Presence (2024)

No doubt we’ve all come across umpteen movies featuring couples with one or two children moving into a new suburban home already occupied by some sort of supernatural shute.

After a week or so of pulpy, entertaining nonsense we were expecting more of the same (especially as our last Lucy Liu movie, the night before, had been proper dross), but for some reason we had forgotten to inform ourselves in advance that the director here was Steven Soderbergh, the acknowledged master of refreshing genre rehabilitations.

And so we found Presence to be kind of superb on almost every level that mattered. The skillfulness of the film-making was so eye-popping I couldn’t wait to see who’d announced themselves this way! 

 

There’s one great line in the dialogue written by David Koepp (known for Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Panic Room and Ghost Town) which I cannot repeat here for spoilery reasons, but if you manage to remember it at right moment later on, you will realise that it contained the nicely-camouflaged seed of the whole story, and thus provides a perfect recollected accompaniment — as a kind of zesty sauce — with which to accompany the final reveal.

 

 

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...

“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.”

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.” 

 

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.

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).

During WWII the Germans killed many thousands of British non-cambatants, a good number of them women and children, but Brits — rightly — remain far more disturbed about the purposeful and systematic slaughter of whole communities by the Nazis, in both eastern and western Europe. 

 

The relative numbers involved are irrelevant. That is why the introduction to Thames TV's The World at War made this point above all others, focusing on the victims in one small village in Normandy, not the thousands of French civilians who died during that battle or others, from varying degrees of carelessness and callousness on both sides.

​Depending on context, one death in a movie can horrify us far more than say Arnie mowing down an entire Central American army in Commando.

When making these ethical / existential judgments, none of which can ever be absolute, we always have to contextualise.

And, as we can see today, the bad guys will sometimes be working extra hard to blur or bedim the context...to constantly throw in metrics of false equivalence or the kind of simple statistical one-upmanship that is never welcome when we are trying to dissect complex moral issues.

 

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.

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.

Nonsuch

On September 21, 1665 Pepys made a solo business trip to Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, near Epsom, carrying a substantial sum of money, "so rode in some fear of robbing".

His resulting diary entry (below) is fascinating on many levels, as Nonsuch* is one of England's great lost palaces.

 

 

 

Certainly the garden was already in a bit of a state — even if there were still paintings by Holbein and Rubens indoors — and less than twenty years after Pepys's visit the palace was demolished entirely.

It had been the biggest of Henry VIII's building projects, at a cost of ten million quid in today's money, and his only surviving legitimate son, the future Edward VI, was born there. The name was chosen to suggest a royal crib of then unparalleled presumption.

Henry had chosen the spot because it was close to one of his favoured hunting grounds, yet the site would prove impractical because of the lack of available water for domestic use. In the end it seems that the King only visited three times.

The property was returned to the Crown with the Restoration in 1660. Ten years after that, Charles II gifted it to his mistress Barbara Villiers, naming her Baroness Nonsuch. I approve of that name. 

 

But the Baroness was a gambler —  and a loser —  and had soon piled up so much debt that the palace's upkeep was beyond her, so she fancied selling it off in pieces. It was pulled down in 1682.

These elms mentioned by Pepys were the last survivors as, according to John Evelyn, who would visit a year later, "the rest of these goodly trees, both of this and of Worcester Park adjoining, were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels in the late war."

There's a certain ambiguity about the "getting" in the last sentence there. Anyone with any familiarity with the Diary will be aware that Samuel was ever a predator...and that he liked them young. 

 

However, I suspect that in this instance, Pepys is probably simply noting the possibility of someday hiring a servant girl with a fine singing voice. In the absence of Netflix, home entertainment in his household largely consisted of making music.

 

* The only other place to bear this rather lovely name was the earliest ever prefab building, made in the Netherlands and then put back together at one end of old London Bridge. Also lost.

 

 

 

 

Confused?

Any confusion of the chronic sort arises because this is a cult, inevitably grounded in another, typically Fascism or Marxism. 

These toxic belief systems are inherently fact-proofed, possessed of fantasised, impractical, often malignant ends which justify almost any means…or misinformation. 

Cultists on both ends of the spectrum can never bring themselves to express any kind of doubt or reproval — indeed they are always like the MAGA witnesses to that conceptualised Trump murder on 5th Avenue. 

They didn’t see, can’t see, because they’re in the rabbit hole. 

Their first response is to not even engage emotionally or intellectually with the event we have all just witnessed — be it a carefree redneck insurrection at the Capitol or Arabs getting into the Jihadi groove around strangled babies’ coffins — but instead to cast around for examples of bad behaviour by their antagonists in the bizarre belief that the most important thing is to somehow immediately offset the unfiltered degeneracy which has just been witnessed…and smoothly internalised — by just about anyone whose brain isn’t already a permanent dumpling in shitweasel soup.

Signs of the times

Some key signs (harvested from 20th century history) that your democracy may be at risk..

— Parties seeking power with deliberately constrained manifestos, but which make no secret at all of wanting to 'go further' once conditions are more favourable to their actual agenda

— Pots calling kettles black....everywhere. In these circumstances all citizens perhaps need to examine the rhetoric of their favoured mouthpieces as a possible mirror image of the worldview they seemingly deplore

— Political movements based on extremism steadily absorbing into their ranks previously more moderate voices, sucking the air out of the centre (and, often at the same time suckering it) and thus reducing the viability of parliamentary-style containment of the underlying conflicts. 

 

Ask yourself, is the coalition you gravitate towards more like a co-option?

Not Scientists all the way down...

Dawkins had a pretty good stint as the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, but when it comes to the public understanding of Atheism, you often need to turn him upside down to get any sense out of him. (You perhaps have to wonder whether he actually understands the concept himself.)

In this clip we witness one of his most-shared and basically rather wrongheaded polemics against the belief in God.

What he fails to acknowledge is that behind every concrete representation of divinity, there lurks a more abstract question, such that it’s not in fact scientists all the way down when it comes to debunking the notions leading us back to the primary metaphysical issue.

And what is that? Well, most of us implicitly or explicitly believe one of three things. 1) The cosmos we experience is eternal and total. It’s all there is and all there ever was or can be. It is its own explanation. 2) The cosmos was instigated by a something or a someone and derives its meaning from the latter’s own essence, good, bad or indifferent 3) It just popped into existence randomly and possesses neither a purpose nor a path towards meaning.

I suppose there is a kind of fourth option, a set of hybrids between 2 and 3, in which there is a Creator who made a cosmos that is essentially purposeless, and maybe also meaningless. Because it could.

Anyway, if one chooses to express these preferences culturally, one is inevitably more likely drawn to the body of myths in one’s own culture. This is perfectly a natural human tendency and in no way represents any fundamental failure of logic.

If one opts for Jesus, the fact that one is at least agnostic towards Mohammed does not somehow immediately invalidate the entire notion of Deism, as Dawkins suggests here, because that intuition ultimately rests on the abstract questions which take shape beneath all faith systems.

One can reject all religions and still not be an atheist, just as one can be a kind of atheist content to wallow within the mythologies that we have constructed from the primary existential anxieties that all sentient humans experience, making use of the ways that they approach ultimate truth from one stage removed.

Dawkins has an even sillier argument against belief in a creator: his Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy, which is patently false, because this imagined supernatural marauder is not the same kind of placeholder for an explanation, not just of the origin of Being itself, but also of how we individual beings ought go about being — while we can — which most of our extant gods tend to be.

 

Insider

The threat from within has come to Europe to warn Europeans about the threat from within. 

The Left side of History

Here we see a key fallacy about History exposed — one cannot be both on the right side of it and constantly touting its tendency to repeat itself! 

Perhaps the most influential conspiracy theory of the last century and a half goes under the name of Marxism. 

Its originator, Karl Marx, began by saying that the driving force of History is always resistance and struggle, then later on changed his mind and said it wasn’t. For the foil-hatted die-hards this was not a significant update to the model, but rather a lasting excuse for having it both ways.

Even at the time of its early confection, Marxism fared badly when exposed to actual history: the people who owned the land and those tied to it were thinking and behaving in ways that significantly challenged the predictions of the doctrine. (Perhaps aware of this, Marx never much cared for peasants, speaking of “the idiocy of rural life”, a form of bigotry that boded ill for the rustic sort once his conspiracy had been elevated to state religion status in Russia, and elsewhere.)

Conversely however, History has tended not to falter to anywhere near the same extent whenever exposed to Marxism. 

For this reason one of the most interesting things we can note today about the 1930s today is the mental state of the 1920s — almost a whole decade before the Nazis had seized power in Germany, the Marxist left in Germany had a workable theory about what was going to happen — which may or may not have played a part in how events subsequently unfolded —  and certainly influenced the immediate retrospectives as WWII came to an end and thereafter, at least for the first couple of decades the end of the Reich. 

The essence of the prediction was that Germany’s advanced techno-capitalists were secretly planning to fabricate a mass political movement which would serve their class interests and profit goals. (Sound at all familiar?) 

At the time this forecast was backed by precious little hard evidence and there were few concrete signs of an emerging fascist base. Yet as I have mentioned previously (in regard to the situation in Spain), these prophecies have a self-fulfilling quality about them. 

So when today we speak of ‘History repeating itself’, we need to carefully distinguish between the sequences of events themselves and the sequences of mentalities which influenced how those events subsequently took shape. 

Actors on one extreme of the spectrum often imagine their antagonists before the latter even materialise. In effect, they help conjure them into existence. They are then likely to blame this enemy which they have at least partially fabricated for everything bad that results from the confrontation thus engendered. 

This broadly applies to both Left and Right, and usually results in a fast-gyrating spiral. If you don’t believe me, consider (briefly) the Middle East...

Centripetal Mimicry

One thing that future historians may marvel at is the interlocking pattern of cheeky inversion which characterises modern discourse e.g. Jihadists moaning about colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, tech bros and populists griping about the demise of accountability, democracy and free speech, and so on.

A new form of post-truthful leadership (or mouthpiece-ship) has come to the forefront, one which habitually makes use of near blatant, pseudo-factual subterfuge fabricated to polarise people around tribal identities which many mistake for rational worldviews.

I see this as very much part of the phenomenon highlighted by Moisés Naim in The Revenge of Power, whereby “the centrifugal forces that weaken power called forth a new set of centripetal forces that tend to concentrate it.”

The political malignancy of today is firmly based on mimicry: “What we’re seeing today,” Naim argues, “is a revanchist variant that mimics democracy while undermining it, scorning all limits. It is as if political power had taken stock of every method free societies have devised over the centuries to domesticate it and plotted to strike back...

“Contending sides no longer seek to accommodate each other in a quest for minimum viable governing arrangements. Instead, they deny the basic legitimacy of the other side’s right even to contend for power...

“Lacking an alternative explanation that they can use to bolster their legitimacy, they go to considerable trouble to dissemble, trying to pass themselves off as exemplars of a system they’re determined to dismantle.“

 

 

Collectively Solipsistic

Not so long ago I sought sanctuary one afternoon in a beachside café-bar in Belize, for what I thought would be a quiet drink. There were little more than half a dozen other patrons present: couples chatting softly plus one or two other solo individuals minding their own business unobtrusively. 

But after a while, a motley mob of Americans, operating at maximum volume, came in off the street and without waiting to be attended to by a server, started to rearrange the tables and chairs around the joint to suit their need to occupy a dominant spot in the middle. 

From then on all attempts to tune out of their blaring yet screechy conversation and concentrate on my book were hopeless.

This is a bit like what it feels to be alive in February 2025. 

The last place many of us really want to be is inside that septic bubble, but it has entered a phase where it is suddenly inflating rather fabulously like the early universe. 

(Grok was struggling to reproduce this remembered scene to my complete satisfaction, but then, out of the blue, tossed me this somewhat left-field option above, which I rather like.)

Spanish Steps (2)

Earlier in the week I was looking to Spain’s 19th century experience for some readily-deployable modern parallels.

Aside from those then noted, I have since conceived of a few more, but these are not quite as straightforward, as they involve an element of flipping across the political spectrum, or outright reversal.

The key thing about Spain is that it became maladapted to its environment...an increasingly modern environment. This was in part because of an entrenched establishment ideology smothering the workings of the state.

Where other nations took piecemeal, yet significant steps towards reform, Spain found that it could not overcome its innate inertia.

And whenever some attempts to aggressively force through change were made, it later became apparent that no government lasted long enough to make anything stick.

This is a situation which has tended to take shape here in Guatemala as well, much more recently. Another familiar environment is that produced by the resistance of what we might call a liberal oligarchy to the full implications of mass democracy.

In the USA, we could now be witnessing an attempt to walk the underlying process back in the other direction.

In Spain from the 1870s onward, a well-defined set of libertarian ideas — though not the sort we now associate with Javier Milei, Elon Musk or Gloria Álvarez — would take a profound hold in both rural Andalucia and industrial Catalonia.

This was one of those classic alliances between the people who think too much and the people who don’t think that much at all.

Bakuninstic anarchism established itself in key regions with a cult-like religious intensity amongst both rural peasants and the urban proletariat because — rather like some of the ‘populist’ discourse we see being used to manipulate modern American equivalents — it triggered anxieties which had repeatedly emerged in response to the established, 'Catholic' system of governance — that it was dark, depraved and despotic — and appealed on an almost unconscious level to their existing communal cultures and historical self-image.

'Forms of Hamas'

This week's LRB has a truly loathsome article on those poor misunderstood dudes at Hamas. Reading it, I was often uncertain whether Tom Stevenson intended me to laugh, or spew. 

The key takeout was less about the subject matter than about the author himself and his ilk. 

For it shows the lengths that the extreme Left will now go to in order to take the maniacal edge off this violent obsession, for once you have concluded that the cause is somehow righteous and have simultaneously discounted the deeper historical narrative beyond the impositions of ideology, and thus have internalised the implications of descriptors like ‘occupation’, ‘resistance’ and ‘apartheid’, along with 'Israel is always to blame' and needs to go, you are on your way to excusing just about anything. 

The central pillars of this exculpation, as far as October 7 was concerned, would appear to be...

• Israel was always going to respond with genocide / invent a terrible pogrom after the incursion, so Hamas might just as well have committed their own atrocity, as not commit one. Why squander the chance?
  
• But anyway...all the bad stuff only really happened because of some chaos and indiscipline, the fog of war and all that, as the equally dastardly British armed forces are themselves fully aware. 
• Hamas never expected to bump into a trance music festival and so, kind of did what anyone else would have done under the circumstances.

Stevenson also carefully conveys the notion that October 7 was conceived as a commando-style raid, thereby obviating the need to mention the numbers involved — a brigade-sized invasion, bigger than the land force Thatcher sent to the Falklands — further muddying the issue by suggesting that many civilian irregulars had poured over the border, thereby confusing both scale and objectives.

A few sentences that simply begged to be copied and pasted, many of which read almost like sneering parody, eliciting a few unexpected chuckles...

"In the US, Hamas quickly became a co-ordinate on the axis of evil (the suicide bombers hadn’t helped) and was conflated with al-Qaida.

"To say that Hamas is simply the zealous champion of a righteous struggle against a brutal military occupation, exercising legal right to armed resistance, is to pass over quite a lot.

(On October 7) "The outward form of a special forces operation quickly devolved into uncontrolled violence (a pattern not unfamiliar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the actions of British special forces in Afghanistan).

"Nothing Hamas did on 7 October approaches what Israel has done in Gaza.

"In the absence of real atrocities, false ones would have been invented, and military action would have been characterised as terrorism. Everything Israel has done was predictable from the moment Hamas paraglided over the barrier.

"The chance that Israel wouldn’t provoke armed resistance from Gaza was always zero. Gazans were in effect under siege, and military action to break the siege can’t be dismissed as terrorism or classed as a pogrom.

"It is in the nature of revolutionary violence to bring about insoluble problems. One must side with the people breaking out of a concentration camp. Yet one must also side with the non-combatant against the man pointing a rifle at him."

Such a delicate ethical tight rope walk the woke these days. Or at least the 'revolutionary' woke.

There's a lot of exposition about the rise of Hamas set within a carefully cherry-picked historical narrative. 

Another line that caught my attention was this one below, suggesting that the Hamas never really had any alternative than to spend everybody else's money on turning their territory into a terror fortress. (Stevenson neglects to mention the billions siphoned off into Qatari accounts by this pragmatic "social force" apparently describing itself as a national liberation movement with a moderate Islamic ideology.)

Indeed, the very idea that a way out of the cycle could be found by using foreign aid to achieve economic independence and a better life for Gazans is haram, clearly. 

"Hamas’s main defensive response was to extend the tunnel network to alleviate the blockade and to provide shelter from air attack – the move anyone would make if placed in charge of a besieged Gaza."

Anyone would have done the same, just like the Al-Qassam zealots did when they turned up unexpectedly at Nova. 

If the whole plan on October 7 had been to take (mainly military) hostages with minimal fuss, why did they end up killing significantly more Thai seasonal workers than they kidnapped?

And if this was just a result of things getting a little out of control on the day (DeepSeek will tell you the foreign workers were 'tragically' in the wrong place at the wrong time), why then did the invaders learn Thai words in advance so as to lure them into a trap? And why not recognise the tragic error, and release these Thais quickly? 

Along with the baby that was also taken hostage, accidentally.

Crucially, was the Jihadi militant who called his mum to boast of murdering ten Jews with his bare hands just a bad apple?

I would imagine that anyone who has not yet descended into an ideologically-induced state of moral turpitude already knows the answers to these questions.

Spanish Steps

Lately it has become more apparent than ever that the only history we are ever comfortable deploying analogously — or indeed oh-so-readily weaponising — in contemporary debate is that of 1930s Germany. The comparisons have become so banal that they have ceased to be illuminating.

I’ve put some alternative medieval comparisons out there recently, but there’s also something in the nineteenth century history of Spain that deserves examination when it comes to the undoubtedly knotty situation in the US right now. (In particular as this was a preamble to another notorious ‘rise of fascism’ in Europe.)

Religious conservatism had long penetrated and to some extent overwhelmed the infrastructure of the Spanish state and, sitting in suspension above the empirical reality of Spanish society, there was a pervasive and occasionally rather toxic, ultra-traditionalist notion of what it meant to be Spanish.

Against this backdrop, in the early part of the nineteenth century middle class, would-be modernisers had somewhat overplayed their hand relative to their demographic position, attempting a wholesale re-engineering of Spanish society along not just traditional liberal principles but additionally upholding some fairly ‘out there’ ideas which had come tagging along.

The backlash came in 1823 when the King Ferdinand VII, teamed up with his French counterpart Louis XVIII in forming the ‘Holy Alliance’ with the aim of dramatically rolling back liberal modifications to the Spanish way of life. They they even reinstated the Holy Office (Inquisition) as a way of extirpating all forms of ‘mad thinking’, and it’s safe to say that the liberals had not expected that.

Soon afterwards, the monarchy itself became the focus of this escalating culture war, with Ferdinand's daughter and heir Queen Isabella II literally in bed with the liberal elites in the armed forces and the reactionaries coalescing around her uncle Don Carlos.

These so-called Carlistas — as illustrated — would become especially strong in deeply-traditionalist Navarra (home today to nice folk like Opus Dei) and had their first proper war named after them in 1833. They would go on to play a key role in the next century as the various conflicts embedded in the national psyche hypertrophied into all out civil war.