“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” > Georges Clemenceau
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Off Night?
Friday, June 28, 2024
Superior Moral Justification
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” > John Kenneth Galbraith
An interesting quotation, the truth of which has lately been complicated by the fact that in the updated account of 'modern', one can all too easily swap the word 'conservative' here for 'liberal'.
Liberal civilisation began with the 'selfish' idea of the individual. This political being, now running amok, has undermined the fundamental conditions of that civilisation, adding layer upon layer of conformity and moral righteousness to the point that complete autonomy is most celebrated at precisely the moment it is near impossible.
Pluralism has been almost imperceptibly replaced by its anti-heroic dopplegänger, Diversity, and personal independence from all constraints, biological or otherwise, opens up a new pathway to totalist enforcement and absurdity.
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Marching, marching...
The pro-Pal marches in London and other European capitals have first abetted and then amplified a distorted antisemitic discourse across the continent, whilst at the same time doing nothing for the cause of peace...to the point of contrariety.
Some of the most toxic aspects of the chanting and tent-poled messaging have been propagated by people with the least direct connection to the region, its history and its cultural polarities, and this includes some of Europe's Muslim minorities who have moved within these mobs in order to express a crude and aggressive tribalism, which has in turn triggered elements of the far right within multiple societies.
Monday, June 24, 2024
Overblown
The Diane Abbot issue has been somewhat deliberately overblown and misunderstood from the start.
In
the European context - and the phenomenon will vary both socially and
geographically - if a black person enters a relatively quiet local bar
in a comparatively non-diverse neighbourhood, the first thing that the
patrons inside will tend to notice is the colour of their skin. This may
not set off waves of prejudice, but that can happen enough times to be
significant and extremely wounding.
I think that is the essence
of what Diane Abbot was trying to communicate and although it is true
that Jews and Irish travellers may not experience this to anything like the
same extent, it was a major political blunder to mention them as a
straight comparison, not least because the 'racism' faced by other groups is
often qualitatively different and sometimes even more likely to lead to
toxic ideological violence anyway.
Jews, for example, are
collectively stigmatised as a source of societal evil. Antisemitism is
about the use of the E word in reference to Jewish communities or
collectives, and whatever forms of racism Diane Abbot has experienced, I
would suggest it was tonally distinct.
Anyway, the Labour Party would have been ill-advised to de-select her. There are far worse positions being adopted by other candidates, not least in my old London constituency in Tower Hamlets.
Saturday, June 22, 2024
Visiting Surrogates
This morning V told me a story she'd heard about CR-7: whenever he has some mates over, the first thing he does is sit them down to eat some salads then, before they've had time to finish their healthy greens, he pulls them out onto his private training pitch to knock a ball around, after which he insists that they all jump in his pool.
Cuando Acecha La Maldad (2023)
As anyone who has come across the fictional work of Mariana Enriquez can testify, Argie horror is a thing.
Friday, June 21, 2024
The Real Victims
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAXmrYxMPvD_0cy_GRT7WtU_HHXGSYVuDGDLfDhxfUbas3i9yVHbCSMk6WuY3wEooF3Q5n4uPcAibAiWICEHzU6yGM0tM3srmgEVfEcPfzSkQZ8k8v_u2fUCtIH0XnwKqomcefJ7Y6daF1YPWlw8k8irdvTmRWteVJD5OnxjICYeVFLf56DU8S/w245-h400/IMG_8232.jpg)
One thing we've been seeing with extreme clarity these last few years is that once you allow everyone (on principle) to identify themselves primarily through their deepest sense of grievance, it is really not long before the thugs, manipulators and intimidators start piping up.
Cult of the C Words
Our world has a stack of major issues: the Big Cs: Conflict, Corruption, Climate...and then there is the Cult mentioned in the title here.
i.e. "Don't fixate on me being a dick...fixate on the thing I am exclusively fixated on in a completely non-constructive, narcissistic manner".
"And if you don't, then I will throw a real strop and start breaking things."
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Dark Matters
“There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they're not really parallel, and two, they're not really universes.”
I was thinking about Douglas Adams a few days ago, as I also recalled the undoubtedly poor first impression I must have made with my father’s oldest friend Michele when we visited her Paris flat in the summer of 1982.
She’s the lady on the left of this group in Buenos Aires, 1948. Born a year before Anne Frank, she is now 96, yet still uses the Metro and is dreading the Olympics. (I am yet to sound her out about the snap election.)
That I have managed to maintain long-term regular contact is a wonder to me as our first meeting occurred when I was in my Harry Enfield teenager phase, and had my face permanently planted in ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’. Barely managing a grunt, I possibly fancied I was cloaked by an SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem field) in reverse polarity mode.
Having just taken in the penultimate episode of Dark Matter I have also been thinking about alternate realities lately too.
Douglas Adams had the sense that these are porous, intersecting. Certainly from the perspective of the writer of fiction, this would make them a good deal more interesting and creatively functional.
The basic problem of “many worlds” for writers was explored by Larry Niven in his story ‘All The Myriad Ways’, in which mankind has found a way to mine the multiverse for its intellectual property, but along the way discovered that choice is somehow meaningless, a realisation that leads to a spate of murders and suicides. If all possible choices are made, the creator of fictional narratives might as well give up, if not exactly euthanasiastically.
Inside the box you have your dead cat/live cat...or do you? Are these mere potentialities and ultimately only one of them is realised? But, if the smallest bits of our mysteriously granular reality can genuinely be in more than one place, WHERE exactly are these other places?
I mention this because we don’t actually need superposition and a manufactured box to take this particular journey, because it is a little mentioned consequence of our current standard cosmological model that many (and I mean MANY) different versions of us exist in basically the same physical space that we inhabit.
Indeed, it has been calculated that the nearest arrangement of protons and neutrons that exactly duplicates the one that I regard as ‘me’ can be found at a distance of 1 followed by a billion billion billion zeroes, metres from my current location. (My gut feel is that Guatemalans won’t have to travel quite so far in order to confront their doubles, but given the way distances work here, the trip may take a lot longer than one might otherwise anticipate just by contemplating all the zeroes.)
This rather startling ‘fact’ is a consequence of the theory of inflation in which we find ourselves in one of a likely infinite number of ‘bubble universes’, yet because the internal dimensions of this are ‘to all intensive purposes’ (as my mother used to say) infinite, and the number of different ways protons and neutrons can be assembled are finite, it follows that there is a good deal of duplication ‘out there’.
Popular science is always a bit cagey about the parts of theory that arise from evidence and the parts which are like placeholders for a lack of it. And alternate versions of ourselves that are a long way away are somehow less immediately intriguing than those that are perhaps right here in the box with us.
I am still struggling a bit with the box in Dark Matter though. There’s only one layer of realities where its construction makes sense, so in all the others did it just materialise like a TARDIS, and why does nobody seem bothered? (The reason why the TARDIS first appeared as a London Police telephone box is that, out of the factory, it came with its own version of the somebody else’s problem field.)
What exactly is superimposed inside this big cube? Is it just the choices of whoever is inside and has taken the drug? In other words does it somehow isolate only the universes which apply to the ‘free’ choices of one human individual, and if so, doesn’t blending two conscious minds into this process add a level of unappeasable confusion?
For want of a better phrase (the one that springs to mind belongs to a parallel reality where politics were never corrected) causation is the dead cat in the box here. It doesn’t ‘choose’ to be alive or dead, it just is...or isn’t.
Our latest little 🐈⬛ has been dubbed ‘Hanky’ after the affectionate apodo Michele always applied to my father, born on the same date, with the name Henry on the certificate, but some time later occasionally referred to as Hank following his evacuation to an American high school environment during WWII.
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Firulais Tasting Menu
One of the most jarring — off-putting even — restaurant names in Antigua, Quiltro being the affectionate name Chileans give to their street dogs🐕. A bit like Chucho here.
I suppose we might put this down to a small failure of hispanohablante linguistic due diligence, if not alongside, then surely somewhere on the same spectrum as the Mitsubishi Pajero (“Wanker”).
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Restless energy somtimes gets found out...
Rumbled!
Monday, June 10, 2024
Hit Man (2024)
Richard Linklater's Netflix offering is almost compulsory viewing over here as one of its stars is the daughter of Ricardo Arjona (still) officially the world's most famous Guatemalan (but, for how long..?), an actress who is also (still) Hollywood's second most famous 1/2-Guatemalan behind Oscar Isaac, and now seems to have become Aquaman's real life girlfriend.
Absurdity Perpetuated
The thing I find most absurd — to the point of unethical — about the role of UNRWA within the Middle East conflict is the way it embodies an ultimately exclusive perspective thereof.
Sunday, June 09, 2024
12th Century Influencer
A remarkably well-informed if rather judgemental review of London as a venue for city breaks in the twelfth century by Richard of Devizes, then a monk and ‘influencer’ at St Winifred’s in Winchester.
Richard was the first to use the term Holocaust to refer to the mass murder of Jews, then also a feature of London life.
Indeed, the Chronicon he penned, from which the above is an excerpt, is written in character — that of a French Jewish cobbler providing travel tips and up-to-date goss on the goings on in England and the Crusader states of the Levant.
Some modern scholars have interpreted the document as a cunning satire on some of the antisemitic prejudices of the time, sending up in particular a regional-historical variant of the blood libel, in which Jews were thought to prowl around Winchester hunting young Christian boys in order to carry out ritualistic murders.
He also famously described Robin Hood’s erstwhile foe ‘bad’ King John as a raging madman who "emitted foam from his mouth", another characteristisation/media cliché which has survived almost 800 years.
Monday, June 03, 2024
Libel as Propaganda
The purpose of the genocide libel is really rather simple. It’s not your war, but making one side in this war a violator of international norms gives you a cover for your strange obsession with it, which might otherwise be characterised as antisemitic. (It also obviously geared to undermine the moral case for the formation of Israel after the Holocaust via a cynical appropriation of Jewish history.)
The war is several generations old. One side basically just wants to survive. The other side, the one that started it, is consciously conducting a fight to the death. Whether this necessarily infers a war of extermination is moot.
This conflict should have ended decades ago, in compromise, but one side has ‘eternalised’ its sense of grievance deriving from the war’s origins and initial result. This has been done by decking out the culturally-specific sense of lasting dishonour that defeat engendered as a ‘calamity’ worthy of more universal empathy.
Hobbes said in Leviathan that nobody weeps for an old calamity, but he was English and perhaps never came across an Arab with a grudge. Nor did he ever have to deal with a multinational body like the UN intent on codifying such grudges into perpetual, unresolvable problems.