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“It Would Be An Apocalypse That Might Leave No One To Claim They Were Innocent”

September 22, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

As the dissolute dotard and the porcine airport poisoner play a game of nuclear chicken with our hides, it’s clear that going forward there’s no positive military option and several truly awful ones. While both blustery parties may have begun this war as one of of words, matters have now escalated past the danger point. Trump and Kim both regard themselves so highly that you would think that their own greedy self-preservation would safeguard the rest of us, but neither leader seems particularly grounded in reality. You don’t behave the way they do if survival if your first impulse.

Christopher Hitchens dubbed North Korea a “nation of racist dwarfs” in 2010, which doesn’t exactly tell the whole picture. It’s a sick society, no doubt, the body diseased from the head down, but one that clearly possesses advanced technological acumen despite its isolation, poverty and want. The late provocateur summed up the populace this way: “Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult.” That may be how things appear to an outsider, especially a serial sensationalist like Hitchens, but I doubt those living beneath a brutal authoritarian regime are truly expressing how they feel. Nuance, that great mitigator, was lacking in Hitchens’ article and it has been in the dialogue spit between Trump and Kim. Its absence could get millions killed.

Two excerpts follow.

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A few Reddit AMA exchanges about North Korea from ABC’s Bob Woodruff, who’s made eight trips to the isolated country:

Question:

As someone who has been to the country frequently, what do you think the greatest misconception of North Korea is?

Bob Woodruff:

I would have to say that in the country’s capital of Pyongyang they seem to be westernized in many ways. Of course there are many soldiers walking around in their uniforms but for the others they now have american looking clothes and shoes. They now have cell phones although they cannot extend outside the city. What we really don’t see are the countrysides and the prison camps. So I don’t know what our misconceptions would be there.

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Question:

With all the rhetoric flying around, mixed with the stories of almost cartoonish absurdity from the regime all the time, what would you say is the biggest/most common misconception that the average Westerner has about North Korea and the Kim regime these days?

Bob Woodruff:

Their intelligence. The people in the elite class are extremely educated. That is especially with technology. They have developed nuclear bombs, rockets, engines etc faster than ever predicted.

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Question:

Is the average North Korean citizen aware of the propaganda they are being fed and just choose to stay silent for their own well being or do they seem to genuinely believe it?

Bob Woodruff:

I think that they believed it more than now. in the doc you can see that i have been going there for more than 12 years and back then i really felt that they consider the leaders god like. Since then more have studied overseas. More importantly there are radio connections along the borders with both China and South Korea. More social media. Cell phones and conversations with family member who worked in China. Better every year.

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Question:

Aside from the U.S.A, what do north Koreans think about other countries?

Bob Woodruff:

Depends on their history etc. They have just a few allies but even they are starting to dislike NK under the leadership of Kim Jong Un. China is their number one friend but it is starting to lose its faith. Nuclear bombs and tests are frightening even to China. As you could see in our “Inconvenient Border” doc we got out yesterday, China is no longer so connected to NK because of Kim Jong Un. He has never been to China and vice versa for Xi Jingping. Their other strong historical ally is Russia. But they essentially ended their military and economic support of NK in the mid-90s. That led to starvation and mass death in NK so that relationship has descended.•

· · ·

From Ariel Dorfman’s New York Review of Books piece “Nuclear Apocalypse Now?“:

Debating whether Hiroshima was a war crime is, at this moment, anything but an academic exercise. America’s presumed innocence is not benign. It allows an ignorant and bellicose president to open the door not just to the Kim regime’s destruction, but to a possible act of collective suicide on a global scale. If Trump nukes North Korea, what will China do? And Russia?

In 1888, the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche predicted the coming of “wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before.” It seems unlikely that Trump was recalling Ecce Homo when he echoed Nietzsche’s phrase with his promise of “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” but he should consider the warning of Albert Einstein, four years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

If this president is seriously considering the first nuclear attack in more than seven decades of uneasy atomic peace, it won’t matter this time whether we call it a war crime. It would be an apocalypse that might leave no one to claim they were innocent.•

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“The News Is Coming Too Fast”

June 26, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Trump will eventually be flushed down the vortex along with other waste products swirling around him, I’m fairly certain at this point, but as an amateur student of human psychology I’d be fascinated to know if he’s fully wrapped his declining brain around this scenario. Is it within his mental powers to grasp that some combination of potential financial crimes, traitorous activity and obstruction of justice could end up with him laundering prison clothes rather than money? As I’ve mentioned, I don’t think America is saved when Trump is toppled, but his ouster is necessary if we’re to have a chance to rescue our Republic and reform our government. Or maybe we’ll end up in another Civil War. Either or.

Elizabeth Drew, the great correspondent of the Watergate Era, cautions that any Trump impeachment process must be a gradual and bilateral one. Of course, we live in a faster age and a far more divided one, so I don’t know if that’s possible. It’s not that I don’t think McConnell and Ryan and the rest wouldn’t kick a sad old goat from a cliff to save their own hides, but I’m not sure that if Russian collusion is proved that it doesn’t pull way more Republicans over the precipice than we can currently guess. The GOP will fight such an outcome with all it has.

In a New York column about Trump’s possible ouster, Frank Rich cites Drew’s work and compares the slow-forming Watergate inferno to the fire next time. An excerpt:

Here’s Drew describing a typical Watergate day: “The news is coming too fast. Faster and harder than anyone expected. It is almost impossible to absorb.” And here she is a week after Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, resigned upon pleading no contest to charges of bribery and tax fraud: “The city seems to be reeling around amidst the events and the breaking stories. In the restaurants, the noise level is higher. At the end of the day, someone says, ‘It’s like being drunk.’ ” It already feels like that right now.

One could argue that the context is different today — that the America of 2017 is not the America of the early 1970s. We think of our current culture as being harder to shock, easier to distract, and more inured to crude public figures who violate traditional societal norms as unabashedly as Trump. This, in theory, would make him harder to dislodge than Nixon, whose sins would more easily scandalize a relatively innocent 20th-century citizenry. But even without the internet’s cacophony, Nixon faced a post-1960s America as factionalized, jaded, and accustomed to shock as our own: It had witnessed the assassination of two Kennedys and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a complete overhaul of its mores as a consequence of a rising counterculture and women’s movement, and a domestic civil war precipitated by the catastrophe of Vietnam. The alarming toxicity of Trump has burst through the noise of our America much as Nixon’s did through his. And while the technology for delivering news makes it come faster and harder in 2017 than Drew or any of us could have anticipated in that day of daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts, the onslaught of shocking developments felt no less overwhelming then than now.

Human nature hasn’t changed — not for those of us standing outside a teetering White House or for the cast of characters within. Much as Trump risked his presidency by empowering hotheaded ideologues like Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon, so Nixon’s White House had recruited the similarly reckless G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to wage war on the president’s perceived enemies. As John A. Farrell writes in his new, state-of-the-art Richard Nixon: The Life, both of them were “wannabe James Bonds.” Hunt, an alumnus of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, was the prolific author of often pseudonymous spy novels, while Liddy was alt-right before it was cool: “a right-wing zealot, with a fixation for Nazi regalia and a kinky kind of Nietzschean philosophy,” who “organized a White House screening of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.”

Though there are a number of areas where the Nixon and Trump narratives diverge, in nearly every case Trump’s deviations from the Watergate model make it even less likely that he will survive his presidency.•

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“Changing The System…Was Not A Question Of Contesting And Polemicizing, But Of Blowing Everything Up”

February 11, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Steve Bannon seems like one of those voracious if prejudiced consumers of media who might be persuaded that ancient aliens helped Hitler become Führer. He has read widely not to debunk his crackpot theories and deep-seated bigotry but to collect fuel for them. The Chief Strategist reminds me of a line from the jacket of Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine: “He is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire.”

Until recently, I never connected him to a 2004 film I reviewed called In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed, which is one of the more deranged, heavy-handed and paranoid pieces of propaganda I’ve ever seen, Riefenstahl included. I remember thinking then that the director must be a unhinged person badly in need of mental help. Until the last five years or so, I watched 250 to 300 films a year during my entire adult life, and because of the quantity I don’t remember many of them, even some good ones, but I still can vividly recall how delusional and chilling this work was.

When not busy making his pseudo-documentaries, Bannon was a decade ago trying to sell virtual gold for real money, then peddled tin-pot despotism at Breitbart, and now he’s trying his hand at political alchemy, a white nationalist in the White House, serving as a Rasputin or Alexander Dugin to Trump. As Jason Horowitz of the New York Times reports, one of the Oval Office insider’s influences is the monocled Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who swayed Mussolini and embraced Hitler, and now serves as a hero to Internet-friendly neo-Nazis.

An excerpt:

Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.

A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.

Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”

Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.

It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.

Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”

Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

February 14, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

dylantyping7

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. neil degrasse tyson delusions of space enthusiasts
  2. the word “computer” will be a relic of the past
  3. an argument for letting athletes dope
  4. hollywood producer don simpson
  5. stanley kubrick playboy interview
  6. hanna reitsch nazi test pilot
  7. grandpa friedrich trump was a “whoremaster”
  8. friedrich nietzsche’s death
  9. harvey pekar article about herbert huncke
  10. margaret atwood predicts the future

“Courage And Spiritual Nobility Are No Match For Machines”

November 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

data1111

Despite his intelligence–or perhaps because of it–philosopher Nick Bostrom could have just as readily fallen through the cracks as rose to prominence, making an unlikely space for himself with the headiest of endeavors, calculating the likelihood of humans to escape extinction. He’s a risk manager on the grandest scale.

Far from a crank screaming of catastrophes, the Oxford academic is a rigorous researcher and intellectual screaming of catastrophes, especially the one he sees as most likely to eradicate us: superintelligent machines. In fact, he thinks self-teaching AI of a soaring IQ is even scarier than climate change. In a New Yorker piece on Bostrom, the best profile yet of the philosopher, Raffi Khatchadourian writes that the Superintelligence author sees himself as a “cartographer rather than a polemicist,” though he’s clearly both.

In addition to attempting to name the threats that may be hurtling our way, Bostrom takes on the biggest of the other big questions. For example: What will life be like a million years from now? He argues that long-term forecasting is easier than the short- and mid-term types, because the assumption of continued existence means most visions will be realized. He refers to this idea as the “Technological Completion Conjecture,” saying that “if scientific-and technological-development efforts do not effectively cease, then all impor­t­­­ant basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.”

My own thoughts on these matters remain the same: In the long run, we either become what those of us alive right now would consider a Posthuman species, the next evolution, or we’ll cease to be altogether. A museum city can linger for a long spell, beautiful in its languor, but humans doubling as statues from the past will eventually be toppled.

An excerpt:

Bostrom has a reinvented man’s sense of lost time. An only child, he grew up—as Niklas Boström—in Helsingborg, on the southern coast of Sweden. Like many exceptionally bright children, he hated school, and as a teen-ager he developed a listless, romantic persona. In 1989, he wandered into a library and stumbled onto an anthology of nineteenth-century German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He read it in a nearby forest, in a clearing that he often visited to think and to write poetry, and experienced a euphoric insight into the possibilities of learning and achievement. “It’s hard to convey in words what that was like,” Bostrom told me; instead he sent me a photograph of an oil painting that he had made shortly afterward. It was a semi-representational landscape, with strange figures crammed into dense undergrowth; beyond, a hawk soared below a radiant sun. He titled it “The First Day.”

Deciding that he had squandered his early life, he threw himself into a campaign of self-education. He ran down the citations in the anthology, branching out into art, literature, science. He says that he was motivated not only by curiosity but also by a desire for actionable knowledge about how to live. To his parents’ dismay, Bostrom insisted on finishing his final year of high school from home by taking special exams, which he completed in ten weeks. He grew distant from old friends: “I became quite fanatical and felt quite isolated for a period of time.”

When Bostrom was a graduate student in Stockholm, he studied the work of the analytic philosopher W. V. Quine, who had explored the difficult relationship between language and reality. His adviser drilled precision into him by scribbling “not clear” throughout the margins of his papers. “It was basically his only feedback,” Bostrom told me. “The effect was still, I think, beneficial.” His previous academic interests had ranged from psychology to mathematics; now he took up theoretical physics. He was fascinated by technology. The World Wide Web was just emerging, and he began to sense that the heroic philosophy which had inspired him might be outmoded. In 1995, Bostrom wrote a poem, “Requiem,” which he told me was “a signing-off letter to an earlier self.” It was in Swedish, so he offered me a synopsis: “I describe a brave general who has overslept and finds his troops have left the encampment. He rides off to catch up with them, pushing his horse to the limit. Then he hears the thunder of a modern jet plane streaking past him across the sky, and he realizes that he is obsolete, and that courage and spiritual nobility are no match for machines.”•

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Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

July 11, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, President Trump said hell never stand by idly while an act of domestic terrorism is committed, the way Obama did this week

This week, President Trump said he’ll never stand idly by as Obama recently did while an act of domestic terrorism was being committed.

Why does this donut taste like Minnie Mouse took a crap on it?

Why does this cruller taste like Minnie Mouse took a crap on it?

 

  • Ai Weiwei discusses his state of mind and the surveillance state.
  • The Rework America think-tank tries to make sense of the new economy.
  • Algorithms, like people, can have intended and unintended biases.
  • A brief note from 1927 about a stroller.

Old Print Article: “The Gospel Of Egotism,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1900)

July 6, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

450px-Friedrich_Nietzsche_drawn_by_Hans_Olde-1899

Nietzsche-piano

Announcing God’s death probably wasn’t a real consensus-builder back in the 19th century, so Friedrich Nietzsche was crucified in effigy by some newspapers when he died. This postmortem, originally published in the Springfield Republican and reprinted in the November 4, 1900 edition Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a merciless takedown of the extremist philosopher.

“He Is Also An Avid Consumer Of Vampire Movies And Detective Fiction”

November 13, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

The opening of Terry Eagleton’s Guardian review of the two most-recent books (Absolute Recoil and Trouble in Paradise) from the always-unplugged fountain of Slavoj Žižek, that mixed blessing:

“It is said that Jean-Paul Sartre turned white-faced with excitement when a colleague arrived hotfoot from Germany with the news that one could make philosophy out of the ashtray. In these two new books, Slavoj Žižekphilosophises in much the same spirit about sex, swearing, decaffeinated coffee, vampires, Henry Kissinger, The Sound of Music, the Muslim Brotherhood, the South Korean suicide rate and a good deal more. If there seems no end to his intellectual promiscuity, it is because he suffers from a rare affliction known as being interested in everything. In Britain, philosophers tend to divide between academics who write for each other and meaning-of-life merchants who beam their reflections at the general public. Part of Žižek’s secret is that he is both at once: a formidably erudite scholar well-versed in Kant and Heidegger who also has a consuming passion for the everyday. He is equally at home with Hegel and Hitchcock, the Fall from Eden and the fall of Mubarak. If he knows about Wagner and Schoenberg, he is also an avid consumer of vampire movies and detective fiction. A lot of his readers have learned to understand Freud or Nietzsche by viewing them through the lens of Jaws or Mary Poppins.

Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, Žižek has it both ways here.”

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Old Print Article: “Sons Of Millionaires Murdered Franks Boy In Desire For ‘Thrill'” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1924)

September 15, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even in the wake of the twin horrors of World War I and a global flu pandemic, the crimes of Nathan E. Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb couldn’t be easily comprehended. In 1924, the gifted, wealthy sons of the best of everything Chicago society had to offer, kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Robert Franks for the “thrill” of it all. It was nothing personal–they knew and liked the lad–they just desired to commit the “perfect crime.” Once arrested, the pair confessed to the premeditated brutality and were defended by Clarence Darrow, who kept them from the death house. Loeb was killed by a fellow prisoner, while Leopold was paroled in 1958 and subsequently moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked in medicine and education. Theories abounded at the time as to what drove their heinous act: poor parenting, improper moral education, overindulgence, an infatuation with science, manic depression, paranoia, sexual perversion, even too much Nietzsche. But it was likely a confluence of factors forever bound in a knot. The below article is from the June 1, 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

October 30, 2011 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

“Team Officials Saw A Flaming Radical, Junkballing Journeyman Lefthander With No Fastball, No Loyalty And No Moral Values”

September 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a true countculture character who starred in the very button-down sport of baseball from 1969-1982, was an outspoken eccentric who bragged about sprinkling marijuana on his pancakes. In the years before he was blackballed from the sport, Lee was profiled in all his mad glory in a 1978 Sports Illustrated article by Curry Kirkpatrick. An excerpt:

“Much of Lee’s rambling over the years has been about such terrific subjects as pyramid power, zero population growth, the goodness of soyburgers, the badness of sugar, interplanetary creative Zen Buddhism and heavy, heavy, zapped-out karma. But Lee’s philosophy is more out of comic books—to be specific, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which his 8-year-old son Michael shares with his dad—than Nietzsche or Vonnegut or even Paramahansa Yogananda…

The Boston-area public always has been divided along geographical as well as generational lines in its feelings toward Lee. In the blue-collar Irish bars of Southie, Lee was anathema after he defended Judge Arthur Garrity Jr., who ordered the desegregation of Boston schools by busing, as ‘the only guy in this town with any guts.’ On the other hand, the Spaceman was a prince to the city’s hip-liberal college population—largely based in Cambridge—which was thrilled by his outspoken lobbying for decriminalization of marijuana and his open defiance of pot laws.

The Red Sox were left in a quandary as to just what to do with Lee. Possibly the most straitlaced organization in all of pro sports, Boston was one of the first teams to impose a no-liquor rule on team flights and one of the last to dress out in form-fitting knit uniforms. In the matter of race, the Sox signed their first black player—Pumpsie Green—long after every other team in the majors had blacks. Even today only two U.S.-born blacks are on theRed Sox’ roster, Jim Rice and George Scott.

In Lee, team officials saw a flaming radical, junkballing journeyman lefthander with no fastball, no loyalty and no moral values. Yet they also saw a media hero who visited all the sick children, kept the sports talk shows in clover and drew crowds to Fenway Park.”

••••••••••

The Spaceman as an Expo:

A Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip:

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New DVD: Waste Land

March 17, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Picker and union leader Tiao recreates “The Death of Marat,” with a tub recovered from the landfill.

Although it’s not in the class of Agnes Varda’s great 2000 documentary, The Gleaners & I, Lucy Walker’s look at life in the landfills of Rio de Janeiro has some illuminating points to make about forgotten people who make their way by recycling society’s detritus. Although it resolutely aspires to be a feelgood film, Waste Land is surprisingly thornier and more bothersome than Varda’s modern classic.

Even though successful New York-based artist Vik Muniz grew up in a low-income Brazilian community, he doesn’t expect to find a genteel sort of people when he resigns to spend a couple of years photographing pickers who live and work in Jardim Gramach, the largest landfill in the world, which is located on the outskirts of Rio. Because of gang wars in favelas nearby, the trash heap is known to be a dumping ground for dead bodies as well as the plastic that the pickers turn in for pennies on the pound.

It comes as some surprise to the artist then that the workers are often quite profound. Some of them collect discarded books from the trash heaps in the hopes of starting free libraries in their poor neighborhoods and are able to quote Machiavelli, Marat and Nietzsche. He probably didn’t expect to find so many workers who could speak so eloquently to the environmental benefits of their drudgery. And he likely didn’t think he would meet a picker like Tiao, a determined young man who formed a union of landfill workers even though his own family told him it was folly. As a whole, the pickers claim to be happy with their work, even as they live in rat-filled shacks and eat food they find in the garbage. They are dignified, they are proud, they are resolute.

They are not completely honest, however, even with themselves. When a group of pickers is hired to work with Muniz for two weeks in his temporary studio in Brazil, helping him reproduce their photographs in large-scale sculptures with the aid of trash and recyclables, most of them quickly realize that they never want to go back to Jardim Gramach. After such beauty, how can they return to the refuse? It’s easy to be amazed by these workers, their industry and ingenuity, but no one should make the mistake of idealizing them or a life that is clearly damaging to body and soul. As Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Sometimes those stories are laced with a self-deception necessary for survival.•


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“Highlights” From Another Week Of Afflictor Crap

January 15, 2011 in Misc. | Permalink

Afflictor: Offering free hair-care advice since 2009.
  • Facebook is more successful than impressive.
  • The religious origins of bowling.

Old Print Article: “The Gospel of Egotism,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1900)

January 10, 2011 in Old Print Articles | Permalink

"That incipient insanity appears in many of the writings can hardly be doubted." (Image by Hans Olde.)

Announcing the death of God probably wasn’t a real consensus-builder back in the nineteenth century, so Friedrich Nietzsche took it on the chin in 1900 when he died. This postmortem, originally published in the Springfield Republican and reprinted in the November 4, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a scathing takedown of the extremist philosopher. An excerpt:

“The death of Friedrich Nietzsche is of no special significance to the world, because for ten years past the famous German philosopher had been in an insane asylum, the victim of the hopeless mania and paralysis, which mercifully brought death.

That incipient insanity appears in many of the writings can hardly be doubted. The brilliant gleams of intellectual insight with which they abound are obscured by great masses of nonsense, a delirium of wild and whirling words, which only the most extreme of his disciples can pretend to understand. His favorite vehicle was the aphorism; he disdained to stoop for demonstration. He might as well have said with the man in the anecdote, ‘I am not arguing–I’m just telling you.’ He likened his aphorisms to mountain peaks and said it took long legs to stride from one to the next. And the least capable of such a stride are those who have the habit of stopping to look where they leap.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is too extravagant and Teutonic to have gained much vogue outside of Germany, but it might very well be the fin de siecle philosophy of the civilized world. It represents the extreme swing of the pendulum away from Christianity. Two things made Nietzsche foam at the mouth, Wagnerism and Christianity. His special detestation was the altruism on which Christianity is founded. His ideal man was the ‘blonde brute,’ as he called him, the magnificent, untamed animal, pitiless, ruling by the right of strength, robbing, killing, regardless of others, joyous and exultant in unbridled egotism. Altruism he hated because it was the religion of the weak and sickly, a religion, he thought, pulling men down to the common level, preventing the development of the ‘beyond-man,’ as he fanatically called his ideal brute. The weak, the halt and the blind, the sick and the unfortunate touched not his sympathies. Away with such rubbish–the refuse of the race.

What profound irony in the fact that this upholder of such savage doctrines spent his last years, helpless and imbecile, in one of those kindly retreats which the religion he despised has given the world!”

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Classic DVD: Pickpocket (1959)

November 22, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Michel often studies "Prince of the Pickpockets," Richard Stanton Lambert's 1930 book about 18th-century thief (and, later, cop!) George Barrington.

Franςois Truffaut famously said that Robert Bresson’s 1959 drama, Pickpocket, was the greatest date movie ever made, though he might have added that it helps if you’re dating an existential thief. The film’s anti-hero, Michel, is a Parisian intellectual who could easily earn his own way, but he believes, as if he were sprung from the pages of Camus or Nietzsche, that he needs to defy the laws of God and man and make other people’s watches and wallets his own.

Morose Michel (Martin LaSalle) lives a sluggish, threadbare existence, spending all his time perfecting his illicit technique and furthers his education when he falls in with a pack of more experienced thieves. As his obsession with the “craft” grows, Michel halfheartedly plays a cat-and-mouse game with an acquaintance who happens to be a police chief (Jean Pélégri). Equally lackadaisical is his (perhaps) budding romance with Jeanne (Marika Green), his sickly mother’s beautiful neighbor.

When the criminal tries to explain to the police inspector that some men should be allowed to transgress society’s rules for the good of society, the lawman will have none of it. “That’s the world upside down,” he points out.  “It’s already upside down,” retorts Michel. And from that moment on it’s a briskly paced race to see if Michel’s hands will end up holding Jeanne’s or in handcuffs. (Available from Netflix and other venues.)

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Afflictor Nation: Achtung Baby, Germany!

March 6, 2010 in Misc. | Permalink

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead and Afflictor is stupid." (Image by Hanns Olde.)

How great that our little Brooklyn website has continued its international expansion by ringing up its first visitor from Germany. It looked for a while like there was a wall between us, Germany, but then it came tumbling down and now we’re together at last. But who among you has so much free time on their hands that they can waste precious moments browsing our idiot website? Was it you, Rammstein lead singer, Till Lindemann, with your crotch o’ fire? Was it you, Chancellor Angela Merkel, with your generous cleavage? Was it you, 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, with your elongated forehead? Well, whoever it was, we extend warm greetings to the whole of Germany. Welcome to Afflictor Nation!

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