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nicklloydnow · 7 days

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“McCarthy, Tocqueville and democracy in America

Rather than speak in terms of Hobbes or Rousseau, it is more useful to suggest that there is a Tocquevillian political ethos present in McCarthy's body of work. This is because Alexis de Tocqueville encapsulates some of the political and philosophical contradictions which I argue are present in McCarthy's work. Moreover, Tocqueville's own work embodies precisely the resistance to ideological classification that we find in McCarthy. Tocqueville has received scant, if any, critical attention in terms of understanding McCarthy. However, his sprawling text Democracy in America offers political observations and critical insights about democratic practices and American identity which are of enormous value for understanding the political components of McCarthy's fiction. While I do nọt aim to suggest that McCarthy aligns necessarily with Tocqueville's political preferences, it is relevant to elaborate on how some of Tocqueville's observations about American political life help us to understand the political reflections implicit to McCarthy's prose.

The most obvious reason why Tocqueville is relevant to understanding McCarthy's work is that Tocqueville wrote in a later period in the chronology of political philosophy, so his ideas therefore are more historically proximate to McCarthy's own political milieu. Tocqueville made the observations on which he based Democracy in America in 1831, when the American democratic experiment was relatively young, if decisively maturing. While indebted to writers in the history of political thought - Hobbes, Rousseau and Montesquieu - Tocqueville was unencumbered by the philosophical expressions of the state of nature found in political theory. Tocqueville based his understanding of democratic political philosophy on concrete and factual observations of one of history's first grand-scale democratic experiments. Democracy in America is a remarkable work in ambition: because of its depth and range it functions at the intersection of journalism, anthropology, history, sociology, travelogue, political pathologies and political philosophy.

On the surface, McCarthy would not seem a natural ally for Tocqueville. Tocqueville suggested that the dominant trait of the United States is its ahistoricality. Given that the United States was in its relative infancy when Tocqueville was observing and writing about it, this positing of ahistoricality is based on his observation that American democracy arises from an ancestral amnesia where: each man forgets his ancestors, but it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries'. This is certainly one place where we can say that McCarthy is not Tocquevillian. McCarthy is fascinated with how the long history of humanity illuminates the present and foreshadows the future - as I have evidenced in my appraisal of McCarthy's philosophical arguments for the continuing relevance of our evolutionary antecedents - where the ancient and the primeval coexist with humans' ongoing linguistic and technological development. Moreover, McCarthy is continually at pains to show how a forgetting, individually and collectively, of an enigmatic covenant of the past, present and future removes the possibility of any form of purposive meaning.

While Tocqueville noted the ahistoricality of American democracy, this view was tempered by his belief in the necessity of the continual refashioning of American democracy. The vitality of America stems from affirming process over identity; it is a country constantly engaged in the making of itself and its history. For Tocqueville, the dearth of historical meaning in American democracy is not necessarily a bad thing, since it bequeaths the populace with some necessary contradictions. While fraught on an individual level, that democracy is the constant process of being made and unmade is utterly essential for the proper functioning of the political sphere. As such, the American democratic spirit, the pursuit of a more perfect constitutional union, does imply a repudiation of the historical, since dogged individual self-determination, under a guiding ethos of 'equality of opportunity', requires one's historical origins to remain secondary to the capacity for self-reinvention. If self-invention is necessary, one ought not to be, and is not, strictly bound to one's own history. It follows that the overall body politic must be essentially weak and fallible rather than fixed or over-determined by past political mechanisms. Meaning is there to be achieved by an effort of will. For Tocqueville, in the political world: 'political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable, things that can be turned and combined at will [. . .] everything is agitated, contested, uncertain'. Thus, the fundamental weakness of democratic institutions is essential to American political identity. The absence of a centre delimits sovereign centralisation and hierarchy. According to Tocqueville, by partitioning federal authority through a constitutional separation of powers, the effect is that power remains weak and indirect. This should not be mistaken for anarchy or disorder, but on the contrary should be viewed as a 'love of order and of legality'.

Tocqueville's necessary contingency at the heart of government and democratic institutions evokes McCarthy's metaphysical proposition seen in the Woodward interview. If violence and contest are the central tenets of reality for McCarthy, it follows that McCarthy is a democratic writer in a Tocquevillian vein, as the political constitution of the American body politic reflects the contingent nature of reality itself. The political register of McCarthy's writing thus corresponds to what I described, when analysing The Sunset Limited, as a type of 'mitigated Platonism'. Democracy is not indexed to an external idea or reality which is impervious to historical power relations. McCarthy, while not necessarily endorsing this or that class or party of participatory or representative democracy, or even the desirability of democracy itself, can still be argued to be a type of democratic realist. He is a writer who aims to represent the unblemished consequences of the contested demos as it transpires. The reality which American democracy generates is not ideal and neither is it to be idolised or fetishised. For Tocqueville, as much as for McCarthy, democratic reality, whether oppressive or emancipatory, is always considered fabricated: there to be made, manufactured and produced, and consequently unfinished. In literary terms, this has a cacophonous effect, giving voice to benign and malign voices, recognising the inevitability of power, rhetoric and political seduction as much as a tolerance of the multiple traditions constituting the demos.

Elsewhere, Tocqueville determined that American democracy was defined by a fundamental contradiction: it was both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously. Fatalism was, as it is usually understood, dismal, inert and pessimistic. For example, inherent to democracy is the possibility of a situation where:

The vices of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would not be slow to bring it to ruin; and the people, tired of its representatives and of themselves, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretching out at the feet of a single master.

However, this fatalism is paired with a faith in progress, since Americans:

All have a lively faith in human perfectibility; they judge that the diffusion of enlightenment will necessarily produce useful results, that ignorance will bring fatal effects; all consider society as a body in progress; humanity as a changing picture, in which nothing is or ought to be fixed forever, and they admit that what seems good to them today can be replaced tomorrow by the better that is still hidden.

What is interesting about Tocqueville's descriptions is that the contradiction is functional. American optimism works because of American fatalism. Tocqueville's America is an optimistic democratic society; however, paradoxically, this optimism is entwined with a fraught pessimism. Because the foundation of the American body politic is built on equality of opportunity as well as the individual's pursuit of happiness, Americans in Tocqueville's account come to believe that prosperity, material acquisition and wellbeing are always within their grasp. But, because material wellbeing is directly correlated to the pleasures of their mortal bodies, they are condemned to agonise continually over any prospective loss of the pleasures they hold, or over not achieving the pleasures they perceive they merit. Pursuing individual material prosperity leads to honour and respectability, but beneath the veneer of respectable prosperity there exists a deeper malaise. For Tocqueville, such are the costs of existing in a meritocracy in which prosperity is enchained to personal abilities in direct competition with all others:

When the man who lives in democratic countries compares himself individually to all those who surround him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of each of them; but when he comes to view the sum of those like him and places himself at the side of this great body, he is immediately overwhelmed by his own insignificance and his weakness.

With respect to McCarthy, Tocqueville offers a unique precursor to the chaotic democratic spirit present in McCarthy's literature.

McCarthy also, throughout his work, depicts the two sides of democratic fatalism. McCarthy's writing is obviously a by-product of a democratic state and one is constantly struck by the passive, pessimistic fatalism of the literary world and characters he creates. Even so, the upside of his characters' pursuit of either essential material wellbeing or riches continually affirms a survival of hope and possibility - most acutely in Blood Meridian, The Road and No Country for Old Men - even if such hope remains fretful, fidgety and wholly brittle. As with the unfolding of American democracy itself, the perpetual pursuit of psychological or social harmony offers no guarantees or resolution in the end. McCarthy's characters are invariably trapped in an anxious wait for the good news that never arrives due to the essential incompletion of the American project he portrays. The framing of democratic politics in McCarthy is necessarily bleak because American democracy, either as a nascent or a mature entity, is chaotic, imperfect, contentious, tumultuous and ultimately without hope. Thus, as so often with McCarthy, we can see a collapsing of oppositional thinking, in this case optimism and pessimism.

What makes McCarthy's writing interesting is that he is both optimistic and pessimistic. McCarthy, like Tocqueville, spotted the tension in democracies, where individuals hold a faith that things will stubbornly work themselves out in the end, and this faith coexists with the ever-present sense of impending threat that prosperity will be taken away. McCarthy does not so much refuse the idea of progress as refuse the idea that American democracy is necessarily self-correcting. In colloquial terms, you cannot have the good without the bad. McCarthy's democratic world entails that the general political mood of his fiction situates itself firmly within American political identity, providing a remarkable mix of failed idealism and stubborn pragmatism. Ultimately, what unites the characters of his oeuvre is the inevitability of failed idealism co-existing with a pragmatic hope for survival.

The political pathology in Tocqueville's version of democracy is present throughout McCarthy's work. McCarthy's novels, with the notable exception of democratic collapse represented in The Road, are uniformly situated within the era of American democracy. If for Tocqueville, democracy invariably disturbs and unsettles the psychological self-description of individuals, then similarly, most of McCarthy's characters experience unsettled ways of feeling, cognising and behaving. As I have argued previously, this is particularly the case with Sheriff Bell's developing uncertainty and wisdom in No Country for Old Men; in Suttree's active rejection of prevailing customs and mores in Suttree; in the boy who transcends his father's pragmatism in The Road; in Lester Ballard and the perverse underbelly of the Tennessee social order, and with the kid grappling with the domineering influence of the Judge in Blood Meridian - all present the obverse underside of American optimism and exceptionalism. Such as it is, McCarthy's characters are the creations of both democratic malaise and democratic accomplishment. This is necessarily the case, since American democracy exists to cultivate the optimistic self-determination of its citizenship. As Tocqueville proposes, 'From Maine to Florida, from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, they believe that the origin of all legitimate powers is in the people.’ McCarthy's characters stand or fall on the extent to which they can or cannot transcend themselves. They, too, are perpetually unfinished, in the process of making themselves, and are a consequence of the way democratic decisions subject them both to a life of uncertainty, but also to a life of possibility and renewal.

If there is a political imaginary in McCarthy's work it resides in coping with a contagion of breakdown, crisis and the mutability of power relations. McCarthy's democratic realism, in its simplest form, tries to understand democratic humans as they live and as they are produced. Given the radical contingency of character psychology that occupies his literature, we can add another trait that McCarthy shares with Tocqueville's account of American democracy: anti-authoritarianism. Put in the simplest terms, McCarthy's literature retains a rebellious, anarchic, even populist scorn for figures of institutional authority: police, social workers, lawyers, clergy and corporate functionaries. As I have argued in Chapter 6, Sheriff Bell offers a particularly sharp example of this: the tragedy of his character emerges from the gradual shedding of his conservative shibboleths. In his more Tocquevillian moments, the political ethos of McCarthy's writing vigorously pinpoints that authority and hierarchy is not natural, with McCarthy revelling in portraying misfits and anachronistic characters which embarrass and shame the pretensions of pompous and unfeeling authority. Thus, the tragedy and renewal of McCarthy's characters are shaped by an irresolution that amounts to a perverse egalitarianism, where all humans hold the possibility and denial of their salvation concurrently.

This weird egalitarianism shows why one cannot easily suggest that McCarthy's written work sits well with conventional conservative pieties. McCarthy continually represents the importance and equality of the forgotten, the lost, misfits and delinquents: those who lose out to historical shifts. That he keeps these voices alive serves to openly embarrass any pretensions that democracy is settled or residing in long traditions. McCarthy is perhaps therefore one of the most democratic of writers, as his work continually serves to stimulate enthusiasm for the possibility of social and political equality, even if that equality is bounded with the inevitable chaos and contingency of life. While it would be inaccurate to argue that McCarthy is a socialist or motivated specifically by, say, a Marxist critique of consumer capitalism, it is clearly the case that his characters engage in a perpetual material struggle for equal recognition. This is nowhere more evident than in The Sunset Limited, with the symmetrical struggle for mutual recognition we find in White and Black. However, because of the ineradicable contingency purveying all McCarthy's writing, and by extension his representation of American democracy itself, any struggle for equality is tragically inaccessible. And therefore, McCarthy exhibits the Tocquevillian paradox: American democracy is radically contingent and ordered; however, it is this very contingency that makes democracy possible. Also, if contingency implies that innumerable possibilities can come to pass, the end of democracy itself must be one of them, which is of course the thought-experiment that The Road entertains.

The fugue of impending threat that adorns practically all of McCarthy's writing thus must be read as undermining any inherent declinism, since ending, in the Tocquevillian sense, is entwined with a possibility of renewal. The rhetoric of declinism is usually distinguished by corruption, decay, nihilism and the weakness of political institutions, and this is certainly evident with McCarthy. Quite often, declinism accompanies a fascistic critique of intellectuals, ideas economic instrumentalism over culture, spirit and vitality, where political institutions are in a state of irreversible decay? While these themes are obvious in McCarthy, they are not paramount. Given that' McCarthy's texts tend to gravitate inexorably towards the apocalypticism of The Road, clearly McCarthy thinks that the American democratic experiment, at best, is not robust enough to withstand whatever catastrophic event precipitates The Road, or at worst is in a de facto state of erosion to the point of self-annihilation. However, as I hope should be clear by now, The Road as ending, as decline, is not the end. The story actually shows that humans can muddle on in the face of enormous hardship. Thus, McCarthy unites the fatalism and optimism that Tocqueville sees at the core of American democracy. What is so interesting about McCarthy and why his literature resists political classification is that his representation of the relations between ruler and ruled show him at his most philosophical. The political inflection of his literature is fundamentally Socratic and McCarthy's political representation is a fly in the ointment of democratic self-assurance and smugness.

The political philosophy present in McCarthy's work is less libertarian conservatism and more democratic anarchism. As we saw in the way the TVA figures in McCarthy's work, we find a scepticism of authority and large-scale transformative projects as well as any faith in individuals and groups to self-govern successfully. McCarthy's democratic realism itself mirrors this logic in his representation of democratic life, with characters swaying between chaos and complacency, resentment, relief, hope and despair. The pursuit of enough material prosperity, as we saw with Llewelyn Moss, only offers an illusion of comfort as well as a complacent assumption that the political order is fundamentally sound. However, what McCarthy portrays throughout his literature is the underside of material progress, showing that American democracy 'works' through ever-present crises. It is not specific ideologies that fracture democracy; democracy must itself be fractured, weak and dispersed. Beneath the underlying stability of the democratic order lies a mélange of competing ideas, values and alternative 'truths'. In sum, the trauma that is always present in McCarthy's literature - Rinthy and Culla's base origin in Outer Dark, the apocalyptic disaster occasioning The Road, the original murder of The Orchard Keeper, the violence of Blood Meridian - is never just a singular traumatic event tied to individual character psychology, but instead reflects the broader manifestation of crises ever present in America's democratic experiment. However, as with the precarious structures in The Orchard Keeper, we should not take McCarthy's writing of crises as a validation of wild, chaotic anarchy or authoritarian rule. Instead, the political philosophy that is detectable in McCarthy's writing endeavours to think the complications of structure and chaos, rule and misrule, law and anarchy.

While Tocqueville thought the never-ending impending threat and crises might not lead to anarchy, this cannot be said for McCarthy. Most probably, for Tocqueville, the eventual outcome of democratic fatalism would be inertia, lethargy and stagnation. For McCarthy, the outcome foreshadowed in The Orchard Keeper is fulfilled in the anarchic savagery of The Road and American democracy's inability to cope with the novel's inaugural disaster. As with the other themes I have tackled throughout this work, the political function of McCarthy's literary imaginary blends the new and novel with the ancient and archaic. The chronology of McCarthy's narratives is preceded by an even longer story, one with deep roots in human evolution and the evolution of human societies. As we saw with Blood Meridian, humans' drive to civility, order and hierarchical rule is inseparable from popular demands for autonomy, self-organisation, mutual aid, voluntary association and even direct democracy. Hence, the conservative Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men vacillates between certainty and uncertainty, a representative of the state's power and frailty simultaneously. Bell's essential weakness and fallibility announces a broader desire for self-directed community and belonging. Bell is weak in the same sense that power is decentralised in America: power is elusive and ubiquitous, distant, yet somehow always to hand.” (p. 181 - 189)

#cormac #cormac mccarthy #tocqueville #alexis de tocqueville #no country for old men #democracy #america #the road #sunset limited #blood meridian #suttree #orchard keeper

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nicklloydnow · 8 days

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“The delay has changed American politics too. Only a minority of House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, joined most Democrats to approve $60 billion in aid yesterday. What is now clearly a pro-Russia Republican caucus has consolidated inside Congress. The lesson is clear: Anyone who seeks to manipulate the foreign policy of the United States, whether the tin-pot autocrat in Hungary or the Communist Party of China, now knows that a carefully designed propaganda campaign, when targeted at the right people, can succeed well beyond what anyone once thought possible. From the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion, President Vladimir Putin has been trying to conquer Ukraine through psychological games as well as military force. He needed to persuade Americans, Europeans, and above all Ukrainians that victory was impossible, that the only alternative was surrender, and that the Ukrainian state would disappear in due course.

(…)

But with the passage of this aid bill, Russia’s demoralization campaign has suffered a severe setback. This is also a setback for the Russian war effort, and not only because the Ukrainians will now have more ammunition. Suddenly the Russian military and Russian society are once again faced with the prospect of a very long war. Ukraine, backed by the combined military and economic forces of the United States and the European Union, is a much different opponent than Ukraine isolated and alone.

(…)

Once the aid package becomes law this week, the psychological advantage will once again be on our side. Let’s use it. As Johnson himself recommended, the Biden administration should immediately pressure European allies to release the $300 billion in Russian assets that they jointly hold and send it to Ukraine. There are excellent legal and moral arguments for doing so—the money can legitimately be considered a form of reparations. This shift would also make clear to the Kremlin that it has no path back to what used to be called “normal” relations, and that the price Russia is paying for its colonial war will only continue to grow.

(…)

As American aid resumes, the Ukrainians should be actively encouraged to pursue the asymmetric warfare that they do best. The air and naval drone campaign that pushed the Black Sea Fleet away from their coastline, the raids on Russian gas and oil facilities thousands of miles from Ukraine, the recruitment of Russian soldiers, in Russia, to join pro-Ukraine Russian units fighting on the border—we need more of this, not less. The Biden administration should also heed Johnson’s suggestion that the United States supply more and better long-range weapons so that Ukrainians can hit Russian missile launchers before the missiles reach Ukraine. If the U.S. had done so in the autumn of 2022, when Ukraine was taking back territory, the world might look a lot different today.

This war will be over only when the Russians no longer want to fight—and they will stop fighting when they realize they cannot win. Now it is our turn to convince them, as well as our own pro-Russia caucus, that their invasion will fail. The best way to do that is to believe it ourselves.”

“In Ukraine, despite already almost two years of devastating conflict, more than 74% of the population are still in favour of continuing the war until the complete liberation of all occupied territories. In the West, however, both public attitudes and the attitudes of ruling elites are showing signs of fatigue, putting at risk the volume of military-technical assistance to Ukraine. The failure of the US government to secure approval from Congress to finance aid to Ukraine for 2024 is an example of the success of Russian efforts, albeit indirect. Clearly, if the level of support for Ukraine in US society remained at the level of an absolute majority, as it was in 2022, refusing to vote for the allocation of aid would be tantamount to political suicide. Yet at the end of 2023, despite the fact that 50% of Republican Party voters still support sending weapons and military equipment to Ukraine, such a refusal has become a political reality.

Given that the threat of ending or at least reducing the amount of aid to Ukraine will only grow in the future, it is worth assessing the consequences of a complete or even partial victory for Russia. For Ukraine, the consequences are mostly clear. Putin does not hide his genocidal intentions to destroy Ukraine as an independent state and Ukrainians as a separate people. The continuation of the war is necessary to achieve these goals, as it allows not only the physical destruction of those Ukrainians who are ready to offer armed resistance (so-called ‘demilitarisation’ in the terms of the Kremlin's ‘special military operation’), but also the creation of conditions incompatible with normal life for millions of civilians – both in the occupied territories and in other areas – forcing them to leave Ukraine and seek refuge in other countries (so-called ‘denazification’, which is essentially nothing more than ethnic cleansing).

(…)

It is obvious that if Ukraine loses support from the West, Putin may well achieve his goal of destroying Ukrainians as a people and erasing the largest country from the map of Europe. Despite the obvious tragedy of this situation for Ukraine, the consequences of its defeat for the West and especially for the US as the leader of the free world would be no less catastrophic.

Despite the fact that the West prefers to consider this war as a bilateral conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian leadership perceives and positions it as a one-on-one confrontation with the US and NATO, where Ukraine serves only as a proxy. This perception is widespread not only in Russia itself, but also in other autocratic states and countries across the Global South. Thus, any situation that can be passed off by Russia as a victory – that is, any achievements resulting from its aggression – will be perceived by these countries as a direct defeat of the West and the US in particular. At the same time, such a defeat would be perceived as a military one, where the West – led by the US – did not have sufficient military means to support the operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, even though it did not have to participate with its own troops. This would undoubtedly have a very negative impact on the perception of the US as the world's leading military power; it would encourage countries such as China, Iran and North Korea to continue their own military expansion; and it would also force the countries of the Global South to seek special relationships with these countries, displacing the US as an international security broker. This would further undermine the US position in the Global South, which is already at its weakest since the end of the Cold War. Not only would this lead to a weakening of the West’s ability to use the military infrastructure of these countries, but it would also limit access to their markets, as well as the ability to obtain strategic materials from them.

A Russian victory in Ukraine is highly likely to destroy NATO, at least in its current form. From its creation, the Alliance was an agreement between the US and Europe, according to which the US undertook to protect Europe from the Soviet threat. In exchange for this, among other things, European countries made their military infrastructure available to the US, undertook to develop their own defence capabilities, and recognised the undisputed military leadership of the US in the event of a war with the USSR. After a brief period of uncertainty regarding NATO's goals that followed the collapse of the USSR, the main threat to the Alliance once again emanates from Russia. The unwillingness of the US to provide Ukraine with enough weapons to win a war with Russia, where the US is not required to send its own troops, calls into question the US’s readiness to protect individual NATO countries from Russian aggression, where sending US troops would be the only option. Moreover, given the trends in US policy towards abandoning the Eisenhower Doctrine in favour of isolationism, there is a real threat that in the foreseeable future the US government may even reconsider its commitments to providing military aid to European countries.

It is obvious that without US troops, and especially without the US nuclear umbrella, European countries will not be able to defend themselves in the event of a full-scale war with a nuclear state. Awareness of the high risk of losing US protection may force the leaders of European states to start looking for bilateral security arrangements with Russia or China, either of which may offer to step in as a security broker, as has already happened in the Middle East. Undoubtedly, the withdrawal of the US from Europe – which was and remains the principal goal of first Soviet and now Russian active measures – would be immediately capitalised upon by filling the resultant vacuum with Russian and Chinese influence. For the US, the loss of Europe would be equivalent to losing the status of leader of the free world, and together with the loss of European markets, it would mean the inevitable end of the era of US political, military and economic dominance.

A Russian victory in Ukraine would destroy the modern system of global nuclear security, pushing the world into an inevitable period of nuclear war. The destruction of Ukraine, which in 1993 gave up the world's third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons after receiving security guarantees from Russia, the US and the UK, would be an absolute argument in favour of the idea that the only means of protection against aggression by nuclear states is the possession of nuclear weapons of one’s own. The combination of Russian conventional aggression with threats to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, as well as the willingness of other guarantors to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia in order to avoid nuclear escalation, would leave no room for any misreading. More and more non-nuclear countries would seek to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Given the increasing number of countries possessing nuclear arsenals, their practical use in a conflict is only a matter of time. Breaking the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons would create a new reality, the tragic characteristics of which are hard to imagine.

(…)

Meanwhile, defeating Russia in Ukraine remains quite achievable and requires only a review of approaches to supporting Ukraine in this war. In the current confrontation, Russia is at the limit of its capabilities, directing about 30% of its state budget to supporting the war. In 2023, the war cost Russia about $100 billion. Russia will retain the ability to continue the war at this level as long as the prices of gas and oil – the sale of which remains the main source of financing for the Russian budget – remain high. At the same time, the costs of supporting Ukraine on the part of the Western coalition remain lower than the costs for Russia, despite the obvious economic advantage of the West. Moreover, the cost of supporting Ukraine is still less than the cost of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the US government estimates cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion. For comparison, the total military aid to Ukraine from the US for the entire duration of the full-scale war has amounted to about $46 billion. Such a situation gives the Russian leadership the impression that the West lacks commitment to achieving a Ukrainian victory and encourages them to continue their aggression.”

“But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.

(…)

As the media and the world awaits full-scale war between Iran and Israel and even frets about nuclear escalation, a huge reality of modern warfare is being overlooked: We are already fighting World War III. No, it is not empires marching armies through countries, conquering continents. And no, it isn’t millions of young men (and now women) pressed in uniform on scales of nearly 100 years ago. And no, in most societies where war is a constant, the public doesn’t even have to feel the pain of war, except in that the military dominates everything and robs everything else of resources: programs to fight poverty, food, housing, health care, transportation, climate change.

World War III instead is all around, a planet that is aflame with armed conflict and awash in arms sales, an overlapping Venn diagram of killing that engulfs the globe, and a constant bonanza for national security “experts” and the military–industrial complex.

(…)

In the Middle East, the U.S., Turkey, Iraq, and even Iran all have footholds in Syria as their internal civil war continues unabated. And all of it goes unremarked most of the time as people look elsewhere for World War II-like battles. Iranian; Iranian-funded or backed or inspired; or independent militias in Syria and Iraq target U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq, and now Jordan. The United States bombs, but so does Israel, and Turkey, and other silent partners of Washington in the war against Iran, and Syria, and ISIS, and Hezbollah. The fight against ISIS, Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. says, involves 80-plus “partners” fighting not just in Syria and Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and Libya. A coalition of 80-plus countries — but the U.S. is loath to name them all, especially the allied “special” operators who are clandestinely working on the ground.

What we do know is that 10 countries have been involved in airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, including the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Korea. Like so many other conflicts, it’s not altogether clear who bombed who or from where, nor other members of the supporting cast. The U.S. bombs from aircraft carriers and from the Gulf states, and from Kuwait and Jordan, and possibly even from Saudi Arabia and Oman. But World War III is about keeping things secret, so who knows.

In the Red Sea, these same countries — plus France, Italy, Norway, Seychelles, Spain, Greece, Finland, Australia, and Sri Lanka — have joined to fend off Houthi attacks at sea. Even more countries are allegedly participating in the coalition in secret, given the sensitivities surrounding support for Israel during its war with Hamas. But then there’s also the war against pirates, and the war against nuclear proliferation, and the war against arms smuggling, and the Middle East war even against drugs, all carried out by a vast international maritime fleet involving dozens of countries.

While Israel’s war in Gaza, and its back and forth with Iran, is atop the Billboard charts for now, in Ukraine, a trench war and a standoff has now dragged on for more than two years. Here as well, all eyes have been on some kind of decisive victory or defeat, but World War III is more characterized by Ukraine or its proxies regularly attacking targets inside Mother Russia, attacks that Moscow downplays. Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side are now making regular incursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions. Meanwhile, the real World War III is NATO already at war with Russia, increasing its activities adjacent to the enemy, expanding its ranks, building up its military, and supplying arms to Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, is deployed from Norway to Bulgaria, and has in the past two years built up a major new base in Poland. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea have played their part in shuttling drones, missiles, and artillery shells into the Russian war effort.

(…)

The war in Ukraine is certainly the world-altering event of the past five years, but even here, without more borders crossed, without escalation, and without Russia and NATO shooting at each other directly, some mighty lessons can be learned. Armies clashing is an illusion. World War III is thus not some conquering army sweeping its way across the continent. At no time have more than 300,000 soldiers been on the battlefield in Ukraine at any one time; in World War II, it was nearly 10 million facing each other on a daily basis (and some 125 million mobilized overall). Because of the greater lethality of weapons, military casualties in Ukraine have been enormous. But most of the ground engagements have taken place at the company or even platoon level; massing too many troops in one place is just too dangerous in today’s world. And this has all unfolded while neither Russia nor Ukraine have been able to harness airpower in the same way the United States has. Other than Vladimir Putin’s heartless offensive that used young Russian men as cannon fodder, few nations want to fight this way, preferring long-range air and missile (and now drone) attacks.

(…)

On the African continent, the U.S., France, and the U.K. have been engaged in expansive yet clandestine fighting, supposedly against Islamic terrorists, while all around the continent smolders and neither can claim any long-term wins on the dual fronts of counterterrorism and peacekeeping. American troops operating in Niger are stuck as the country’s U.S. government-trained junta claims America’s footprint is illegal. The United States has also been bombing targets in Somalia for years now, and the African Union mission in Somalia has been actively involved in combating al-Shabab.

U.S. forces continue to fan out across Latin America and the Caribbean, using missile cruisers to intercept drug smuggling submarines, sending marine anti-terrorism teams into a fully destabilized Haiti, and fast-tracking exports of helicopters, aircraft, and naval drones to Guyana as its neighbor Venezuela hungrily eyes its oil reserves. Senior Biden administration officials have floated sending U.S. troops into the treacherous swatch of jungle connecting South and Central America known as the Darién Gap to stem the flow of migrants and drugs across the U.S. southern border.

(…)

Ubiquitous warfare, our World War III, paints a worldwide picture that is overwhelming, leaving little room to imagine that something can be done about it. And it’s hard not to conclude that the superpowers and the national security “community” aren’t somehow satisfied with the status quo. But as with addiction, the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem — or in this case, a global war.”

#ukraine #russia #war #putin #israel #iran #world war iii #world war 3 #wwiii #ww3 #anne applebaum

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nicklloydnow · 12 days

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“On an ordinary day, not in an ordinary way

All at once, the song I heard, no longer would it play

For anybody or anyone

That needed comfort from somebody

Needed comfort from someone

Who cared to be not like you and unlike me”

#SoundCloud #guns n roses #axl rose #robin finck #buckethead #the catcher in the rye

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nicklloydnow · 14 days

Text

“He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay.

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”

#cormac mccarthy #the road

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nicklloydnow · 14 days

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“McCarthy defines alienation and alienated life as the norm rather than the exception. Even more, beyond the limits of our world, there are infinitely new monstrosities awaiting.” - Patrick O’Connor, ‘Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned’ (2022) [p. 65]

#cormac mccarthy #alienation #the road

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nicklloydnow · 15 days

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"My helmet was totally squashed. Then I see the doctor. Usual procedure - they try to see my d*ck first, touching my balls."

(…)

It's true! I learn that in UK. When balls move, brain is fine. When big crash, scissors, take off the overalls, see the balls, hit the balls, then when balls move, this guy's fine. If balls don't move, then there's a problem with brain damage, I think." - Taki Inoue

#inoue #taki inoue #f1 #racing #brain damage #balls #top gear

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nicklloydnow · 16 days

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“How is one, finally, to account for the continued appeal of H. P. Lovecraft? There now seems less dispute that Lovecraft somehow belongs in the canon of American and world literature; a reviewer of Burleson's Disturbing the Universe remarked pointedly: "It's getting to where those who still ignore Lovecraft will have to go on the defensive." The attacks of Edmund and Colin Wilson have been forgotten, and Lovecraft is cited in encyclopaedias and other reference works with some cordiality.

But why do people read Lovecraft at all, and what leads a good many of them to develop a kind of compulsive fascination with both his work and the man himself? There is no denying that Lovecraft appeals on many levels, to many differing types of readers, from teenage boys to college professors to highbrow novelists. For young boys, it is Lovecraft's very exoticism—the absence of those disturbing creatures, girls, and the family scenario altogether; the depiction of boundless space, not in the science-fictional sense of a place of infinite possibilities for human action but of infinite horror and dread; the apparent luridness of some of his monsters, from fish-frogs to ten-foot cones to humans degenerating into cannibals; a prose style that can seem hallucinatory as a drug-delirium—that seems to cast an ineffable appeal; and there is still the half-mythical figure of Lovecraft himself, the gaunt "eccentric recluse" who slept during the day and wrote all night. As one matures, one sees different things in Lovecraft the man and writer—the philosophical depth underlying the surface luridness of his work; the dignity, courtesy, and intellectual breadth of his temperament; his complex role in the political, economic, social, and cultural trends of his age. Perhaps it is useless, and foolish, to deny that Lovecraft is an oddity—neither he nor his work is "normal" in any conventional sense, and much of the fascination that continues to surround him resides exactly in this fact. But both his supporters and his detractors would do well to examine the facts about both his life and his work, and also the perspective from which they make their own pronouncements and evaluations of his character. He was a human being like any of us—neither a lunatic nor a superman. He had his share of flaws and virtues. But he is dead now, and no amount of praise or blame will have any effect upon the course of his life. His work alone remains.” (p. 1057, 1058)

#lovecraft #h p lovecraft #providence #joshi #s t joshi #literature #fiction #weird #colin wilson

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nicklloydnow · 20 days

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“This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.

Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”

(…)

Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases. She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling — the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy — explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.

The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology — such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context. Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?

“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.

“And I say that because I have seen it used that way,” Rowling continues. She says other women have told her they’ve been warned: “Look at what happened to J.K. Rowling. Watch yourself.”

(…)

Phelps-Roper told me that Rowling’s outspokenness is precisely in the service of this kind of cause. “A lot of people think that Rowling is using her privilege to attack a vulnerable group,” she said. “But she sees herself as standing up for the rights of a vulnerable group.”

Rowling, Phelps-Roper added, views speaking out as a responsibility and an obligation: “She’s looking around and realizing that other people are self-censoring because they cannot afford to speak up. But she felt she had to be honest and stand up against a movement that she saw as using authoritarian tactics.”

As Rowling herself notes on the podcast, she’s written books where “from the very first page, bullying and authoritarian behavior is held to be one of the worst of human ills.” Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she is sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered.

(…)

In the words of Fiennes: “J.K. Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centered human being,” he said. “The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting. It’s appalling.”

Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.

(…)

Because what Rowling actually says matters. In 2016, when accepting the PEN/Allen Foundation award for literary service, Rowling referred to her support for feminism — and for the rights of transgender people. As she put it, “My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to satanism, and I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.”

Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.

Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.”

“But I do like the phrase, implying as it does a refusal to bow down to the establishment. Although we had a Labour government from 1974, it’s fair to say that the establishment of the 1970s was a fusty right-wing thing, sexist and racist and snobbish. But funnily enough, it’s still sexist and snobbish, in that women and the working-class are expected to obey (transvestite) men and the liberal elite respectively; it’s not racist in the old vulgar way but in a modish, middle-class way, dealing in the poverty of low expectations, seen best in that hilarious Labour election promise that only Jeremy Corbyn ‘can be trusted to unlock the talent of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’ when the Tory cabinet already featured more black, Asian and minority ethnic people than a Labour one ever had. Oh, and racism is also judging people on the colour of their skin as opposed to the content of their character – as Martin Luther King preferred – which is inherent in every diversity and inclusion drive, every taking of the knee, every ‘black-out’ theatre performance. When people of colour refuse to lose their agency by identifying as underdogs and waiting for whitey to save them (some to the point of becoming Conservative politicians), they may be called ‘coconuts’ and all sorts of nasty names – but in a caring, anti-racist way.

(…)

Punk wasn’t ever left-wing – it was anti-establishment, so whatever the establishment is for, punk was against it. The anti-Lydon lot will always bring up The Clash as an example of a left-wing punk band, but this was more a difference of class origin than of politics proper; Joe Strummer was a lovely fellow, but he was also an upper-middle public schoolboy and thereby prone to a bit of P’n’P (poncing and posing) with his R’n’R. Of the other big punk bands, The Damned were about as political as The Munch Bunch, The Stranglers had a soft spot for the crazed Japanese militarist Yukio Mishima and The Jam were young patriots who pined for ‘the great empire’ and spat loathing at avuncular James Callaghan (‘The truth is you’ve lost, Uncle Jimmy!’). Unlike the cosy 1960s scene, they barely spoke to each other; that was the whole point of punk, to be different. But the rewriting of punk history by anxious middle-class lefties happened almost from the start; by the 1980s, punk was being recalled as a reaction against Thatcher’s Britain, despite it all kicking off three years before she became prime minister. Indeed, with her desire to destroy anything which seemed weak and outdated, there’s a case for saying that Mrs T was the most punk politician thus far. This was echoed in Sex Pistol Steve Jones’s autobiography Lonely Boy – surprisingly good – in which he understandably writes that he went into showbiz to make money as much as music, and that when he finally scraped enough royalties together to buy himself a second-hand car, Vivienne Westwood accused him of ‘selling out’. This would be the Vivienne Westwood who took an honour from the monarchy and was a shameless tax avoider. Hypocrite, heal thyself.

Punk was, as Westwood and McLaren so flagrantly demonstrated, always marbled with corruption, as indeed is every place where art meets showbiz; it gives it its piquancy. But punk is like a religion to some pathetic purists now. There was a long-running argument on a social media forum a few weeks ago about whether Anarchy In The UK was a call to real anarchic communal living. (No, that would be for the filthy hippies.) Others said (correctly) that it was simply a call to smash the status quo – and the status quo is now woke.

Punk can be traced back to historical anti-establishment art from the political cartoons of the 18th century, through Beyond The Fringe to Monty Python, all mocking the monarchy, judges, police and politicians. It couldn’t have started anywhere but England; someone said that Brexit was an amalgamation of South Downs Tories and snarling inner-city punks. It was only natural that the great charismatic loner contrarians of 20th century pop, Lydon and Morrissey, were in favour; If you’re independent and rebellious, you certainly weren’t going to be a remainer.

Predictably, the vast majority of those who identify as punks these days come across as extremely wet blankets who get their knickers in a twist over weird things; think of the hissy-fit Rage Against the Machine had over people who wouldn’t wear masks at their gigs and the American ‘punks’ who beat up ‘fascists’ who aren’t fascists in the least unless one uses the word in the manner of Rik in The Young Ones. Then we have the weirdest cause of all, trans. whereby privileged white men can whack on some rouge and call themselves women – the war for the soul of punk is being fought on this front, too.

(…)

When I started out as a musician, I thought that punks were anti-establishment; then when my first album was released, I passed through the scene and realised it’s full of Stasi boneheads who love the boot when they’re the ones wearing it. Punks pretend to be rebellious musicians but act more like bureaucrats and propagandists who contribute nothing to music except a pathological hatred of women and the highest form of wokery I’ve ever personally encountered. Speaking your mind publicly is what making music is all about; freedom of speech and our hard-won rights as women – especially in male dominated music industry – is something that should be protected at all costs no matter what -ism we’re living under. But when the establishment and corporations support you, you are the establishment. So, for me being a Terf is about as punk as it gets.

I was there; I may not have liked the music much, but I lived the ribald and riotous experience that was punk – and I know a short-haired hippie when I see one. As I wrote in Welcome To The Woke Trials: ‘Woke is the revenge of the dullard on the wit, the curtain-twitcher on the headline-maker, the wallflower on the whirling dancer’ – add to that ‘the establishment stooge who believes himself righteous on the outlaw’. So, punk’s not dead – this time, she’s a Terf.”

#terf #punk #anti establishment #john lydon #johnny rotten #brexit #joe strummer #the clash #britain #margaret thatcher #julie burchill #woke #jk rowling #harry potter #free speech #antiauthoritarian

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nicklloydnow · 23 days

Note

привет

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nicklloydnow · 25 days

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“Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind - surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false. Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him.

"I told you, Winston," he said, "that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression," he added in a different tone. "The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"

Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.

"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:

"And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands - all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live forever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon - and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again, generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken-up, contemptible - and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. "You can't!" he said weakly.

"What do you mean by that remark, Winston?"

"You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible."

"Why?"

"It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure."

"Why not?"

"It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide."

"Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal."

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

"I don't know - I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you."

"We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside - irrelevant."

"I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces."

"Do you see any evidence that this is happening? Or any reason why it should?"

"No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe - I don't know, some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome."

"Do you believe in God, Winston?" "No." "Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?" "I don't know. The spirit of Man." "And do you consider yourself a man?"

"Yes."

"If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are nonexistent."”

#orwell #george orwell #1984 #april 4 #power #party #suffering

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nicklloydnow · 26 days

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“To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Anathemas and Admirations’ (1987) [p. 151]

#cioran #emil cioran #big bang #implosion #explosion

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nicklloydnow · 26 days

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“Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Anathemas and Admirations’ (1987) [p. 151]

#cioran #emil cioran #cobain #kurt cobain #nirvana

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nicklloydnow · 29 days

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“For years, the City of Santa Monica has required new developments and extensive remodels in the city to include public art. According to a 2017 Arts Commission staff report about the new installation, “In December, 2006 the City Council adopted an ordinance that requires that developers include public art in a majority of new development projects, as well as substantial remodels. The requirement is for an expenditure on art that is equivalent to 2% of the building cost, which are currently fixed at $200 per square foot for new construction and $50 per square foot for remodels.”

Based on the size of the project, developers NMS Properties were required to install art with a minimum value of $392,000. But NMS went bigger.

The 2017 staff report said “the budget for the proposed artwork will exceed the art requirement significantly,” with an updated public art budget of $1 million including $50,000 toward consultant Lendrum Fine Art (a LA-based art advisory firm and gallery) and $30,000 (or three percent of the artwork budget) committed to an endowment for maintenance of the sculpture.

The new sculpture was created by acclaimed Czech artist David Cerny, whose sculpture work has been described as “shocking and provocative,” according to various online biographies. Compared to some of his famous work that features genitals, weapons and political messages, the David Lynch sculpture avoids incendiary subject matter: “The proposed artwork is of the highest aesthetic quality and has been designed to be eminently suitable to its surroundings, given that it meets City standards for material, vehicular and pedestrian safety,” according to the 2017 Arts Commission staff report. It resembles another Cerny project, a kinetic sculpture depicting surrealist author Franz Kafka that is installed in a public square in Prague, Czech Republic.

The 2017 staff report also included a detailed description of the sculpture.

“The artwork will be comprised of 7-8 mirror-finished, marine-grade stainless steel layers that are stratified to form a head resembling the likeness of David Lynch, which will be mounted atop a plinth. The total height of the artwork and plinth will be approximately 21 feet. Each stratum will be motorized and will spin on bearings, activating this kinetic artwork,” the report described. “The layers will shift and realign in a dynamic and mesmerizing way. At certain points in its revolution it will be figurative; at other’s (sic) it will be abstract and undiscernible (sic) as a human form. The sculpture will remain active 24 hours a day and will present extremely little to no noise disturbance.””

#david lynch #david cerny #santa monica #art #sculpture

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nicklloydnow · 29 days

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“In the first fraction of a millisecond, a flash of light superheats the air to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, incinerating people, places, and things, and absorbing a once bright, once powerful, once vibrant city center in a holocaust of fire and death. The fireball from this 1-megaton nuclear weapon that strikes the Pentagon is thousands of times more brilliant than the sun at noon. People from Baltimore, Maryland, to Quantico, Virginia, see this flash of light. Anyone staring directly at it is blinded by it.

In this first millisecond, the fireball is a 440-foot-diameter sphere. Over the next ten seconds, it expands to 5,700 feet in diameter, more than one mile of pure fire—nineteen football fields of fire—obliterating the nexus of American democracy.

The edges of the fireball stretch all the way to the Lincoln Memorial to the north and into Crystal City to the south. Everything and everyone that existed in this space is incinerated. Nothing remains. No human, no squirrel, no ladybug. No plants, no animals. No cellular life.

The air around the fireball's edges compresses into a steeply fronted blast wave. This dense wall of air pushes forward, mowing down everything and everyone in its path for three miles out, in every direction. Accompanied by several-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, it is as if Washington, D.C., just got hit by an asteroid and its accompanying wave.

In Ring 1—a nine-mile-diameter ring— engineered structures change physical shape and most collapse. Piles of rubble left behind stand thirty or more feet high. The initial thermonuclear flash has set everything in the fireball's line of sight on fire. It melts lead, steel, titanium. It turns paved streets into molten asphalt.

At the outer edges of Ring 1, rare survivors become trapped in liquified roadways, catch fire, and melt. The X-ray light of the nuclear flash burns skin off people's bodies, leaving their extremities a shredded horror of bloody tendons and exposed bone. Wind rips the skin off people's faces and tears away limbs. Survivors die of shock, heart attack, blood loss. Errant power lines whip through the air, electrocuting people and setting new fires alight everywhere.

As tens of seconds pass, the fireball rises three miles up into the air. Its ominous cloud cap turns the light of day into darkness. Some 1 to 2 million people are dead or dying, hundreds of thousands more now caught in the rubble and the flames. "There will be virtually no survivors," the government's nuclear advisory panel has long warned of what will happen in the first ring around ground zero. "There will be nothing recognizable remaining.... Only foundations and basements remaining."

Never in the history of mankind have so many human beings been killed so fast. Not since a mountain-sized asteroid smashed into Earth 66 million years ago has so much global devastation been set in motion in a single strike.

The die has been cast.

The singular, haunting words from former STRATCOM commander General Robert Kehler come alive: "The world could end in the next couple of hours."

And now it is about to.” - Annie Jacobsen, ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’ (2024) [p. 164 - 166]

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nicklloydnow · 29 days

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“The elements are not the only death sentence that looms. As the postwar weeks and months pass, survivors fighting the bitter cold become sick with radiation poisoning. Strontium-90, iodine-131, tritium, cesium-137, plutonium-239, and other radioactive products swept up into the mushroom clouds and dispersed around the earth as fallout continue to contaminate the environment. Death by radiation is an excruciating way to die. As acute vomiting and diarrhea run their course, bone marrow and intestinal destruction sets in. The lining on victims' organs ruptures and hemorrhages. The insides of people's bodies liquify as blood vessel lining sloughs away. These are grueling maladies to endure in a hospital, near impossible to overcome in the cold and the dark, on the run from firestorms and toxic smoke.

Those who continue to live suffer chromosomal damage and blindness. Many will become sterile, or semi-sterile, with reproductivity further reduced over time. There isn't enough uncontaminated food and water to go around. Humans fight for these resources. Only the ruthless survive.” - Annie Jacobsen, ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’ (2024) [p. 285]

#annie jacobsen #nuclear war #easter

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nicklloydnow · 30 days

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“Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

(…)

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

(…)

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

(…)

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

(…)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

(…)

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.””

#nick cave

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