Category Archives: Nihilism

Social Media Finalized The Death Of The Internet June 2, 2017 A few years ago a working farm opened up near me. These are farms that are open to the public, but show you how that exotic class of human beings known as "farmers" actually make food and survive without Amazon Prime accounts. The farm came about because a farmer allowed school groups to witness the slaughter, breeding and care of animals. Then they wanted to see how the potatoes were planted. Now tours of the fields were added, including a visit to the manure pile, where tourists could genuflect and debase themselves in order to assert humility, which always pleases the crowd. Soon the tours became more valuable than the farm output. They came from the cities -- doctors, plumbers, lawyers, carpenters, architects -- looking for a way to school their children in a way of life that had passed into history, hoping to bestow "authenticity" to a life defined by conformity, products, political correctness and public relations. They wanted an escape from the transactional life of the city, and an insight instead into what life is like when results in reality matter more than what other people think. In this way, the needs of the herd overwhelmed the realistic nature of original human behavior. The farm became a stage, and soon a gift shop appeared, and then there were videos and public image adjustments. Reality was forgotten and replaced by the human, as happens with every homo sapiens endeavor when it is about to fail. Humans love posturing and pretending. For them, to act like a farmer is to be the real thing because that is what people in their social group react to. They have no concern for being accurate, only for having other people nod and acknowledge them as having achieved another milestone on the path to greatness. Social media is the same thing. No one can tell you are a dog on the internet; via social media, however, you can be whatever you want. Ignore that failed marriage, day job in a cubicle, and personal ineptitude. On the social media internet, you are whatever you can project. Starting in 2007, the internet permanently shifted to the mobile device consumer audience, which means that it plunged far below the 120 IQ point minimum required by the old internet. Before Eternal September, the internet was limited to those who had demonstrated competence. After that, the herd began coming in. With the rise of Google and Facebook, the herd dominated the internet. This merely showed to us the need for hierarchy and aristocracy: if left up to the Crowd, every human venture degenerates to the lowest common denominator, and whatever makes it exceptional is lost. Social media is democracy with no standards: whatever herd shows up, and whatever majority emerges from the midst of it, takes the day. It is the equivalent of the audience for a circus or tent revival deciding our future, and in the case of social media, they choose our path by excluding anything that is not popular. Following that pattern, social media selects lies over truth. It prefers what most people want to believe is true over what is real according to the best minds we have. It is the triumph of the herd in denying reality so that each member of the herd may pretend to be a king, hero, genius, artist or inventor. On the other hand, this means the rise of an underground within the internet: the sites that cannot be found by Google, will not show up in your news feed, and will be censored by Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram. The is the underground internet, and it is rising as the utility of the public internet plummets since it is now designed for and populated with the same people who watched a lot of daytime TV in the 1980s, like the poor, old, housewives, cube McJob slaves, mentally ill, physically broke, neurotic, intoxicated and lonely. Ten Types Of Modern Fool June 4, 2017 When you live in a dying time, the most common response is to into denial, which consists of ignoring the actual problem and finding some way to distract oneself instead. For example, heroin addicts routinely insist that their problem is too much clutter around the house, a speck in the face of the larger problem of heroin addiction that looms over them like an unseen predatory god. With complex problems, craftier and cannier evasions commence. That is: people find proxies for dealing with the problem, or substitutes, excuses, rationalizations and justifications. These are symbolic problems that they either can conquer or will persist whether conquered or not, making them the safest enemy (one against whom the knight cannot fail or prevail). Null proxies like this consist of 90% of the activity of a democratic state or troupe of monkeys in the wild. You will find the following non-answers to be happilly promoted by humans from every race, caste, sex, class, religion, political alignment and sexual orientation. We all know our civilization has fallen and we are living in a vile and evil time, and that the solution is to give up our arrogance which insists we have the lottery of being able to do pretty much whatever we want but also having to suffer others doing the same. These null proxies are used by people who will proclaim them as "the solution" and then, like a monkey who has found a bone, will use that answer to beat on all the other monkeys to force them into submission to the will of the original monkey. Any time you hear someone speaking in this way, you may be dealing with an idiot -- not always -- but you are certainly dealing with someone who has lied to themselves at such a fundamental level that they will never tell the truth again:

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American Nihilist Underground Society: Nihilism, Nihilists ...

Last year on these pages I wrote about an ageing man in Karachi who had travelled to Egypt to fight against the Israeli military during the 1967 Egypt-Israel war.

After the war (which had lasted just six days and saw the Israelis wiping out the Soviet-backed Egyptian forces), the man had travelled to Jordan where he joined Yasir Arafats Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). He was soon sent to a village on the Lebanon-Israel border to mount guerrilla attacks against Israeli border guards.

During the planning of one such attack, the PLO squad he was part of split when there arose a possibility that the attack might cause civilian casualties. He told me that the majority of the men in his squad were against killing civilians and refused to take part in the attack which was eventually aborted. The man returned to Pakistan and set up a tea stall on Karachis I.I. Chundrigar Road.

Disturbed, confused and angry youth are easy recruits for militant groups promising them an identity in return for total obedience to a charismatic leader

The reason I have briefly repeated this story here is to contextualise the mutation of the idea of modern Muslim militancy and/or how drastically it has changed in the last four decades or so.

Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, James Lutz, in his 2005 book Terrorism: Origins & Evolution, wrote that most European left-wing and Palestinian guerrilla groups, between the 1960s and late 1970s, largely avoided inflicting civilian casualties because they wanted the media and the people to sympathise with them.

This is not to suggest that civilian deaths were always entirely avoided; it is however true that many militant groups often suffered splits within their ranks on this issue. The most well-known split in this context (and regarding Muslim militancy) was the one between Yasir Arafat and Abu Nidal in the PLO in 1974. Arafat had decided to abandon armed militancy and chart a more political course. Nidal on the other hand not only wanted to continue pursuing militancy but wanted to intensify it even further. He formed the violent Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO) which, by the 1980s, had become a notorious mercenary outfit for various radical Arab regimes in Libya, Iraq and Syria.

Even the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan the forerunners of devastating Islamist outfits such as Al-Qaeda were conscious of receiving good press and public sympathy by avoiding civilian casualties. In spite of being heavily indoctrinated by CIA and Saudi-funded clerics in Afghanistan and Pakistan to embrace death as a religious duty, the mujahideen did not use suicide bombings, not even against Soviet forces.

The first-ever suicide bombing involving Muslim militants took place in Beirut in 1983 when a member of the Hezbollah drove a truck laden with explosives into a compound full of US military personnel. Yet, it was not until the 1990s, when so-called Islamic militants, many of who had never used violence against civilians during the Afghan insurgency, began to attack soft civilian targets in various Muslim-majority countries.

In his excellent 2004 BBC documentary, Power of Nightmares, film-maker Adam Curtis noted that those who fought in Afghanistan were made to believe (by their facilitators in the US and Saudi Arabia) that it was their religious war which downed a superpower in Kabul many such fighters returned to their home countries and tried to overthrow the existing governments there.

Since this time they were trying to uproot Muslim regimes (and not atheist communists), Curtis suggests that they believed that they could trigger uprisings among the people against corrupt Muslim regimes by creating revolutionary chaos in the society. Thus, car bombs began to explode in public places and, as Curtis then notes, once these failed to generate the desired uprisings, suicide bombings became common when the militants became desperate.

It is also vital to note that suicide bombings, despite the fact that suicide is explicitly forbidden in Islam because it challenges Gods authority over life and death, was hardly ever condemned even by the supposedly apolitical and non-militant religious figures. This was especially true between the 1990s and the mid-2000s and largely because most Muslims were still stuck in the quagmire of the glorified narratives of divinely-charged bravado diffused by Muslim and US propagandists during the anti-Soviet insurgency.

For example, in Pakistan, suicide bombings were not condemnedtill 2014. Even as 50,000 people lost their lives to terror attacks between 2004 and 2014, many non-militant religious figures, reactionary media personalities and so-called experts were continuing to see sheer nihilist violence (in the name of faith) as reactions to state oppression, poverty, corruption, drone attacks, anything other than total nihilist madness.

Nihilism. Thats exactly what it really is. Famous French academic, author and a long-time expert on Islamic militancy, Oliver Roy, recently wrote in The Guardian [April 13, 2017], thatthe nihilist dimension is central to understanding the unprecedented brutality of outfits such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and especially the militant Islamic state (IS) group. To them violence is not a means. It is an end in itself. Such nihilism that wants to wipe out existing social, cultural and political modes and structures of civilisation through apocalyptic violence has been used before in varied forms and in the name of varied ideologies. Nazis in Germany did it in the name of Aryan supremacy; Mao Tse Tung in China did it in the name of permanent (communist) revolution; and theKhmer Rougedid it in Cambodia, by wiping out thousands of Cambodians and announcing communisms Year Zero.

But since Islamic nihilists are still in the shape of insurgents (and not part of any state), Roy sees them more as large apocalyptic death cults who this time just happen to be using Islam as a war cry, mainly because this gives them immediate media coverage.

Roy writes that just as disturbed teens and confused angry youth become easy recruits for cults promising them an identity (in return for total obedience to a charismatic leader), contemporary nihilists and death cults posing as Islamic outfits attract exactly the same kind of following.

Whats more, after painstakingly going through the profiles of known young men and women who decided to join such cults and willed themselves to carry out the murder of civilians and of themselves, Roy found that only a tiny number of them were ever actually involved in any political movements before their entry into the outfit. Roy noted that most were born again Muslims who had suddenly become very vocal about their beliefs and then were rapidly drawn in by the many recruitment tactics of nihilist cults operating as Islamic outfits around the world.

Most telling is the fact that religious figures in Muslim countries had continued to see the nihilists as a radical expression and extension of the glories of the Afghan insurgencyonly to now realise that to the nihilists they too are as much infidels as the Soviets were, or the Westerners are.

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 11th, 2017

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SMOKERS' CORNER: DEATH CULTS - DAWN.com

Those nave, self-destructive young people who associate the long-running gang war in Champaign-Urbana with a romantic notion of living life on the edge should have been at the Salem Baptist Church about 90 minutes before Friday's funeral for Darien J. Carter.

The church was empty, save for a white casket bearing a floral display and holding the body of a young black man 24-year-old Mr. Carter.

Nihilism never looked so quiet, peaceful and pathetic.

Meanwhile, across town, another young black man was being arraigned on murder charges in connection with the fatal shooting of Mr. Carter.

Marquise T. Burnett, a 21-year-old Champaign man, was arrested Wednesday for shooting Mr. Carter on the previous Friday (June 2). Mr. Carter was riding a bicycle about 6:15 p.m. in the 500 block of East Eureka Street in Urbana when he was shot multiple times.

To sum it up one dead, one behind bars, more of both in the rearview mirror and surely more on the way.

It's impossible to describe the appeal those kind of numbers represent to the outlaws who generate them. They reflect a lack of respect for almost everything life and its fulsome possibilities most people hold dear.

Mr. Carter is the latest casualty of that mindless mind-set, his death drawing a church full of friends and family members who mourned his death and repeatedly asked how and why it could happen.

One of Mr. Carter's cousins said this was no ordinary funeral because "Busta didn't die at all."

"They killed my cousin in cold blood," he said, referencing Mr. Carter's nickname Busta DaHustla.

The cousin suggested retaliation against those he perceived responsible for Mr. Carter's death because "Busta didn't mess with nobody."

That suggestion drew a strong response from the Rev. Devita Benard, one of several ministers who presided at the emotional event.

"The Bible says, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,'" the Rev. Benard said. "Forgiving has to be the rule for this situation."

Friday's service was a combination of traditional mourning, a revival service emphasizing the love of God and pep rally urging members of the black community to protect its young people from the temptations that lead to deaths like that of Mr. Carter.

"We've got to stand up and take our children back," said the Rev. JoAnne Goodloe, a Chicago minster who is Mr. Carter's grandmother.

That will remain a significant challenge because the names of all the individuals involved in this latest incident are familiar to local police.

Burnett, the alleged shooter in this case, was a target in a 2015 drive-by shooting. Three local men were driving in the 600 block of West Beardsley Avenue in Champaign when they slowed down to fire at a group that included Burnett. He was struck in the leg.

The gunman, Kyjuan Dorsey, also accidently shot one of his companions, 18-year-old Jeremy O'Neal, in the head. Dorsey is now serving a 55-year sentence for killing O'Neal and 25 more for shooting Burnett. Now it's Burnett who is looking at a lengthy prison term if he is convicted.

At the time he was shot, Mr. Carter was awaiting a sentencing hearing on a charge of unlawful use of weapons by a felon.

Those sinister activities are a far cry from the descriptions of Mr. Carter included in Friday's service.

His grandmother described a smiling, happy youth who sent her holiday cards and frequently visited.

Goodloe reminded the audience that God gives life but that "it wasn't God who took my grandson."

"For those who did this to my grandson. ... I pray to God for forgiving hearts," she said, reminding that forgiving wrongdoers is "not about them."

"It's about you," she said.

One of Mr. Carter's uncles also spoke, discussing the challenges young black men face growing up in fractured families without positive role models. He said that he wished he could have offered better guidance to his nephew.

"I feel like I failed him," the uncle said. "It just breaks my heart to see him like this."

Judging by the tears, many members of the audience were in pain.

Goodloe acknowledged the hurt, noting that she has been the victim of a crime herself and that she also lost other family members to violence.

"So this, too, shall pass. It will take awhile, but this, too, shall pass," she said.

Jim Dey, a member of The News-Gazette staff, can be reached by email at jdey@news-gazette.com or by phone at 217-351-5369.

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Jim Dey: Another fatal shooting raises the same question why? - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette

For an ensemble piece about family and the pains it can endure, Carmen Ejogos Sarah is more than just the mother of an endangered den in It Comes at Night; shes the key that makes these people blood relatives. So she has the most to lose whenever any of it spills.

When the film begins, an unseen apocalypse has been muddled through for an unknown amount of time, but its certainly taken its toll on Ejogo and everyone left that matters in her life. Secluded and surviving in her presumable childhood home, a house deep in the woods, the picture opens on Sarah saying goodbye to her father Bud (David Pendleton), a man suffering from a mysterious plague that has caused blisters to crop up on his face and body. His grandson Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and son-in-law Paul (Joel Edgerton) reluctantly take the former patriarch out into the woods and euthanize him in his grave.

For Sarah, it is all downhill from there as an enigmatic family with young parents (Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough) ends up staying with them. She isnt sure if she can trust them or anyone else who isnt kin these days. But with already one loss in the family, she isnt eager to see another member vanish.

When Den of Geek sat down with Ejogo earlier this week, the foreboding nihilism of this film hung heavy around the conversation. After all, director Trey Edward Shults cited the medieval painting The Triumph of Death as one key inspiration, and the loss of a parent as the other. Ejogo is aware of the interpersonal horror in this epic worldand how unique of an opportunity it was for her and her co-stars to build that world simply through their acting choices.

In our conversation with the Selma actress, we veer from discussing how she, Edgerton, and Harrison had the freedom to conjure this reality and emotion, as well as what it means to her and our seemingly darkening world. But there is light too since we also discuss whether we might see Ejogo again in a Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them sequel!

So youve been in horror movies before, but none quite like this. Could you talk about what you mightve expected the script to be and how you reacted upon reading it?

So I got the script, thought it was really interesting, but didnt have a sense of who the director was given he had only made one film. So I went to that film, which is called Krisha. It was immediately obvious to me that this was somebody who had a very clear sense of self as a director and a filmmaker, and whatever he did next would be potentially really powerful. So I guess it was a combination of script and seeing his material that made me sign on, and then it just got better and better. I was like, Who else is probably going to be cast? Hearing about how he was going to approach lighting in the movie and the very unorthodox attempt at bringing on a sound supervisor who was going to be pretty radical in some ways.

So there were so many reasons to be excited. Because the things that are the most hard to come by in this business are original ideas that are then executed the way they are intended, which is what I think was the promise of this from the start.

How much of yourself do you look for in the subject? Because despite being such an apocalyptic setting, the film is dealing with very primordial concerns about mortality and losses within ones family.

Good question. I think often as an actor you read material and you dont even realize fully why youre responding until maybe afterwards, maybe never. That was probably the case for me. I know it was the case for Kelvin. I didnt know until today that he had gone through in some form or another Hurricane Katrina.

So he lost a home. He was only 12-years-old at the time, but thats the kind of memory that I imagine stays with you the rest of your life. So its bound to inform the kind of professional choices you make too. So I dont doubt that there are experiences I had, if I thought about it, that would keep me interested and pull me back to this sort of genre world, and this sort of darker, nihilistic kind of space we inhabit.

Did you call on anything specifically to find Sarah?

I think the one thing I drew about regularly was the relationship with my own son whos 15-years-old, who is at a very close age. I would argue that Kelvin plays it like a 15-year-old a lot of the time, in terms of his innocence, curiosity, his sexual desires for Rileys character, and so on and so forth. Its all just emerging. Its all just beginning to blossom in him.

Trey is apparently heavily influenced by Pieter Breughel paintings, specifically about medieval plagues. Obviously, theres a painting in your characters house in the movie. Did you study the paintings of Brueghel and did you get to talk to Trey about why your characters would keep this painting?

We definitely talked about why we keep the painting for sure. One of the things that became a fixation for all of us was timeline. Even if we didnt know what the backstory was entirely, we did need to have a feel for if this disease is something thats been around for six months or two years. How long does it take to die from it? How long has Bud have it before he gets the blisters? You know, these things kind of things did need to be answered in order to move forward in a way that was consistent.

So in that exploration in putting questions back and forth to Trey, it became clear he had imagined that this had been the house Bud stayed in as the family moved out and grew up, or moved to after he split with his wife or his wife died. But then there are other things he had no intention of letting us know or understand fully. He wanted to keep us in the dark. I think to fester a certain amount of paranoia among ourselves. There are things Riley knew about me that I didnt know about her and all kinds of shady stuff he was encouraging. [Laughs]

Were you, Joel, and Kelvin able to come up with your own backstory for what family life was like before all hell broke loose?

I dont know if we were ever completely on the same page to be honest. I know we all did it as part of our process. I had several dinners with Trey to talk about what I thought might make sense in terms of profession. Is this a rich family or a poor family? You know, where do we land on that stuff? So we definitely got into that. But as I said, some of the things would really live within ourselves. So if it makes sense to us, given the kind of family performance we were hoping for.

Who do you think Sarah was before the plague then?

So I think Sarah was a bit of a daddys girl, but tomboyish and resourceful, and may have learned to use guns by observing her dad, who I think its kind of clear, not really, but hes probably come home from the military or Vietnam and established the house. That maybe there is something a little PTSD about him, which may be why he is so secluded in this forest in this house. And thats also why I have an aptitude for putting together the water system or doing ABC. I can use guns it seems. Its not a big thing for me to get readythere are parts of the movie where Im using guns. So that was certainly something we explored.

But you know, I could know nothing about my character, and there still would have been enough with the paranoia.

Out of curiosity, did you speak with Chris or Riley about their own backstories, or were you as actors kept apart to build that suspicion of each other?

Yeah, I knew and I know nothing about Chris and Rileys characters. Other than what you see on the screen? Nothing else. I remember there was some kind of strange pitting us against each other by Trey, between myself and Riley, so thered be a degree of jealousy festering as well. For me, the mother of my son who clearly has thing for this other girl, and I was also jealous of their marriage, because mine is very stale and a little frigid. So these are things that arent on the page.

Theres nothing in the stage direction or dialogue that suggests thats what were playing, but there are layers and colors that lend themselves to this sort of movie, that make it very much a character-driven piece.

This movie can at times be bleakly nihilist. It goes back to Breughel and The Triumph of Death. What do you think the appeal is in such grimness from our art or even entertainment?

I think theres something a little nihilistic in every one of us. That theres this awful dance with mortality that we have to play every single day of our lives, which means theres a fascination with death and death in all the forms it can take. Whether its self-inflicted, whether its apocalyptic events, whether its pandemics, whatever it might look like. To have a grasp of it in a safe arena like a cinema screen is a kind of experience that most of us are willing to go through, because we will understand that it may only be around the corner in real-life.

On a somewhat lighter topic, I just recently rewatched Fantastic Beasts again. Have you heard whispers yet about Seraphina Picquery returning for another wizarding adventure?

Write all requests to @jk_rowling on Twitter and hopefully shell get the message that Seraphina cannot be done without for number two! [Laughs]

When I last saw it, it was actually the day before the U.S. election in November. JK Rowlings vision of nationalist forces on the rise again seems more timely than ever.

You know, Ive made a few filmsthis is very interesting, because I came up earlier with the theory about Trey, who wrote [It Comes at Night] three years ago about something completely different. It wasnt an attempt at being political or socially relevant. It was a personal film about his father dying of cancer. And yet, somehow, his feelers were out enough to tap into the zeitgeist. Ive had that experience, when I think about it, three times. So maybe its as much to do with me as it is to do with Trey in how I found myself in repeated pieces of material that really resonate in the here and now.

Certainly, which you just mentioned Selma and also this. I dont think Trey had any intention when he wrote this to tap into whats happening right now. But if youre following the newsreal newsyou saw this coming. Its not that it happened yesterday and suddenly a movie happened to coincide [with it]. It feels like its in-tune or attuned. This has been cyclical for as long as I can remember. It wouldnt surprise me around the time that Trey was writing the piece three years ago that he was just getting a feel in the air for something that was coming. Interesting that as an audience, we get to watch it right smack back in the middle of that time that he may have been sensitive to three years ago.

It feels like art will be reacting quite a bit now.

Yeah, for sure.

Thank you for doing this.

Thank you, it was great to see you.

It Comes at Night is in theaters now.

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How Carmen Ejogo Helped Build a Personal Apocalypse in It Comes at Night - Den of Geek US

Last Thursday afternoon President Trump walked into the Rose Garden and told the American public were getting out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The spectacle, classically Trump, came after days of leaks saturated cable punditry with speculation and preemptive partisan squabbling. The amateurish administration watched as Twitter shifted its short attention span from Trumps most recent harmless error #covfefe to his next tragic mistake.

Trumps decision is undoubtedly tragic. The Paris Agreement represents an incredible achievement for global governance and the green energy movement. The pact, joined by nearly 200 countries, sets ambitious emission targets designed to curb global temperature increases to a manageable 2 Celsius. The United States, the worlds second largest polluter, emits 18% of the worlds carbon. We now join Syria (entrenched in a deadly Civil War) and Nicaragua (a green energy stalwart who held out for a greener deal) in a small and informidable group of dissenters.

The decision to leave the Paris Agreement is the most potent example of Trumps jingoistic America First foreign policy doctrine to date and may be the most damaging to Americas status as the worlds lone superpower. Angela Merkel has clearly moved on, speaking to German voters after Trumps romp through Europe she warned, the time that we can rely on others is a bit in the past. Europes strongest leader has already shifted her focus to China calling the quasi-communist nation an important and strategic partner.

Americas self-imposed solitude will have real consequences we have lost our seat at the table as the world begins to rebuild its energy infrastructure.

But Trumps decision to withdrawal is also a reflection of a new American ethic in the era of Trump.America is no longer a reliable ally in global governance. In Trumps White House, diplomacy and collective action are for suckers or at least elitist liberals who watch MSNBC. Trump is not content with isolation, but is imposing his own nihilism on the world through American foreign policy. His lieutenants primed the pump for a Paris withdrawal earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal articulating the administrations depressing world view. The world is not a global community but an arena where nations, non-governmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage. If this is true, then Trump has made clear the United States has, at least temporarily, changed teams.

My mother used to tell me when I was a kid, show me who your friends are and Ill show you your future. Right now, Americas future looks bleak. The U.S withdrawal has already ostracized America from its most important allies. The President of the European Union, Jean-Claude Juncker, unabashedly denounced Trumps decision and added that Europe would not act as vassals of the Americans. Berlin added this morning, U.S. climate move cant and wont stop those of us who feel obliged to protect the planet. Meanwhile, in the first year of Trumps presidency hes invited Rodrigo Duterte to the White House, was silent when Erdogans thugs attacked protesters in the nations capital, and of course his association with Putin is well documented despite the Presidents best efforts.

After years of conservatives lambasting President Obama for leading from behind, Trump has abdicated Americas role on the world stage. Americas self-imposed solitude will have real consequences we have lost our seat at the table as the world begins to rebuild its energy infrastructure. Beijing will certainly be happy to fill the void left by Americas ill-fated decision and is well positioned to do so. China has invested billions to complete their One Belt, One Road initiative,building partnerships with Europe and building the developing worlds infrastructure to receive Chinese products. Trump, the ultimate deal maker, just missed out.

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What Doesn't Kill Us does not make Us Stronger - The Good Men Project (blog)

BY: Sonny Bunch June 9, 2017 4:55 am

It Comes at Night is something like a super-stylish, extended episode of The Walking Dead: a tour-de-force of hateful nihilism that will likely leave audiences feeling far worse about themselves and the state of man than they did 97 minutes previously.

We're dropped into the middle of a plagueits origins unclear; its results quite obviouswhere a family of survivors is getting ready to end the life of their sore-riddled grandfather. The work being done is both deeply personal and strangely impersonal; nothing is more heartrending than having to pull the plug on a relative yet nothing is more necessary in the midst of an outbreak. We see the actions and hear the muffled words of distraught, duty-bound loved ones, but director and writer Trey Edward Shults obscures the faces of Paul (Joel Edgerton) and his son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), with gas masks, the glass lenses reflecting only the darkness around them.

It isn't until the old man's funeral pyre lights up that we see their eyes, the horror haunting them, the pressure they're under. Paul, Travis, and family matriarch, Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), are living on borrowed time, barricaded in a house with only one entrance, and only one set of keys to that entrance. The only question is how quickly it will run out.

The sand starts slipping through the hourglass more quickly once Will (Christopher Abbott) breaks into the house and convinces Paul et al to allow him to bring his family to their compound. Will and Kim (Riley Keough) have chickens and goats, and a son, Andrew. The two families try to coexist, but paranoia mounts, anxiety rages, and blood is shed.

It Comes at Night is an easy movie to admire, a technically masterful work that ratchets up the suspense by withholding information and carefully controlling what the camera shows us. Shultz makes expert use of natural light sources, often allowing just enough brightness from lamps or flashlights for us to make out the character the camera is focused on and little else in the frame. The literal darkness creeping in on each shot matches the figurative darkness encircling the increasingly paranoid families.

All that technical skill is employed in an ultimately empty endeavor, however. It Comes at Night is an exercise in relentless nihilism. By withholding key pieces of information and forcing us to distrust everything Will and his family do, It Comes at Night can't really serve as a critique of distrust or paranoia in the face of civilizational breakdown; rather, it revels in paranoia, rubs your face in its fear-mongering.

In short, It Comes at Night is the feel-bad movie of the year. I can't help but feel as if audiences are going to hate it. And I can't blame them if they do.

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'It Comes at Night' Review - Washington Free Beacon

One time tour manager for the Grateful Dead (and Rolling Stones) Sam Cutler weighed in on his thoughts regarding Amir Bar-Lev's all-encompassing four-hour documentary Long Strange Trip.

Cutler, who tour managed the Dead from 1970-74,is one of the stars of the film for his no-bullshit honesty and incredible perspective about how the Dead fit into the culture back then compared to another band he famously worked with--The Rolling Stones. In a wide rangingFacebook post, Cutler gave his thoughts upon seeing the finished product and there were reviews both positive and negative.

Cutler admits he loved the film and that "I loved that so many people in the film expressed love, lived in love, loved one another and most of all, loved Jerry." He complimented Bar-Lev for his work ("Sure picked one hell of a hill to climb") while noting its an "impossible task" to capture all that the Grateful Dead were.

"I was struck by what people decided to say in the film--what they articulated as 'appropriate for posterity'," Cutler noted in one of the more critical moments. "How some of the more 'fey' representatives of the family laughed uproariously at the notion that latter-day Deadheads could be told (or asked) to behave and not come to shows if they didn't have tickets; whilst on the other hand, these same modern day 'libertarians' (so hip and so free) could happily suggest that there were too many nasty hairy Hells Angels back-stage for their taste."

He admits that the film left him "an emotional mess" as he looked back on his time with the band. "It was, at times, unbelievably painful to see the mistakes we made, the errors of judgement, the poor planning, the rampant nihilism, that led like some tragic operatic shuffle towards Jerry's demise," he wrote. Cutler also clears up some misinterpretations by others in the film, particularly a brief time where Cutler and his team decided that taping wouldn't be allowed ("That lasted for two shows at the most") and complimented the band members' contributions, calling them the "true psychedelic explorers of their time."

Where the hell to BEGIN? Well, lets begin with love. I loved the film. I loved that so many of the people in the film expressed love, LIVED in love, loved one another, and MOST OF ALL, loved Jerry. I became for a few years another person in that psychedelic army of people all over the planet who loved that gentle and so-loving man and his band. I was just so amazingly fortunate to have been his tour manager, co-manager (with Jon McIntyre and David Parker) and his agent, through my company Out of Town Tours from 1970 - 74.

Amir Bar Lev, the mountain-climbers mountain-climber, sure picked one hell of a hill to climb when he decided to make this film! Solo unaided up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite has nothing on the perils associated with trying to capture who what where how and when on the Grateful Dead. Its an impossible task on a rational level, but thankfully rationality was never a particularly necessary attribute around the band and the family - in fact, it seemed sometimes that the wackier things were, the better. It never seemed to represent too much of a problem, and (of course) people loved the madness, but only up to a point! When it got to be too much, the good ol Grateful Dead simply retreated or practiced invisibility.

Jerry might not have been the whole ship, but he sure as heck was the vessel. AND the anchor! I was struck by what people decided to say in the film - what they articulated as appropriate for posterity. How (for example) some of the more fey representatives of the family laughed uproariously at the notion that latter-day dead-heads could be told (or asked) to behave and not come to shows if they didnt have tickets; whilst on the other hand, these same modern day libertarians (so hip and so free) could happily suggest that there were too many nasty hairy Hells Angels back-stage for their taste. Jerry, bless him, kept it all in balance. For example, he point-blank refused to sign any letter to the fans when their behaviour became an issue, and he pointedly welcomed the Hells Angels to concerts as he welcomed anyone who loved the music.

The film left me an emotional mess. In the midst of it all I burst into tears and had to be comforted by my son Bodhi. It was, at times, unbelievably painful to see the mistakes we made, the errors of judgement, the poor planning, the rampant nihilism, that led like some tragic operatic shuffle towards Jerrys demise. BUT, conversely, it was thrilling to see how all of those too-human errors that we made were happily embraced by the family and the band and laughed about, and thus in some crazy unexplainable way survived. Embracing failures was surely one of the distinctive markers of the magnificence of the Grateful Dead. There was room for all.

One little thing stands out as a perfect example of the Grateful Deads approach and how posterity has somehow misinterpreted what happened. The record company hated the tapers because they believe it would damage the bands record sales. The band was in a quandary. It was decided that the taping couldnt be allowed. Myself and the crew had the unenviable task of implementing this edict. That lasted for two shows at the most, then we brought up the situation in the dressing room prior to a show. We had all taken a trip and were getting high. We explained to Jerry we aint cops, we dont wanna be cops and the policy of stopping taping was then and there abandoned as it was unanimously agreed that asking ANYONE to police the tapers was a bridge too far. That was it. No big deal. We tried it. (banning the tapers) It didnt work, so we immediately abandoned it and moved on. This was later interpreted by some Wall Street people as a supreme example of the Grateful Deads business acumen which directly led thru the distribution of the tapers recordings to the bands huge commercial success. As if we'd planned it all ! You have to laugh!

WHERE did I cry in the film? Where did I laugh? When Barbara said that Jerry told her Id just like to live on the ice-cream money. I thought THAT was so poignant that I cried like a baby. Poor Jerry, the thing that he had spent his life creating and nurturing consumed him in the end, and it seemed as if no-one could save him, though they all surely tried. The ONE thing that they COULD have done, they DIDNT DO !!!! Namely, they could have abandoned ship. Called the whole thing to a halt and simply STOPPED. Jerry could have scuba-dived for the rest of his days. BUT, no-one could bring themselves to do it, and Jerry, poor Jerry, disappeared down the dumb rabbit-hole of heroin. PigPen had died, Keith had died, Brent had gone before him - tragic and ghastly precursors of what was to come. Vince followed thereafter.

The film captured it all. It was heart-breaking, and yet in the end it was MORE than simply THAT. It was an epic trip those guys wrote on the pages of their lives, an adventure of Homeric proportion and Shakespearian intensity, that has had no equal. Phil said some beautiful soulful things, as did Micky and Billy and Bobby these guys were the true psychedelic explorers of their time and showed us how to LIVE. Phil said: the Grateful Dead was the best thing that ever happened to me and that goes for me too, and everyone else that was on the bus. As soon as Ive recovered I want to see the film again .. and again. It has so MUCH depth and is so subtle.

Amir Bar Lev is to be congratulated on a magnificent achievement. The Grateful Dead never quite managed to capture the sound of heavy air in the recording studio, but Amir got it on film. In the end, the movie rendered me speechless and just simply GRATEFUL to all the guys in the band and all the people in the family for the four years I was involved. They were the best years of my life.

Read more from the original source:

Former Grateful Dead Tour Manager Chimes in on Long Strange Trip Documentary - Relix (blog)

The Chinese government has recently banned the sale of an award-winning novel, Soft Burial, written by Fang Fang about Chinas land reform in the 1950s.

The novel tells the story of an old woman who suffered from amnesia after she witnessed her husbands entire family driven to take their own lives during the Chinese Communist Party's nationwide land reform, which aimed to eliminate the landlord class not long after the People's Republic of China was established in 1949. The buried memories haunt the woman throughout her life, and her son decides to investigate her past.

The suicides tied to the land reform are not an invention of the novel. In addition to public executions, the class struggle resulted in tens of thousands of landlords and better-off peasants killing themselves. There are no official records of exactly how many were killed during the land reform, but estimates by Chinese and US scholars have ranged between 1 and 5 million.

Soft Burial, originally published in 2016, won the 2016 Luyao Literature Award, a tribute to its historical realism. Fang Fang explained the title of the novel in her postscript:

When people die and their bodies are buried under the earth without the protection of coffins, this burial is called a soft bury; as for the living, when they seal off their past, cut off their roots, reject their memories, either consciously or subconsciously, their lives are soft buried in time. Once they are in a soft burial, their lives will be disconnected in amnesia.

Ahead of the announcement of the Luyao award on April 23 2017, a literature criticism seminar organized by the Worker, Peasant and Soldier reading group in the city of Wuhan concluded that the novel is a poisonous plant:

An attack on the land reform aimed at resurrecting the spirits of the landlord class and hence a poisonous plant against communism.

Similar gatherings that are critical of the novel have also taken place in other cities, including Zhengzhou.

Former Chinese Communist Party leaders have also published their rebukes of the novel. Former head of the Central Organization Department Zhang Quanjing wrote a political struggle-style piece denouncing it, titled Soft Burial is a reflection of ideological class struggle in the current terrain:

Fang Fangs novel ignores the essence of land reform and pours dirty water onto the campaign. This is a distortion of history, a typical expression of historical nihilism in the literature and art fields, a concrete example of the struggle between peaceful transformation and anti peaceful transformation [of the political system].

Lieutenant General of the Peoples Liberation Army Zhao Keming extended the criticism to a number of contemporary novels:

Though historical nihilism has been criticized by the party and the people, it has been spreading in different forms. In addition to the poisonous historical research, university lectures and public forums, it has been very rampant in the field of literature. Soft Burial is just the latest published novel to explicitly attempt to vindicate the landlord class and criticize the land reform. Before its publication, novels such as To Live, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, White Deer Plain, The Ancient Ship, etc., have not been criticized in mainstream media. The writers have not been denounced by their leaders in their work or party unit. Some of them have even reached high positions, received praise from fans and followers. Objectively, this has given birth to a trend that sees subverting history in writing is the ticket to success and a bright future.

The wave of criticism culminated in the novel's ban.

However, a digital copy was circulated online and won readers applause. Many found the novel inspiring and wrote their commentaries on social media. Quite a number complained that their comments were reported, deleted and soft buried. Below are a number of comments still circulating on the popular platform Weibo.

A reader from Chengdu said:

The story is well toldunrelated characters come together in the end. But I really don't like the ending, why not dig into the truth, why let his parents history remain buried? Such a coward and lack of filial piety. Maybe this is the writer's intention, to let the readers feel the sense of soft burial because it is a reality that we are facing in our lives.

A reader from Shandong reflected:

No incident has absolute truth. What matters is not the truth, but our attitude towards truth. Perhaps we can never evaluate the past in a fair manner, but we have to right to question it. A country should be open to confronting its history, or the historical baggage would become too heavy to bear.

And Fang Fangs novel inspired one Anhui reader to write about his family history:

My great-grandfather was a servant working for a landlord. Because he was smart and diligent, he opened his own woodwork and dyeing workshops, bought land and became rich. He was a rich peasant but not a landlord. But he was labelled as a landlord during the land reform because he was at odds with those who led the reform. When they calculated his property, they included the land owned by my great-grandmother's family. Her family was a landlord but the land was owned by her brothers and had nothing to do with him. It was an excuse for revenge. I don't know how my great-grandfather died, but my great-grandmother was starved to dead in her own bed.

The father of my great-grandfather was a literati in the late Qing Dynasty. He was a teacher his whole life and left behind loads of books. They were all burned into ashes during the land reform.

My grandfather was studying medicine and agriculture in high school in town. He was getting ready to go to Fudan University. But he was labelled as the son of landlord and had to return to the village and became a farmer. He taught briefly in the 1960s but because of that, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

My family background is that of peasants and literati. Because of the land reform, all the books were burned, land confiscated. There was no other exit for them. They had suffered for many decades and shed tears and blood and they could not even cry and tell their stories aloud!

The Chinese government has recently banned the sale of an award-winning novel, Soft Burial, written by Fang Fang about Chinas land reform in the 1950s.

The novel tells the story of an old woman who suffered from amnesia after she witnessed her husbands entire family driven to take their own lives during the Chinese Communist Party's nationwide land reform, which aimed to eliminate the landlord class not long after the People's Republic of China was established in 1949. The buried memories haunt the woman throughout her life, and her son decides to investigate her past.

The suicides tied to the land reform are not an invention of the novel. In addition to public executions, the class struggle resulted in tens of thousands of landlords and better-off peasants killing themselves. There are no official records of exactly how many were killed during the land reform, but estimates by Chinese and US scholars have ranged between 1 and 5 million.

Soft Burial, originally published in 2016, won the 2016 Luyao Literature Award, a tribute to its historical realism. Fang Fang explained the title of the novel in her postscript:

When people die and their bodies are buried under the earth without the protection of coffins, this burial is called a soft bury; as for the living, when they seal off their past, cut off their roots, reject their memories, either consciously or subconsciously, their lives are soft buried in time. Once they are in a soft burial, their lives will be disconnected in amnesia.

Ahead of the announcement of the Luyao award on April 23 2017, a literature criticism seminar organized by the Worker, Peasant and Soldier reading group in the city of Wuhan concluded that the novel is a poisonous plant:

An attack on the land reform aimed at resurrecting the spirits of the landlord class and hence a poisonous plant against communism.

Similar gatherings that are critical of the novel have also taken place in other cities, including Zhengzhou.

Former Chinese Communist Party leaders have also published their rebukes of the novel. Former head of the Central Organization Department Zhang Quanjing wrote a political struggle-style piece denouncing it, titled Soft Burial is a reflection of ideological class struggle in the current terrain:

Fang Fangs novel ignores the essence of land reform and pours dirty water onto the campaign. This is a distortion of history, a typical expression of historical nihilism in the literature and art fields, a concrete example of the struggle between peaceful transformation and anti peaceful transformation [of the political system].

Lieutenant General of the Peoples Liberation Army Zhao Keming extended the criticism to a number of contemporary novels:

Though historical nihilism has been criticized by the party and the people, it has been spreading in different forms. In addition to the poisonous historical research, university lectures and public forums, it has been very rampant in the field of literature. Soft Burial is just the latest published novel to explicitly attempt to vindicate the landlord class and criticize the land reform. Before its publication, novels such as To Live, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, White Deer Plain, The Ancient Ship, etc., have not been criticized in mainstream media. The writers have not been denounced by their leaders in their work or party unit. Some of them have even reached high positions, received praise from fans and followers. Objectively, this has given birth to a trend that sees subverting history in writing is the ticket to success and a bright future.

The wave of criticism culminated in the novel's ban.

However, a digital copy was circulated online and won readers applause. Many found the novel inspiring and wrote their commentaries on social media. Quite a number complained that their comments were reported, deleted and soft buried. Below are a number of comments still circulating on the popular platform Weibo.

A reader from Chengdu said:

The story is well toldunrelated characters come together in the end. But I really don't like the ending, why not dig into the truth, why let his parents history remain buried? Such a coward and lack of filial piety. Maybe this is the writer's intention, to let the readers feel the sense of soft burial because it is a reality that we are facing in our lives.

A reader from Shandong reflected:

No incident has absolute truth. What matters is not the truth, but our attitude towards truth. Perhaps we can never evaluate the past in a fair manner, but we have to right to question it. A country should be open to confronting its history, or the historical baggage would become too heavy to bear.

And Fang Fangs novel inspired one Anhui reader to write about his family history:

My great-grandfather was a servant working for a landlord. Because he was smart and diligent, he opened his own woodwork and dyeing workshops, bought land and became rich. He was a rich peasant but not a landlord. But he was labelled as a landlord during the land reform because he was at odds with those who led the reform. When they calculated his property, they included the land owned by my great-grandmother's family. Her family was a landlord but the land was owned by her brothers and had nothing to do with him. It was an excuse for revenge. I don't know how my great-grandfather died, but my great-grandmother was starved to dead in her own bed.

The father of my great-grandfather was a literati in the late Qing Dynasty. He was a teacher his whole life and left behind loads of books. They were all burned into ashes during the land reform.

My grandfather was studying medicine and agriculture in high school in town. He was getting ready to go to Fudan University. But he was labelled as the son of landlord and had to return to the village and became a farmer. He taught briefly in the 1960s but because of that, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

My family background is that of peasants and literati. Because of the land reform, all the books were burned, land confiscated. There was no other exit for them. They had suffered for many decades and shed tears and blood and they could not even cry and tell their stories aloud!

Oiwan Lam | Global Voices

http://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/wap/images/bs_logo_amp.png 177 22

Read more:

China bans 'Soft Burial', a novel about deadly consequences of land reform - Business Standard

Christians vs. Mormons vs. Hindus vs. Democrats vs. Republicans vs. Alt-Rights vs. Utilitarians vs. Existentialists vs. [insert belief here]. Isnt it exhausting? The constant squabbling and never ending chain of opposing beliefs. All the debate and fracas about proving who knows best. For eons, humanity has waged wars, founded religions, established governments, etc., all in the name of moral justification.

What if there were no morals? Im not talking about atheism. Some religions and ethicists have circumvented the need for a god/goddess. I am talking about moral truths and laws of right and wrong. Do those exist? I am not going to sell my beliefs to you because I dont have any. Im a nihilist.

First off, lets make a distinction clear. Nihilism and atheism are two separate conclusions. Atheism denies the existence of any god(s) or goddess(es). Atheists are considered independent thinkers, counter-hegemonic, cosmopolitan chic. Of course, while it may be considered blasphemous in Bible Belt country, atheism today is more widely accepted than before. And to be an atheist doesnt necessarily make one a bad person. After all, they have other avenues to believe in like utilitarianism, existentialism or humanism. Greg Epstein, author and Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, summarizes the beliefs of good atheists in a sentence from his book Good Without God: There is no life after death, so offer kindness to all, not in the next life but now. But where atheists depart from formal religion saying, We dont need a god to be good, I [and other nihilists] reply with Well who said good and bad are real, too?

Nihilism is the assertion that moral truths like good and evil, right and wrong, are as fictitious as the deities atheists denounce. Its no longer a question of deciding what is good and bad without the guidance of a preacher, it is just deciding there is no good or bad to choose from.

After this point, many misconceptions emerge on what being a nihilist means. Again, I am not selling my beliefs to you, but I want to address these common misconceptions of what nihilism entails. Believers have altars and politicians have pulpits to air their defenses. I have a laptop.

The following are common stereotypes and assumptions people make about what nihilism does to a person. Nihilists are considered destructive, untrustworthy, suicidal or just plain confused. That simply is not the case.

The Destructive Nihilist

A nihilist believes there is no true value in words like good and bad. Morality is a conventional tool which humanity created for itself, by itself. For opponents of nihilism, it follows then that nihilists are morally absent and a danger to society. They imagine nihilists murdering and bombing and so on because nihilists wouldnt know how to distinguish between good and bad actions.

My rebuttal: Why are nihilists categorized as inherently destructive? Yes, we dont believe in moral truths, but is demonizing nihilists truly founded? This assumption that nihilists are destructive seems to branch from the argument that people need religion or some equivalent to be a good person. If that is the case, explain the Crusades or ISIS to me. Explain how the most ruthless of kings and destructive of dictators can preach divine appointment or moral justification if its really the nihilists society should be worried about.

In short, having some moral belief is not sufficient on its own for one to be a productive, altruistic member of society. Ultimately, whether nihilist or otherwise, violent people will be violent. The concern is that humanity needs a big book or normative philosophy to prevent unnecessary violence, but that hasnt stopped killers and tyrants before. Just as the pendulum can swing from destructive to altruistic, nihilists can be either or somewhere in between. I choose to be altruistic not because I believe karma or moral goodness expects it, but because I choose to be altruistic for no other reason than to be giving. Nihilists arent all killers, just like how preachers arent all saints.

The Untrustworthy Nihilist

Apparently, you cant trust a nihilist either, at least that is what Ive heard. The stereotype of the deceitful nihilist seems to be concluded after considering if nihilists dont believe in good/bad then they have no ethical obligation to keep promises or duties. In other words, nihilists are liars that will not honor any commitments made with them.

My rebuttal: Liars lie, but not all nihilists are liars. Similar to the destructive nihilist double standard, this assumption implies moral believers dont lie because their morality obligates them to tell the truth. We all know thats not true, so again, belief in morality isnt enough for someone to be completely trustworthy. Some Methodists lie about email scandals and some Evangelical Christians institute scam colleges.

The point is that, again, morality alone isnt sufficient to keep an individual from deceitful behavior, so labeling nihilists as inherently untrustworthy is intellectually dishonest.

The Suicidal Nihilist

This is the idea that morality gives people a purpose in life, and that without it we are empty shells with the bleakest of outlooks. After all, if there is no true meaning to life or moral goodness, then what is there to live for?

My rebuttal: Is life not enough of a reason to live? I understand that life on Earth is no piece of cake. For some people, the world is a cruel, unjust, despicable place. But does it follow then that life is not a sufficient enough reason to live? Do we need some grand deity or moral tally score at the end of our lives to put meaning into living on Earth? I am comfortable with not having an afterlife or cosmic scoreboard tracking my good deeds. I dont feel the need to have my experiences on Earth be validated later on. I still appreciate life and people. I still find art beautiful, rainy days wonderful and cartoons magical. I look up to J. K. Rowling and Nathaniel Hawthorne as great writers, and my family and friends are dear to me. All these statements do not conflict with my belief in nothingness. I understand some may need a moral mission in life, but nihilists are not all suicidal for not having one.

The Fake Nihilist

No, Im not an atheist. No, Im not an existentialist. No, Im not a humanist. No, Im not an agnostic. Nihilism is a harsh position to relate to for many people. Its not like finding similarities between a pastor and rabbi or understanding the doubt of an atheist or agnostic. Nihilism throws everything out the door and rejects the basic concept of morality. Some people handle that by labeling us as confused. They refuse to dignify our belief in moral absence by properly recognizing it instead infantilizing our capability to understand nuanced philosophies and maturity to recognize our own beliefs.

My final rebuttal: Why are you threatened? How does my belief threaten your own spiritual autonomy? It is not as if I am frequenting your home regularly and asking to share the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. I do not set off across the globe in hopes of converting the religiously diverse into a homogenous network of global nihilism.

I respect the beliefs of my family (all of which are one variant of Christianity or another). I respect my friends identify as Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon, Catholic, etc. I do not degrade their beliefs by claiming they just havent figured it out yet or they are just confused. In the same way, I am not confused: I am a nihilist. I am just as capable of making that identification as the next fellow.

Nihilism may not be your cup of tea, and I am not asking for it to be. But in an age where religious tolerance and acceptance are widely paraded, dont forget that it is a diversity of thought that should be respected, not just religion.

letters@chronicle.utah.edu

Original post:

A Defense for Moral Absence - Daily Utah Chronicle

Common Dreams

Changing This Bumbling Narcissist Impossible, So We Must Depose Him Common Dreams What some see as a blind tendency to stumble into huge blunders I see as a kind of aggressive nihilism that is much more primed to stumble in some directions than others. If such an assumption is on the right track, it makes no sense to appeal to you ...

Here is the original post:

Changing This Bumbling Narcissist Impossible, So We Must Depose Him - Common Dreams