Unfinished Genus

All are welcome no one is excluded. Only your behavior can exclude you from humanity.

[nosferdoc]

“Under Ms. Bass’s signature initiative, the city has spent $82,420 a year for each homeless person it has sheltered in motels. A withering independent audit of L.A.’s homeless agency last year found the government wasn’t tracking spending or outcomes.”

— Allysia Finley, Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2026.

[floridaboiler]

[nosferdoc]

Holmes and the Psychiatrist (@victorianfog) on Tumblr

A short story based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[nosferdoc]

Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photo courtesy of Working Title Films).

By Alan Koppschall

Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski is no hero, the ever-mustachioed Sam Elliott tells us at the start of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult classic, The Big Lebowski. But “sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place.” For the Dude, the time is the early ’90s, and the place is Los Angeles; the United States is about to go to war, and the Dude’s rug has just been urinated upon. It’s an act that sets off a series of events that includes a faked kidnapping, an attempted ransom handoff, and a clash with a sword-wielding German nihilist and his two nihilist compatriots.

We’re never told why the Dude is the man for this time and place. It’s unlikely that he himself knows. He drifts through life like the tumbleweed that rolls across the screen at the start of the film, spending most of his time at the bowling alley with his two friends, Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran, and Donny, “who loved bowling,” as he is fittingly eulogized at the end of the film. (Donny is the only one of the three whom we actually see bowling.) He’s not even the only Jeffrey Lebowski in Los Angeles: A millionaire known as the Big Lebowski shares his name—which is cause for much confusion.

The plot is hard to summarize. But the Coen brothers’ inspiration for the film was the detective novels of the American-British mystery writer Raymond Chandler. As Joel Coen told IndieWire in 1998: “We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story—how it moves episodically and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.”

But what is important in The Big Lebowski? At the heart of the meandering plot is the Dude’s stand against nihilism. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher of nihilism, the Dude could be misunderstood as a nihilist himself, but he is concerned with finding meaning and order, not deconstructing these concepts.

There’s a section of Nietzsche’s 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil that is perhaps even more perplexing than the plot of The Big Lebowski. Suddenly, after three essayistic chapters on the nature of truth (which could be summed up imperfectly in the Dude’s words that the truth claims of the philosophers are “well, you know, just, like, uh, your opinion, man”), Nietzsche launches into a series of “aphorisms and interludes,” two-to-three-sentence witticisms that may or may not be connected in any meaningful way. “When you look long into an abyss,” he writes in one of them, “the abyss also looks into you.” It’s the ultimate description of the consequences of nihilism and one of Nietzsche’s most famous lines.

The Dude has certainly looked into the abyss. His constant refrain that his rug “really tied the room together” might seem superficial in the face of the drama going on around him, but it is a cry for help as the abyss swallows what little order and structure existed in his drifting existence. His room is no longer tied together; the unity of his life is beginning to fragment. Because of this, the Dude’s standoff with the nihilists is more than literal. It reflects his internal conflict with nihilism.

What is it that gives the Dude a sense of meaning by the end of the film? It’s hard to say. He did not make something of himself as the big Lebowski told him he should at the start of the film. But it is not the big Lebowski with his key to the city of Pasadena nor Maude with her fashionable tastes and artwork that triumphs over the nihilists, but the Dude. He will likely continue “taking it easy for the rest of us sinners,” but as Martin Luther once quipped, “God made man out of nothing, and as long as we are nothing, He can make something out of us.”

[nosferdoc]

[nosferdoc]

[nosferdoc]

Post by @victorianfog · 1 image

💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 0 · Introduction · This ‘side blog’ contains my writing aided by ChatGPT. It is a short story extending the Holmesian world exp

A story about Sherlock Holmes and a Psychiatrist.

[cruiseaire]

[nosferdoc]

Booing Of Jonathan Haidt Shows How Bad The Left’s Coddling-Induced Intolerance Has Become

Why NYU college graduates view their rude behavior as moral

“Few public intellectuals have done more to warn Americans about how the coddling of children produces intolerant adults than Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. Their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, argued that helicopter parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the rise of campus safetyism had set up a generation for failure. They warned that universities were teaching students three Great Untruths: that hardship makes you weaker, that you should always trust your feelings, and that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, has spent more than a decade documenting the link between fragility and authoritarianism.”

— Michael Shellenberger.

[nosferdoc]

[morgan5451]

[nosferdoc]

“You know, someone very profoundly once said many years ago that if fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.”

— Ronald Reagan, during a 1975 interview on 60 Minutes.

* The quote is associated with Ronald Reagan and appears in a 1975 interview.

* Reagan implied he was repeating an older saying.

* No verified original pre-Reagan source for the exact wording has been conclusively identified.

[nosferdoc]

Michael Shellenberger on the Psychology of Left-Wing Violence

Podcast Episode · Conversations with Coleman · May 18 · 1h

“And so there's, I think, a core left-wing anti-civilization identity and ideology that then you might go on the world and be a climate change activist, but you might be a homelessness activist, you might be a trans activist, but actually they all share that same underlying anti-civilization worldview as I did, and is very familiar to me as somebody that basically had that baked in from an extremely young age, certainly from the time I was a young adolescent.”

— Michael Shellenberger From Conversations with Coleman, May 18, 2026.

[nosferdoc]

“You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

[psycheapuleius]

“Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement?”

— Muriel Spark, The Comforters (1957).

[nosferdoc]

[nosferdoc]

[nosferdoc]

“It is now clear that you will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election, where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”

— Wes Streeting, Health Minister, in his resignation letter.