Nihilist Neil

Whether you’ve undercooked your eggs or your degree, Neil is here to tell you none of it matters

Dear Nihilist Neil, is there such a thing as true love? From, Hopeful Romantic

Dear Hopeful Romantic, No.

Dear Nihilist Neil, is there any viable escape from the endless maelstrom of pain and torment that is the human experience? Will I one day be liberated from my own vicious cycles of self-destruction before I drive away everyone who loves me? What is intimacy? Can it be achieved in this lifetime? Is it possible for anyone to truly know me, see me for what I am, and not ultimately be horrified by what they’ve found? From, Existential Angst

Dear Existential Angst, No.

Dear Nihilist Neil, should I attend my racist grandmother’s funeral? From, Loving Grandson

Dear Loving Grandson,

Let the bitch rot. Light a joint to celebrate. I don’t know, just leave me out of it.

Dear Nihilist Neil, my long-distance SO has broken up with me. Is there any way I can get them back? From, Broken Heart

Dear Broken Heart,

Take the hint. They (presumably) moved country, county or state to abandon you. When will you finally realise that your “abandonment issues” aren’t issues and just objective reality? They’re not abandonment issues if everyone actually abandons you.

Dear Nihilist Neil, are Oasis better than Blur? From, Audiophile

Dear Audiophile (ridiculous name by the way),

Of course not. Develop your palate. Oasis are, at best, a second-rate set of coattail riders who essentially did the same thing as the Beatles thirty years later, but since their singer was worse and harder to listen to, and because their guitarist wasn’t as good, it was deemed “Britpop”. Never listen to music again! You don’t deserve it!

Dear Nihilist Neil, is it OK to be in love with your college mother? From, Keeping it in the Family

Dear Keeping it in the Family,

Yes, as long as you send your college father a “thank you” letter after sex.

In the months since the overturning of Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade, many people - not just Americans - may be asking themselves what the point is in having a wildly racist country with a touchand-go stance on women’s rights that also has a net worth of over twenty trillion USD. The answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t exist.

The Americas, at its inception, was a patchwork of several European diaspora communities and franchises each competing with each other to see who could commit the largest scale genocides of the local population in the least possible time. One could argue that, as a country founded on colonialism and the forced displacement of its indigenous communities, that the United States was, at its foundation, less of a country and more of an extended illegal occupation of sovereign lands.

Nothing is more representative of the United States’ inability to transform than the last seven decades since the end of the Second World War - we/they reinstituted racial segregation policies, maintained laws against homosexual relationships (in some states active until 2003), resisted abolition of the death penalty and did everything we could to prevent abortion from being legalised. The United States is de facto ruled by a rural minority who have been benefitted by excessive gerrymandering and disproportionate allocation of Electoral College votes. The power of this vocal, Republican minority is so great that, despite the United States being predominantly Democratic (recent polls show this percentage as north of 50%), and in spite of the fact that the two most recent Republican presidents lost the popular vote before beginning their first term, the US has aggressively pursued an interventionist policy based on hunger for oil and good, old-fashioned racism.

Our resident Californian Hayden gets extra controversial

And, now that we have a new monarch in the White House Buckingham Palace, it’s high time we tried to convince the United States to relinquish its independence and re-join the United Kingdom indirectly via application to the Commonwealth.

Using the United States’ considerable financial assets, we could make significant steps towards reducing poverty in Commonwealth countries across the globeindeed, had developing countries in the Commonwealth had access to more financial resources, they would have been able to vaccinate their population and reduce death rates while the rest of the world reopened their doors and restarted music festivals, which is pretty fucked up when you think about how indifferent we were towards people dying in India in 2021.

The US is a fucking mess. No one likes it - even people in the US are embarrassed. California, the financial powerhouse of the United States, are working on their secession and in the meantime have just settled for legalising marijuana. But eventually, it won’t be enough to keep them happy, and the US’s conservative bloc will only realise how important California was after it’s too late.

The US should join the Commonwealth and save us all the fucking trouble.