Friday, March 15, 2024

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Winner of both the Palme d'Or and the Palm Dog, this extraordinarily well scripted and well CAST movie (practically an advert for the Academy's decision to add a new statuette category for this skill-set), presented me with a key dilemma (not the one the writer-director intended I think) which I never fully resolved: did I believe in the trial as anything other than a storytelling means to an end.

 


For the story here is not really about a crime or potential crime, but about human relationships, and very well told, yet I never quite understood why the French state would have taken a gamble in providing the mechanism for developing it.And amidst all the truthful insights into couples and masculine vulnerabilities there is one dominant and ultimately decisive suggestion which struck me as a little irresponsible for current times: "If you don't know...just decide"
 

 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

“Better be pruned to grow — than cut up to burn”

Every so often one comes across a statement like “The Muslim world lacks the equivalent of the Reformation”. Those who repeat it seem to have been misdirected by all those virgins in paradise and the predisposition for child marriages into forgetting that, from the get go, Islam was a highly puritanical religion. 

As the Arab empire took shape and began to rub up against the Roman Empire in the eastern Med, so-called westerners made some decisions which would lastingly affect how they themselves thought about the correct approach to the big issues. 

Early Christianity in the Middle East under Greek tutelage had largely consisted of a plethora of coexisting sects. Under Arab rule all but the state-sponsored Orthodoxy of the Emperor himself were effectively extinguished, but that permitted a rebel tendency, puritanical and iconoclastic, to emerge and threaten the core, even to the extent of declaring the veneration of the cross a form of idolatry. 

The fact that at this point primitive Christian and Islamic underlying attitudes were barely distinguishable must have set up an 'Aha!' moment for the ecclesiastical authorities. And thus the official church’s solution was to surrender their own puritanical rabble to Islamic control. 

Rather than fight them, they simply offloaded them, permitting them to become Muslims. (In this they became like the ‘useless third’ of society — the telephone sanitisers and so on — which Douglas Adams had dispatched into deep space on an iffy colonising venture, or indeed the right-thinking passengers of the Mayflower who, as luck would have it, somehow initiated the socially beneficial project of founding the United States.)

Meanwhile the Orthodox church maximised its own fancy image worship and overall grandeur, seemingly liberated from the priggish and the abstemious. 

‘The West’, might feel existentially threatened by Islamic teachings today, but it only ever took the shape that it did because it learned how to put them to practical uses. 

This plan seemed to be working well at first, but there would be a period of iconoclastic reaction and relapse within Byzantium itself, yet once this was over the authorities went back to actively persecuting those who rejected the finer things of worldly life. 

Meanwhile, further to the still comparatively light-starved west, under the authority of the Bishop of Rome, a work-around had been found, whereby individuals of uncompromisingly ascetic bent were walled off and made socially useful within monasteries and convents where they were much less likely to become a nuisance. 

Later on of course, there would emerge new religious orders which got out a bit more, and as these became commercialised, the conditions for a Reformation and a society-wide re-emergence of puritan nutjobbery were once again established.

In parts of the affluent world today we see an analogous development whereby the rebel extremist tendency within our own cultures is either being offloaded or perhaps self-offloading onto Islam in a manner which might otherwise seem unlikely to the historically ignorant. 

Only time will tell if this will again result in a handy purge of these cultish cranks, or whether in fact they are all coming to sweep away the rest of us.

Monday, March 11, 2024

The Evil of Banality

There were no terrorists hiding in tunnels beneath the city of Hiroshima, nor indeed underneath Mariupol's drama theatre, yet once again last night it was the IDF response to 7/10 that drew facile comparisons from people in fancy formal wear with one very specific part of the murderous, ethically complex inferno that was WWII.

Yet the thing about the Holocaust is that it stands apart from everything else that happened between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the dropping of the second of Oppenheimer's atrocious new weapons on the citizens of Nagasaki, and deservedly so. And it in no way preserves this status as a result of some sort of process of 'selective empathy'.

Those who would have us lose sight of this are, in my recent experience, morally moronic, morally degenerate or both. Not so much the banality of evil as banality and/or evil. 

 

 

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Argylle (2024)

A not entirely un-entertaining 007 pastiche targeting immature audiences (by age or otherwise).


Like the aforementioned off-ness in Foe, audiences are distracted from the crap-ness of Argylle by tge rather cunning inclusion of the decoy variety in the ludicrous opening sequence involving Dua Lipa and a Mini Moke, with such terrible haircuts and CGI that there just HAS to be a kind of punchline, which there is, and Matthew Vaughn's early twist is just enough to dispatch thoughts like "hang on though, the CGI for Alfie the cat really is shonky..." for the remainder of his movie.

Foe (2023)

 


Aside from its central pair of talented, nice-to-look-at thesps, perhaps the most engaging thing about this movie is the way many of the scenes making up at least the first two thirds of its running time feel strangely off, predominantly in an uncanny way.
 
And yet, upon reflection, there's a good deal of off in Foe which cannot have been so deliberate, like Irish actors unconvincingly cast as rural Americans, Australia cast as the MidWest and a whole rather flimsy backdrop-as-Macguffin about space stations and environmental apocalypse, which does little to to distract the audience from noting that this is essentially a low budget three hander set in an old wooden house.

The intentional part of the off-ness might have been used to better effect had the director not delivered a spoiler, or at least a very large hint, in the opening textual prologue.

This places expectations at the Phillip K. Dick or at least Black Mirror level, but these are bound to be disappointing because this is not a movie about the existential crises of artificial consciousness, rather an examination of what happens to the affections of wetware when presented with an edges-off, slightly unworldly facsimile of the love object.

This distinction between real and fake would have worked a whole lot better if all the real characters did not come across as so fake.
And the reason why Phillip K Dick's variety off-ness remains the touchstone for these AI narratives is that he was confronting something seriously off in his own lived reality when he wrote his stories, and so any binary doubts quickly segue into universal incertitudes bordering on paranoia, which become available for vicarious participation by audiences.


Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Tools...of empire

This X-pleet would be funny for its total lack of self-awareness if it wasn't so dumb. (Morons with zero self-awareness are rather less funny in the Trump era than they ever used to be.) 



It starts off well enough I suppose, helpfully explaining why many members of the Pro-Pal mob have acted like morally degenerate, antisemitic morons, not exactly censuring them for this, but pointing out that it is probably damaging the noble cause. In effect an impassioned call for greater care in disguising their racist bile as progressive concern.

Yet then it goes full moronic itself, conflating Zionism with a supposed western settler-colonial ideology, before basically saying that all worldviews (though presumably not hers) are innately relative.

I guess she might agree with Sartre that none of it ultimately matters, the only important thing is one's 'commitment' to one's own ideological compulsions.

And given that this worldview of hers was using the misleading term 'genocide' very actively even before the events of 7/10 — which breached the ceasefire they now want rather imperiously reimposed — one has to conclude that it has always been deployed in this context as a form of not very indirect Holocaust denial/rebuttal by the Jihadis (and their 'apologists').

And if genocides can be 'active' (i.e. they manifest potentially even before they meet the agreed criteria), then raping freshly-made Israeli corpses and burning Israeli babies alive possibly also counts, you'd think?

The post was shared by an individual who reposted it saying it was "important...urgent", having only just shared a shameful image combining the Star of David with a Swastika. It was that urgent.

Anyway, there's more than one empire in play here, if that's how you have to caricature the geopolitics. Uncle Sam and the 'West' share the field with Russia, Iran, China and Islamic Jihadism.

Plenty of ways to act like a total tool. 

 

 

Flow My Tears

 

Around the time of my infancy Phillip K. Dick determined that his favourite composer was John Dowland
 
 

 
Then on November 17, 1971 the music in his life was abruptly muted when his California home was broken into, his stereo stolen and his steel-plated filing cabinet relieved of its contents via the use of dynamite.

When he reported this rather brutal burglary to the police, their immediate response was like the title of this book, but in the sarcastic register. Treating him as a troublemaker, they advised him to leave town rather than open an investigation.

Dick immediately wondered what dangerous truths he might have inadvertently stumbled upon. Eventually he concluded that the problem was this very novel, which he had abandoned.

He recalled having recently discussed its premise with a random bloke who’d crashed at his place, this man having confided that the CIA were indeed looking into a pill that would catapult users into a reality in which they were completely disconnected.

When he’d started Flow My Tears…the author had thrown his celebrity protagonist Jason Taverner into a new day in which he found himself utterly forgotten. The mechanism for moving across to this alternative, authoritarian reality would turn out to be a rather nasty narcotic, but as Dick picked up where he’d left off, he was starting to think that the flip-side world had actually been hiding in plain sight. He might indeed have stumbled upon an alarming insight.

In their native environments totalist societies do ‘exactly what it says on the tin’. But in order to gain traction within the ‘liberal’ world, they tend to have to make use of cunning subterfuge.

‘Queers for Palestine’ is precisely the kind of absurdist role play which only makes sense in this export grade idiom of inversion, tailored for gullible westerners. Outside that protective bubble, it would be an open invitation to oppression. It’s more a trick of perspective than an acid trip.

Dick duly concluded that that Nixon was probably a communist sleeper agent.
 

 

Government by the party, for the party...

We live in an age where nuance suppression is an industry, which makes them all that more important.

Take Belize here. Up until 1862 it was effectively an independent territory under long range British protection, not a Crown colony.

This anomaly is poorly understood even in Belize itself today, where contemporary arguments for a republic feed off a narrative whereby the British monarchy was complicit with the condition of African slaves there (with fairly constant murmurings about reparations), yet by 1862 both the trade and institution itself had long been abolished.

An alternative, feel-good caricature would have the British monarchy as the first imperial power in history to have dispensed with slavery.

This means it would be hard to pin the blame for the presence of people of African descent around the Bay of Honduras on the Windsors, in particular because a very significant minority of this demographic — the Garifuna — were never in fact enslaved outside of Africa and turned up in the region originally as part of a mechanism for avoiding European rule.

Anyway, these nuances are no luxury right now, because it has become questionable whether republican government in the Americas can remain wholly commensurate with the preservation of the core values of democracy.

One can point to El Salvador, Mexico, the USA and lately Guatemala, where the lack of a properly independent arbiter (however symbolic) within the state, immune to corrupt, party political packing is posing a severe threat to the system of popular suffrage.

So, beware Belize. Change made largely for the sake of historical misconstructions can lead to all kinds of places one does not really want to go.
 

Monday, March 04, 2024

Nativier than thou...

One of the more spurious arguments one occasionally hears from the Pro-Pals is that so-called Palestinians are descended from ancient peoples who inhabited the Levant.

They may well be. But the point is spurious because almost all historical-nationalist polemics derived from DNA analyses are notoriously dodgy, and 'nativier than thou' is generally considered an essentially racist proposition in most other contexts. 

Indeed if I were to make a show for political purposes of how much longer my ancestors had spent on the island of Britain compared to newcomers of any kind, I would soon be designated a knuckle-dragger and scheduled for ostracism.

And one is also obliged to remember here that many of those who big up these statements are otherwise inclined to aggressively play down biological factors compared to cultural ones in the other situations which matter to them.

I would also suggest that the argument is being used rather blatantly in bad faith, because the peoples who have long opposed Jewish self-determination, have done so precisely because they have closely identified with the culture and geopolitical objectives of their own later colonisers, the Arabs. 

It is this adopted Islamic identity which means the very notion of going Dutch with non-Muslims is broadly antithetical to them, and this means that there is something extremely cake-and-eatey about the DNA narrative.

In 1948 roughly 120,000 non-Jewish inhabitants of the Mandate decided that they could coexist with the Jews, assuming Israeli citizenship, while as many as 600,000 chose the path of violent 'resistance', which they have followed ever since.

The numbers of the latter have swollen to millions — that great inverted genocide — suggesting that any ancestry test result is likely to have been significantly diluted. Yet the continued 'resistance' remains grounded in another highly spurious, historically-blinkered line of argument, that it is the Jews who are all newcomers to the region, occupiers or settler-colonialists no less
.

If it is really anti-colonialism that you support, be careful what you wish for…
 
 



Even Yemen was a Jewish kingdom pre-colonisation.

The truth is that the modern world should not rely on any kind of regressive territorialism, based on race, religion or uncompromising irridentistism. Everyone has to come to the table with dotted lines in their heads based on actuality.

This applies to all significant actors in the current situation, yet in saying that, one must never lose sight of the fundamental dynamic of the conflict, which has always been an attempt by Islamists to eradicate the only Jewish-identifying polity from this earth. They dress up this objective in all sorts of borrowed fineries, but nobody should ever be fooled.
 
There have been immoral behaviours and attitudes all around since 1948, but until that urge to smother all alternatives to the Islamic way is put on the back-burner, there is unlikely to be any real peace in the region.





Self-representation deficits...

I was recently reading a fascinating essay about Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 30s, at the time one of the most self-consciously modern urban spaces outside of Europe and North America. (And perhaps the only one of such that had no direct experience of the world wars. Additionally, even though the conditions for long term decline might have already begun to crop up, Argentina also had a very mild experience of the Great Depression.)

One might contrast Antigua, which has self-identified as 'old' in recent times.

Yet like all cities with a well-defined image for both the outside world and its own denizens, there ought to be more open and diverse debate here about the meanings and appropriate uses for the streets here, socially, politically, culturally — and the Alcalde ought to assert for himself a key role in marshaling these as well as articulating his own vision.

The obvious immediate danger, as we have seen, is a vacuum into which step those whose own project is largely limited to using Antigua as a lure for leeching off high-end transients. The outright cynicism one can detect here is likely to result in a gradual augmentation of the phoney-ness of the environment, with the city ultimately converted into little more than a boutique mall.

 

Friday, March 01, 2024

Wholeness and its discontents...

 

Theodicy is the name given to the discipline which aims to explain the presence of evil in our reality. We can call it theo-idiocy when it stands for the conclusion that it’s all just a matter of perspective, and that if we could only see the big picture…

Mani's position was that Good and Evil are there from the start, unconnected. Darkness, rather counter-intuitively, spills over into the Light, effectively causing a cosmic level environmental disaster which has to be cleaned up using spiritual ‘mestizo’ beings such as ourselves.

This soteriology was odd, because the salvation going on has more to do with cleaning up the system level evil-spill than with individual salvation.

St Augustine was into Manichaeism first and never really shook off the dualism. His swerve towards Christianity was influenced by an important ‘pagan’ precursor, the Enneads of Plotinus.

In this neo-platonic system there is only one true being, self-identical and unchangeable. Us lot live on a sliding scale below this absolute One, removed from full participation in Being by degradations like the need to think, move and engage with matter.

The more we collaborate with the external world, the more we slide downwards. Evil is thus the final notch on this scale, the furthest distance from perfection — but we possess a native buoyancy arising from the innate tendency of our inner being to lift itself up towards full reunification. (Sin and Grace are notably absent from this game of snakes and ladders for souls.)

Yet like Augustine after him, Plotinus struggles to explain precisely why these degrees of imperfection and multiplicity in general might exist, albeit contingently. He talks of it all starting with an overflow of Good, resulting from a superabundance, but fluid dynamics of this sort require the presence of Time to make proper sense.

Augustine comprehended that his God cannot precede His universe, nor can it have come about as a result of creative thoughts (or potentiality) in the deity, for cognition would encumber Him with the knower-known duality of our own intellectual experience. An Absolute creator is thus a bit of an oxymoron.

If Gnosticism feels like a 'work around', the term 'cop-out' comes up more readily with Christian theodicy. Augustine ultimately settled on the idea that it is "fitting” for God to be associated with good things, such as making universes. 

Slightly more appealing is the notion that without us, goodness would ‘always’ remain virtual rather than actual. It's the only way the One could be said to have had needs. Materialisation has a few negative outcomes, but maybe they were always factored in as acceptable.


 

The Goggles

As an historian it would never occur to me to don the googles of moral righteousness before analysing events in the past, so it is a mystery to me why people seem so determined to do so before commenting on events in the present.

There are of course situations in all periods which are located in close proximity to what we could describe as absolute wrong. But possibly not as many as today's Twitterati (X-twats?) seem to presume. And applying a filter which removes all the grey from one's black and white images is a horrendously lossy process. 

Take one example. Consider Bullfighting as something done within an ancient cultural milieu as opposed to one which persists into our own world. 

We are far more likely to judge it in overtly moralistic in the latter instance, in part because we tend to believe that it is within the powers of our free will to make a change. We innately prioritise suffering experienced in the present moment, that forever moving point with hints of a dotted line extending into the future.

However, in doing so today we open ourselves up to a couple of avoidable hazards. 

Firstly, we get such a buzz from this militant sense of virtue that we do indeed start to apply it in retrospect, dispatching forthwith into hellfire all kinds of historical actors living at some temporal distance from our own culture and its shibboleths.

Secondly, the righteous mentality has a way of mis-reading and ultimately perverting relative goods (or even relative bads) which historically has led inevitably towards some of those rare cases of absolute bad. 

In both cases we end up with a dogmatically unified, totalist perspective shorn of all shade and sometimes also of useful complexity.

By squeezing all nuance out of the exposition, it becomes like a cliff-face with no hand-holds.



 

 

 

 

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Sin Bin

 

“According to a Gnostic legend, a war broke out in heaven among the angels, in which Michael’s legions defeated those of the Dragon. The nonpartisan angels who had been content to look on were consigned to earth, in order to make there a choice they had not been able to determine on high, one all the more arduous in that they brought with them no memory of the combat or, indeed, of their equivocal attitude.

“Thus history’s commencement can be traced to a qualm, and man resulted from an original...vacillation, from that incapacity, before his banishment, to take sides. Cast to earth in order to learn how to choose, he was condemned to action, to risk, and was apt for it only insofar as he stifled the spectator in himself. Heaven alone permits neutrality to a certain point, while history, quite the contrary, appears to be the punishment of those who, before their incarnation, had found no reason to join one camp rather than another.” 
 
>>> E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
 
That reality exists as a kind of sin bin for fence-sitters is a deliciously silly idea, yet also somehow makes so much sense.
 
It's actually an improvement on the 'solution' proposed by Mani, whose Christianity, like that of St Augustine, emanated out of Zoroastrianism. 
 
I will simplify rather ruthlessly. In the beginning there was Light and Darkness. They had both always been there. Then Darkness acquired an urge to spread, seeping into and polluting the perfect.

So a buffer zone was set up, two walls on either side, rather like we now see either side of Gaza. The beings born into this no man's land (actually 'man's land') have a spark of the Light in them which has to be distilled and restored to the good side of the wall so that it may be absolute once more. 
 
Upon completion of this historical process, the formal separation between the Light and the Dark will have been restored, and 'evil' put back in its box forever. 
 
The reason for the original leak is never fully explained. 
 
What is rather striking about this cosmogeny is that human existence is not conceived of as a primary end in itself, but rather a means to an end. 
 
A kind of cleaning package.
 

Bare Bones Republics

Over the past few years I have had some first hand experience of the Guatemalan justice system and this has permitted me to observe a set of fundamental discrepancies which may not be all that easy to solve, because they reflect an increasingly universal deficiency in the practice of Republican government in the Americas.

Judges here like to deliver sermons. If you listen carefully to these you get a sense of the intellectual and moral underpinnings of their worldviews, and in most instances you would be forgiven for concluding that their education largely lies on the foundation of codified law and the Bible.
In other words, almost everything they come out with betrays a lack of what, for want of a better term, we Brits would call a broad ‘classical education’.

Jewish and Christian morality is certainly a key component within the western concept of justice, but it seems to function optimally when tethered to the wisdom of the ancients as well as the contributions of more modern thinkers.

And the very notion of Republican government took hold in this hemisphere in an era when the classics were being actively rediscovered and propagated, most notably up north by the founding fathers of the USA.

Yet nowadays there would seem to be a growing cadre in positions of authority within American republics who rely almost wholly on scriptural perspectives, and I would argue that that is like putting diesel in a petrol car.

 

Monday, February 26, 2024

The Cadgers' Chorus

I’m starting to experience a degree of miffedness with all this moaning about the Sunday visiting vehicle moratorium during Lent.

First up, it’s just Sunday. And only a handful of such Sundays during the whole year.

Secondly, the majority of the people doing all this griping are doing it from within sectors of the local economy which are almost ludicrously over-saturated (beer, pizza, coffee etc.) and which almost anywhere else would be subject to superior year-round regulation.

Frankly, if your business cannot cope with a reduced footfall for half a dozen days per year, you are in the WRONG business. You are in effect operating at the rather iffy margins, like people who build homes on cheap land close to collapsible hillsides (...or indeed, ancient Mayan civilisation.)

Indeed, and this might be painful to hear, if you are not doing something significantly different (and better) than everyone else in the sector, you are little more than CLUTTER, not a vital ingredient in the lifeblood of the community.

Antigua really ought not — or at least need not — depend so wholeheartedly on tourism, and especially not the over-saturated sort. When I first came here there were relatively few transients present and the city was doing just fine.

This much-mentioned economic dependency today is largely limited to the enterprises which have been drawn in to exploit — and in many cases over-exploit in a notably parasitical manner — what they perceive as the opportunity offered by the host location.

“Antigua is for all” is their deceptively egalitarian mantra, which would in effect put a stop to any attempt at regulation. What they really mean is that "Antigua is a free for all", and that their right to make a living here trumps everyone else’s right to enjoy a reasonable quality of life or indeed occasionally pursue goals which are non-commercial.

We saw much the same petulant outpouring of grievance just a few months ago when the political protests and associated blockades were seemingly reducing inbound traffic, and a near identical mob of over-privileged whingers started up with a sob story they falsely assumed to be all-embracing and ubiquitous.
 

Friday, February 23, 2024

Ambiguity at the edges...

Extremism, left, right, racial and religious, and any combination of the four, now uses cosplay and carefully packaged ambiguity in the message, to avoid censure in western democracies.

Nobody waits for the full moon any more to release their inner wolf, because there’s a whole range of sheep costumes on the rack.

Ambiguity used to to be the preserve of the Centre, a spur to rational compromise, yet now it has become a key tool in the hands of zealots and the unhinged in general, half of whom were always a bit too dumb to ever fully understand it, but nowadays those that make use of it with practiced cynicism, do so in the knowledge that that is no bad thing...for them. Stupidity becomes the covert to their overt.

And now the compromise the Centre has to make, is ceding ever more airtime to the fanatics.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Mercerism

It's fascinating to me how many interesting themes this book had which didn't make it into the film, yet could easily form the conceits for alternative adapted screenplays. 


 

For example, the androids (replicants in Blade Runner) are produced on a Mars colony, not simply to provide labour, but also to serve up the semblance of human social bulk and a more complex society. Dick has a word for this in his fiction: simulacrum.

So, you could buy a package of neighbours: two adults, two kids and maybe a dog. Their presence nearby would be comforting, as would the knowledge that one could safely ignore them.

The other theme which is so on the mark for our present moment is the cult of empathy.

In the novel this is called Mercerism and adherents have an 'empathy box' at home which they use to observe and emotionally participate in, the tribulations of an individual who is pelted with rocks as he attempts to push his own large rock up the steep flank of a mountain, seemingly on a loop.



Later on in the story Mercer's situation is exposed as a phoney production, but this does not seem to be any kind of deal breaker for the believers.

Merleau-Ponty once said of Socrates that he "reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it," thereby demonstrating what both the French Existentialist and the Greek moral philosopher did not really understand about religion — how blind faith often advances willy nilly in the face of contrary evidence.

This is certainly true of the religious/political empathy cults which have taken hold of western society in recent decades, which operate on the basis of an unshakeable conviction and moral narcissism, and often tend to focus on subjects which can be observed through what my parents' generation called 'a set' (my father even referred to his laptop this way), which further reduces the need for engaging with facts, and thus understanding.

Dick's own understanding of how these belief systems work, how his own tended to work, was along the lines of "the Truth is out there, even when it's not".

Thursday, February 15, 2024

The Bequeathed (Netflix)

 


Six episodes. From the director of the much-loved Train to Busan. Very watchable, yet rather like the latest installment of True Detective, the soap opera (and rather obviously decorative supernatural vibe) seems to swamp the procedural elements.

The subtitles are a bit ropey. I think this is the minimum Netflix needs to get right before pushing these shows out to a global audience. There's questionable vocabulary and unidiomatic sentence formation and the problem is somewhat exacerbated by the need to chug through this textual stuff as the cast members repeatedly embark on disconcertingly histrionic exchanges.

At the end I still had some key uncertainties about how all the different relationships tied together and why exactly Yoon Seo-Ha's husband met the fate that he did. I possibly wasn't always paying close enough attention, but this all added to the lost in translation sensation.

Part of the problem from a storytelling perspective is that there are in effect two protagonists, an art professor and a detective and the teleplay resists the temptation to bring them together romantically. The detective has a back story (of course he does), but this remains resolutely disconnected from the main narrative. And the art professor never quite attains the status of likeable/relatable central character.

 

Artificial Urges

One of the more convoluted explanations of Creation is that an absolute being, as the deists tend to conceive Him, falls short of completion until He is able to participate in contingency, albeit indirectly. He's self-contained and Perfect, but experiences urges.

I was reminded of this recently when pondering the crossroads humanity now seems to face with its own technological creations.

I find I am less interested in AI as an enhanced version of human capability, software which can do what we do, see what we see, but better, than as a pathway to 'artificially' unfolded forms of perception, which in effect remove the psychological filters which appear to stand between consciousness and reality in the raw.

In other words, we end up placing within our world something which goes against our own natural disposition, which is precisely what the theologians insist that God felt he needed to do.
 
(Either way, the assumption that creation comes bundled with benevolence can probably be Ockham’d away.)
 
 

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Rock of Israel

Over the past few days I've been reading about the small but highly significant Jewish component of New Holland, the 17th century Dutch colony in what is now northern coastal Brazil.

They referred to themselves as Zur Israel, rock of Israel, a play on the name of Recife, their capital, which derives from Rock of Brazil, apparently, but is also a reference to a messianic snippet within the Book of Isaiah.

They had a fairly tolerant governor who they called wise: Johan Maurice van Nassau, who permitted them to form the first legal community of Jews in the New World. These guys were the real deal: settler colonists in contemporary parlance.

There were about 1500 of them, 20-40% of the whole population of the colony. Aside from their commercial interests (The three Ss: shipping, sugar and slaves) they ran various charitable programmes, including one for unattached Dutch women looking for a husband in the Americas (!), a bank of last resort for their Christian neighbours and, interestingly, a fund which regularly donated money to Israel.

And that historical factlet certainly caught my attention, because just how many idiots are there out there who think Israel is a place made up by Eastern Europeans at the end of WWII. 

Lady Gaga and Madonna's mad hatter Nazim Mashar certainly seems to, writing in December that “Hamas is a resistance movement and Palestinians have every right under international law to defend themselves and resist the theft and occupation of its land from European and American settlers." He later referred to the 'Zionists' in his own US-based fashion industry as parasites and called for them to be named and shamed.

Clearly none of the peoples who have invaded and repressed Israel almost since the dawn of recorded history: Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Turks and so on have in any way behaved parasitically. Absolutely not. Never. How could you even presume to say so?

I think we can leave it to an impartial third party, the Buddhists, to respond to this apparent injustice of stolen Arab land: Karma's a bitch!
 

Friday, February 09, 2024

No need to share...

One of history’s premium ironies is that the Jews themselves laid the foundations of their own long-term persecution, for who was it exactly who first came up with the idea that there was only one God and only one religion that could be True?

Having done that, they largely passed on the need to convert everyone else. Pretty much anyone could have pointed out to them that this was going to be a ticking time bomb.

All that needed to happen was for the notion of special revelation to become yoked to the Roman (and later Arab, Marxist-Leninist etc.) obsession with world domination and then everyone was fucked, but especially the Jews.

And the slightest hint that they might like to persecute their way out of this trap of perpetual persecution that they’d got themselves into was only ever going to make things a whole lot worse.

"The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man." > Hannah Arendt

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Dhimmis for Dummies.

The UN helped initiate this problem by not listening to the British who had been handed the Mandate in 1920 by its precursor organisation The League of Nations, specifically with the project of establishing a homeland for Jews.

After 27 years the Brits understood what the problem was, and would always be. 
 
On February 18, 1947 Foreign Secretary Bevin explained it to Parliament — the Jews want independence, but for the Arabs the point of principle is not the recognition of any rights of their own, but the denial of sovereignty over any part of the territory to the Jews. 
 
This was because the very idea of a Jewish nation was an affront to natural justice in the Arab worldview. As non-Muslim monotheists the Jews were supposed to reconcile themselves to the socially and politically inferior status of Dhimmis (protected people) and could under no circumstances be permitted anything like equal status within the 'Arab World'. 
 
The British lobbed this matter of irreconcilable perspectives back at the UN, who duly failed to address it. Instead they pressed ahead with a plan for partition, which was immediately and violently rejected by the Arabs after the Security Council vote. 




 
The UN thus oversaw a massive problem of displaced Arabs largely of their own making, which they have since gone about making ever more massive. 
 
They done this by switching from the mishandled, misapprehended compromise to establishing their own organisation (UNRWA) which would duly ‘go native’ and thus perpetuate, seemingly for eternity, the most rigid, relentlessly uncompromising mental model of the situation. 
 
Along the way UNRWA has explicitly helped transition this sense of injustice from its origins in Arab-Muslim chauvinism into something which will more likely gain traction amongst the gullible of the wider world (even Jews) — the geopolitical social injustice of 'settler colonialism'. This is a process I have given an appropriate name in the title of this post.
 
The partition of India created 20m refugees. The Russian invasion of Ukraine created 9.1m refugees. The Syrian Civil War created 6.7m refugees. The Israeli war for Independence initially created 360,000 refugees. 
 
Only the latter group has had its own UN Agency in perpetuity. This is because UNRWA consciously chose to preserve and then enlarge the group as cognitive refugees from the need to recognise Israeli legitimacy.
 
All that ever shifts is the underlying rhetorical justification for that fundamental intransigence, some of which is basically demented and anti-Semitic, but even in the more moderate register the effect is basically the same. 




 
There were in effect two wrong ways to go about this and the UN have tried both with a degree of die-hard obstinacy which has now left pretty much the entire institution looking in need of an overhaul.
 
As for UNRWA, it surely cannot survive in its current form. There unfortunately remains much that nation states are able to get away with, flaunting common decency, but multilateral organisations, especially UN agencies, have to be held to higher standards and frankly any degree of complicity in the rape, murder and abduction of innocent civilians has to be game over, surely? 
 

 


Monday, January 29, 2024

Oversize Racket

Over the past decade or so Guatemalan society has been serially defiled by a a number of rather epic corruption rackets, but even so, nothing even remotely on the scale of the one that UNRWA has been abetting in Gaza. 


The unique degeneracy of this scam has been the manner in which hatred and an explicit set of financial incentives (derived from monies contributed by both the ingenuous and the disingenuous) for pumping more violence into the cycle have been so deeply ingrained within it from the start. 

And just as the fraud based on poisonous ideological trickery is finally about to unravel — thanks to the exposure of a small group on its outer fringe found guilty of abominations which cannot be overlooked — up pop the usual suspects to demand its immediate, unconditional reinstatement. Jeremy Corbyn, inevitably, referred yesterday to the “moral depravity” of the decision to withhold further funding from UNRWA. 

Yet at the very least, some sort of open international enquiry and audit needs to be put in the diary by Guterres before the gravy train can start rolling again. 

This is, and has long been a CON, just like the zany narrative of historical resentment and de-legitimisation of Israel it has been blithely developing and broadcasting for decades. (In 1905, under Ottoman rule, two thirds of the population of Jerusalem was Jewish, yet the pro-Hamas propaganda line is that the Jews somehow ‘colonised’ their ancient capital and homeland.) 

In 2022 the US alone contributed $320m to this bloated scheme. UNRWA employs 13,000 staff in Gaza, one for every 114 ‘refugees’. That compares all too favourably with the 1550 serving 1.24m actual refugees in Cox Bazar, the world’s biggest facility. 

UNRWA employs more than the World Bank, and seriously outnumbers the UN staff in both Geneva (8500) or New York (6400). 

Today the WSJ reported that 1200 of these staffers are active Hamas operatives while 23% overall have participated in the Iran-backed terrorists’ military framework. 49% have been found to possess close personal or family ties with Hamas. This is more like a coffee plantation undone by leaf rust than a pristine orchard with a few bad apples in it. 

And during an extended period of alleged ‘genocide’ the number of individuals supposedly covered by the system of perpetual refugee status which underpins all this free money for the venal and hateful has risen to 5.9m from around 600,000, even though more Jews than so-called Palestinians were originally displaced in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. 

And look who might just be able to step in and assist with any temporary shortfall...