Category Archives: Nihilism

The last few decades have not been good ones for those of us who believe in the rule of law, who subscribe to our countrys proudest boast, that ours is a government of laws, and not men (or persons).

What this means is that we are governed not by arbitrary political power, but that our republic is committed to the values that endure from the founding generation. These core values include an appreciation that there can be no order without law, no law without morality, and, indeed, that there can be no morality without religion. These traditional views have been largely abandoned by our legal and political elites on the left, a trend that Dukes Dean Paul Carrington characterized as legal nihilism, the belief that law doesnt matter and thats its simply all about politics.

Weve seen enough of this in practice to persuade some supporters of President Trump that a nihilistic and lawless legal system, in the person of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, might overturn of the will of the people expressed in President Trumps election. Mueller is a good friend of the dismissed FBI Director, James Comey, and has staffed his team with a group of donors to Democratic candidates.

Traditional views of the rule of law have been largely abandoned by our legal and political elites on the left, a trend that has been characterized as legal nihilism, the belief that law doesnt matter and thats its simply all about politics.

I am actually encouraged by Muellers appointment, however. I think hes going to get to the bottom of things quickly, and I think hell find that theres nothing there. And thats the best and cleanest way to dispose of a false issue.

First, Mueller is a person of the highest integrity, and I can speak to that because I know something about the law firm from which he and many of those he hired came. This is the firm now known as Wilmer, Hale once known as Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering. I worked for two years at that firm, and I have never been surrounded by more brilliant and principled individuals. There were more Democrats than Republicans at the firm, but unlike the academy, there was a diversity of political views, and there was a commitment to the law itself that was, I think, the real thing.

One of the most zealous former Special Prosecutors, Ken Starr (scourge of Bill Clinton) has expressed his trust in Mueller and the team he has assembled, and that means a lot to me (I have long known and respected Judge Starr, and have had the pleasure of working with him).

Second, I think Mueller will find that, as President Trump claims, he never attempted to obstruct justice, and, indeed, never attempted to stop such an investigation. There is no denying that Trump expressed his hope to Comey that Trumps fired aide, General Michael Flynn, would not be hurt by such an investigation, but Trump apparently gave no direct orders to cease investigating Flynn, and, to the contrary, even Comey admitted that Trump expressed his wish that if any of his satellites apparently referring to those persons who were connected to his campaign had colluded with the Russians, he, Trump, wanted to have that revealed.

To obstruct justice in this context would require two things, as the lawyers call them, actus reus and mens rea. The first means evidence of a criminal act and the second refers to the intention to commit it. If Trump is telling the truth, neither occurred here the investigation was never stopped, and Trump never sought to stop it. Last year the Supreme Court unanimously held that former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was not corrupt because he never ordered his subordinates to aid a donor. What Trump did was so much more benign that that. From what evidence weve seen, Flynn had not done anything out of line with the Russians, and if thats so there was neither an actus reus (wrongful act) nor a mens res (intentional wrong) from which one might infer an obstruction of justice.

If Mueller is an honest man, this is the conclusion he will have to reach, and he will, when he makes his report, have to exonerate the president. And since itll be easy to examine the evidence, we should expect the issue to disappear before very long. In that case, the president will emerge stronger, not weaker, from the investigation. That would be a defeat for the legal nihilists, and a pleasant surprise and a reassurance that the rule of law is returning to this country.

Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor Emeritus at Northwesterns Pritzker School of Law and the author of Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law.

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Can Robert Mueller be trusted? - Fox News

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He is the loudest rallying cry in the world that its time for us to do better and get to work

The 2016 election was a slow-motion nightmare, the kind that gives you sleep paralysis, like you're awake and have to scream to survive but your mouth is stitched shut as the vague outlines of men set your house on fire. It was a year of destruction. All those nice little lies it's so easy to tell ourselves about politics, about how politeness is a virtue and facts beat muscle, were incinerated.

It's a nightmare that's hard to wake up from, so total was its trauma and ability to crush resolve. This is partially because President Trump refuses to shut up about his win, a win he never planned for. It's also because the actions of his White House are so utterly corrupt and incompetent and depraved that they don't even feel real.

Navigating our political landscape feels like we went for a walk in the woods and fell down a hole and landed in an America where the sun is going out. It is so surreal that it's tempting to regard it as fantasy, as something that has to end fantastically, something that can be undone with a magical reset button that sends Donald Trump back to a version of 2014 in which Bill O'Reilly voluntarily retires from Fox News and hands Trump his show and we can go back to our normal lives oh god, for a road back home to our normal lives.

I was on the road for most of 2016 covering the election, and only now is any perspective arising. When I attended the fringe right-wing Constitution Party's convention in Utah, I got the feeling that the Christian conservative community I knew growing up was dying, which was advantageous to progressives. What I understated then was that these kinds of conservatives, governed by rules and traditions and "the old way is the best way," were being replaced by a more nihilist strain, a type of conservative who is not hopeful or politically engaged and wants to demolish government as we know it for entertainment, for spectacle. It's a movement whose motto is "fuck everything, who cares."

When I first started taking Trump seriously as a contender for the White House, I wrote about his birth via conservative talk radio by Michael Savage and Alex Jones, and Rush Limbaugh before them. These performers used the language of politics, the idea of politics, for entertainment. Rush Limbaugh was a comedian who needed to keep his listeners amused so they'd stick around after the commercial breaks. He didn't care about truth, because truth is dull and has the odor of schoolwork.

Then Limbaugh got too popular. People who weren't comedians took his talking points and used them to sculpt new characters, with more conviction. It was a racket and it made a lot of people rich, but it also created voters who didn't engage with their fluff entertainment critically and came to believe its stories through overexposure. It created voters who were used to having their prejudice and moral laziness validated and encouraged. It made it easy for Donald Trump, who founded his career on rackets, to mobilize these voters who had been poisoned for decades. Much easier than it would have been for the melting wax statues who made up the rest of the Republican Party to do so.

Trumps barreling plea to chaos gave me cause to worry at the 2016 conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. I fully expected riots, because Trump was soaking Republican anger in ethanol and so many Democrats were distraught about the primary defeat of Bernie Sanders. But no riots came. There was conservative vitriol and liberal despair, but I mostly saw an ocean of people from all walks of life who were unmoved by and unhappy with their party's candidate for president.

The week before the election, I drove cross-country with my brother to ask every single regular person we could find about the election, and how they felt about the country. What we found was not an uprising of white working-class malcontents who were foaming at the mouth for white nationalism, but a resounding and thorough sigh of "this sucks." There was no evidence whatsoever that Trump was actually popular. His ascendance was mostly a matter of mobilizing regular Republicans while Democrats were divided over their anointed wonky centrist.

In the months since that drive into purgatory, we've seen how Trump governs: like somebody who has no idea how government works and only cares about being the most famous guy on the news. And he's exactly as smart as a YouTube fast-food reviewer hopped up on trucker speed (if YouTube fast-food reviewers hated poor people), which means he can't finish a sentence without choking on his own tongue. He will be easy to defeat in 2020 if the left can stop trying to be polite and run a campaign of blood and guts against him.

The lesson I learned from covering this election, and from the early days of the presidency from hell, is not that America is any worse than it used to be. Its flaws are just more obvious and underlined. Ours has always been a nation founded on imperialism and massacre, and its people have always been prone to tribalism and hate. Trump is not cause to give up on this country. Trump is not cause to retreat into fantasy. Trump is the loudest rallying cry in the world that it's time for us to do better and get to work.

Building that future starts with an inspired American left that gives a real alternative to Trump yelling at us, a left that knows the material well-being of our citizens is imperiled and nobody feels secure, a left that makes our people an offer for something else, a left that promises a future and shows us how that future would be made manifest. That starts with talking to Americans, engaging them on their level, and selling them on real leftist principles instead of telling them how bad the alternative is. That starts with making young people believe in your candidate. That starts with admitting the train has been derailed but hasn't exploded.

Public political nihilism is everywhere because of this president, and it's pure bullshit. It's all about creating a morose, vaguely teenage, and powerless conception of your place in the world to escape moral culpability. It's a way out. It gives you narrative and closure. It makes your life a movie that you're watching from the nosebleeds.

But there's a way to change that. Whenever you want to say the world is ending, whenever you want to say the ship is sinking so let's crack open some Scotch and sing a funeral song, slap yourself in the face and tell the truth. If you engage with the news at all, the easiest thing to say in 2017 is that the world is ending. What's harder is admitting the scary truth: It's not, and there's work to do in it.

2017 Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved. MTV and all related titles and logos are trademarks of Viacom International Inc.

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Against Nihilism - MTV.com

President Trump tweeted on June 22 that he doesn't possess and didn't record tapes of his private conversations with former FBI director James B. Comey. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

This post has been updated with Trump's tweets.

President Trump acknowledged Thursday that he doesn't have any tapes of conversations with former FBI director James B. Comey, finally coming clean after playing a nearly six-week-long game.

And in the end, it wasn't just another bluff from Trump; it was another bluff that was called and that continued to chip away at Trump's honesty and credibility, for no discernible benefit.

The presidentlast month wielded those potential tapes as a very thinly veiled threat against Comey. And ever since then, Trump and the White House have decided to withhold the truth from the American people, refusing to answer a simple yes-or-no question about whether they had tapes.

But Newt Gingrich just gave away the game earlier Thursday, for all intents and purposes. In an interview with the Associated Press, the Trump-backing former House speaker basically admitted that Trump was bluffing to try to get inside Comey's head.

I think he was, in his way, instinctively trying to rattle Comey, Gingrich said. He's not a professional politician. He doesn't come back and think about Nixon and Watergate. His instinct is: 'I'll outbluff you.'

Apparently not being a professional politician is a license for dishonesty because that's what this was.

This isjust the latest in a long line of Trump bluffs. There was the time he was going to force the House to vote on its health-care bill, pass or fail,until he urged that it be delayedin the face of defeat. There was the time during the spending debate when the White House signaledthat Trump would allow a shutdown ifthe bill didn'tfund his border wall, only to back downa couple of days later. More examples abound.

But this has been a particularly brazen brand of bluffing from the president of the United States. Trump threatened a former top government official using a falsehood to try to get him to soften his testimony. It's not difficult to attach this to the lengthening list of things suggesting that Trump has tampered in the Russia investigation or even obstructed justice in doing so.

And for a president who has huge trouble with facts, it displays a striking disregard for the truth. No, Trump never said clearly that he had the tapes, but he has left that possibility out there for weeks, refusing to go on the record. Politics tends to be a rough-and-tumble business, but this is pretty unapologetic political nihilism, plain and simple.

It also has shelf life. I argued after one of Trump's previous bluffs that this kind of strategy may pay dividends in the business world and in the near term as president, but that as a politician it can and will catch up to you:

This kind of bluffing and having it called is undoubtedly something Trump is used to in the business and real estate worlds. But in the political world, you are negotiating with the same people over and over again. And the lesson of the first two big congressional debates is that when Trump says a bill must contain XYZ, he doesn't really mean it; it's just posturing. And that doesn't bode well for future Trump demands.

During the last government shutdown in 2013, when Republicans demanded defundingObamacare, they were at least willing to follow through on that demand. The government was closed for more than two weeks before the GOP relented. That served notice to Democrats that Republicans were at the very least willing to go all-in on their strategy and follow through that they weren't bluffing when they made such demands in order for a bill to pass. And that made their threats on other things seem more legitimate.

Trump has shown no such inclination to make it so people take his demands at face value. And given what's happened in the first two legislative debates, the next time he draws a line in the sand, you can bet lawmakers know how easily it can be raked over.

And the final point here is that Comey essentially called Trump's bluff. In blistering testimony that pointed to Trump's potential obstruction of justice two weeks ago, Comey didn't hold back at all. And at one point, he addressed the threat of tapes directly and suggested they would vindicate him if they did exist.

Former FBI director James B. Comey said he has seen President Trump's May 12 tweet that suggested there could be "tapes" of their private conversations, saying "Lordy, I hope there are tapes." (Reuters)

Ive seen the tweet about tapes, Comey said. Lordy, I hope there are tapes.

So Trump appears to have not only done something dishonest that undermines his credibility going forward, but it didn't even work.At least the charade is over.

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Trump's bluff on White House tapes wasn't just dishonest it was also a failure - Washington Post

Lots of movies are manipulative, but Edgar Wrights action-comedy Baby Driver defines the era by pampering its teenage audience.

Yet its most impressive moment invokes an obscure but cinematic icon: The hero nicknamed Baby (Ansel Elgort), an orphaned hipster who loves speed-racing and pop music and works for a crime boss as a getaway driver, loses the right lens of his sunglasses during a botched escape.

This odd, striking occurrence recalls Jean-Paul Belmondos sunglasses lens popping out at the crisis point of Breathless (1961), as did Warren Beattys in Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Jack Nicholsons in Chinatown (1974). No mere coincidence, the visual image connects Baby Driver to its cool-crime-movie lineage (film scholars can trace it back further to Sergei Eisensteins eyeglasses montage in Battleship Potemkin). Such insider references make Baby Driver a curious, coddling delight. Like his Monsters, Inc.quoting protagonist, the only thing Wright loves more than movies is pop music, and the films overflow of these pop references prove he is a more talented and artistic manipulator than Quentin Tarantino.

For those who have desperately waited for morality to return to movies after Tarantinos paradigm shift into nihilism, Baby Driver is almost it. But thats exactly how it pampers. Wrights evocation of cinematic history demonstrates the blinkered moral lookout that once defined the Baby Boomer generation and now Millennials. The fears and scant hopes we feel today are personified in Baby, a hero on the Aspergers scale, who shades himself from the world and plugs earbuds into his head, feeding the energy of pop songs into his alienated existence.

Wright is also a satirist, as seen in his previous films Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which similarly used pop references to define his characters moral choices. The opening car chase here is a spectacular display of sharp editing and speedway hijinks that flip Walter Hills existential action-noir The Driver (1978) into a dangerous daytime parade. After this hyper-kinetic showing-off, Wright mocks Tarantinos love of sadism by providing Baby with a sentimental motive: He falls for the orphaned waitress Debora (Lily James). Their love story is scored to Carla Thomass B-A-B-Y, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas Nowhere to Run, and Brenda Holloways Every Little Bit Hurts, each trenchantly expressing moments of romance, excitement, and fear.

While Baby Drivers crime plot is routine (riffing on The Usual Suspects), Wrights movie and song references should return audiences to the principles that post-Tarantino culture has lost. Or have we been Occupied, Antifad and Fergusoned so harshly that the young generation Wright addresses enjoys only the shock of violence and no longer cares about the cultural heritage based on those non-Tarantino virtues: connection, respect, obligation, civility, and love?

Wright makes several narrative explorations into honor-among-thieves, trust-between-lovers, and family-fidelity themes, but one stands out: Babys scariest criminal colleague is Bats (Jamie Foxx), a black ghetto fiend from the films Atlanta, Ga., setting. Its Foxxs best characterization since Any Given Sunday, and the Black Lives Matter mob should be analyzing it from now on.

Bats updates Foxxs title role in Django Unchained, QTs inauthentic Blaxploitation-movie fantasy. Perhaps because Wright is English and somewhat distanced from those self-gratifying cultural delusions that made QT think he was revealing essential American race tensions, Foxxs badass stereotype here is an undisguised, frighteningly modern miscreant. Bats doesnt seek justice, he just wants money and, secretly, he wants revenge for the social ills that, according to hip-hop ethos, have urged him toward heartlessness and crime. This is Hollywoods first postMichael Brown characterization, and, through this character, Wright pinpoints black ghetto resentments behind the slogan Black Lives Matter. Bats effectively sizes up his criminal rival (Jon Hamm, playing a former Wall Streeter) as you acquired the kind of debt that makes a white man blush.

Babys white-boy innocence is the opposite of the seething menace represented by Foxx, Hamm, and Jon Bernthals Griff, revealing the conspicuous, audience-pampering, and ethnic cop-outs of most Hollywood entertainment. Babys collection of personally recorded mix-tapes and scenes with his black foster father Joseph (CJ Jones) nod to Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool, geek blockbusters that also pampered fans who take pleasure in feigning their innocence. But when Wright lets loose with his British-tinged social satire, Baby Driver compares to Jared Hesss more genial crime comedy, Masterminds, and becomes the funniest and most incisive crime movie since Next Day Air. Wright goes beyond the comic-book and action-movie spoofs of QTs ilk.

Baby Driver might have equaled Breathless, Bonnie & Clyde, and Chinatown had Wright not peppered Babys crime spree with so many cute asides (or repeated several testimonies to the kids decency). His music cues and music-based sound design finally become glib and self-congratulatory (unlike the moving way a single pop song connected generations in the Mexican film Geros). Consider that the smart-ass title Baby Driver is the title of a 1970 Simon and Garfunkel ditty about family heritage that recites, My daddy was a prominent frogman / My mammas in the Naval reserve / When I was young I carried a gun / But I never got a chance to serve. And then comes its most telling line: I did not serve.

The reference to that songs Vietnam Draftera abstention (the choice of criminal rebellion over military service) establishes that baby-faced Elgort is a contemporary response to the anomie of Taxi Drivers Travis Bickle. Yet, thats it. None of Baby Drivers compacted pop-culture totems sparks consciousness like the Renaissance art that obsesses the teen hero in Eugne Greens Son of Joseph. Though not as meretricious as the culture remixing by that innocent amoral idiot Tarantino, Wright is essentially shallow, which is akin to what made Paul Simon a gifted yet minor artist.

I wanted Baby Driver to be great, but Wright doesnt risk tragedy as Breathless, Bonnie & Clyde, and Chinatown did. Instead, Baby Driver caters to the blinkered, solipsistic state of our present-day culture; its an Aspergers masterpiece.

*****

Sofia Coppola seems to have lost her pop-music smarts in her remake of The Beguiled. Without ironic pop-music commentary (as in her 2006 Marie Antoinette), this adaptation of Don Siegels 1971 drama (which starred Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page in a Civil Warera, Tennessee Williamsstyle gothic revenge drama) becomes another of Sofia Coppolas listless spoiled-girl forays. She evokes the same sorority-house haziness of her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides, once again pondering female sexual deviousness and navet: Nicole Kidman runs a boarding school of southern maidens (intense Kirsten Dunst, nubile Elle Fanning, and others) who take in a wounded Yankee (Colin Farrell).

Every character is subject to his or her own arousal and self-interest except Coppola, who here proves she isnt really a director but a blas hipster who extracts the drama out of everything. Pseudo-feminist Coppola even erases the black slave cook, forcefully portrayed in the original by Mae Mercer, whose presence made the microcosmic melodrama turn macro historically accurate and politically relevant. Instead, Coppola once again relies on her own social and gender status, pretending to observe the war between the sexes, with cannons booming in the distance. She ought to have known that her over-obvious point was already made better by the New York Dolls song Who Are the Mystery Girls?

*****

Michael Bay finally makes his Armageddon II, even though its titled Transformers: The Last Knight. Bay stretches the franchise backwardto medieval times, then forward to our imminent dystopian future when Optimus Prime gets brainwashed on the planet Cybertron and then returns to destroy Earth. In the opening Arthurian-travesty scenes, Bay creates actual thunderballs (maybe he should do a Bond next), then he entertains quasi-political allegory in the present-day scenes of Transformers hiding out in Alien No-Go zones of postIndustrial Revolution ghost towns.

Once again, the Transformer series verges on absurdity but thats less important than the unique big-screen spectacle of Bays pop-art and futurist filmmaking. In the 2013 Pain & Gain, Bay had seemed to be moving toward artistry of his own his love of mechanics, digital effects, and an ad-mans view of the world (including leggy, full-lipped, model-type heroines).

But The Last Knight seems plot-driven, not purely and ingeniously cinematic like the previous installments. He even employs a new little robot, in the mode of The Phantom Menaces BB-8, which rolls around the explosive, pyrotechnic chaos while humans and bigger bots enact endless repetitions of Road Runnerstyle slapstick violence, acrobatics, and painlessness in strangely empty cities. By trying to outdo James Cameron, Peter Jackson, and Christopher Nolan, Bay must have forgotten that he used to be the superior artist.

READ MORE: The Book of Henry: Bad Rhetoric from Violence-Justifying Liberals The Mummy: American Guilt and Masochism Wonder Woman: What Does a Wonder Womanchild Want?

Armond White is the author of New Position: The Prince Chronicles.

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In the Almost-Great Baby Driver, Hollywood Goes Asperger's - National Review

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How brainwashing works: I began my formal research in 1999, eight years after battling my way out of a secret, so-called Marxist-Leninist group whose leader controlled my life in its most intimate details. He determined what I wore: a version of the advice in John Molloys bestseller Dress for Success (1975), featuring tailored blue suits and floppy red silk bowties. More significantly, he decided when I could marry, and whether I might have children. The leaders decrees were passed down via memos typed on beige notepaper and hand-delivered to me by my contact. Because I was a low-ranked member, the leader remained unknown to me. I joined this Minneapolis-based group, called The Organization (The O) believing I was to contribute to their stated goal of social justice, a value instilled in me by my family.

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Julian Assange is a staunch supporter of free speech except when its about him: WikiLeakss young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a 12 million penalty if it were breached. [I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign, Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assanges impulse towards free speech, according to Andrew OHagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assanges failed autobiography, is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.

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Revisiting Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy at 60: His working class world is one in which people may well be living intuitively, habitually, verbally, drawing on myth, aphorism and ritual which makes them sound practically Lawrentian yet are also prone to cruelty and dirt of a gratuitously debasing coarseness. That Hoggart can be so even-handed towards a social class that simultaneously entices and repels him is a mark of his inseparability from the things he is writing about and the moral attitudes at their core.

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Emily Dickinsons hope.

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Matisses objects.

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Chuck Palahniuks coloring books.

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Essay of the Day:

If you didnt read The New Atlantiss blockbuster report on gender and sexuality this past fall, you should. Theyve published a follow-up on the problems of treating gender dysphoria by suppressing puberty. Here are a couple of snippets:

In 2016, the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group, partnered with the American Academy of Pediatrics the nations most prominent professional organization for pediatricians and the American College of Osteopathic Pediatricians to publish a guide for families of transgender children. The guide says that to prevent the consequences of going through a puberty that doesnt match a transgender childs identity, healthcare providers may use fully reversible medications that put puberty on hold. Delaying puberty, according to the guide, gives the child and family time to explore gender-related feelings and options.

Reading these various guidelines gives the impression that there is a well-established scientific consensus about the safety and efficacy of the use of puberty-blocking agents for children with gender dysphoria, and that parents of such children should think of it as a prudent and scientifically proven treatment option. But whether blocking puberty is the best way to treat gender dysphoria in children remains far from settled and it should be considered not a prudent option with demonstrated effectiveness but a drastic and experimental measure.

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The use of puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones for minors is a radical step that presumes a great deal of knowledge and competence on the part of the children assenting to these procedures, on the part of the parents or guardians being asked to give legal consent to them, and on the part of the scientists and physicians who are developing and administering them. We frequently hear from neuroscientists that the adolescent brain is too immature to make reliably rational decisions, but we are supposed to expect emotionally troubled adolescents to make decisions about their gender identities and about serious medical treatments at the age of 12 or younger. And we are supposed to expect parents and physicians to evaluate the risks and benefits of puberty suppression, despite the state of ignorance in the scientific community about the nature of gender identity.

The claim that puberty-blocking treatments are fully reversible makes them appear less drastic, but this claim is not supported by scientific evidence. It remains unknown whether or not ordinary sex-typical puberty will resume following the suppression of puberty in patients with gender dysphoria. It is also unclear whether children would be able to develop normal reproductive functions if they were to withdraw from puberty suppression. It likewise remains unclear whether bone and muscle development will proceed normally for these children if they resume puberty as their biological sex. Furthermore, we do not fully understand the psychological consequences of using puberty suppression to treat young people with gender dysphoria.

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Photo: Kites

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Poem: Susan Donnelly: Mrs. Maher's Iron

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Prufrock: How Brainwashing Works, Julian Assange's Nihilism, and Emily Dickinson's Hope - The Weekly Standard

The most violent of the violentest crimes we give life to If these Queensbridge kids dont like you We bring drama of the worst kind to enemies Your first time will be your last Earth memories Its only your own fault, I gave you fair warning: Beware Of killer kids who dont careShook Ones Pt. 1

He put his lifetime in between the papers lines, but not autobiographically, as most rappers of renown do. Instead, Albert Prodigy Johnson pioneered an extraordinary rap flow full of cold-eyed nihilism that presented death as the only meaningful framework for life.

Prodigywho passed away in Las Vegas this week at age 42was one of hip-hops Three Ps. Along with the late Sean Price (who died in his sleep at 43 in 2015) and Pharrell Williams, he was one of few rappers whose name could be filed down to a single letter. Butunlike Price, who needed his first name to accentuate himself, or Williams, who characterized his name with modifiers (like Skateboard P)Prodigy was simply P. And with good reason. Even as half of one of the genres most vaunted duos (along with Kejuan Havoc Muchita), P was a singular character in hip-hop, a rule-breaker and world-creator, weary and grounded even as he threatened to stab your brain with your nose bone.

The legacy of Prodigyand by extension Mobb Deepmay be a hip-hop case of Seinfeld is Unfunny; an act whose ethos has been so influential that looking back in an archival sense robs listeners of the first night chills that came in on those Queensbridge winds.

Its almost impossible to recapture the impact of Prodigy and Havoc, donned in Hennessy football jerseys, without realizing that less than a decade earlier, at a a time when professionally recorded rap was still novel and change was slow, Heavy D & The Boyz were dancing in Coca-Cola sweatshirts as a representation of an affront to the status quo. But Mobb Deep werent dancingthey were the stone-faced super-predators that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton would decry the next year: They are not just gangs of kids anymore, shed say at Keene State College in New Hampshire. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predatorsno conscience, no empathy.

I got you stuck off the realness; we be the Infamous. You heard of us: Official Queensbridge murderersShook Ones, Pt. II

Ps opening lines were things of depraved beauty. Take the start of Shook Ones, or the beginning of its more well-known sibling, Shook Ones, Pt. II, both quoted above. These are not threats, but declarations of self as fair warning from real n-ggas who aint got no feelings. These words represent what was important to him; this is how he wanted to introduce himself as a greeting: Hello, my name is P. I am only 19, but my mind is old. I represent death, violence, and the Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing development in North America. This is the start of your ending.

It was as if he was saying to other rappers what Bane said to Batman in The Dark Knight Rises: Oh, you think darkness is your ally? But your merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by itI didnt see the light until I was already a man. By then it was nothing to me but blinding. He was Nietzsche in construction Timberlands and an Army-certified suit; New Yorks harshest Darwinist.

Ps bleakness wasnt just depressed ghetto existentialism expressed via hyperbole, but something in his bloodliterally. His lifelong war against sickle cell disease made death a more pressing inevitability for him than most and rooted his worldview that only the strong survive, but also that the strong would also perish. (See: Infamous Prelude.) He would drink away his pain with Ease-Us Jesus (E&J brandy) or Dainy (thats St. Ides and Pina Colada champales in dunn language), but not without pouring some out for the fallen and sharing the bottle with the standing. In his early rhymes as part of Mobb Deepwhich were separate from his Michael Jackson dancing days, his stint as Jive Records artist LordT (The Golden Child), or his time as part of Poetical Prophetstheres nary a verse without the mention of the tightly wrought struggle between living and dying. Beyond simply detailing crime, Prodigy showcased depression, dysfunction, and self-medication.

You just complain cause you stressed N-gga, my pains in the flesh And through the years, that pain became my friend, sedated With morphine as a little kid I built a tolerance for drugs Addicted to the medicine You Can Never Feel My Pain

No one did more to present NYC housing projects as a world within in a world than Mobb Deepnot the Wu-Tang Clan, not M.O.P., not the Boot Camp Clik. And no one did as much to present the Queensbridge as a land of its own rules and morality as Hempstead, Long Islands Prodigy. Not even Nas with his clear-eyed insight, Tragedy with his hard-earned wisdom, nor Capone with his in-the-trenches war reportage ever came close depicting the defeatist maladjustment borne of poverty and closed quarters the way that P did. Not even Havoc, with his trife life and times and proximity to his partner, could capture the front lines of hell on Earth like Prodigy. There are no bars to depict thisone simply has to give over to the experience of listening to the H.N.I.C.s bleak worldview at length.

If there was joy to be found in Ps music, it was in his literary specificity and the way he viewed the world as an enemy and other rappers as nuisances. His appearance on Hell On Earths Nightttime Vultures exemplifies both strengths. He begins by awakening and recounting the prior nights violence: Bullets flew, I had to drag my man behind a wall/Left a wet trail, delivered these slugs like air mail/Directly at the cat that made my man blood spill. But then hes quickly on to stoically boasting about his rap prowess:

I kick that '98 shit for your ears to list N-gga P way ahead of his time, surpass kids Kickin' rhymes that's true lies Let me break 'em down to size, minimize they air time After this you never will go back to that which Sit back an' write half-ass shit At last, the official taking out the artificial Let me relieve you, replace that shit with some lethal Mobb, remember the name it's been along Yall n-gga's shook to death from the first fuckin song

Beef with other rappers seemed to be in Prodigys DNAfrom Keith Murray to 2Pac to Saigon and Jay-Z, to spats with Noreagea, Nas, and eventually Havoc, Prodigy spent his careers enmeshed in conflicts that often turned bloody and felt more dangerous than garden variety hip-hop squabbles. Though he often emerged from the losing end of these disputes, there remained a sense of unbeatability about him. Through it all, he stood tall at five feet and six inches, resolute in himself, if nothing else.

Battle-scarred and wizened, Prodigy lived long enough to see himself become a grand antihero of sorts. Following his deal with 50 Cents G Unit and a three-year prison bid, he came back to rap in 2011 more as a solo act than group member. He embraced his veteran status, co-authoring an autobiography and a prison-centered cookbook, and focused on his physical health in the way the Black men need to as they approach their 40seating better, working out, moving away from alcohol. He became a working rapper, leaning on his legacy without resting on his laurels or reliving his glory dayshe pushed forward and kept himself current by acknowledging ascendant talents, releasing songs with Troy Ave and Buffalos Conway. Right up to his death, he was workingcreating new music and touring.

At the same time, he could be a bit of a drunk uncle. He released a classic blog rant demanding homage (to be fair, shook would not be a colloquialism without Mobb Deep) and delved deeper into his arcane fascinations (his latest album, released this past January was titled Hegelian Dialectic (The Book of Revelation) as part of trilogy that was set to include The Book of Heroine and The Book of the Dead). His belief that the Illuminatia secret society that wanted his mind, soul, and his bodywas actually a thing became more pronounced.

In 2011, he appeared on Alex Joness Infowars, claiming that President Barack Obama was part of a bloodline that made him cousins with the Bushes and Dick Cheney. Whether he knows it or not, hes down with this whole conspiracy to rule the world, Prodigy asserted of Obama. Basically, hes a part of itto brainwash people and to kill people, genocide. Everything thats going on out there that is just so fantastic [that] you really dont want to believe it, Obama is down with it.

To his credit, he knew how he sounded: This [is] what I was promoting to people and they tried to, like, almost demonize me or say, Oh, Prodigys crazy. Whats wrong with this guy? Hes just ranting and he doesnt know what hes talking about. Hes a conspiracy theorist and he does this and he does that. Im like, Wow. Theres that many crazy people in this world, for real.

Spaghetti-head Mobb n-ggas is full-bred Fully-blown melanin tone I rock skeleton bone shirts and verses But thirst for worse beats So I can put more product out on the street Get respect and love all across the board We've been adored for keepin' it raw Nothin' less or more I score every time for sure While the rest of y'all n-ggas just nil Quiet Storm

It may be impossible to overstate Mobb Deeps importance to hip-hop as a whole, and to New York hip-hop in particular. Theyalong with the Wu-Tang Clan and Boot Camp Clik were responsible to defining what is now undeniably referred to as an East Coast sound: chopped dusty jazz and soul samples over big drums, accompanied by gritty and grimy rhymes about urban despair. Mobb Deep created headphone musicengrossing and encompassing analog mood music thats sonically distinct from pristine, dignified earbud sounds of today. Its the banner carried by acts like Roc Marciano, Ka, Westside Gunn, and Conwayand the reason why those artists exist at all.

As conversations about these things go, its become a shortcut to a point to describe Mobb Deep as a duo where Prodigy was the rappers rapper and Havoc was the producers producer, but the truth is more intertwined than that. Prodigy constructed bars of theretofore unforeseen formation that remain some of raps most iconic verses. And its true the Havocaided by the tutelage and assistance of A Tribe Called Quests Q-Tip on The Infamousbuilt incomparably dour grooves of head-nodding moodiness. But, when I was interviewing the group shortly after the release of The Infamous, two things stood out to me that I have thought about often in the 20-plus years since.

The first was when I commented on the groups vocabulary. They seemed to not know what I was talking about as I was telling them about the way they used wordsnot just slang, but terms like butter-soft leather upholstery, their internal rhymes, their novel ending couplets. I asked them if there was something in the water in Queensbridge. Havoc doubled-over cackling and P, sunken on a couch giggled and smirked to himself as they both repeated: He said something in the water

Theres no replacement for Prodigy.

At that early stage, there was no narrative that said that P was the rapper of the group. He was undoubtedly the stronger and more gripping writer of the two, but Havoc wasnt just there for dressing. Especially on the first two Mobb Deep albums, he more than holds his own.

The other thing I think about gives lie to the idea that Havoc was the lone architect of the groups sound. As we spoke during that interview, there wasnt any indication that the musical process was anything but a joint affair. At one point, P was talking about how they had to rework some samples due to clearance issues and he played an invisible keyboard in the air. It never left me how nimble and articulate his fingers wereit was the movement of someone familiar with keys, not a haphazard plunking of digits. Its something that makes sense in the face of Prodigys lineagehis mother was a member of the 60s girls group The Crystals, his father was part of a doo-wop act, his grandfather was a jazz musician. Not only was P the driving force between many of the Mobbs narrative ideas, he was instrumental in charting the course for their sound, and his solo albums revealed his ear was as crucial and influential as Q-Tips fifth Beatle role on The Infamous.

Mobb Deeptitans of rap with a decades-long career that few could have predictedwas a coming of two halves to create a whole. Its doubtful that either member would have reached the rarified heights that they had without the other, or had the confidence to place their big pre-release single as the next-to-last cut on their debut album. And its without question that Mobb Deepafter all of the internal and external dramais over. Theres no replacement for Prodigy.

For most acts that debuted in 1995, this would be a career retrospective with no thought of future endeavors. But Mobb Deep was just not any act. They may have peaked a handful of projects ago, but there was always the possibility of new greatness. Unlike rapping, production is not necessarily a young mans game and Havoc still has the potential to create transformative soundscapes. And Prodigy was in continued development as a writer; he still had interesting things to say. Its not a stretch to believe he could have further spearheaded into old-head chronicles, filled with rewarding revelations.

But, with his death, the books are closed on the Official Queensbridge Murderers. While they were here, they put their lifetimes in between the papers line and into our ears, minds, and souls. And rap was never the same.

See the article here:

Why Prodigy Was A Once-In-A-Generation Rapper - Complex

(Courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

(Courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

To begin with, the title for Transformers: The Last Knight is incorrect. There are several knights to be found in this movie, all of whom interact with other knights throughout the movie. There is nary a final knight to be found in this movie, making the title the warning sign for a wretched movie that sucks the energy right out of its audience.

The Last Knight is a dire experience. It has so little going for it that the asinine madness Sir Anthony Hopkins inserts out of his general lack of interest in the material is the best thing the movie has going for it. Everything else is garbage, detritus spawned by barely earned nostalgia and producers sucking those happy thoughts for all the money they are worth. And that's how a movie like this come to be, prepackaged as a big budget experience targeted at people who care little for the value of their entertainment. The old-fashioned way of describing them are rubes, making director Michael Bay, producer Steven Spielberg, and everyone else involved in creating this rubbish high-priced grifters.

None of this really matters though. The Last Knight will make hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more than a billion dollars, at the box office in the coming weeks. People will watch this despite protestations from many, many people over its lack of quality. This is the dark side of nihilism that doesn't reveal the optimism of nothingness once the absence of importance is accepted. What's being accepted here is bad cinema with too much regard devoted to viewers who take pride in their anti-intellectualism.

To be fair, movies don't need to be smart to have value; the Furious series is pretty great despite how legitimately dumb those films are. Yet they possess both passion and insanity, a desire to entertain their viewers and provide satisfaction for the money spent. The Last Knight does not entertain.

A movie supposedly about giant robots fighting one another somehow cannot provide entertainment, even on the fun side of the puerile level. This movie very much lingers on the dark side of juvenile, with a few bits of casual racism and Marky Mark Wahlberg comparing his female co-star Laura Haddock to a prostitute added in to serve as jokes. That it sexualizes pretty much all of its female characters, including a 14-year-old (played by Isabela Moner), is disturbing but expected for this series.

None of it actually provides an iota of entertainment. Nothing keeps viewers interested in the characters on screen or the fact that, sometimes, giant robots fight one another to the death.

It's about right that The Last Knight only shows its giant robots that morph into cool things fight on just a few occasions, holding franchise stalwart Optimus Prime in the background until the final act. Bay & co. instead toss in some elements that, if one squints hard enough, begin to resemble a story and allow Wahlberg and Haddock to serve as the centers of attention instead of the giant fighting robots. It would have helped if the screenwriters actually tried to keep their narrative logical and create contradicting plot points, or if the haphazard editing had stuck with a logical timeline. There's also some awful, hacky, and terribly worded expositional dialog to move things forward, because this movie doesn't feel the need to show what's happening or allow the actions to guide story.

The selling point for The Last Knight is the action sequences, or at least they would be if viewers could actually follow along with the poorly framed battles. At this point in the series it's tough to find a way to inject interest in seeing the same giant robots fight one another to the death. Bay and crew have effectively run out of ideas on how to make these sequences look cool, which is an odd thing to say considering this is a franchise about giant robots with guns, explosives and swords going at one another.

Bay, for all his faults as a filmmaker, used to create singular, well-orchestrated action sequences that at least came close to making what are otherwise bad movies at least a little fun.

Five films into the Transformers franchise and the thrill is gone for Bay.

Without any redeeming value aside from the scenery Hopkins consumes, The Last Knight is a slog. It leaves viewers drained from boredom and confusion over the preposterous state this film exists in, and the two-and-a-half hours of it to sift through. But, again, none of this really matters. A ton of people will watch this movie, more than enough to fund two more movies in the near future. Critics will rip them apart, too, as Bay, Spielberg and Paramount sleep comfortably in the piles of money they've conned out of audiences everywhere.

Rating: One and a half out of Five Stars

Target audience: Folks who've been roped in to the last few entries in the series.

Take the whole family? This isn't particularly great for the younger kids, with the heavy doses of violence and bad editing creating a less than comforting viewing experience.

Theater or Netflix? Just don't bother with it.

How good is the cast? Of a higher quality than expected, although none of them seem to care. It remains strange how many good actors sign up for these movies. Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Ken Watanabe, and Tony Hale are the highlights for film five. Add them to alumni like Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Alan Tudyk, and many, many others and there's the making for a really good movie. Even American hero Buzz Aldrin has shown up for one of these movies.

Watch this instead: Best bet is to find a copy of the animated Transformers movie from the '80s it has a surprisingly stellar cast, including Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Judd Nelson or watch the original animated series. That, or just find your old toys and make up a way cooler story on your own.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 149 minutes

Genre: Action

The rest is here:

'Transformers: The Last Knight' morphs into a clunker - WCTI12.com

Video rental stores are dead. Its sad from a nostalgic perspective, but it was inevitable once Netflix, Hulu, and other on-demand streaming services came out. In some parts of the country, you can still glimpse the desiccated husks of old Blockbusters, rustling with the whispers of dead business models.

Then, driving through Atlanta last week, I found the new flesh. There is one great video rental store out there, and its in Atlantas Little Five Points neighborhood. That store isVideodrome, and its fantastic.

You know its special from the title itself, referring to the David Cronenberg classic and one of James Woods best roles next to him playing a nihilism-fueled omnicidal parallel universe Batman. The logo of a head with tape reel glasses over the eyes is pretty strong, too. And once you walk in and see the shelves, you immediately understand how it still exists and why its great.

The new releases wall has some big blockbusters (which, after theyre taken off that shelf, get relegated to their own section with appropriate commercial reverence), but theyre surrounded by the obscure, indie, foreign and just plain weird. May 23rds new releases includeGet Out,Logan, andGreat Wall, alongside the all-female horror anthologyXX, a French drama about Tamil refugeesDheepan, and the new Blu-ray releases of the 1975 Yakuza filmCops Vs. Thugsand 1988 Frank Henenlotter comedy horrorBrain Damage.

Havent heard of those films? Neither have I, and thatsgreat. Its a taste of the full spectrum of art house and schlock that Videodrome offers. If you want the full meal, you need to dive into the different sections.

First, there are the Asian films. Its more than just Kung Fu movies (though there are plenty). There are Japanese, Chinese, and Korean comedies, dramas, and horror movies, both new and old. Do you want to binge on Kim Ki Duks classics? He has half a shelf. And dont worry, several-of-my-jaded-coworkers: Anime is in another section, along with kaiju films.

The international movies dont stop in Asia. Denmark, Finland, Holland, Ireland, Norway, and Serbia all have shelves. Yes, there are more Serbian films thanA Serbian Film, and theyre not all like that one.

If you have favorite directors, they probably have shelves, too. Carpenter, Cronenberg, Gondry, Jonze, Lynch, you name it. If they made something with a vision, especially if that vision was weird, theres a section in Videodrome.

Beyond the artsy, foreign, indie, and films made by filmmakers movies, theres the shlock. The delicious, delicious shlock. Videodrome lets you start atSweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song and work your waydown. You bet theres a Blaxploitation shelf. Its two shelves above the Ausploitation shelf. And its across from the really, really gross Italian horror movies. You can binge on Lucio Fulci and Dario Argentos films, and watch as manyZombi sequels as there are alternate titles on IMDB.

To enjoy this great wealth of esoteric cinema, you need to live in Atlanta or otherwise be staying there for a few days. Besides a small stack of DVDs and Blu-rays you can buy, Videodrome is rental-only. That means you pay a few dollars, take the video for a few days, then bring it back. Which seems like a really weird concept in 2017, but its the best way to find and enjoy new and obscure movies that youll never stumble upon with Netflix.

Videodrome is a marvel of weird movies of all stripes and from all ages. If you love foreign films, if you eat up obscure movies from the silent era to the 80s, if you have a favorite director who hasnt generated a billion dollars for his studio, or if you recognize the names Rich Evans, Diamanda Hagan, Brad Jones, or Kyle Kalgren. If you find yourself in Atlanta, you owe it to yourself to visit Videodrome.

Go here to read the rest:

Atlanta's Videodrome is the Last and Greatest Video Rental Store - Geek

Risk

a documentary film directed by Laura Poitras

About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitrass messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. This is not the film I thought I was making, she says. I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.

By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential electionfirst with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clintons nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clintons adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clintonelevated Assanges profile and his influence.

And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaigns ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.

In 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assanges four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradleynow ChelseaManning.

The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didnt know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a sources identity. Assanges goal was to hold powerstate power, corporate power, and powerful individualsaccountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this radical transparency. Mannings bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.

Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeakss young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a 12 million penalty if it were breached. [I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign, Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assanges impulse towards free speech, according to Andrew OHagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assanges failed autobiography, is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.

Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assanges own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an administrative error.

Most egregious, perhaps, was Assanges collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamirs access to the WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus. WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. Most people with principled stances dont survive for long, Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. Its not clear if hes talking about himself or others.

Then there is the matter of redaction. After the Manning cache came in, WikiLeaks partnered with a number of legacy newspapers, including The New York Times and The Guardian, to bring the material out into the world. While initially going along with those publications policies of removing identifying information that could put innocent people in harms way and excluding material that could not be verified, Assange soon balked. According to the Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges War on Secrecy, their 2011 postmortem of their contentious collaboration with Assange on the so-called Afghan war logsthe portion of the Manning leaks concerning the conflict in Afghanistanthe WikiLeaks founder was unmoved by entreaties to scrub the files of anything that could point to Afghan villagers who might have had any contact with American troops. He considered such editorial intervention to contaminate the evidence.

Well theyre informants. So, if they get killed, theyve got it coming to them. They deserve it, Leigh and Harding report Assange saying to a group of international journalists. And while Assange has denied making these comments, WikiLeaks released troves of material in which the names of Afghan civilians had not been redacted, an action that led Amnesty International, the Open Society Institute, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commissionto issue a joint rebuke. The group Reporters Without Borders also criticized WikiLeaks for its incredible irresponsibility in not removing the names. This was in 2010, not long after Poitras approached Assange about making a film.

Lack of redactionor of any real effort to separate disclosures of public importance from those that might simply put private citizens at riskcontinued to be a flashpoint for WikiLeaks, its supporters, and its critics. In July 2016, presumably when Poitras was still working on Risk, WikiLeaks dumped nearly 300,000 e-mails it claimed were from Turkeys ruling AKP party. Those files, it turned out, were not from AKP heavyweights but, rather, from ordinary people writing to the party, often with their personal information included.

Worse, WikiLeaks also posted links to a set of huge voter databases, including one with the names, addresses, and other contact information for nearly every woman in Turkey. It also apparently published the files of psychiatric patients, gay men, and rape victims in Saudi Arabia. Soon after that, WikiLeaks began leaking bundles of hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails, also full of personal information, including cell phone and credit card numbers, leading Wired magazine to declare that WikiLeaks Has Officially Lost the Moral High Ground.

Poitras doesnt say, but perhaps this is when she, too, began to take account of the contradictions that eventually turned her film away from hagiography toward something more nuanced. Though she intermittently interjects herself into the filmto relate a dream shes had about Assange; to say that he is brave; to say that she thinks he doesnt like her; to say that she doesnt trust himthis is primarily a film of scenes, episodic and nearly picaresque save for the unappealing vanity of its hero. (There is very little in the film about the work of WikiLeaks itself.)

Here is Julian, holed up in a supporters estate in the English countryside while under house arrest, getting his hair cut by a gaggle of supporters while watching a video of Japanese women in bikinis dancing. Here is Julian in a car with that other famous leaker, Daniel Ellsberg. Here is Julian instructing Sarah Harrison, his WikiLeaks colleague, to call Secretary Clinton at the State Department and tell her she needs to talk to Julian Assange. Here is Julian walking in the woods with one of his lawyers, certain that a bird in a nearby tree is actually a man with a camera. Here is Julian being interviewed, for no apparent reason, by the singer Lady Gaga:

Lady Gaga: Whats your favorite food?

Assange: Lets not pretend Im a normal person. I am obsessed with political struggle. Im not a normal person.

Lady Gaga: Tell me how you feel?

Assange: Why does it matter how I feel? Who gives a damn? I dont care how I feel.

Lady Gaga: Do you ever feel like just fucking crying?

Assange: No.

And here is Julian, in conversation with Harrison, who is also his girlfriend:

Assange: My profile didnt take off till the sex case. [It was] very high in media circles and intelligence circles, but it didnt really take off, as if I was a globally recognized household name, it wasnt till the sex case. So I was joking to one of our people, sex scandal every six months.

Harrison: That was me you were joking to. And I died a little bit inside.

Assange: Come on. Its a platform.

The sex case to which Assange is referring is the one that began in the summer of 2010 on a trip to Sweden. While there, Assange had sex with two young supporters a few days apart, both of whom said that what started out as consensual ended up as assault. Eventually, after numerous back-and-forths, the Swedish court issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, who was living in England, to compel him to return to Sweden for questioning. Assange refused, declaring that this was a honey pot trap orchestrated by the CIA to extradite him to the United States for publishing the Manning leaks.

After a short stay in a British jail, subsequent house arrest, and many appeals, Assange was ordered by the UK Supreme Court, in May 2012, to be returned to Sweden to answer the rape and assault charges. Assange, however, claiming that there was a secret warrant for his arrest in the United States (though the extradition treaty between Sweden and the US prohibits extradition for a political offense), had made other arrangements: he had applied for, and was granted, political asylum in Ecuador. Because the British government refused safe passage there, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Poitras was with Assange in an undisclosed location in London as the British high court in Parliament Square was issuing its final ruling. The camera was rolling and no one was speakingit was all sealed lips and pantomimeas Assange dyed his hair red and dressed in bikers leather in order to make a mad dash on a motorcycle across town to the embassy. (Theres a sorrowful moment when his mother, who, inexplicably, is in the room, too, writes I love you, honey, on a piece of notebook paper and hands it and a pen to her son and he waves her off.)

This past January, five years into Assanges self-imposed exile, he promised to finally leave the embassy and turn himself over to the Americans if President Obama were to grant clemency to Chelsea Manning, who had been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for giving documents to WikiLeaks. Obama did; Assange didnt. In May, the same month Manning left prison, Sweden dropped all charges against Assange. He remains in the embassy.

The sex case, as Assange called it, figures prominently in Risk. It serves to reveal his casual and sometimes noxious misogyny, and it is a foil for him to conflate the personal with the political, using the political to get out of answering to the personal, and the personal to claim that hes the victim here. Who is after you, Mr. Assange? Lady Gaga asks. Formally there are more than twelve United States intelligence organizations, Assange tells her, reeling off a list of acronyms. So basically a whole fucking bunch of people in America, she says, and then he mentions that the Australians, the British, and the Swedes are also pursuing him.

Whether this is true or not has long been a matter of dispute. The Swedes definitely wanted him to return to their country, and the British were eager for him to abide by the Swedish warrant, and he made no friends in the Obama administration. Following the Manning leaks in 2010, the attorney general, Eric Holder, made it clear that the Department of Justice, along with the Department of Defense, was investigating whether Assange could be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, though no warrant was ever issued publicly. Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, said that WikiLeakss release of the diplomatic cables was an attack on the international community [and] we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information. Still, Assanges self-exile in the embassy, which the United Nations condemned as an arbitrary detention, was predicated on his belief that the Americans were lying in wait, ready at any moment to haul him to the US, where his actions might land him in prison for a very long time, or even lead to his execution.

All this was well before Assange was accused of using WikiLeaks as a front for Russian agents working to undermine American democracy during the 2016 presidential election. And it was before candidate Trump declared his love for the website and then watched as Assange released a huge arsenal of CIA hacking tools into the public domain less than two months into Trumps presidency. This, in turn, prompted the new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who appeared to have no problem with WikiLeaks when it was sharing information detrimental to the Democrats, to declare WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service, and the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to prepare a warrant for Assanges arrest. If the Justice Department wasnt going after Assange before, it appears to be ready to do so now.

Despite Assanges vocal disdain for his former collaborators at The New York Times and The Guardian, his association with those journalists and their newspapers is probably what so far has kept him from being indicted and prosecuted in the United States. As Glenn Greenwald told the journalist Amy Goodman recently, Eric Holders Justice Department could not come up with a rationale to prosecute WikiLeaks that would not also implicate the news organizations with which it had worked; to do so, Greenwald said, would have been too much of a threat to press freedom, even for the Obama administration. The same cannot be said with confidence about the Trump White House, which perceives the Times, and national news organizations more generally, as adversaries. Yet if the Sessions Justice Department goes after Assange, it likely will be on the grounds that WikiLeaks is not real journalism.

This charge has dogged WikiLeaks from the start. For one thing, it doesnt employ reporters or have subscribers. For another, it publishes irregularly and, because it does not actively chase secrets but aggregates those that others supply, often has long gaps when it publishes nothing at all. Perhaps most confusing to some observers, WikiLeakss rudimentary website doesnt look anything like a New York Times or a Washington Post, even in those papers more recent digital incarnations.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that WikiLeaks publishes the information it receives much like those traditional news outlets. When it burst on the scene in 2010, it was embraced as a new kind of journalism, one capable not only of speaking truth to power, but of outsmarting power and its institutional gatekeepers. And the fact is, there is no consensus on what constitutes real journalism. As Adam Penenberg points out, The best we have comes from laws and proposed legislation which protect reporters from being forced to divulge confidential sources in court. In crafting those shield laws, legislators have had to grapple with the nebulousness of the profession.

The danger of carving off WikiLeaks from the rest of journalism, as the attorney general may attempt to do, is that ultimately it leaves all publications vulnerable to prosecution. Once an exception is made, a rule will be too, and the rule in this case will be that the government can determine what constitutes real journalism and what does not, and which publications, films, writers, editors, and filmmakers are protected under the First Amendment, and which are not.

This is where censorship begins. No matter what one thinks of Julian Assange personally, or of WikiLeakss reckless publication practices, like it or not, they have become the litmus test of our commitment to free speech. If the government successfully prosecutes WikiLeaks for publishing classified information, why not, then, the failed New York Times, as the president likes to call it, or any news organization or journalist? Its a slippery slope leading to a sheer cliff. That is the real risk being presented here, though Poitras doesnt directly address it.

Near the end of Risk, after Poitras has shown Assange a rough cut of the film, he tells her that he views it as a severe threat to my freedom and I must act accordingly. He doesnt say what he will do, but when the film was released this spring, Poitras was loudly criticized by Assanges supporters for changing it from the heros journey she debuted last year at Cannes to something more critical, complicated, and at best ambivalent about the man. Yet ambivalence is the most honest thing about the film. It is the emotion Assange often stirs up in those who support the WikiLeaks mission but are disturbed by its chief missionary.

This ambivalence, too, is what makes Risk such a different film from Citizen Four (2014), Poitrass intense, resolute, Oscar-winning documentary about Edward Snowden. While Snowden and Assange are often twinned in the press and in the public imagination, these films demonstrate how false that equivalence is. Snowden leaked classified NSA documents that he said showed rampant unconstitutional intrusions by the government into the private lives of innocent citizens, doing so through a careful process of vetting and selective publication by a circle of hand-picked journalists. He identified himself as the leaker and said he wanted to provoke a public debate about government spying and the right of privacy. Assange, by contrast, appears to have no interest in anyones privacy but his own and his sources. Private communications, personal information, intimate conversations are all fair game to him. He calls this nihilism freedom, and in so doing elevates it to a principle that gives him license to act without regard to consequences.

The mission Assange originally set out to accomplish, thoughproviding a safe way for whistleblowers to hold power accountablehas, in the past few years, eclipsed WikiLeaks itself. Almost every major newspaper, magazine, and website now has a way for leakers to upload secret information, most through an anonymous, online, open-source drop box called Secure Drop. Based on coding work done by the free speech advocate Aaron Swartz before his death and championed by the Freedom of the Press Foundationon whose board both Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden sit, and which is a conduit for donations to WikiLeaks among other organizationsSecure Drop gives leakers the option of choosing where to upload their material. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Forbes, and The Intercept, to name just a few, all have a way for people to pass secrets along to journalists.

It is not yet known why a National Security Agency contractor named Reality Leigh Winner didnt use a digital drop box when she leaked a classified NSA document to The Intercept in May outlining how Russian cyber spies hacked into American election software. Unlike Edward Snowden, who carefully covered his tracks before leaking his NSA cache to Glenn Greenwald (before Greenwald started The Intercept) and Laura Poitras (who filmed Snowdens statement of purpose, in which he identified himself as the leaker), Winner used a printer at work to copy the document, which she then mailed to The Intercept. What she and those at The Intercept who dealt with the document did not know, apparently, is that this government printer, like many printers, embeds all documents with small dots that reveal the serial number of the machine and the time the document was printed. After The Intercept contacted the NSA to verify the document, the FBI needed only a few days to find Winner and arrest her.

We will soon get to witness what the Trump administration does to those who leak classified information, and to those who publish it. WikiLeaks, apparently, will be providing the government with an assist. It is offering a $10,000 reward for the public exposure of the reporter whose ignorance or carelessness led the FBI to Reality Winners door. Such are the vagaries of radical transparency.

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The Nihilism of Julian Assange - The New York Review of Books

This review of ProdigysH.N.I.C. originally appearedin the November 2000 issue of SPIN. In the light of Prodigys passing, we are republishing it here.

On his 1994 debut,Illmatic, Nas painted New York Citys Queensbridge housing projects as a hard-knock hood as rough as any in the Bronx or Brooklyn. In his wake, QB natives like AZ, Nature, and, most potently, Mobb Deep came up perpetuating the mythology of The Bridge with stark rats-in-a-cage tales of project violence and petty thuggery. But Nas went the way of diamond-studded self-parody, leaving Mobb Deepwho always put guns before cheddarto keep their hometowns blood-stained legacy alive. No surprise then that on his solo debut, Mobb Deeps Prodigy consumes the fury and desperation of his environment and spits out the cold, concentrated ghetto the Mobb made infamous on 1996sHell on Earth.

As much a point of view than a place of origin, Mobb Deep/Prodigys Queensbridge is inhabited by killers with dry blood on their face who came out of the womb not giving a fuck, andH.N.I.C.s production (handled by the Alchemist, Rockwilder, Mobb Deeps Havoc, and others) is equally harshsteely, stark, infused with the rowdiness of a party you might leave with glass all in your nostrils. Prodigy fans should have a high tolerance for such gory details. Theyve been numbed by four Mobb Deep albums worth of guns and drugs, and like scores of post-Illmatic dramas,H.N.I.C. is the work of a thug shoving his steelmicrophone/pistoldown your throat. But where Nas was the kid whod seen just enough of the streets to dream of breaking free, P is the walking dead. Not even money matters. On You Can Never Feel My Pain, he attributes his nihilism to the permanent physical suffering caused by a lifelong battle with sickle-cell anemia, giving lines like Shoot me / Who gives a fuck, really? a harsh realism most reality rappers would kill (or be killed) for.H.N.I.C. is titillating; its rugged beats and brooding rhymes rival some of the best in the Deep canon, even if they dont expand the vocab. The dread is overwhelming. Nas Bridge was a place to survive and possibly escape. Prodigys is only a place to die.

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Review: Prodigy HNIC - SPIN