Category Archives: Nihilism

At a secretive conclave this week, Chinas Communist Party is busy excising the unwanted chapters of its history. The resulting portraitwhich may shape the future even more than the pastwill be enshrined in a pronouncement with a title that leaves no doubt about its emphasis: The Resolution of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Partys Hundred-Year Struggle.

In the argot of Communist politics, the session that began on November 8th is the sixth plenum of the Nineteenth Central Committee. In practice, its the last big occasion for the paramount leader, Xi Jinping, to cement his dominance before next year, when he is expected to begin a third term as leader. (He got rid of term limits in 2018.) The meeting this week carries special significance: the Party, for only the third time in its history, will issue a verdict on past events, a maneuver of power politics that George Orwell famously described when he wrote, Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

The full self-portrait wont be released until after the meetingwhich consists of four days of closed sessionsbut its been clear for months that Xi is determined to eradicate what he calls historical nihilism, the corrosive doubt that could threaten the dominance of his party. During the summer, Chinas official online Rumor Refutation Platform, a Web site that collects public tips and reports levels of purportedly false content online, warned of attempts to smear Party history through what it called efforts to slander and discredit revolutionary leaders. Under Chinese law, a person found to have spread a rumor faces up to fifteen years in prison. A list of the top-ten most-circulated rumors ranged from deep strategic questionsDid the Communist Party avoid confronting the Japanese army directly?to sensitive details, such as the suggestion that Chairman Maos son died during the Korean War because he gave away his battlefield position by cooking egg fried rice. (Mao Anying died in an air strike in 1950. The fried-rice story, which has never been confirmed, outrages nationalists and Party agencies.)

But the effort runs deeper than removing unflattering discussions online; it is shaping up as the historiographical equivalent of bulldozing a cemetery. Earlier this year, an official volume known as A Short History of the Chinese Communist Partywas revised to limit discussion of the Great Leap Forward, Maos calamitous social and political campaign, which resulted in the worst famine in recorded history. (The previous rendering of the Great Leap Forward carried the admonition This bitter historical lesson shouldnt be forgotten.) The revised history also removed a candid assessment of the Cultural Revolution, the decade of bloody chaos that Mao set in motion in 1966. In an article published in September in the journal China Quarterly, Patricia Thornton, a specialist in Chinese politics at Oxford, observed that the official history of this turmoil had been replaced with an account that restricted its focus to highlighting various industrial, technological and diplomatic advances.

A verdict on history is a tool for clarifying who has accumulated sufficient power to render it. In 1945, after years of purges and infighting, a resolution cemented Maos supremacy by declaring that his ideological line had prevailed over the errors of his opponents. In 1981, when Deng Xiaoping was steering China toward a pro-growth brand of Leninism, the Party lifted him by pinning blame for the Cultural Revolution on the Left errors of Mao and his radicals.

For Xi, pruning Chinas history to remove patterns of infighting, dissent, suffering, and discrimination is a technique for engineering the future. It is the next step in a march to remove obstacles from his path, beginning with the arrests of his political opponents, after he took power nine years ago; extending into a sweeping campaign of incarceration and human-rights abuses against dissidents, writers, and Muslims in the Xinjiang region; and eventually reaching into the ranks of Chinas oligarchs, by kicking away the power of business leaders such as Jack Ma, who retired from the tech giant Alibaba in 2019, and by redoubling Chinas claims to sovereignty over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and other disputed regions. Xis use of history projects the message that the struggles of the first century of Communist Party rule have been buried by the need to cohere around Xis pursuit of strength, dignity, and obediencewhat he calls the great rejuvenation of China.

Xis party has taken to calling the great rejuvenation an irreversible historical process, a concept that echoes with some of the triumphant certainty that attached to Western liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War. But Geremie Barm, a historian of China living in New Zealand, notes that, in the current case, the promise of inevitability is framed largely around the leader. His works have been published in luxurious volumes; every speech he makes is celebrated as importanthis every statement and quotation is hailed as golden formulations, Barm told me. His activities, history, and personality are limned in terms that suggest an approaching apotheosis.

At the moment, outside analysts see no major threat to Xis power, but the history of the Chinese Communist Party casts doubt on the prospect of a simple, certain future. After all, since 1936 there has been only one peaceful transition of power within the Chinese Communist Party, and that was in 2002, when Hu Jintao, designated as heir by Deng Xiaoping, took over the reins as Party General Secretary from Jiang Zemin, Barm said. Far more often, the pressures of ambition and factionalism within the Party have given rise to sudden bids for power and dominance.

The more Xi closes down the routes for advancement, dissent, and individual success, the more he risks fostering a kind of political sepsisa volatile, sometimes fatal, rot from within. It is a lesson contained in the past, but one has to be open to seeing it. In July, in a speech marking the Partys hundredth anniversary, Xi addressed a hand-picked crowd of more than seventy thousand people. He turned, as he often does in speeches, to the power of history. By learning from history, we can understand why powers rise and fall, he said. Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand, and gain foresight into the future. Perhaps, but only if the mirror is true.

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Does Xi Jinpings Seizure of History Threaten His Future? - The New Yorker

For many in the west, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most Russian of Russian authors. His work teems with holy fools, holy prostitutes, nihilists and revolutionaries. Crime and Punishment, his best-known novel, radiates a dark chaos and apocalyptic sensibility. Its murderous antihero, Raskolnikov (from the Russian raskolnik, dissenter), embodies a violent ideology of redemption through suffering that Vladimir Nabokov, for one, found distasteful. (Dostoevsky is a third-rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible, he judged.) For all that, Dostoevsky remains a quasi-divine figure in Russia. His Slavophile bias and Orthodox-heavy chauvinism endeared him to Stalins propagandists, who tailored his image to fit Soviet ideology.

He is a difficult quarry for biographers, though. With his appetite for affliction and self-torturing asceticism, he was a casebook of neuroses. Joseph Franks celebrated five-volume biography, published between 1976 and 2002, devoted more than 2,500 pages to the life of a man who was dead at the age of 59 from untreated epilepsy and a gambling addiction (also untreated). Rowan Williamss scholarly Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction concentrated instead on the novelists tormented Christian messianism.

The radical politics and anti-tsarist personalities that fed into Crime and Punishment are the subject of Kevin Birminghams excellent biographical study, The Sinner and the Saint. As Birmingham shows, Dostoevsky was exposed at an early age to tragedy when, in 1839, his landowning father was murdered by his own serfs. Unsurprisingly, Dostoevsky was left with a bewildered awareness of human cruelty. Later, inspired by a reading of the gospels, he espoused a proto-Soviet socialism that sought to abolish serfdom and return Russia to a state of original Slav holiness. In St Petersburg in the 1840s, he fell in with a circle of intellectuals who preached French utopian politics and the redemptive possibilities (as they saw it) inherent in the Russian peasant soul. Tsar Nicholas Is secret police were watching: opposing serfdom was a clear threat to the throne, Birmingham writes.

In 1849 Dostoevsky and his co-conspirators were arrested and interrogated by General Nabokov, the great-great-uncle of the novelist. Subjected to a gruesome mock execution, the 28-year-old graduate engineer was afterwards deported to Siberia. His four years of hard labour in the Asian side of the Ural mountains convinced Dostoevsky more than ever that Christ was alive in Russian lands. Even the most degraded of convicts showed a readiness for penance and redemption, Birmingham suggests. The book that emerged from Dostoevskys Siberian ordeal, The House of the Dead, pretty well created the gulag genre in Russia and remains a work of unsparing lucidity and documentary realism. (I dont know a better book in all modern literature, Tolstoy enthused.)

Released from Siberia, Dostoevsky seemed to court disaster and illness. Epilepsy was associated in the popular mind with demonic possession and visitations from the beyond. It left Dostoevsky in permanent dread of the next convulsive onset. His growing discontent with the west stemmed in part from its betrayal (as he saw it) of Russias Christian cause in the 1854-6 Crimean war. France and Britain had sided with the Ottomans against Russia to defend their imperial interests and thus ensured the crucifixion of the Russian Christ.

Dostoevskys anxiety about national character what does it mean to be Russian? Are Russians even European? contained a streak of xenophobia and antisemitism that surfaced during the trips he took abroad in the 1860s to avoid gambling debts back home. Mid-Victorian London represented the soullessness and hard-nosed mercantilism of capitalist western life; Crystal Palace appalled Dostoevsky with its thousands of tonnes of glass and iron like something out of Babylon.

Crime and Punishment, published in instalments in St Petersburg in 1866, was partly inspired by the sensationalist story of Pierre Franois Lacenaire, a Parisian murderer-poet whose trial Dostoevsky followed avidly. Lacenaires influence on the creation of Raskolnikov had been explored by Frank, but Birmingham goes further and braids Lacenaires story with that of Dostoevsky. A dandified fop, Lacenaire set French society ablaze with his catalogue of gratuitous, unmotivated crimes. He appeared to kill simply in order to act (or perhaps to alleviate boredom). His motiveless murders would be mirrored in Raskolnikovs axing to death of an old moneylender and her sister. Nothing no inkling of anger, or rage, or hatred apparently has the power to shake Dostoevskys existentially disaffected creation.

The notion that Raskolnikov is moved to repent and find God is, Birmingham writes, one of the aspects that nearly everyone gets wrong about Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov does eventually confess to his crimes, but without obvious remorse. Killing for the nihilist sake of killing is the theme that runs like the black line in a lobster through Crime and Punishment and behind it all lay the bizarre figure of Lacenaire. In pungent, well-researched pages, Birmingham reveals the secret background behind Dostoevskys great murder novel the gambling debts, the epileptic seizures, the Tsarist police surveillance.

Crime and Punishment might have been accused of promoting nihilism and even tsaricide (an attempt was made on Tsar Alexander IIs life just as a chapter went to press). Fortunately for us, it was not successful. A model of luminous exposition and literary detection, The Sinner and the Saint can be recommended to anyone interested in the dark twisted genius of Dusty, as Nabokov (with a touch of mockery) nicknamed the ill-fated Russian maestro.

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a Crime and Its Punishment by Kevin Birmingham is published by Allen Lane (25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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The Sinner and the Saint review the story behind Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment - The Guardian

There is still much that we dont know about the explosion outside Liverpool Womens Hospital yesterday morning, a minute before the two minutes silence for Remembrance Sunday. Reports suggest an explosive device turned a cab into a fireball in the hospitals car park at 10.59am, killing the passenger, suspected of being a bomber, and wounding the driver. Counter-terror police are involved and four men have been arrested in Liverpool under the Terrorism Act. It has now officially been declared a terrorist incident.

But what is clear is that things could have been so different. Today we could have been mourning another mass-casualty event, were it not for the quick thinking and heroism of the cab driver, David Perry. Friends of Perry say his fare had wanted to go to Liverpools Anglican Cathedral, half a mile from the hospital, where thousands had gathered for Remembrance Sunday. When parade cordons kept them away, the passenger allegedly asked Perry to pull in at the hospital. According to these sources, Perry saw his passenger fiddling with something that looked suspicious, so he locked the cab doors just before the explosion. Remarkably, he escaped with minor injuries.

We await more details, particularly about the nature of the explosion and the possible motivations for the attack. (The nail-biting footage of Perrys car going up in flames has just been released.) But Perry is clearly owed a huge debt. As a friend of his told the Mail, Davids the luckiest man in Britain as well as the most heroic. The hospital, which has featured in Channel 4s One Born Every Minute series, was brimful of innocent people, including new mothers and their newborns. Had it not been for Perry, an unspeakable horror could have unfolded.

In this, Perry joins a long line of members of the British public who have shown remarkable heroism and quick thinking in the face of terrorist nihilism. At London Bridge in 2017, when three Islamists rammed a van into pedestrians, before jumping out armed with knives and strapped with fake suicide vests, citizens and tourists alike took on the killers with bottles, glasses and stools. Florin Morariu, a Romanian baker, smashed one of them over the head with a crate, and threw one at another, before ushering people inside his bakery and locking them in to keep them safe. Ignacio Echeverria attacked one of the terrorists with his skateboard, saving a womans life before tragically losing his own. At the second London Bridge attack in 2019, a group of men armed with a fire extinguisher, a pole and a narwhal tusk managed to subdue terrorist Usman Khan, who had just fatally stabbed two people, until he was shot by police.

The Liverpool attack isnt the first time that a cab driver has stepped into the fray during a terrorist attack, either. At London Bridge in 2017, a cab driver known only as Chris told LBC of how he tried to ram one of the attackers as the carnage unfolded. Then there is cab driver Alex McIlveen, one of eight brave Scots who foiled the Glasgow Airport bombers in 2007. His heroics produced the immortal headline, published on the front page of the Daily Record: I kicked burning terrorist so hard in balls that I tore a tendon in my foot.

Such remarkable nous and heroism should never cease to inspire us, even in the face of the tragedy, bloodshed and horror that has been inflicted on the public in recent years by those who loathe our way of life. Time and again it is the public who are our last line of defence against this barbarism.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked.

Picture by: Twitter.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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David Perry and the incredible heroism of ordinary people - Spiked

Last weels column concluded with the statement, We want to drive the newest car we can finance, dress very well, smell sweet, and make a knock-out impression. Appearances matter more, to many, in this superficial, performative age of reality television, Facebook, and the ubiquitous video screen, than do substance, values, moral principle, and character. It all goes with narcissism and nihilism, both a belief in nothing except what I want.

What we wanted grew from one car for each family household, to a car for every eligible driver, in each family household. In maybe 40 years, from about the 40s until the 70s or 80s. I noticed it happening all around, and in our own family. It is no wonder that carbon emissions skyrocketed in this country. As I wrote last week, we have wanted it all. I confess to the same malady.

Adolf Hitler bought the death of God lie and weaponized it through Naziism to deceive his nation and ravage the world. The devils lie of death of God always fosters the claim that we ourselves are gods, capable of being gods unto ourselves. Hitlers term for Aryan supremacy was the ubermensch, the overman. With a dead God dethroned and no longer believed, Hitler claimed pseudo-divine status for the overman, the man over all, god unto himself. Why shouldnt gods have what they want? It follows, doesnt it?

This present manifestation of the death of God blasphemy is degrading us, choking us, disfiguring the image of God in us, and if we stay this course, it will doom us. Much more than a political matter, our predicament is fundamentally a spiritual matter of ultimate importance.

So, now what? Do we invest our hopes in scientific artificial intelligence? Some now assert that we stand on the frontier of that epoch. God forbid! That way follows the same old formulaic lie, decked out in silicon disguise! Ubermensch on steroids! (I plan to say much more about this in a later column.)

We were, and are, warned by the biblical prophets. By Paul. By Christ Jesus Himself.

What did we trade off in these last decades of capitulation and decline? What did we get in the trade? Our era traded off loyal commitment in loving, bonded relationships and stable families, for satisfaction of perverse sexual craving, through adultery, pornography, and indiscrinate hookups, in wasted lifestyles. Pop music rarely mentions falling in love anymore, as it nearly always did in the 40s and 50s and some years afterward.

Instead, commitment in romantic love and lasting marriage was traded off for exploitation and the predatory excitement of no-name, on-the-fly hook-ups. Or perhaps a few months of shacking up until boredom signaled time to move on. Tina Turner nailed it with Whats Love Got To Do With It? Remember that? Remember the hurt, and angry disappointment, in Tina s lyrics and voice?

This era traded off concern for our neighbor for getting ahead at all costs, keeping up with the Joneses, and leaving them in the dust and the rearview mirror. Too seldom have we helped others in need without thought of whats in it for me? Even the good deeds have been done to make a good impression.

Jesus said that what is not done in faith is sin. And we give scarcely a thought to starving children in Madagascar, those too far away to be considered neighbors, or to be impressed by us.

This eras sorry gain has been meaningless lives of scrounging out a living, spending it all on ourselves, chasing the good life, plundering Earths resources, aimlessness, and spiritual starvation. Can you see it? Look around. It may be hard to spot the wasted lives. They can look well-fed, well-dressed, and well-situated.

For a time.

It runs out.

Still, there is hope. God gives the remedy. But it comes at a cost. Repent. Repent, saith the Lord. Take heed: sincere repentance is not a rote formula. Sincere repentance costs deep, wrenching grief and mourning, over a wicked heart and a sinful lifestyle. Sincere repentance demands giving up our sin, hating our sin, and sackcloth-and-ashes sorrow, over sin against a Living God. Sorrow like Davids. Like Isaiahs. And conversion to love of God. Like theirs.

Furthermore, discipleship, following Jesus, comes at a sacrificial cost. Taking up a cross means death, the death of wanting to have it our way, to get what we want, just like we want, as much as we want. Conversion and faithful discipleship cost our lives, our souls, our all: Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all, (Isaac Watts, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross). Amen.

Sincere repentance, Almighty Gods amazing grace and forgiveness of sin, conversion, and following our Lord in cross-bearing for His glory and His kingdom, are humankinds one salvation. One. God offers it still.

And joy! Rejoice! God has not given up on us! In Christ Jesus, its shouting time, whirling about with joy time! Everyday! Christmas is coming!

Thanks be to God.

Dr. Elizabeth Barnes is a retired professor emerita of Christian Theology and Ethics at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and a resident of White Lake.

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Barnes: There is hope, for He has given us the remedy - Elizabethtown Bladen Journal

For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academics opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers. If only we could shed these illusions, we could revel in a world of infinite possibility. Instead of waking up to the same tedious old self each morning, we could flit from one identity to another as easily as David Bowie. The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance.

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Even so, postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than the marketplace. Nobody on Wall Street believes in absolute truth. The true anarchists are the free marketeers. So is postmodernism a critique of the status quo or a capitulation to it?

Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to distinguish the boss from the bohemian. Postmodernism may be playful, witty and depthless, but so is the British prime minister. It is unashamedly populist, defiantly embracing the everyday, but so is Nigel Farage. As Jeffries points out, Steve Jobs was selling conformity masquerading as personal liberation. He may have thought of himself as a hippie, but the Chinese factories that made his products had suicide nets beneath the windows of its dormitories for exploited workers. Madonna is seen by some as a feminist guerrilla fighter and by others as peddling rape fantasies, along with the most successful coffee table book (Sex) of all time. Post-truth politics may have started on the left bank of the Seine, but they ended up in the White House.

Some studies of postmodernism are cultural, some are historical and a few of them are philosophical. The achievement of this book is to roll all three approaches into one. This is rare, because those who know about Sid Vicious may not be avid readers of Michel Foucault, while those who are deep in Jacques Derrida are not always fans of Chris Krauss I Love Dick. Jeffries packs a remarkable knowledge of postmodern culture into these pages, from punk, hip-hop, film and photography to anti-psychiatry, the Rushdie fatwa and queer theory. All this is set in the context of the neoliberalism of the 1970s, showing how a revamped capitalism gave birth to a culture of the flexible and provisional of short-termism, endless consumption and multiple identities.

Postmodernism may be a historical fact, but it finds history itself a bore. The past is simply a collection of styles to be recycled, while the future will be just like the present only with a richer array of options. There are no more grand narratives like the idea of progress, no momentous transformation to be feared or hoped for. The point is not to change the world but to parody it. History has come to an end with Ben & Jerrys and Grand Theft Auto.

When two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, a new grand narrative the conflict between the west and Islamism began to unfold. For some observers, this spelled the end of the postmodern era. Jeffries himself is not so sure: it may have lost some of its youthful zest, but its malign spirit still lives on. Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth. For a whole generation of young people, simply to have a conviction is to be guilty of dogmatism. When asked about his convictions, Boris Johnson replied that he had picked up a couple of them for speeding. To suggest that someones opinion is false is a form of discrimination. Every viewpoint should be respected, except for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for the birds? There are writers today who rightly insist that women have been shackled and humiliated throughout history, yet who put words like truth and reality in scare quotes.

The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery. Perhaps Jeffriess compelling critique will help to sort them out.

Terry Eagletons latest book is Tragedy (Yale). Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries is published by Verso (20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries review how we became postmodern - The Guardian

The five members of London band Squid are architectural engineers who plot points of distinction for listeners to marvel ator, as vocalist and drummer Ollie Judge sings on Narrator, off their 2021 debut, Bright Green Field (Warp), they mold beauty out of clay. The 2020 single Broadcaster consists mostly of a description of outdoor environs and listening to a voice beamed through the air, but the bands tendency to set their construction projects atop music colored by a whirling succession of influences might make lyrical nuance tough to decipher; Judges alternately deadpan and screamy vocal delivery from behind the kit recalls the punky portions of Neu!, the nihilism of the Falls Mark E. Smith, and the no-wave yelps of James Chance, among other things. The music Squid have cultivated is broader, though. Along with referencing Gang of Fours funk-punk polemics and mid-period Kraftwerk, they touch on Londons contemporary jazz scene, including a guest spot from rising multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray on the spindly Paddling. They also cover experimental 20th-century composer Steve Reich on a pandemic-times recording to benefit the East Bristol Food Bank, and they reference dystopian sci-fi novels in interviews. As taut and visceral as Bright Green Field sounds, the live renditions of these songs could top the recordwith any luck theyll reach the fever pitch of the bands 2019 single, Houseplants, which underlines their statement of purpose, musically and philosophically. And I find myself looking for a future that doesnt exist, Judge shrieks. This is my beautiful house and I cant afford to live in it. Here Squid build up the white-picket-fence myth only to tear it down with motorik rhythms, down-stroked guitar, cornet filigree, and the sound of the well-read and cultured giving themselves over to utter abandon.

Squid, Sharkula x Mukqs Sat 11/13, 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, sold out, 21+

Squid, Sharkula x Mukqs Sun 11/14, 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15, 21+

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UK band Squid build up worlds only to destroy them - Chicago Reader

Jarvis Cocker has teamed up with the electronic DJ Riton to release what he calls the worlds first sustainable banger to encourage action to address the climate crisis.

Lets Stick Around, released on Thursday to coincide with Cop26, brings together one of the figureheads of Britpop with a powerhouse of electronic dance music. Anybody with any sense is passionate about the climate emergency, its moving more into the centre of everybodys consciousness, Cocker said.

The former Pulp frontman was approached to do the vocals last year by the Grammy-nominated Riton and Ben Rymer, who together make up Gucci Soundsystem.

It seemed appropriate to unleash it on an unsuspecting world during Cop26, Cocker said. A lot of debates in the modern world devolve into people shouting at each other from opposite corners of a room. The idea was that anybody could dance to this song and agree with it. Thats what music does so well. It brings people together.

Cocker has long been an advocate for climate action. His concerts have featured stalls for Extinction Rebellion, some of whose members joined him on the Q awards red carpet in 2019.

He said it was hard to get a sense of the stilted announcements at Cop26, which involved a lot of discussions behind closed doors Theres still the idea that theres an elite of people who are going to tell you how the world works. An issue such as climate change that affects everyone also needed to include everyone, he said.

Cocker, who is performing in Glasgow on Thursday with his solo band Jarv Is , lamented the fact that air travel was cheaper than rail. Im getting the train to Glasgow, but while thats the situation, nothings going to change that much.

He said climate solutions should not hinge on asking people to give things up, because its never going to work. Its about doing things differently, like the experimentation with hydrogen fuel. Aeroplanes arent going to disappear, its just daft to think that people arent going to go on holiday any more.

His song (Cunts Are Still) Running the World has become an epic singalong on his current tour, but Cocker said he had been in two minds over whether to include it in the setlist. The late Tony Benn had taken him to task over the track, warning against cynicism and nihilism. He said youve got to believe in the democratic process. I took that to heart. But unfortunately, I still feel that the song is appropriate.

Earlier this year Cocker released an album of French music to accompany Wes Andersons latest film, The French Dispatch. But the Sheffield-born singer, who has spent much of his life in Paris, where his son is based, said it was dispiriting that musicians were still having trouble touring in Europe post-Brexit.

Its still really complicated and expensive, he said. Normally we would be preparing after this tour to do some shows in Europe.

Cocker said Pulps Common People, one of the biggest-selling records of the 90s with lyrics centred on a meeting at Central Saint Martins might not have been written today if government plans to limit the number of arts students go ahead.

This idea that arts is not a proper job or a proper thing to study is stupid, he said. Creativity is the centre of the human experience. The first things that show you that people were alive are cave paintings or little bone carvings. Its how humans say we exist. Its not some kind of fringe pursuit.

My life would have been so different if I hadnt had that opportunity to go to Saint Martins at the time that I did. But that kind of opportunity isnt open to people from my kind of background any more. And that just makes me very angry and very sad.

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Sustainable banger: Jarvis Cocker stars on climate-themed dance track - The Guardian

The expo portion of this years Taiwan Creative Content Fest offers a glimpse into the future of entertainment and cultural applications

By Han Cheung / Staff reporter

Im not too sure what to expect when I enter the wormhole to the Metaverse Playground.

Ive done my homework on the event, and Ive tried my hand in VR games and Ive attended one virtual art opening (due to the pandemic), but Im still unsure of the loaded word metaverse especially in light of Facebooks recent, much-maligned embracement of the term, which was first coined in a 1992 dystopian novel.

The Metaverse Playground is the Expo portion of this years Taiwan Creative Content Fest, featuring a diverse array of immersive events and other showcases and live activities. The festival, which runs until Sunday, also features livestreamed forums, a Next Academy side-exhibition on the future of content creation and Garden Mingle, an interactive, futuristic outdoor performance and a concert that begins tonight.

Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times

Expo curator Samuel Wang () says that the metaverse is more than just cold digital technology and applications. Theres no need to be nervous, as people were averse to smartphones when they first came out, too, he argues.

I see the metaverse as a way for people to examine the universe within themselves. Since VR content moves between reality and virtuality, I think this exhibition shows how ones avatar can journey between the two realms and find a balance.

Just like how our dreams can be used to deal with our real lives, the metaverse can also be a chance to look within and redefine the way we live. It doesnt need to be like the nihilism of cyberpunk. Its something that can be faced positively, he says.

Photo courtesy of Taiwan Creative Content Agency

ENJOYING THE PLAYGROUND

The shows first half mostly features VR and other types of cutting-edge visual entertainment, from 360 movies to interactive, immersive experiences as well as more art-oriented projects, which are becoming increasingly dynamic.

For example, Huang Hsin-chiens () latest project Samara Ep 1 (), which won Best VR Story at the Cannes XR showcase, is a step up from his previous work; the scenes are more vivid, the movement is smoother and more exciting and the viewer can use their voice to trigger certain images as well. Still, storytelling is key, and Huangs tale of humans evolving over hundreds of millenia as they leave a devastated earth to find a new home is a relevant and compelling one.

Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times

Not all projects rely purely on 3D animation, and its encouraging to see the combination of physical crafts and VR. As a history buff, I enjoyed the four-minute video on the changes in Taipeis railroad system over a century, bringing to life actual miniature models belonging to the Kaohsiung Museum of History. The VR content is interspersed with old photos, which is a wonderful way to make education fun.

The VR film The Sick Rose () by HTC Vive Originals is also such a combination. Set during a pandemic in a fantastic Taiwan-esque landscape, it employs old-school stop-motion animation with traditional dough figurines. This is a highly effective way to combine tradition and the latest technology, and could be important in keeping dying arts alive in the future.

On the other side of the exhibition, which focuses on interactive entertainment applications, a woman using a motion sensitive smart glove to control a Taiwanese hand puppet catches my eye. This is part of a larger venture between the Seden Society Puppet Theater Foundation () and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University that attempts to combine AI and other tech to promote and preserve the art of puppetry.

Photo courtesy of Taiwan Creative Content Agency

In addition to getting more young people interested in puppetry, the glove can capture the old puppet masters hand motions, recording their skills as the art form becomes rarer by day.

Another intriguing experience is singing karaoke in a virtual booth, which can feature up to 40 users from anywhere in Taiwan. I still prefer in-person interaction, but I can see the appeal its clean, convenient and perfect for a pandemic or long distance friendships. In four months, organizers say, they have amassed over 2,000 users.

IS THIS THE FUTURE?

Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times

However, it still feels that there are limitations to these magical tools as far as popularization goes, at least for now. After all, the main goal of expos is to display the possibilities for potential users, or creative and business partners.

For example, due to the limited number of headsets, virtually all the immersion events were booked before the event started. Plus, one cant really experience that many products in one go as the devices are still slightly uncomfortable (especially for someone wearing glasses) and some of the content can make people dizzy.

A lot of these productions can only be displayed at exhibitions or film festivals, either due to logistics, physical space or system requirements. For instance, people cannot sing real-time duets in virtual karaoke unless they both have 5G. A neat-looking interactive AR film that only requires a tablet cannot be played at home yet due to massive file size.

Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times

But there is progress. For example, Kaohsiungs VR Film Lab can seat up to 30 people per screening since 360 degree movies require less space than interactive ones. During the annual Kaohsiung Film Festival, they also allow people to rent headsets so they can get used to watching movies with the device in their home. One day, the staff tells me, they hope that it will be common for every household to own one.

Wang says he thought it would still take some time for the public to really embrace metaverse technology, but he was surprised at how quickly the time slots for each experience was booked long before the event began especially compared to last years expo. Accessibility has also been boosted with headsets getting cheaper in recent years.

He remains optimistic about the future, noting that with more tech giants such as gaming company Roblox and Facebook joining the fray, both the software and hardware will improve quickly, not unlike when Apple introduced the iPhone and App Store more than a decade ago.

Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times

For those who missed out in signing up for the VR events, Wang says theres still much to see as VR content only consists of about 60 percent of the expo. There are data-driven art projects, for instance, such as the Winds of Taipei digital painting created from a years worth of local wind information, and Signal, an interactive, immersive art piece drawing from real-time COVID-19 diagnosis data from various countries.

We want to show that the metaverse is more than just VR content, he says.

Photo courtesy of Taiwan Creative Content Agency

WHAT: Taiwan Creative Content Fest

WHEN: Through Sunday

WHERE: Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (), 133, Guangfu S Rd, Taipei City (133)

ADMISSION: Free

ON THE NET: tccf.taicca.tw/en

Comments will be moderated. Keep comments relevant to the article. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned. Final decision will be at the discretion of the Taipei Times.

Excerpt from:

Playing around in the 'metaverse' -

Fallen from power and stripped of his Twitter account the bullhorn he once used to declare victories and mock rivals Donald Trump still haunts American politics. So too do the dark forces he unleashed on the US political scene between 2016 and 2021: nihilism, fear, conspiracy theory, white supremacy.

There are reminders of Trumps spectre at our door. The most recent came on 2 November when the Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia. A 54-year-old former businessman, Youngkin appears to be straight from GOP central casting: though he recognised Joe Bidens presidential victory as certifiably fair, he has raised some concerns about election integrity; he refuses to acknowledge human activity as a cause of climate change; and he has been accused of anti-Semitism for highlighting what he sees as the malign influence of the billionaire philanthropist George Soros in American education. He has said that mask mandates for children in schools are a step towards full economic shutdown and, like his fellow Republicans, decries critical race theory (CRT) a legal concept that says Americas political and juridical systems uphold white supremacy. Youngkin has promised to ban the teaching of CRT in Virginias classrooms.

Trump, who endorsed Youngkin but avoided visiting Virginia during the race, claimed credit for the victory against the Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, thanking his base for coming out to vote. McAuliffes campaign focused heavily on linking his opponent with Trump, who, strategists thought, would be a toxic figure for most voters. The message did not have its intended effect.

The presence of Trump is similarly felt in the debates over pandemic politics that were stirred under him. Support for vaccine scepticism and mask mandates largely splits along party lines. The GOP is attempting to pass legislation through federal state houses that would prevent the return of certain pandemic restrictions in some states.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has become the neuralgic point where political and ideological disagreement between Americas left and right is most intense. Six of the nine justices (who serve lifetime appointments) were nominated by a Republican president. Sixty-two per cent of voters believe the court is now a political tool. Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative judge appointed by Trump in 2020, has insisted the court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks. She said this while appearing at an event with arch-Republican and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

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Most worryingly, at the start of this year almost two-thirds of Republican voters refused to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election. Half of Republicans believe their votes will not be accurately counted the next time they go to the polls. Insisting that electoral fraud robbed him of victory, Trump has helped engender state-level laws that make it more difficult to vote. There are now extra requirements to submit ballots by mail and in some states, such as Georgia, it is illegal to give water to voters waiting in line at the polls.

He has also established a precedent whereby future presidential candidates may refuse to concede defeat. His attempt to have the 2020 result overturned may have been thwarted after election officials refused to find votes in his favour. But that does not mean this system of safeguards, designed more than 200 years ago, can hold forever.

What are Biden and the Democrats to do? With Covid cases falling, the pandemic is subsiding. The economy is showing some signs of recovery: unemployment has fallen to 4.6 per cent and, according to JPMorgan Chase Institute, median household current account balances were up more than 50 per cent at the end of July 2021 on July 2019. But although Americans may be richer, inflation is rising and people believe general economic conditions are poor.

At the start of this year, Biden seemed to be in constant motion passing a $1.9trn stimulus, dispensing 100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots in his first 60 days, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, and ending Trumps travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries. But at 38 per cent approval the result of a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released on 7 November his rating is the lowest of any modern president at this point in a term except Trump. A year before the midterm elections, Biden risks stalling. If his polling does not improve, the Democrats could lose their fragile hold over the House of Representatives in 2022.

As well as the defeat in Virginia on 2 November, the Democrats lost local elections throughout New York state and just managed to keep the Democratic governor in office in New Jersey. These defeats are a reminder that the party might have a limited time to be in a majority, one Democratic House staffer told me. If anything, it should put us in high gear to communicate our successes to the American people.

[see also: Leader: The Democrats face a reckoning]

The question is not just how to communicate political achievements but how to secure them. Bidens infrastructure legislation, which will pour $1trn into rebuilding roads and bridges and improving transit and internet access, finally passed in the Senate on 5 November. But his more ambitious social spending bill, which amounts to $1.75trn, has not. Some progressive Democrats, including Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez part of the so-called Squad of young, left-wing Congress members did not support the infrastructure bill, withholding their votes in an effort to get assurances the social spending programmes would also be passed.

Democrats are trying to work out what lesson to take from the Virginia defeat. Some see it as a sign that Biden and the party have strayed too far from the political centre. Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has resisted committing to vote on Bidens social spending bill, said on 4 November that America is a centre-right country and legislators should recognise it, adding: We must not go too far to the left. After the Virginia election, Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from the state, remarked that nobody elected Biden to be Franklin D Roosevelt, who administered the New Deal between 1933 and 1939. Americans, she said, just want things to be normal.

But other Democrats believe Biden should be more economically ambitious and pass a modern New Deal. Its not clear to me that running a more economically populist, working-class orientated campaign is going to be enough, but its very clear that not doing that will fail, said Max Berger, a political organiser who worked on Senator Elizabeth Warrens 2020 presidential campaign. Is there anything Democrats can do to forestall Republicans retaking the House, and with it hastening the demise of free and fair elections? My gut says no. Republicans lost the House two years after Trump came into office; the Democrats lost it two years after Barack Obama did. Still, Berger said, I think we should at least try to go down guns blazing.

[see also: The US is not a leader in the fight against climate change]

With the infrastructure bill now passed, some on the left will push for Bidens social spending bill to go through. Our work doesnt stop there, Ro Khanna, a leading progressive in the House of Representatives, told me. We have to keep fighting for important policies not included in the bills. That means passing comprehensive paid leave, an incredibly popular programme that would offer clearly established benefits to families. It means fighting to raise the minimum wage, [write off] student loans, and continue to push for additional climate action. We have to deliver for working- and middle-class Americans to make their lives better. Democracy is at stake.

If the threat of Trumps return is felt in Congress, it is sensed in local election campaigns too and not only by Democrats. Watching [Youngkins] campaign was like watching him try to walk along a four-inch balance beam without falling off, said Whit Ayres, a Virginia-based Republican pollster. Youngkin never criticised or rebuked Trump, but he also never appeared with him. He didnt show up at the rallies where Trump called in and Trump never appeared for him in a rally in Virginia.

In more solidly Republican states, it would be harder to get away with this distancing strategy. In Ohio, for example, JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and now a GOP Senate candidate, has been targeted by attack ads reportedly costing nearly $1m for his past criticisms of Trump. The groups behind the ads, Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund, support the former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel, whose Twitter bio boasts that he was the first statewide official in Ohio to support President Trump. He regularly tweets his fierce criticism of so-called Rinos (Republicans in name only) a favourite pejorative term of Trump.

In Democratic strongholds such as New York and California, Republican prospects are unlikely to be affected by the way GOP candidates talk about Trump. But in swing states, and with the right candidate, the Youngkin model a combination of keeping Trump at arms length, not too close but still in reach works. At the same time, the success of Youngkin and Republicans like him depends on the extent to which Trump remains in the background. In the next presidential campaign in 2024, will Trump be content to campaign separately from the candidate, or will he insist on showing up to the rallies? Can Trump resist making another run for the presidency?

If Republicans win back the House and the Senate in 2022, there is a chance they will be able to use Trump without being overshadowed by him.

For the Democrats, the question is how to define their political ambitions, as they decide whether to remake the country or return to the political centre. The concern with the moderate position is, as the US historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr put it in the late 1990s, the middle of the road is definitely not the vital centre. It is the dead centre.

Some in the party understand this. I think the writing is on the wall, one Democratic House staffer said. We kind of know how the [2022] election is going to play out. Education and specifically how students learn, or dont, about race and racism in America is going to be a significant campaign issue. Democrats need to step up and have a message to respond to that, they said.

All the while, Trump is a looming, threatening presence in US political life. Republicans will continue to use him and the base of supporters he brings, and in the process may end up being used by him. But Democrats cannot run a campaign simply on being the not-Trump party. Biden can spend the next year in a defensive crouch. Or, alternatively, he can try to pass legislation that improves peoples lives in tangible ways, and position himself not against a vision of America, but for one.

Trump may cast a shadow over American politics. But Biden and the Democrats cant be afraid of that shadow, and they certainly cant afford to be afraid of their own.

This article appears in the 10 Nov 2021 issue of the New Statesman, Behind the Masks

Read more from the original source:

Joe Biden and the spectre of Donald Trump - New Statesman

Twitter is a source of perspectives, ideas, opinions, and facts, and the space is graced by some of the brightest minds of our times. Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, is among those minds and can almost pass as a netizen. Recently, the billionaire-cum-netizen interacted with another bright mind, and the conversation was about nothing, literally. Lex Fridman, a researcher, working in the field of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), shared his appreciation towards the number zero. Lex wrote, Zero is the most important number ever invented in mathematics. It enables algebra and calculus and thus physics, computing, and engineering. He added how zero assists the human mind to fathom the concept of nothingness.

The tweet was a desirable fuel to fire up a conversation that can cross various topics and churn out some amazing perspectives. Naturally, it caught Elons attention. Elon contributed to continuing the thread and replied, Nothing matters.

Elon Musk, through his tweet, accidentally touched upon the concept of philosophy called Nihilism, which says that amid the epitome of randomness, i.e., the universe, nothing really matters, and the existence of humans is a blip in the fabric birthed out of the randomness.

In the next tweet attached to the philosophical one, Elon brought back zero into the conversation and, in brackets, wrote, Zero is a cool concept.

Since shared, Elons piece of mind converted into a tweet has garnered more than 23,000 likes and multiple retweets from Twitter users. Interestingly, a technological company named Nothing commented, Indeed.

One user thought of complicating the matters further and wrote, From nothing comes everything.

Should be the name of your new rocket, wrote another.

Recently, Elon Musk started a poll regarding selling 10% of his Tesla stocks and stated that he would do what the poll decided.

According to reports, Elon is facing a tax bill worth $15 billion, which might be the reason behind the unprecedented Twitter poll pertaining to him selling his stocks.

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Go here to see the original:

'Nothing Matters': What Elon Musk Thinks About the Concept Of 'Nil' - News18