Trump’s primary qualities as an electoral disruptor are very personal to him. They permit him to form two unlikely coalitions, one for and one against.
(And in the US of course, there is a more or less explicit underlay of religious dingbattery.)
Trump’s primary qualities as an electoral disruptor are very personal to him. They permit him to form two unlikely coalitions, one for and one against.
My first American girlfriend (my second serious girlfriend) possessed a Pontiac Firebird.
It was red, and the doors didn't open for some reason, so getting in and out felt authentically 'Dukes of Hazard'…though this was Long Island.
I think perhaps that I now regret that I was too busy responding to the curiosity of the people around me - the 'Englishman in New York' circus act - to have fully applied my own curiosity to the milieux.
However, 80s New York did write itself into my consciousness in important ways, and much like 80s Moscow, has taken its place as one of those destinations I have chalked off, but can never return to.
I had my second-most terrifying mid-air emergency experience on one of these in December 1989, returning from what had been my second trip to Central America.
Much sex was had in the rear toilets.
Referring to events in Amsterdam this week as a ‘pogrom’ is, on significant levels, not that much different to referring to events in Gaza as a ‘genocide’.
Hyperbolic use of analogues does a massive disservice to historical victims.
That said, one also needs to maintain a keen eye on the qualitative differences.
If Maccabi fans acted like football hooligans, in terms of chants and small to medium-scale property damage, accompanied by tribalist aggression, this does not justify an escalation to the next level, i.e. mob targeting of a specific cultural-ethnic group — any more than anything about the ‘context’ somehow justified October 7 — or indeed anything about the way the war has been conducted, retroactively.
‘Football’ contains, sublimates even, many of our worst masculine instincts, but there are certain things that it should never be allowed to provide sanctuary for, under any circumstances.
This may indeed be one of those posts requiring that prefix.
More silver linings, beyond the fact that we won’t have to endure another contested US election, which would probably have destabilised American democracy more than anything Trump can do from inside the White House, especially with the Senate providing 'guard rails' as its Republican leader put it this morning…
Unless Trump decides to go full South American, there’s a natural 4-year term limit to how much more of his nonsense we will have to endure. (Complemented by the age factor.)
This gives the Dems a significant full reset opportunity in 2028, and they will need to take full advantage of the preparation time that they seemingly lacked this time around.
Whatever one thinks of the domestication of the Donald by the GOP, he came into this campaign less as an outsider surrounded by genuinely fringe and toxic Alt-Right ideologues. In fact, in spite of all the lying he continues to do, it’s the Dems’ base that has looked the more detached from factual reality at times.
The Republicans might have shifted to a a Trump alternative, Trump-lite, still focussing on the key populist issues and the economy and still won yesterday. That would have set up something looking more like a pencilled-in 8-year period in the wilderness for the progressive agenda.
Instead, as of today, the clock starts to tick towards a definitive conclusion and even if Donald does deliver on some of his ‘winning’ promises, we know that much of this Presidency will have the appearance of a shit show. And with any luck, by 2028 the Dems will have finally learned how to take advantage of this without relying exclusively on ad hominem attacks and fear mongering.
Vance has obvious limitations. Elon? Eek.
Harris did not improve on Biden’s performance in a single country across the country. Small percentage drop-offs everywhere amounted to an apparently substantial shift overall. Great care must be taken by the Dems in three years, but ideally sooner, in identifying the candidate and message combination which will likely reverse these losses amongst key ethnic and demographic groups. They need to show a much better understanding of the sensibilities driving these groups relative to the proposition they pump out.
Meanwhile, the next four years could turn out to be truly pivotal in European history, for Trump has now assumed the role of crash test dummy. If he delivers back home in a way that satisfies the instincts of his voters, especially the newer ones, this could empower political movements across the old continent, for whom border control would be their political battering ram. If he fails, or at least disappoints, surrounding himself in unbearable chaos, then the European centre might yet hold.
The instant the people under the care of UNRWA wholeheartedly embrace peaceful coexistence and a broadly secular form of nationhood, a version of this state will almost immediately appear, as if by miracle.
Ceasefires are not peace, they are an obstacle towards that end, for all they do is force a reset of the terms of on-going resistance to any mutually-viable settlement.
Those who choose to ignore or even deny this are either being very naïve or extremely disingenuous.
Other than a decisive, irreversible victory for either one of the 'sides', with all the horrors that would entail, the only way this conflict ever concludes is with a peace deal. Resistance is little more than perpetuation without any kind of reasoned objective in the medium or long terms.
And whenever I hear ‘resistance’ to describe the often un-tempered hostility of one set of combatants, I point out the bigger picture historically, which is this. The people of the Levant have spent the past millennium and a half resisting enforced Islamicisation from various external ethnic representatives of that faith. First Arabs, then Turks and now it seems, Persians as well, though up to now largely via surrogates.
This pressure was only briefly interrupted by a counter surge from the West, involving Germans and French-speaking Scandinavians in the main, and their rather stop-start attempts to forcibly re-Christianise the same region.
1500 years of war and oppression, sandwiched between these two self-regarding and enveloping civilisations. THAT is a story of resistance which has the scale which makes it worthy of primary consideration today, and not the one which is little more than a lasting expression of UN guilt for its ham-fisted attempts to break the cycle in the last century.
Nations are ‘imagined communities’, some imagined rather better than others, and as we have seen during this US election cycle, there are both superior and inferior imaginations in the mix.
So, the nation state is not any kind of absolute good. Why should it be? But together they make up our current international order which, if not optimal, is itself superior to many of the alternatives.
History has an interesting and somewhat overlooked lesson for us here. Incipient nations which consciously reject a clear opportunity to add the suffix “-hood” when the opportunity first arises, pay a very heavy price. To wit, Cuba and Palestine.
There is an element of near mythological original sin in each of these refusals. And both have since tried to over-compensate by donning the hair shirt of Marxist victimhood in a not particularly convincing manner.
Cuba might have gained independence at the same time as the other Spanish possessions in the Americas, such as Guatemala. But it was one of the most terrible of enslavement-based economies and the criollos, Cubans of Spanish descent, feared what would happen if they were left without a rescuer of last resort.
So they chose to pass on self-determination. Later, when the matter seemed more feasible and urgent, they were easy prey for that anti-colonial coloniser just a short raft-trip away.
And so they paid the price. Freedom came at a far bigger cost and most of their efforts to re-define it on their own terms have had the appearance of ideological self-harm.
Palestine also had the chance to embrace nationhood. Not just in 1948 in fact, for the carrot has been dangled repeatedly, but the temptation has never been able to outweigh the urge to continue the 1500-year-old project of forcibly Islamicising the entire Levant, by which I mean not only what the UN considers to be Israel, but also Lebanon.
It’s as if they ‘imagine’ themselves incapable of enjoying this formalised upgrade in status should any of the other ‘dhimmis’ of the medieval caliphate also be to enjoy it.
Like those Cuban criollos with their African slaves. The hold on to the delusion that the new order would have to encompass the old one.
“Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history.”
Really enjoyed this, but it's one of those which I perceive might not be for everyone, and what was extremely prickly for me, could be almost stultifying for others.
Gaza is often described rather loosely as an 'open air prison', notably by David Cameron.
What is far more resembles however is one of the great Jesuit missions set up during the early seventeenth centuries within the amorphous border zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Rather than being taught the violin, agriculture and how to sing in a choir, UNRWA, the modern equivalent of the Society of Jesus, appear to mainly want to pass on a form of cosmic grievance and hatred, but the effect is the same for the Gazans as it was for the Guaraní: total dependency.
They are forced to live within an artificial, anomalous legal bubble in which they are utterly infantilised, and thereby absolved of all responsibility for their own actions, and attitudes.
And UNRWA, just like the Jesuit order, defends the permanency of this state of tutelage for largely self-serving reasons.
Their ‘protected’ community needs more external aid than any other human population on Earth because, how else could they even exist?
They have to be comforted that theirs is not the ordinary lot of citizens, the task of building a prosperous secular society. UNRWA feeds them, not just with actual victuals paid for by outsiders, but also with an existential fantasy, a vision of a promised land, a world without the evil of Israel, without Jews and other infidels, a return to how things were before all the sins were committed, and these will of course all be forgiven.
One interesting difference however. The Jesuit missions resulted in a form of genocide. The Guaraní were incapable of adapting to their physical and spiritual cage, and thus died off rather rapidly.
Meanwhile in Gaza, in spite of a reported 40,000+ casualties of this recent war, the population has increased by a further 2% October to October.
It may be relevant that the Jesuits chose to immerse a ferocious people (Guaraní means war) in a permanent condition of peace, whereas UNRWA...
Marxism is a dialectical system, which on some levels means that it is more interested in where we have been and where we are going than where we are at now. (Sometimes emphatically so.)
Kore-eda Hirokazu is my favourite director working in world cinema today, and all the finest qualities of his work, particularly when working in Japan and and with child actors, are on display here.
But not his writing, because the screenplay was produced by Yûji Sakamoto, most noted for his plays, television scripts and song lyrics.
Its episodic structure, featuring three re-treads of the same temporal ground, will have people reaching for their Rashōmon comparisons, but these are not three separate, subjective interpretations, but rather alternatively-skewed re-tellings, blending some things we've seen with things we haven't, with an adjusted mix of protagonists, central and support, seemingly with an objective of adding a bit more murk even as some clarity gradually emerges.
Within this tripartite structure, the narrative is a little disjointed with perceptible gaps that deliberately disrupt the experience of flow between scenes.
All this means that, on some levels, Monster feels a bit like hard work.
It certainly didn't help that in the version we watched, the hard-coded subtitles were a little off. It wasn't so much that the language was inaccurate, just that the way it was rendered came across as mechanical and affectless, and I'd imagine that the precision and tone are very important to this Cannes Best Screenplay winner. (It also took the Queer Palm in 2023.)
We also felt there were a few cultural references that went flying past us, and the ambience of urgent unfamiliarity was perhaps accentuated by the setting, around Lake Suwa (in Nagano prefecture), characteristic of a form of Japan one rarely comes across in the movies.
Freed from the need to tell the story with words, Kore-eda is conspicuously devoting himself to the visuals. He calibrates the colour palette in a manner I've not seen done before, which is both fun and a little distracting (one has a sense of being bombarded with details, foreground and background) and some of the scenes have that exquisite, ethereal quality which one tends to associate with the hand-drawn animations of Miyazaki — complemented by the equally diaphanous final score of the late Ryuchi Sakamoto.
Is Monster worth all the heightened attention (and sensibility) it appears to require? Resoundingly yes, I would say.
(For the record, one reviewer on IMDB commented that the 'monster' of the title is Japanese society and its mores. This is very much NOT a horror movie, but there does seem to be an underlying premise at work in the story that this society can sometimes function as a hall of mirrors, making it that much harder to make observations without perceiving malformations which are not really there.)
One of the reasons that the Democrats have failed to smother the threat of Trump seems rather more obvious to me than to them.
They relentlessly take the Donald at face value. In doing so they place him in the same bucket as maybe half of his supporters — so when the Democrats call him a dictator, these folk say "hell, yeah!"
Meanwhile, the remainder of his supporters more or less hold onto the idea that what he says on campaign is just the idiot fodder necessary to carry the swing states and that, once elected, he will do what the big business, libertarian elites want him to do and not the MAGA-hat morons.
Some of this lot are (rightly) scared that perhaps, after all, it's not so straightforward to read Trump this way. But the Democrats are doing nothing to address this potentially mythical "just pretending' version of Trump. Instead they relentlessly mock and/or fear-monger in response to the flow of the "just what it says on the tin" rhetoric, which somehow provokes them into this permanent pattern.
Essentially this means that their riposte to all the scary nonsense is only of interest to his base and they take it as reinforcement, the part of scary that's a thrill ride.
It really doesn't matter that Trump should be taken at face value if enough highly educated, successful individuals think he shouldn't be. They vote, they influence, and their position needs a counter-position.
Harris’s strategy of calling Trump a fascist is precisely calibrated not to win over moderate Republicans, however counter-intuitive that might seem.
You can argue, with little exaggeration I believe, that the distinguishing feature of the Quran compared to the other holy texts of the Abbrahamic desert delusion, is that it functions more or less explicitly as an instruction manual, at the collective level.
As with Shōgun, it was hard to appreciate just how good the second season of Sherwood was until the last few episodes had run.
The
slow build works differently here though. James Graham begins by
setting up a series of adjacent narrative bubbles populated with
well-defined characters. This makes the initiating drama feel a bit like
a British working class soap opera. Quite soon however adjacency
becomes intersection, at first in a manner which feels a bit arbitrary,
but once the major themes are applied, and the various deeply 'torn'
characters have stated their inner conflicts, it all starts to feel that
much more satisfying, rather like a classical play.
There was a stage where it appeared to be a blend of the original Sherwood with Roberto Saviano's Gomorra...in a good way.
My
one serious objection was perhaps the presence of Robert Lindsay, a creepy left
wing extremist playing a creepy right wing extremist. The overall
effect was more creepy than I really needed. (With hindsight I suppose
we now realise that when we watched him in Citizen Smith, we were
laughing AT him and not with him.)
The
story also tiptoes (I think necessarily, but nevertheless usefully)
around another issue: are individuals with learning difficulties always
innocent, and does the visibility of the cognitive impairment affect our
judgment on this matter?
There were enough loose ends at the conclusion of part six to suggest that we will yet be treated to a third season.
The 'futuristic' conceit here is that the dying can provide comfort for everyone that cares about them by having themselves duplicated.
The replacements then have a short period in which to 'imprint' on their originals. Karen Gillan's character Sarah, faced with terminal illness, opts for this process, and the indebtedness it implies, but from the outset there are some imperfections in the replication, minor defects are that are nevertheless taken as significant improvements by Sarah's mother and partner.
And then all of a sudden Sarah is no longer dying, and the law only permits one version of her to persist.
Sarah is clearly not especially good at life, but believes it is worth fighting for anyway. Her double possibly possesses the personality tweaks necessary to be a bit better at it, but the duel (a word I think has been cunningly camouflaged in the title) will ultimately undermine her more self-confident approach.
Dual is billed as 'Science Fiction', but like the scenarios in the novels of José Saramago, it isn't really, for this take on cloning is less of a projection of technology, and more of a fable where the key anxiety might well be social: life in Finland (where it was shot), or at least a society where everyone seems to be interacting in an affectless, deadpan fashion, on the edge of abject misery.
I will not actively support the War in the Middle East or any other war or armed conflict for that matter.
Regardless of the underlying motivations, all violence enmires the partakers in a lasting debit of evil which can never be offset. Once these things are done, there is no undoing them — committing any kind of evil in the name of good is an ethical compromise one is obliged to regret on some profound level, regardless of circumstances.
However — and this caveat comes from my own life experience of growing up in peacetime in a household with parents and other close relatives who had not been given much choice in the matter, around a generation before my own birth — when a group of people constituted as a national group with a clear collective identity and the impulse to live freely and fairly, are faced with the existential threat of hostility from a neighbour who consistently expresses that animosity in a broadly anti-liberal, fascistic, annihilation-centric fashion, such being the situation of both Ukraine and Israel today, I will not criticise their urge to self-defence (or even their chosen methods), at least not without checking the baggage of my own peacetime privilege at the cloakroom beforehand.
As a child, my instincts were essentially pacifist. But these ideals were time and again tested by the facts of recent European (...World history) and I found myself having to compromise, mentally. Not the same compromise of the person who actually pursues uninhibited violence as a means of self-defence, but enough to know where I would stand should I ever face the same situation as my immediate forebears.
I would still be encouraging myself to constantly evaluate the terms of that compromise, based on my understanding that evil is in a sense always more lasting than good.
Each of the key libels the deranged Left levels at Israel has been fabricated in order to impose an inverted logic on one of the significant features of a century-old conflict between competing nationalist aspirations which, in combination with others, render it existential from the Jewish perspective.
These are the essential pair...
‘Genocide’
Not only does this represent a fairly deliberate appropriation of Jewish historical experience and a reworking of the ‘blood libel’, it rather crucially diverts attention away from an obvious lopsidedness in the conflict: Israel has had the means to commit genocide and has not*, its enemies have demonstrated their genocidal tendencies at every available opportunity, they have only lacked the means.
Hence this war has always been an existential struggle for Israel, for the Jews can only really end it by submitting to national dissolution and genocide, where by contrast, the Palestinians could end it almost right away by taking a territorial deal in return for recognition as a nation state and an end to all hostilities.
‘Apartheid’
This is one of the most pernicious, and not just because it suggests that Jews themselves are beholden to a retrograde, racist ideology.
Those who use it have to be aware that non-Jews in Israel benefit from civil and political rights which Jews could never enjoy in a Muslim-majority country, no matter how weakly fundamentalist.
Should there one day be peace, with Jewish and Arab states living alongside each other, it will still remain likely that there will be far more Arabs in Israel than Jews in Palestine.
This is another critical disparity at the heart of the conflict, because it underpins the very need for a state where Jewish safety and self-determination is preserved, and also explains why the ‘right of return’, which Palestinians have refused to surrender as part of any peace agreement, poses such a significant threat to the population of Israel as currently constituted.
* Even if they have tried, they have failed, for the population of Gaza has increased by over 2% since October 2023, with 50,000+ live births according to internationally-recognised statistics.