The future is terrifying
It constantly plagues my mind
Where will I be in ten years
Will I be homeless? Or buried?
Or have children and be married?
Or will I still be stuck standin' right here?
Either way it's been a privilege
To have had time to spend
With my wonderful family and friends
So I'll toast to all of you
And to all that you do
You're f*ckin' awesome don't you ever forget!
-Days n Daze, Post Party Depression
Hey Nevermorons!
Today is June 24th. You know what that means? It’s Rozali’s birthday!
Given that Rozali is a core member of the Nevermore team, and that she is relatively new to Substack, I thought that for her birthday I would provide an introduction to her work and direct the reader to some of her greatest hits.
Rozali is a punk in the truest sense of the word.
What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that she’s a true non-conformist. I don’t think that she is physically capable of being anything other than herself.
If you’re unfamiliar with her work, her bio states:
Rozali writes about society, technology, culture, propaganda, and more.
She has contributed to CounterPunch, Spiked, Dissident Voice, Peace magazine, among others.
You can find her at Plebity, a pro-free speech site from the leftist perspective, or here at Nevermore.
Rozali first came to my attention about a year and a half ago, when she submitted something for publication. I hadn’t even finished reading before I had decided her writing was a perfect fit for Nevermore. Soon, we were speaking often, encouraging each other and excitedly sharing ideas.
For those of you who aren’t writers, you gotta understand. Writing is a solitary pursuit. Most of the time, it feels like no one cares what you’re doing (or trying to do). One of the things that I’m most proud about is that Nevermore has created a team of writers who support one another in various ways.
And Rozali really has been a huge part of this. She even created a Nevermore web store that offers dank Nevermore swag!
THE CROW IS A MESSENGER
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May 9, 2023
Rozali was born in Bulgaria. Her parents immigrated to Canada when she was young, fleeing the depressing former Soviet bloc country. I suspect that her passion for activism comes from a deep-seated aversion to authoritarianism comes from a blood memory of how the Bolsheviks and their accomplices ravaged her homeland.
That said, arriving in Canada wasn’t exactly a picnic in paradise. For some reason, her parents thought it would be a great idea to move Rozali and her sister to Yellowknife, a town of 20,000 located just 400 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.
In an extremely moving piece written shortly after her father’s death, Rozali recalls:
Neither of my parents spoke English, and both worked entry level, minimum wage jobs to get by. My early years were spent living in a run-down trailer in Yellowknife, NWT, which also happened to be the worst years of my life.
ROZALI IS A CHAMPION
There is no question that Rozali’s early life experience made her who she is today. As Leo Tolstoy famously said:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In some ways, it hardened her. Sometimes she reminds me of Charles Bukowski, who attributed his artistic brilliance to the life lessons he learned from the school of hard knocks.
On the other hand, Rozali is also deeply compassionate. Partly, she is driven by a passionate hatred for injustice, as is evidenced by her animal rights activism. (Rozali is a committed vegan and a veteran volunteer at animal shelters.)
Ever the contrarian’s contrarian, Rozali also has her critique of the vegan movement, which she feels lost its way during the woke era. The first thing that she ever submitted to Nevermore was called The Case Against Intersectional Veganism. I hadn’t even finished reading it before I had decided she was a perfect fit for Nevermore.
Unlike Bukowski, Rozali is passionate about women’s issues. She was formerly a radical feminist on the front lines of the gender wars, but has since stopped identifying as a feminist due to her disgust with woke feminism.
I guess you could call her a post-feminist, but I think of her as a proto-next-wave feminist. The world just needs a bit of time to catch up with her, if you ask me.
Despite the fact that I have published numerous anti-feminist diatribes, Rozali and I have never fought about this issue, likely because she recognizes the hypocrisy of “intersectional feminism” (which I call fourth-wave feminism). Indeed, our critiques overlap.
One of the most prescient thing she’s written was published exactly one year ago and was called Why are women ditching feminism?
THE CROW IS A MESSENGER
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June 24, 2023
It’s pretty crazy that this piece was only published one year ago! Rozali really seems to have called it. Even died-in-the-wool rad fems like Meghan Murphy have distanced themselves from feminism in the past year.
Back in May, Laura Dodsworth, who I thought was THE leading feminist of the truth movement, even said this:
Did you know I used to identify as a feminist? It was actually in my Twitter bio for while. Such flagrant identification with a ‘tribe’ in a bio is almost as embarrassing as my brief membership of the Green Party. (Dear reader, you now know my darkest secrets.)
That said, I’m not accusing Rozali, Meghan or Laura of betraying themselves or the political tribe to which they used to belong.
Really, the meaning of the word changed after Hilary Clinton and Justin Trudeau made “feminism” part of their respective brands.
If you ask me, neither Rozali nor Meghan Murphy has betrayed themselves by distancing themselves from the feminist brand. When the meaning of a word changes, it’s not proof of integrity to remain loyal to it. It’s a sign that one can’t keep up with the times. But I digress.
Basically, Rozali is a contrarian’s contrarian. She thinks for herself, is passionate, and it’s an honour to be publishing her excellent work.
Thank you for putting up with me, Rozali! I know I’m not always the easiest to get along with. But I hope that we stay allies for many years to come.
My dream has long been not only to be a writer, but also a publisher. I used to promote punk shows and I take pride in being a hype man. When I think something (or someone) is awesome, I’m not shy about saying so.
Rozali is an awesome writer, and I’m one of her biggest fans. And I can’t tell you how good it feels for me to work closely with someone I’m a fan of. It kinda makes me feel like I’ve already made it, in a sense.
So, Rozali, I wish you a very happy birthday! Thank you for doing everything you do and I hope that we remain friends and keep working together for many years to come.
Love & Solidarity,
Crow Qu’appelle
P.S. I am reposting one of Rozali’s most popular pieces, which is about Canadian apathy and nihilism in the face in increasing crime. I think this is a good place to start exploring her work.
NEVERMORE MEDIA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
THE CROW IS A MESSENGER
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May 9, 2023
by Rozali Telbis, May 9, 2023
On Sunday, March 19, 2023, a 37-year-old man was stabbed to death outside a Starbucks in downtown Vancouver as his wife and daughter looked on in horror. A TikToker by the name of Alex Bodger (who goes by Gora Pakora on TikTok) recorded the final moments of the victim’s life.
The incident itself was horrific for obvious reasons, but it laid bare more disturbing trends.
For one, Alex, the TikToker who stood by and recorded the stabbing later took a selfie next to the victim’s body, and even returned to the crime scene the day after to level up his social media game.
After the incident Alex said,
“Yeah, this s — [the stabbing], it doesn’t faze me too much,” he said. “I’ll just say human life to me, the way I look at it, if I don’t know you, it’s meaningless, it’s meaningless. I’m just keeping it straight up.”
No worries about the loss of human life, Alex is just “keeping it straight up.”
Alex isn’t the only one who behaved with disgusting indifference to human life.
In the video, a witness can be seen on the patio of the Starbucks taking a sip of his drink as the victim, Paul Stanley Schmidt, bleeds out just a few steps away.
Paul died because he asked Inderdeep Singh Gosal, the 32-year-old man who killed him, not to vape around Paul’s child.
This incident laid bare the callousness that people have for human life – not just the murderer who ended Paul’s life over a simple request not to vape around Paul’s child, but also the TikToker who recorded the entire incident and shared it online for clicks, and the man who continued drinking his coffee as if it was just another typical day in downtown Vancouver.
After this incident, a number of people attributed the inaction of witnesses to the bystander effect which states that the more people who are present in an emergency situation, the less likely it is for witnesses to step in and help. But this incident goes far beyond simply not helping. Not only did people not intervene, but they actively exploited the incident and either leveraged the situation to further their own agenda, or sat back and watched with a disturbing sense of nonchalance and acceptance, like the man who continued sipping his drink as he witnessed a man die in front of him.
Weeks later, a 17-year-old was stabbed and killed on a Surrey transit bus in another unprovoked attack.
Random attacks like these are no longer rare.
Indeed, while violent crime is decreasing in Canada, unprovoked violent attacks are actually increasing at alarming rates all over the country.
A statement released by the Vancouver Police in October 2021 reads:
“Over the last few months, we’ve noticed what appears to be an uptick in unprovoked stranger attacks... Over four people a day are the target of a random, unprovoked assault.”
In the last year, 1,705 people had been the victim of an unprovoked attack.
Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Yukon are also seeing higher rates of “more intense” crime. Edmonton and Toronto city officials also reported a marked spike in public attacks.
A survey conducted by the Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found that two thirds of Canadians believe violent crime is worse than it was before Covid. 1 out of 5 respondents said they feared for their safety in the last six months.
Canada is not alone; the United States is seeing the same trends of increased unprovoked attacks though the weapon of choice differs.
In Illinois, a 79-year-old man shot and killed his neighbour over an argument of the victim’s use of a leaf blower in his yard.
In North Carolina, a 24-year-old-man shot a 6-year-old girl and her parents after a basketball rolled into his yard and the family went to retrieve it.
In upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed by a homeowner after her friend mistakenly pulled into the wrong driveway.
As of this writing, a 29-year-old man in Texas paused his date to shoot and kill a fake parking attendant. The attacker allegedly told his date “everything was fine” after returning to the restaurant from the parking lot where he killed the man. I guess he thought losing 40 bucks was reason enough to end someone’s life.
All of these incidents took place within weeks of each other.
This is the New Normal nihilism.
While random acts of violence aren’t new, they have been on the rise. In many places, random acts of violence are increasing, reverting a decades long trend of decline in stranger attacks.
What do the influx of random acts of violence say about us and where we are headed?
For one, it might say something about our collective sense of nihilism that has progressively gotten worse post-Covid.Some attribute the sudden rise of stranger attacks to Covid lockdown policies which contributed to more loneliness, isolation, insecurity, mental instability, and so on. While society has always been encumbered by violence and crime, Covid has hurtled us closer toward this gnawing sense of meaninglessness and uncertainty.
Disciples of progress and rationality like the Steven Pinkers of the world may argue that we are living in the most prosperous period in human civilization; they’d say we are living longer; that we are objectively safer than ever; and that we are living in the Information Age, a period marked by constant advances in technology that simplify our lives (or so is the claim).
NEVERMORE MEDIA
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Jan 26
They might even tell us that despair or pessimism is not helpful, and that – all things considered – everything is pretty good, including in developing countries where more people are being lifted out of poverty.
But all is not well.
We may be living longer, but has our quality of life improved? Are we any more happier or fulfilled than we were 10, 20, 40 years ago?
I suspect this sense of disillusionment has been brewing for some time due in part to our lack of conviction and meaning in modern society, and Covid has merely exacerbated it. Slowly, and then suddenly we have entered the New Normal Nihilism era where nothing really matters, least of all human life.
In ‘May We Live in Fleeting Times,’ I wrote about conviction scarcity in today’s modern world:
“Those who lack conviction exist in the in-between. When we have no convictions, no strong beliefs, anything is then acceptable. Fetishes must be accepted and affirmed. Morally questionable lifestyles are validated. Mental illnesses must not only be normalized, but celebrated. We’re told that truth is subjective. There is no capital ‘T’ truth, only small lower case ‘t’ truths. And everyone’s truths must be affirmed. But how are we to develop a framework in which all of us can co-exist if everyone is simultaneously correct in their truth?
Convictions are an antidote to alienation. They allow us to take personal responsibility for our own actions and to regain agency over our lives.
They force us to reflect on what gives our lives meaning. They can either make us retreat further into ourselves, or they can help free us from our shackles to the Wasteland.”
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor said that humans are “striving for meaning and spiritual direction” and that our behaviour is a reflection of our search for meaning and recognition. What happens when these needs aren’t fulfilled? While the search for meaning has long been a staple of the human condition, it seems as if this sense of meaningless is permeating all aspects of society. Post-modernism breeds meaningless, and a society in which ‘nothing is true’ and ‘everything is permitted’ naturally results in a cultural relativist framework in which truth is relative and morality does not exist, at least not in a universal sense. Morality doesn’t dictate action, but lived experience does.
But if we are able to co-exist, we must abide by common truths, or a common foundation in which to live.
Unfortunately, such common truths no longer exist, and with the loss of foundational truths that would otherwise preserve society, we are at great risk of collapse.
What it means to be human is just as much a reflection of our present environment as it is with our past. We must go beyond graphs and data to get a richer understanding of the human condition and the importance of finding meaning.
Without conviction or meaning we allow nihilism to metastasize and grow like a sickness, leaving us with fleeting moments of gratification that barely sustain us.
How this will play out is yet to be seen, but I suspect it will only get worse before it gets better.
Feature image credit: Hugo Simberg, ‘Garden of Death.’ Wikimedia Commons.
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