I am become determined, fuelled by some fiery desire to change, to truly improve and become something objectively significant. But to be truly better, you must focus on the aspects of your personality that you dislike. To be able to improve as a person, to grow as an individual, and to get closer to approaching your ideal, you must either withdraw from other influence entirely and become a completely solitary individual or else use your interactions with other people as mirrors, to understand yourself through their reflections, i.e. Lana’s Jim, "cause I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage."
If you choose to interact with someone, therefore, you must never accept incomplete interactions that are not entirely beneficial to you. You must consistently refuse stunted connections, and unless you feel that you are actively learning more about yourself through a given interaction - abandon it. It is only through another’s perspective, within an alien reflection, that you can see yourself in a truly objective manner. This exploration must be intellectual, physical, and thereby complete, and if The Other is unwilling or else incapable of playing this role, they are not the mirror that can empower your growth.
This album is a Harmony Korine film, it is hyperrealist art. There is no possibility that titles like "Cruel World", "Money Power Glory" or else lines like "I'm churning out novels like beat poetry on amphetamines" or "he plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed" are meant to be taken literally. If anyone can listen to those lines, take them seriously and not recoil, there is something fundamentally wrong. Just like Born to Die was a sarcastic experiment and a half-cynical, half-earnest look at opulence as a part of the American dream, Ultraviolence is a similar Shaviroesque look at America. Per Woody Allen, “life does not imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
And thus, I have finally returned to sit in the exact same spot that I was in before I had left for reasons that now strike me as utterly ludicrous, incomprehensible.
One wonders whether all that searching would have been necessary had I simply never left. Or is it precisely in the search that meaning and appreciation for what I had lost or left behind is found? In other words, perhaps we can only appreciate in absence, in longing for that imagined presence that had never really meant all that much all along? Or else, do these unknowable, indescribable things gain meaning through this their temporary passing? Is it possible to learn to value prior to departure, to comprehend that which we have before it passes through our hands once more?
I have recently been engrossing myself in a deliberate process of identifying precisely what it is that I seek and desire in terms of my interactions with others. What spurned it on is the realization that I have found myself so occupied with working, living, and addressing a never-ending parade of immediately pressing needs that I had not engaged in that critical process in quite some time. When I finally did, I was shocked and appalled to discover that I had somehow allowed myself to neglect the very things that were critical to my self-identity. In other words, I suddenly found that I was losing my edge even though "I've never been wrong, I used to work in the record store, I had everything before anyone." "I was there" until I woke up one fine morning and realized that I wasn't there any longer...
With each passing year, the list of issues that are off-limits, that are not to be discussed, and with respect to which one is only permitted to hold one view, grows. It currently feels as if the trend of groupthink as well as political and societal hyperpolarization will intensify ceaselessly, and whilst one may be forgiven for believing that this trend has already reached its fevered crescendo, it hasn’t. Rather, the din of the mob that is attempting to drown out and silence individual voices in a juvenile attempt to control the way that others think and perceive the world grows increasingly louder.
Both our beginnings and our ends are shrouded in mystery, the middle parts being the only fragments that are at all comprehensible. We are not capable of understanding from whence our opportunities come and we are equally unable to determine whether an open window is an omen of doom or whether it is a blessed opportunity that had just come into being. It is only once we step through the gate of perception that we can hope to interpret the true nature of the essence with which we had come into contact. Windows, both physically manifested and as metaphysical concepts, are pathways to The Other, while the nature of said Other may be malignant or benevolent. Prior to the transformation from potential to the real, both forces are held in balance and are equally likely and equally impossible to ascertain prior to the event of manifestation. It is through openings: windows and mirrors, that we experience both the outside world and ourselves.
This single opens with the lines: "Can you stay up for the weekend
And blame God for looking too old?
Can you find all that you stand for
Has been replaced with mountains of gold?"
This has inadvertently become a rather ironic lyric considering Calvin Harris' later move to exclusively creating music for the masses, simultaneously forsaking his earlier more independent efforts.
The slow but steady march of the Cultural Marxists through the educational, cultural, and artistic communities has been taking place since the 1950s. This group has been exceedingly careful in pursuing their aim of systematically destroying and dismantling Western society. Had they come out with their present agenda when they started approximately seven decades ago, they would have been unlikely to succeed; instead, they slowly advanced and took over the vital cultural institutions of the West, advocating for increasingly extreme positions as they continued to gain ground.
This proposed study will investigate the relationship between individual personality traits examined through the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and the political values of individuals as assessed by the Eight Values Inventory (EVI). The results will indicate any significant relationships between individual personality traits and political values as well as any interactive effects between personality traits. In accordance with prior literature, it is expected that significant relationships will be found between personality traits and political values, specifically with higher levels of openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism predicting higher rates of equality, globe, liberty, and progress values, and with higher rates of conscientiousness predicting higher rates of markets, nation, authority, and tradition. It is predicted that extraversion rates will not be significantly related to higher rates of any political value. Such a finding would support the existence of personality trait differences amongst individuals with divergent political perspectives.
It is such a common human condition to feel that we are trapped but simultaneously that we are just one small hurdle away from breaking free at long last. It is the promise of that eternal tomorrow which shall be the day that we will be able to run faster, stretch out further, and finally grasp that elusive thing that we have been perpetually pursuing. All of us are fighting against the current, all trying to escape our present confines and yet, for all of our effort, we remain stuck firmly in place. It seems like there is no escape, like every minutia of our day-to-day life is just fated to be repeated endlessly like the playlist of some superlatively, unbelievably lazy DJ. I look at all the changes that I have made, but yet somehow nothing I change changes anything. At the end of every night, it is always the same feeling waiting for me, that once again there is not any grand resolution or reward, the realization that there never was. We perpetually feel that we are missing something. “I don't wanna be what I'm becoming.”
The results of numerous past studies have indicated that individuals have a limited ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Moreover, negative effects on memory have been identified in situations where subjects were engaged in divided attention tasks at the time of memory encoding. The present study examined the effect of device-delivered notifications on the accuracy of memory through the use of a word recognition paradigm. Two groups of students were presented with an identical word list and were then tested with a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test consisting of a combination of previously presented and novel words. The first group received numeric notifications during word presentation which they were instructed to note down while the other group received no notifications. The results showed that false alarm rates were significantly greater and hit rates were significantly lower for the group that received notifications, demonstrating a mirror effect, and thereby providing support for the hypothesis that notification-derived divided attention has a negative impact on memory. Therefore, using one's phone while doing something else (whether that be studying, watching a film, or enjoying a record) really does impact one's ability to focus on what one is doing, regardless of what many people might claim.
The present study examined whether a false memory effect could be demonstrated for categorized word lists. It drew inspiration from previous studies in the field of false memory, most notably in replicating and extending the Roediger-McDermott study and utilizing the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In the current study, students were presented with word lists of 2 sizes: containing 4 or 8 studied exemplars per category and were then tested on recognition with 2 types of words: words previously presented and novel words. It was predicted that the false alarm rate would be higher for new words from the studied categories and that the false alarm rate would be greater for the categories that contained more exemplars. The results showed that false alarm rates were greater for new words from the studied categories as compared to new words from unstudied categories and also showed that the false alarm rate was greater for the larger categories.
This essay explores linguistic determinism and linguistic relativism which have been the subject of considerable scientific debate and the two theories can be viewed as being in competition with one another. Linguistic relativism is an idea that is related to how language is structured and is used by people and can be viewed as a weak form of linguistic determinism. The central idea of linguistic relativism is that the language spoken by a given person impacts the way that that person views the world. On the other hand, linguistic determinism is a stronger form of the same position that agrees that language affects the way that a person thinks and perceives their surroundings but also states that language is determinant in forming how a person thinks. Therefore, both theories attempt to demonstrate that the way that individuals think is influenced by the language that they use to communicate.
The argument from the existence of evil as evidence that God does not exist is one that frequently appears in theology. The basic premise of this argument is that the fact that there is so much evil in the world ought to count as evidence against the existence of God. Law puts forth a rather unconventional form of this argument that presents the evil-god hypothesis along with the problem of good as a challenge to the traditional theistic good-god argument that aims to resolve the problem of evil. This is an analogous argument that contrasts with the classical argument that merely presents the problem of evil which is exemplified with Rowe’s discussion of the problem of evil. Law’s argument is a good one because it uses a new perspective from which to attack the good-god hypothesis, since it is one that accounts for possible responses well, and due to the fact that it is an argument that has a complex structure and therefore requires numerous counterarguments and examples in order to be effectively challenged.
I am afraid that I have some seriously bad news. Free speech is a choice and an admirable one but is not one that comes without consequences. Why? Simply put, one has to choose between being inoffensive and thus producing a safe space for all, including even the most easily offended, or instead to truly stand for the preservation of the value of free speech.
Sexual perversion is to be defined as sexual behavior that is not practiced by the clear majority of humans in a given culture that is differentiated from sexual exploration by the reoccurrence of the behavior, the extremity of the deviation, and the harm resultant from the performance of the perversion. It is recognized when a certain individual expresses certain sexual desires or urges that are uncommon, unrelated to typical sexual interactions, and/or are somehow outside the two categories entirely. Perversions are many and varied, diverse in their characteristics – varying from sexual attitudes towards non-sexual objects, to frotteurism, transvestitism, and voyeurism.
There are many differing definitions of justice – but at its most fundamental – justice is the concept of fairness, that all individuals receive what they are rightfully owed. However, there is a major debate between the political right and left on what is owed to each person. Stemming from this debate is the question of whether capitalism is just. Far from being an empty, meaningless debate, the question does indeed have an answer and that answer is a resounding... yes.
The view “that anything that we can successfully interact with by treating as if it were rational, and as if it had beliefs, desires, etc., has the very same claim to be regarded as having beliefs and desires” as humans do is one that is put forth by Daniel Dennett. This view is implausible for a multitude of reasons. It is important to note the contrast between faux beliefs and desires, and genuine beliefs and desires of rational beings. There is also the issue of conflation between metaphor and reality, the unique nature of being human, and finally the fundamental difference between non-rational things and rational beings that are able to control their impulsive and immediate pseudo-desires and pseudo-beliefs in favor of real desires and beliefs, such as a human’s life purpose in the existential sense.
The money's running out and the whoosh of the upcoming ground is becoming deafening. Am I running forward or am I collapsing? Am I still getting away with my risks or is this The Great Reckoning at long last? If I was given another chance would I do anything differently?
The Void is calling and so I enter it, à la Gaspar Noé. In the town that I have spent the last three years of my life (God has it been so long?!), I still feel trapped alongside the music of Tim Hecker, which like other ambient music, is fuller of emptiness than the ethereal. More numinous than ominous, more lonely and gossamer than New Order’s Movement, and more ill-defined than my own movement forward. Why wouldn't Icelandic and ambient music be fitting in a place that feels so empty? It’s only natural.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “existence precedes essence” is a multifaceted statement that is invoked in order to defend existentialism against its critics. In order to understand and analyze the phrase, all three of its constituent components must be analyzed and then assembled together to comprehend its full meaning. The declaration reverses the status quo perspective, but simultaneously allows mankind freedom. The statement is accurate, and is universally applicable to man, the author himself included.
America’s yellow media had first completely missed the phenomenon of Trump and called him all kinds of names, forgoing the possibility of a Trump victory even after he had become the nominee of the Republican party. To their credit, they have nominally apologized profusely for their mistake, but now this very same media is exclaiming how impossible a Trump victory would be in November. These are very much post-modernists, those that believe that feelings matter more than facts. Their personal biases and their insulation is preventing them from seeing the light, the nature of what the true American patriots want for their formerly great nation.
Ellen Allien's Berlinette is a record for staring at the pale full moon whilst watching the wispy, elusive phantom fumes come off your cigarette.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, characterizes our experience of individuality (principium individuationis) as an illusion, making use of the Greek gods of Apollo and Dionysus to personify the two sides of our humanity. The ideal man, as characterized by Nietzsche in this work, is a human being in which the Apollonian and Dionysian elements were brought into some kind of harmony with each other. Is our individuality an illusion? What could it mean to reconcile the Apollonian and Dionysian sides of our existence?
Sensual, sexual, ephemeral but inescapable, Nina Kraviz has created something truly beautiful and unique; something that approaches a numinous experience.
The deepest of house reminds us of our most buried and intense memories and dreams, leading us on, a definite will-o-the-wisp, forcing us to trudge ever onward through the muck, to sail through the mist, a siren's call that leads us onto the rocks.
It's briskly walking through the freezing streets of Moscow at 3am, walking quickly because of the howling gale and the bitter cold, but never running because that would be undignified. To be more accurate, it is likely more Murmansk or Irkutsk than Moscow but the lights are of the boutique stores and the inescapably grim albeit everyday realities that contrast sharply with the dream-like opulence displayed to the public. The contrast of a drunk with a glimmering shopfront: all in this mist, all while actively trying to go somewhere and being purposeful about it but without actually having anywhere to go.
Sometimes things get complicated. It's easy to lose track of what you want or need and it is often difficult to realize that you're not working towards those things that are truly important, instead merely occupying your time with tedious, unimportant, and uninteresting things simply so that you don't feel quite so reclining. It's important to work, it's important to do what society expects of us, so that one may in turn receive what they expect from society - a career, a standard of living, and the ephemera that make up our life: Evian water, a Prada luggage bag, an Audio-Technica turntable, Bang & Olufsen earphones. These things aren't necessities in the standard meaning of the word because they are not necessary for life but these kinds of little extravagances are important in order to take our mind off the true emptiness of it all - a sort of Fight Club-esque indulgence wherein we fill our vacant apartment-cum-souls with IKEA furniture because what else is there to do? In moments of realization such as these, it's important to take a step back and find something that can float you away from all of that tedium and into a parallel dimension where you can be free from all of those concerns. This is what this record achieves.