Tag: cynicism

5,476 words

I have been watching 1970s Nazisploitation movies lately. This started when, on a whim, I thought it would be funny to write a review of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, which is one of those movies that everyone has heard of — because, credit where it’s due, it is one hell of a name — but which very few people have ever actually seen. Nonetheless, you still hear people drop the name as a punchline all the time. If some conservative bimbo offers a milquetoast take that is mildly critical of Black Lives Matter, someone will inevitably say, “Who does she think she is, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS?” So I thought I’d watch it just to know where the joke came from. (more…)

4.906 palabras

English original: Part 1, Part 2; Traducciones: Francés, Polaco

Capítulo 1 aquí, Capítulo 6 aquí, Capítulo 8 aquí

“El hombre no lucha por la felicidad; sólo el inglés lo hace.” – Nietzsche

Las cuestiones centrales de la metapolítica lidian con la Identidad, la moralidad y la posibilidad.

Como afirma Carl Schmitt, lo político está basado en la distinción entre nosotros y ellos. La cuestión de la Identidad es: ¿quiénes somos? (more…)

1,528 words

Since I am avoiding Oppenheimer and Barbie, I went back into the archives. While reading Arthur Miller’s The Price, I conjured YouTube and watched 1948’s All My Sons, where Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster brought a tragedy by Henrik Ibsen to Middle America. I continued my sortie into post-war American cinema with Clash by Night, a 1952 Fritz Lang film based on a 1941 play by Clifford Odets. Considered a strong melodrama, it is a very watchable film dealing with emotions and relationships in post-war America in a semi-noir setting. (more…)

Epictetus, in an eighteenth-century English artist’s imagining.

1,834 words

Socrates was not in prison since he was there of his own free will. — Epictetus

I’m free.
And freedom tastes of reality.
— The Who

We should talk about slavery. Goodness knows, it’s not a subject we hear talked about much these days. That’s my dose of irony, now for some history. If you were at school or college today in the West, you would know that no slavery existed until a man called Jim Crow had his people — probably the Ku Klux Klan, or Donald Trump’s ancestors — sail to Africa, cast black people into chains, and then bring them back to America to pick cotton and be lynched. (more…)

1,010 words

In my last article, I wrote on the question of whether politics should be abandoned or not. My conclusion was that no, it should not be. However, those who wish to improve themselves and those in their immediate vicinity should also be heeded lest we go down the all-too-common, unproductive path of browsing Telegram and Discord all day and foolishly calling it “political activism,” as so many keyboard warriors do today. (more…)

Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife shortly before their televised execution on December 25, 1989.

2,188 words

“A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.” — Z-Man, “An Empire of Lies”

Solipsism: a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing. (more…)

3,018 words

The singer Édith Piaf famously, and throatily, regretted nothing about anything. But the poet John Betjeman wished that he’d had more sex. And the economist John Maynard Keynes that he’d drunk more champagne. Me? I regret two things much more important than recreational sex or champagne. (more…)

1,503 words

For years now, readers have been urging me to review Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which adapts Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel of the same name. I have resisted, because although A Clockwork Orange is often hailed as a classic, I thought it was dumb, distasteful, and highly overrated, so I didn’t want to watch it again. But I had first watched it decades ago. (more…)

1,215 words

Six black people have been found dead, hanging from trees, during the month of June so far. They were all ruled as suicides by local police. Black people refuse to believe that’s true, of course. The circumstances of these deaths too closely resemble the lynchings of yesteryear, right down to the surrounding social turmoil and the highly public spectacle of the corpses. (more…)

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Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, Network (1976) is a sardonic, dark-comic satire of America at the very moment that its trajectory of decline became apparent (to perceptive eyes, at least).

Network has an outstanding script and incandescent performances, which were duly recognized. Chayefsky won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Peter Finch won the Oscar for Best Actor (more…)

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In the fall of 2000, I taught an adult education class entitled Philosophy on Film, (more…)

John William Waterhouse, Diogenes (1882)

872 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

One cannot know what a man must lose to have the courage to defy all conventions; one cannot know what Diogenes lost to become the man who allowed himself to do everything, who turned his most intimate thoughts into acts of a supernatural insolence, as would a god of knowledge, at once libidinous and pure. No one was more frank; an extreme case of sincerity and lucidity, as well as an example of what we could be if education and hypocrisy did not restrain our desires and actions.

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