COUNTER-CURRENTS: “[Robert E. Lee]’s bronze head was ripped from his body, his face was peeled from his head in the form of a death mask, and then it was super-heated to the point where it glowed…”
HOW TO MAKE ART in NORTH KOREA: “[Laibach] are very, very unashamedly flirting with totalitarian aesthetics and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who is also Slovenian and who is a contemporary of Laibach and has even defended them publicly against accusations of real fascism through the years, he’s elaborated quite a bit on Laibach’s tactics of over-identification, that they are criticizing or ridiculing, but not only ridiculing, they’re kind of celebrating and ridiculing totalitarianism at the same time. And that allows me, or us as their followers or listeners or the fans to release our inner fascists from time to time, to march a little bit to their music. But at the same time, it is a game. We are not fascists, but we have, as I believe most people have, we have an urge to dominate or to be dominated. And music like Laibach’s, not only music, but the whole Laibach aesthetic kind of liberates us who are honest enough to play with our inner Sturmbannfuhrer from time to time.”
THE FEMININE SIDE of the FORCE: “We’d be better off if stories for boys showed them worthwhile leaders, but judging by entertainment nowadays, there are no stories that appeal to boyish love of beauty. How did we lose them?”
THE PERSONAL GOD: “…one of the most scandalous things about the Bible is that in it God embraces us as moral authorities. We are told that we will judge angels. We got to judge God. We looked at him and decided he was unworthy and sentenced him to death with the full power of the state and he accepted our judgment as right and valid. Strange god. A scary one. One that makes us… uncomfortable. To say the least.”
THE ROOTS of PHILOSOPHY: “Nietzsche, in writing of the ‘death of God,’ pointed to the chief dimension of the problem, the collapse of the traditional nomos of the West. (Nietzsche’s thought on this topic is complex, but whatever else he was aiming to convey, it surely wasn’t whether a being called ‘God’ is ‘alive’ or ‘dead.’) To anyone knowledgeable of the relevant history, the fact of this collapse is indisputable, whether one exuberantly rejoices in it, bitterly mourns it, or weaves among the myriad possibilities in between.”
TUCKER [Carlson] vs. the NEOCONS: “One night, the compound where he was staying came under attack by gunfire. It was a jittery, gloomy week in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where he stayed — a marooned outpost of huddled interlopers engulfed in shapeless, ethereal peril, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. No one was ever quite sure where the threat came from, or who was shooting at them — Al Qaeda, Baath Party disciples, cartels of random street criminals, or even trigger-happy, improperly vetted fellow Western contractors.”
And for something entirely different, people are always welcome to explore my energy blog.
