to which we should judge religion. Who gave us these standards? Who and what justifies these standards? Who provides the first principle proofs of their truth and certainty? If it is social pressure which is fluid, dynamic and relative, then we cannot objectively hold them to be of any standard value. If we hold these rights and moral sensibilities to be trans-human objective realities then we need God (who transcends all contingent subjectivities) as a grounding to support those values. But how far is the present secular/ liberal world open and accommodating to the idea of God? It is not difficult to guess given the way God has been forced out from all spheres of our lives.

The writer is a student of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

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Beware, ye Muslims, of the misleading ways of Liberalism - Kashmir Reader

The University of Mississippi is facing a fight over its very identity.

Like other universities, the state's flagship campus in Oxford is not generally addressed by its full name. For more than a century, it's been called Ole Miss. It sounds like folksy shorthand for Old Mississippi.

The term's actual origin is more unsettling.

In 1896, a fraternity-backed council asked students to name the new school yearbook. Student Elma Meek proffered Ole Miss.

She borrowed it from the vernacular of the antebellum "darkey," who used it as a term of reverence for the slave master's wife, Meek told the university newspaper in 1937.

The story, which explains how the term became "the valued possession" of the university at large, ran under the headline: "Ole Miss takes its name from darky dialect, not abbreviation of state."

She felt the term was a tribute to Southern women, the paper reported.

'We will continue to use the terms'

The university declined CNN's requests to discuss the matter with the chancellor or provost, saying, "Our leadership is absorbed with Covid-19 planning as we prepare to resume on-campus operations safely."

UM has been here before

They see what's happened across the nation since Floyd's death. His killing ignited a simmering movement to redefine the legacies of Confederates and other historic figures -- and statues have dropped like bowling pins since.

"It feels like you're in the Upside Down. Everywhere else in the country these statues are coming down," UM associate history professor Anne Twitty said. "You feel like you're fighting the battle of 15, 20 years ago."

Thinking back on the struggles she's seen since joining the faculty in 2010, she said, "The battle over Ole Miss will be particularly hot."

Last month, Blake Hinson, a guard on UM's basketball team, put the school's ties to the Confederacy in the headlines by transferring to Iowa State.

The dangerous messaging at play

Jack Carey received his master's and doctorate at the university. He devoted a section of his dissertation to "the invention of Ole Miss" and is writing a book, "Jim Crow U.," about flagship Southern universities during segregation.

"There's really no ambiguity about what (Elma Meek's) tapping into: a romanticized vision of the Old South and slavery," said Carey, a University of Alabama instructor of American studies. "A lot of people don't think that much about it, which makes it all the more important to acknowledge the origin. It's quite a bit to try to explain away or rationalize."

Aside from sending an unwelcoming message to more than a third of the state's residents, who are Black -- along with those who feel those residents' lives and feelings matter -- retaining the nickname poses deeper dangers in its messaging, he said:

By romanticizing slavery, Carey said, an institution doesn't have to confront it.

"To speak honestly about the origin requires a pretty serious reckoning not just with the name but also the institution's identity," Carey said.

By fighting to keep its name and other holdovers of the Confederacy, he said, the university sends a strong message to prospective Black students: "Go somewhere else."

"That is not the way that a flagship state university should be imagining itself," Carey said. "That's really exclusionary in terms of who that university would welcome, and its commitment to academic freedom and diversity of thought."

'I think rebellion is a good thing'

Not everyone concurs with Carey. On Facebook and in interviews, many students and alumni -- and some would argue most -- feel the same way the university does about keeping Ole Miss. Despite their alignment with university leaders, they worry because the school has defended traditions like Colonel Reb and "Dixie" in the past, only to relent under pressure, said Howie Morgan, a 2000 graduate and political consultant.

"I think the problem that anyone's going to have in the current climate is the University of Mississippi, through its leadership over the last several decades, has not been honest with the students, alumni and fan base in their argument to change the symbols," he said.

That the Ku Klux Klan and other hatemongers co-opted the flag after the Civil War is just an example of groups stealing symbols, he said: "The Klan also used an American flag. The Nazis also stole a Christian symbol."

He frowns on efforts to change Ole Miss or Rebels, echoing his alma mater's assertion that they've taken on new meanings. Those who fought for suffrage and to end child labor were rebels, he said.

"I think rebellion is a good thing," he said.

He worries outside pressure is pushing administrators to "change from a niche market into a more bland university so we would blend in with all the other universities across the United States."

'We're destined to repeat the bad'

For senior Lauren Moses, a columnist for the school paper, the controversial symbols, along with Ole Miss and Rebels, are not honors. They're reminders, she said.

"Things that happened around the Civil War, we remember those things. We don't celebrate them, but we remember. I don't think the majority of students who utter the words support neo-Nazis or racism," she said. "For me, Ole Miss means both the good parts and the bad parts of our history."

"I see a sort of nihilism. We're trying to whitewash our history and get rid of everything that's bad," she told CNN. "I think that's dangerous for society and dangerous for Ole Miss specifically. We're destined to repeat the bad."

'If they're not willing to unlearn, we're at a standstill'

Carl Tart, 22, the university's first homecoming king, faced backlash when he told his family he was attending UM. Relatives disapproved of its racist and Confederate history, he said, but he had attended an all-Black high school in Yazoo City.

"I knew the world wasn't going to be all Black," he said. "I wanted to learn how to navigate the world with people who are different from me."

Once on campus, he'd experience a range of racism. He shared anecdotes about hateful messages Facebook and screen grabs of death threats on Snapchat targeting Black students. Other bigotry he experienced was more Archie Bunker than Bull Connor, he said.

White students at pep rallies couldn't tell star wide receiver D.K. Metcalf from other Black players, he said. They'd blurt out the n-word while singing along with rap music in local bars. At tailgates in The Grove, Tart and other Black students had to check each other's backs to make sure no one put "Our State Flag" stickers on them. Unwilling to study in halls named for racists (the contextualization plaques "didn't go far enough"), Tart did most of his schoolwork at home, he said.

Despite his stature, 6-foot-5 and almost 300 pounds, he found himself anxious when a vehicle pulled alongside him bearing the Confederate flag.

"I tense up because I have no idea if these people are about to target me. I have no clue what's going to happen from this point forward," he said.

On June 19, he issued an ultimatum: If his alma mater breaks ground on a shrine glorifying the relocated Confederate statue, count him out of any marketing initiatives expected of him as homecoming king.

"It's time for change and change is happening whether people like it or not. We have to start leaving behind these old traditions and these old prejudiced ways and bring positivity to the change," he said.

Now a graduate student at Louisiana State, Tart bristles at the idea Ole Miss can be "rebranded" with new meaning. He doesn't understand how university leaders can continue to justify its use, he said.

"We're expected to basically assimilate into a culture that's not ours. You can teach a person so many things, but if they're not willing to unlearn, we're at a standstill," he said. "It's not OK you're allowing Black students to live in fear."

A conflicted Black student experience

"The biggest problem is Ole Miss is a brand. It's making money," she said.

The 22-year-old graduated in May and is destined for the other Oxford, in England, come fall, but she has made the drive from her hometown, Tunica, for campus protests. The statue has spawned a few.

As a young orientation ambassador, Hudson recalls debunking "wild" rumors from prospective Black students -- no, the KKK doesn't live on campus; no, they're not still lynching people in Oxford -- while affirming other disturbing elements of the university's history.

"Some of this stuff happened, but that doesn't mean you don't belong here," she'd tell them.

She occasionally wears Ole Miss apparel but takes a harder line on Rebels gear. Her aunt won't wear any of it, she said. Depending on Hudson's audience, Ole Miss might slip out in conversation, but never in interviews or academic settings. Still, Hudson thinks the sobriquet sends a negative message, she said.

"I think it definitely means we haven't come to terms with all the history of the University of Mississippi and our role with slavery, with Jim Crow, within the Reconstruction era," she said.

Honesty and transparency are often missing from the debate, she said, echoing a complaint heard from both sides. Administrators too often announce a victory, only to hatch secret plans "to glorify Lost Cause mythology rather than contextualize Civil War history," which is what Hudson believes happened with the statue, she said.

Real dialogue means listening to all sides and using opposing arguments to hone her own, she said.

"You have to get more people engaged with that history and understanding that history," she said. "Education pulls people to your side."

Administrators also do the right things for the wrong reasons, she and other students and faculty complained.

The stadium stick ban was purportedly about safety, rather than denouncing the Confederate flag. Ditching "Dixie" and Colonel Reb were couched as efforts to make pregame more inclusive. The new names for buildings and the statue relocation came after a consulting firm said such honors hurt the school's reputation.

"That's not the only problem or the main problem," she said, explaining that just once she'd like hear university leaders say, "No matter how much it costs or how much we lose, it's wrong and we're going to take it down."

See more here:

The Battle over Ole Miss: Why a flagship university has stood behind a nickname with a racist past - CNN

The term nihilism comes from the Latin word nihil which literally means nothing. Many believe that it was originally coined by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) but it probably first appeared several decades earlier. Nevertheless, Turgenevs use of the word to describe the views he attributed to young intellectual critics of feudal society generally and the Tsarist regime, in particular, gave the word its widespread popularity.

The basic principles which underlie nihilism existed long before there was a term that attempted to describe them as a coherent whole. Most of the basic principles can be found in the development of ancient skepticism among the ancient Greeks. Perhaps the original nihilist was Gorgias (483 to 378 BCE) who is famous for having said: Nothing exists. If anything did exist it could not be known. If it was known, the knowledge of it would be incommunicable.

Nihilism has been unjustly regarded as a violent and even terroristic philosophy, but it is true that nihilism has been used in support of violence and many early nihilists were violent revolutionaries. Russian Nihilists, for example, rejected that traditional political, ethical, and religious norms had any validity or binding force on them. They were too few in number to pose a threat to the stability of society, but their violence was a threat to the lives of those in power.

Atheism has long been closely associated with nihilism, both for good and for bad reasons, but usually for bad reasons in the writings of critics of both. It is alleged that atheism necessarily leads to nihilism because atheism necessarily results in materialism, scientism, ethical relativism, and a sense of despair that must lead to feelings of suicide. All of these tend to be basic characteristics of nihilistic philosophies.

Many of the most common responses to the basic premises of nihilism come down to despair: despair over the loss of God, despair over the loss of objective and absolute values, and/or despair over the postmodern condition of alienation and dehumanization. That does not, however, exhaust all of the possible responses just as with early Russian Nihilism, there are those who embrace this perspective and rely upon it as a means for further development.

There is a common misconception that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a nihilist. You can find this assertion in both popular and academic literature, yet as widespread as it is, it isnt an accurate portrayal of his work. Nietzsche wrote a great deal about nihilism, it is true, but that was because he was concerned about the effects of nihilism on society and culture, not because he advocated nihilism.

Original post:

The History and Philosophers of Nihilism

Your TV GPS, Globe TV critic Matthew Gilberts look at the week ahead in television, appears every Monday morning on BostonGlobe.com. Todays column covers July 20-26.

WHAT IM WATCHING THIS WEEK

1. The corporate setting can be soul-crushing, as Dilbert, The Office, and Better Off Ted have noted. But Comedy Centrals cheeky Corporate, one of my pet favorites, takes that idea to new blackly comic heights. Matt and Jake (played by co-creators Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman) are junior execs in training at the nefarious Hampton DeVille company, a kind of Amazon whose slogan is We make everything. The guys know theyre buying into evil, but their cynicism and passivity keep them in the race. Its nihilism at its most entertaining. The third and final season is starts Wednesday on Comedy Central at 10:30 p.m.

2. COVIDs Hidden Toll, the latest installment of PBSs Frontline, looks into the immigrants and undocumented workers who help maintain Americas food supply during the pandemic. Workers talk about having to choose between their health and their jobs, as well as what they say is a lack of protection from their employers. Its on WGBH 2 on Tuesday at 10 p.m.

3. Exploitation? Explication? Revelation? Love on the Spectrum is a new reality show about the world of dating for young adults on the autism spectrum. It joins Born This Way, The Good Doctor, The A Word, Parenthood, Atypical, and Speechless in bringing special needs into the mainstream. Netflix will make the five hour-long episodes available on Wednesday.

4. Get ready for tears. The Dog House sets up dogs with humans to see if theyre compatible. Each episode shows the arrivals of pets at a rural British rescue organization, tells their stories of abandonment, and looks into the lives of the people who might adopt them. Cameras in the pen record the first meetings between the dogs and their prospective new owners. Its on HBO Max on Thursday.

5. Rage ritual, anyone? Nine strangers, each undergoing stress, attend a wellness retreat in Costa Rica in a new unscripted series called Lost Resort. They work with a team of alternative healers who push them to their limits, with rage rituals and vulnerability circles. Premiering on TBS at 10 p.m. on Thursday, the reality show is from the producers of The Real Housewives of New Jersey and will of course feature hookups and breakups along with all the healing.

CHANNEL SURFING

Fear City: New York vs. the Mafia A limited series about Mafia families in New York in the 1970s and 80s and the feds trying to take them down. Netflix, Wednesday

The Pale Tourist Jim Gaffigan delivers a new stand-up set. Amazon, Friday

Rogue Trip Bob Woodruff and his 27-year-old son, Mack, travel to overlooked destinations. Disney+, Friday

RECENT REVIEWS

I May Destroy You An intense, intricate series about sexual trauma. HBO

Father Soldier Son A complex documentary portrait of a wounded warrior and his young boys. Netflix

P-Valley A compelling drama series about the workers at a Mississippi Delta strip club. Starz

Little Voice A musical rom-com series featuring songs by Sara Bareilles. Apple TV+

Stateless A six-part drama about life in the dirty, bureaucratically impacted limbo of an Australian refugee camp, featuring Cate Blanchett. Netflix

Ill Be Gone in the Dark A docu-series about true-crime author Michelle McNamara and her search for the Golden State Killer. HBO

Perry Mason The legendary attorney, played by Matthew Rhys, gets a backstory in this series, to mixed effect. HBO

Love, Victor A sweet, somewhat simplistic coming-out series aimed at young adults. Hulu

Laurel Canyon A two-part docu-series about the vibrant L.A. music scene in the 60s and 70s. Epix

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.

See original here:

This weeks TV: Corporate humor, dating on the spectrum, and dogs seeking forever homes - The Boston Globe

Lauren Beukes's new speculative novel imagines a world stripped overnight of men. Do women do a better job of running things?

By Sally Adee

Getty Images

Afterland

Lauren Beukes

Michael Joseph (UK) and Mullholland Books (US)

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IF ALL the human cells in your body were to suddenly dematerialise, your outline would briefly persist, in all its exquisite detail, in the form of the billions of bacteria and viruses that colonise your every nook and cranny, still suspended in the shape of the frame your body provided.

Something analogous happens in Lauren Beukess novel Afterland, available in July worldwide and in September in the UK. Over about two years, a pandemic kills nearly every man in the world, leaving its patriarchal systems staffed exclusively by women. Cole, the mother of one of the precious few surviving boys, needs to get him out of the US and back to their home in South Africa. Her sister, meanwhile, wants to sell him. This gives the novel its structure and speed: it is a deceptively simple heist caper, with Cole on the run across the US from both her sister and the Department for the Protection of Males.

The organisation is charged with imprisoning the few males that remain, probing them to find whatever biological quirk has spared them from the plague and using that knowledge to find a vaccine for the virus. Its aim of jump-starting society back to normal will be uncomfortably familiar as we too languish in a pandemic limbo between the Before and the After, hoping for our own vaccine. The misguided waiting game in the novel results in a few temporary accommodations to reality: straight women negotiate awkward first dates with one another, while fake baby bumps become the hottest fashion accessory.

So who gets to maintain civilisation now, and do women run a better society than men? This is where the book shines as one of the best thought experiments of its kind, in which Beukes has stitched together the surprise matriarchy of The Power, the millenarian despair of Children of Men and the deeply intelligent questions of Ursula Le Guins The Left Hand of Darkness.

The Power in which women develop the ability to give electric shocks, ending their status as the weaker sex once and for all concludes that women are just as bad as men when in ultimate control.

Beukess take is more ambiguous. Like Le Guin, she seems to conclude that it doesnt much matter if it is women or men in charge of society, as it is the structures themselves that turn us into monsters. You have to be bigger and meaner as a woman to claim your turf, Coles sister tells herself, negotiating her nephews kidnapping on behalf of the widow of the kingpin she used to work for. The widow has slid into his place, just as easily as the thugs around her have shifted from being vicious beauty queens to vicious enforcers. The Sisters of Sorrow, the religious community in which Cole and her son take refuge, somehow figures out how to make Christianity even more violently misogynistic in a world without men.

There is no guarantee that the once-oppressed will wield power any more judiciously than their oppressors

Yet it isnt all nihilism. Beukes seeds the book with hopeful rumours of matriarchal societies that have sprung up in other countries. There are never many details beyond the promise, like mirages just over the horizon. They say the matriarchal societies have been a lot better about getting rid of the homosexuality laws, promises an email from a friend trying to help them escape across the Atlantic. It is a promise of a better body politic.

Afterland is that rare creature, a ripping tale that neither shies away from big questions nor interesting answers. What happens when the powerless get power? There is no guarantee that the previously oppressed will wield it any more judiciously than those who oppressed them. It isnt about the individuals. It is about the society they need to maintain.

More on these topics:

Original post:

Afterland review: A thought-provoking tale of life without men - New Scientist

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM: This picture shows the London offices of "The Economist" 16 February, 2005. ... [+] Figures due to be released on Thursday, while officially still secret, are widely expected to show that the London-based news magazine has exceeded the one million mark for weekly sales worldwide for the very first time. AFP PHOTO/ALESSANDRO ABBONIZIO (Photo credit should read ALESSANDRO ABBONIZIO/AFP via Getty Images)

Britains decision to ban Huawei actually, completely, perhaps irrevocably from the UKs 5G wireless networks seems to have caught some of the medias solid citizens by surprise. The Economist popped a monocle, and spun up a bright red cover story, subliminally hysterical, entitled Trade Without Trust

The Economist goes on to explain, adopting their once-upon-a-time style:

And after tendering the reader anarchy and collapse,the editors push on to their conclusion:

(This verges on economic nihilism. Unworthy of such a venerable journal, I would say. One wonders how much of Chinas nature we are obliged to go along with. Does that include hostage-taking as a negotiation technique (viz., the two Canadians being held by the Chinese state in solitary confinement since 2018, to trade for Huaweis CFO Meng Wanzhou)? Does it waiver the re-education camps in Xinjiang which Huawei may or may not be helping to technologize?)

But as to Huawei first, to recap: They are of course the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world. They are Beijings number 1 national champion. They are deeply invested in the narrative of Chinas Rise. Yes, they have been under siege by various branches of the U.S government but the American campaign was seen by many as mere sound and fury, to be resolved in the end as part of the Really Big Deal on trade between the economic superpowers.On what was this supposition based? Well, last year President Trump himself allowed that it was possible that Huawei would be included in a trade deal. And after all, wed seen this movie already once. Huaweis Chinese rival, ZTE, was accused, threatened, roughed up, dangled over the ledge, and then reprieved and restored to a (somewhat diminished) legitimacy. Yes, it is vexing that Huawei and Beijing havent drawn the obvious lesson. But still, it had seemed inconceivable that the U.S might actually go nuclear on Huawei. The company is too big, too important to China, and too well-established in the market to quash completely. The pressures being applied to our allies were interpreted as the usual pro forma American bluster. As recently as January, it seemed as though the Brits would essentially stand pat on Huawei.

The UK ban transformed a colorful tactical skirmish in the US/China trade spat into a tectonic event. Suddenly (as per The Economist) we are at the endgame. It was noticed that Canada and Singapore have decided in favor of Ericsson and Nokia (even though they have not formally banned Huawei). And the French government, while not endorsing a ban, has advised the operators there to steer clear of Huawei.Germany is wobbly. Merkel hesitates, but members of almost every German political party are pushing for a ban If there were a vote in parliament today, Huawei would lose. Telecom Italia also announced this month that it was excluding Huawei from its 5G tenders in Italy and Brazil. Not a good trend for Huawei.

The Chinese are threatening to retaliate, perhaps by banning or restricting European competitors Ericsson and Nokia. Thus, it seems to some that Huaweis take-down must portend a much larger shift in the global order, a New Cold War.

There is overreaction here (where perhaps there was under-reaction before). The Huawei episode is likely not an end but a beginning, a sign of what will become a long turnabout in world economic affairs.

It is not plausible that the global trade network can operate for long without trust. Finance certainly cant function without trust, and trade wont run without finance. The investment process, the capital markets, are based on trust.We can go all the way back to 1913, to J.P. Morgan himself, called to testify on his business practices before a skeptical Congress. Towards the end of a long interrogation, when he was asked by the chief counsel for the House Banking Committee Is not commercial credit primarily based on money or property? Morgan famously declared,

Morgan spoke of trust as personal matter, rooted in the character of ones counterparty. There were very few institutionalized forms of trust in his day. There were no financial reporting standards (no GAAP, no FASB), no true audited statements, no securities or banking regulators (no SEC, no FDIC).There was no central bank in the U.S. In fact Morgan was the Central Bank CPF .

We have spent the past century laboriously constructing the common framework to support trust in the financial system, systemic, structural trust, trust-worthy institutions, like the Dollar, the Federal Reserve, the stock exchange and all its plumbing, the system of financial regulation, modern accounting standards The commercial contracts that enable the global trade process today rest upon these foundations. This is the framework that gives an investor, or a business executive, the confidence that a transaction here (in New York, say) will be honored in London, or Hong Kong, or Shenzhen, and vice versa. Trust is the name of the game today as much as it was in Morgans time. We have built the whole system to uphold and strengthen it, and to make it more fungible. We have made trust which began as a handshake and an eye-to-eye connection into a commodity, which the world can trade in confidence. It underpins our prosperity.

The Economist will regain its composure. Beijing has some sorting out and reflecting to do. Over time, they will build the same framework of trust that the U.S. has assembled, and for the same reasons.

As for Huawei, their predicament as dire as it seems right now is in principle recoverable, as ZTEs was. Not without a price, and with some obvious adjustments. Their basic problem is in a word a loss of trust. They have been careless with that most intangible, but most valuable, of all corporate assets. Still, recovery is possible. Unlike in Morgans day, the world is well stocked with institutions and mechanisms to create and validate trust and confidence. Trust today can be acquired, almost like any other commodity. Huawei has really only to avail itself of these resources. In the companion piece to this column here I have proposed how this might work.

Continued here:

Is The UK Ban On Huawei The Endgame For Free Trade? - Forbes

Caddyshack, released 40 years ago this week, tells the story of the working-class caddies, slobs, wise-asses and nouveau riche who clash with the calcified swells of a country club. Its that rare over-quoted and over-watched movie demanding another look now.

1 Caddyshack was directed by Harold Ramis, who grew up in Rogers Park and died at home in Glencoe in 2014. He made his career Animal House, Ghostbusters, Stripes on movies about irreverent guys facing down an establishment. Caddyshack, his first directing job, was based on the stories from the Murray brothers of Wilmette Bill, Brian, et al. They caddied public courses in Evanston and at Indian Hill Club, a private course in Winnetka.

2 It wasnt made on the North Shore, because production was set for autumn 1979.

3 So, Caddyshack, though inspired by Illinois, was set in Nebraska and shot in Florida.

4 The concept for Caddyshack was sold as Animal House on a golf course Animal House being a still-fresh blockbuster co-written by Ramis and Doug Kenney.

5 Caddyshack may be signature Bill Murray, but older brother Brian Doyle-Murray was more involved. Bill spent a short time on the set. Brian provided the idea, co-wrote the screenplay (with Ramis and Kenney), then played the manager of the caddy shack. When the film was released, he had just become a featured player (and Weekend Update anchor) for Saturday Night Live.

6 Brian based Lou Loomis, his character, on Lou Janis, an Indian Hill caddy master. According to Cinderella Story, Bill Murrays 1999 golf memoir, Janis would bet on anything. In the movie, Loomis wagers that a member will pick his nose and eat it. (He wins.)

7 As early as the mid-70s, Bill Murray was performing variations of his character Carl Spackler his side-talking, imbalanced, philosophical groundskeeper as a cast member at Second City.

8 ABC News once asked the Dalai Lama if, as Spackler recounts, his holiness offered caddies a promise of total consciousness upon death, in lieu of a tip. Answer: The Dalai Lama does not golf. Fox News also later asked the Dalai Lama about Caddyshack. He had never heard of it.

9 After Ramis died, Barack and Michelle Obama issued a statement of appreciation, including the hope that Ramis, upon death, received total consciousness.

10 I had forgotten how loose-limbed Caddyshack becomes, to a point of anarchy. At least four styles of comedy clash, between Murray (absurdist), Rodney Dangerfield (nightclub one-liners), Chevy Chase (snark) and Ted Knight (sitcom rage).

11 I dont know if it was intentional but the pinkish sunburn on Knight is the exact color of the salmon that a stuffy institution like fictional Bushwood Country Club would serve regularly.

12 That infamous pool evacuation scene a Baby Ruth candy bar lands in the water and gets mistaken for something more scatalogical was inspired by an actual prank played while the Murray brothers attended Loyola Academy in Wilmette.

13 That scene, shot four years after the release of Jaws (and borrowing John Williams iconic score) is remarkably faithful to Steven Spielbergs staging. Ramis keeps the camera at the water line, waves swamp the lens, and the stampede out of the water is ugly, out of focus at times.

14 Baby Ruths do not float in water.

15 Early in the film, Brian Doyle-Murrays cranky caddy wrangler explains to his unruly charges that they need to buckle down and stop screwing around. The club would just as well replace them with cheap, less mouthy golf carts. Indian Hill still has live caddies.

16 I visited Indian Hill the other day. It reminded me of New England. The buildings, vaguely colonial, were tasteful, the club house less opulent than the neighborhood homes. The lobby was cute and fusty, like a drawing room no one uses. Caddies wore COVID masks, and the caddy shack from the Murrays days is still there white-painted brick, green trim, like a Nantucket coffee house.

17 Many characters were based on Indian Hill regulars. Several employees (as in the film) had Irish accents. Chases self-satisfied Ty was based on a member. As was the elderly couple who can barely swing their clubs according to Murrays book, he caddied for a very old member who had trouble hitting anything. Until his bosses caught on, he routinely marked the guy down for holes-in-one.

18 According to Jamie Pfaff of Winnetka, who was on the Indian Hill grounds crew 50 years ago, The film is an exaggeration, but it did have a slightly older and slightly out-of-it membership.

19 Despite several decades having passed, the Indian Hill management will not discuss Caddyshack at all.

20 However, the pro shop sells Bushwood Country Club and gopher-themed belts.

21 A member whispered to me: Not all our members appreciate Caddyshack.

22 Caddies in Caddyshack accept tips. Caddies at Indian Hill do not.

23 The clothing in Caddyshack sleeveless Ts, stiletto heels, Dangerfield wearing more plaids than a Logan Square hipster becomes a character in itself. At Indian Hill, however, according to its website, sports jackets must be worn during lunch, shirts should be tucked-in, cargo shorts are not permitted, nor are denim cutoffs around the pool area. Hats must be worn bill forward only.

24 Cindy Morgan, who played Knights sophisticated, promiscuous niece Lacey Underall, grew up in Chicago. Before acting, she was morning DJ at WSDM-FM (now WLUP, The Loop).

25 The only Black actor with a line was Jackie Davis, the actor who shines shoes at the club and, after overhearing Knights character tell a racist joke, destroys the members golf cleats. Davis wasnt really an actor. He was an accomplished jazz musician who made several solo albums and backed Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald.

26 The only non-white characters given any prominence are played more as props than people. Mr. Wang, Dangerfields clubhouse sidekick I think this place is restricted, Wang! So dont tell em youre Jewish! is identified in the credits as Dr. Dow. His full name was Tsung-I Dow. Before arriving in the United States after World War II (via a Merchant Marine ship delivering aid to Hiroshima), he was an officer in Chinas Nationalist Party. He became a history professor in Florida.

27 The chaotic family home in the films opening scenes lines of kids waiting outside the bathrooms, bawling children and slamming doors was inspired by the Murray family home in Wilmette, across from Mallinckrodt Park. A three-bedroom home with nine kids. Bill Murray once described the scene there as a wreck, a constant, claustrophobic mess.

28 Caddyshack, at first, looks like a lot of 70s films. Theres a disorderly middle-class home, a hero who crosses tracks to reach the rich part of town. (I detect robust notes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Breaking Away.) But once the film crosses tracks, the rest follows. The plot a promising caddy vying for a scholarship, resistant to authority, nervous his girlfriend may be pregnant is so thin you probably forgot there was a plot. The movie plays closer to a Marx Brothers comedy now much of the action unfolds in single shots, as if were watching a play, theres spontaneous dancing and less story than gags.

29 That scholarship plot was inspired by Ed Murray, the oldest Murray brother, who won the prestigious Evans Scholarship given to exceptional caddies. It gave him a full ride to Northwestern University. (Evans Scholarships, which are still awarded, are now 90 years old and overseen by the Western Golf Association of Glenview.)

30 Actor Michael OKeefe, who played Danny, that mildly rebellious scholarship candidate, was later an Oscar nominee for The Great Santini and married to Bonnie Raitt for eight years.

31 Other than Bill Murrays performance, you probably remember the gopher, wreaking havoc across the course. Its unclear if this is related, but according to a 2018 newsletter from the Winnetka Historical Society, during the late 60s, a muskrat took up residence near the 16th hole at Indian Hill. One night, a frustrated groundkeeper, a military vet, waited until the animal revealed itself, then flipped on the headlights of his ATV and fired a shotgun at the wild beast. (He missed.)

32 Insane as it sounds, though Kenny Loggins Im Alright became the soundtracks ubiquitous smash, Ramis wanted Pink Floyd initially to do the music. (They were busy.)

33 Pink Floyd would have been all wrong. Caddyshack, like Star Wars a couple of years before it, is actually very old fashioned stuff, with a wink of irony pointing towards a less earnest future.

34 Caddyshack (along with Animal House and Stripes and others like it) celebrates the underdog, but the culture of the 1980s that followed those films was enamored paradoxically with privilege. You can see it happening in the film, which at first is about working-class kids with summer jobs but gradually tells the story of the feckless captains of industry whom they serve.

35 Last year, in his book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America, James Poniewozik, TV critic for The New York Times, makes a compelling case that Trump essentially campaigned for president as a variation of Dangerfields character as a crass and insult-spewing real-estate mogul who upsets the establishment, whose wealth doesnt give him membership in high society, just the independence not to care to about its rules.

36 The only time I met Ramis was backstage before an event at Columbia College. A film student told him that Caddyshack was his favorite movie of all time. Ramis smiled sincerely and laughed: Thank you, but I hope you make better movies than that one.

37 Doug Kenney, the co-screenwriter and producer, died a month after Caddyshack was released. He was found at the bottom of a ravine in Hawaii. As Chris Nashawaty recounts in his 2018 history, Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, Kenney was such a troubled, drug-addled writer some friends assumed he killed himself, while others said he slipped.

38 Of the many Caddyshack tributes, my favorite is a 2004 American Express ad with Tiger Woods as the groundkeeper. It was made by Chicago advertising guy Jim Larmon, who said Woods was such a Caddyshack fan, he resisted saying any line that Murray didnt say in the film. Warner Bros. even gave them a gopher, Larmon said. They claimed it was an original. It wasnt.

39 At the back of the Crowne Plaza in Rosemont, surrounded by a drab parking lot, there is another homage: The Murray Bros. Caddyshack, one of two Caddyshack theme restaurants owned by the brothers. (The other is outside Jacksonville.) Eat, Drink and Be Murray reads the sign. Inside, a sports bar, outfitted with Bill Murray film posters, Murray family holiday photos and even a Murray Andy is the chef, floating between Florida and Rosemont. Stuffed gophers sit on every other table to encourage social distancing. Booths are tartan. The deep fried golf balls (mashed potatoes, bacon, horseradish) is the clubhouse munchy you imagine Indian Hill would prohibit. Its all modestly charming, and yes, Bill drops by a few times a year, Im told. Though to be honest, that family is so big, a waiter said, its like one of them is here every day.

40 Before Caddyshack was released 40 years ago, Ramis said that, though the movie was contemporary, its 70s nihilism and casual golf club already made it a period piece. He wished they set in the 60s, like Animal House. The movie should have said at the beginning Chicago 1963, because Caddyshack really is about things that dont even exist anymore.

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Forty thoughts on 'Caddyshack's' 40th anniversary | Features - yoursun.com

The Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) never wrote anything long, yet he was one of the most prolific writers who composed thousands of pages that covered many subjects and genres.

When Orson Welles first feature-length and studio produced film came out, Borges wrote a typically short review of it. Citizen Kane (1941) made an indelible mark on the American consciousness and has elicited both praise and criticism. Borges review of Citizen Kane is anything but typical. Hes not a critic or a film reviewer that we understand by todays standards. In almost everything Borges has written, there are traces of philosophy, particularly metaphysics. Commenting on Welles film, we experience the great sensation of Borges continuous philosophical and theological endeavor.

Borges called Citizen Kane an overwhelming film, but we have to be careful not to assume that Borges means this negatively. An overwhelming feeling might signal a moment of revelation and unraveling of our interior being.

Although he considered some parts of the film pointlessly banal, namely the simplistic plot that involves Charles Foster Kanes appetite for possessing everything and everyone, Borges finds metaphysical depth in it. Its the second plot, as Borges puts it, that reveals something incredibly superior and superb about the film and Welles himself. He writes that Citizen Kane links Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. A kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a mans inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined.

This is an intriguing and unusual description of Welles cinematic endeavor, yet completely true and authentic. Borges is referring to Koheleth, one of the books of the Hebrew Bible, also known as Ecclesiastes. Its a depressing book. The author or authors are unknown, and the book doesnt offer any practical advice on life. Rather, the author reflects on the futility of life. As the Biblical scholar, Robert Alter, points out, the author invites us to contemplate the cyclical nature of reality and of human experience, the fleeting duration of all that we cherish, the brevity of life, and the inexorability of death, which levels all things.

The very first verses of this Hebrew book immediately alerts us to what will follow:

Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.

What gain is there for man in all his toil that he toils under the sun.

A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever.

That which was is that which will be, and that which was done is that which will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Borges may not have been a theologian by profession but his writing is imbued by mans search for God and meaning. Welles was certainly not a theologian either but his films are infused with philosophical reflections on our quest for meaning and happiness. This is a theme that continues to develop in Welles oeuvre and Borges is correct to describe Citizen Kane in such a way. After all, what is Charles Foster Kane running toward or away from? Does he not understand that no matter how large and opulent Xanadu may have become, he will face the inevitability of death?

Theres a second component to this characterization that Borges offers, linking Kafka to Welles (in 1962, Welles filmed a loose adaptation of Kafkas novel, The Trial). This is a curious description but once again, not so far-fetched. The futility and a constant rush to become the man he doesnt want to be, Kane is the embodiment of Kafkas world. He enters the realm of absurdity time and time again, proving that his actions, no matter how large, shocking, and other-worldly are empty attempts at control, that life is nothing but an illusion, and that we will rest uneasy in that illusion if we keep avoiding gazing at our face in the mirror.

Borges calls Citizen Kane a metaphysical detective story, and he s correct to make such an assertion. Welles begins the film with Kanes death, and because of this it would appear that we are moving backwards in time only. But this is an illusion. Welles also presents the film in continuous fragments, broken up by Kanes own impending personal doom and brokenness. We struggle to reconstruct these parts of Kane because we want to solve the mystery of his public and private self, yet were also driven by an intense dislike of this man whos overly ambitious (a seemingly good quality) but unwilling to search for his own interiority.

Does the mystery ever get solved? On the surface, (something, which Borges recognizes and acknowledges), the mystery of Kane lies in that first and final word, Rosebud. Certainly, it relates to the forgotten depths of a child thats no longer there. The man and the child shall never meet, even though the yearning for such a chance encounter never ceases.

On a deeper level, this reconstruction of Kanes character is a thankless task. Its futile (as Qohelet tells us) precisely because of the fragmentary absurdity and nihilism (as Kafka tells us) of Kanes existence. Borges points out that there are forms of multiplicity and that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. Theres no difference between Kanes personhood and persona because he never allows himself to be vulnerable to himself or others. Welles shows this superbly in every frame: the larger the persona of Kane is, the smaller his interiority becomes. As the metaphysical masks duplicate, Kanes face is entirely disappearing. Looking in the mirror brings only anguish and self-hatred. As Borges writes, The hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.

Its hardly surprising that Borges saw these elements in Citizen Kane with such clarity of a writer and a philosopher. Throughout most of his fiction, hes obsessed with mirrors and labyrinths. They represent the ever-present tension inherent in every human being that rarely gets resolved. In his story, The Draped Mirrors, he writes:

As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality. Their infallible and continuous functioning, their pursuit of myactions, their cosmic pantomime, were uncanny then, whenever it began to grow dark. One of my persistent prayers to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream about mirrors. I know I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared that they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities.

Welles was not explicitly a philosophical filmmaker. Nevertheless, the themes in his films always deal with moral and ethical problems, as well as reality and illusion, and certainly with labyrinthine mirrors, the clearest examples are Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Ever the magician, Welles presents both appearances and reality with an artists certainty, yet our certainty of whats real and whats fake diminishes in our minds. Continuously, and at times, unbearably, Welles thrusts the mirror in front of our faces in order to confront the labyrinths of our own minds.

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The Futility of the Masked Life - Splice Today

The bottom line is, life is sacred to the person who has it. Therefore no one has a right to take it away without that persons consent with a fecklessly insouciant action.

by Ruwantissa Abeyratne

writing from Montreal

Human progress isn't measured by industry; it's measured by the value you put on a life.

Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine

Once upon a time, a wise young man - Seth Adam Smith said every life has immense value. Another valuable saying is by Thich Nhat Hanh: Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be.

With these profound and incontrovertible truths have I pondered over life in these pandemic times. As a result, I have made a futile attempt at trying to mesh these sage truisms with the fact that as of 23 July 2020, according to global figures, 623,897 had died from the Covid-19 virus. Polemically, one could argue that the fundamental platitude that, if one is born, one has to die one day, is rendered destitute of meaning on the ground that these deaths have been caused by exogenous causes where, if not for the devastating and deadly effect of the virus, all of the aforesaid deceased could still be alive. They are gone forever, for no fault of their own: they who wanted to live. Life was just stolen from them.

Many of those now dead (if not all would have had the zest to dance; to party with their friends; to study and join learned professions and lead exemplary lives. Others would have looked forward to their childrens graduation, their grandchildren. Whatever it might have been, it follows that all these people who lost their lives lost the most precious thing they had their life. Or did they?

The first stop in the conundrum is the fusion between religion and philosophy. The Holy Quran says: whoever kills a person not in retaliation for a person killed, nor (as a punishment) for spreading disorder on the earth, is as if he has killed the whole of humankind, and whoever saves the life of a person is as if he has saved the life of the whole of humankind (5:32). On this basis, the learned Mawln Muhammad Saleem Dhorat says: As Muslims, we value human life irrespective of geography, race and gender . We do not distinguish between the poor and the wealthy, women from men, the less able from the able bodied, as a life is a life, hence sacred and precious. Therefore, a loss of life in any corner of the world is a cause of grief and sorrow for every true Muslim.

In the Gospel of St. Mathew (10.31) Jesus says: Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. Along similar lines The Buddha said several centuries before Christ Life is very precious. Those who want to destroy it should know that once it is destroyed, it is gone forever. Turning to theoretical philosophy, one is struck by what Plato said: Life is a gift: wake up, everyday, and realize that.

On the other side of the coin were those who espoused nihilism or a nuanced concept of nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche (1854-1900) arguably the most admired and followed philosopher of the 19th century said: To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. In his Twilight of the Idols he goes on to say: Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) argued that it is death that makes life possible. In a bizarre ontological sense, this has some legal legitimacy. With all this philosophical theorization and moral relativism, the law remains clear and unequivocal. The 623,897 who died had their lives taken from them. The legal definition of theft is that when a thing that one possesses is taken away from them without their consent such an act constitutes theft. This brings to bear the issue of whether life is a thing and a tangible possession of the person who enjoys life. This can be answered deductively when we refer to a person dying as having lost his life. Of course, one has to commit the theft and in the Covid-19 context the culprit if there is one, has not been identified yet. However, this does not detract from the fact that absence of the miscreant or identity does not presuppose the fact that there has been no theft.

The bottom line is, life is sacred to the person who has it. Therefore no one has a right to take it away without that persons consent with a fecklessly insouciant action. This boils down to the fundamental question as to whether a person (or persons) was responsible for introducing the virus to the world. The multifarious conspiracy theories that abound aside, one cannot deny that life is sacred. I would conclude with fictional wisdom. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his monumental work The Brothers Karamazov cites the instance where one brother (Ivan) asks the other (Alyosha) whether the latter would, if it were in his power, build an edifice of human destiny that brings happiness to all mankind, but for that he must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, a child and build the edifice upon the unrequited tears of that child. Alyosha vehemently says he will not agree to such a condition. The right to life is sacrosanct and those 623,897 people were unjustly denied that basic human right.

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The Covid-19 Pandemic and The Theft of Life - Sri Lanka Guardian

Numerous criticisms of medical science have been articulated in recent years. Some critics argue that spurious disease categories are being invented, and existing disease categories expanded, for the aim of profit. Others say that the benefits of most new drugs are minimal and typically exaggerated by clinical research, and that the harms of these drugs are extensive and typically underestimated by clinical research.

Still others point to problems with the research methods themselves, arguing that those once seen as gold standards in clinical research randomised trials and meta-analyses are in fact malleable and have been bent to serve the interests of industry rather than patients. Here is how the chief editor of The Lancet medical journal summarised these criticisms in 2015:

Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.

These problems arise because of a few structural features of medicine. A prominent one is the profit incentive. The pharmaceutical industry is extremely profitable, and the fantastic financial gains to be made from selling drugs create incentives to engage in some of the practices above. Another prominent feature of medicine is the hope and the expectation of patients that medicine can help them, coupled with the training of physicians to actively intervene, by screening, prescribing, referring or cutting.

Another feature is the wildly complex causal basis of many diseases, which hampers the effectiveness of interventions on those diseases taking antibiotics for a simple bacterial infection is one thing, but taking antidepressants for depression is entirely different. In my book Medical Nihilism (2018), I brought all these arguments together to conclude that the present state of medicine is indeed in disrepair.

How should medicine face these problems? I coined the term gentle medicine to describe a number of changes that medicine could enact, with the hope that they would go some way to mitigating those problems. Some aspects of gentle medicine could involve small modifications to routine practice and present policy, while others could be more revisionary.

Lets start with clinical practice. Physicians could be less interventionist than they currently are. Of course, many physicians and surgeons are already conservative in their therapeutic approach, and my suggestion is that such therapeutic conservatism ought to be more widespread. Similarly, the hopes and expectations of patients should be carefully managed, just as the Canadian physician William Osler (1849-1919) counselled: One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine. Treatment should, generally, be less aggressive, and more gentle, when feasible.

Another aspect of gentle medicine is how the medical research agenda is determined. Most research resources in medicine belong to industry, and its profit motive contributes to that obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance. It would be great if we had more experimental antibiotics in the research pipeline, and it would be good to have high-quality evidence about the effectiveness of various lifestyle factors in modulating depression (for example). Similarly, it would be good to have a malaria vaccine and treatments for what are sometimes called neglected tropical diseases, the disease burden of which is massive.

The current coronavirus pandemic has displayed how little we know about some very basic but immensely important questions, such as the transmission dynamics of viruses, the influence of masks on mitigating disease transmission, and the kinds of social policies that can effectively flatten epidemic curves. But there is little industry profit to be made pursuing these research programmes. Instead, great profit can be made by developing me-too drugs a new token of a class of drugs for which there already exist multiple tokens. A new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) could generate great profit for a company, though it would bring little benefit for patients, given that there are already many SSRIs on the market (and, in any case, their demonstrated effect sizes are extremely modest, as I argued in a recent Aeon essay).

Also read: Can We Push Pharma Innovation Without Giving Away Pricey Patents?

A policy-level change, for which some now argue, is to reduce or eliminate the intellectual property protection of medical interventions. This would have several consequences. It would, obviously, mitigate the financial incentives that appear to be corrupting medical science. It would probably also mean that new drugs would be cheaper. Certainly, the antics of people such as Martin Shkreli would be impossible. Would it also mean that there would be less innovative medical research and development?

This is a tired argument often raised to defend intellectual property laws. However, it has serious problems. The history of science shows that major scientific revolutions typically occur without such incentives think of Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Breakthroughs in medicine are no different. The most important breakthroughs in medical interventions antibiotics, insulin, the polio vaccine were developed in social and financial contexts that were completely unlike the context of pharmaceutical profit today. Those breakthroughs were indeed radically effective, unlike most of the blockbusters today.

Another policy-level change would be to take the testing of new pharmaceuticals out of the hands of those who stand to profit from their sale. A number of commentators have argued that there should be independence between the organisation that tests a new medical intervention and the organisation that manufactures and sells that intervention. This could contribute to raising the evidential standards to which we hold medical interventions, so that we can better learn their true benefits and harms.

Returning to the issue of the research agenda, we also need to have more rigorous evidence about gentle medicine itself. We have a mountain of evidence about the benefits and harms of initiating therapy this is the point of the vast majority of randomised trials today. However, we have barely any rigorous evidence about the effects of terminating therapy. Since part of gentle medicine is a call to be more therapeutically conservative, we ought to have more evidence about the effects of drug discontinuation.

For example, in 2010 researchers in Israel applied a drug discontinuation programme to a group of elderly patients taking an average of 7.7 medications. By strictly following treatment protocols, the researchers withdrew an average of 4.4 medications per patient. Of these, only six drugs (2 per cent) were re-administered due to symptom recurrence. No harms were observed during the drug discontinuations, and 88 per cent of the patients reported feeling healthier. We need much more evidence like this, and of higher quality (randomised, blinded).

Gentle medicine doesnt mean easy medicine. We might learn that regular exercise and healthy diets are more effective than many pharmaceuticals for a wide range of diseases, but regular exercise and healthy eating are not easy. Perhaps the most important health-preserving intervention during the present coronavirus pandemic is social distancing, which is completely non-medical (insofar as it doesnt involve medical professionals or medical treatments), though social distancing requires significant personal and social costs.

In short, as a response to the many problems in medicine today, gentle medicine suggests changes to clinical practice, the medical research agenda, and policies pertaining to regulation and intellectual property.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under a Creative Commons license.

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What Is Gentle Medicine? - The Wire

Passion of Christ. (Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0).)

COMMENTARY: The noise of mob rule can leave no one at peace a peace which is only found, ultimately, in union with Christ.

The present civil unrest in American U.S. society is the culmination of a long descent from the Judeo-Christian ethic a descent which began in earnest with the onslaught of World War I. Europe committed spiritual suicide in a war which led to casualties on a massive level and ended in an equally devastating pandemic of influenza (which historians note, was spurred on, in part, by the close-quartering and mass-movement of troops throughout the U.S. and Europe during and after the war).

World War I was the fruit of nihilism the denial of objective truth already begun in the 19th century. I have used the word nihilism for this denial because when nothing is absolutely true then there is no certain path in either reason or faith. Pope emeritus Benedict XVI referred to this as the dictatorship of relativism. Anarchy is its political equivalent.

The denial of objectivity was characterized by two things a century ago which have gained more ascendancy with the passage of time: the discovery of relativity in science which indirectly led to a relativity regarding all truth and especially moral truth. (As Catholic historian Paul Johnson notes, Einstein himself protested against making this leap from objective science to the moral realm.) ````Nonetheless, however unfairly, Einsteins scientific discovery was coupled with Sigmund Freuds psychological discoveries, which together with the rising popularity of Marxism and Darwinism, brought the whole issue of personal responsibility into question. Indeed, the philosophical relativism of the 19th century embodied by Marxism and Darwinism, affirmed that all universal truths were either a result of the projection of human need or human emotion or some invisible and inhuman force but not objective thought grounded in sense experience and in the fact that a transcendent God does exist and does take an interest in human affairs.

Relative to Catholicism

Naturally, then, this denial of objective truth, when applied to Catholicism, has had very destructive results. Reflecting on this, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave a talk published as Difficulties confronting the faith in Europe Today (May 2, 1989) when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in which he recounted that there were three basic areas of difficulty in Catholic doctrine today caused by this relativism of truth.

The first regards the complete disappearance of the doctrine of creation from theology. The demise of metaphysics goes hand in hand with the displacement of the teaching on creation. Their place has been taken by a philosophy of evolution (which I would like to distinguish from the scientific hypothesis of evolution). This philosophy intends to discard the laws of nature so that the management of its development may make a better life possible. Nature, which ought really to be the teacher along this path, is instead a blind mistress, combining by unwitting chance what man is supposed to simulate now with full consciousness (Difficulties). The results of this denial blur the distinction between God and the world so that the world becomes God.

The second area is a new idea of Christ. If one denies a transcendent deity and yet claims to be a Christian what does one do with Christ? He says there are two models, both equally disturbing. One sees Jesus as just a good middle class male who preaches a simple doctrine of love and pacifism, and never challenges anyone to anything. The other is the failed revolutionary. Now in both these versions there runs a common thread, namely, that we must be saved not through the Cross, but from the Cross. Atonement and forgiveness are misunderstandings from which Christianity has to be freed (Difficulties).

The third unfortunate consequence is the denial of the afterlife. If there is no transcendent God and Jesus need not have suffered the cross to redeem us then the afterlife described in Scripture is one we create here ourselves by better social structures. This is the better world of Utopia. Where the Kingdom of God is reduced to the better world of tomorrow, the present will ultimately assert its rights against some imaginary future. The escape into the world of drugs is the logical consequence of the idolizing of Utopia. Since this has difficulty in arriving, man draws it to himself or throws himself headlong into it (Difficulties). Young people have been imbued with this escape from reality because there is nothing certain they can hold on to as truth.

Toss Out the Cross?

The results of the new Christology, which presents a Christ without a Cross is to humanize Jesus so much he ceases to be divine. The Cross and all his suffering during the passion become a regrettable incident he could have avoided. The Cross is called absurdity itself, not in the sense of St. Paul who contrasts its higher wisdom with Greek philosophy, but in the sense that it is senseless. Jesus did not choose the Cross but only suffered the humiliation of Golgotha because the politics of the time were not ready for his revolution. As a result, he threw himself into the blackness of the unknown as what might be supposed an irrational act of faith which itself is anti-intellectual. He hopes against hope that God will make sense of this meaninglessness and his cry, My God, my God why have you forsaken me? expresses the fact that he really has no idea why he is there.

This interpretation of Jesuss passion and death culminating in an ultimate cry to his father is completely contrary to Catholic teaching on the subject. Jesus did not have faith because he did not need faith. He is the only person in Scripture to whom faith is not attributed. Traditional Catholic theology, even expressed in the teaching John Paul II, affirms that Jesus has the vision of God in heaven in his human mind from the moment of his conception. He does not merit heaven for himself but only for us. He is always in command even in his passion. No one takes my life from me, I have power to lay it down and take it up again. (John. 10:18)

Though Jesus feels abandoned on the Cross does he think this to be the case in what we call his higher intelligence? How could he be deserted by God by himself? He cannot cease being the second Person of the Trinity, nor God made man, nor a sinner, nor lose the Beatific Vision once he has it. He is only abandoned externally to the will of his enemies and though he feels this deeply (the Passion was a matter of horrific suffering) he knows he is not. Catholicism has always expressed this as: God withdrew his protection but preserved the union. The cry from the Cross is the first verse of Psalm 22 and if one reads the psalm through, the innocent psalmist is suffering terribly, but his concluding verses are very far from a cry of despair. All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord! proclaims David near the end of the poem.

Nowhere Peace but in Christ

For those who do not believe in the afterlife or the Beatific Vision, their attempts to create Utopia lead to a dead end. Pope Benedict thought it was to explain their despair of saving themselves that modern culture has taken refuge in drugs. More recently, and at an alarmingly increasing rate, secular society has indulged in a new sort of drug: Rage. Rage which destroys the other as other (thus, racism, abortion, etc.) is a convenient scapegoat for the inability the impossibility to save oneself. Stupid rage which destroys property and society is like a drug and like a drug it must be controlled. As with the other deadly sins pride, greed, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth-- if one must ascetically challenge and control sex, one must control anger with an aesthetic discipline grounded in the cardinal virtues. To strive for such virtues, however, requires a return to objective truth which culminates, theologically speaking, in the Cross and resurrection.

If faith is true, then reason can enter the soul again. Satan loves noise because it rejects and corrupts the ability to think. The noise of mob rule can leave no one at peace, and even if protests at injustice are accompanied by the best motives, the noise in a soul inhibits the objectivity necessary to carry out such protests with peace of mind and peace of soul a peace which is only found, ultimately, in union with Christ.

Dominican Father Brian Mulladys latest book is Captivated by the Master: A Theological Consideration of Jesus Christ (EWTN).

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Nihilism and the Passion of Our Lord - National Catholic Register

These days, nihilism isnt a choiceits a corner that weve boxed ourselves into in a feeble attempt to preserve some semblance of peace of mind. By 2020, Protomartyr had already spent more than a dozen years making malaise seem ineffably cool, with vocalist Joe Casey serving up tongue-lashings over gummy bass lines and bristling riffs. On the bands new fifth album, Ultimate Success Today, Casey confronts the decline of his own health alongside the decay of our planet due to human recklessness. In a bit of gallows humor in the press release for the album, he says he treated it like it might be the bands final act: I made sure get my last words in while I still had the breath to say them. Caseys farewell letter reads like a laundry list of quagmires and calamitiesrabid dogs and disease gnash through the anti-police dirge Processed by the Boys, while they must ward off black bile to make way for golden light in the acid-punk-tinged Tranquilizer. Ultimate Success Today could have easily buckled beneath the weight of Protomartyrs dissatisfaction, but the Detroit four-piece enlisted a seasoned crew of guests to help shoulder the load, including improvising saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, vocalist Nandi Rose (aka Half Waif), and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. Thankfully the extra hands dont distract the band from their postpunk whims: Casey still incants like a whiskey-sloshed soothsayer, and the two-man rhythm section still hot trots and syncopates with abandon. Had Ultimate Success Today been released in a year untouched by pandemic, rebellion, and locusts, it wouldve landed somewhere between cautionary tale and philosophical inquiry. Today it arrives like a wretched proof of life. v

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Protomartyr dive into the murk of modernity with Ultimate Success Today - Chicago Reader

Amid the pandemic lockdown, streaming platforms have become the storehouse of zombie thrillers. Not all that long ago, Netflix Brazil presented to us their own remake of Charlie Brooker's 'Deadset' titled 'Reality Z' and now joining the slate of the genre is Netflix Brazil's second original, 'Kissing Game' aka 'Boca-a-Boca'. It sounds lie your regular teen drama, a name raunchy enough to flock bored teens to the streaming platform for an easy Friday binge. But while the satirical coldness of 'Reality Z' isn't prevalent in the Esmir Filho thriller, there's an in general nihilism and rebellion sprinkled throughout the six-part miniseries, that burns slow enough to keep one on the edge about what exactly the source of this virus, and who the real villain is.

A sheer mirror of the social issues plaguing a ranch-dependent rural town, 'Kissing Game' puts under the microscope more than just the dangerous virus that starts attacking teenagers after a night of drugs and raving gone wrong. It tackles social media and the adult society's response to a crisis that the world is now all too familiar with, through a story that even though not exactly worth a must-watch recommendation, does deserve its due nod for being so strangely unique.

The story kicks off with the free-spirited Bel dragging her relatively introverted best friend Fran (Iza Moreira) to a local rave in the village on the outskirts of their town. Soon after, Bel is traumatized by a growing numbness in her body and a dark bruise around her mouth. She gets admitted to the local hospital but nobody can figure out just what is afflicting her. Bel's situation worsens as she turns into what can be labeled as this show's version of zombies, who somewhat glow in the dark. At least their eyes and veins do. It is soon revealed that the disease was contracted from the rave and everybody is at risk. Why? Because of the titular game of course; Bel kissed a stranger at the party and thus arose what they keep calling a 'kissing orgy'. Everybody kissed everybody and it's a lot of making out under neon lights and against slow-mo transcendental music. Sadly, as aesthetic as the scenes were probably meant to be this whole lot of kissing becomes hard to overlook.

But once you're able to overlook it, Filho and his cast of what looks like seasoned actors create a fluid web of secrets and mysteries, as they indulge in seeking answers to questions their parents want to stay blind to. Social media works its charm at exposing all the nitty-gritty of the disease and how one of their own contracted it. Soon it becomes a story of outcasts and rebellion as teenagers do what they do best and both overexaggerate and demonize people who don't pander to their silly mockery of the disease. There's also an ongoing mystery about the school principal's daughter that is revealed only at the end of the penultimate episode and surprisingly enough - there's a cure - or an antidote to living with this virus, because get this - it targets teenagers the worse because they are most prone to suppressing their feelings.

As the story progresses, people flock to natural cures and apothecaries in the wild as a unique amalgamation of the village life and the city coming together to find a cure to the spreading epidemic - perhaps a commentary on how instead of outcasting, compassion and support should be the tone in today's times. Filho also notices the power and privileged enjoyed by the rich as they continue to exploit the not-so-privileged in the name of family and economy whenever it is convenient for them. The rebellion comes from the teenagers who just want to have fun, smoking up and getting laid - something their very religious society vehemently condemns, especially if they are gay. Bullying and hate crimes shine through as well, binding together all the contributing factors that strive to divide the society at a time when they all must come together, and go back to their roots to find peace and help. And somehow all of this blends together to make for a thought-provoking, if not compelling watch.

In its own way, 'Kissing Game' is reminiscent of the 2014 horror, 'It Follows', where people were being targetted for having sex. The Brazilian thriller is also a funny reminder for breaking social distancing norms and works best for people who 'don't enjoy drinking other people's saliva', as character Alex Nero (Caio Horowicz) puts it. Yet it is the narrative being that from a teen's point of view that strikes the most. Fran, a possibly closeted lesbian battling her own reserved trauma of watching her twin die at the age of nine, is both mature and vulnerable at the same time. As her mother reflects while looking over an unconscious Fran lying in isolation at the hospital, "I knew this one would cry only when she had to." It is these touching moments, the desperation of family's doing their utmost to save their children, and the consideration for teens raising an alarm that strikes a chord. More than god complex, these kids are driven by the knowledge of apathy their parents are known to possess. So it's no wonder they take matters in their own hands, trying to find a cure for the plaguing virus.

'Kissing Game' is now available for streaming on Netflix.

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'Kissing Game' Review: Drugs, nihilism and a mysterious virus make this Netflix thriller stand out - MEAWW

by Sarah Jaquette Ray|July22,2020

According to polls, Generation Zpeople born between the mid-1990s and early 2010sshare some startling characteristics. Surveys show that they are more lonely, depressed, and suicidal than any previous generation. They are more likely than earlier generations to be economically poorer than their parents, and they are the first generation expected to live shorter lives than their parents. As the most ethnically diverse generation of Americans, they care deeply about racial justice and are leading the George Floyd protests. They also led the largest climate strikes in 2019. Indeed, this generation seems to combine their efforts for both racial and climate justice for the first time in history.

But my experience of this generation, as a college professor of environmental studies, centers on another salient quality: Young people arent just motivated by climate change, they are downright traumatized by it. They are freaked out about the future of our planet, with a sense of urgency most of the rest of us havent been able to muster. This has profound political implications: Young people like my students are committed to making our world a better place. Its my job, Ive begun to think, to make sure that people in this climate generation dont get swallowed up in an ocean of despair along the way.

The Gen Z students I am teaching now are different from those Ive taught for 12 years. The students who used to choose environmental studies as a major, even as recently as five years ago, were often white outdoorsy types, idealistic, and eager to righteously educate the masses about how to recycle better, ride bikes more, eat locally, and reduce the impact of their lifestyles on the planet. They wanted to get away from the messiness of society and saw humanity as destroying nature.

By contrast, my Generation Z students care a lot more about humans. They flock to environmental studies out of a desire to reconcile humanitys relationship with nature, an awareness that humanity and nature are deeply interconnected, and a genuine love for both. They are increasingly first-generation, non-white, and motivated to solve their communities problems by addressing the unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits to people of color. They work with the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous sovereignty groups fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and organizations that dismantle barriers to green space, such as Latino Outdoors. Unlike my students from earlier days of teaching, this generation isnt choosing environmental studies to escape humanity; on the contrary, they get that the key to saving the environment is humanity.

Its a vision of wholeness and hopebut it comes with a dark side. Digging into environmental studies introduces young people to the myriad ways that our interconnectedness in the world leads to all kinds of problems. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports predict that climate change and habitat destruction will increase the spread of infectious disease; climate also exacerbates health disparities between white and African American people in the U.S., including Black womens pregnancy risks. Studying these sources makes it clear that the devastations of climate change will be borne unequally.

We cannot afford for the next generation of climate justice leaders dread to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their psychological resources of resilience, imagination, efficacy, and, against all odds, their fierce capacity for joy, are just as necessary for the future of a viable planet as natural resources like clean air and water.

Some of my students become so overwhelmed with despair and grief about it all that they shut down. Youth have historically been the least likely to vote; but Ive also seen many stop coming to lectures and seminars. They send depressed, despairing emails. They lose their bearings, question their relationships and education, and get so overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness that they barely pass their classes. One of my students became so self-loathing that she came to think the only way to serve the planet was to stop consuming entirely: reducing her environmental impact meant starving herself. Most young people I know have already decided not to have children, because they dont want their kids growing up on a doomed planet. They barely want to be alive themselves. They often seem on the brink of nihilism before we even cover the syllabus.

The young people I am teaching say they will bear the worst consequences of processes they did not initiate, and over which they have little or no control. They speak of an apocalypse on the horizon. My students say they do not expect to enjoy the experiences older adults take for grantedhaving children, planning a career, retiring. For many youth, climate disruption isnt a hypothetical future possibility; it is already here. They read the long predicted increases in extreme weather events, wildfires, sea level rise, habitat destruction, worsening health outcomes related to pollution, and infectious disease as clear signs that their worst fears will be realized not just in their lifetime, but right now.

This sense of doom is more widely felt, beyond college classrooms. Psychologists and environmental scholars are coming up with a whole new vocabulary to describe these feelings of despair, including solastalgia, climate anxiety, eco-grief, pre-traumatic stress, and psychoterratic illness.

Whatever one calls it, all of this uncertainty can immobilize young people when they feel they can do nothing to fix it. Their sense of powerlessness, whether real or imagined, is at the root of their despair. I have found that many young people have limited notions of how power works. My students associate power with really bad things, like fascism, authoritarianism, or force; or slightly less bad things like celebrity, political power, or wealth. They have little imagination about how to engage in social change, and even less imagination about the alternative world they would build if they could.

Without a sense of efficacythe feeling of having control over the conditions of their livesI fear some may give up on the difficult process of making change without even trying. Psychologists call this misleading feeling of helplessness the pseudoinefficacy effect, and it has a political dimension that may keep individuals from working to help others. This feeling may also sync up with Americans recent cultural and economic history of seeing ourselves as consumers. Some scholars have argued that limiting our ability to imagine ourselves as having agency beyond being consumers has resulted in the privatization of the imagination. The combination of the feeling of misplaced despair and the feeling that they can only make changes through lifestyle choices creates a sort of ideological box that blocks real democratic political change.

Meanwhile, there is very little in the mass media to suggest that young people have real power over changes in the climate at largeor even our political system. The 24/7 news cycle thrives when it portrays a world on fire. And mainstream media offers few stories about solutions or models for alternative, regenerative economies. The stories that are covered often only tackle technological or market solutions that have yet to be invented or produced. By portraying climate change as a problem that is too big to fix, and suggesting that the contributions of any single individual are too small to make a difference, these messages leave young people with little sense of what can be done. Amid the clamor of apocalyptic coverage, few are talking about what it would take to thrive in, instead of fear, a climate-changed future.

We cannot afford for the next generation of climate justice leaders dread to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their psychological resources of resilience, imagination, efficacy, and, against all odds, their fierce capacity for joy, are just as necessary for the future of a viable planet as natural resources like clean air and water. Activists and teachers of my generation must help Gen Z learn to push on the levers of technical, political, cultural, and economic change, and to draw on existential tools or deep adaptation in times of crisis.

Theres hope in the images on the streets and on social media: Todays protests against police brutality are a testament to young peoples power and evidence of their commitment to their future. It isnt an especially large leap from fighting a racist justice system to improving the planet; indeed, many in this generation see them as inextricably connectedthats the point. And the rapid and radical changes that society has undertaken in response to COVID-19 is further evidence that change is possible. Humans can sacrifice and make collective changes to protect othershopefully, in these difficult weeks, my students will be able to see that.

The trauma of being young in this historical moment will shape this generation in many ways. The rest of us have a lot to learn from them. And we would do well to help them see that their grief and despair are the other side of love and connection, and help them to channel that toward effective action. For their sake and that of the planet, we need them to feel empowered to shape and desire their future. They have superpowers unique to their generation. They are my antidote to despair.

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Generation Z Is the New Face of Climate Justice - zocalopublicsquare.org

In a year that will go down in history as a dumpster fire of a horror show, a duality of mindset exists among the people one that can be broken down into either apathy or rage. With our every waking thought being recorded on social media, addicted to the micro-dopamine hit of likes, but also doomscrolling long into the night, nuance is dead and opinion is binary. Yes or no, black or white, on or off. There is no maybe, there is no grey area, there are nohalf-measures.

Theres a fine line between people screaming at each other because of what happened on the last season of a shitty reality show and people having a strong opinion politically, muses KW, vocalist and guitarist for Canadian doom-mongers Vile Creature. People need to understand that when it comes to, Which band is your favourite? Which colour is your favourite? Who is the coolest celebrity? that none one of it matters and if you have a strong opinion then you need to calmdown.

When youre talking politically, you have to have a strong opinion because inaction iscomplicity.

Kerrang! is chatting to KW over Skype following the release of Vile Creatures new album Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm! last month. And while the album title is tongue-in-cheek, it raises questions of internalised apathy, often born from a place of privilege and wilfulignorance.

KW explains it as a feeling of wanting to make the world a better place but not knowing how, so you just sit in front of Netflix and tell yourself youll do ittomorrow.

Its much easier to blend apathy into your life than to combat things and actively work on making things better not only for yourself but for otherpeople.

He continues: For me specifically, Im referring to the ideals of moral nihilism and the idea of people saying, The worlds nothing and we are nothing so we should just do nothing because nothing fucking matters. Its lazy and stupid and prevalent in a high amount of metal bands. But its metal to care, its metal to try and change things. Do you think Black Sabbath wrote War Pigs to sit around not doing anything? You think Rob Halford was out and proud for no reason? No, they wanted to change things and make thingsbetter.

Since their formation in 2014, Vile Creature have been actively spreading a positive message of change and equality through their punishing slabs of tar-thick riffage. KW (he/they) and his partner Vic (they/them) both identify as queer, and over the past three albums have been sharing their personal experiences at high volume and even higherintensity.

The project began when they began dating and KW taught Vic how to play the drums. Within three months they had released their first record and now, six years later, they have played hundreds of shows and become one of the most respected names in the underground, although they were initially seen as the black sheep of their local scene in Hamilton, Ontario playing just eight shows in their local areaever.

We were a two-piece who were outwardly talking about our personal experiences as queer persons and were very up-front about it. Near the end of the set wed talk for a minute about who we are, what we stand for and what the songs were about. I dont think that was a thing that was around in SouthernOntario.

Our first two years of playing shows, all of our bills were a noise act, a queercore pop-punk band and then us because nobody knew who to put us with. I dont think at that point there were many outwardly, specifically anti-oppressive doom bands, which has changed a lot in the past few years. Its amazing to see so many outspoken bands continuing to pop up, even bands who are significantly older than us being more vocal about their political beliefs. It makes it a much more comfortable experience going out to playshows.

Growing up in south Florida in the late 90s/early 00s, KW explains that the words trans and queer werent a part of the culturallexicon.

It was Oh, youre a f*ggot! Punch, punch, kick, hospital. Thats what growing up was like in a lot of circumstances and the band for me lyrically and creatively started as a means to put those feelings out there and releasethem.

Despite heavy musics supposed ideals of rebellion and independence, LGBTQIA+ is still viewed as a taboo subject by many of its followers ironically going against the progressive attitudes on which this genre wasfounded.

We were looking at Twitter this morning and a tweet said, I was stoked to buy the album on both LP and CD and give this band a try, then they started with all this political crap so I spent my money elsewhere and Im no longer interested in their creativity, smirks KW. Weve got a good amount of pissbaby clownshoe boys like that and we dont give afuck.

We talk about our personal experiences more than anything, but our personal experiences are politically-based. Were politically-charged people because of the system we grew up in and the experiences that we faced. For us it was about being true to ourselves and just generally ignoring everyone who had an issue with what we were saying because we dont care aboutthem.

But could someone who doesnt ascribe to Vile Creatures progressive, liberal viewpoint still enjoy them?

If we were just aiming it at queer people wed just be preaching to the choir, says KW knowingly. If someone listened to our band and it opened them up to thought processes of dealing with their own internalised racism, misogyny or homophobia and come out the other side with a better understanding then thats a wonderfulthing.

Its important for bands like us to play in uncomfortable spaces and talk to people who have opposing views and force them to reckon with their own internal shit, he adds. I will always feel so safe and amazing playing for 500 beautiful, affirming voices of people who intrinsically agree with our politics, but were not changing anything by doingthat.

KW and Vics personal lives have fed directly into new album, Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!. While their previous album 2018s Cast Of Static & Smoke was a sci-fi odyssey released with a 16-page story, their latest full-length is rooted in reality; a reality dripping in bile anddespair.

Love songs are the biggest songs of all time theres a lot of positive art out there but when it comes to us specifically, we utilise this band for letting out feelings in a healthy way, says KW, extolling the virtues of catharsis. No matter what we do or say, theres always a twinge of positivity at the end of it, even because were not the type of people who sit down and takeit.

And for an album that opens on a banshee shriek of the words We die!, it does take you on an adventure out of the darkness and into the light. KW views it in a more cyclical nature, moving the needle from 0 to 360 degrees, forever experiencing the stages of grief from denial toacceptance.

Its the epic, choral finale that solidifies this journey through the rabbit hole and into sunlight. Written with Laurel Minnes from 12-piece choir Minuscule, who also appear, the 14-minute double header of closers Glory! Glory! and Apathy Took Helm! sets you on a path of enlightenment before hurling you back down to Earth with an unholysmite.

Its the thing I was meant to write after 20 years of writing music, smiles KW, acknowledging that his life-long love of musical theatre instilled the idea of wanting to write a full choir-piece. But its not just an accomplishment of songwriting, as a whole its what sets Vile Creature apart in a scene that is awash with bands who simply worship theriff.

Of course, this pair have never been about doing things the normal way, its only about releasing the poison inside. But what about those listening to the new for the firsttime?

Im hoping that they feel okay, or more okay than when they went into the album, says KW sincerely. I hope theyre able to find comfortability in themselves and apply that to the world outside. Maybe this is the least metal thing to say, but I just want people to be okay. I want people to care about themselves and those around them. The most metal thing that you can do is care about other people and the community at large. I want people to feel empowered and have an emotional response; to feel confident to go about the world as the best version of themselves, as well as the best version that can help otherpeople.

And I hope they enjoyedit.

Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm! is out now via Prosthetic.

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Posted on July 20th 2020, 3:40pm

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Vile Creature: "The Most Metal Thing That You Can Do Is Care About Other People" - Kerrang!

By Roger Bowen

the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

H.L. Mencken

My partner of 50-plus years and I live at one of the most remote spots on Americas East Coast, also one of the most beautiful. Our small fishing village gives genuine meaning to the heavenly words peace and quiet. We do hear the occasional gunshot during the fall deer hunting season and fireworks on July Fourth, but these noxious interruptions to our psychic balance mercifully pass. When the noises end the bald eagles, sharp-shinned hawks, snowshoe hares, foxes, bobcats, chickadees and chipmunks come out of hiding and life as we love it returns in all its fullness.

COVID-19 thus far has been tolerable. Only 18 souls in our county have been infected; just one has died. Nevertheless, most residents and visitors wear masks whenever they travel to the nearby shire town, they practice social distancing, they wash their hands after every visit to the local post office or grocery store, and they avoid crowds. Our neighbors prudence and regard for community welfare reassures us that we live exactly where we should.

More worrying to us are the health and safety of our two children and two grandchildren. One child lives just north of Boston, the other, and mother of our grandies, lives on Long Island while her husband works in Manhattan. They all hope to visit us at the end of this month. It is an annual ritual that enriches the spirits of us all. Several years ago, when our grandson was just 5 years old and his baby sister only 2, he placed his kiddy rocker on the deck looking out onto the Atlantic, and quietly uttered, You know, Maine is the only place where I can really relax.

What frightens me more than the virus is our President and his most ardent supporters. Trump is a philosophical nihilist who has no firm convictions about anything other than his own glorification. His nihilism has been embraced by his diehard base. They are the ones who defiantly proclaim that they can defy government mandates to wear a mask because they are free, even as they fasten their seat belts, pay taxes, send their children to school and obey the laws of civil society.

To date, Trump has told them what they want to hear: wearing or not wearing a mask is a personal choice made by freedom-loving individuals; CDC guidelines are voluntary; malarial medication and Lysol kill the virus and somehow the virus will magically disappear on its own accord. Thats leadership.

They believe Trump when he describes the Black Lives Matter movement as manipulated by radical leftist fascists; they believed Trump when he said some of the racists in Charlottesville are good people. They believe Trump when he tells them that his tax reform benefits every American; Wall Street just smiled. They believe him when he denies he is Putins puppet, when he denies being briefed about Russia paying the Taliban a bounty for killing American soldiers, when he promises to make America great again, etc. Trump has told over 18,000 lies since assuming office and his base seems to have swallowed most of them. One of the great elitist cynics of the 20th century, H L Mencken, once wrote: No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people.

Americas Bill of Rights was written to protect Americans from government overreach and to enshrine the rights of the individual. Now as never before, at least in my lifetime, have the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and to redress grievances meant more. Of course, rights are meaningless unless you exercise them.

Now is the time to prove Mencken was mistaken. Do not be taken in by Trumps lies, listen to the CDC experts and vote this November to remove Trump from office. Our democracy is at stake. And I want our grandchildren to grow up unencumbered by fears, of COVID and of the egotist occupying the White House.

Roger Bowen held nonpartisan elective offices in Gouldsboro for 10 years. He currently works (remotely) for a Washington, D.C., higher education nonprofit.

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Lets turn the tide this November - The Ellsworth American