Daily Archives: May 27, 2021

If embarking on a second year of shutdowns, social restrictions, constant health risks, and existential dread has eroded your sense of lifes ultimate meaning and purpose, a new report by philosophers in Britain and Australia may offer a double whammy of encouragement.

First, youre absolutely right, they say. Life is meaningless.

Second, this fact poses no significant problems or threats.

In fact, there are good things that might come out of it, said Tracy Llanera, research fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Sydney and assistant research professor at the University of Connecticut.

I think that shift in perspective will just open a lot more philosophical and practical possibilities for people.

Llanera co-authored the 70-page study, entitled A Defence of Nihilism, with the British philosopher James Tartaglia, a professor at Keele University. His earlier books include Philosophy in a Meaningless Life.

Im passionate about nihilism, said Tartaglia. Its so badly misunderstood.

Nihilist viewpoints begin with a refusal to believe that human life draws meaning from a greater context, such as the will or purpose of a divine being, or another external force such as fate or moral goodness, or any measure of the worth and quality of human life. In some interpretations, a purely nihilistic outlook disdains any attempt to attribute value or meaning to anything at all.

Such views traditionally receive bad press and blunt condemnation from thought leaders across the world. During the pandemic, critics on the political left and right have targeted nihilism as a root cause for what they perceive as widespread cultural and moral malaise.

Writing in Politico in April 2021, Charles Sykes accused the U.S. Republican Party of abandoning its principles in favour of a free-floating nihilism. He was objecting to what he perceived as the partys attempt to gain power without consideration for moral, economic or democratic justifications or traditions.

Two of Pakistans most senior medical experts, Saira Afzal and Khalid Masud Gonal, have accused countries of medical nihilism for failing to take seriously the threat of COVID-19.

In their view, an apparent willingness by some governments to let the virus spreadand even to encourage behaviours known to result in more deathsamounted to an abdication of responsibility that reminded them of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsches definition of a nihilist: someone who believes nothing in the world has a material existence or value.

And The Guardian reported this winter on the lonely repetition and growing nihilism characterizing the lives of Australias young adults after months of wildfires and pandemic-related news and restrictions. The nihilism in this case entails a sense of apathy with a loss of psychological ability to face the future and take actions aimed at achieving happiness.

Llanera told IdeashostNahlah Ayed that a constant barrage of anti-nihilist sentiment from acquaintances and the media helped prompt her to fight back on nihilisms behalf.

Defending it really makes me feel like the madman in Friedrich Nietzsches The Gay Science, said Llanera. You know, Youve come too early! Its not yet time! Dont rock the boat! But we think that its about time and thats why were making the case.

The philosophers case depends on separating the premise that life has no cosmic meaning from the many negative conclusions people tend to draw as a consequence. Tartaglia points to a common fear that a person who considers life ultimately meaningless will embark on a destructive rejection of life itself, potentially endangering others or at least falling into despair.

Thats the one major misunderstanding, Tartaglia said. The other one is that you concern yourself with trivia because you failed to see the important things in life. He often sees the latter fear expressed in relation to the time people spend online or purchasing consumer goods instead of participating in some activity deemed essential to a meaningful life by whoever is making the criticism.

The most monstrous nihilists in popular culture include Heath Ledgers portrayal of the Joker in the 2008 Batman film, The Dark Knight. He ridicules moral codes and rules as groundless, and sees order itself as an illusion created in a desperate bid for an arbitrary happiness. To the movies audience, these beliefs seem tied to the Jokers penchant for chaos, crime and sociopathy.

Tartaglia said that figures such as the Joker might correctly be described as nihilists to the extent that they reject the idea of an overall meaning for their actions coming from some non-human source.

But I dont see any reason why that view would push you to go around destroying people and holding knives to their throats, said Tartaglia. Hes a particularly evil nihilist.

Historically, German philosopher and soldier Ernst Jnger blamed rampant nihilism after the First World War for his countrys descent into Nazism.

Although such associations continue to influence perceptions of those willing to call life ultimately meaningless, the merely trivial nihilist is perhaps the more common caricature now.

An especially well-known example is the squad of cartoonish German-accented antagonists to Jeff Bridges character, the Dude, in the film, The Big Lebowski. These self-announced nihilists seem to embody both major ingredients of the philosophys poor image: violence and foolishness.

Llanera finds no compelling logical connection between nihilism and antisocial behaviour or a choice to waste ones life on trivial, unrewarding obsessions.

And while a lack of ultimate sources for the meaning of ones life cannot directly justify good behaviour either, it can release people from harmful mistaken beliefs and damaging mindsets.

Llanera hears often from students that they consider themselves not religious, but spiritual, a description she finds potentially concerning.

It strikes me that people are always looking for something to hold ontotarot cards, the luck of the stars. I think [thats] being used to fight against this threat that life will become meaningless, Llanera said.

She criticizes some non-nihilist philosophers for spreading the message that the best way to respond to a sense of meaninglessness is to tap into non-human sources, such as a sacred entity or magical realm. In her view, this amounts to misdiagnosing the problem.

The problem is egotism, Llanera said, our attitudes of wanting to have an authority controlling and giving us answers, rather than being responsible for our own lives.

Despite her passion for defending nihilism, Llanera considers the central point about lifes meaninglessness to be neutral, rather than good news or bad news for humankind. She hopes that more people will simply outgrow their sense that the cosmic meaninglessness of their lives poses a threat. In her view, life does not need a larger context of meaning to add weight to a private or social sense of morality or joie de vivre.

Those things could be understood in a familiar, ordinary sense, like you need to take responsibility for your dog, you need to not cheat on your partner or you need to protest horrendous acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing. All of those things are part of the human condition, said Llanera.

They matter and they mean something to our individual lives and to human society. But this kind of meaning doesnt extend beyond our human context. And we think that those who defend the meaning of life, theyre just very uncomfortable with that idea.

The philosophers attempt to distance nihilisms core claims from the undesirable behaviours associated with the word itself has drawn protest from some colleagues in the field. The University of Edinburghs Guy Bennett-Hunter disputes that self-professed nihilists can enjoy a social meaning to their lives while also calling life itself ultimately meaningless.

Id stress that the social meanings, which James [Tartaglia] accepts, logically as well as psychologically require a transcendent context of meaning for life which he rejects, Bennett-Hunter said. He also argues that Tartaglias nihilism fails to account for the possibility that an ultimate meaning of life may not be factual in a prosaic sense, but nevertheless exist and be poetically true, as with creation myths.

Tartaglia argues that his interpretation of nihilism relates to its history and the intellectual battles surrounding claims to know a factual reality, especially in European thought.

He points out that the widespread use of the word nihilism and the phrase meaning of life originates in a single decade at the end of the 1700s, when religious certainties broke down among scholars while scientific beliefs gained power. Tartaglia sees most modern anti-nihilist fears as a continuation of the intellectual panic that ensued back then.

During that period, French religious conservatives railed against almost any form of reasoning and learning. To them, such pursuits risked a descent into nihilism as a result of extinguishing all divine mysteries. The supposedly threatening concept of nihilism often seemed inextricable from atheism or free thinking.

Today, however, Tartaglia feels he must defend nihilism from both religious and atheist world views, since the latter have tended towards replacing the divine meanings of life with another non-human equivalent, such as a worshipful attitude toward technology. Tartaglia worries that too many leaders perceive technological advance as a force that must be allowed to progress regardless of whether humans desire the consequences or not.

It could go in very bad directions, Tartaglia said. And thats why nihilism seems worthwhile.

On the positive side, Tartaglia argues that nihilistic attitudes offer a potential common ground upon which extremes of religion and secularism could meet, since it dispenses with all their competing claims to an ultimate meaning of life.

Life is the common ground, said Tartaglia. If youre a nihilist, you dont think that anything goes beyond life. If youre not a nihilist, you think theres something extra. OK, but theres still this massive common ground. Fundamentalists on one side or the anti-religionist brigade [with nihilism] we can all understand each other, right? We can all agree on life.

Tartaglias optimism in this regard might appear out of all proportion with the worlds many unending and brutal conflicts over much smaller doctrinal differences between all manner of groups, religious or otherwise. But then, a nihilist can dream.

Tom Howell is a producer forIdeason CBC Radio.

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Good news for nihilists? Life is meaningless after all, say philosophers | CBC Radio - News Nation USA

Greta Thunberg often paints the world as being in a dire position, stirring her followers into confronting the existential threat of climate change. Credit: Markus Schweizer. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Several years ago, a team of Australian researchers asked people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia about how probable a global catastrophe in the near term might be. They found that a majority (54 percent) rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 percent or greater, and a quarter rated the risk of humans being wiped out at 50 percent or greater. Another study that focused only on climate change found that four in ten Americans think the odds that global warming will cause humans to become extinct are 50 percent or higher. A search for human extinction via Google Ngram Viewer, which combs through digitized documents in Googles collection, shows a significant leap in the terms frequency over the past 20 years.

The Australian researchers also noted that, when confronted with end-of-the-world thoughts, people tend to have one of three responses: first, they interpret the situation through the prism of religion. On this view, the threat of catastrophe is seen as part of the grand battle between Good and Evil in the universe. Second, people come to believe that the worlds future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love, or in a weaker form, we should enjoy the life we have now, and not worry about what might happen to the world in the future. And third, people latch onto the idea that we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world. The authors referred to these fundamentalism, nihilism, and activism, respectively.

The fact is that many scholars who study existential threats agree that the probability of doom is higher today than ever before in humanitys 300,000-year history. From nuclear weapons to killer drones to designer pathogens, humanity is acquiring much more efficient methods of bringing down civilization or causing our extinction than in the past. Lord Martin Rees, a world-renowned cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, estimates that human civilization has a 50/50 chance of making it through this century intact.

Given the ominous possibility that Rees and others are right, the key question is how to talk about global catastrophic risks in ways that inspire people to become activists, rather than nudge them into fundamentalist beliefs or an attitude of defeatism.

In the book Enlightenment Now!, the psychologist Steven Pinker worries that the drumbeat of doom will ultimately backfire: Humanity has a finite budget of resources, brainpower, and anxiety. When these resources are used up, brainpower has been drained, and anxiety reaches a tipping point, the result may be a paralyzing sense that humanity is screwed. And if humanity is screwed, then why sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? Why forgo the convenience of fossil fuels, or exhort governments to rethink their nuclear weapons policies? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die! In other words, Pinker is afraid that people will succumb to nihilism rather than activism.

But is this warranted? Pinker notes that many leading intellectuals throughout the Atomic Age have made dire predictions that the world is about to end. For example (these are taken from Pinker):

Albert Einstein warned in 1950 that only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind.

C.P. Snow, an English novelist and chemist, wrote in 1961 that within, at most, 10 years, some of those [nuclear] bombs are going off. I am saying this as responsibly as I can. That is the certainty.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT computer scientist, declared in 1976 that I am completely certain that by the year 2000, you [students] will all be dead.

Hans Morgenthau, an influential international relations theorist, opined in 1979 that the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world wara strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it.

But the nuclear holocaust didnt happen. Were these proclamations a misguided waste of nerves that did nothing more than frighten people at the time? In fact, a survey conducted after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, later described by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as the most dangerous moment in human history, found that some 40 percent of adolescents experienced a great deal of anxiety about the possibility of war. Another survey that asked schoolchildren about the world in 10 years reported that more than two-thirds mentioned war, often in terms of somber helplessness. As a junior high-school student put it in the early 1980s, responding to an article on the nuclear winter hypothesis written by the cosmologist Carl Sagan, My friends are scared. Sometimes they thinkWill we wake up to see the world tomorrow?

These warnings may very well have galvanized people into action.

Perhaps the doomsday prognostications of Einstein, Snow, Weizenbaum, Morgenthau, and others were self-defeating prophecies that, by virtue of foregrounding the worst-case outcomes, led to actions that saved humanity.

Many people accused Sagan of alarmism about nuclear weapons. Even pro-disarmament colleagues, someone wrote in a 1997 obituary for Sagan, described the nuclear winter scenario that Sagan popularized in the early 1980s as the worst example of the misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory. But the fact is that former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev told former US President Ronald Reagan in 1988 that Sagans activism against nuclear weapons was a major influence on ending proliferation.

Today, young climate activists like Greta Thunberg embraced the strategy of frightening people into action. In a 2019 message in Davos, she declared:

Adults keep saying: We owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I dont want your hope. I dont want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

So far, the strategy hasnt solved the climate crisis, but it could very well be the best approach going forward. Fear can be paralyzing, but it can also be motivating. There is no point to sugar-coating our collective plight: It is absolutely dire. We really do face a higher probability of catastrophe today than ever before in our history, if one takes seriously the estimates from Martin Rees and others. A 2008 informal survey of experts, for example, put the median probability of extinction this century at 19 percent, and of course the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is currently set to a mere 100 seconds before midnight.

But the urgency of humanitys present situation is only half of the story.

Communicating about existential risks is a two-step process: First, the messengers need to stress that not a single problem facing humanity is hopelessly insoluble. And second, they need to point out that there are things that every person on the planet can do to make things better. We know how to solve climate change. We know what wed have to do to redirect an asteroid or comet away from Earth. We know how early detection systems can prevent a global pandemic. We even understand that in about 800 million years, the sun will become too luminous for complex lifeforms, like us, to continue residing on this planetary island. We know we will have to move.

There are solutions to each of these problems. Some may involve technological fixes, while others might require changes to our norms, attitudes, or the structure of political systems. But there is nothing inevitable about humanitys self-destruction this century or beyond. The only natural existential threat that we dont currently know how to mitigate is a supervolcanic eruption. A speculative plan from NASA scientists, for example, involves pumping high-pressure water into magma chambers to prevent a supereruption, but these scientists add that this might inadvertently trigger a catastrophe. More research, though, could very well provide an answer.

Along similar lines, we do not yet have any good solutions to what AI risk researchers call the control problem, that is, the puzzle of how to effectively control an algorithm whose general intelligence capabilities far exceed those of the smartest possible humans. But again, there is no reason to believe that further exploration of the problem wont reveal an effective solution. In other words, there is hope, an essential feature of activism.

Beyond this, there are plenty of ways that each of us, as individuals, can ensure a good outcome for humanity in the face of grave dangers. Obvious things include flying less, recycling, embracing a vegetarian or vegan diet, supporting movements like Fridays for Future, donating money to charities or think tanks, and even (controversially) having one fewer child. Young people might consider pursuing degrees in philosophy, public health, microbiology, computer science, or climatology to help solve the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced. Alternatively, it may be that some threats can only be solved from the top downfor instance, via government regulation. In this case, our moral obligation would be to call our government representatives and demand changeand, if that fails, to vote better politicians into office.

This is how we create activists: Tell the truth about how bad our existential predicament is, but always emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless, nor are you and I helpless. There is reason for optimismconditional optimism: If we take the risks seriously and act accordingly, the future could be better than ever before.

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Scared straight: How prophets of doom might save the world - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The Republican party has transformed projection from a psychological phenomenon into a political strategy. In a clinical setting, projectionaccusing others of ones own flawsis an uncontrollable behavior. While that may be true of Donald Trump (Lord knows he presents as a compelling case for psychoanalysis), it is not true for his loyal minions. For them it is a conscious effort to stuff reality down the memory hole.

Three women have exposed the viciousness and nihilism guarding the official Republican version of history by daring to contradict it. The abuse that Rep. Liz Cheney, Susan Hennessey, and Natasha Bertrand have suffered says more about the Republican party than it does about them.

What could generate such animus?

Though there is more than a hint of misogyny in the assaults on the integrity of the three women, the graver problem for the Republican party is the intellectual threat they pose in reminding people of the truth.

Cheney had the temerity to refuse to forgive or forget the January 6 insurrection. In addition to being ousted from her leadership role in the party, she has been criticized for everything from her politics to her decision to politely greet President Biden during the State of the Union address. One of her colleagues, in display of the sort of juvenile trolling increasingly common among Republicans, tweeted a childish hey, hey goodbye at her after she lost her position.

The events of January 6 are sufficiently recent that the effort to erase the memory of them is still ongoing. Some Republican members of the House are trying to recharacterize the riot as a normal tourist visit and condemned the FBIs investigation of the insurrection as the harassing peaceful patriots. Likewise, Sen. Ron Johnson has claimed that the assault was by and large a peaceful protest, which is true in the same sense that Fords Theatre on April 14, 1865 was by and large free of assassinations.

Cheneys refusal to let this destruction of history stand unchallenged is what they fear. Projection is a strategy born of weakness and the recognition that there is no defense for the Republican partys actions. By refusing to be deterred, she exposes the Republican party to scrutiny for inciting and defending the insurrection.

Similarly, there is no defense for former Attorney General William Barrs shameful actions while in office, so projection is the only option. Hence the absurd charges that Hennessey, who recently left the Lawfare blog (where I am a contributor) and joined the National Security Division at the Department of Justice as a special counsel, will politicize the Department of Justice. The rightwing commentariat went ballistic at her appointment, claiming that her work on Russiagate and the history of DOJ politicized engagement reflects a political bias and would somehow make DOJ more political than it was before. Even if partisan squabbles were in her nature, given the history of how Barr bent DOJ to Trumps service, that would be a tall order.

The list of Barrs corruptions, abuses, and lies is long and sordid, including politically motivated interventions in multiple prosecutions of Trumps allies, the Lafayette Square incident, refusing to respond to congressional oversight, misleading the public aboutthe content of the Mueller report, and being an early proponent of the foreign ballot conspiracy. One recent revelation about Barrs tenure is both troubling and comical: The Washington Post reported last week that DOJ tried to protect Rep. Devin Nunes from an anonymous critical parody account by issuing a subpoena to Twitter seeking the identity of the user known as Devin Nunes Alt-Mom. (Under Attorney General Merrick Garlands leadership, DOJ withdrew the subpoena earlier this year.)

Hennesseys appointment, far from being a politicization of the Department of Justice, is a rejection of the politicization of the department during Barrs twenty-two month tenure. As a skilled lawyer and an assiduous observer of the Trump administration and its Russian connections, shes well positioned to repair the damage done to the department under Barr.

The final leg in this tripod of forgetfulness is the ongoing attempt to rewrite the history of Trumps collusion with Russia during the 2016 election by calling all of those who reported on the story or analyzed it conspiracists.

Hence the case of Natasha Bertrand, a reporter for CNN. Shes been prolific in reporting on Trumps connections to Russia. For her efforts, as recounted in Washington Monthly, she was sued by Kash Patel, a Trump/Nunes acolyte, for defamation. The case has little if any factual basis, to say nothing of its lack of legal merit. More recently, Glenn Greenwald called her a deranged conspiracy theorist and scandal-plagued CIA propagandist.

This assault is a classic case of misdirection. Both Bertrand and Hennessey were, it is said, more credulous of the allegations of the Steele dossier than the document warranted. In hindsight, maybe so. But their analysis of one document doesnt disqualify the validity of their observations of the myriad Trump-Russia connections, nor absolve Trump and his enablers of one of the most grievous acts of unpatriotism of the twenty-first century.

The fact remains that the Mueller report, and, more recently, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, described a pattern of activity that involved hundreds of steps taken by Trump, his campaign team,and his friends and confederates during the 2016 election campaign in which Trump or his associates connected themselves to or benefited from Russian actions.Never has the history of American politics seensuch an entanglement. The report describes, in painstaking detail, what happenedand the wholesale assault on Bertrand and Hennessey as conspiracy mongers is nothing less than historical revisionism. In the end, at least sixteen of Trumps campaign staff can be proven to have had Kremlin connections.

The five-volume Senate report is replete with detail, which is precisely why Republicans wont allow reality to stand. Trumps subservience to Russia, his corruption, and his attacks on constitutional democracy are political liabilities. Forgetting, distracting from, or distorting them is political necessity. And for insisting on those truths, Cheney, Bertrand, and Hennessey have become the objects of Republican ire.

As George Orwell said: The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.The objective of the Trumpians who wish to destroy democracy is exactly that: to obliterate history and, at the same time, destroy those who would remind us of it. The only way to fight themthe only step left for those of us who prize history and rationality over power and authorityis to remember that history so that it will never be repeated.

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The Republican Partys Partisanship Projection Problem - The Bulwark

God Save the Queen is the second single by British punk icons, the Sex Pistols. Shortly after its release, Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten claimed, There are not many songs written over baked beans at the breakfast table that went on to divide a nation and force a change in popular culture.

The song is undoubtedly a punk classic and one of the highlights from the original British wave. In addition to its composition, the lyrics and the furore they caused cemented the songs place in pop culture history making it one of the most punk songs of all time.

The song was released during Queen Elizabeth IIs Silver Jubilee of 1977. If by some miracle, you havent heard the song, the title God Save The Queen may seem like an uber-patriotic reaffirmation of the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. However, it is not. Given Johnny Rottens take, as mentioned earlier on the songs polarising nature, it is clear there was more to the track than meets the ear.

Everything about it was controversial. Released on the 27th of May 1977, slap bang in the middle of the Queens 25th anniversary of her accession, the single caused widespread horror. The lyrics and the cover were seen as highly provocative at the time.

The extent of the offence caused was so deep that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) flat out banned the song. The Independent Broadcasting Authority refused to play the song, and ubiquitous chain Woolworths refused to stock the single. The BBC called it an example of gross bad taste. This furore played into the band and their manager, Malcolm McClarens hands. Between late May and early June, they were shifting 150,000 units a day.

The songs original title was No Future, as the lyrics display a general malaise towards the British monarchy and a general anti-authoritarian stance. In 2017 Rotten said To me, the lyrics themselves were a fun thing. It was expressing my point of view on the monarchy in general and on anybody that begs your obligation with no thought. Thats unacceptable to me. You have to earn the right to call on my friendship and my loyalty. And you have to have value-proven points in order for me to support you. Thats how it is.

The songs title also caused great offence as it took its name directly from the UKs national anthem. This, in tandem with it being the Queens Jubilee, and the lyrics were too much for many sections of the Mustard clad, red-trousered, stuffy British public to take. The lyrics equate dear Queenie to a fascist regime. They also sardonically claim, like a progenitor to David Ickes whacky theories, God Save The Queen/She aint no human being. Rottens lyrics also embodied that jaded nihilism of punk that made it such a tangible force for the youth, there is no future in Englands dreaming.

It seems as if the change of name from No Future to God Save The Queen was, in fact, a coincidence rather than a well-orchestrated business move or a piece of stringent anti-authoritarianism. Sex Pistols drummer, Paul Cook, maintained, it wasnt written specifically for the Queens Jubilee. We werent aware of it at the time. It wasnt a contrived effort to go out and shock everyone.

Johnny Rotten has also expanded on the intention behind the lyrics You dont write God Save the Queen because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and youre fed up with them being mistreated. His purpose of evoking sympathy for the British working class seems fair enough, given the mire of the 1970s on the island. After all, Britain in the 70s was dubbed the sick man of Europe.

The song also caused much debate surrounding its chart standings. It reached number one on the NME charts in the UK and made it to number two on the Official UK Singles Chart, which the BBC used. However, given the number of units it was shifting in its first month, many people doubted that it could have been stuck in the penultimate position by chance.

The rumours that the charts had been fixed by the BBC were exacerbated by the fact the song that pipped it to the top spot was Rod Stewarts forgettable single I Dont Want to Talk About It.

More recently, Rotten has also thrown shade on the BBCs general reputation. He claimed that when the BBC banned him personally in 1978, it was for calling out Jimmy Savilles depravity in the until-recently-concealed interview with his post-Pistols band, Public Image Ltd.

The furore God Save The Queen caused has only added to the band and the songs legacy. Punk in all its essence, it remains a three-chorded staple for rebels everywhere. Its lasting impact made somewhat of an ironic turn on the 3rd of November 2016.

Andrew Rosindell, a Conservative MP, argued in a motion for a return to the broadcasting of the national anthem God Save the Queen at the end of BBC Ones daily transmissions. Rosindells call came as he wanted to commemorate the Brexit vote and Britains consequent withdrawal from the European Union. Rosindells claim drew much ire, largely because the BBC had dropped the practice in 1997 when they switched to 24-hour news broadcasting (which rendered the need for a closing song obsolete).

In a bizarre twist of fate, that same evening, BBC Twos flagship programme,Newsnight, ended their broadcast with host Kirsty Wark saying that they were incredibly happy to oblige Rosindells request. They proceeded to close with a Sex Pistols song clip much to Rosindells displeasure.

Watch the music for God Save The Queen, below.

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The controversial reasons Sex Pistols song God Save The Queen was banned by the BBC - Far Out Magazine

Remembering Fuad Sir: English teacher, funny adult, tongue-clicker extraordinaire

As a reader, consumer, and perhaps even a man of letters once upon an optimistic time, tributes, be they written or otherwise, constitute some of my least favourite types of content. Between the narcissism of the author and the nihilism of temporal annihilation, what purpose does a tribute serve but to ensure that, through the weight of tragedy or through serendipitous proximity, an individual finds his or her way into the spotlight for a brief moment in time?

These journeys through the artificially cobbled streets of a strangers lane of tediously strung-together memory -- oftentimes with an eradicated person of some import whose existence, unfortunately, has failed to earn its place next to yours -- are oftentimes little more than hyperbolic, poorly expressed, uninteresting forays into the falsity of a person that once existed.

Is there really such shame in remembering, loving, liking, enjoying the company of, praising somebody who existed imperfectly, that we must take away these flaws, instill pretenses, create statues out of clouds so that an act of remembrance in effect serves the exact opposite purpose -- to be forgotten as just another subject of a few thousand words forcefully spread to span a few hundred hours?

Can we move away from such selective memory sharing, from birthing elephants inside rooms too small to house so many?

Contrary to appearances, this is not a bitter diatribe that unnecessarily seeks out flaws in individuals who have perhaps earned the right to indulge in the harsh unrealities of manufactured memory. This is a response to finding myself in a situation similar to my predecessors: A desire to offer a few words dedicated to my subjectively important memories regarding a person who is an objectively unimportant stranger to most people to have ever existed.

This is an attempt to do something different.

While I wish to make no claims towards the quality of writing I now present you with, the activity itself is something that I enjoy and feel comfortable doing. Such instances occur less frequently in these times of millennial misery, time shortages, and overly indulgent digital dalliances, but hardly ever as a 16-year-old student of O Levels and future failure at committing to less than three letter grades.

But, thanks to fragile alliances formed by soft fathers in hardened corporations, thanks to inevitable friendships formed in Lalmatia and unlikely ones formed above a Dhanmondi bicycle store, thanks to the forces of the universe blowing woefully unprepared dad-son duos across the subcontinent and back, I found myself awkwardly sitting in a room filled with adolescent teenagers, doodling endlessly in my notebook.

This was the class of Abdullah Al-Fuad, father of friend, sporadic attention giver, also teacher of O Level English. My memory, notorious for not existing most of the time, does not recall detail with much accuracy, or at all. But I can remember so many moments of shared laughter, specificities now long forgotten, not with him, but the people who surrounded him. From the way he clicked his tongue to the unaffordable price of his attention, leaving you dumbfounded with his answer to a reasonable question you were unlucky enough to have asked, to the random Turkish swear words he would slip into conversations with unsuspecting students, he was just incredibly fun and funny to be around.

Three decades into a life dissipating its worth, I understand the value of laughter: I have all the patience for people who have shown moments of exceptional cruelty, whose sins have delved into the societally unacceptable and the justifiably illegal, who have dumbfounded me with their ability to be self-serving with such unwavering consistency, but none whatsoever for unfunny individuals with hollowed out senses of humour.

That room was also where I discovered that this was something I enjoyed. I dont know which aspects of Fuad Sirs knowledge pool I was fortunate enough to have inherited, but I do know that the room served as an endless well of opportunity for me to sweat out the frustrated, imitational words of a lovesick teenager. And then, later, more practically, the provider of my first salary as an individual qualified enough to scrutinize the English language skills of others.

But, before that, I read at home. I wrote in Fuad Sirs class. Sometimes we exchanged words. I read at home. And I attempted to write like the writers I read. I think I received some feedback or the other in between but I remember nothing. I read at home. I wrote in Fuad Sirs class. I began with simple sentences. Like that one.

And now its 15 years later and I do not know if the dependent clauses which constantly shove their way into my sentences are welcome details or burdensome annoyances, whether this is a skill to take pride in or a habit to be eliminated.

Between the nostalgic act of recalling those times-when-we-understood-so-little to the living of these times-where-we-understand-too-much, we have gained and lost the people we choose to act as supporting characters in the forgettable movie of our lives. Fuad Sir, along with the people who surrounded him, was part of a similar process, not for some unfortunate, avoidable, and regretful decision on anyones part, but merely due to frosty way leading on to frosty way.

But all of this is just a complex, time-consuming, and convoluted path towards expressing a simple sentiment: Fuad Sir was an undeniable catalyst in my life. I had at 16 what most people spend their entire lives missing: Knowledge of exactly what I was meant to do.

I dont know why I choose to waste this knowledge with such consistency of spirit, and I dont know why I began nor where we have ended up, nor do I know what my intention was as I began. And I definitely dont know if youll remember Abdullah Al-Fuad, teacher of English, funny adult, and tongue-clicker extraordinaire, but I do know that our memories only exist in the living and that our incessant need to create statues of ourselves will only lead to a half-broken visage in an antique desert.

I believe I was lucky to have my life visited by Fuad Sir and to have later visited his life and that of his family. Maybe I will visit again. But if you have found any value in my visit into your life today, unannounced and unearned as it may have been, then you too have been visited by the spirit of Fuad Sir. And that realization is the closest to immortality we ever get.

SN Rasul is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune and a Lecturer of English at North South University.

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OP-ED: Between a simple sentence and an essay of uncontrollable complexity - Dhaka Tribune