All the stuff everyone else is saying is right. The Lou Bloom character is a creation of sheer genius, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance in the role is beyond superb. The movie edges right up to the boundaries of the horror genre, and is also savagely humorous. Nihilism can produce high art, when it’s done right.

Nightcrawler approaches the topical subject of the relationships between the media, business, and law enforcement in a way that eludes conventional pieties. It deserves NRx endorsement just for that. In its darkness are strung subtle threads of possibility, in the working out of abnormal but powerful imperatives — of a supremely cynical kind — comparable in their diagonal subversiveness to a re-animated Scottish Enlightenment on ketamine, with all progressive hope burnt out so radically it doesn’t even register as a question.

These impulses are avatars of what is coming out of the collapse — tough, consummately disillusioned, and exploratory things.

… that was (ex-)Detective Rustin “Rust” Cohle, from the final episode of True Detective (in case you didn’t recognize it). At the brink of the end, a near-mortally wounded Cohle underwent a descent through the loss of his “definition”, and beyond the darkness touched upon “another, deeper darkness, like a substance” where lost love is restored in de-differentiation. The reference to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was unmistakable. It was TV-format Schopenhauer.

As philosophy, Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective is deeper than Wagner, because it holds tighter to the integral obscurity that is the ultimate object of horror. Where Tristan und Isolde finally reaches musical resolution and release into eroticized extinction, True Detective ends inconclusively, with a puzzle. Cohle and his old cop partner Martin “Marty” Hart, who has earthily absorbed Cohle’s acid nihilism throughout the previous seven episodes, switch stances momentarily in the closing scene. Recalling a previous conversation about the stars, Marty observes that in the night sky “darkness has a lot more territory”. Cohle corrects him — “Once there was only darkness. It looks to me as if the light is winning.” Following a long, soul-excruciating season in the shadows, the show’s nihilist fan-base were only dragged back from the brink of insurrection-level rioting at this point by a single, residual suspicion. In a cosmos where consciousness is the realization of hell, can the triumph of the light be interpreted as anything except torment strengthening its grip?

Continue Reading

There’s enough fizzing chaos at the moment to justify one of these, isn’t there?

Special merit badges for anybody who can link at least three of these topics into a coherent insight point: nerds, Piketty (+), Thai micro-media, alien signal, killer robots, democratic crisis, and heavy whining …

(For anyone unfamiliar with local traditions: it’s an open thread.)

ADDED: “I used to think that such people were blowing smoke, deliberately lying to make a point, but I am increasingly willing to consider the possibility that they’re just stupid.” (Discuss.)

ADDED:

I dreamed I saw Samo last night Alive as you and me Says I "But Samo you're ten years dead" "You're just mindkilled" said he

— St. Rev. Dr. Rev (@St_Rev) May 26, 2014

ADDED: Cthulhoid kickstarter. (Via @PuzzlePrivateer)

“… if the people that are supposedly running the country aren’t actually performing any of the functions of governing, who is?” asks Foseti. Anybody who follows his writing will recognize where this is coming from. It belongs to a consistent (and thus informal) critique of formalist illusion. To confuse government  with constitutional structures, legislation, or political offices, is to be blind to the real machinery of power.

Steve Sailor offers a pointed example of this reality in the field of higher educational administration, whose authorities are adamant in the determination to pursue systematic racial discrimination against Asian candidates (in particular). ‘Constraining’ legislation, which explicitly criminalizes these practices, is treated as a formal obstacle course, rather than a prohibition. It complicates anti-meritocratic racial profiling, but is utterly incapable of preventing it.

Continue Reading

Glenn Reynolds suspects that this story will confirm some PUA stereotypes settled pattern recognition.

I used hang with a guy who would go to Saskatchewan and sell drugs all the time. He was ballin’. He made tons of money. On our first date, he spent well over a G. He was just throwing it out like it was nothing. He was buying me anything I wanted. We rode around in a limo… It was crazy. We would go out to all these fancy-ass restaurants and all the white people would stare at us like, “Who let these hood rats in?” That was fun. He’s never really in town though, so I only get to see him a few times a year. I think if I ever decide to just settle down and be a housewife, I’ll marry him.

There’s not much in the story for religious traditionalists to latch onto with any sense of consolation. Still, as far as genetic selection for entrepreneurial traits is concerned, it has to be possible to do worse.

ADDED: Another sex psychology story (also via). If you think about the archaic genetics of warfare the answer to the question is obvious. For males losing matters absolutely. For females, not so much.

Ron Unz writing at his own blog:

The more conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration, sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.  Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being targeted for replacement is not the white one.

(via, of course)

Well-argued, and bolstered by statistics, this article is going to turn some heads around.