Can decisive action wait?

There surely cannot be any semblance of peace in the Near East until those who live and die for the dream of eradicating Jewish civilisation in the Levant have either sufficiently softened their perspective to the point of functional cohabitation or have been effectively contained by the combined actions of the majority of the interested nations around them.

All other scenarios are essentially heinous and present with the danger of further international contamination.

Some progress towards rapprochement/containment had been made prior to October 2023, but then the Iranian theocracy activated its assorted crazed clients around the region (and within the sometimes equally uncompromising and deranged western Left) — arguably quite seriously overplaying its hand…out of an apparent desperation to prevent a new detente — yet unquestionably also fostering a new level of intense and inhumane conflict which has already de-localised and could potentially drag on and lead to further chain reactions.

All any outside parties need to consider right now is what kind of decisive action (or credible threat of such) might be available to force a reset, putting the all or nothing obsessives back in their box.

Regime decapitation is the responsibility of relevant citizens, not outside parties.

Mountainhead (2025)

Is it me or are they really making movies these days in such a way that audiences are going to really struggle to decide whether they’ve seen something half decent or utterly dreadful?

Before watching this I’d seen a fragment of a review that described the dialogue as a ‘barrage’, and that’s basically all you need to know here. Like a game of buzzword bingo set to the pace of a bid caller at a Sotheby’s auction.

At times the words seem to detach themselves from the characters, leaving one with the sense that a familiar actor has been left stranded in the scene, his artificial soul having abandoned him.

There are a few laughs. The amoral tech bro caricatures are done well enough, but the drama feels superficial and forced.

Maybe it didn’t help that I live with someone who cannot abide scenes with loads of food and everyone appears too busy talking to eat, or indeed chopping away at an orange, but whenever the camera looks down, it’s still only in two pieces. 

The Surfer (2024)

 

In spite of what this publicity still might suggest, this is neither a Christmas movie nor indeed a surfing movie. It's very much a Nicholas Cage movie, and a psych-Aussies movie, but it also belongs to that noirish genre (does it have a name?) in which a male character arrives in an enigmatically detached and latently hostile location where his life starts to unravel at quite a lick.

If you liked Oliver Stone's U-Turn (1997) or Scorsese's After Hours (1985), then you will probably enjoy this, though as a caveat I would say there seems to me to be considerably more unrealised potential in this scenario, particularly in the final act.

 

 

The Wrong Candidate

 You can often identify an extremist simply by spotting how bad they are at affecting to be reasonable.

​This week I came across one of those diversionary, bad-at-being-reasonable posts which in essence claimed that Sharia courts in the UK are no different from Jewish and Catholic equivalents, the inference being that if you specifically take issue with Muslim community tribunals, you are basically a xenophobe or a racist.

This one of those false-analogy / hidden straw man arguments so beloved of contemporary 'progressives', grounded in a misrepresentation of both the underlying situation and any apparent concern being voiced about it.

To illustrate how this is really an anxiety about potential variations of culture and not about religious affiliation or indeed the nature of such institutions, I will relate a story from the Maldives in the fifteenth century.

These islands in the Indian Ocean were then governed under an Islamic political entity which could broadly be described as colourful. A vibrant society to be sure.

In 1460 they had an unexpected visit from the period's most famed scholar-traveller, Tangier-born Ibn Battuta.

To the Maldivians this appeared like an unmissable opportunity. How could they not want this man of almost unparalleled learning and knowledge of the world from the university of medieval life to be their most senior judge in Male?

They hoped to sweeten the offer with gold, assorted jewels, an official horse and litter, high-status wives, even a bevy of young slave girls.

The itinerant Mahgrebi reluctantly accepted...and then the whippings, amputations, dress-code impositions and all-round clamp down on the community's sexual mores commenced.

The problem, if indeed it’s a problem that one divines here, wasn't the court, it was the judge. (Or maybe the human embodiment of certain interpretational tendencies.)

Designated Foreigners

Anti-Colonial theory — which at its most simplistic and fanatical is little more than a binary moral judgment concerning the populations left behind as a legacy of imperialism, with precious little effort at analysis — possesses one really perverse stream whereby an ostensibly indigenous people, often a minority with a peculiar history relative to the previous situation, are assigned the role of foreign colonisers. 

This might be most obvious today in the Middle East, but in fact it has often taken its most toxic forms in Africa. If I had the time I would explain here why the Rwandan genocide could not have occurred without an imposition of some of these often deliberately muddled perceptions (along with essentially bogus ethnic categorisation) but another, easier-to-outline case is that of the Swahili peoples of the East African coastline. 

For hundreds of years before the ‘scramble for Africa’, these Muslim converts had acted as middle men between the trans-oceanic traders to their east (mainly Indians and Arabs, then later on, Portuguese) and the hinterland to their west, with its gold and other desirable commodities which were traded for Asian silks and such like. 

It is this long-term connection with the dreaded C word, commerce, or worse, Capitalism, that can prove deadly to any population once the post-colonial Marxist ideologues show up. The Swahili had emphasised to the Europeans that they were different, and once the Europeans had gone, demagogues from amongst the other Bantu-speakers were more than happy to designate them as foreign settler colonists, worthy of violent expulsion. 

In fairness, the historical choice they had made, avoiding the dangers of actual maritime trade, but exploiting their control of coastal access meant that they were also driven to exploit their pagan neighbours inland simply in order to maintain a certain lifestyle within their wealthy emporia, which included slaves. 

History is necessarily complicated, and it would be a fine thing if we could always so easily decide who the oppressors and the oppressed have been in any given situation, but that is basically the starting point of a certain ideological MO, and the irony is that it often leads to terrible conflicts between the people left behind after the most obvious oppressors have departed the scene.