Friday, May 02, 2025
Havoc (2025)
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Missing You (Netflix)
Monday, April 28, 2025
Essence vs Experience
The dawn of Europe’s long day of rational inquiry began with the presumption, upheld by Spinoza et al, that essences precede experiences, so it is perhaps fitting, as dusk approaches, that the opposite notion is now starting to gain the upper hand.
A day or so ago I encountered an exchange on X in which JK Rowling was trolled as a “biological essentialist” and her response was simply to observe that all forms of zealotry tend to rest on an obstinate defence of fraudulent ideas.
I am about to make an argument in order to make a point — about a certain kind of argument — and I would ask Trans activists, especially the zealous kind, to bear with me, and thus forbear marching upon my house with torches and pitchforks until I have proceeded to at least partially (and tentatively) debunk the content of this argument myself.
Here we go...
In any human society at any time, in any place, one would be likely to come across homosexuality. How this manifests might vary, but it would be hard to argue with the statement that it represents a human universal. Trans-sexuality or trans-genderism on the other hand, is rather less ubiquitous and it seems reasonable to therefore conclude that any underlying biological or psychological factors are often significantly amplified by cultural factors. And therefore Trans rights must be seen to differ innately from Lesbian and Gay rights, requiring an additional layer of collective negotiation and buy-in.
I think the above paragraph sounds perfectly reasonable...but in fact I have grounded it in one of those dichotomies which may either be imperfect or even fallacious, at least in certain contexts: Nature vs Nurture.
Now, I am not going to speak for everyone who had the same education as myself, but as my years of study progressed I began to see everything in less granular terms. Meanwhile, the NATSCIs around me were probably becoming more and more reductive in their reasoning and I am well aware of Richard Dawkins’s snide “Holistier than thou” characterisation of some of the arguments which most irk him.
When one starts studying history one tends to imagine that all one has to do with any large scale event is something akin to examining the dish as it comes out of the oven and reasoning back to the original recipe.
Gradually however, one starts to comprehend that parts of the mix only really become operative in the process when exposed to each other, often in highly complex ways (Physicists are probably more on board with that intuition these days than biologists like Dawkins).
I was pondering this (occasional) fallacy of the clear distinction recently when I recalled one of the central contributions made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to twentieth century philosophy: speech is the accomplishment of thought.
This existentialist thinker had begun his career by taking aim at the duality which had dominated French thought for centuries: the Cartesian notion that Mind and Body are fundamentally different in essence — and soon determined that any attempt to prise apart thinking and speaking was likely a fools errand.
So, if we're looking for a resemblance to today’s trigger-fingery Twittersphere, Merleau-Ponty was trolling the "thought essentialists".
We are kind of stuck now with this world that is at once mechanical and relative, where we still imagine we have certainties, but the truth is that these only really make sense in relation to others, and a degree of uncertainty is necessarily baked into the whole dish.
The postmodern tendency to give precedence to the uncertain and/or wholly subjective should probably be resisted, for this leads to a discourse where either nothing matters or what certain very shouty individuals say matters, absolutely.
But choosing to die on the hill of an apparent certainty threatened by the flood waters unleashed by these forces may also not be the most productive approach to argument right now.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Mind boggles at DNA goggles…
As antisemitism flourished in Germany during the first few decades of the last century it became increasingly 'scientific', which in practice meant that the underlying prejudice was coated with a growing corpus of bogus academic interpretations.
In today's America, where ignorance has gained the same kind of prestige that science and medicine once had in early twentieth century Germany, the requirement to appear knowledgeable whilst being openly bigoted has been softened, to say the least.
To wit, this report of a 'visible' DNA test with the finding that Israel's PM is Polish.
Some time ago Benjamin Netanyahu had an actual ancestry test, which uncovered that his genes reveal a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage, which is completely unsurprising as his father emigrated from Poland to the Mandate and there met his mother, who had been born in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule.
Netanyahu's father was Polish in the way that South Asians in Idi Amin's Uganda were Ugandan i.e. a member of a deeply resented and persecuted ethnic minority.
So yes, technically he was indeed a Polish national, but the way that this antisemitic podcaster and Xcreter uses the term is rather like referring to a Mayan family living in Boston as 'Irish'.
Would these same a simple vista DNA tests determine that Obama is a native Polynesian from Hawaii?
This is all racist and stupid in equal measure, and unfortunately, unashamedly so. (Let's not even begin to wrangle with the notion of assessing people's territorial rights by relative pigmentation.)
And this is the problem we now have with ideologically-driven discourse emanating from the US on a range of different topics, especially those referencing other parts of the world, for this toxic emulsion of ignorance and thin, low-grade information is steadily seeping out into the wider world and affecting the thinking of everybody who comes into contact with it.
As a boy I read and enjoyed Arthur Koestler's provocative book The Thirteenth Tribe in which the author speculated that Ashkenazis may have descended from the Khazars of the Northern Caucasus — who had mass converted to Judaism in the early medieval period — a notion since debunked by both historians and geneticists.
It remains one of those immensely stimulating yet patently wrong hypotheticals, like Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind: worth reading if you are not the sort of person who systematically believes the last thing you read.
Ironically, Koestler seems to have imagined that by throwing doubt on the semitic origins of European jews he could take the sting out of antisemitism, yet today his theory has been appropriated by numbskull antisemites and used to make out that Israelis are on some fundamental level European settler-colonisers within a territory that has — as any broader historical analysis informs us — been under brutal and restrictive Arab and Turk colonial rule for around 1500 years.
And this when not even half of Jewish-Israeli citizens today have this Ashkenazi heritage which seems to set off the fanatical and chauvinistic simpletons.
Sunday, April 13, 2025
Rabbit Hole Contours
The 'Free Palestine' fixation bears comparison with similar ideological rabbit holes.
At the same time they often insist on highlighting handpicked, sometimes brutal truths, even as their overall disposition speaks rather clearly of a tendency to dispense with information which could prove inconvenient.
Thus the Anti-Vaxers are virulently anti-science and anti-expert in much the same way that the Pro-Pals are virulently anti-western...and anti-semitic — though they are usually at pains to disguise that particular pathology by assuming exclusive responsibility for the public interpretation of this rather hoary form of bigotry.
Adolescence...and Apaches
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
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 which 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.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
The trouble with ceasefires...
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...
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
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.
Monday, March 17, 2025
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.
Friday, March 14, 2025
Ahoy Mateys

Tuesday, March 11, 2025
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: 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?)
Saturday, March 08, 2025
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.
Monday, March 03, 2025
The Positives...
— European unity and, who knows, maybe even the prospect of concerted, collective European action?
— The extortion attempt failed.
Friday, February 28, 2025
Presence (2024)
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...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.”
“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.”
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.
Sunday, February 23, 2025
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).
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.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
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.