When it comes to the perverse use of language for political gain Orwell is the most oft-quoted author in English, perhaps a little over-quoted, as his observations do not necessarily encompass all aspects of the problem we face today.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Word Pictures
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
3 Body Problem, first impressions
The
top show on Netflix in Guatemala right now is Bandidos, deservedly
awarded a second season. The action kind of floats, driven by half a
dozen likeable characters and a plot which is cleverly structured yet
never feels anything other than light.
And then, in second place, we have this, 3 Body Problem ("from the makers of Game of Thrones') possibly not the ideal follow-on choice after all that enjoyable Mexican triteness. At the end of episode one I was already referring to it as the Cheesy CGI problem (though Bandidos had a bit of that too).
Not having read the original Chinese 'hard' sci-fi series by Cixin Liu, I was not immediately aware how the modern-era main protagonist in the book had been split into five different TV characters, suggesting an updated gag: 5 Body Problem.
I'm now four episodes in and I still find them a completely non-credible group of former Oxford Natscis, but the low levels of likeability I experienced in the opener are easing just a bit.
It says much that the better parts so far have been those set 40 to 50 years ago in Communist China, apart from the really unnecessarily violent opening scene.
A Generational Conflict
Instead they'd much rather lock you into a seemingly self-contained side debate about the human costs associated with eliminating Hamas for good where, even if they are losing the intellectual argument, they can lay permanent claim to the moral high ground, falsely.
Those who fought in WWII for the Allies, in a war started by enemies that had few visible red lines, did not subsequently carry around a large share of the burden of blame for the slaughters in places like Dresden or Hiroshima.
For it is self-evident that just because one supports the goal of one's own survival and the long-term removal of a systemic threat, one does not become morally complicit with every instance of callousness in the manner in which the conflict ultimately progresses.
You are probably deluding yourself however. Fascism knows few natural boundaries. To my parents' generation the opportunity costs could not have been clearer.
Israel has been obliged to wage a definitive war it had ducked for over a decade in order to eliminate an antagonist it can no longer afford to rub up against, a loud and proud nihilistic nemesis which has promised to repeat the atrocity of October 7 at every available opportunity.
This may not seem to be your fight just now, but do everyone a favour and think before you sit in judgment on those given little alternative but to fight it.
Civilians are dying, in their thousands. This is probably at least partially down to Israelis not caring (just like my parents' generation stopped caring in analogous circumstances), but it is also a consequence of Hamas caring, but in entirely the wrong way.
Still, there is no reason to believe that this war is any more monstrous than others, unless of course you have become convinced that all Jews are innately monstrous. Then you are part of the pathology.
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.
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)
Foe (2023)
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.)
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.
Plenty of ways to act like a total tool.
Flow My Tears
‘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.
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.
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.
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…
Self-representation deficits...
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.”
Bare Bones Republics
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Rock of Israel
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?
"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.