Daily Archives: June 1, 2020

Mayor de Blasio has it right and, yes, youre reading a Post editorial.

New York Citys problem right now is not the inevitable, even necessary, peaceful protests. The problem has been folks who are clearly trying to incite violence against the police and create vandalism and property damage. Theyre a small number, but theyre clearly very motivated and very violent, de Blasio said Sunday.

And theyre largely out-of-towners coming from outside the neighborhoods that are raising the concerns peacefully and trying to create a violent, negative situation with police.

That doesnt mean that some locals arent joining in on the violence; the city has its own idiots trust-fund Trotskyites, for starters. But here as elsewhere, the worst confrontations reeks of the roving radicals who rush in to turn protests into riots in some demented dream of fomenting full-on revolution.

Theyve been doing it at least since the anti-globalization protests of the 90s, all the way to the Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore protests of 2014-15. Whatever they say, their true agenda isnt economic or racial justice its chaos and destruction.

The same nihilism fed off the idealism of the 1960s to produce the sheer terrorism of the Weathermen bombings and the Brinks assassinations.

To quote the mayor again: This is not the American progressive protest tradition. This is not the tradition of Dr. King. Its dangerous, its counterproductive. It puts the lives, particularly of young men of color, in danger if it creates deeper tension between police and community. It puts the lives of police officers in danger. So, no, this does not represent our values, and it has to be addressed very forthrightly.

And the NYPD, in the face of this threat, has overall shown enormous restraint. Even that video of the police van driving into a crowd has important context, as the mayor noted to WINS: A small group of motivated, violent people has been surrounding police cars, surrounding police vans, attempting to do violence to police officers and to the vehicles. And thats exactly what you saw in that video [The cops] were being surrounded by people who are attacking that vehicle as they were in a situation where it was getting more and more dangerous, and they had to get out of there ... If those protesters had just gotten out of the way we would not be talking about this situation.

With a national network of would-be revolutionaries looking to exploit the righteous anger over George Floyd and other clear victims of excessive police force, its entirely appropriate for the feds to step in as the Eastern District did in charging Samantha Shader.

Video shows Shader hurling a Molotov cocktail at a police van in Brooklyn late Friday night plainly intending grievous harm to the four cops inside. Her sister, Darian, then jumped in to try to prevent Samanthas arrest.

The Shaders, incidentally, hail from Catskill, 120 miles north of the city perfectly fitting de Blasios profile of people coming from outside the community to sow chaos.

Police arrested Samantha on four counts of attempted murder of a police officer, plus attempted arson, assault on a cop, criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment and Darian for resisting arrest and obstruction of governmental administration.

But the Brooklyn DA has yet to file any charges. Instead, the feds stepped in, hitting Samantha with property-damage charges that would mean a sentence of five to 20 years if convicted. She may yet face stiffer charges we certainly see attempted murder as appropriate: Even though her Molotov turned out to be a dud, her intent was murderous.

Local prosecutors have been rushing left in recent years, and we fear they wont get tough on the radicals pushing violence. But someone needs to throw the book at everyone apprehended for striving to turn peaceful protests into a conflagration.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio is right about the riots -- and the NYPD's response - New York Post

Talk to me about philosophy, morality, and the meaning of life, and you're likely to conclude that I'm a conservative. Yet I've voted exclusively for Democrats since 2004 and I'm convinced my conservative assumptions entail voting that way.

I said as much, in passing, in a column earlier this month, and that raised some eyebrows, with several conservative acquaintances on Twitter and at least one prominent Republican friend requesting a broader explanation. Why am I "situated on the center left" despite holding "assumptions about politics and life [that] are more often held by philosophical conservatives than modern liberals"?

The answer is complicated in its details but clear in its conclusions: There is nothing remotely conservative about the present-day Republican Party. It injects moral nihilism into the body politic on a daily basis as a means of acquiring and deploying power primarily for the sake of enriching a class of plutocratic donors mainly wealthy businessmen and defense contractors. Democrats may have their problems, including a contingent of online progressive activists who work to pull the party in directions that would be politically ruinous. But at least the economic policies Democrats support don't actively shred the social fabric of the country, leaving workers and their communities in tatters while right-wing media rabblerousers get rich directing the resulting anger and blame at liberals.

At the center of the maelstrom is the singularly appalling figure of Donald Trump, but the GOP began trending in this direction long before he emerged to codify and consolidate the transformation. That's where many conservatives will part ways with me. Rejecting Trump is understandable, but embedding him in the longer-term trajectory of the Republican Party goes too far. Yet this view of the party and its history follows directly from my conservative assumptions about politics, society, and morals.

What are some of those assumptions?

That the liberal vision of politics founded on the consent of rights-bearing individuals is a myth that badly distorts political reality. That the elementary unit of politics is society, not the individual, and that the customs and traditions we receive from our communal past deserve respect (though not unthinking deference). That the notion of historical progress is a fiction. That claims to knowledge and mastery need to be taken with a dose of skepticism. That the best we can reasonably hope for from politics is muddling through, enacting modest reforms that attempt to make things somewhat better while not unintentionally making them worse.

I'm both suspicious of absolute moral claims and consider them indispensable for maintaining social and political decency which means the love of justice needs to be both cultivated and tamed. The best way to achieve this balance is through the encouragement of moderation and recognition of the reality of pluralism. As I explained in another recent column, pluralism holds that:

[T]here are many objectively good ideals or ends freedom (in its multiple senses), equality, communal solidarity, piety, justice, to name just a few and that they inevitably clash with each other. The liberty of a gay couple to marry, for example, will clash with the piety and communal solidarity of the bakery owner who doesn't want to be forced to bake a cake for the wedding ceremony. And of course both sides appeal to conflicting notions of justice as well. [The Week]

I went on to note that the implications of pluralism for politics include a commitment to seeking "compromise and accommodation whenever possible, using every available means, including appeals to federalism and the crafting of highly nuanced and narrow court decisions that carve out space for different ways of life to flourish as much as possible."

Both of America's two major parties respond poorly to the reality of pluralism, with Democrats eager to use the power of the state to impose and enforce one set of absolute moral claims and Republicans aiming to do the same with another. Each affirms a comprehensive vision of what Aristotle called "the good life" and wants the political community as a whole to affirm it while ruling certain competing moral visions out of bounds.

Aristotle himself proposed ways that the city-states of ancient Greece could balance such clashing moral outlooks to produce decent polities. The challenge of achieving such decency in our vastly larger and more diverse nation-states is much greater and the culture war makes it even harder than it might otherwise be, because it absolutizes political disputes, turning policy disagreements into assertions about non-negotiable goods.

But if both parties deserve blame for contributing to our civic turbulence, why do I so forcefully side with the Democrats in the voting booth? For one thing, because Republicans have come to believe that they benefit electorally by transforming policy disagreements into culture-war clashes. This has had the effect of turning increasing numbers of political disputes into total war, and driving a segment of Republican voters to embrace positions that in some cases actively threaten the common good as we can see very vividly with absolute opposition on the right to gun regulations as well as the adamant refusal of some to wear masks in public during a pandemic that has already killed more than 100,000 Americans.

But Democrats also do much better than Republicans at responding in a civically healthy way to the challenges of self-government under modern conditions. They do so by focusing their attention on the advancement of lower-level goods. If appeals to the good life tend to spark disagreement and divisiveness about the highest goods, directing our attention to what political philosopher Leo Strauss called the "low but solid ground" of economic and material well-being which Aristotle dubbed "mere life" can be politically salutary.

That's because everyone in a political community even a political community as large and differentiated as a modern nation-state benefits from a thriving economy. And because, again following Aristotle, one way to minimize rancorous disagreements in politics is to encourage the growth of a large middle class. The corollary of this view is that the immiseration of a large share of a country's population is bound to produce an increase in unrest and political agitation.

From Otto von Bismarck to the advocates of the American New Deal and beyond, modern reformers have understood that preventing the rise of radicalism requires a robust social-welfare system along with regulation of the economy to help foster the flourishing of a large, dynamic middle class. In this respect, the economic policies pursued and enacted by the Republican Party since the election of Ronald Reagan ever-greater tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, support for trade policies that have contributed to the decline of the manufacturing sector and the communities that benefitted from it, the thinning out of regulations on business, the shrinking or elimination of welfare benefits, opposition to the expansion of access to health care have actively contributed to the struggles of the middle class and the growth of political extremism on both the left and right.

Democrats have been complicit in some of these policies, but Republicans have been the driving force behind them and that makes the GOP a party that deserves a lion's share of the blame for the increasing radicalization of the electorate on both sides of the spectrum, very much including the distinctive moral degradation, vulgarity, incompetence, and corruption of Donald Trump.

For those, like myself, who desperately want to see the country pull back from radicalism and return to a more moderate style of politics, there is really only one option. The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but it will at least do what it can to address the inequalities and injustices that Republican policies have encouraged and exacerbated. That makes the Democrats the party in greater harmony with conservative insights and assumptions about the preconditions of a healthy politics.

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The conservative case for the Democratic Party - The Week

Yet there was Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, issuing a wee-hours statement that asked Americans not to ignore their pain, but to use it to compel our nation across this turbulent threshold into the next phase of progress, inclusion, and opportunity. There was Killer Mike, the rapper from Atlanta, reminding his fellow citizens, Atlantas not perfect, but were a lot better than we ever were, and a lot better than cities are.

Conservatives will focus on the pleas for law and order in their messages. But what I hear is a repudiation of Trumpian nihilism a rejection of the tyranny of the perpetual anxious present that Masha Gessen describes in her forthcoming book Surviving Autocracy. Theyre instead speaking with what Gessen calls moral ambition, inviting fellow citizens to build a more expansive country, rather than an us-versus-them one. Their messages werent, Dont destroy your community, so much as, Theres still a community left for you to join. Come and make it better.

And so, along with terrifying imagery of fire and fury, we also saw images over the weekend of police officers and protesters in solidarity. The bonds were sometimes fragile, only to later disappear. But they happened. In Flint, Mich. In Camden, N.J. In Coral Gables, Fla. In Santa Clara, Calif. In Ferguson, Mo. In Kansas City, Mo., where two cops, one white, held aloft a sign saying End Police Brutality.

Or listen to the chief of police in Atlanta, Erika Shields, tell an anxious protester, I hear you. When Trump met with those whod lost loved ones in the Parkland shooting, he needed an empathy cheat sheet that contained those very words; it was item No. 5. For her, they simply spilled out, as naturally as rain.

Here is the original post:

What Trump and Toxic Cops Have in Common - The New York Times

Yes to Life

Yes to Life

Photo: Beacon Press, Handout

Yes to Life

Yes to Life

Book World: In the midst of despair, discovering a way to have hope

Yes to Life

By Viktor E. Frankl

Beacon Press. 127 pp. $19.95

---

Late in March, holed up in my apartment in New York, I received the terrible news that the coronavirus pandemic had claimed the life of someone I knew. Just as shocking was the fact that it wasn't the physical symptoms of this terrible disease that had overwhelmed her body. It was, instead, despair that had killed her spirit.

We cannot know all the factors that played into the tragic logic that led her to suicide. But piecing the story together afterward, her closest friends think that when New York shut down, she believed that so, too, had the possibility of continuing the full life she had created there. Before the pandemic, her calendar overflowed not just with work and volunteer activities, but with social engagements and cultural events, scheduled through the rest of this year and into the next. And now amid the cascade of closings, cancellations and postponements into an unknowable future of all the work, volunteer, arts and other in-person events she had so carefully planned but could no longer look forward to, her own life seemed to be crumbling into ruins. So she negated it, all of it, on her own terms.

And this is only one among many deaths of despair against our current backdrop of heightened stress, uncertainty and vulnerability.

It's the challenge posed by any crisis: How do we hang on to hope? It is also the question that Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Viennese psychiatrist and author best known for his exploration of trauma and resilience, "Man's Search for Meaning," devoted the bulk of his career to answering.

Now, with the publication for the first time in English of "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything," originally written as a series of lectures in 1946, we have the opportunity to read what amounts to a brief, early draft of the concepts he presented in more accessible form and in greater detail in his later classic. But in whichever version you encounter them, Frankl's ideas bear particular consideration right now.

Frankl stressed the importance of what he called the will to meaning. He believed that having a sense of meaning or purpose or a goal in life drives us forward from one day to the next, even when we confront personal suffering, family tragedy or public calamity. That is the inner compass that gives us direction; when we lose it, we begin to drift and can become lost in, and to, despair.

Frankl had begun to develop his ideas about the pivotal role meaning plays in our lives before the Nazi regime deported him and his family to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. As Jews, the Frankls were in Hitler's crosshairs for annihilation.

But despite four years of being shuttled from one camp to another, suffering the ravages of typhus and starvation and the nonstop threat of being shot, beaten or gassed to death, Frankl endured. He held onto the hope that he would see his family after the war. He also set his sights on completing the unfinished manuscript describing his theories that the Nazis had seized and destroyed when they imprisoned him.

Those goals kept him focused on the possibility of a postwar future. He even jotted down brief notes on scraps of paper, which he hid in his threadbare uniform, about how his experience of life in extremis bore out his ideas. He observed that fellow inmates who were able to maintain an inner purpose were less likely to give up and give in to the futility of camp existence.

It did not matter what the goal was - whether to reunite with loved ones, to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, to stay true to religious faith or to spite the enemy simply by staying alive. Just having a reason to live bolstered the will to live, to try to persevere, evade death, survive, even if just for another day and then the next, with each day holding the possibility of bringing the goal that much closer.

After the war, Frankl was devastated to learn that neither his parents nor his wife had made it out of the camps alive. But he did have his work, and he buried himself in it, reconstructing and in time completing the manuscript the Nazis had seized, "Man's Search for Meaning," as well as composing, less than a year after being freed from his hellish incarceration, the three public lectures that make up "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything."

With World War II's horrific death toll still being reckoned, and the atomic bomb having just been unleashed as a new existential threat, Frankl was acutely aware of an underlying public mood he described as numb, fatalistic, "spiritually bombed out."

How could survivors return to life, if they did not believe that their lives held value? In the approach to psychotherapy he developed, which he called Logotherapy, Frankl proposed an antidote to giving in to such nihilism: taking hold, instead, of life's meaning - and more precisely, the particular aim we set for ourselves. If we search, such a purpose can be found embedded in our values, beliefs, experiences and capabilities, and in and through the different personal and professional interests, communities and caring relationships we've created. Even at the end of life, Frankl wrote, a sense of fulfillment can be derived from taking "a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to this limitation, react toward it, how they accept this fate."

The fate Frankl confronted was the Holocaust. Our fate today is wrapped up in the coronavirus pandemic. Finding and sustaining meaning in the midst of crisis is not easy. I wish my friend had known about this strategy, and had sought help that could have harnessed her back to life.

---

Cole is book columnist for the Psychotherapy Networker and the author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges."

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Book World: In the midst of despair, discovering a way to have hope - Alton Telegraph

Hope.

Four little letters, yet together they represent the most powerful substance in the universe. Whether associated with Princess Leia or Samwise Gamgee or Gene Roddenberry, hope conjures up images of the impossible victory, the candle in the darkness, the moral arc of the universe finally snapping back to its correct path.

In recent years, the idea of hopeor, as Barack Obama once famously put it, the sheer audacity of hopehas taken on a more tangible form as a movement among storytellers. The term hopepunk was originally coined by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland to be the opposite of grimdark. As Rowland puts it:

Hopepunk says, No, I dont accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full. YEAH, were all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. Weve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and heres the important part) weve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesnt equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.

A narrative beacon in a time of political and environmental chaos, hopepunk as a movement is equal parts dreamer and realist, the former holding onto the thought of a better tomorrow and the latter unafraid to get ones hands dirty in the process. In a time of resistance when the daily news feels like a dystopia fueled by chaos and disinformation, hope is indeed the most punk rock thing you can have.

Its important to note that hope isnt as simple as a happy ending. Its a sense of justice that is greater than a single characters romantic or business aspirations. In recent years, such a feeling has been seen in the best of science fiction and fantasy, from Annalee Newitzs The Future of Another Timeline to Mary Robinette Kowals Lady Astronaut series to Rowlands own A Conspiracy of Truths.

But can you find hope when the world has literally ended? The answer, it seems, is yesif you know where to look.

Throughout many traditional subgenres of science fiction and fantasy, hope is inherently woven into the elements of a narrative. In an epic tale of good versus evil, regardless of whether it takes place in space or a magical realm, the very existence of the proverbial good guys inspires hope, even if it starts with one person. Time travelers have a built-in mechanism to set things right. In cyberpunk, the goal is often to reset a beings or a societys humanity back after layers of technology have buried it.

Those examples find hope built into the narrative DNA of the subgenre. The timeline can be corrected, the empire can be overthrown, humanity can overcome machines. The apocalypse, though, presents a much different challenge: where does that hope exist? The apocalypse, whether it came via zombies or climate change or nuclear war, cant be reset. The dead cant be brought back to life. Water, infrastructure, and other resources cant return.

Except that isnt the end of the story. If it was, then the following books wouldnt exist. In each of these examples, the end of the world is the storys foundation. But while the desolate landscape may feel like its own character, each story has a heart much greater than any apocalypse.

In Sam J. Millers Nebula-nominated title, the pressures of the modern world have led to collapse, as climate change and economic warfare have led to a new world. From this emerges Qaanaaq, which symbolically merges these issues into a floating Arctic city. Despite living in post-apocalyptic conditions, the inhabitants of Qaanaaq have not relied upon grimdark violence to re-establish society as seen in so many other end-of-the-world scenarios. Instead, Blackfish City presents a living, breathing society that combines the simple pleasures of spectator sports and steaming noodles with the repeated horrors of economic inequality and deadly disease. In short, Qaanaaq represents a microcosm of the world at large as humanity pushes onexcept with an old woman leading a polar bear across the sea.

Emily St. John Mandels novel is recognized as a seminal work in post-apocalyptic fiction, something that stands apart from many of the ideas established by The Road or The Walking Dead. Yes, theres a pandemic, and yes theres danger on the road, but at the heart of it is a different type of survival. Station Elevens shifting narrative puts a spotlight on the survival of ideas rather than daily sustenance, acknowledging that art and music and stories are as vital to our civilization as infrastructure and technology. And by keeping the creative spirit alive, Station Eleven dares to challenge the reader to examine what exists outside of the general definitions of faith and communityand how the answer to that can keep humanity going.

The cover for The Book of M uses iconography familiar to fans of post-apocalyptic media: the lone vehicle traveling down a dark road. But in the end, Peng Shepherds debut novel pushes beyond tropes found in other post-apocalyptic fiction towards the establishment of a new society. In this realm where memories and shadows disappear and mere ideas can become magical reality, ultimately the building blocks of civilization lay in two separate but equally important pieces of the human experience: the stories we carry with us and the search for answers. Each of these feed into the other for an emotional chicken-egg cycle that allows humanity to step forward from the shadows of devastation.

The bond between humans and their pets often represent the best, most wholesome parts of our lives. Consider that social media and video streaming sites often feel filled with mudslinging and division, and yet, cute animal photos unite all of us. The unconditional love we give and receive with animals is universal, and yet heightened even more so in C.A. Fletchers tale of the apocalypse. In this book, a young boy named Griz traverses the post-apocalyptic landscape following The Gelding, an event that leaves only thousands in the world. Griz sets out on a simple quest: to find his dog.

Through his journey, Griz encounters both humans and people, some helpful and some harmful. Things get messy of course, and the plot twists and turns, though the bond between Griz and his dog remains the foundation of the story. Through it all, Griz maintains his humanity by refusing to let the desolation and violence pull him down. Holding onto hope in our world is hard enough, but maintaining that humanity in the face of nothing sometimes needs a guiding lighteven one with four legs and a wagging tail.

If Station Eleven dove into how live theatre could carry on the human spirit, Sarah Pinskers book gives that a punk-rock boot to the face. Rather than a single decimating event for humanity, Pinker portrays a world on edge with death coming from multiple sources: powerful viruses, climate change, terrorist attacks, and more. These threats take a mirror image of our own world and, to quote Spinal Tap, turn it up to 11. The public response to this is an authoritarian rule, where public gatherings are illegal and homogenized entertainment rules the day.

This repression leads to two very different points of view: dynamic performer Luce and corporate employee Rosemary. As their stories begin to intertwine (along with some cool worldbuilding for transforming the live music experience), this dangerous world details the risks of suppressing the artistic spirit. As Luce begins to perform illegal concerts, Pinsker deftly illustrates a key point: art, hope, and rebellion often overlap, making each an indomitable part of the human spirit.

Hope is only human.

Despite the devastation in these examples, hope is found simply by existing and engaging in the things that make us human: relationships, art, and community. This all boils down to a common thread through each of these examplesin each story, humans adapt rather than give up.

In fact, that core trait is more than just a narrative tool, its a scientific theory called variability selection. Our brains are essentially social brains, paleoanthropologist Rick Potts told Scientific American in 2013. The originator of the term, Potts spoke about how humans may be the most adaptive species in earths history. We share information, we create and pass on knowledge. Thats the means by which humans are able to adjust to new situations, and its what differentiates humans from our earlier ancestors, and our earlier ancestors from primates.

Resiliency, adaptability, making the best out of situations even in the face of widespread destructionthats not just the way to survive after the apocalypse, but to thrive when everything else has gone. Should the world end (hopefully only a fictional one), then theres still a reason to be optimistic that the survivors wont always be murdering each other over resources, despite numerous stories portraying this.

Our wiring is a little better than that.

We change. We adapt. And we find a way to overcome. Fiction offers a mirror to humanity, and by creating the most extreme and hopeless circumstances with end-of-the-world stories, it becomes clear that hope will always win. Because, as it turns out, hope is an inherently human thing.

And in times like these, where headlines can feel more dystopic than post-apocalyptic fiction, hope might be the most powerful thing in the world.

Originally published in January 2020.

When hes not writing about sci-fi for Tor, The Mary Sue, StarTrek dot com, and other geek media, Mike Chen writes sci-fi books. His second novel A Beginning At The End (January 14, 2020, MIRA/HarperCollins) is an intimate post-apocalyptic story with heart, hope, and humanity (Publishers Weekly). Visit his website or follow him on Twitter for geekery discussion, dog photos, and many curse words. Visit him on twitter and on his website.

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Five Books About Finding Hope at the End of the World - tor.com

The horror genre thrived in the darker, grittier "New Hollywood" of the 1970s, with hits like Alien. But not every scary movie was a cinematic gold.

The 1970s brought some of the greatest horror movies of all time. As the New Hollywood movement took over the industry, movies in general were becoming darker and grittier, with a rebellious, staunchly anti-establishment point of view. It didnt take long for this nihilism to bleed into the horror genre.

RELATED:The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) '70s Action Movies

George A. Romero solidified his creation of the zombie genre with Dawn of the Dead, Richard Donner gave a face and name to the Antichrist in The Omen, and Brian De Palma terrified moviegoers with his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Kings debut novel Carrie. So, here are the five best and five worst horror movies from the 70s.

When Ridley Scott was hired to direct Alien, he couldve easily phoned in a schlocky, half-baked haunted house movie set in space, designed to cash in on the sci-fi craze that followed the success of Star Wars. But Scott went above and beyond with a perfectly paced Hitchcockian thriller that slowly builds to a terrifying midpoint twist, then holds that intense atmosphere for the rest of the movie.

Sigourney Weavers portrayal of Ellen Ripley revolutionized the female action hero, while H.R. Gigers haunting designs beautifully distorted the familiar human form.

As with any sequel that no one involved in the making of the original was interested in doing, Exorcist II: The Heretic is a pretty obvious cash-grab with nothing inventive or fresh to add to the story.

William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty managed to dodge this bullet, but cast members like Linda Blair and Max von Sydow were sadly dragged back into the proceedings.

Slashers follow a pretty rigid story structure, and John Carpenters Halloween perfected that structure. Usually, movies that created clichs (from Lethal Weapon to National Lampoons Vacation) dont age well because they seem clichd in hindsight.

RELATED:The Night He Came Home: 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Halloween (1978)

But Halloween is just as terrifying today as it was in 1978. Carpenter reveals just enough about Michael Myers to make him an intriguing and somewhat sympathetic character, without revealing so much that he ceases to be a chilling on-screen presence.

Marketed as if it was an actual snuff film, Snuff follows a cult leaders obsession with an actress to ludicrous lengths. This is low-budget splatter cinema at its absolute worst.

This movies main notable accomplishment is popularizing urban legends about snuff films, but thats hardly a noble artistic achievement.

The franchise that spawned from Tobe Hoopers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been defined by its excessive gore, but the original is surprisingly bloodless. Instead of relying on bloodshed for scares, Hoopers film expertly uses tension and less-is-more cinematography to create an overriding sense of dread.

All kinds of symbolism has been read into The Texas Chain Saw Massacres deceptively simplistic storytelling. Its been perceived as everything from a discussion of violence against women to an allegory for animal rights.

Richard Donners The Omen wasnt just a series of jump scares playing on religious imagery and revolving around an evil little boy. It was smarter and more thoughtful than that. Its sequel, on the other hand, doesnt have that layer of complexity to elevate it above cheap, shock-driven horror.

Donner didnt return to helm the second filmas he was busy shooting Superman: The Movie, and his signature directorial flair is sorely missed.

Dario Argentos Suspiria is one of the cornerstones of the horror genre. Its use of unsettling imagery to dive into the darkest abyss of the human psyche is a prime example of what makes this genre so uniquely challenging.

Moviegoers flock to horror films to be unnerved and drawn to the edge of their seats, and Argento nailed this kind of instinctive audience reaction with the chilling genius of Suspiria.

The great thing about 70s horror cinema is that it was so unabashedly weird. The Bat People squanders an absurd premise about a honeymooning scientist being turned into a bloodthirsty maniac by a mutant bat with a movie thats so bad that it was covered by Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Theres so much potential in its drive-in B-movie premise, but director Jerry Jameson lets it down with a painfully slow pace. The movie never really takes flight.

Steven Spielbergs Jaws changed the film industry forever. It created the summer blockbuster. Its the reason why Hollywood studios cram a ton of high-concept crowd-pleasers into multiplexes over the summer season.

RELATED:Jaws: 10 Things That Made The Original Great (That The Sequels Missed)

With its everyman protagonist Chief Brody, pitch-perfect story structure, iconic suspense-building score by John Williams, and Hitchcockian restraint in depicting the shark, Jaws is a virtually unparalleled masterpiece of horror cinema.

Although it touts a brilliant poster tagline and its easily the best of the Jaws sequels, Jaws 2 is not a good movie. Following the impeccable craft and searing social commentary of the original,the sequel was depressingly shallow.

Steven Spielbergs idea for a Jaws follow-up was a prequel telling the story of the shark-infested U.S.S. Indianapolis shipwreck that Quint told in the first movie. This wouldve been a lot more interesting than what we got, which follows the grand sequel tradition of shamelessly rehashing the original with diminishing returns.

NEXT:The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) '90s Horror Movies

Next 10 Most Bizarre Star Trek Episodes Of All Time, Ranked

Ben Sherlock is a writer, filmmaker, and comedian. In addition to writing for Screen Rant and CBR, covering a wide range of topics from Spider-Man to Scorsese, Ben directs independent films and takes to the stage with his standup material. He's currently in pre-production on his feature directorial debut (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema and BabbleTop.

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The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) '70s Horror Movies | ScreenRant - Screen Rant

In his first Inaugural Address, and hopefully his last, Donald Trump talked about American carnage. He got it last week. What we couldnt have known in January 2017 is that he wasnt here to save us from this carnage, but to perpetuate it; that incitement wasnt just a feature of his campaign, but of his governance. When historians look back at the Trump era, they may very well say his presidency was encapsulated by this moment, when a sadistic cop knelt on the neck of an African-American man in plain view for almost nine minutes and the streets exploded in rage.

Derek Chauvin was by no means the first cop to gratuitously brutalise and lynch an African-American. But he embodied something essential about Trumpism: Its us versus them. Thats the poison ethos at the heart of police brutality, and its the septic core of our 45th presidents philosophy. Neither a toxic cop nor Donald Trump sees himself as a servant of all the people theyve sworn to protect. They are solely servants of their own. Everyone else is the enemy.

From the beginning, the police has received a lot of perverse messages from Trump, encouraging them to embrace the bitter angels of their nature. Three summers ago, he gave a speech on Long Island, disparaging officers who cradled the heads of suspects as they tucked them into their squad cars: You can take the hand away, OK? (A bank of cops, seated behind him, started to laugh and cheer.)

File image of Donald Trump. AP

One of Trumps most revealing tweets since the rioting began was a boast about the prowess of the Secret Service and to threaten to sic the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons on the crowds outside the White House if things intensified. Hes Bull Connor with a comb-over. Or Walter E Headley, Miamis former police chief, who in 1967 said, When the looting starts, the shooting starts, a phrase that reappeared in a Trump tweet on Friday.

And this is the point, is it not? Trump, who made his political bones by peddling apocrypha about our first African-American presidents country of origin, thrives on racial divisions. Us-them. Conflict zones are his comfort zone, perfect for firing up his base.

But the pressures of this historic moment proved to be too much. We cant see the African-Americans who are dying in disproportionate numbers inside our hospitals, but we can see George Floyd, an African-American, cruelly singled out for asphyxiation in the street. His death in police custody is a potent symbol of the obscene inequality and racial hostility of this moment, with the police officer as Trumps smirking and pitiless proxy. African Americans and many whites, too were so enraged that they poured out into the streets to protest, even in the midst of a pandemic, even though African Americans are most at risk in this pandemic.

A month from now, its quite likely many will end up in hospitals, once again in disproportionate numbers. Its too awful to contemplate.

And once again, theres a leadership vacuum in response to the chaos, just as there is with COVID-19. Its every state for itself, with Trump trolling the most liberal leaders for their supposed failures to contain the unrest.

How these protests devolved into violence across the country will be the subject of analysis for years to come. For now, what has riveted me is that somehow, in spite of the dystopian horror unfolding in front of us, in spite of execrable responses from some of the largest police forces in the country (including New York Citys), were nonetheless hearing talk of America as a perfectible place of the arc still bending. Its been more than three years since weve heard that tune.

Yet there was Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, issuing a wee-hours statement that asked Americans not to ignore their pain, but to use it to compel our nation across this turbulent threshold into the next phase of progress, inclusion, and opportunity.

There was Killer Mike, the rapper from Atlanta, reminding his fellow citizens, Atlantas not perfect, but were a lot better than we ever were, and a lot better than cities are.

Conservatives will focus on the pleas for law and order in their messages. But what I hear is a repudiation of Trumpian nihilism a rejection of the tyranny of the perpetual anxious present that Masha Gessen describes in her forthcoming book Surviving Autocracy. Theyre instead speaking with what Gessen calls moral ambition, inviting fellow citizens to build a more expansive country, rather than an us-versus-them one. Their messages werent, Dont destroy your community, so much as, Theres a still community left for you to join. Come and make it better.

And so, along with terrifying imagery of fire and fury, we also saw images over the weekend of police officers and protesters marching together. The bonds were sometimes fragile, only to later disappear. But they happened. In Flint, Michigan. In Camden, New Jersey. In Coral Gables, Florida. In Santa Clara, California. In Ferguson, Missouri. In Kansas City, Missouri, where two cops, one White, held aloft a sign saying End Police Brutality.

Or listen to the chief of police in Atlanta, Erika Shields, tell an anxious protester, I hear you. When Trump met with those whod lost loved ones in the Parkland shooting, he needed an empathy cheat sheet that contained those very words; it was item No 5. For her, they simply spilled out, as naturally as rain.

Jennifer Seniorc.2020 The New York Times Company

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Us versus them: It's the poison ethos at the heart of police brutality in America and Donald Trump's... - Firstpost

Several things happened in the year 2000. We made it to January 1 without the fears of the Y2K bug being realized. The Millennial generation was filling up college campuses. And Tom Brokaw published a book called The Greatest Generation. He described the Builder generation who fought World War II, survived the Great Depression, and sacrificed greatly to build America. You could say the Builders made America great back then.

They also gave us the biggest generation in U.S. history following World War II, until the Millennials came along later. The Baby Boomers were named for their population boom: from 1946-1964, some 77 million Boomers were born, making up 40 percent of the U.S. population at one point.

This is the second of six articles on generations. For this one, I want to give credit to one of those Builders who influenced countless people. Elmer Towns was an early hero to me, and a friend of decades. Elmer has written over 140 books, which basically means he has no unpublished thought!

Elmer Towns and the Five B's of the Boomers

I remember attending the first of what we might consider a church growth seminar taught by Towns called How to Reach the Baby Boomer. I was a very young GenXer learning how to reach the then-young Boomers!

I believe it's still the best-selling church growth seminar of all time. Towns described things that shaped the Boomer generation in terms of the five B's. I want to walk you through these to think about Boomers.

First, Towns spoke of bucks. The Boom refers to its size, but this generation also experienced an incredible increase in wealth in one generation. Some Baby Boomers had parents who grew up without electricity or with dirt floors in their homes.

But Boomers parents, the Builders, were determined to give their children a better and more prosperous life than they had. This was when America came into the fullness of its economic promise. Sadly, the remarkable economic wealth led many Boomers to embrace the consumerism-driven prosperity gospel.

Next was the bomb. Sometimes, it's easy for us to forget that there was a certain nihilism that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. The Cold War was a real and present danger in the minds of many. There was this idea that at any moment on any day somebody could set off a global thermonuclear war and we'd all die.

Today, students have drills to know what to do if an active shooter came on campus. Boomers performed civil defense drills in case a nuclear bomb came to their town.

Generation of Revolution

The angst around the Cold War helped ignite a sexual revolution, helped by Towns' third point: birth control. This is more important than most people think. When a couple had sex before the birth control pill, babies were a normal result.

All of the sudden, sex could be freed from the reality of childbearing. This revolutionized sexual practice, and not in a biblical direction. Some sociologists think the birth control was the most important technological innovation of the last millennia.

It changed women's roles in the home in many ways. It changed people's perception of sexuality. It created a pathway to sexual practice that before was not there which led to new levels of promiscuity. Baby Boomers changed sexual mores of the nation.

Following this revolution, Towns recognized the book. It was not the Bible it was Dr. Benjamin Spock's book Baby and Child Care. Dr. Spock taught people permissive parenting. This marked a radical departure from previous generations. Revolutionary changes came in views of morality in the 1960s; authority figures like Dr. Spock gave credibility to some of the more permissive ideas cutting against the grain of previous generations.

The fifth one may sound odd today, but it was a common term in the past. Google it and see for yourself. The final mark Towns gave was the boob tube, or the television. It came from the fact that TV sets originally used cathode tubes, and critics called the millions suddenly glued to it "boobs" (aka idiots). Of course, this was before people binge watched Netflix.

Back then, a television remote control meant sitting close to the television. If you were really good, you could turn the knob to change channels with your foot.

But there wasn't one knob. There were two. There were three channels on the top knob like ABC and NBC. The bottom knob had the letter U. You could get PBS and maybe others depending upon the weather and how the antenna was working that day.

The television influenced Boomers the way computers did Gen X, the Internet impacted Millennials, and the iPhone affects Gen Z youth, who depend upon their smartphones about as much as oxygen.

There's something I want to add about Boomers. The Boomer experience was overwhelmingly enjoyed by white Americans. Many of the opportunities afforded white Boomers was not shared with people of color. Various ethnicities were also underrepresented on television shows or movies in that era.

Boomers and Church Innovation

Still, the Boomers came in the early stages of a technological and innovation revolution, which also influenced the church. Boomer pastors and ministry leaders brought a revolution of entrepreneurial evangelicalism starting in the 1980s.

If the church you attend worships like a Calvary Chapel and is led like a Saddleback, that relates to things that happened with the Boomers in the 1980s. Boomers shifted the church culture and practice in substantial ways, from megachurches to multisite, from contemporary worship forms to new ideas about global missions. Their entrepreneurial spirit paved the way for other approaches in church life as I will note in coming articles.

Next, we will talk about Gen X.

Ed Stetzer holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College, is executive director of the Billy Graham Center, and publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group. The Exchange Team contributed to this article.

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Understanding, Engaging, and Deploying the Generations, Part 2: The Baby Boomers | The Exchange | A Blog by Ed Stetzer - ChristianityToday.com

As a reader and supporter of Evolution News, you must have noticed the same thing I have. Its an ominous sight to observe the two waves approaching each other. On one side is an intensifying drive to police social media, where countless people get most of their information. On the other are biologists who (according to a Darwinist scientist!) spend a fifth of their time fretting about how to combat intelligent design, as we reported here the other day.

One prominent scientific journal, BioEssays, has already brought the waves together. They have called for Internet censorship of intelligent design, identifying Discovery Institute by name as being in need of special attention by the censors. If giants like Facebook and Twitter dont follow through on the threat, then says biologist Dave Speijer, the government should Make them. Its only because we are changing how people think about life and its origins thanks to you! that we have attracted this malice.

Dont doubt that their idea has a bright future with what journalist John Zmirak calls Darwins Inquisition. Nobody Expects the Darwinist Inquisition, as Zmirak says in a headline at The Stream, a wry homage to a famous line from a Monty Python sketch. Well, I expect it! He cites the BioEssays article that takes aim at Discovery Institute and its Center for Science & Culture:

Theyre drilling down to essential matters, to the fundamental divide of basic worldviews. That is, the yawning chasm between Darwinian nihilism, and a universe designed and replete with meaning.

Zmirak adds that ideology isnt all that motivates the would-be Internet police: Its the classic will to dominate, to bully and rule your neighbor.

As editor of Evolution News, I appeal to you to join us in resisting these moves. A universe designed and replete with meaning is a vision that strict Darwinists cant stand. They will do what they can to suppress it. The fact that a designed universe is supported by responsible science, as we make clear here every day for our growing audience, is what really drives them to the edge.

Every indication suggests that before long, they will take action against those who argue in public for design in life and in the cosmos. Please consider donating now to the Center for Science & Culture and its campaign for Evolution News and for freedom of speech. Theyve already come for the professors. Next theyll come for us. Expect it.

Image credit: Francisco de Goya, Escena de Inquisicin, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Nobody Expects the Darwinist Inquisition? I Do - Discovery Institute