#nihilists

[tomorrowusa]

House Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson is an unintentional gift to Democrats.

It's not necessary to spend a lot of time doing oppo research on MAGA Mike. He's quite openly an anti-abortion fanatic, a homophobe, an insurrectionist, and a climate denier.

Donald Trump is the face of the Republican Party and MAGA Mike is his understudy.

Just because the House now has a Speaker doesn't mean the ongoing Republican dysfunction there will soon end.

[secular-jew]

With great sorrow and a broken heart

I share that we were informed this evening

Our beloved Shehili

No longer with us. 💔

Thank you very much to everyone for the support and looking for her

the funeral will take place tomorrow in Kfar Yona

[dougielombax]

Is there a starter pack for condescending, nihilistic, middle aged armchair historians?

There must be one somewhere out there.

Maybe down the back of the sofa with those lost snowglobes and receipts

[nagyoncringe]

Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (Ве́ра Ива́новна Засу́лич) - Russian revolutionary

In 1878 she attempted to assassinate Russian government official, Fyodor Trepov, with a British Bulldog Revolver. The jury sympathized with her cause, so they found her not guilty.

[correctopinionhaver]

so called nihilists when i steal the burrito they just heated up

[nicklloydnow]

“There has been much talk in Athens of social cannibalism; that is, the social body devouring itself. Immigrant pimps selling their immigrant prostitutes to wealthy Greek men. Greek heroin dealers selling their dope to Greek junkies. The police of Athens turning against each other. The citizens attacking politicians. The anarchists attacking each other. The fascists attacking anarchists. The war of all against all. Chaos. This is the famous image of Athens being destroyed by Athena, its patron goddess.

The media and the government has a very clear interest in promoting this idea of social decomposition. Because, in the end, if things become bad enough, it will be the State that comes in and restores order. At least that is the standard script. But something different is taking place here in Greece. Society actually is falling apart, more rapidly than it normally is in every major metropolis. No one has any money, the government is poised to take out another loan from the Troika, and everyone is aware of a problem. The form that this problem takes is different depending on who you talk to. The fascists say the problem is immigrants and left-wing politicians. The politicians say the problem is the irresponsibility of the citizens who do not pay their taxes, refuse to pay the tolls, and refuse to allow garbage dumps in their villages. The anarchists say the problem is capitalism and the State. These different forces find varying resonance for their ideas in different areas of Athens.

(…)

The Conspiracy (of Cells of Fire) claims to be made of anarcho-nihilist-individualists. They have consistently criticized the population of Greece for being too cowardly, passive, and blind. They blame the population for its own misery, primarily because the population is too stupid to change its situation. The Conspiracy is also critical of the traditional anarchist scene and the limitations it imposes on itself by remaining fixed in the same ineffective forms. They advocate for the creation of small armed cells that are federated informally across Greece and the world, cells that strike the symbols and mechanisms of authoritarian power directly. Generally speaking, they do not speak firmly or with conviction about the creation of anything else. On the other hand, they are critical of everything else.

The nihilism of the Conspiracy is a reflection of the nihilism that is rampant among the youth of 2008. These youth have not only witnessed and lived within the failure of the capitalist world system, but they have witnessed and been part of the failed resistance against that world system. There are many people from the seventies who may tell the youth the correct way to struggle, but to the youth, these old men failed, just like everyone else. When these youth attempt to express their desperation and eagerness to act, they are usually silenced, shouted down, or ridiculed by anarchists who have a closer connection to older traditions of struggle. The effect of this is that the youth drop out of the conscious centers of the movement, preferring to stay on the periphery where they are free to do as they like. Some of them break away completely, as evidenced by the Conspiracy.

There are some guerillas and militants that have found general acceptance and admiration amongst the anarchist scene. The “robbers in black,” Revolutionary Struggle, and Vassilis Palaiokostas, to name a few. Palaiokostas is famous internationally as the man who escaped from prison by helicopter. These people, however daring their exploits, have always maintained their theoretical connections to the traditional anarchist or autonomous scenes. They believe in social revolution and the infinite potential of the population to rebel. Although they may share the same general goals as the nihilists (the destruction of the global order and its agents), they have publicly disassociated themselves from them on several occasions. The other guerillas and militants have a hope and confidence in the population that the nihilists do not share. The nihilists are the few who, to invoke Euripides, have asked Athena to destroy the city completely. But they are alone, having been pushed out and ignored by most other anarchists. In their isolation, the most determined of them have disconnected completely from where they came from and are being slowly picked off, one by one. As they sit in jail, the city persists.

The current nihilism amongst the youth is not arising from nothing. It is a reflection of the total failure of both resistance and capitalism. Many see no alternative and want nothing else other than the complete destruction of the beast that feeds them: the city. To espouse these views is very difficult. To people who want social change, radical transformation, or a drastic change, total destruction sounds as insane as it is. December 2008 may have been aided by conscious actors who carefully selected targets, but the destructive urges of all who participated was general in its scope. These urges may have been shaped or channeled by different ideologies once the insurrection was over, but at their core they were uncontrollable.

2008, the first explosion of the same fire that spread over North Africa, was the emergence of something new. Not anarchism, not communism, not democracy. It was the desire to get rid of everything. In Egypt, that desire was channeled into democratic parties that killed the energy, leaving the country with a military dictatorship. In Greece, that desire was channeled back into the trade unions, the parties, and the ideologies. What sustained each insurrection, what kept them at a fever pitch, was the complete absence of any guiding hand. As soon as someone took control, as soon as someone promised a better tomorrow, that tomorrow soon arrived, identical to all the other yesterdays.

There is a fear amongst anarchists, in Greece and internationally, of committing to the goals they espouse. The abyss of freedom is terrifying. Without the police, there will be civil war between different groupings and it will look worse than the struggle between anarchists, fascists, and immigrants we are seeing today. Without the city, the grid, and the infrastructure, there will be mass starvation and violence. It is utopic to imagine workers taking over the electrical plants and water system, of the population re-appropriating the resources of the city and putting them to better use. But just like the Bastille, the city of Athens will always retain the purpose it was built for. The Bastille was built to be a prison, nothing else. Athens was built to house workers and their overlords. It has retained this character for thousands of years. If capitalism vanished, the purpose of the city would vanish with it.

It is daunting to face this fact, and in fear most retreat into pre-existing forms of struggle that, in the end, amount to little more than resigned acceptance and permanent defeat. The same forms can be repeated, the same scenes and rituals can be replicated, but they will not suddenly work when they haven’t for so long. It is fear that pushes people away from the conclusion that the most important project left to us is to destroy what capitalism has created. Who wants to destroy the place where they live? Who wants to see it slip into chaos without being able to promise themselves and their friends that something better will come? There can be no promises in the future. All promises turn into lies, the deceived becomes the deceiver, and the present misery continues.

The nihilists and the youth among us must not be pushed away or driven into desperation. They are part of our anarchist worlds and reflect something that is at once new and terribly old. If we do not listen to them, they will act regardless of our approval or recognition. If we try to control them, we will appear to them as nothing more than extensions of the system they want to destroy. Perhaps there is more truth to this than any of us have ever imagined. Perhaps we are simply cowards, biding our time until the perfect heroes come to save us, to promise us a future, to act first so that we might follow. As anarchists, we know the destruction of capitalism is necessary, but now that capitalism has integrated so deeply into our lives, this knowledge is even more terrifying. We retreat back to the eighties, the nineties, the two-thousands, always clinging to the little bit of history we have held onto, becoming trapped by the form of ideas that have not changed.

I do not want to abandon anarchism. In fact, I want the ideas to spread as widely as possible. I want people to remember the methods and tactics of those who came before us, but I want people to not only use those methods against our enemies, but to do so knowing we are not building a better world, nor are we promising one. Anarchism is not about handing the perfect society over to a recently enslaved population, it is about the creating the world we want now, for ourselves. We must destroy what we have set out to destroy and not be afraid of what will happen.

To champion the destruction of capitalism in 2011 is to champion nihilism. To destroy capitalism is to destroy everything that it has created, and to honestly go about this task is to be a nihilist in the eyes of all the others who still have something invested in this world. And so I am advocating a conscious nihilism, a nihilism that is not a reaction to the anarchist-fathers of the assemblies, the demonization of the mass-media, or the indifference of the population. The nihilism I am advocating would pit itself against all those who wish to manage the potential of the present, not against the people who are managed. Our enemy is not society, our enemies are the people who maintain and create society.

This conscious nihilism starts from the single idea of being against this world. What comes next, a commitment to being against this world, a commitment that materializes in action and not in speech, is the most difficult part. To consciously organize the destruction of everything rather than haphazardly lash out against everyone: that is the task of conscious nihilism. We have to ask ourselves whether we want to linger, grow old, and exist within this world we despise, or throw ourselves into the abyss. Others have jumped into the abyss and are now falling. It is time to catch up with our young friends, to join them in their plunge and remind ourselves, not them, that we are not alone in thinking our crazy, nihilistic thoughts.”

[digiindie]

Nihilists - Back Seat Drops (@nihilistsmusic)

[lovesinistra]

[phasmotid]

rust cohle is The character that i’ve seen called a sociopath (in the shallow, “this is a flawed person who does things i don’t understand” prestige tv fan way) who obviously, like, cares the most. he forms his entire life in response to people. he’s in louisiana because of his daughter. he leaves louisiana because his relationship with marty and maggie is ruined. he spends his time away on fishing boats, marty’s hobby. he needs to save every child he can (or force himself to bear witness if he can’t) because he couldn’t do anything about his daughters death. he carves little visages of men out of empty beer cans while he’s talking. he loves humanity so much it eats at him. don’t know how people can get any other idea in their head, watching that show

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Paul Merwart (1855-1902) "The Nihilist" (1882)

[tomorrowusa]

The Kremlin can’t create, so all that is left is to destroy. Not in some pseudo-glorious self-immolation, the people behind atrocities are petty cowards, but more like a loser smearing their faeces over life. In Russia’s wars the very senselessness seems to be the sense.

After the casual mass executions at Bucha; after the bombing of maternity wards in Mariupol; after the laying to waste of whole cities in Donbas; after the children’s torture chambers, the missiles aimed at freezing civilians to death in the dead of winter, we now have the apocalyptic sight of the waters of the vast Dnipro, a river that when you are on it can feel as wide as a sea, bursting through the destroyed dam at Kakhovka.

[ … ]

Russians also send their soldiers to die senselessly in the meat grinder of the Donbas, their bodies left uncollected on the battlefield, their relatives not informed of their death so as to avoid paying them. On TV, presenters praise how “no one knows how to die like us”. Meanwhile, villagers on the Russian-occupied side of the river are being abandoned by the authorities. Being “liberated” by Russia means joining its empire of humiliation.

– Author and academic Peter Pomerantsev at The Guardian.

Russia is the closest place to Hell on the European continent these days. If Dante Alighieri were still alive, he'd be tempted to write a sequel to Inferno.

Ukraine is not just defending its independence, it is doing the world a big favor. Russia is led by kleptocratic nihilists who have little regard for human life – including the lives of Russians outside the ruling class.

[mautdesigns]

Fringe Medusa

Fringe Medusa Medusa with a fringe haircut, or bangs. Medusa's visage has been adopted by many modern women as a symbol of rage. Here are some thoughts about Medusa, and my interpretation of her.

Available here: Fringe MedusaMedusa with a fringe haircut, or bangs. Medusa’s visage has been adopted by many modern women as a symbol of rage. Fringe Medusa Women’s T-Shirt Fitted There are a lot of different myths about Medusa, and even more in recent years as the story is revisited by modern women. The basic story that most people know today is that Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden…

[icrowler]

i always forget that zuko is unapologetically and unintentionally the funniest person simply bc he's depressed. sokka makes dad jokes, zuko speaks nihilistic sarcasm. they're both the funny ones in the group for very different occassions

[endlessmazin]

I̵̬̽V̵͖̆Ő̵͈R̶̮̈Y̷̯͛ ̷͎̃T̶̋ͅÓ̵̙W̷̮̓E̷̮͌R̵̢͘

[im-already-dead-inside]