At the center of this image, water and sand come blasting out of the ocean onto the replenished beach. UD got a tutorial in the whole double-your-beach process this morning from one of the workers – there’s the little GPS boat that scans the ocean floor for sand mountains, and then the bigger boat with one end of the pipe, sucking up the sand and sending it forward. They put shells and stones in dumpsters and then smooth the stuff along the strand. “I work in Florida, South Carolina – I’m not sure we do much good down there, but the weather’s milder here.”

… replenished.

… the Kurds.

“The most radical women have taken over al-Hol Camp, enforcing a strict ISIS dress code and mandatory Koranic instruction. They burn down the tents of families they consider insufficiently fanatical and have knifed to death several young women who didn’t wear the full black hijab and veil. The annex where the foreign families live is so dangerous that the camp administration was reluctant for us to visit, even in an armored car. Roj Camp is somewhat better. The Kurdish camp administration has successfully banned veils and the wearing of only black clothes, and it is possible to walk around with armed escorts. In both places, radical women are indoctrinating children with ISIS ideology.”

Heading down there to take a morning boardwalk stroll with my friend Di Elkin, who has an apartment next door to ours.

… are off for their annual Halloween at the beach thing. Rehoboth, dog parade, costume parade, boardwalk up and back twice a day, dinners with old friends, gazing at container ships through binoculars. Of course UD will continue blogging.

Years of the most gruesome violence, game after game, have reduced increasing numbers of matches to quickly suspended exercises in riot control. The visiting morons who continue to march into Greece to play – who even allow their children to march into Greece to play – are “shocked” when eighty thugs blast into a stadium and beat up their kids in the stands because… because… because the Greeks never do this sort of thing!

You might have thought a team owner ambling onto the field during a big televised match and waving his loaded pistol at an official who displeased him might have signaled to the Greek state that the game … needed a pause. You might have thought the fact that no one is able to police the event at all would instigate a moment or two of withdrawal and contemplation.

UD‘s suspicion is that the Greek government is working on a plan whereby that country’s substantial violent minority is at it were herded into stadiums and allowed to torch property and bloody people to its heart’s content, thereby keeping the streets reasonably safe.

Soccer reduced to repressive desublimation is an intriguing short-term approach to a homicidal population; but

1. it won’t work for long; and
2. death rates inside the stadiums are going to go wild.

I mean, in its outlines it’s a reasonable plan, but it needs tweaking. UD‘s suggestion to the Greek government: Build hundreds more stadiums and turn them into fun concentration camps where disarmed fascist gangs are held in comfortable cells during the night and then let loose during the day to storm the fields and rip each other to shreds. Light meals will be provided.

Layers and layers of horrible in UD’s hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, where a woman driver being threatened by the city’s adorably named squeegee kids takes out her gun to make them go away.

Squeegee is a venerable Baltimore institution:

One police officer estimates squeegeeing has been a part of the city “as long as murder has.”

 My answer to Mr. Bloom, L.?
I'm fine, and am nowhere near hell.
My answer to this?
I'll stick with the Swiss.
The weather in Zurich is swell. 

I have to buy a lot, because the squirrels are always disemboweling them.

… after the success of their committee room storming, Republicans are planning a second action, this one a knitting circle. Apparently the congressmen will sit together just outside the hearings room, each of them knitting a panel revealing a dystopian America if Democrats win the White House. Steve Scalise, for instance, will depict an America where James Hodgkinson is unable to buy a gun.

Now that its quarterback has been filmed calling a woman over to his car and telling her to help him finish masturbating, UNM – one of this blog’s venerable favorites – is in the news again. UD has long argued that a state as corrupt and fiercely anti-intellectual as New Mexico should give up on the whole public university thing, with its Dave Schmidlys and Mike Locksleys and a host of others running this hopelessly shabby show. But on it goes; the curtain … or whatever … keeps going up…

Her neighbors live in rural Arkansas, ground zero for nihilism, American-style. Their worst enemy is Elizabeth Warren, the Plan lady who not only thinks she can improve rural education and health care, but who thinks people in rural Arkansas want to improve them. Au contraire: they appear to like the chaotic destructionism of Trump. “[M]any here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them.”

The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called “chaos voters” helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.

As for caring whether Trump betrays Kurds and Ukrainians: “It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.” If they’re not going to care about their neighbor, imagine how they feel about Kurds and Ukrainians.

************************

Matt Taibbi puts it like this:

Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.

  The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it.

Think of the final scenes of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The world is ending (nuclear annihilation), so the inhabitants of the last city the fallout will reach stage endless insane suicidal car races, where drivers who have nothing to lose gun their engines until the final spectacular flame-out.

Leaving nuanced definitions to the philosophers, I would define nihilism as a combination of three basic elements: a refusal to hope for anything except the ultimate vindication of hopelessness; a rejection of all values, especially values widely regarded as sacrosanct (equality, posterity, and legality); and a glorification of destruction, including self-destruction—or as Walter Benjamin put it, “self-alienation” so extreme that humanity “can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” Nihilism is less passive and more perverse than simple despair. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation,” according to Albert Camus, “but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.”

A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the “aesthetic pleasure” of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law.

Another go at it:

[Evidence suggests a] significant share of Trump supporters are as nihilistic and destructive as Donald Trump himself, [which] supplies a sort of Occam’s-razor answer to all the questions about why they put up with him: His worst traits are a feature, not a bug, for those who take pleasure in chaos.

Democrats still don’t understand it, says Taibbi. Okay, so let’s zoom in a bit:

Self-destruction is apparently many Arkansans’ middle name. If they’re not panting piously after the end of days, they’re offing themselves with opiates, or putting one of their abundant guns to their heads. They make the Sex Pistols look like the Lennon Sisters. The Donald Trump Show is what they’re laughing at on tv while kissing their ass goodbye, exactly like their fellow end-stagers from states with similarly massive gun ownership/suicide rates (Montana, Alaska, Wyoming). We’re killing ourselves! But before we do, we’re voting Trump.

******************

And on that chaos thing. UD has always liked William Arrowsmith’s comment about an education in the humanities:

[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

So, you know, distrust higher education all you like. But be aware that it’s trying to make some serious moves against your chaos, that its novels and poems both acknowledge the foundational reality, and exploit the generative energy, of that chaos as we seek to emerge from it, on occasion, into form and order. Into organized life.