Triggers

Sometimes it can be fun to detect some of the triggers currently at the disposal of the crazies in our culture.

‘Visigothic Spain’ is an anachronism, just like ‘Iron Age Scotland’. It’s perfectly normal and I would argue, legit, for historians to use modern labels for geographical zones so that their readers know what areas they are referring to. (One ought not need to remind everyone that culturally and politically a good deal has undoubtedly changed.)

Today I was I was reading about the early Jōmon culture in the far East (from c14,500 BC) and the book in question liberally makes use of terms like Japan and Korea. No need for anyone to spontaneously combust over that...right?

Yet it seems that when it comes to Spain, any attempt to use this designation to refer to the pre-modern situation breaks open a hornets’ nest of haters.

Some of the trolling that I have been treated to on Threads lately appears to reveal that Visigothic Spain now enjoys a similar status to the pre-twentieth century Jewish presence in the Middle East e.g. it’s something that the Islamists would rather you didn’t know about.

In this way, Al Andalus, or the Moorish period on the peninsula, can either be taken as Edenic and indigenous (like 'Palestine') or as a kind of gallant anti-colonial reaction to the Romans, rather than say, an imperialist project (a Caliphate no less) which duly made second class citizens of Christian and Jew alike.

‘Spain’ in this worldview is thus that tiny territorial remnant in the north which then came and stole the lands below from Allah. That cities like Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba and Mérida had a monotheistic history going back several centuries before Arabic became the official language, is seemingly a major inconvenience for the Jihadist narrative today. 

 

The trouble with ceasefires...

 

Several of the more high profile conflicts in today’s world appear far more medieval than the ones we grew up with, which tended to be driven by supposedly more modern phenomena: ideologies, nationalisms, imperialisms and so on. 

This quote comes from a book about the 1380s when England and France were already locked into what would become known as the Hundred Years War, (which actually lasted a bit longer than that). 

At the time the country rather clearly needed peace in order to avoid the financial burden and all round distraction of permanent international strife, but there didn’t seem to be a way to achieve it without giving up what was seen as a fundamental principle, sovereignty: e.g. England did not want to hold its remaining territories on the continent in ‘fealty’ to the French King, it wanted Aquitaine and Calais for example, to remain part of England. 

And because they could not make peace in any way that would be satisfactory, this war became a long drawn out game of temporary ceasefires. In such an environment, negotiations tend to bog down with all sides acutely aware during this process that the best form of defence is almost always attack. 

The English also had to crane their necks to look behind them, so to speak. In 1385 the truce between them and the Scots was due to expire on July 15. As this date approached, a massive army was assembled at York, because the French were simultaneously preparing to join forces with the Scots at the moment the ceasefire was due to expire in order to attack from the north. 

Faced with this combined threat, 20,000 Englishmen marched behind their King and all his great lords into Scotland. For reasons not entirely military, this campaign collapsed fairly quickly and the English had retreated back to Newcastle as the French and the Scots poured over the border into Cumbria. 

This invasion in turn fizzled out because these perhaps unlikely allies discovered a few of their basic incompatibilities: the French knights were apparently appalled by the uncouth habits of the Scots coupled with the horrendous absence of wine, while the latter found siege warfare utterly boring, convinced that their home territory favoured faster-paced ‘guerrilla’ attacks. 

Anyway, medieval truces were respected, for what they were, which was not peace, but rather constantly re-scheduled interruptions to the on-going fighting. 

Compare the violent competition between states here in ancient Mesoamerica, which was also stop-start, but according to fixed calendrical milestones, so a bit more like the way European football leagues are currently organised.

Experts are part of the problem…

"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past" > Spinoza

Seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Yet most historians of the phlegmatic variety will tend to admit that by the time the parallels are so obvious that they need to be called, it is often too late. 

When looking to avoid a recurrence of proto-fascist tendancies in our own times, we are generally quick to pinpoint certain streams of cranky and potentially hazardous thinking which took hold in say, early twentieth century Germany. 

This exercise fits with our sense that right now we are witnessing a widening gulf between 'populist' chatter and the discourse we associate with experts and the more technocratic sort of administrator. 

Yet one of the things that has struck me about Richard J. Evans's exposition of the situation The Coming of the Third Reich, is that beyond the antisemitism and other forms of extremist babble bubbling up in German political life at the start of the twentieth century, there was another problem emerging from an entirely different and perhaps less avoidable source — what Evans refers to as a "widespread medicalization of society".  

German scientific successes, especially in the field of medicine, had given one particular group of accredited experts an almost untouchable form of prestige in the society, and a consequence of this was the way "the concept of hygiene began to spread from medicine to other areas of life, including not only ‘social hygiene’ but also, crucially, ‘racial hygiene’." 

I take this to indicate that the interplay between the elite culture and the strange, mutating pathologies further down the chain may have been crucial in the formation of the truly 'diseased' politics which would emerge under the Nazis. 

When I came across these passages it prompted me to think about how the recent global pandemic may be informing political attitudes in 2025. 

And low and behold, today this article pops up...

Incertidumbre

 

There’s something going on in this novel which bears comparison to the conceit of the Apple TV series Severance: a world of innies and a world of outies, with formally separate memory streams and a narrative process by which the two are potentially ‘re-integrated’ even as it becomes perhaps a little less clear which of the two is the actual ‘underworld’.   

Modern long form TV seems above-averagely fascinated with journeys to and from an isolated, relatively constricted alternative reality or inframundo: Lost played with this scenario and a host of related motifs for six seasons, before finally settling on what was probably the most banal of available symbolic resolutions.

The ancients were of course fascinated with these transitions into mythological realities which abruptly coalesce for dramatic purposes with our own. There’s Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Cretan labyrinth of course, and over here we have the central narrative of the sacred book of the Quiché Maya — Popul Vuh — recounting the away games of Mesoamerican ball played by the hero Twins against the Lords of Xibalba.

I am fairly certain this isn’t Murakami’s best novel, but it strikes me as undoubtedly his most profound that I have read to date. 

However, it may well end up being hard for many to appreciate just how interesting and original it is, because it is long and packed with passages of workaday language (especially in the English translation).

Yet beneath the verbiage, Murakami’s city with its uncertain walls has a range of qualities which set it apart from other hidden worlds one might stumble across in modern literature....

1) It’s an imagined place — a story with a back-story — which sometimes assumes the properties of a real place

2) It is a hard-working multi-layered metaphor: at its simplest, for human consciousness and its processes for interfacing with the unconscious. 

And in this sense the latter assumes the role of the underworld’s own underworld, with dreamland forming something like an interstitial space between the mundane world and the wobbly-walled city. 

Murakami is noted for his blend of east and west — or perhaps for the western cultural patina he lays upon eastern intuitions — and here we can see how European ideas, like those of the psychoanalysts, are made to connect with native Japanese notions, such as those which emerge out of Shintoism. (The English translation, not the Spanish, works the title of Miyazagi’s film Spirited Away, into one passage, in italics.) 

3) The city is seemingly subjectively-constructed, for two (apparently) distinct individuals can perceive it differently from both within and without.

Something similar is intimated — though never explicitly — in Dante’s Inferno and other western tales of descent into worlds caught between literal and figurative existence. These tend to have been rather obviously customised to the cultural perspective of the poet/author, in Dante’s case that of late medieval Florence. 

Murakami also hints at a kind of Chinese Whispers effect here, whereby an individual can experience the structure and content of the city according to the misremembered or re-constructed version of another.

4) A representation of what a world might be like if somehow tailored for people who have refrained from engaging with the actual world. 

5) It is a place where time happens but has no meaning and remains somehow 'anchored', compared here to turning the pages in a book and finding that the number never changes.

6) And lastly, it functions as a kind of laboratory for testing Murakami's notions of self-hood and perennial anxieties such as incipient transparency and/or the existential version of imposter syndrome.

I may be projecting a little here, but I detect that Murakami understands the self as variations on a theme, at least two, if not more, and not all of which may be present within the sheet music book to hand at any one moment.

Each individuality is always a multiplicity and some of our multiples may right now be away getting by in another world. 

At the very least every person is a packaged duality, yet not precisely in the way Descartes saw it. Murakami himself seems a little uncertain at what he is getting at here, and the novel is better for it. 

People and places have shadows, which sometimes rebut each other and on other occasions align and merge. This phenomenon is loosely mapped onto the interplay of the subjective and the objective, and this leads to a discernment according approximately with one of my own: the possibility that we might somehow, sometimes be able to project the uncanny into the world around us. 

As Anaïs Nin said Nous ne voyons pas les choses comme elles sont. Nous les voyons comme nous sommes, though I don't think that's quite what she meant.

Only one of the basic pair can cross over between realities. There is a sense here that for some people the distinction could be more demarcated, but for others the barrier between them is far more permeable to the extent that at any one time a sentient human cannot be sure it is him or herself leading this life or whether the shadow is filling in while the ‘real’ person goes off for a metaphysical wander.

Yet these essentially fused beings are sometimes also able to share knowledge and sentiment when apart. 

Many years ago as an undergraduate I attended a fascinating series of lectures on popular beliefs in early medieval England. Inhabitants of small rural communities tended to imagine that objective reality started to blur at the physical edges of their village. They understood that certain members of their community always had one foot in this supernatural shadow reality: those whose job it was to wander, like hunters, but also some who hardly ever left home, like children. Dogs too could pick and choose which world to perceive. These ideas have been very sticky and often form the basis of Horror genre treatments in contemporary films, and in this novel Murakami also suggests that certain individuals have privileged access to existential ambiguity (though he'll swap dogs for cats). Yet the personages of this age old 'superstition' have been seemingly placed within an inherently more vague yet sophisticated cosmological geography, where the netherworld is neither simply down below us or out in the woods somewhere.

In the Afterword Murakami explains how important these fancies have always been to him. Indeed, this big book started long ago as one of his earliest short stories which appeared in the literary magazine Bunguku-kai c1980, and then, once established as a writer, he approached it five years later, from a parallel perspective, appropriately enough, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a novel I am yet to tackle. 

Now he has returned to what he sees as the core conceit because he suspects he has never quite nailed it, perhaps because underlying it there is a shimmery set of convictions which one can only catch sharper glimpses of by changing perspective. The substantial and its shadow are sometimes hard to tell apart.

Used Car Salesmen

There's some history to this 'leaders doing automobile advertisements' ritual...

Anyway, as I mentioned in a post the other day, one of the dangers of mining '1930s Germany' for gotcha parallels is that most of the really unpleasant trends in that society had established themselves quite visibly some 35 years before the Nazis came to power. And we need to factor that understanding into any comparisons we now choose to make.

At the beginning of the twentieth century fringe groups and parties in Germany — particularly those suffering from antisemitic paranoia — had, according to Richard J. Evans "introduced a new rabble-rousing demagogic style of politics that had freed itself of the customary restraints of political decorum".

The Third Reich's most noted contemporary historian in English goes on to say that it had thus "become possible to utter in Parliamentary sessions and electoral meetings hatreds and prejudices that in the mid-nineteenth century would have been deemed utterly inappropriate in public discourse."

And as a consequence of the way German political system was set up, these fringe ideas and the alarming improprieties which attended them percolated upwards into the mainstream.

Between 1900 and WWI it might have been possible to suggest that European Jews had it far worse in say France or Russia, but in Germany antisemitism was mutating in ways that augured very badly.

Early in his career Wagner had been a 'cultural antisemite', an attitude which compares somewhat to the speech crime we now refer to as Islamophobia. He took issue with Jewish culture and thought the problem would go away if Jews were properly assimilated.

But following his marriage to Liszt's daughter Cosima he seemingly shifted towards a more overtly racist conception of the situation, as did many other bigots in Germany, who could no longer keep up the cultural or religious disguise for their biases quite so effectively in the midst of rapid Jewish acculturation, conversion and intermarriage. It seems that Wagner came to believe that instead of assimilation, the only way forward for Germany would be to exclude Jews entirely from national life.

When it comes to lamentable British interactions with the Nazis one name often springs to mind: Chamberlain. Yet it was another individual of that name whose contribution was arguably even worse than our dithering late 30s PM.

This shift to racist antisemitism needed just one more component to make it truly toxic and this was, regrettably, provided by an English writer called Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married one of Wagner's daughters and whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900, was the first to explicitly combine antisemitism with Social Darwinism, retaining the old religious notion of the cosmic threat posed by a specific religious minority and adding to it the concept of a deadly ongoing struggle in the name of species improvement.

Another one of this Chamberlain's key obsessions was the denial of Jesus' Jewishness and the claiming of Christian culture and values for the Germanic peoples.

Ahoy Mateys

I suppose you have to hope that this isn’t a front for a Royal Navy base…or perhaps worse, some sort of ghastly egalitarian commune where you spend your days sowing sails and scratching at barnacles. 

The anarchist thinker David Graeber did indeed uncover some interesting goings on at a late seventeenth century pirate democracy called Libertalia on Madagascar.

In his last book before an untimely death — Pirate Utopia — Graeber describes how a kind of proto-Sugar Daddy culture on the island set off a significant socioeconomic feedback loop, which ought to be an eye opener for all those tropical, anti-colonial soapbox orators.

These boatloads of wealthy and exotic strangers unmistakably represented a significant catch for Malagasy women, presenting them with a striking opportunity for the kind of sexual and socioeconomic freedom that had previously eluded them.

The pirates came and settled with their portable wealth and their unusual political values, but had very limited local social capital and grasp of the language, which led them to cede a lot of control and autonomy to their native wives, often trusting them to manage all of their pieces of eight.

The rather surprising end result of this arrangement was the development of an independent female merchant class whose children would be established as a new and powerful aristocracy on Madagascar — not perhaps what one might have anticipated from a project whose origins lay in the decentralised ways of salty sea dogs (which derived in part from the fact that before embarking on this somewhat syndicalist seafaring lifestyle, these plunderers had mostly all grown up under a multiplicity of different forms of government, some even former slaves).

Libertalia went from Popular/Leveler Democracy to Complacent Aristocracy via Merchant Capitalism, which is not quite how Marx plotted out the Dead Man’s Tale of human history.

Uncovered Well

“Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.”

That snippet from the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible (‘Translators to the Reader’) will serve as an introduction to this post in which I attempt to demonstrate to any bilingual readers out there, why I think Haruki Murakami manifests as a more interesting and stylistically adept writer, en Castellano rather than in the somewhat bland renderings of his prose in English.

It even features a rather appropriate mention of a well  — of signification —  something the Japanese author is known to have a bit of an obsession with.

In the English translation there is sometimes an apparent intent to simplify, though not being able to read the original Japanese, I can’t be sure if the more elaborate language in the Spanish is Murakami’s own.

And one might even attempt to argue that the latter language is the more inherently symbolically laden of the two here.  

Some relevant examples from The City and its Uncertain Walls...

 

ENGLISH: Time, no matter what, ticked away, ceaselessly.

SPANISH: El tiempo no se detiene, continúa tallando y desmenuzando la realidad sin descanso.

ENGLISH: A part of my heart remained still not fully known to me. A realm that even time cannot reach.

SPANISH: Dentro de mi propio alma, aún había numerosos territorios que desconocía por completo, territorios en los que ni siquiera en tiempo podía entrometerse.

ENGLISH: Or maybe I was just tired of being alone and wanted someone I could have a pleasant conversation with. But that wasn’t all there was to it. Intuition told me that.

SPANISH: Pero tal vez las cosas fueran, en realidad, mucho más prosaicas y solo me moviera el deseo de traicionar la indolente soledad diaria y de tener alguien a mi lado con quien conversar durante una de las muchas noches que pasaba en silencio.

ENGLISH: To take it a step further, I’d have to say that at this point I was bereft of any intentions or plans.

SPANISH: Yo mismo encajaba a la perfección en la categoría de quien apenas actúa bajo la luz de propósitos nítidos y definidos

ENGLISH: He insatiably crammed in knowledge, but it never was enough, since the world overflowed with an outrageous amount of information. Even with his special abilities, of course, there had to be a limit to one individual’s capacity. It was like scooping up ocean water with a bucket—though there might be differences in the size of the bucket.

SPANISH: La información surge sin descanso, como de un pozo sin fondo, y no importa cuán dotado esté uno para registrarla: su capacidad siempre se verá superada, sobrepasada por el caudal informativo. Es como querer achicar el agua del océano con una cubeta; no importa que la cubeta de una persona sea más grande que la de otra porque la limitación es obvia y similar para ambos.

(Notice how we even lost a Murakami well there?)

 

 

 

 

Thirsty Ghosts

 

Perhaps one of the lasting appeals of leading a normative life in a modern, developed nation, is the shield this usually provides from the naggings of Nothingness. 

The Ballad of a Small Player is ‘sung’ by Freddy, ‘Lord Doyle’, a partially fugitive larcenist attached to the baccarat tables of Macau, who has wound up outside this bubble, and like many who find themselves in this position, exchanges active or unconscious avoidance with dependant engagement, (almost) literally going out each night to ask Nothingness for a dance.

As with Osborne’s also much enjoyed later novel The Glass Kingdom, the basic premise is the situation of an amoral white person with a hoard of loot which doesn’t really belong to them, isolated within a modern, yet dangerously abstruse section of Asia. Yet here the author also rather pleasingly locates his protagonist within the local mythology of the Hungry Ghost — and more generally those Chinese conceptions of the supernatural along with their superstitions surrounding the operations of chance.

I was long keen to acquire this book, perhaps appropriately watching as its Amazon price fluctuated alarmingly up and down rather like the shares of Nvidia, seemingly never quite sure when the right moment “to get in’ would finally arrive.

Then later reading it as I simultaneously started to get into Severance, I realised that one does not have to have experienced these precise situations in order to find them existentially creepy, thanks to an anxiety-inducing latent familiarity.

Hereabouts, us ‘hybrids’ sometimes ponder whether we are ex-pats or immigrants: innies or outies, if you like. The answer comes in part from our relationship with the everyday flimsiness of life in the partially modern environment, and those naggings of Nothingness. Whilst there are known examples of actual fugitives in this milieu, along with some partials, collectively the whole group seems to exhibit some lingering concerns regarding where they stand in regard to dematerialisation.

Second Reich: misfits into the mainstream

The 1930s in Germany are very much back in fashion again, so I thought I would take the oft repeated advice of the tankies and educate myself...even if I have long been possessed by the prejudice that the vast majority of all those Hitler books are not really intended for serious historians. 

This, the first volume in the acclaimed Evans trilogy, does however cast its eye back into the slightly deeper history, the so-called Second Reich established by Bismarck — and thus provides some very interesting insights into how the bizarre scapegoating of the Jewish population hypertrophied, having first flourished as a rogue and opportunistic response to forces buffeting Germany from outside, thereafter creeping into the mainstream.

​In the period between unification and WWI, there were approximately 600,000 Jews in Germany —  just 1% of the total population —  heavily concentrated in the larger cities, with a quarter of the total in Berlin. 

They had long been excluded from landholding and discrimination continued to deny them positions in the establishment (army, civil service, universities etc.) but, beyond finance, they were well represented in medicine, law, science, teaching, journalism and the arts in general. New forms of retailing, like department stores, were an area of economic specialisation and politically they tended to cluster around the centre and the left, with a pronounced devotion towards German nationalism, as the Jewish minority had strongly favoured the formation of a unified nation state.

Explicitly antisemitic political platforms started to emerge at the end of the century. These agitators had responded to a rather nasty global recession caused by American capitalist excess, as usual (failed US railway investments in the main on this occasion), which led to widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Europe.

They found it particularly easy to stir up resentment of the Jews in areas where there were almost none, deploying the age-old trope of accusing a distant and somewhat obscure religious minority of conspiracies against both the nation and the economic wellbeing of 'traditional' farming communities. 

In this way Jews became an emblem for everything a specific, pretty unsuccessful demographic in Germany had come to detest about their changing world, particularly its most modern and progressive trends in the cultural, social and financial spheres. 

The German Conservative party soon started to see this motley crew of antisemitic demagogues as a significant electoral threat to their hegemony in the countryside and thus developed their own copycat programme, which demanded an end to the 'widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life'.

A clear example of how misfits, amoral reprobates, crazies and all round losers — nearly always held back by their own internal conflicts — somehow manage to pollute the political mainstream, even if that ultimately spells doom for their own relevance.

The Positives...

There are some notable pluses from the Oval Office debacle.

— European unity and, who knows, maybe even the prospect of concerted, collective European action?

— The extortion attempt failed.

 

Zelensky, with his firmer grasp on facts, history and reality had clearly made up his mind that he could not sign up for partial resource colonisation unless he could anticipate some substance to any deal done later by Trump with Russia.

Prior to this meeting and during it, he must have read the signals as Trump consistently echoed Putin’s ‘talking points’, and the pretence of fair mediation and western strength in the face of Russian intimidation and posturing crumbled.

Ukraine, like Israel, has learned to its cost that ceasefires are no match for formal peace — not even in amuse-bouche form — of the kind where sovereignty is firmly recognised and protected.

Zelensky has been very clear about this and Trump and his sidekick were foolish to imagine that this resistance could easily be overcome by a burst of verbal bullying and public humiliation.

Most peoples engaged in existential conflict long for peace, but almost never lose sight of the need to protect their basic requirement to exist on their own terms.

— Russia is not in the position of relative strength that the White House needed to project in order to help itself to those minerals.

Ukraine has been brutalised, but is not on the verge of disintegration. Any celebrations (and gloating) by Moscow may well be premature. This was less of a missed opportunity for Zelensky than the other parties, present two days ago in the Oval Office, or in spirit.

— Each time Trump tries to impose his own narrative — in this instance, arguably not even HIS, or the USA’s — he says or does something which undermines it, usually characterised by ignorance or pettiness, and this was no exception.

— Zelensky didn’t just sit back and take it. There had been visible green shoots with both Macron’s and Starmer’s responses in the same venue in the days before. Perhaps others will now unfurl a bit more too. 

Overall, many things were damaged, perhaps irreparably on Friday, but it is now certain that Trump will never be able to credibly assume this ‘all the cards’ position and/or adopt these distorted rhetorical positions again, and that has to be a good thing for the democratic world.

 

Presence (2024)

No doubt we’ve all come across umpteen movies featuring couples with one or two children moving into a new suburban home already occupied by some sort of supernatural shute.

After a week or so of pulpy, entertaining nonsense we were expecting more of the same (especially as our last Lucy Liu movie, the night before, had been proper dross), but for some reason we had forgotten to inform ourselves in advance that the director here was Steven Soderbergh, the acknowledged master of refreshing genre rehabilitations.

And so we found Presence to be kind of superb on almost every level that mattered. The skillfulness of the film-making was so eye-popping I couldn’t wait to see who’d announced themselves this way! 

 

There’s one great line in the dialogue written by David Koepp (known for Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Panic Room and Ghost Town) which I cannot repeat here for spoilery reasons, but if you manage to remember it at right moment later on, you will realise that it contained the nicely-camouflaged seed of the whole story, and thus provides a perfect recollected accompaniment — as a kind of zesty sauce — with which to accompany the final reveal.

 

 

Subtracted Dimensions

There’s one rather great passage in The Perfect Crime in which Baudrillard piles in on three of his technological bugbears simultaneously —  High definition, Real Time and Interactivity  — carelessly (or perhaps carefully) confusing these three ‘useless’ enhancements, which in practice, he believed, turn out to be painfully lossy...

“The highest definition of the medium corresponds to the lowest definition of the message...

“It is merely a mania for making an image no longer an image or, in other words, it is precisely what removes a dimension from the real world...The more we move towards that perfect definition, that useless perfection, the more the power of illusion is lost.

“Real Time: the instantaneous proximity of the event and its double in information...Now, there is something obscene about the instant replication of an event, act or speech and their immediate transcription, for some degree of delay, pause or suspense is essential to thought and speech...there is a profound incompatibility between real time and the symbolic rule of exchange.”

His grudge with interactivity is somewhat less precise, but he seems to be saying that there is a level of exchange in the real world, with its own natural rhythm, which is being clouded by these extra layers, and his way of characterising this is very much his own: “An interactive compulsion...which combines artificial insemination and premature ejaculation in the same operation.” 

 

Old Guy (2025)

 

Simultaneously shambolic and lifeless, perhaps the thing which most annoyed me about this movie is the way it made me sit through its entire running time. I was never quite bored enough.

The director, Simon West and two of the leading trio of stars have been around the block. How did they end up appearing so clueless here?

Waltz's ageing hitman Dolinski says that he only kills people who 'had it coming', yet as the body count mounts here it is extremely hard to understand (or care) why any of these people were slotted to die. (You almost start yearning for the offing of at least one of the innocent bystanders Cooper Hoffman's Wihlborg has seemingly built his formative reputation on.)

By the end of the movie Dolinski has started to care for Lucy Liu's Anata. We, however, did not care at all for this tacked on romantic sub-plot, even though it potentially offered some release from the mysteries of the main one.

He has also started to care for his psychotic Gen Z replacement. I definitely never did.

Strangled Context

That we pay more attention to (and some of us care more about) the deaths of the Bibas boys than countless civilian victims of the war(s) in the Middle East is not an expression of 'semitic supremacy' as some have ludicrously and chauvinistically suggested, but an example of one of the key ethical distinctions which underpins the values which our civilisation operates by (or at least likes to think it does).

During WWII the Germans killed many thousands of British non-cambatants, a good number of them women and children, but Brits — rightly — remain far more disturbed about the purposeful and systematic slaughter of whole communities by the Nazis, in both eastern and western Europe. 

 

The relative numbers involved are irrelevant. That is why the introduction to Thames TV's The World at War made this point above all others, focusing on the victims in one small village in Normandy, not the thousands of French civilians who died during that battle or others, from varying degrees of carelessness and callousness on both sides.

​Depending on context, one death in a movie can horrify us far more than say Arnie mowing down an entire Central American army in Commando.

When making these ethical / existential judgments, none of which can ever be absolute, we always have to contextualise.

And, as we can see today, the bad guys will sometimes be working extra hard to blur or bedim the context...to constantly throw in metrics of false equivalence or the kind of simple statistical one-upmanship that is never welcome when we are trying to dissect complex moral issues.

 

Companion (2025)

Following advice from a friend I read nothing in advance of this viewing. Not absolute zero, but cold. 

 

 
For the first half hour or so I was thinking 'OK, Black Mirror-lite' and maybe also taking in Sophie Thatcher as Anya Taylor-Joy-lite in this role too. But then I remembered how good she was in Heretic and as her performance here starts to escalate, I began to shed that sense that I was getting something less than I needed from Companion.

It might be a bit less self-consciously clever than a lot of its contemporary equivalents, but it's fun, and humour is generally underrated in Sci-Fi. This film is not really about our most pressing technology anxieties, rather it gives us a scenario grounded in humans being greedy and dumb in familiar ways with a patina of gender politics.

If I have a quibble it's that the situation requires the tech to be both near adjacent to our own and yet simultaneously far more advanced, and that in this context the humans do all seem just a bit blasé about machine sentience.

But as I said, the whole thing is a bit of an extended, entertaining and partially disguised gag, and so that apparent disconnect from projected reality doesn't matter too much.

Bibas

This family name is a handy tool for gently, rationally critiquing the shrieky 'settler colonist' narrative ("babies are colonisers too!") deployed by jihadist 'Palestinians' and their enablers abroad.

The murdered boys' most notable ancestor, named Judah, was a Rabbi in Jerusalem in the eighteenth century, whose thinking is considered a precursor of modern Zionism, in that he conceived of the anticipated movement back to Judea as both a political and a religious motion.

The Bibas surname derives from the Greek spoken in what is now Libya after the Roman expulsion, prior to Arab colonisation.

The clan established themselves as renowned physicians and rabbis in Visigothic then Moorish Iberia until they were expelled once again by the Catholic monarchs in 1492.

They then re-settled in North Africa, though parts of the family showed up in Corfu and Hebron, in the 'West Bank'.

Later, during the twentieth century, they had put down roots in Yemen until, you guessed it, they were expelled again as a result of the existential post-colonial conflict initiated by the Arabs in 1948.

Unlike the 'Palestinian' refugees created by this war, they had no help, either physical or ideological, from the UN, and so had little alternative but to shift themselves to the fledgling haven state, like hundreds of thousands of other Jews, similarly displaced at the time.

Shiri Bibas, she of the initial dead body 'mix-up', came from a Jewish family with a combined Latin American history: her father arrived in Israel from Argentina, while her mother's family had long been living in Peru.

Nonsuch

On September 21, 1665 Pepys made a solo business trip to Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, near Epsom, carrying a substantial sum of money, "so rode in some fear of robbing".

His resulting diary entry (below) is fascinating on many levels, as Nonsuch* is one of England's great lost palaces.

 

 

 

Certainly the garden was already in a bit of a state — even if there were still paintings by Holbein and Rubens indoors — and less than twenty years after Pepys's visit the palace was demolished entirely.

It had been the biggest of Henry VIII's building projects, at a cost of ten million quid in today's money, and his only surviving legitimate son, the future Edward VI, was born there. The name was chosen to suggest a royal crib of then unparalleled presumption.

Henry had chosen the spot because it was close to one of his favoured hunting grounds, yet the site would prove impractical because of the lack of available water for domestic use. In the end it seems that the King only visited three times.

The property was returned to the Crown with the Restoration in 1660. Ten years after that, Charles II gifted it to his mistress Barbara Villiers, naming her Baroness Nonsuch. I approve of that name. 

 

But the Baroness was a gambler —  and a loser —  and had soon piled up so much debt that the palace's upkeep was beyond her, so she fancied selling it off in pieces. It was pulled down in 1682.

These elms mentioned by Pepys were the last survivors as, according to John Evelyn, who would visit a year later, "the rest of these goodly trees, both of this and of Worcester Park adjoining, were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels in the late war."

There's a certain ambiguity about the "getting" in the last sentence there. Anyone with any familiarity with the Diary will be aware that Samuel was ever a predator...and that he liked them young. 

 

However, I suspect that in this instance, Pepys is probably simply noting the possibility of someday hiring a servant girl with a fine singing voice. In the absence of Netflix, home entertainment in his household largely consisted of making music.

 

* The only other place to bear this rather lovely name was the earliest ever prefab building, made in the Netherlands and then put back together at one end of old London Bridge. Also lost.

 

 

 

 

Confused?

Any confusion of the chronic sort arises because this is a cult, inevitably grounded in another, typically Fascism or Marxism. 

These toxic belief systems are inherently fact-proofed, possessed of fantasised, impractical, often malignant ends which justify almost any means…or misinformation. 

Cultists on both ends of the spectrum can never bring themselves to express any kind of doubt or reproval — indeed they are always like the MAGA witnesses to that conceptualised Trump murder on 5th Avenue. 

They didn’t see, can’t see, because they’re in the rabbit hole. 

Their first response is to not even engage emotionally or intellectually with the event we have all just witnessed — be it a carefree redneck insurrection at the Capitol or Arabs getting into the Jihadi groove around strangled babies’ coffins — but instead to cast around for examples of bad behaviour by their antagonists in the bizarre belief that the most important thing is to somehow immediately offset the unfiltered degeneracy which has just been witnessed…and smoothly internalised — by just about anyone whose brain isn’t already a permanent dumpling in shitweasel soup.

Signs of the times

Some key signs (harvested from 20th century history) that your democracy may be at risk..

— Parties seeking power with deliberately constrained manifestos, but which make no secret at all of wanting to 'go further' once conditions are more favourable to their actual agenda

— Pots calling kettles black....everywhere. In these circumstances all citizens perhaps need to examine the rhetoric of their favoured mouthpieces as a possible mirror image of the worldview they seemingly deplore

— Political movements based on extremism steadily absorbing into their ranks previously more moderate voices, sucking the air out of the centre (and, often at the same time suckering it) and thus reducing the viability of parliamentary-style containment of the underlying conflicts. 

 

Ask yourself, is the coalition you gravitate towards more like a co-option?

Not Scientists all the way down...

Dawkins had a pretty good stint as the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, but when it comes to the public understanding of Atheism, you often need to turn him upside down to get any sense out of him. (You perhaps have to wonder whether he actually understands the concept himself.)

In this clip we witness one of his most-shared and basically rather wrongheaded polemics against the belief in God.

What he fails to acknowledge is that behind every concrete representation of divinity, there lurks a more abstract question, such that it’s not in fact scientists all the way down when it comes to debunking the notions leading us back to the primary metaphysical issue.

And what is that? Well, most of us implicitly or explicitly believe one of three things. 1) The cosmos we experience is eternal and total. It’s all there is and all there ever was or can be. It is its own explanation. 2) The cosmos was instigated by a something or a someone and derives its meaning from the latter’s own essence, good, bad or indifferent 3) It just popped into existence randomly and possesses neither a purpose nor a path towards meaning.

I suppose there is a kind of fourth option, a set of hybrids between 2 and 3, in which there is a Creator who made a cosmos that is essentially purposeless, and maybe also meaningless. Because it could.

Anyway, if one chooses to express these preferences culturally, one is inevitably more likely drawn to the body of myths in one’s own culture. This is perfectly a natural human tendency and in no way represents any fundamental failure of logic.

If one opts for Jesus, the fact that one is at least agnostic towards Mohammed does not somehow immediately invalidate the entire notion of Deism, as Dawkins suggests here, because that intuition ultimately rests on the abstract questions which take shape beneath all faith systems.

One can reject all religions and still not be an atheist, just as one can be a kind of atheist content to wallow within the mythologies that we have constructed from the primary existential anxieties that all sentient humans experience, making use of the ways that they approach ultimate truth from one stage removed.

Dawkins has an even sillier argument against belief in a creator: his Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy, which is patently false, because this imagined supernatural marauder is not the same kind of placeholder for an explanation, not just of the origin of Being itself, but also of how we individual beings ought go about being — while we can — which most of our extant gods tend to be.

 

Insider

The threat from within has come to Europe to warn Europeans about the threat from within. 

The Left side of History

Here we see a key fallacy about History exposed — one cannot be both on the right side of it and constantly touting its tendency to repeat itself! 

Perhaps the most influential conspiracy theory of the last century and a half goes under the name of Marxism. 

Its originator, Karl Marx, began by saying that the driving force of History is always resistance and struggle, then later on changed his mind and said it wasn’t. For the foil-hatted die-hards this was not a significant update to the model, but rather a lasting excuse for having it both ways.

Even at the time of its early confection, Marxism fared badly when exposed to actual history: the people who owned the land and those tied to it were thinking and behaving in ways that significantly challenged the predictions of the doctrine. (Perhaps aware of this, Marx never much cared for peasants, speaking of “the idiocy of rural life”, a form of bigotry that boded ill for the rustic sort once his conspiracy had been elevated to state religion status in Russia, and elsewhere.)

Conversely however, History has tended not to falter to anywhere near the same extent whenever exposed to Marxism. 

For this reason one of the most interesting things we can note today about the 1930s today is the mental state of the 1920s — almost a whole decade before the Nazis had seized power in Germany, the Marxist left in Germany had a workable theory about what was going to happen — which may or may not have played a part in how events subsequently unfolded —  and certainly influenced the immediate retrospectives as WWII came to an end and thereafter, at least for the first couple of decades the end of the Reich. 

The essence of the prediction was that Germany’s advanced techno-capitalists were secretly planning to fabricate a mass political movement which would serve their class interests and profit goals. (Sound at all familiar?) 

At the time this forecast was backed by precious little hard evidence and there were few concrete signs of an emerging fascist base. Yet as I have mentioned previously (in regard to the situation in Spain), these prophecies have a self-fulfilling quality about them. 

So when today we speak of ‘History repeating itself’, we need to carefully distinguish between the sequences of events themselves and the sequences of mentalities which influenced how those events subsequently took shape. 

Actors on one extreme of the spectrum often imagine their antagonists before the latter even materialise. In effect, they help conjure them into existence. They are then likely to blame this enemy which they have at least partially fabricated for everything bad that results from the confrontation thus engendered. 

This broadly applies to both Left and Right, and usually results in a fast-gyrating spiral. If you don’t believe me, consider (briefly) the Middle East...

Centripetal Mimicry

One thing that future historians may marvel at is the interlocking pattern of cheeky inversion which characterises modern discourse e.g. Jihadists moaning about colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, tech bros and populists griping about the demise of accountability, democracy and free speech, and so on.

A new form of post-truthful leadership (or mouthpiece-ship) has come to the forefront, one which habitually makes use of near blatant, pseudo-factual subterfuge fabricated to polarise people around tribal identities which many mistake for rational worldviews.

I see this as very much part of the phenomenon highlighted by Moisés Naim in The Revenge of Power, whereby “the centrifugal forces that weaken power called forth a new set of centripetal forces that tend to concentrate it.”

The political malignancy of today is firmly based on mimicry: “What we’re seeing today,” Naim argues, “is a revanchist variant that mimics democracy while undermining it, scorning all limits. It is as if political power had taken stock of every method free societies have devised over the centuries to domesticate it and plotted to strike back...

“Contending sides no longer seek to accommodate each other in a quest for minimum viable governing arrangements. Instead, they deny the basic legitimacy of the other side’s right even to contend for power...

“Lacking an alternative explanation that they can use to bolster their legitimacy, they go to considerable trouble to dissemble, trying to pass themselves off as exemplars of a system they’re determined to dismantle.“