Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Triumph of the Nerds

Max Read, one of the sexy boyslaves in Nick Denton's weird empire, has, I think, the appropriate response to a story that a couple of our commenters and correspondents also noticed. Nihilism. Kneechee! "An anarachist philosophy"! The alleged is reported to have on multiple occasions stated that "You just don't get me," and, "You don't understand." Asked why he was not bringing his girlfriend to the prom, he reminded friends that, "You don't know her," and, "She's from Canada."

Posted by IOZ at 10:09 AM | email »
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29 comments:

ts said...

Anyone who reads this blog knows that nihilists are nothing to be afraid of.

And if one marks it eight, one will be in a world of pain.

10:43 AM
Montag said...

it's not fair!

10:57 AM
Dumbo said...

But look at that last paragraph. Context is everything. This article would have been brilliant in the Onion.

11:11 AM
Justin said...

I bet he listened to Marylin Manson too.

11:37 AM
Red Donny said...

Don't know about Manson, but he was often heard to whistle that nihilist anthem "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". This affects all of us.

11:50 AM
BenSix said...

Mr Loughner was presumably distinct from all those cheery, life-affirming gunmen.

11:51 AM
Anonymous said...

Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least its an ethos.

11:51 AM
Anonymous said...

Is this your homework Larry?

12:38 PM
lucid said...

He talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Will To Power” and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing.

Um, really? That's what "The Will to Power" was about? And here I thought it was all about the aesthetic personality!

This entire sentence is philosophically retarded. Who the hell writes this shit?

12:50 PM
mistah charley, ph.d. said...

Too bad Loughner never read Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man.

[Note: the effort required to read the unfamiliar terminology and complex syntax is a feature, not a flaw.]

"All the beings of that planet then began to work in order to have in their consciousness this divine function of genuine Conscience, and for this purpose, as everywhere in the Universe, they transubstantiated in themselves what are called the 'being-obligolnian strivings' of which there are five, namely:

First Striving: "To have in their ordinary being-existence everything satisfying and really necessary for their planetary body."

Second Striving: "To have a constant and unflagging instinctive need for self-perfection in the sense of being."

Third Striving: "The conscious striving to know ever more and more concerning the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance."

Fourth Striving: "The striving from the beginning of their existence to pay for their arising and their individuality as quickly possible, in order afterwards to be free to lighten as much as possible the Sorrow of our Common Father."

Fifth Striving: "The striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred Martfotai, that is, up to the degree of self-individuality."

A.R. Orage's commentary on these exercises for conscious morality is found at http://tinyurl.com/4ulvgh9

12:52 PM
lucid said...

This kid actually sounds kind of like me when I was 16, minus the firearms and all...

1:06 PM
zencomix said...

It was Kobe Bryant in The Library with either a Candlestick or a Call of Duty:Black Ops TV Commercial.

2:49 PM
boetian said...

Until we know what video games Loughner played, or whether he was into metal, any judgment is recklessly premature

2:56 PM
mistah charley, ph.d. said...

from the LA Times

Jared Lee Loughner's high school girlfriend: 'He was completely different back then than he is now'

Kelsey Hawkes, who dated Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner in high school, says she's been 'bombarded' by media inquiries. 'I did date Jared Loughner six years ago in high school,' she says, 'but he's not the same Jared Loughner that the world now knows as a mass murderer -- not the same person at all.'


By Molly Hennessey-Fiske, Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2011, 7:18 a.m.

Jared Lee Loughner's friends have spent recent days asking themselves how someone they trusted had transformed into the suspect in a shooting rampage that killed six people and wounded 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).

Kelsey Hawkes, 21, dated Loughner when he was a sophomore and she was a freshman at Mountain View High School in Tucson.

Hawkes, now a junior at the University of Arizona, where President Obama is scheduled to speak at a memorial for the shooting victims Wednesday night, said in an e-mail that she has been "bombarded" by reporters asking about her involvement with Loughner.

"I get the impression that people are trying to figure out if I would know what is going on inside Jared's head or why he may have chosen to shoot all those people last Saturday," Hawkes wrote. "The truth is, I have had absolutely no contact with Jared in over five years -- I haven't seen, nor spoken to him in that time. Yes, we dated in high school, but it was no different than any other high school boyfriend-girlfriend thing that's ever existed."

At the time, she said, Loughner was the kind of person she wanted to date.

"He was completely different back then than he is now. He was very sweet, caring, and kind, had no interest in drugs or alcohol, and had a big interest in music. He didn't start acting differently until AFTER we had been broken up. While we were still dating he had never shown any signs that he would become the person he is today," Hawkes wrote.

Hawkes said she and Loughner broke up "for typical reasons that you see in high school: nothing out of the ordinary, nothing significant."

Afterward, she said, they did not remain friends.

She said she kept track of him after he left high school, started taking classes at Pima Community College and began changing his lifestyle.

"I had noticed that he had started getting into alcohol and drugs," she wrote in the e-mail.

Looking back, Hawkes said, Loughner definitely changed after high school, but not because of their breakup, as some people have implied.

"I've just been very overwhelmed by everybody tracking me down and trying to get information out of me that I don't have, or trying to pin our breakup on his behavioral change," Hawkes wrote. "I did date Jared Loughner six years ago in high school, but he's not the same Jared Loughner that the world now knows as a mass murderer -- not the same person at all. What he chose to do with himself and his life between the time that we weren't dating and what he did on Saturday is far beyond me."

3:13 PM
boetian said...

For the record:

"Gaming appears to have been an important part of Mr. Loughner's life. In the 7th grade, he and a friend, Alex Montanaro, began playing the multiplayer online games Starcraft and Diablo, which featured complex virtual worlds where players assume roles and play against other people around the globe ... Mr. Loughner originally played under the pseudonyms Cries and Cry. At various times he also used the aliases Heroin, XTC and Erad, according to two people familiar with the matter, and played for various clans."

SCENE: Darkened parking garage, night.
SHADOWY FIGURE: "Listen, Loughner's just the fall guy. It's the clans. Always follow the clans."

3:23 PM
Anonymous said...

This entire sentence is philosophically retarded. Who the hell writes this shit?

Oh, probably some 28-year-old with a humanities or polisci degree from a lesser Ivy, did a little turn in J-school, shares a two-bedroom in Gramercy or Astoria, dredged up from the cobwebs of his/her mind some drivel from Freshperson Intellectual History, corroborated by a 30-second visit to Wikipedia.

Then his/her editor indirectly suggested that he/she dumb it down a little more, and being the fundamental suck-up that he/she is (despite the fact that he/she occasionally hangs out in "edgy" bars in Billburg, furiously pecking away on his/her Blackberry), and given the state of the labor market for journalists, did just that.

4:35 PM
ts said...

Quick! Somebody call Jack Thompson!

4:37 PM
Happy Jack said...

Until we know what video games Loughner played, or whether he was into metal, any judgment is recklessly premature

Drowning Pool is a fave of his. Therefore, guilty.

4:58 PM
lucid said...

(despite the fact that he/she occasionally hangs out in "edgy" bars in Billburg, furiously pecking away on his/her Blackberry)

That is so 10 years ago. 'The Wick' is where the 'edgy' bars are now...

5:26 PM
Anonymous said...

What a perfect patsy, first use him to slander the Tea Party, then have him ready to drag out as an example of the evil of anarchists and bookreaders in general on a later date.

6:07 PM
Anonymous said...

'The Wick' is where the 'edgy' bars are now...

precisely

6:57 PM
Tiffany Jewelry said...

That is not quite fair.

7:57 PM
K. Ron Silkwood said...

The guys with the long beards who hurl the spherical black bombs with the sputtering fuses - are they nihilists or anarchists? I'm never able to keep them straight.

8:05 PM
coach outlet said...

I think this is a great post. One thing that I find the most helpful is number five. Sometimes when I write, I just let the flow of the words and information come out so much that I loose the purpose.

8:07 PM
LA Confidential Pantload said...

Thanks, coach. I look forward to your next writing tip.

8:33 PM
NutellaonToast said...

Watch out, though, Tiff is turning on us.

9:31 PM
NutellaonToast said...

When you've lost Tiffany Jewelry...

9:31 PM
Gridlock said...

I heard he was into playing "chess", a violent game where regicide and killing the clergy is encouraged and, most troublingly, commoners can attain power.

4:59 AM
TGGP said...

So he was apparently normal at some point in high-school. In his yearbook he's got somewhat long hair. Later on he started retreating to a world of dreams & drugs, and so we see him with quite short hair at a bookfair. Finally, he completely shaves both the top of his head and his eyebrows and starts shooting. The obvious conclusion is that his sanity resided in his hair.

9:36 PM

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