Category Archives: Nihilism

Grimes, as she is wont to do, has been causing a hubbub online of late, discussing the fact that she believes human art will die out in the near future due to the impending prevalence of artificial intelligence. This comment has, naturally, prompted a variety of responses, with prominent musicians criticising Grimes for the nihilism of such an opinion. (Pitchfork reports that Zola Jesus called Grimes the voice of silicon fascist privilege.)

Now, one of the few true experts in the field of AI-informed music has spoken out on the subject. Holly Herndon, whose latest record PROTO was made partially using AI, has responded to Grimes, writing an essay about the shortsightedness of the idea that AI can ever replace humans. Im not worried about robot overlords, Im worried about democratically unaccountable transnational companies training us all to understand culture like a robot or narrow AI, she writes. Ultimately, AI is useless without us AI is just us, in aggregate. That is a powerful metaphor and responsibility.Read Herndons full essay below.

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Holly Herndon responds to Grimes AI comments: Im not worried about robot overlords - The FADER

Billboards First Stream serves as a handy guide tothis Fridaysmost essential releases the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.

This week, The Weeknd is back with something for everyone, Ozuna continues to dazzle in his respective lane, and City Girls are stronger (together) than ever. Check out all of this weeks First Stream picks below:

The Songs That Are Designed To Heat Up Dropping Temperatures:The Weeknd, Heartless & Blinding Lights

We all know The Weeknd comes alive in the fall time, and although it took until the back half of autumn for Abel Tesfaye to return for a semi-prolonged absence, he has roared back with a pair of tracks that demonstrate how simple it is for him to command our attention whenever he pleases. Heartless and Blinding Lights caters to fans of The Weeknds chest-thumping sneer and dance floor swagger alike: the former serves as a sort of re-introduction to his particular brand of flashy nihilism, as he asserts that All this money and this pain got me heartless, after waving off any romantic entanglements. Meanwhile, Blinding Lights is the Weeknd to play for your parents who enjoyed when I Feel It Coming played at that family wedding a few years ago -- its sleek, springy and shows his natural easy with a pop hook. The songs are two sides of the same coin, and the combo pack signals that its officially Weeknd Season.

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The Album That Should Make a Latin Star Cross Over:Ozuna, Nibiru

Puerto Rican superstar Ozuna has remained prolific while turning into a household name within the Latin music industry; theres no one song or album that explains his meteoric rise, but a steady clip of strong material that showcases his singular vocal presence. Nibiru, his third album, once again corrals an impressive guest list, including frequent collaborator AnuelAA as well as Swae Lee, Diddy, Nicky Jam and Sech, although, on cue, Ozuna saves some of the most mesmerizing moments for himself. The front-loaded track list includes the beguiling Fantasia, in which Ozunas voice winds around a hypnotic melody, and Hasta Que Salga el Sol, where a flute drives the action forward and the singer-songwriters delivery is more intense than ever. Nibiru deserves not only a deep dive into its 18 songs, but to reposition Ozunas standing in mainstream music as an undeniable pop personality.

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The Song Thats Actually This Weekends Best Family Reunion:City Girls, You Tried It

Longtime fans of City Girls understood how dynamic JT and Yung Miami are on the same track, and had to await JTs return to the group as she served a prison sentence for most of this year. The duo is now reunited after JTs release last month, and both sound revitalized on You Tried It, a breakneck scorcher aimed at both their slew of men and also anyone who attempted to discredit them during their period of separation. City Girls, period, but I need them commas / I can wait in the car, I aint trying to meet your mama, JT raps, in a line that doesnt track during the week of Thanksgiving but speaks to her unflappable energy. You Tried It wont be City Girls biggest hit, but it doesnt need to be -- the pair is back, and the rest of the hip-hop world is on notice.

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The Album To Toss On While Youre Putting Up The Tree:Kacey Musgraves, The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show

Want to listen to the music of Kacey Musgraves star-studded Christmas special on Amazon without watching all the holiday zaniness? The soundtrack to The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show will certainly wrap your heart in tinsel, whether youre a fan of the country-pop songwriter or a handful of her famous friends who stop by. Musgraves singing Let It Snow with James Corden is predictably jokey, while Present Without a Bow flaunts her melodic charm next to the buttery soul of Leon Bridges; Camila Cabello, Fred Armisen, Troye Sivan and several more are involved, and as expected, Musgraves sounds like shes having a ball while playing an amiable host. The music from The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show is as delightful as one would hope, and even if your favorite tracks are extracted from the full product, theyll make delectable additions to your holiday playlist of choice.

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The Song Thats a Proper Victory Lap for a New Reggae Star:Koffee feat. Gunna, W

Before her 20th birthday in February, Koffee will attend the Grammys ceremony as a nominee for best reggae album with her impressive five-track release, Rapture; now, a wider audience will get to know her self-assured deliver thanks to W, a new collaboration with another recent breakout artist, Gunna. The rapper brings the opulent flow of his Drip or Drown 2 project to the track, but Koffee could not be more in control, over a gorgeous piece of production that favors bubble-pop percussion and the whisper of a guitar riff. W should not get lost in the shuffle of a major year for Koffee, and deserves consideration for more dance-focused holiday activities.

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First Stream: New Music From The Weeknd, Ozuna, City Girls & More - Billboard

USA TODAY Published 8:00 a.m. MT Nov. 29, 2019

From Trump corruption, impeachment and Latino support to a global Twitter fight over Indian food, here are some of our top columns of the week.

In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've startedin-case-you-missed-it compilations of some of the week's topUSA TODAY Opinionpieces.As always, thanks for reading, andfor your feedback.

USA TODAY Opinion editors

ByRuben Navarrette Jr.

"Its like chickens for Colonel Sanders.Why would any self-respecting Latino vote to re-elect President Donald Trump, arguably the most anti-Latino chief executive in U.S. history? Yet, Trump is likely to do better than expected with Latino voters After all, they tell themselves, the president is not talking about people like them.The problem is that, when it comes to Latinos, Trump cant stop talking trash."

By Jason Sattler

"The truth is that if Trump cared about corruption, he would be a huge fan of impeachment. As House Intelligence Committee ChairmanAdam Schiff saidlast week, the Founders put impeachment in the Constitution 'because they wanted a powerful anti-corruption mechanism when that corruption came from the highest office in the land.'But Donald Trumps concerns here are far more sinister and obvious.If hes looking into corruption, its for one simple reason. He wants to do more of it."

ByCasey Burgat

"Democrats, on some level, are asking Americans to get upset about foreign aid to a country many of them would have trouble finding on a map. It mightbe a tough sell to gin up uncommitted members of the publicagainst a president who is reluctant to send taxpayer funds to a foreign country with a reputation for corruption. Trump ran on that message, and it paid off. NowRepublicans can claim hes following through."

Impeachment fight staredown(Photo: R.J. Matson, CQ Roll Call)

By The Editorial Board

"Trump, who seems to equate war crimes with battlefield toughness,certainly has the authority to order such a thing as commander in chief of the military. But is it worthy of being obeyed?Military ethicists have debated this for years."

ByTom Nichols

"I decided to go for the gold and point out that I cannot stand the cuisine ofover a billion people. And just to be annoying, I added that no one else could possibly like it either'I thinkIndian food is terrible,' I said, 'and we pretend it isnt.' This was all lunacy, of course, and I assumed that after everyone had engaged in their performative outrage, the world would move on. I was so very wrong."

By Reed Galen

"Stefaniks transformation from thoughtful conservative to frontline Trump defender should worry lifelong Republicans, NeverTrumpers and conservative-leaning independents. They once claimed an ideal, if built only on one-liners. That foundation has been shed and shredded, replaced by the GOPs increasing nihilism."

By Chelsey Nelson

"Ive built a business that I love, working with all people regardless of who they are. But I strongly believe that photographers should be free to align their creative talent with their beliefs. The government shouldnt force artists to express views they disagree with."

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7 of our top opinion columns this week: ICYMI - AZCentral.com

Chris Truax, Opinion contributor Published 10:14 a.m. ET Nov. 26, 2019 | Updated 11:48 a.m. ET Nov. 26, 2019

Impeaching a U.S. president might not be the be-all-end-allfor their career. We explain why this is the case. Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

Chairman Adam Schiff recently announced that the House Intelligence Committee would wrap up impeachment proceedings. He might want to rethink that now.

A ruling in Don McGahns lawsuit could not have come at a worse time for the Trump administration.

Back in April, McGahn, a former White House counsel who resigned in October of 2018, was issued a subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee who wanted him to testify about President Donald Trumps efforts to get him to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. President Trump, claiming an absolute privilege to prevent his current and former subordinates from testifying, ordered McGahn to ignore the subpoena. McGahn, finding himself in a constitutional no-mans land between an executive branch claim of privilege and a legislative branch subpoena, opted to let the courts sort out the competing claims.

On Monday, a federal district court did just that, categorically rejecting President Trumps claims and finding that McGahn had a duty to comply with the Judiciary committees subpoena and to appear before Congress to testify. [T]he President does not have (and, thus, cannot lawfully assert) the power to prevent his current and former senior-level aides from responding to congressional subpoenas.

The court observed that the duty to appear and offer testimony was completely separate from whether a witness could use an appropriate assertion of executive privilege or some other privilege to avoid answering a particular question. White House aides can withhold the kinds of confidential and privileged information that distinguishes them from everybody else; they can do so by asserting an appropriate privilege if needed, when legislators ask questions that probe too deeply."

More on impeachment: Stefanik's dive into Trump's MAGA nihilism reveals dark Republican future

How Devin Nunes lawsuit threat undermines Donald Trump's defense

In this Sept. 4, 2018 file photo, White House counsel Don McGahn, listens as he attends a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington.(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin, AP)

Now it gets interesting. There is no wiggle-room in Judge Jacksons decision. On the question of an administration officials duty to comply with a subpoena, it is as clear as it is possible to be. This is immensely consequential for John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney and a host of others. While this case will almost certainly be appealed, there is no certainty that either Judge Jackson or the Court of Appeals will issue a stay of the order requiring McGahn to testify. In fact, there are good reasons why a court wouldnt do so in this case. McGahn has already said he will respect Judge Jacksons order and appear to testify if a stay isnt issued.

To make matters worse or better Judge Jacksons discussion of executive privilege is in the context of a normal legislative subpoena. Thats because this case began on August 7th, long before the House opened a formal impeachment proceeding.

While this has never been directly tested by a court, most legal scholars agree that there is no such thing as executive privilege in the context of an impeachment proceeding. When the House is investigating what it believes is impeachable conduct, the president cannot simply refuse to provide information that it doesnt want Congress to have. For obvious reasons, it cant be left up to the target of an investigation to decide what information the investigators are allowed to see. As Judge Jackson observed, [T]he primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that presidents are not kings. Indeed they are not. They are subject to the laws and to congressional oversight just like everybody else.

In other words, not only are all of the presidents aides legally required to testify before Congress, since this is now an impeachment inquiry, they will not be able to refuse to answer questions based on executive privilege. They most certainly will not be allowed to refuse to answer questions based on the lazy version that has become so popular over the last few years even without an express claim of privilege by the White House. I cant disclose my personal conversations with the president. Its those personal conversations that are now at the very heart of the impeachment inquiry.

So Judge Jacksons opinion opens up whole new vistas of inquiry from what were previously unobtainable witnesses. No doubt many of them will refuse to testify no matter what. But some of them, like Don McGahn himself, may well decide to come in from the cold. Chairman Adam Schiff recently announced that the House Intelligence Committee would be wrapping up its part of the proceedings shortly after returning from the Thanksgiving recess. He might want to rethink that now.

Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer in San Diego, is an adviser to Republicans for the Rule of Law and amember of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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Trump impeachment: Judge's ruling may mean John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney have to testify - USA TODAY

The actor Karen Gillan makes her writer-director debut with a downbeat, interesting-but-flawed drama set in her hometown of Inverness, and shot on a tiny budget the kind of money they probably spent on almond milk lattes making the Avengers blockbusters in which she played cyborg Nebula.

Her character here is familiar from countless millennial indie movies: a funny, smart twentysomething who cant pull her life together, boozing too much, sleeping with the wrong guys, waking up still wearing her mascara. But a gravitational downwards pull tugs at the film, though I wasnt convinced it has the emotional depth for the dark places Gillan wants to take it.

As well as writing and directing, she plays underachieving 24-year-old Liusaidh (pronounced Lucy), who lives with her parents and works behind the cheese and ham counter at the local supermarket. The film begins with a Trainspotting-ish drunken rant by Liusaidh about the shitness of Inverness; later she tells a guy that she drinks to make her job bearable. You cant really conjure up the energy to resent it through a hangover.

But Gillans film isnt really about disaffection or despair. Liusaidhs nihilism is driven by grief after the suicide of her best friend, Alistair (sensitively played by Matthew Beard).

In flashbacks, we watch Liusaidh with thoughtful, introverted Alistair, a gay man in a hopeless relationship with an evangelical Christian. Back to the present, all unprocessed guilt and anger, she gets pissed and shags randoms in pub toilets. Towards the end there is a scene of sexual violence that Gillan doesnt give enough space to explore, adding to the films undernourished, unfinished feel.

Elsewhere, theres some fun banter between Liusaidh and a friend (Rachel Jackson), and these scenes have a relaxed and unselfconscious truthfulness to them. I cant help thinking Gillans superpower as a writer and performer might actually be comedy. Still, always a compelling screen presence, shes now a film-maker to watch.

The Partys Just Beginning is released in the UK on 1 December.

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The Party's Just Beginning review Karen Gillan's dark days in the depths of grief - The Guardian

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

TOWARD THE START of Females, a book-length essay of media criticism and gender theory, Andrea Long Chu admits that she doesnt mean what she says. The content of her claims, she suggests, matters less than the fact of saying them. Chu relates an incident from an academic event: someone asks what she means by ethics, and she replies, I think I mean commitment to a bit. To commit to a bit is to play it straight that is, to take it seriously, she continues. A bit may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real. This passage presents something like a how-to guide for reading Females, a book that, as its own publishers copy states, defends the indefensible. Chu articulates something less than an argument and more than an attitude. If what counts is doubling down on what you say, no matter if you really believe it in the end, then the point of saying it becomes convincing someone that you really feel how you feel. Your argument is a front for your tone. Females therefore doesnt so much present a theory about gender as an affective stance toward it, one derived from a politics but without political claims per se at least, not claims that, in the last instance, the author is really prepared to defend the truth of. [M]aybe Im just projecting, she ends one chapter, throwing a rhetorical stink bomb in the air and ducking for cover.

Considering the content of her claims, Chus willingness to back off not to commit at the last moment seems prudent. Her bit, after all, is contained in two theses: that everyone is female not in the everyday sense of that word and that everyone hates it. Chu intertwines these claims with a reading of a play by Valerie Solanas, a curious figure of the 1960s downtown scene. In 1965, Solanas began writing the SCUM Manifesto, a pamphlet arguing that every form of social misery war, work, disease derives from mens drive to disguise their social and biological inferiority. In 1968, she shot Andy Warhol, pled guilty to the attempted murder, and was incarcerated in a psychiatric institution for three years after a diagnosis for paranoid schizophrenia. Chus book upcycles an essay she once wrote on Solanass 1965 play Up Your Ass; in its second life, the essay becomes a tract about gender, sort of.

Chus two theses dont concern biological sex at all, she says. She means female in an idiosyncratic as she says, ontological sense. Being female means any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. [] To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. Chu is not the first person to describe this experience. In fact, she taps into a well-mined philosophical vein. In the Kantian tradition, Chu just describes heteronomy, the experience of being subject to anothers will. In the language of psychoanalysis significantly closer to Chus own territory, given her lexicon of desire she describes castration.

Jacques Lacans formulation that desire is always the desire of/for the Other [le dsir de lAutre] presents a version of the same thesis: to be a desiring subject means to be confronted with a social world that you inherit, and that shapes, constrains, and continually exceeds the desire you have toward it. In that regard, the six or so chapters at the center of Chus book on incels, sex, and pornography addiction are straightforwardly a series of footnotes to a Lacanian theory of castration: tops turn into bottoms, powerful men are always begging for sex, anyone who claims command of the phallus actually wants to get fucked, et cetera. From whichever perspective, becoming a subject means pursuing limited means of agency in the midst of vast external determination.

Chu isnt the first to understand this relationship between self and other as somehow violent, either. Following a certain materialist tradition from Du Bois, Fanon, Silvia Federici, or David Harvey you could just as easily describe the experience of [letting] someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense as a dispossession: a forfeiting of your own capacities and agency into someone elses control, whether exchanged by force or sale. Chus contribution to theorizing this experience of being hollowed out for anothers aims and agency therefore takes two forms. First, she redescribes the material experience of dispossession in the basically psychoanalytic terms of desire. Second, she transforms a series of psychoanalytic theses about becoming a subject among other subjects into what she calls an ontological, or an existential, condition the one and only structure of human consciousness.

Still, why call this experience not one of gender or sexuation per se being female, rather than any of its more familiar names? Because everyone already does, she answers. This is a head-scratcher: before galleys of Females began to circulate, nobody referred to this experience by a name that the author simultaneously acknowledges is a wildly tendentious definition of being female. Women hate being female as much as anybody else, she explains, but unlike everybody else, we find ourselves its select delegates. This argument takes, to put it mildly, some reconstruction to understand. Chu argues for a position like the following: by whatever historical accident, women have been, so to speak, synonymized with the experience of dispossession vel sim. The social dynamic of misogyny, a critical term in Chus lexicon, doesnt express the abjection of women so much as the abjection of abjection itself. This argument reverses a more common and more convincing order of explanation: instead of arguing that women experience social abjection because of the contempt that various institutions, practices, and social codes hold for them, Chu argues that the object of societys misogyny isnt women at all, but the experience itself of being hollowed out for anothers desire. Women are only its accidental, but universal, targets.

Whereas the various theorists alluded to above make claims about the social order, or the historical record of expropriation and exploitation, about processes of becoming a subject, or of the alienation constitutive to selling your labor-power, Chu makes a claim about what she calls an ontological, or an existential, condition. Being female, in her account, is a subject position outside and against politics; politics as such all politics rebels against that position. Redescribing this experience in terms of ontology rather than social relations removes both the experience and its possible causes and redresses from the order of history or social struggle. Its a just-so story about total antagonism. Indebted once more to a psychoanalytic tradition, Chu presents something like a drive theory of social relations, only darker, even nihilistic: if all politics positions itself against acting on anothers desire, then the point of any politics couldnt be a society founded on, say, mutual aid. Theres no collectivity here, no sense of social liberation. Really, theres no liberation, period, only a Hobbesian war of all against all, in different social disguises: feminism, mens rights. Its hard to reconcile any of these arguments with a politics in which life and the means for living it for whom, by whom, and at whose expense are actually at stake.

Sifting through someone elses political nihilism is one challenge; doing so when the writer admits she isnt speaking in good faith is another. Chus book is littered with indefensible syntagms, sentences designed for maximum shock value. Females masterminded the Atlantic slave trade, she writes in her preface. Given her commitment to arguing that everyone is female, hers is a tautologically true sentence but one that refuses in advance an encounter with the arguments of critical race scholars, including Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, and others, about gender and sex as both objects of dispossession and imposition through the world-historical cataclysm of chattel slavery. (Chu stages a late encounter with C. Riley Snortons argument that the distinction between biological females and the social category of women emerged in order to allow Black women to be the objects of biological study without receiving the benefits of legal personhood. Chu concludes that in this sense, a female has always been less than a person. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand: Chu has already insisted that she doesnt mean female as a category of biological sex at all; her arguments are categorically irreconcilable with Snortons.) Chus flippant sentences dismiss any conceptual encounter with the actual consequences of what shes saying in this case, its implications for racialized gender, a target and device of state-sponsored and extralegal violence on a mass scale well into the present. Then again, maybe shes just doing a bit: the books dodge of last, and every, resort.

Whether or not she believes them, Chus initial theses lead her into a series of chapters in which she theorizes, among other things, gender transition according to the recuperated principles of her personally curated second-wave feminism. Chu quotes her icon Solanas on Candy Darling (19441974), an actor and trans woman associated with Warhols Factory scene: [A] perfect victim of male suppression. (Chu says the epithet was spoken admiringly; its hard to see how.) Females inclines toward this view, with a twist. Trans women come across as the dupes of patriarchal gender norms, consuming and reproducing the stereotyped and anti-feminist images of the beauty industry. In that mode, Chu describes the YouTube makeup artist Gigi Gorgeous as in the most technical sense of this phrase, a dumb blonde. She only recuperates this, frankly, sexist jeer by universalizing its principle: From the perspective of gender, then, were all dumb blondes. Trading on an alt-right lexicon borrowed from The Matrix, she refers to hormone therapy as plugging [] back into the simulation. The charge that gender transition reinforces sexist stereotypes and retrograde gender norms is an old accusation; it doesnt get more convincing when the person saying it happens to be trans herself. Chu updates this anti-trans feminism by generalizing its theses: she agrees with the accusation that transition sustains the objectification of women, and submits that theres no way out, for trans people or anybody else.

Females regurgitates the anti-trans ethics of earlier decades including the notorious second-wave tendency to refuse any acknowledgment of the subjectivity of trans men blended together with its own particular political fatalism: transitioning is politically bad, Chu argues, and so is every other gendered disposition. This conclusion follows from Chus attempt to turn a Lacanian theory of sexuality into an ultimately nihilistic drive theory of social relations. For all the dubious uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the medicalization of transsexuality, [1] Chus rendition of this theory offers significantly fewer conceptual resources for thinking about gender transition with respect to agency, autonomy, or the renegotation of gender and sexual relations. Oren Gozlan, for instance, argues that Lacans captivating concept of sinthome points to a different route out of endless suffering. [2] The Lacanian sinthome sutures together the spheres of real, symbolic, and imaginary the world as it is in itself, the discursive representation of that world, and its conceptual and fantastical representation in thought and identification. For Gozlan, along with Patricia Gherovici and Susan Stryker, the sinthome offers a conceptual model for gender transition, a rebirthing of the self that holds the threads of the real, symbolic and imaginary. [] It is a transition that accepts failure as inevitable and is willing to live creatively with the between zone the interval between the fantasy of a complete and satisfactory identification and the selfs acknowledgment of its own lack in the face of that fantasy.

None of this complex acknowledgment of the creative potential of the subject or the mourning of a fantasy survives into Chus rendition of castration as the one and only structure of human consciousness. Theres just inevitable failure, and the taunts that follow it. Chus signature conceptual moves eventually become pretty clear: she subscribes to the dubious theses of so-called radical feminism the anti-trans theorist Janice Raymond and the anti-sex work feminist Catharine MacKinnon appear in Females with approving citations so long as she can transform its formulations into a description of a universal gendered disposition; and she happily throws trans women under the bus, demonstrating her neutrality by including herself as the object of her own contempt.

Its not like there arent other ways to think about transition and transsexuality. There are. I could start listing items off a bibliography say, Snortons Black on Both Sides, or Strykers introduction to the recently released diaries of Lou Sullivan, or Gayle Salamons Assuming a Body. I could go on; by the time you closed the tab I wouldnt be done. Its not clear what Females achieves in the warmed-over theoretical truisms of a prior cultural moment, beyond the projection that it promises, or a scandalized reaction to the comedic bit. And the problem with the bit the problem for comedy in general, a genre that Chu more than once expresses an affinity for is that its theses have conceptual consequences and social implications, whether or not, in the last instance, Chu really means what she says. However tangentially, Females addresses political problems with significant stakes: bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, gender liberation, sexual violence. In the face of those struggles, maybe it makes somebody a killjoy to hate feeling like theyre being fucked with. But so what? Instead of the carte blanche of the bit, we could opt to commit to the concepts that we mobilize, and to being accountable to their consequences.

Kay Gabriel is a poet, essayist, and PhD candidate at Princeton University.

[1] Witness, for instance, Catherine Millots Horsexe (1991), which argues that trans people have a clinically psychotic relationship to subjectivity.

[2] Gozlan, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (New York: Routledge, 2015)

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The Limits of the Bit - lareviewofbooks

We are over-policing black culture but were also oversensitive about the knife-crime debate.

Vue announced yesterday that Andrew Onwubolus film, Blue Story, will return to its cinemas. The film is about two young friends who become rivals in a postcode street war. It was initially pulled by Vue following a mass brawl at its StarCity cinema in Birmingham on Saturday involving up to 100 teenagers.

Vue said the decision to pull the film was taken following over 25 significant incidents within the first 24 hours of the films release across its 60 sites. The film was also pulled by Showcase Cinemas, another national chain, shortly after Vues announcement.

Vues initial decision attracted a justified backlash. An open letter signed by BAME campaigners said it was disproportionate to sanction the film for an incident that had no relation to [it]. Some reports suggest that most cinemagoers were queuing to see Frozen 2 rather than Blue Story it is unknown whether any of those involved have actually seen Blue Story.

Kehinde Andrews writes in the Guardian that the controversy around the film occurs in the context of a wider clampdown on black culture. Vue denies that the decision was taken solely in light of the incident in Birmingham and also says it was categorically not related to race. But Andrews concern is surely justified when you consider the current moral panic over drill music. Last year, the Metropolitan Police issued Criminal Behaviour Orders against a drill collective called 1011 to prevent them from making violent music. Police chiefs even suggested that anti-terror laws could be used to convict rappers who are identified in what they call gang-related music videos.

Alongside the over-policing of culture, the risk of anti-black bias in policing serious crime is real. Consider the doctrine of joint enterprise. This is a legal doctrine that allows anyone to be convicted of a serious crime in which they encourage or assist the principal offender. In cases of so-called gang violence, this means that very large groups of young people can end up in the dock for a crime committed by just one person. The police often target large networks of young black men because of an ill-defined connection to a crime, based on an alleged gang affiliation, even when such an affiliation is tenuous. Consider the murder of Abdul Hafidah in 2016. Only one person committed the murder, but 11 people were jailed because of the joint-enterprise principle.

The Blue Story ban is complex, however. There are real issues around the over-policing of black culture and the law around serious violence does arguably overreach. But there is another story here, which is the violence itself. The brawl has largely been forgotten in the response to the Blue Story ban.

We know very little about what triggered the mass brawl in Birmingham. Images of those involved in the fight emerged on social media, showing a large group of Asian boys, one of whom was brandishing a long machete. None of them looked over the age of 17. Some footage has emerged of the incident but it is difficult to interpret. Despite the apparent unknowns, of which there are many, we do know that a large gang of teenagers engaged in a brawl involving weapons. Five people were arrested and seven police officers are injured.

Questions around the policing of black culture and bias in the criminal-justice system should not prevent us from discussing the very real and serious issues which persist around youth violence. Appalling, nihilistic violence among young people is still a major problem.

In October, footage emerged of an attack in Maidstone following a concert by the rapper, MoStack. Twenty-one-year-old Andre Bent was fatally stabbed following a brawl outside the gig. The person who filmed the footage can be heard laughing as the attack goes on. By November, the number of knife murders in London had reached 130 in a year an 11-year high.

It was wrong to pull Blue Story. It was wrong even to assume that it was fueling violence in the first place. No film, song or artwork is ever responsible for violent crime. But we also cannot afford to avoid discussion of the nihilism that is driving so much youth violence a discussion that many people are also trying to shut down.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His new book Human Rights Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, is published by Zero Books. Order it here.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Why it was wrong to ban Blue Story - Spiked

What do you want to hear when everything is apocalyptic and embarrassing, ridiculous and cruel?

Since the 2016 election, more people than ever are talking about things I care about. And yet it all falls just short of what Im desperate to hear. So much explicitly political work comes close, but it doesnt land the way Id hoped or strikes a self-congratulatory note that feels premature in the wake of continuous bad news.

Lindy Wests new essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, could have veered into that territory. Wests one of the High Priestesses of the 2010s Very Online cohort, an early cornerstone of website Jezebel and a once-ubiquitous Tweeter who has gone on to be an instantly recognizable voice in a liberal commentariat. But even if the ground she covers is well-worn, both by herself and by others, Wests voice remains vital. Her collection is fresh and engaging, never remaining at a self-righteous distance from the absolute mess were all living through.

The opening essay is adapted from her 2017 column for the New York Times titled Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. Im a Witch and Im Hunting You, and from there she writes about climate change, Adam Sandler, feminism and the experience of adapting her 2016 memoir Shrill into a Hulushow. In the fantastically titled essay Ted Bundy was Not CharmingAre You High?, West picks apart societys willingness to let men, including those who literally murder scores of women, be likable while women only get the chance to be likable if they are willing to contort themselves around the many demands of patriarchy. In A Giant Douche Is a Good Thing if Youre a Giant, she uses South Park to explore the toxicity of nihilism and the bankrupt idea that believing in nothing somehow makes it okay to punch down. In The World is Good and Worth Fighting For, which discusses the Pacific Northwest and the need to address climate change, she notes that in her own lifetime the summer snow that once topped the mountains on the horizon is goneone of those heartbreaking realizations that identifies how the world around us is already changing.

In a time when its easier than ever to find pro-choice, pro-environmentalism, pro-labor messaging anywhere from presidential candidates platforms to Instagram, what makes West different? What sets her apart when the causes shes long championed have hit the mainstream? The reality is that West helped shape our current discourse; even though shes off Twitter, her voice is so interwoven with the way we talk on the platform that its easy to forget shes not marinating in it all day.

Wests writing is spot-on not just in politics, but in style. She can be hyperbolic yet exactingable to craft a long sentence into a fillet knife of an insult. But shes just as likely to dispense a single Cool! or Great! at the end of a paragraph detailing one of the many horrors taking place around us and those perpetrating them. She punches up with such dismissiveness of her targets self-importance that reading her work is as cathartic as a conversation with your wittiest friend after a couple glasses of wine.

But heres the essential piece of the puzzle: West does not let herself be swept away by her own rhetoric. Shes adamant that things must change, not just the people in power and the structures which support them, but in culture, media and how we think about how we got here. And shes just as quick to puncture any delusions about the power of words alone; in an essay on her memoir-turned-show Shrill, she writes, Yes, Im a witch and Im hunting you, and so on, but catching you doesnt liberate fat people any more than trapping one fox makes chickens immortal. In a time full of opportunistic retweet-baiting Lets show the President what we really think, overblown fandom directed at career public officials and optimism about how art will save us all, Wests unwillingness to feed any mythos about the power of words alone in the face of fascism is a glimpse of reality.

Its a bleak reality, but its reality, nonetheless.

You can make the case that West, who has long been targeted by online trolls and disparaged because of her fat and feminist activism, will always be preaching to the choir. This collection doesnt change that; she comes down hard on the inherent immorality of conservatism, for example, and even though shes willing to cut Adam Sandlera bit of slack, few others she sets her sights on get the same treatment. But Wests not out to win over the other side. Instead, shes hammering a stake into the cultural and political landscape.

Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.

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Lindy West Reminds Us Why We're Glad The Witches Are Coming - Paste Magazine

Tom Scott, otherwise known as Avantdale Bowling Club, has leaked his collaboration with producer choicevaughan, shortly after winning album of the year at the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards.

Avantdale Bowling Clubs first, eponymous album propelled Auckland-based rapper Tom Scott to new heights. After working in groups Home Brew and Average Rap Band earlier in his career, Avantdale Bowling Club was a personal project for Scott. He was acclaimed by critics and the public alike.

The next Tom Scott album, Deuce, could therefore be expected to attract a lot of attention. A collaboration with producer choicevaughan, Deuce brought together Scott and a range of Auckland artists for a six-track record about life in Auckland.

The album was scheduled for release next Friday. But yesterday, Scott chose to leak it, posting a link to a full and free download on social media.

See also:

The NZ Music Awards were pure chaos and an extremely good time

Tom of Avantdale: If youre worried about pissing people off, your careers done

Scott is comfortable with causing a little controversy. Earlier in the month, he used his Album of the Year acceptance speech to tell prime minister Jacinda Ardern to visit Ihumtao. Yesterday, he posted private messages hed exchanged with Ardern regarding armed police forces. On Deuce, he continues his battle for land rights: Fuck Paula Bennett and her philosophy / the countrys colonised, needs a colonoscopy.

Artists including Scott, SWIDTs INF, and Melodownz made a six-track collaborative record that spoke to the political and economical ills affecting local artists.

The leakp0-[;/bfgrtv45cde3 is apparently because of a release clash with Deuce-contributing artist Melodownz. Melodownzs label, Def Jam/Sniffers, is having a launch party for his single release No Mercy next Saturday. Deuce was slated for release next Friday.

The Spinoff understands that Sniffers asked Scott and choicevaughan to postpone Deuces release until next year. Instead, Scott placed a link to a WeTransfer download on his Instagram page, which contained the full six-track album. In an Instagram post, Scott explained this choice: I need to start this next decade free of this thing.

The songs on Deuce will not be on any forthcoming Avantdale Bowling Club albums, and Scott has described the album as both lazy and no magnum opus. He wrote the songs for the working folk I see everyday.

Listening through the album, its clear the project has been a long time in the making. Beyond, a track which veers between nihilism and calling listeners to action, contains references that could date the album back a couple of years. To Live and Die in Ad, the collaboration with Melodownz, is explicitly Avondale-based, and speaks to a passion for the suburb that has burned inside Scott since the beginning of his musical career.

Choicevaughan produced the entire album and was not expecting the leak. He has placed the album on his Bandcamp account without the song featuring Melodownz (To Live and Die in Ad) as a pay-what-you-want download.

The Spinoff approached both Scott and Sniffers representatives for comment, but all declined.

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The Spinoff Weekly compiles the best stories of the week an essential guide to modern life in New Zealand, emailed out on Monday evenings.

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Tom Scott just leaked his own album on WeTransfer - The Spinoff

Nihilism, (from Latin nihil, nothing), originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II. The term was famously used by Friedrich Nietzsche to describe the disintegration of traditional morality in Western society. In the 20th century, nihilism encompassed a variety of philosophical and aesthetic stances that, in one sense or another, denied the existence of genuine moral truths or values, rejected the possibility of knowledge or communication, and asserted the ultimate meaninglessness or purposelessness of life or of the universe.

The term is an old one, applied to certain heretics in the Middle Ages. In Russian literature, nihilism was probably first used by N.I. Nadezhdin, in an 1829 article in the Messenger of Europe, in which he applied it to Aleksandr Pushkin. Nadezhdin, as did V.V. Bervi in 1858, equated nihilism with skepticism. Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, a well-known conservative journalist who interpreted nihilism as synonymous with revolution, presented it as a social menace because of its negation of all moral principles.

It was Ivan Turgenev, in his celebrated novel Fathers and Sons (1862), who popularized the term through the figure of Bazarov the nihilist. Eventually, the nihilists of the 1860s and 70s came to be regarded as disheveled, untidy, unruly, ragged men who rebelled against tradition and social order. The philosophy of nihilism then began to be associated erroneously with the regicide of Alexander II (1881) and the political terror that was employed by those active at the time in clandestine organizations opposed to absolutism.

If to the conservative elements the nihilists were the curse of the time, to the liberals such as N.G. Chernyshevsky they represented a mere transitory factor in the development of national thoughta stage in the struggle for individual freedomand a true spirit of the rebellious young generation. In his novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), Chernyshevsky endeavoured to detect positive aspects in the nihilist philosophy. Similarly, in his Memoirs, Prince Peter Kropotkin, the leading Russian anarchist, defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom.

Fundamentally, 19th-century nihilism represented a philosophy of negation of all forms of aestheticism; it advocated utilitarianism and scientific rationalism. Classical philosophical systems were rejected entirely. Nihilism represented a crude form of positivism and materialism, a revolt against the established social order; it negated all authority exercised by the state, by the church, or by the family. It based its belief on nothing but scientific truth; science would be the solution of all social problems. All evils, nihilists believed, derived from a single sourceignorancewhich science alone would overcome.

The thinking of 19th-century nihilists was profoundly influenced by philosophers, scientists, and historians such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Charles Darwin, Henry Buckle, and Herbert Spencer. Since nihilists denied the duality of human beings as a combination of body and soul, of spiritual and material substance, they came into violent conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. Since nihilists questioned the doctrine of the divine right of kings, they came into similar conflict with secular authorities. Since they scorned all social bonds and family authority, the conflict between parents and children became equally immanent, and it is this theme that is best reflected in Turgenevs novel.

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nihilism | Definition & History | Britannica