[To skip the preamble, scroll down to the heading “Pod People”.]

[SPOILER WARNING]

This substack assumes that you have watched both Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)—or one of its several remakes—and Season One of Pluribus (2025) in full. This isn’t just a nobody-on-the-Internet reviewing B-movie SF content, dammit! This is a Philosophical Treatise! So it’s also one big spoiler.

Though this isn’t a review, I do recommend both Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Pluribus wholeheartedly, so, if you haven’t watched them already, go away and do so; then come back and read this.

Even though I don’t give much away about it, I’m pretty sure you’ve already read Animal Farm.

tl;dr: History rhymes

In 1954, Halas and Batchelor released a feature-length animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The original novella was intended as a cautionary (fairy) tale about the the fall of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism; it was also a children’s story played out by anthropomorphic livestock animals, rising up against their human oppressors until their leaders betrayed them. The film replaced the novel’s bleak then-“historically-accurate” ending with an upbeat one. Perhaps because of this change, and because it became a staple of 20th-century western state-school classrooms, most people watching this adaptation didn’t realise that it was itself a anti-communist propaganda film, covertly sponsored by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1956, Walter Wangler released Don Siegel’s feature-length live-action adaption of Jack Finney’s The Bodysnatchers. After it was shot, it was given both new framing scenes and a more upbeat ending. Most people who’ve seen it assume that it’s about the Red Menace: the real and perceived threat of communist infiltration of mainland America1. But the film’s makers always said that they just wanted to make a profitable B-movie.

In 2025, Angel Studios released a feature-length animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Despite its shoehorning a fashionable anti-capitalist message into the plot of the anti-communist original, it has not been well reviewed in fashionable media outlets.

In 2025, Apple TV broadcast the first season of Pluribus, a TV show that, by its own admission, is a descendant of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers—though it isn’t another remake to add to the three that followed the 1956 movie, in 1978, 1993, and 2007. Unlike the makers of the 1956 original, I suspect that Pluribus’s makers do want their creation to send several political messages, and that they are wisely coy about those messages.

This post is about what I think the political meanings of Pluribus are. It’s also about the layers of irony that have accumulated on the moving-picture adaptations of Animal Farm andThe Body Snatchers, and about the impossibility of preserving the original intentions of creative works, as culture and technology change around them and critics and audiences fight to co-opt their power.

Pod People

“For me, it started last Thursday.”

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was made in the United States at a peak of Cold-War paranoia. So it’s apt that two opposing political interpretations of it have been popular with commentators since: Either it was a science fiction thriller whose alien invaders stand in for the hidden communist agents then threatening to take over American society from within and claim it for the expanding totalitarian Soviet empire, or it was a cryptic protest by Left-leaning filmmakers against the insidious threat of anti-communist persecution of creators. We know that both interpretations had a basis in reality: There really were communist agents working to subvert America. Artists, both actual communist traitors and innocents, really did pay a professional price for their politics and their associations.

Neither interpretation excludes a third: that Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, besides being well-crafted, gripping, low-budget entertainment, was a film-noir parable that worked and works because we all know that it’s sometimes true that “They” really are out to get you, that the greatest danger in comfort is that it lulls us into complacency. IotBS’s makers were doomed to channel through their work the dominant currents of their times. Perhaps, the more fantastical and escapist the story you try to tell, the more that story tends to reflect your subconscious preoccupations and those of the people who hear it, the more all of you are prisoners of the reality the story exists in. We all know how our nightmares manifest our anxieties.

What is not ambiguous in the original, even as its script lets the alien spawn of the title pitch their utopian manifesto to the resisting protagonists (and to the audience), is that the body snatchers are the villains. In a film made when extraordinary growth in mass wealth and convenience at home was haunted every day by a forever-war of usually distant and invisible terrors, the bad guys invite the good guys to lay down the wearying burden of eternal vigilance in return for a promise of endless peace.

Pluribus is the latest creation of Vince Gilligan et al.. Gilligan has long been a fan of film noir and a maker of speculative fiction for television. Not only are Pluribus’s in-universe characters aware of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, they hang a lampshade on the fact. Since the last century, the phrase “Pod People”, derived directly from the original’s plot, has been slang for unthinking (usually political) conformists. Carol, the protagonist of Pluribus, refers to the billions of her fellow humans—who, following The Joining, have become part of a new global Hive Mind—as such in front of The Pod People themselves. But she is living in an actual dystopia/utopia forged by extra-terrestrials; so, unlike pretty much everyone in our universe who’s used the word since the 1950s, she doesn’t do so to insult her political or social enemies metaphorically; she intends the label literally.

Almost everyone important to the making of the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers insisted that, whatever the intentions of the author of the original novel it adapted, their film didn’t have a political intent. But the B-movie endures as a cultural artefact because the political meanings projected on to it have long since eclipsed its importance as entertainment or art—even as it remains an inspiration to generations of visual storytellers.

We now have three layers of irony:

1. The original film is almost always referenced in popular discourse, against its creators’ claims, as a political allegory.

2. In this fictional descendant of the original trope, the original is cited instead, for perhaps the first time in history, as a literal template.

3. But, unlike the makers of their model, I’m convinced that the creators of this contemporary variant intend their take on IotBS to be very political indeed.

So there is the over-arching cosmic irony that forces beyond film-makers’ control are always going to make audiences see things that were never intended. There is the tragic irony that the particular circumstances that preceded IotBS doomed that to happen: No creator could prevent a film made in the United States of the 1950s, in that tone, with that story, from being interpreted it in a political way. And, today, as viewers, we enjoy the dramatic irony of the protagonist using our metaphor to describe her reality.

Real Space Communism Has Finally Been Tried

Apart from the bigger budget and the newer SFX and the longer running time, Pluribus is a better Body Snatchers because it gives its protagonists better body snatchers—and it gives those body snatchers a better Space Communist Manifesto. Let’s run quickly through the iterations of Pod People Philosophy.

In the original source novel, The Body Snatchers, the human-replacements/copies have all their templates’ memories, but no emotions. Fatally, they are also unable to reproduce. Within years they will die out. When challenged, a pod person justifies his species’ lifecycle to the book’s physician protagonist thusly:

“[W]hat has the human race done except spread over this planet till it swarms the globe several billion strong? What have you done with this very continent but expand till you fill it? And where are the buffalo who roamed this land before you? Gone. Where is the passenger pigeon, which literally darkened the skies of America in flocks of billions? The last one died in a Philadelphia zoo in 1913. Doctor, the function of life is to live if it can, and no other motive can ever be allowed to interfere with that. There is no malice involved; did you hate the buffalo? We must continue because we must; can't you understand that?" He smiled at me pleasantly. "It's the nature of the beast."“

In IotBS, the Reds-Under-The-Beds operated as if Real Communism Had In Fact Been Tried. As in Pluribus, its Space Commies offered a collectivism that needed no coercion, because all live in harmony. Unlike real-world communism, Body-Snatcher communism doesn’t run aground on human nature, because its proles aren’t human—in a perfect implementation of the dreams of communist elites throughout history, it eliminates the original, messy, emotional, intentional people entirely and replaces them with The People, who look the same, have all their memories, but who aren’t people at all. It wants not for liberal crowd-wisdom or free-market co-ordination, because The Hive Mind sees and knows all.

Pluribus’s Keplerite collectivism is even more refined: The People endure as physical individuals, but their brains belong to The Collective. Those whose bodies reject the subjugation of their minds die in the process of conversion. When told of their nearly-one-billion deaths, a stunned Carol replies: “I guess you gotta break a few eggs, huh?”. The long, appalling provenance of that formulation is well-known:

The [New York Times] has a hall proudly displaying its Pulitzer winners. The section devoted to [Walter] Duranty now contains a note which states that his writing about the Ukrainian famine had been tendentious, slovenly and uncritical. This man, who never doubted the legitimacy of the show trials of 1936−1938, often found a way to put a smiley face on a grim country. He wrote that the deaths of all those peasants had been justified by Stalin’s noble purpose, his “march to progress.” Duranty felt that this and other Stalin-era atrocities were nothing to be very concerned about. “If you want to make omelettes,” he paraphrased Robespierre, “you have to break a few eggs.”

This link with communist famine is a neat dovetail with what we later learn about the Keplerites’ food supply.

Putting the genocide to one side for a moment, we have to concede that the Keplerites are bound by a strict moral code. There was no need for them to spread their ideology through violence, because, unless you are immune, one kiss from one of the The Joined is all it takes to recruit you to the cause. It just happens to be true in this story that that recruitment process caused the greatest mass slaughter in the history of the planet. Apart from those “broken eggs”, Pod People cannot deliberately damage even so much as an apple.

We eventually learn that this means that this hardwired constraint puts conventional agriculture outside the reach of The Hive. The Pod People cannot keep livestock, let alone kill it for food. They cannot grow crops to eat, because consumption requires harvesting. A series of accidental observations, of the sort that you might expect from a professional novelist like she is, leads Carol to the chilling truth: that much of the Pod People’s nourishment comes from “HDP”: Human Derived Protein. The Joined are consuming the processed bodies of the frozen dead. This is an echo of what is explicit in the original Body Snatchers novel, and perhaps implied in its offshoots: that the absence of sexual reproduction in human replacements makes their extinction on Earth inevitable.

Even as they are unable to resist the drive to convert everyone on Earth to Join, The Joined cannot “force”2 the remaining immune to become part of The Hive. Indeed, The Joined must do all they can to satisfy the requests of those outside the collective. Their genetic reprogramming also wires The Joined to find happiness in ensuring that The Un-Joined are happy—for some definition of that word.

By steel-manning The Pod Life as non-violent harmony, Pluribus is free to focus on Vince Gilligan’s real interests—and, arguably, the real interests of extended fiction since the emergence of the novel as an art form: character and morality, the human condition beyond the political. But, as the echo of Duranty signals to us, we know from the title of the show itself that Pluribus is also all-in on Big Political Ideas. The reverberations of “E Pluribus Unum”, the legend on the seal of the nation, the unofficial motto of the United States, ring even further down through recorded history—Heraclitus, Augustine, Motteux—and, above all that clamour, the United States Of America has never been a communist country.

Odd people

In Pluribus, there are thirteen human beings whose bodies reject the virus that Joined everyone else still alive on planet Earth3, but who do not die in the process of that rejection—as hundreds of millions of others do. Four of The Immune feature most prominently in the first season. Two are very happy indeed with the happy new world: one nestling in the bosom of her family, the other resting his head on whatever willing bosoms most please him in any moment. But we spend most time with two who both disagree with this new transformed humanity and who were disagreeable individuals in The Beforetimes. Aside from, and originally distant from, Carol, the protagonist, there is Manousos, the grumpy proprietor of a storage facility in Paraguay. (We also briefly meet one other member of The Immune who is unhappy to remain un-Joined, but whom we later witness Joining—about which more later.)

Carol’s motivating backstory is an elegant provocation to a contemporary woke audience: She is a married lesbian who, in the past, had to fight for her identity in a public way; but who, today, remains discreet about her love for women. Her well of antipathy for the urgings of the converted humans surrounding her was filled by her mother’s attempt to “cure” her sexual orientation through “conversion therapy”.

Many contemporary gay and lesbian activists consider “gender affirming care” to be a descendant of such conversion therapy, and believe that it’s used to tell same-sex attracted minors and autistics that they are “the wrong sex”. Many trans activists campaign for laws banning what they believe to be “conversion therapy” are accused of doing so in the hope that such laws will make it impossible for healthcare workers to tell young homosexuals that they are not the wrong sex.

Carol tells her liaison with The Joined , Zosia, that at Carol’s conversion camp, the camp counsellors were “some of the worst people I have ever known. And they smiled all the time, just like you.”

This idea that, once you have changed into a different form from the one in which you were born, you will be happy, that this transformation will free you from feelings of difference or loneliness or suicidal thoughts is so central to the show that it’s embedded into its tagline:

God People

It is one of the most powerful choices of the show that the same Zosia whom Carol repeatedly injures, physically and mentally, with her recklessness and hostility, later seduces Carol, literally and metaphorically. While Carol’s resolve against The Hive is chaotic and fragile, that of Manousos is pure and infinite—because he finds his resolve in God. Manousos believes that The Joined have had their souls stolen; he would rather that they died than that they had to live without them. Alongside Carol’s bleakly ironic “Gotta break a few eggs, huh?”, the unspoken motto of Manousos’s opposition to the Space Commies is “Better Dead Than Red”. We see him endure excruciating physical pain and risk almost-certain death in his quest to defeat the invasion without moral compromise.

Manousos’s objection to space communism isn’t that it prevents humans from enjoying the benefits of free thought or free expression or free markets, but that it steals from humans their God-given freewill. (Gilligan himself was raised a Catholic.) Atop his faith, Manousos’s petit-bourgeois dissent from cosmic collectivism is so hilariously complete that, after The Hive treat him for what would otherwise have been fatal injuries that he suffered on his defiant solo pilgrimage to meet Carol and he can barely stand to leave his care bed, he insists on leaving an IOU to the hospital for the full notional cost of his treatment.

I am being ironically harsh for effect. Yes, Manousos, is a proudly independent small businessman who still believes in property rights, but he leaves IOUs for everyone whose no-longer-property he co-opts on his self-appointed quest “to save the World”. As we discover later, when he makes a harrowing and clumsy attempt to cleave an individual from the collective, we know he does this because he believes that some trace of the original human beings persists somewhere and he hopes that these souls will return to their co-opted bodies. With this return, of course, will come the restoration of the God-given order of consensual free exchange and quotidian suffering.

Anti-Woke Antiheroes

So the two heroes (so far) of Pluribus are a white, North American trad lesbian4, who writes romantasy novels, and a devoutly Catholic South American sole trader, who calls his mother a “bitch” to her face and drives a classic petrol car—a car which, once he’s finished using it, he immolates in the jungle.

Their enemies are permanently blissed-out, vegan, pacifist star-children who conserve energy by sleeping communally and admit they are doomed to starve themselves to extinction because their ideology is incompatible with human biology. They are so anti-human that their collective goal is not the propagation of the species (even in its Joined form), but the propagation of their message across the universe at whatever cost.

It’s also the case that the most materially moral and simply heroic character in Gilligan’s most famous creation was a white, middle-aged, racist cop. With this record, it’s safe to say that the author of this allegory is not going to be standing for office on a Democratic Socialists Of America ticket any time soon.

Message in a bubble

Here are the political messages I take from Pluribus. It’s easy to find reasons to believe that, intentional or not, these messages are there to be taken—because the show’s basic outline is crisp and high-contrast—even if, as you zoom in on its nice details, that shape turns out to be fractal. But I’m not going to pretend that these really are what the show’s makers meant it to say. Worse, I happen to agree with most of these messages.

Like The Body Snatchers, the novel, Pluribus is pro American freedom—in all its painful, grumpy, loneliness. It’s a naughty delight to read a review in The Guardian that—of course!—is uncomfortable with the idea that a current satirical US show could have any other target than the America under Trump:

It takes some chutzpah to look at the world in 2025 – especially if you are a non-Maga citizen of the US – and say to yourself, “Yes, but wouldn’t it be almost more terrible if everybody just … got along?”

Imagine thinking that there could be something more dystopian than living in a free democracy under the Bad Orange Man!

Gen-X-er Gilligan claims that Pluribus does not tell its viewers what to think; he himself invites them to reach their own conclusions about whether or not life would be better as part of The Pod. But, even beyond its side-taking tagline, in its very first episode, it undermines The Pod’s propaganda representative making its central, upbeat offer to the protagonist to “fix her” biological immunity to assimilation with the most sinister musical soundtrack sting we hear in the entire season.

Pluribus is anti-communist and anti-woke. In addition to the explicit textual historical references above, we know Pluribus is anti-communist because the one Pod Person that Carol connects with and tries to disconnect from The Hive, Zosia, is a Pole from Gdańsk, the city whose resistance to communist rule was the domino that ultimately led to the fall of The Wall5. That Zosia not only talks about this time of “opening up” as we’re led to believe she is opening up to Carol, but, when asked for a memory, Zosia recounts a moment of literal and economic consumption (of ice cream) cannot be accidental.

But perhaps the most stark visual evidence for this is the scene that opens the Season One finale: in which Kusimayu, a young Peruvian woman native to a mountain settlement, willingly succumbs to assimilation. We see her life with her apparently loving family in a tourist-postcard traditional village. A refrigerated flask of virus, customized to her genetic make-up, is flown in to this remote location. A serene ceremony accompanied by folk song heralds her convulsive conversion. Smiling beatifically, she walks away with her neighbours, now no longer obliged to play-act for her benefit. The final, telling, shot of this cold open is of the infant goat she cradled lovingly at the start of the scene. Now released by Kusimayu (in accordance with The Hive’s moral programming), it trails behind her, bewildered and abandoned, as she leaves.

This vignette is a masterpiece of horror. It’s both pastoral and serene, yet as hi-tech and terrifying as the infamous “birth” of the monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien. At the instant of assimilation, everything around Kusimayu is exposed as a sham. Since The Joining, she had been living in a Potemkin village, her neighbours’ routines a performance intended to seduce her into joining The Hive—to reassure her that, if she chose the future they offered, she could keep the past she loved.

(The play-acting is identical to that described in the original Body Snatchers novella: alien duplicates perform reassuring theatre for the yet-to-be-converted, but stop their show the moment it becomes redundant.)

As the rest of the episode makes clear, Kusimayu and the people she loved will swap their lives on the land to become drones in the service of The Hive’s ultimate plan: The creation of a gigantic transmitter to forward the message of assimilation. Kusimayu and the villagers will discard Brigadoon for scientific socialism—industrial-scale cannibalism, followed by slow mass starvation, all in pursuit of The Project: to spread an irresistible collectivist biological imperative across the Universe. The crying infant goat is an avatar of Kusimayu’s forsaken love and her people’s cleansing from their homeland.

Commentators have suggested that Pluribus is anti-artificial intelligence. But Gilligan says that—much as he finds the idea appealing and he’s flattered to be thought so prescient—this isn’t the case; he conceived of Pluribus over ten years ago. This puts its birth date near the inflection of the west’s steep ascent to "Peak Woke”. Gilligan’s original concept was of a single man who, overnight, becomes universally adored, and his intention was to explore themes of conformity6.

To me, the aspects of The Joining that don’t resemble communism are the ones that most resemble the conformity of the woke. Kusimayu isn’t a dissident Peruvian peasant targeted for violence by the Shining Path. She experiences no bloody coercion into the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, until she Joins, Kusimayu is a victim of benign “cancellation”. Everyone around her shares secrets and solidarity that she cannot—until she surrenders her own distinctiveness to The Hive.

Pluribus is, broadly, anti contemporary trans ideology. Like another speculative fiction Apple TV show named for a famous American motto, it features—it almost celebrates!—old-school homosexuality that chooses not to draw attention to itself, rather than identity-obsessed “queerness”. Its lesbian heroine is afraid of and angry at any threat of her being transformed, “consensually” or otherwise, from the way she was born. Crucially, she is told that her biological conversion into another state would make her happy in way that she cannot understand until she has experienced it—even though her transition to that state would be irreversible.

Pluribus rejects eco-wars and utilitarian declinism. It’s hard to deny this when one of our two heroes gives a painfully on-the-nose rebuke to green politics by telling The Hive where to stick their offers of help as he drives a 1970s petrol-engined car across a continent, parks it in a rainforest, and sets fire to it to stop them from recycling it. In contrast, in every way possible, The Hive has optimised human activity for conservation. Concomitantly, they have made Homo sapiens obligate cannibals and doomed the human race to extinction. Indeed, it’s worse than that: The Hive’s primary goal is to doom countless other races as-yet-unknown to the same fate. Again, it’s difficult to spin this as anything other than a hostile caricature of eco-fascism.

Pluribus identifies the greatest totalitarian threat to human freedom as memetic-genetic, not material. In Pluribus, the Earth is invaded by information: The information begins as a radio signal. Free humans convert the radio signal into a genetic code. The genetic code takes over human beings, not, as in previous body-snatching tales, by changing their bodies, but by changing their minds.

To me, the current real-world ideology that most closely parallels that of The Hive Mind in Pluribus is Islamism. “Islam”’s literal meaning is “submission”. Even if any of the show’s creators had the spread of political Islam in mind when they wrote about The Hive, I doubt this is something that they would even discuss in the writers’ room; it’s certainly something they would never admit in public. But I don’t think it’s an accident—conscious or otherwise—that the one member of The Immune who is hinted to be an active collaborator with The Pod People hails from an Islamic country and responds to The Joining by taking up a literal harem of women.

Once again, the cunning choice to make The Hive disown active violence gives the allegory a stiletto sharpness. What is dangerous about this invasion is not the “invaders” themselves as people; it’s the idea that they carry and that they aim to infect others with. That idea (the Hive virus) literally kills most people who reject it. What hinders the tiny surviving resistance is their reluctance to fight the people carrying the idea. Like communists before them, when they bring their anti-human ideas to liberal states, Islamists exploit this same weakness—and other weaknesses that come with being humane.

“Already it was impossible to say which was which”

My excuse for taking things further than I suspect the message of Pluribus was intended7 is that: There is nothing wrong with getting an allegory “wrong”—in the sense of seeing something in it that its author(s) didn’t plan but haven’t ruled out. Indeed, Gilligan cheekily invites this by telling audiences over and over in interviews to make up their own minds about Pluribus. What is wrong is to invert or distort the content of an allegory in order to claim for it a meaning that it could never have had when intact—or, worse, to steal the valour of an admired allegorical (dissident) work by adapting it in such a way that its intended meaning is inverted, without acknowledging that inversion. It’s wrong like lying is wrong and it’s wrong because it wrongs the artist.

More fundamentally, making a successful claim on the “correct” meaning of an allegorical work, however much it is admired, has as much power in the real world as proving the political affiliation of an imaginary person. The structure of a parable is evidence of nothing more than the literary gifts of its architect. But, when most people agree on the validity of a cautionary tale in itself, there is, of course, much fun to be had from drawing parallels between some aspect of real life of which you disapprove and some aspect of the tale in question.

Allegories and claims about allegories don’t give us factual-historical information about the World, but they do tell us a lot about their authors and their times. If imaginary-world follies help their consumers to recognise real-world follies, then the authors of those imaginary worlds win over real-world minds. Sometimes, all we need to recognise an error is to see it translated into another context. Sometimes, we can become so fixated on a real-world error that we see it in every context.

The same Guardian review of Pluribus I referenced earlier also makes an unintentionally funny effort to spin the show as an allegory of an abusive relationship—funny because the only way it can make this case is by getting wrong almost everything important that happens in the show:

“Pluribus also functions brilliantly as a portrait of (especially) middle-aged womanhood and as an allegory of abusive relationships. Carol is urged to keep her feelings, especially her anger, in check, deny her instincts, reframe her experiences and endlessly believe the best of people – and believe they want the best for her – in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. She speaks and is not heard. She repeats herself and she is not believed. She shouts and is told to behave better.”

This is such a clear-cut example of straining Guardianista projection that we should be grateful to Gilligan for inspiring it, not least of all because it illuminates what really is so sinister about the show’s enemy: The Hive does not tell Carol to “keep her feelings … in check”; it literally withdraws from Carol to protect itself from the damage (actual death) Carol’s feelings do to its members—in obvious contrast to the behaviour of a real-life abuser. The Hive does not tell Carol to “believe the best of people”; it is scarily open and honest about its motivations and intentions and reassures her repeatedly that she is free to reach her own conclusions about them8. Far from being “not heard” when she speaks, Carol discovers that The Hive will answer every question she asks, and it will do all that it can to meet any spoken request from her—up to and including requests for things that harm The Hive itself. Indeed, a central feature of Manousos’s paranoia is his (justified) fear that The Hive is eavesdropping on his every word via its network of hovering surveillance drones.

The Hive is a threat because it offers the opposite of an abusive relationship: It cannot be violent towards Carol; it cannot coercively control Carol; it is infinitely, unquestioningly attentive to her needs; it will even deny itself the food it needs to live to make her happy. So Carol’s challenge is not to escape her relationship with The Hive—it literally chooses to separate itself from her to protect itself from the violence she has done to it. Her challenge is to find a reason not to Join with it in unholy union when she finds herself falling in love with one of its drones.

Pigs

What if anti-communism, but anti-capitalist?

Just as everybody wants to claim the quoted words of secular saints like Mandela or Gandhi for their cause, everyone wants to claim that a celebrated dystopian fiction is intended to be an allegory attacking their enemies. Sometimes, an allegorical work and its author’s intentions are so explicit and specific that the only way that one-eyed ideologues can wish them otherwise is to remake the allegory in the image of their own ideology. Animal Farm has been so successful and so beloved that generations of communist sympathisers have regarded it with hatred and envy. The original novella is so simple that children can understand and enjoy it—I read it happily before I had any idea what Stalinism was—and George Orwell left no one in doubt of his intentions in writing it and of its referents in the real world. So, of course, it’s the latest victim wilful, tribal, dishonest inversion.

The trailer for this “re-educated” adaptation is enough to convey the scale of the liberties that have been taken with its source material. Even critics sympathetic to its anti-capitalist turn are embarrassed by how completely the Hollywood clique behind the feature has chosen to misunderstand the story it retells:

“Enough of Orwell’s raw material remains for ‘Animal Farm’ to be recognizable — from the dogs Napoleon trains to be his hench-mutts to the slip that sends Boxer to the glue factory — but the film is far too disorderly to substitute for the book. Woe to the student who tries watching this toon instead of doing the reading. To paraphrase Napoleon, when it comes to adapting Orwell: All ‘Animal Farms’ are equal, but some ‘Animal Farms’ are more equal than others.”

This 2025 animated Animal Farm brings us full circle, because, just two years before the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, in the same paranoid geopolitical climate, the CIA subsidised the first animated version of Orwell’s novel. The novella was, undeniably, perfect anti-communist propaganda to feed American youth. But not perfect enough for the Office Of Policy Co-ordination. Once again, the ironies compound. The CIA wanted Brits to make the movie, not Americans—because the political Americans couldn’t trust the artistic Americans to complete the mission without subverting it!

And, as with the 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the ending of the 1954 Animal Farm was changed to be less dark. In both cases, this seems crazily counterproductive. Surely, the more you want audiences to perceive the bad guys as bad, the worse you want the consequences of their actions to seem?

Shiny Happy People

But this is itself a gloriously, intensely American thing to keep happening when dystopian allegories meet US movie money: What is the Hollywood-shaped American Dream if not the global acme of irrational optimism?9 Animal Farm’s US publishers removed its original subtitle, “A Fairy Story”, when printing the book for the domestic market—before American propagandists made their British agents give their adaptation an inaccurate fairy-tale ending. Decades later, to nearly everyone’s amazement, this fairy story became some kind of truth, because the classically liberal United States of America did, in fact, defeat the communist Soviet Bloc without a hot world war10.

The collectivist title of Pluribus isn’t a quote from The Communist Manifesto; it comes from the Great Seal of the United States of America. The way Pluribus hangs a lampshade on its cannibalism exposition dump is by turning it into a cheery celebrity infomercial, fronted by the co-opted body of a retired American pro-wrestler11!

It’s almost as if it’s impossible for Americans to depict even a cannibalistic global invasion from space, dooming humanity to extinction, without making us smile.

Pluribus imagines a totalitarian ideology that combines economic and political collectivism and eco-declinism with extreme-biotech networked consciousness and nano-targeted feelgood marketing, and suggests that it could wipe out the entire human race without wiping the smile off a single face. Then, as it shows us this happening, it makes us laugh.

Perhaps, despite all my talk of too-on-the-nose anti-communism, that is the ultimate meta-message of the show: That you can sell any horror with a promise of happiness.

Kitchen politics

Let’s start as far away as possible from Bluesky, with some 4chan greentext:

Transcript of the screengrab:

i can’t prove it but i think much of the west’s current political moment is downstream of this phenomenon

Before internet

>i want to fuck toasters

>dont be a fucking retard

>grow up

After internet

>I want to fuck a toaster

>google

>find a community with 1000+ members about people wanting to fuck toasters

>fuck up your life

Like many words that escape the troll dungeons of 4chan into normiespace, these ones are as cutting as they’re crude and surreal. They offer no more evidence for their claim than a single absurd imaginary example, but everyone reading about this imaginary online toaster fetish community would believe it existed if a newspaper reported one in the real world; and everyone, regardless of their politics, recognises the phenomenon: People with psychiatric disorders go online to seek validation of their pathological behaviour from others with similar psychiatric disorders—for example, in pro-ana groups. Other people with psychiatric disorders go online for validation of their fake physiological disorders from other people with real physiological disorders—“Munchausen by Internet”.

In both cases, people tell themselves damaging untruths that are questioned by—or that even disgust—other people in the real world; so they look for reassurance online. Sometimes, they find that reassurance by lying about their own lies to truthtellers; but, more often, they find affirmation for their fantasies by nodding along with other fantasists.

Their logic: If your neighbours don’t agree with your view of reality, you don’t need a reality check; you need penpals who are as deluded as you are. If your real-world peers think starving yourself close to death is crazy, maybe it’s time to check out of the real world and into a part of cyberspace where starvation equals status?

Jonestown blues

For anyone with low-status political views, like, for example, believing that transwomen are biological men, pre-Elon-Musk Twitter1 was a hostile environment. Its members and moderators were overwhelmingly self-described “progressives”2. Worse, they were eager to suppress any dissent from their own tribal positions—on gender ideology or on Jews, on Net Zero or ZeroCOVID, on “Islamophobia” or Black Lives Matter. If you had any significant audience on Twitter back then, you knew that, if you deviated from those positions on those issues, you risked being reported to the site’s moderators, who might delete your tweets or suspend your account.

Right now, this person is a fugitive from the Canadian police. Back in the 2010s, multiple users—including feminist author Meghan Murphy, conservative free-speech advocate Lindsay Shepherd, and Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan—were banned from Twitter for calling Yaniv “he”. This “misgendering” was possibly motivated by Yaniv’s suing multiple beauty spas (in vain) for refusing to wax a living penis while it was attached to the plaintiff.

Even if (especially if?) you were even more famous than the three Twitter users I cite above—perhaps you had millions of followers—your committing even the tiniest offence against this enforced consensus was a crime for which you had to atone3 in public, lest the online mob came for you in the real world.

Here’s the Huffington Post, in March 2018, reporting on the fall of the first domino in one of the most infamous cascades of controversy on that platform:

J.K. Rowling has denied intentionally ‘liking’ a transphobic tweet.

The ‘Harry Potter’ author came under fire from fans after they spotted she had liked a post containing a slur against trans women, referring to them as “men in dresses”.

The offending tweet read: “I was shouted at by men at my first Labour Party meeting aged 18 because I asked them to remove a page 3 calendar. I’ve been told to toughen up, be louder, stronger, independent. I’ve often not felt supported. Men in dresses get brocialist solidarity I never had. That’s misogyny!”

While the tweet no longer appear in Rowling’s likes, the fact she had liked it originally was captured by Twitter users and circulated.

No matter how high Rowling’s status in material public life, she was as exposed to attack on social media as the rest of us—not even for anything she had written or said, but merely for momentarily attending to forbidden content.

It’s not paranoia if they’re out to get you

Thanks to the subsequent publication of Twitter corporate internal messaging and source code, we also know now what was only suspected then: that Twitter’s management indulged in politically motivated censorship4, to the extent that even its non-human-supervised algorithms were weighted against heresy.

Despite my then being a low-real-life-status holder of low-online-status opinions myself, I still loved the platform. Trying to express heretical views under a theocracy is a supreme refiner of arguments and test of one’s evidence for them, a temperer of logical and moral mettle. Every morning, you walk into a cult camp run by the enemy, full of complacent cranks to mock. Of course, if you live under such a micro-theocracy, you are yourself at risk of developing either paranoia or a superiority complex, or both. But, to mix religious and martial metaphors, if you can avoid falling into those traps, low-level disruption behind enemy lines is elite combat training on the battlefield of ideas.

But, then, the great disruptor, Elon Musk, bought out the global coffee house and kicked over its tables5. For a while, he did everything he could to revive early-years-of-the-Internet anarchy. Twitter users howled. Advertisers fled (or they were petitioned to leave by outraged users). Musk discarded both employees and code. Whatever you thought of everything else he did, his pissing off his subordinates on a platform engineered for gossip was reputational recklessness.

It wasn’t only advertisers who fled. Refugee users from the new regime sought another platform that offered similar features. Indeed, at the same time as Musk sought to turn Twitter back to the anarchy of the original Internet message boards, those refugees went looking for, and tried to create, something that was like censored-Twitter, only more so.

Threads has huge on-paper mass-market numbers—thanks mostly to aggressive promotion by its owners, Meta. That company owns both Facebook and Instagram, and it pushed and pushes those platforms’ millions of users towards Threads. But, over the course of the last three years, Bluesky seems to have become the sanctuary state for the elites of Twitter’s ancien regime: academics, celebrities, influencers, journalists, NGOs, and politicians.

In November 2024, The Guardian’s 70 separate Twitter/X accounts collectively flounced to Bluesky. The paper’s editorial said:

“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism,” it said.

“The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”

Imagine using Twitter “to shape political discourse”!

In December it claimed that

A mass departure from Elon Musk’s X has led to the site losing about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in the US in two months, with its rival social media platform Bluesky gaining nearly 2.5 million over the same period.

Twitter/X has of the order of 600 million active users a month, so Bluesky’s base is still a tiny fraction of X’s. But even that bucket-from-a-lake has been leaking continuously since the Guardian crowed about it:

Worse for Bluesky’s champions than the small and declining popularity of their platform of choice is the effect their using it has on their own beliefs and behaviour, an effect that’s magnified by the departure of the less-committed. The last occupants of the cult compound are always the true believers.

Blueskyers are almost certainly more political and more active on social media. They’re probably also younger, richer, and more academically qualified on average than users of rival platforms. Their disgust at X’s new, aggressive openness to dissent from their inferiors has driven them to build ivory towers worthy of their lofty view of themselves. In their tiny city state, they can say anything that their peers will let them without fear of challenge.

As Musk hobbled Twitter’s blocking features, exiles over on Bluesky built vast subscription lists of The Disapproved, using the individual and collective blocking tools plumbed into its core. Over There, it is trivially easy to hand the curation of your social media experience to what people Over Here (on Twitter) would call “The Woke Mob”, so that you need never see an “Islamophobic” or “transphobic” word again on your timeline. Here’s a fan of the platform, raving about how completely and rapidly wrongthinkers can be excluded by rightthinkers [my emphasis on my favourite part]:

When you block someone on Bluesky, it doesn’t just keep them from seeing you and vice versa. It removes any interactions they have had with you. It’s a powerful moderation tool that really helps protect users from harassment. Blocking a user prevents all interaction and hides the user from the client experience. Blocked accounts will not be able to like, reply, mention, or follow you. Their posts, replies, and profile in search will also be hidden from you. The function has been affectionately nicknamed “The Nuclear Block” for its effectiveness in stopping trolls/harassment.

Reporting an account that is out of line can also be incredibly effective. Oftentimes when users will share that they have encountered a harassing or spam account, the account is removed before I even get a chance to report it.

Bluesky, like old-school Twitter, is still a place where you can be banned by the admins for “misgendering” someone:

And—of course!—even as they punish their enemies’ thoughtcrimes more aggressively, Blueskyers’ own behaviour towards their designated targets becomes more vicious:

I could have filled this entire page with examples of the comedy of purity that Bluesky has become: its homicidal hatred of mouthy-but-moderate Jesse Singal, the unhinged response of its users to its administrators’ attempts to prevent the invasion of the site by “Palestinian” scammers, and any number of routine scolds:

“Don’t use AI-generated images to make your point; use copyrighted ones, like me.”

“Debate is genocide”:

“Have you got a licence for that birthday party pizza?”

“I can’t believe you’re still friends with your ex-!”

Safe space or echo chamber or both?

Amongst more thoughtful progressives, the unfolding of Bluesky’s culture triggered a meta-debate: Is the creation of such online “safe spaces” A Good Thing for The Cause?

This article by Megan McArdle was a concise factual summary of what I agree with her is the doom loop that Bluesky represents and one of the most prominent pieces arguing that, in the US at least, secession has been bad news for the pseudo-Left:

For roughly a decade, Twitter hosted what is lightheartedly called the “national conversation” on issues of the day, particularly social justice and public health. Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users — politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.

That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals’ demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.

Moderation suppressed conservative users and stories that hurt the left — most notoriously, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter throttled as “disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Of course, progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.

Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later. All that changed when Musk bought Twitter.

But, here, Josh Barro makes a case against—based on the, just-plausible, idea that it might be a good thing for the declining image of progressive politics in the wider public’s eyes that the words of progressivism’s noisier champions are getting much less of a hearing. Because mad6 people scare voters:

…[O]ne of the reasons Democrats didn’t realize it was a big mistake to make promises and statements that made them sound wacky was that they were constantly being yelled at on Twitter by people whose unpopular viewpoints they mistook for broad public opinion. The screamers won the battle but they lost the war: they pressured their own candidates into manufacturing attack ad fodder for Republicans, and as a result, Donald Trump is president again.

Correlation, doesn’t imply causation; but, right now, the McArdle position fits the data closer than the Barro position. The Labour Party in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US have responded to the striking unpopularity of their respective offerings by talking among themselves, and then concluding that the solution is to push even more unpopular policies and express even more unpopular views.

Before a bad idea can be beaten, it has to be dragged out into the public square

My own view? Bluesky and other highly policed online safe spaces are like extreme trans ideology: They’re exactly what you would want progressives to adopt if you were a conservative and wanted to destroy your enemies from within.

Communism lost the Cold War. Socialism is unpopular with voters. Left-liberalism—which I consider to be class-conscious, secular, scientific, internationalist, colour-blind, anti-hierarchical, intellectually rigorous, and committed to free expression—has been hollowed out and worn like a skin by “progressivism” and “wokeism” and Corbynite/Mamdanite crankism.

Because ordinary people, especially the working-class people the Left once relied upon, won’t vote long-term7 for this toxic cocktail of genderwoo, Islamism, pseudoscience, “reverse” racism, magic-money-tree economics, terror-worship, identity politics, credentialism, crankademia, and censorship, its best hope of influencing the real world is to infest public-sector and supranational institutions and the media and to embed itself in international rights agreements, outside of the reach of national democratic accountability.

Accountability depends not only on citizens’ being able to vote bad law down and to remove bad actors from office; it requires that citizens know that Bad Things are being done in their name. If you want to subvert a democracy that’s hostile to your beliefs, you need to protect those beliefs from public scrutiny.

A tidy example of this is the behaviour of the respondents in the infamous employment tribunal currently taking place in Scotland: Peggie v NHS Fife, where proceedings were delayed by the withholding of internal documents discussing her employer’s reasons for suspending nurse Sandie Peggie. Even before fuller disclosure, what we’d heard of internal communications involved in the decision to discipline Peggie was as surprising in its absurdity as its spite.

NHS Fife’s Equality And Human Rights Lead Officer, Isla Bumba, told the tribunal she could “hazard a guess I would be female” but “no one knows” their chromosomes or hormonal composition unless they have had formal testing. The boss of the individual respondent, Dr Upton, a consultant, admitted circulating an email that condemned Peggie before any formal investigation, and that this mailing was a “flagrant breach of confidentiality”.

If you are a small-C or big-C conservative, these are the kinds things you want your enemies to be saying out loud in front of dumbfounded voters.

You want the opposition’s Foreign Secretary to be telling his constituents that a man can have a cervix.

You want the opposition’s Home Secretary to be telling her constituents not to “get into rabbit-holes” of what a woman is8.

You want their candidate for Prime Minister to say that “trans women are women”—and, even better, once elected, to have to retreat from that position three years later in public because the Supreme Court forced him to.

To force a G7 leader to acknowledge reality as it is apparent to the overwhelming majority of his nation’s voters, it was necessary for campaigners to drag the simple and vital question “What Is A Woman?” out of NHS doctors’ messes and comprehensive school staff-rooms and internal HR memos, all the way up to the highest court in the country.

Perfectly, the original reason for this appeal to the Supreme Court was to get a ruling on the implementation of identity-based quotas for public appointments.

Could there be a more satisfying outcome for conservatives than to have two pseudopodia of The Blob—on one side, sex-identity-quota-pushers, and, on the other, NHS-employed advocates of biological men in biological women’s spaces—wrestle each other in open court and national media for months? Could any “progressive-on-progressive” fight better serve conservatives’ ends than one between a public appointments policy that ordinary people consider to be unfair and a view of medical sex that ordinary people consider to be batty?

In democracies, bad-but-widely-held political beliefs don’t die of natural causes—they rarely die at all!—but they can be defeated at elections and they can be made irrelevant to real life. As summertime visitors to Portugal might testify, laws against drink-driving have less effect on people driving drunk than public stigma against drink-driving does. For bad political beliefs to have political consequences, people have to appreciate their practical consequences. Bluesky is just one of many places where people who believe the way the world works is wrong in theory can protect their own politics from practice.

Media political commentators, talking to each other rather than to voters, reinforced each other’s belief that Westminster’s choice to have a showdown with Holyrood over “gender” self-identification would be a disaster for the UK Prime Minister, rather than, as transpired, downfall for the Scottish First Minister. When people in power believe absurd things, they can have absurd consequences. But it was only when voters saw photos of a biologically male rapist in a blonde wig on his way to a women’s prison that irrational ideas that had been seeping into Scottish public policy for years manifested themselves in a form sufficiently concrete and crazy that their most prominent champion had to go.

The electoral turning point for former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—the point at which handout-enjoyers tipped from a vague sense that Corbyn was a generous old weirdo (“Magic Grandpa”), to perceiving him as something more sinister—was when he responded to the poisoning of UK citizens in a provincial English market town by recommending that officials of the obvious sponsor of the chemical attacks, the Russian Federation, be invited round to investigate whether or not Russia really was to blame. It was only when Corbyn’s Stalinist-apologist head of comms broadcast Corbyn’s long-held true beliefs about Putin, an enemy of this state, that previously sympathetic voters saw Corbyn for what he was.

According to polling, while most voters may find their individual policies attractive, they don’t like contemporary “progressives” or their ideas as a whole; but, spiritually, progressives dominate the administrative and regulatory cathedrals of western democracies. Given this dominance, the two wisest things they can do to cement their place as the clerk-clerics of the new established church, are to stay silent and stay invisible. (That many progressive footsoldiers believe noisy, disruptive street activism is a winning strategy is one of the many reasons they keep losing.)

Any ecologist will tell you what happens to populations in isolated environments under limited selection pressure. It’s ironic given the fetishization of the word on Bluesky, but one main biological effect is a reduction in diversity. Another is the expression of previously hidden (recessive) harmful traits through inbreeding. When individuals from such pockets are exposed to the wider world, things often don’t work out well for them. Just ask the Christmas Island shrews.

The tiny blue Devil’s Hole pupfish is one of the most isolated and inbred macroscopic species known to humankind. It’s both adapted to an extreme environment and very delicate outside it.

Why does any of this matter?

Conservative Americans who scored high on the authoritarianism questionnaire had no problem saying “Yes, I am authoritarian.” But liberals were a different thing entirely. Not only were liberal authoritarians less likely than conservatives to accurately identify themselves as authoritarians (when they were, in fact, authoritarian), but there was actually a negative correlation between left-wing authoritarianism (the reality) and liberals’ willingness to identify as authoritarian (their own perception). That means that the more authoritarian liberals are, the less they believe they are authoritarian!

— Luke Conway, The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It)

Here’s the overarching irony: I want genderwoo, Islamism, pseudoscience, “reverse” racism, magic-money-tree economics, terror-worship, identity politics, credentialism, crankademia, and censorship to find a deep hole to die in. I want the pushers of such ideas to keep talking to one other and not to people who might otherwise be seduced by their ideologies or who might otherwise help them to present them better to voters. But, unlike the Bluesky ultras, I also want healthy, open debate with people I disagree with, if only so that far better—but less superficially appealing—ideas can be refined. And I also want my political opponents’ ideas to be exposed to public scrutiny.

But it’s not just the ultras that matter. Many people considered moderates, and people I once at least respected for their rejection of some of the Left’s worst excesses, were radicalised by old-school censored-Twitter and have been pushed further by Bluesky. Some might not be Corbynites, but, like the Corbynites, they believe in a hostile media conspiracy against the Labour Party. Some might not be Stalinists but they want Elon Musk arrested for incitement. Some might not have been totalitarians, but they wanted children locked out of schools on shaky grounds, with terrible long-term consequences.

And terrible long-term consequences will result if, for example, the UK elects a Reform government with Nigel Farage as PM. The last time they went up against him, Remain campaigners turned inwards to their allies and called their enemies racists and tried to tell voters what they really thought and tried to stop the government from doing what voters had told them to do. We know how that ended: not only with a victory for Leave, but, eventually, after frustrating voters’ wishes, with a Boris Johnson landslide on a “Get Brexit Done” platform and a harder Brexit than if they had at least played by the rules that they themselves had written.

In the same way that I, as a soft-Brexiter, warned continuity Remainers that their dedication to blocking the result of the EU Referendum would be fatal to their cause, I’m warning today’s Centrists that hiding themselves away from voters in Leftist sinkholes and treating the views of the voters outside with contempt will give them exactly the kind of government they profess to be terrified of, a government that I believe would be a disaster for this country.

Being good requires that you draw lines to separate you from evil. US conservatives are currently having their own problem with this; but, generally, this comes more easily to those on the side of the political divide that respects Chesterton’s Fence and considers borders sacred than the side that venerates inclusion and has “No Enemies To The Left”.

There aren’t many people on Bluesky and their behaviour is weird, even among the WEIRD; but they include elected representatives, national media commentators, tech entrepreneurs, scientists, university professors, and senior public-sector employees. Even ones without official power often have disproportionate influence. Their political positions are skewed strongly to what passes for the Left now and their collective outlook affects the real world: what’s thought and taught and done.

Bluesky is a place where, instead of learning to be better advocates for their views in the face of mainstream criticism, elite progressives can go to frot each other to greater radicalism and thrill in ever-more-vicious purges of dissenters. It’s a place where camaraderie can go to curdle into crankery. It’s a place where even politicians who must have a professional interest in voters’ views can go to prepare for irrelevance. But—as the implementation of Brexit and the rise of Trump and Reform have shown—it’s those pesky earthbound voters who choose the kind of world that highfalutin Bluesky-dwellers have to flutter down to live in.

Conservatives didn’t have to banish progressives to this or to any other cult camp. Progressives banished themselves. Every step they take away from the public square is another step they take away from public office.

8

That Cooper immediately pivoted from this question firstly to her own feelings about the launch of her book, and then to the question of violence against and rape of women was particularly revealing when she was later accused of blocking investigations into alleged child rapes and of having taken the side of the now-convicted attacker of a female police officer.

Click below to hear me read this post:

To do my bit to save it from bankruptcy, I take out two months’ subscription to Apple TV+ and review three of its most prominent original productions (but not Severance).

The Gorge

It’s rare that a high concept is tempting enough to make me hand over cash for the film built on it. But I caught the trailer for The Gorge and, even though I could see it was a cynical attempt at a Gen-Z Valentine’s Day date-flick—bit of army and horror action for the lads, bit of edgy romance for the lasses, precision-engineered by the market research department at Apple—it made me want to stream it, for the simple reason that it looked entertaining1 and I wanted to be entertained.

Dear reader, I took out a month’s subscription to Apple TV+ and I watched The Gorge and I was entertained.

Don’t get me wrong; The Gorge is rubbish. But there’s Bad Rubbish: every book in the Da Vinci Code series. There’s Good Rubbish: The Empire Strikes Back. And there’s Not-Bad Rubbish, like this. It was also not Annoying Rubbish: There were no “progressive” homilies; there were no artistic pretensions; there was no Mark Rylance.

As with Alec Guinness in the aforementioned Good Rubbish of the original Star Wars trilogy, Sigourney Weaver is roped in, at no-doubt huge expense, to provide actorly heft and cross-generational name recognition. But the leads—Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy—are both capable performers, albeit playing this videogame on Easy Mode, and a handful of non-extras give them solid support.

Teller and Taylor-Joy are also “unconventionally good-looking”. In the everyday world, this is a euphemism for “bordering on ugly”; but, in Hollywood, this means that, on any random weekday evening in any random provincial nightclub, they’d be the fittest couple present. He’s giving Ripped Nerd and she has that fashion-model Sexy Space Alien thing going on.

Which reminds me that the casting of two of the principals in The Queen’s Gambit, the streaming show (a Netflix original) that secured ATJ’s place in the mainstream, gave us some glorious memes.

The trailer for The Gorge doesn’t mislead us about its plot either: Hot, tormented western assassin (Teller) and hot, tormented eastern assassin (Taylor-Joy) are assigned to opposite sides of the eponymous gorge, a deep, tree-shrouded scar on the landscape of an unknown far-off country, a scar that hides a dark-and-deadly Cold-War secret. Each killer is ordered to keep that secret in its place without being told exactly what the secret is. They are also each ordered by their superiors not to fraternise with the respective appointed agent of the old enemy on its other side.

Like all good high concepts, it’s a What-If? on the part of its writers that immediately provokes questions on the part of its watchers: “What is the dark-and-deadly secret?”, “What’s going to happen when the two killers, inevitably, start fraternising with each other?”, “Will either or both of them die when they, inevitably, come face-to-face with the dark-and-deadly secret?”

The answers to these questions were, inevitably, preposterous; but I didn’t care, because the action is brisk, the actors are easy-on-the-eye (even if their chemistry is less than convincing), the effects are good enough to get the job done—the budget went on the big-name cast—and the whole freak show has no fancy airs at all. Everyone craves a dirty burger in their viewing diet from time to time; but, even in our age of content bounty, well-made, if overcooked, junk like The Gorge is surprisingly rare.

Slow Horses

[WARNING: I’m going to say less about this show because it’s harder to talk about it without spoiling it, but there are still vague, minor spoilers ahead.]

It’s annoying when Everyone agrees that some piece of Art is excellent and you consume it in the hope that you’ll be able to disagree with Everyone in an interesting way, but you can’t. Slow Horses adapts a series of British spy thrillers about bad British spies—one volume per season, apparently with decreasing fidelity to the original novels as they proceed—and it does so in a way that you might describe as stylish if it weren’t for its Deightonesque seediness.

The supremely seedy Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) shepherds a parliament of MI5 rooks-tagged-for-sacrifice2 through their respective professional purgatories, trying to avoid attention from “Second Desk” Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), his superior at HQ (“The Park”). We are drip-fed details of Lamb’s own fall from legendary status within the service, while the stories of his subordinates’ career tragedies are lobbed into the proceedings like flashbangs.

Despite, or because of, their failings as spooks, the arc of each season draws these cast-outs into the centre of significant action, where they then make things worse—while we pray they’ll make things better, or at least not die trying.

The nearest the show has to a James Bond is sad-but-gung-ho MI5 nepobaby River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), but it’s the show’s miserable Moneypenny, Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) who is the heart of the team. We learn that her backstory is entangled both with Lamb’s and with that of River’s grandfather and former “First Desk”, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce).

A lot like the-Slow-Horses-the-protagonists, Slow Horses-the-show combines attention to detail with Not Giving A Shit: The apparently woke plot development that you’re building up a head of outrage about? It’s a red herring, but one we’re going to dangle in front of you until you roll your eyes. That regular character you were warming to? We’re going to kill them in an unpleasant and pointless way.

But, a lot like Jackson Lamb, despite its best efforts, Slow Horses is also cryptically sentimental. Besides its writers’ random cruelty to principals, it tries to hide this sentimentality by being broad: Fart jokes are weak at the best of times, but Lamb’s supposed frequent and noxious emissions are a running gag that’s in need of a hip replacement. This clip is mildly amusing though:

Yes, Slow Horses is sweary and messy and implausible. Yes, multiple characters are deliberately unlikeable (which represents a pleasing extension of Counsell’s Third Heuristic into spy fiction). But it’s also often original and surprising and tense and, fart jokes aside, very funny. Even in its deliberately dated simulation of London, it has sharp things to say about what it’s like to live in the nation’s capital when you aren’t loaded and your life is, literally and metaphorically, hanging by a thread. Like much of the dodgy-men’s-club of gritty-Britty fictional spies that live beyond Bond—Harry Palmer, George Smiley, Joe Lambe [The Game3]—Jackson Lamb and his Slow Horses are even more British than 007.

Aside from being gripping in itself, Slow Horses is a show about one of its the best qualities of many British people: It’s a show about keeping buggering on through dark and dingy times, a show about trying to be a hero even when you’re a zero—and not a Double-Oh.

For All Mankind

[The review covers Seasons One to Three, because, during Season Three—you’ll know the point I mean if you get there—it felt that FAM had turned from a saga into a soap: stuff was happening for the sake of stuff happening, rather than as part of an overarching narrative.]

Until I saw the programme itself, Apple’s promotion of For All Mankind loomed in my peripheral vision like an overtaking tour bus wrapped with the legend: “What If The Space Race, But Women?”

After I’d watched several episodes, I realised that this first impression was not a million miles away from the show’s premise; but it’s a long way to the Moon—a tiny deviation from the true path at the start of your journey, and you’ll miss the target by a light-second4. Yes, FAM is an alternative-history, hard-SF space-race drama starting in the 1960s. Yes, it begins with Soviet Russia landing a man, and then a woman, on the Moon before the US does. Yes, in the FAM timeline, America competes with Russia by deploying its own female astronauts, doing so by reviving the not-alternative-history Mercury 13 programme.

But, after that set-up, FAM develops into something more interesting and less obvious than you’d expect. By that, I mean that it’s about people, not merely identities. People can be fascinating; identities are not.

A show that depicts female astronaut training in the USA from the 1960s can’t avoid speed-running the history of Second-Wave feminism. But, like The Right Stuff, which is explicitly referenced by a minor character at one point, FAM grapples with the history of what we might call modern masculinity without lapsing into psychobabble or platitude. It explores fatherhood as much as motherhood; it establishes a manned presence on parenthood. Indeed, there’s an explosive family scene between major characters in the second season that says deep and true things about being a blood parent and about being an adopted parent. And a passing anecdote about an overweight NASA engineer, a then-minor character, pissing his pants later unlocks a major character’s thoughtful examination of the metaphorical and literal scars of adolescent humiliation. In both cases, men and women drag each other from mutual conflict to shared pain.

Mons veneris, mons pubis, montes lunae

Much as I hate art about identity, there is, however, one “community” that features in For All Mankind that I want to “celebrate” alongside it: homosexuals.

Part of the show’s retro appeal is that it boasts straightforward, 20th-century Women-Who-Love-Women and Men-Who-Love-Men. Because, one quarter into the 21st century, that’s weirdly refreshing, like watching a show about civil rights now we live in the aftermath of the fraud of “Black Lives Matter”. FAM reminds us of a time in which being “out” was career suicide and the idea of any mostly-straight adult finessing ever-so-slightly-divergent-from-the-mean sexual desires into an entire new personality would have seemed grimly hilarious. There’s no “non-binary” this or “queer” that, and the only “transitioning” that looms large in the plot is that from the gravitational influence of the Earth to the gravitational influence of the Moon.

Sappho doesn’t have to be contrived into the drama of Apollo for reasons of “representation”; she’s stage-front because there’s nothing easier to imagine happening when you invite the women of the USA to serve their country in a dangerous and physically demanding setting alongside other women than a U-Haul of lesbians rocking up—except perhaps that, once you’ve recruited a literal army of astronauts, some of them are definitely going to be gay men.

Heterosexuals get a look-in too of course. When their relationships risk cliché, the streaming-service timescale gives the showrunners space to prove their plans for the straights are more subtle—sometimes even hanging a lampshade on an obvious temptation, as they do by explicitly citing The Graduate (twice) as a reference for a fling between a student and the mother of his best friend (though this particular entanglement says more about the enduring effects of a cruelly random childhood bereavement than about mid-20th-century sexual mores). Then there is an exquisite shot of a middle-aged female nerd staring at a middle-aged male nerd’s meaty hand holding an elevator door open that’s worthy of a few paragraphs of Henry James in painting the landscape of their long-suppressed feelings for each other.

The show is honest about society as well as about physics. Of course this generates some counter-intuitive results:

Cute paradox One:

Joel Kinnaman gets star billing—he looks like a star, in the long-limbed, frontier-American mode that goes back to James Stewart and John Wayne, and he can glower with the best of them—but it’s the women who get the most screentime and are the most three-dimensional. As not-quite-first-man-on-the-Moon Ed Baldwin, Kinnaman is meant to depict a frustrated all-American hero; yes, he has to embody the flaws you’d expect from that description; but the female leads—including Wrenn Schmidt, Shantel VanSanten, Krys Marshall, Jodi Balfour, Sarah Jones, Sonya Walger, and Coral Peña—also get to be both heroic-and-likeable and fools-and-jerks.

That’s the final stage of being a “minority” on screen: when you’ve gone beyond token-casting, beyond being allowed to be a villain (again), into a zone of acceptance where you can be portrayed unsympathetically as a matter of routine and portrayed as a rounded human being as a matter of course.

Cute paradox Two:

A series set in the vastness of outer space cares enough about verisimilitude to depict the American(!) living spaces of its principals as relatively small. In the FAM timeline, astronauts are jobbing government employees, who, despite their Corvettes and chunky collectors-piece wristwatches, live in what appear to be, by the standards of the booming eras it depicts, modest circumstances. The production design is both accurate and chic, but it isn’t tempted to dress up reality for the sake of a sexy backdrop.

Cute paradox Three:

The CGI is excellent partly because it has the otherworldly high-contrast crispness that’s going out of fashion in the wider special effects business, but which is true to the way things look outside of Earth’s atmosphere. In the unfiltered, unscattered light of our sun, orbital and lunar vistas resemble oversharpened old-school digital film-making and the sights in them have the no-gravity, no-friction, everything’s-a-point-mass weirdness of the earliest physics engines, which happens to resemble the mechanics of non-falling objects in the vacuum of space.

Rhodes not taken

If you’re not interested in the story-as-a-story, the characters, the effects, or the identity politics5, For All Mankind is full of interesting speculation, as in “speculative fiction”. As the make-up artists put wrinkles on the cast, the screenwriters accumulate wrinkles on the face of their alternative history: In FAM’s timeline, Pope John Paul II is assassinated; John Lennon isn’t; the IRA murder Margaret Thatcher; the Challenger shuttle doesn’t explode; and The Beatles do, eventually, play a reunion concert. For the elected US Presidents in their world, they playfully mix real historic POTUSes with politicians who were losing contenders for the White House in our timeline—until they give us a woman President, but I'm not going to tell you who she is. The real politicians from our timeline are brought to life in theirs with a clever mixture of archive footage, CGI, editing, and some note-perfect impressions by voiceover artists.

Which is neat, because FAM depicts a timeline in which the same energy we directed at digital technology, and content to pour through it, was instead poured into rocket science. This results in another pointed diversion from our reality: In the world of FAM, climate change isn’t believed to be an existential problem because the whole planet committed unapologetically to nuclear fission and then nuclear fusion. Yet its parallel Earth remains a world of struggles. How could it not be? Every drama needs struggles—even a weightless one. This tension made me nod along with a 2022 New York Times review of Season Three:

“All this gives the series something unusual in top-tier TV drama now: an earned sense of optimism. History, “For All Mankind” argues, is not the inevitable product of immutable forces. It is the result of choices. Small choices make bigger choices possible. Early choices (like having women help lead us into space) make later choices imaginable (like having a woman lead the country).”

I’m a sucker both for space opera and for hard-science NASA content and I grew up wanting to be an astronaut as much as the next kid, so I was always going to find something to enjoy in For All Mankind , but I was still surprised at how much it engaged and moved me. As soapy as it eventually becomes, it’s better even than Good Rubbish; it’s great television.

Are you still watching?

Streaming services dread viewers giving up on a show before season’s end or looking away during episodes to doomscroll. But committed Olds like us don’t need preview montages that tell us what’s coming up—thank you Slow Horses—or spicy chapter titles that give the next big story twist away—thank you FAM—to keep us committed; we don’t need to have plot points spelled out to us by the cast to compensate for our trying to watch the smart TV screen and browse the smartphone screen at the same time. Just in case we weren’t watching the thing we clicked “Play” on, the trailer for The Gorge even has a voiceover, seconds in, warning us that the trailer-proper for The Gorge is about to begin!

We Olds do, however, appreciate the extravagance of a retro soundtrack. Heaven knows the sums that Apple spaffed on getting FAM the rights to use Sinatra and Elvis and Nirvana and Marley and the Stones. The show’s official Spotify playlist is packed with bangers. No wonder Apple TV is bleeding hundreds of millions.

[Isn’t Todd Spangler a glorious name?]

I won’t be renewing my Apple TV+ subscription, but if you take one out, one thing you can’t complain about is not being able to see (or hear) where your money is has gone. Apple TV is losing billions because everything they make looks (and sounds) a billion dollars. And everything on it that looks a billion dollars looks that way because it cost millions to make.

Apple TV+ reminds me of Apple hardware back in the 1990s: Even if you were a hardcore nerd who looked down the way the company restricted your access in order to keep things simple for their non-nerd fans, you could only admire the aesthetics, the quality control, and the attention to detail. Apple seemed to make luxury toys for people with more money than savvy, for people with more taste than you. The company’s hardware is now no longer levels-above the competition’s, but its streaming content is elite tier—a luxury for the company as much as it’s a luxury for consumers. How long can sales of Apple’s not-so-elite hardware sustain Apple’s new elite software? I hope long enough to up everyone else’s game.

[If the company doesn’t go bust first, the fifth seasons of both Slow Horses and For All Mankind are due to stream on Apple TV+ in autumn 2025.]

[For those readers unaware of the years-old Counsell’s Laws, I’ve appended them to the bottom of this post.]

1. The Cynic’s Razor

If you worry that you’re being slightly too cynical about the motivations or behaviour of an individual or organisation, you’re being insufficiently cynical.

One of my favourite examples of a failure of cynicism is the widespread belief that the Iraq War was a “War For Oil”, fought by the US/the west to seize Iraq’s natural resources. In fact, the pre-war Iraq “Peace” was, like so many others before and since, a “Peace For Oil”: The west turned a blind eye to the Hussein family’s atrocities—indeed, it propped up Saddam even while he gassed Iraqi civilians—in the hope of a relatively stable supply of oil.

Today, even as he betrays the people of Ukraine, we can at least thank Donald Trump for making this classic kind of great-power deal-with-the-Devil out in the open. His self-described peace deal to end the war started by Russia’s invasion of the country explicitly demands that Ukraine sign over rights to its natural resources to the US.

The accusation of “War For Oil” was doubly stupid, because it was possible to find evidence for multiple motivations for the Allies to remove Saddam Hussein that actually made some kind of sense1 and that reflected badly on the people Stoppers2 wanted so much to hate. Though this particular stupid theory did have the dual campaigning advantages of sounding plausible to non-political bystanders who hadn’t been paying attention to the past couple of centuries’ geopolitics and of “War For Oil” being an easy-to-spell three-syllable slogan that fits conveniently onto any size of placard—preceded by the protester’s favourite word: “No”.

If you were opposed to involvement in the Iraq War, and were looking to attack the motivations of Allied forces, you could, quite legitimately, have cited George W. Bush himself saying words to the effect of: “They [the Iraqi regime] tried to kill my daddy” in public. I don’t happen to believe that family revenge was his motivation either, but it’s better supported by evidence than any supposed economic justification, based on some fantasy that the US would spend astronomical sums of money on a war to “seize” Iraqi oil, something which, twenty years later, the US still hasn’t done—in much the same way the United States continues not to “buy our NHS”. It’s certainly more cynical.

What marked neo-conservatism out as different from other forms of American conservatism was its rejection of traditional US conservatism’s, especially anti-communist conservatism’s, longstanding foreign-policy attitude of “He might be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, in favour of what New Labour called a “moral” foreign policy, a foreign policy that not only aspired beyond narrow self-interest, but boasted classically liberal, democratic, “nation-building” goals.

Consumer nations tolerated and supported murderous autocratic regimes in producer countries in return for continuing access to the natural resources of the producer countries those regimes ruled over. Consumer nations did this for far longer and on a much larger scale than they had ever tried to depose or destabilise such regimes. But “anti-imperialists”, normally so enraged by consumerism, found it difficult to fit neo-conservatism’s rejection of this (perfectly rational and perfectly wrong) behaviour into their model of the world. Theirs was and is a model in which everything “white” western countries did and do—including, for embarrassing example, freeing slaves—was Bad in some way. So they had to project motives onto the Allies that made no sense, even on anti-imperialists’ own terms.

It’s always annoyed me that most conspiracy theories have no internal logic, especially when they ignore human nature—about which, I emphasise again, it is difficult to be too cynical. There is no person more likely to pompously ask “Cui bono?” than someone convinced of a conspiracy theory that requires the supposed conspirators to have acted against their own interests.

This happens so often that one of my favourite responses to a tin-foil-hat-wearer advancing a conspiracy theory is to suggest to him a better (less-bad) conspiracy theory of my own invention that is at least a) consistent with reality and b) rational from the alleged perpetrators’ point-of-view. My starting point for devising such a theory is usually, of course, to assume that the theorist I’m arguing with has failed to think badly enough of his enemies: that he has been insufficiently cynical.

2. The Intersection Of Repulsion

If you are not in the habit of disliking people, but someone’s behaviour makes you take a strong dislike to them, there is a good chance that you are not half of a “clash of personalities”, and that other rational people share your feelings about that unlikeable someone.

If a person you’ve dealt with for a non-trivial length of time has made you ask yourself more than once “What is their problem?!” or “Why are they like this?!”, it’s likely that other people have found that person bafflingly unpleasant too.

If you are worried that you might have been over-sensitive or that the problem might be you*, I recommend that you discreetly solicit the opinions of mutual acquaintances/colleagues. The more eager/relieved/engaged they are in expressing their own exasperation with the person in question, the more likely it is that you have simply been dealing with a shit and responded reasonably and rationally to their bad behaviour. A bonus: You now might be able to recruit said mutual to your crusade against said shit.

A much more interesting question is: “How do repellent people thrive?”

I’ve written previously about my puzzlement at the persistence of genuinely good people. Genuinely unpleasant people are a lesser mystery, but a mystery nonetheless. It’s possible to be morally bad and personally pleasant. Indeed, if you are planning on screwing people over to your own advantage, it might seem to be an optimal strategy. But it can’t be sustained forever, because people are gossips—and people love gossip. As word gets around that you might be civil but you aren’t moral, eventually you run out of suckers, or at least you are reduced to exploiting the suckiest of suckers.

Not-terrible people co-operate with terrible people because terrible people make it costly not to co-operate with them. In the short term, this is a win for terrible people; but, in the long-term, it’s a loss: because rational non-terrible people will a) remember being treated badly and avoid terrible people, and b) tell all their non-terrible friends that the terrible people are terrible. If you don’t have any other things going for you, like being hot or being rich, your being a bad person will tend to make your life worse.

If no one else thinks the person you think is obviously bad is bad, you might be early to the party or you yourself might be the problem. Always do a sanity check that you aren’t the problem.

3. The Disliked-To-Dismissal Pipeline

I developed this rule-of-thumb after years of my volunteering as a union rep alongside my doing “proper” jobs3 and it follows naturally from The Intersection Of Repulsion above.

In the UK, even as a matter of admin alone, sacking an employee is always tedious and unpleasant4. Managers do everything they can to avoid it—often including constructive dismissal (trying to drive the person to give himself/herself the sack so they don’t have to do it).

Because of this, most sackings require the additional incentive—beyond, say, criminality from the soon-to-be-ex-employee, and certainly beyond that employee’s mere incompetence—that the employee in question is unpleasant for his/her coworkers to be around.

The corollary of this is that, if you ever read or hear of someone (in this country especially) being fired, then there is a high probability that, in addition to the official reason for that person’s dismissal, no one liked having them around.

This is sad in itself and, sadder still, implies that, if you want to keep your job (especially at an employer already looking to make redundancies), it’s more important to be widely liked by your fellow employees, especially your superiors, than it is to be competent. Similarly, most of your colleagues won’t fret about your professional integrity, unless your lack of it puts their own employment at risk; and most of your colleagues won’t care about your contribution to an organisation’s aims or bottom line, as long as your shared employer is big enough that the output of your work doesn’t affect their income as well.

Does this make me sound too cynical? See Counsell’s First Heuristic, “The Cynic’s Razor”, above.

Addendum: Counsell’s Laws

Counsell’s First Law

The Cool Kids are always wrong, even when they are right.

Counsell’s Second Law

The two most powerful forces known to contemporary humankind are peer pressure and the desire for a quiet life.

Counsell’s Third Law

The most dangerous political weakness is sentimentality. It’s not a coincidence that every form of fascism has had a deep and wide sentimental streak.

Counsell’s Fourth Law

Where there’s a subsidy, there’s a scam.

[BE WARNED: THE YOUTUBE VIDEO EMBEDDED AT THE END CONTAINS A MASSIVE SPOILER FOR ANYONE WHO HASN’T SEEN BREAKING BAD.]

I started writing this substack a few weeks back, intending to argue—against those in the media claiming otherwise—that this Labour government’s bad start in office was going to continue. Every time my own life stopped me from completing this essay, that same Labour government hit the news with a new screw-up, making my prediction less impressive.

Luckily, our mostly-pro-Starmer broadcast commentariat are so lazy and partisan that they keep giving us new failed predictions to laugh at.

For example, we can always count on James “How To Be Right” O’Brien: He didn’t let us down yesterday, when, after yet more rambling whataboutery concerning Boris Johnson, he told us this…

“I would stake what’s left of my reputation on there being no more details [about the incident that led to Louise Haigh’s resignation] to come out.”1

Just before this story dropped…

To be fair, O’Brien’s betting “what’s left of his reputation” is less impressive when you know that he previously bet on this.

A Convenient Stranger

One thing Substack is good for is that I can tell true stories here that would be drowned out by Didn’t Happen Of The Year heckles over on Twitter. On this site, there’s more space, the people reading me either know me personally or have already decided I’m not a bullshitter, and everyone knows that the incentives are different: It takes more effort to attention-seek and Like-harvest on Substack.

(Don’t get me wrong; I am King Of The Cynics; DHOTYA serves a useful purpose, because lots of people really do Make Shit Up For Clout: “My eight-year-old looked up from his Kumon work today, pointed at Boris Johnson on TV, and said: ‘Why does the blond man always lie?’.”)

But what about when something happens in real life that neatly makes a point? Am I going to pretend I hallucinated it? No. I’m going to substack it:

A few weeks back, I’m minding my own business, browsing the greetings cards in Morrisons. All the gift-giving stationery is in the same aisle next to the print magazines. A middle-aged man I have never seen in my life before walks up to me, holding a copy of Private Eye in his hand. He points at its front-page montage:

“Look at these! They’re funny! Serves them right.”

(They’re not funny.)

I have strong political opinions, but I’m British enough not to want to get into an argument in public. I also have internal organs that I don’t want perforated by an offended rando. So, in such situations, my first resort is diplomatic ambiguity. “They [Labour] do seem to have got themselves in a mess over this,” I reply, pretending to be even more interested in the birthday cards.

But Private Eye Man has found in me a responsive audience now. He goes for it. He rants for England about the state of the current government, about how Starmer and Rayner and the rest of them are a disgrace and an embarrassment and how difficult it will be to get rid of them—and it’s not just the freebies they’ve collected; their policies are bad for the country and bad for him and bad for me.

Yes, I agree with much of this; I mumble my assent accordingly; but I’m agreeing quietly because I’m listening properly now, and I’m listening properly now because I’m interested now. As I say so often, non-activist Brits rarely think about politics-with-a-capital-’P’ and even more rarely think out loud about it. Something Is Going On. It’s exactly the sort of unsolicited everyday voxpoppery that persuaded me back in 2016 to make the biggest wager of my life—on an online betting site—on UK citizens voting to Leave the EU.

At the very least, this encounter was a datum of what the pundits call “cut-through”. As when Biden’s public mental deterioration becoming so obvious to voters that US media could no longer spin it without sounding absurd to the ordinary people watching the US President’s behaviour on live TV, things were becoming so bad for Starmer’s team that even their biggest fans in the commentariat were faced with a choice between conceding that the wheels on the clown car—while not off yet—were in need of some tightening, or doubling down and going Full Comical Ali. Either way, it’s still impossible for them to travel back in time and rewrite their preceding gushing words of praise.

The Events Horizon

We need a word or phrase for the point at which a political leader—Truss, Sturgeon, Biden—has become such a liability in the eyes of the public that the politician’s credibility can no longer be spun by the politician’s party or their media champions, the point at which the whirlpool-circling ship of state approaches no return, the point at which not removing its captain dooms its crew to electoral oblivion.

We’re not there yet with Keir Starmer, but, even after just 100 days, his friends were already staging their first round of interventions:

The BBC2:

Andrew Marr in The New Statesman:

Beth Rigby of Sky News:

Pippa Crerar in The Guardian:

Whoever writes the editorials for The Independent:

Prophetic Fallacies

These are funny

So, before we get into the grit, let’s point and laugh at a few more of our supposedly professional, supposedly even-handed ex-state-broadcaster journalist fanboys (and one straightforward fanboy).

On the 5th of July, Andrew Marr, formerly Political Editor of BBC News, looked forward to “ordinary, down-to-earth, serious people, talking like the rest of us” being “in charge of the government”. Before the month was out, the country was rioting.

And, only a couple of months later, newspapers sympathetic to the government were reporting at length on a “civil war” involving both its political and civil service arms and asking questions both about government Ministers having accepted gifts from third parties and the way in which those ministers defended accepting those gifts. Those reports were dismissed as nothing more than media muck-raking—until one general in the non-existent fighting was suddenly toppled from her non-existent warhorse.

At which point, her fall was being spun as Starmer’s cunning “ruthlessness”:

Let’s fast-forward only weeks from Andrew Marr on BBC Question Time on the incoming government to newly installed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Building Safety and Homelessness Rushanara Ali on BBC Any Questions. Here’s the reaction of the audience to her claim that “Keir Starmer is absolutely committed to restoring trust in politics”:

They’re laughing at her. They can’t help themselves. Because what she was saying was obviously funny even to a BBC Radio 4 listeners. The People had speed-run their way through Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, and were already at Mockery—leaving only Pity and Assisted Suicide to go.

What Sopel, former Chief Political Correspondent for the UK state broadcaster, was trying to say here was that he “doesn’t want to do the whole pathetic fallacy thing”. It’s an understandable mistake: The words “prophetic” and “pathetic” have a passing resemblance, like the words “sychophancy” and “stupidity”.

And, on the subject of stupidity, also last month, the new Foreign Secretary had annoyed a longstanding international ally against terrorism, left officials scrambling to deal with the fallout from his describing an ethnic cleansing as a “liberation”. and abandoned the Chagos Islanders, while claiming to be striking a blow for decolonisation.

More interesting than Sopel’s malapropism is how neatly this tweet from a supposedly impartial commentator, one who once addressed millions of voters on a daily basis, encapsulated the mood of a large subset of the nation’s establishment—from civil servants to clergy to other supposedly neutral broadcasters: a combination of sentimentality, unselfawareness, gross bias, and plain obliviousness to facts. (Because facts aren’t for graduates of elite universities; they’re for factory fodder.)

For full effect, this next one really needs its accompanying byline photo:

“The grownups are back in Westminster. The Tory psychodramas inside No 10 have been replaced by a serious Labour government focused on delivery. It’s going to take time for all of us to make the adjustment. Except, time is the one thing Keir Starmer is not going to allow his new cabinet. He knows that the only way to win over those who didn’t vote for him last Thursday is to make an immediate difference. These days even a landslide majority is no guarantee of a second term.”

That was Sunday 7th July. Here’s the same outlet on Sunday 6th October of the same year:

“Sue Gray has resigned from her position as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff after finding herself at the centre of a political storm since Labour came into power.

Gray will be replaced by Morgan McSweeney, the party’s election guru who masterminded Starmer’s succession from Jeremy Corbyn, with whom she is said to have found herself at odds in government.

While a number of senior Labour figures had downplayed the friction between Gray and McSweeney, both of whom are close to the prime minister, one cabinet minister had foreshadowed Gray’s future weeks ago, telling the Guardian: “One or both of them will have to go. It’s not going to be Morgan.””

I could do this all day. Fun as it is, I’ll stop now. (But you can find plenty more examples of this kind of juxtaposition out on Twitter.)

Yes, it’s happening and, yes, it’s good

But I’m a big fan of taking the long view. By the rules of British democracy—dare I call them our constitution?—this government has years to go. However, the key to taking the long view is to ignore the immediate drama and focus of the characters. It’s the nature of tragedy that the protagonists are doomed by their inherent flaws.

Because, on their own terms, its less the chronic wrongness of the UK media-establishment consensus that matters; it’s their chronic inability to sniff out the real story.

The Real Story

Reality has already proved most of them comprehensively wrong about the material consequences of Brexit, but the greatest peri-referendum failing of journalists—especially because it’s their job—was to miss the bigger disaster:

• that the EU is constitutionally doomed to secular decline by the fundamentals of economics. (Writers for the Financial Times in particular have no excuse for getting so drunk on Remainerism that they repeatedly tried to deny the gravity of financial arithmetic.)

• that, as bad as corresponding trends are for the United Kingdom, its ancient democratic settlement—a settlement as influential as it’s idiosyncratic—at least offers its citizens a way out that continued EU membership would have blocked.

Similarly, they were too busy branding Leave voters “racists” to spot the blockbuster news, now falling out all around us, that Boris-and-Rishi’s Brexit regime promised on paper the biggest influx of non-white immigrants in UK history. Political correspondents could not be bothered to read public-domain government policy commitments.

But things are so bad now that the previous tension between journalists reporting on (what they must always call) “chaos” in the government’s leadership and those same journalists claiming this chaos is temporary or trivial is dissipating. And I write that as someone who believes that Starmer is going nowhere any time soon..

I’ve said before that Labour’s moral failings and its lack of a “vision” won’t keep the party from power. I’m saying now that Labour’s cabinet of skeletons, chronic infighting (in itself)3, and catastrophic news management aren’t going to bring the government down either. Of course I wish it otherwise; but, because I care more about being right than about defeating my enemies; and because my living doesn’t depend on my flattering my readers’ prejudices or keeping in with a particular media-political set, I have to admit that.

This last consideration also means my eyes aren’t, unlike a newspaper journalist’s, fixed on Time’s sweeping second-hand. I can afford (literally) to take a longer view. My view in this case is that, in the long run (before its full term has expired), this government is already in terminal decline.

Its tragic faults lie deeper. They can’t be fixed by removing someone other than the PM, however senior, who is bad at her job and appointing someone who appears to be good at his.

Its fatal flaws are threefold:

1. Its leadership is incompetent.

2. The people it works with and who voted for it hate it.

3. Its policies are broken—on their own terms.

I’ll address each briefly for now. There are and will be many more supporting examples, and I’ll probably be forced to write about them here over the next couple of years.

1. The childlike incompetence of the Chief Grown-Up

Here’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer being interviewed by Sky News’s Beth Rigby:

What's amazing here is that Beff taps the ball to Starmer in the gentlest way possible—by inviting him to comment on appearances not actions; by asking only to empathise with voters, not to justify what he’s done. But Starmer chooses—actively chooses—to take a huffy swing and kick it up into his own face. [If you want to see his face during this, I recommend you check out the video embedded in the tweet this audio comes from.]

Any seasoned political operator would recognize a sympathetic set-up from a friend in the media and tap the ball back to her:

"Yes, you're right, I can understand how some people might see things that way, and some in the media have been keen to paint all these things in the worst possible light, but..."

Instead, Starmer drags his own son into the public square and hides behind him, talks over his interviewer’s citing of other (quite relevant) examples, and defends choices that he will subsequently reverse, at least one of which might in fact have been against the rules.

Again, I link to a previously not-unsympathetic news provider: the BBC. Because it’s important to appreciate exactly how bad Starmer is at this stuff—even while he's still playing on Easy Mode.

This is the boss of Marr’s “ordinary, down-to-earth, serious people, talking like the rest of us”, given the opportunity to identify with the rest of us, but completely failing to say anything that might be recognisable as their language.

Slow-witted, unselfaware presentation is only the visible part of the iceberg; now, the part of the Labour Party that still has a reputation for delivering meaningful change has gone public with its concern about the other 90%.

In addition to accusing Starmer’s Ministers and aides of being “not very good”, a source in the article accuses them of being “a bunch of academics and librarians in charge of a government”. To me, this faint praise is all the more damning, because at least academics and librarians are thought to be clever and organised, and this government has so far shown little evidence of either quality.

This also leads into the next dooming flaw, because it tells us that even those ideologically adjacent and tribally committed to Starmer, those who helped put him where he is, don’t think much of him. In any organisation accountable to the public, if you’re not visibly liked by your colleagues, you’re invisibly marked to be a scapegoat.

2. Counsell’s Termination Heuristic

It’s not just that the old Labour Right has been unsupportive of Starmer’s operation. The Office Of Budget Responsibility has not been supportive of the Chancellor Of The Exchequer’s central claim about government finances, upon which her poorly received first Budget was based. Business has not been supportive of that Budget’s outcomes. The Labour Left in Parliament has been surprisingly and conspicuously unsupportive of the Assisted Dying Bill.

Sacking someone is difficult; sacking one’s boss doubly so. Even in the face of gross misconduct or vast incompetence, British white-collar public-sector workers especially don’t want to go through the administrative hassle of a dismissal unless they very much dislike the person who they want to be rid of. If one powerful person or many less-powerful people hate a colleague, that colleague should take great care not to put a foot terminally wrong.

For pertinent example, yes, Sue Gray was already in trouble for “becoming the story”, but what sealed her fate was office politics: She had, apparently, messed around the appointment of other members of staff. It’s hard to think of anything that would piss off high-rent-paying, heavily indebted London professionals than acute job insecurity caused by lazy admin.

The Labour Party is terrible at getting rid of bad leaders, so this is, to reuse that word, mostly academic. But, should an opportunity arise for the Parliamentary Labour Party to bring down the guillotine, the chances of it losing its head are far higher if Starmer continues to fail to cultivate friends.

3. Nothing works

To be clear, none of the above will do for this government. What will do for it—sadly, only years down the line—is that its policies fail even on their own terms: Tax grabs that end up costing more to implement than they grab, Austerity-lite wheezes to save money that are more-than-offset by Ed Miliband giving us a German-style energy crisis that crushes productivity4, and a whole array of schemes designed to promote "community cohesion" that will continue to revive the previously-long-dead UK far-Right.

Even Starmer himself is sufficiently worried about the his team’s performance so far that he’s had to start ranting about immigrants and announce a reset in The Sun newspaper, perhaps to reassure the sort of voter who rants about Starmer in provincial newsagents.

Starmer’s reset article is exactly what you would expect from him: light on specifics, dense with cliches: “radical measures”, “meaningful change”, “gone are the days of”.

People like me, who actually read this stuff, hate it. But it’s ordinary, non-political-nerd voters Starmer needs to reach. It’s often said that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. No one will read this and no one is listening to what he says in his mumbling, nasal, monotonous voice any more—though they might subconsciously register the contrast between its properties and Badenoch’s resonant diction when PMQs plays in the background on the TV news.

Starmer had his chance of a second chance, but he’s already blown it. He keeps talking about “tough decisions”, but none of the unpopular things he’s done so far will lead to sustained future growth over the rest of his time in power. Without that growth—and with increasing government lending costs—the expensive remainder of his commitments will remain unaffordable.

The median member of the UK commentariat isn’t as smart as Walter White. They haven’t realised it yet, but the voter in the newsagents made up his mind weeks ago. Starmer Labour is already dead5.

Having checked my inbox, I see I received no notification of its being posted, so it’s been up here for nearly a year—at least until I saw it over the weekend. The comment’s sole source was an interview with Asa Winstanley.

In completely unrelated news, here’s an apology from Novara Media yesterday:

Table Of Contents

[Originally, I followed Substack’s official instructions for inserting a table-of-contents here, but they don’t work. However, if you’re viewing this on desktop, hover your pointer over the left edge of your browser window, click on the little ruler that appears, and you can use the table-of-contents that appears there to jump to any of the individual sections by name.]

Peter Kay: An Unauthorised Biography

book by Johnny Dee

My dad used to teach secondary-school English. It was only after I found myself teaching post-secondary science that I understood properly why he tended not to want to read serious literature in his downtime. Going through his bookshelves, I’ve found plenty of thrillers, plenty of crossword-solving references, and plenty of biographies. Among the last was this one, which happens to be about someone who happens to have had his roots in the same part of the country as my dad (and the same social class); but, unlike both of us, had no interest whatsoever in education.

Nearly twenty years old now, so pretty much only available second-hand, this book is all the more interesting for having been written before Peter Kay became A National Treasure.

Dee writes engagingly and, even though his admiration is obvious, with a healthy cynicism and with an (I suspect hard-won) insight into the way real human beings behave in real-life situations—both everyday and showbiz. For example, Dee’s a good judge of when Kay’s former colleagues/competitors speak out of envy and when they offer a counterpoint to the legend—he’s especially good on Kay’s early tendency to sabotage rivals when he had to share a stage with them.

The story-telling gets a bit shakier when Kay’s career takes off properly and Dee, inexplicably, begins trying harder to be funny himself; but he otherwise remains clear-eyed and entertaining. What redeems Dee even at this stage is that he writes with a sincere respect for northern English working-class and popular culture, some of which is deserved.

Kay neglected his schooling to wallow in junk TV—especially British junk TV—and went on to mine this, like all the other aspects of his everyday life, for material. Dee understands how dangerous Kay’s compulsive consumption of lowbrow media could have been to the prospects of someone from the Kay’s circumstances; but he also can’t disguise his sneaking admiration for anyone willing to do the “work” needed to attain PhD-level mastery of any subject, no matter how low-rent, even if that includes acquiring encyclopaedic knowledge of Coronation Street.

Kay is to pulp TV what Tarantino is to pulp cinema: an obsessive young fan who turned into an auteur and raised its game. He’s always going to be successful and widely loved; but, over time, he will, like Les Dawson before him, get more of the serious recognition he deserves. I doubt a better book will be written about his formative years.

The Night Agent

Netflix Original TV series

[Not to be confused with The Night Manager.]

Based on a novel that I haven’t read, The Night Agent isn’t a radical rewrite of the paranoid thriller template, but it tortures the subgenre’s tropes until they say something more interesting. Plenty of clichés are present—but they’re not correct.

The male co-protagonist has a Dark Backstory—but this Dark Backstory pertains to his father, not to him. He’s young and low down in the FBI hierarchy, doing a boring job—but this combination of unpromising premises is responsible for everything kicking off around him.

The female protagonist is suspicious of the male protagonist—but not merely to generate obligatory sexual tension; her suspicions are justified by the plot. At the start of the story, she also has a “boring” job—but there are at least two good reasons why she becomes entangled in the exciting shenanigans.

Indeed, one of the satisfactions of The Night Agent—too rare in our times—is that people have reasons to do things. Actions that lead to action aren’t free-floating excuses for another stunt set-piece; they’re expressions of demonstrated interests and characters.

This is in contrast to, for example, The Bricklayer, which I’m not going to give its own review, because I don’t have enough nice things to say about it not to stay mostly silent about it. (Once again, it’s sad to see Aaron Eckhart’s talents wasted.)

The Night Agent’s two protagonists make mistakes that drive the story, but they are both competent, and their errors aren’t teen-cheerleaders-taking-a-shortcut-through-the-graveyard foolish. When there’s violence, it’s both believable in itself and has physical consequences even for those protected by Plot Armour. They get hurt and the pain and damage hobble them. The biggest plot twist makes sense. I like a conspiracy thriller that doesn’t make me roll my eyes like I do when someone tells me their favourite conspiracy theory.

Classic Albums: Phil Collins—“Face Value”

Pop album/Amazon Prime documentary

There’s no need for this review to be deep or involved. This documentary does what it says on the tin and is as unpretentious as its subject, but it reminds you just how much better and enduring the work of Phil Collins was and is than that of most of the people who sneered at him at the time he was creating it. Indeed, it’s the unpretentiousness of Phil Collins’s non-prog, non-jazz, non-big-band musical output that’s central to its ageing better than much of his far-more-feted-at-the-time, artsier pop music contemporaries.

Accordingly, Collins spends much of his interview time in this telling us that this, his debut solo album, was simpler than everyone thinks—even to the extent that he told his guest musicians, including Eric Clapton, an actual blues man, to make their contributions simpler too.

Collins also tells us that people have over-interpreted the lyrics on the album: Yes, he was angry because he was getting divorced at the time, but his words were a stream of free-associated rhyming rage, never intended to address specifics; and no, none of the urban myths about “the incident behind In The Air Tonight” are true, because there was no such incident.

People have imagined that his composing and recording the music was a lot more complicated and clever than it really was: Yes, he did use drum machine presets and mixing-desk talkback channels and other random elements that had a ready-made sound that pleased him.

People not alive during his chart-bothering heyday might find it hard to grasp how detested Phil Collins was back then, a sort of Margaret Thatcher of corporate pop. Even though, as this documentary reveals, PC’s real-world relationship with his record company was far from smooth.

Even if you hate Collins and his music, it’s hard to deny there’s a charm about Face Value and its creator when set against the agonising of the work of other 1980s artistes. This documentary does its subject justice for most non-musically-trained, non-tribal listeners. Recoommended.

Becoming Bond

Amazon Prime documentary

George Lazenby is famous for playing James Bond once; and he’s almost as famous for then refusing to play James Bond ever again—despite being offered all the gold in Australia. This documentary pulls off the same trick of the best of the EON Productions’ 007 franchise by being both dry and camp (two qualities that outsiders often associate with his birthplace of Australia).

Much of the dryness comes from one third of the documentary’s format: Current1 Lazenby’s close-up, face-on answers-to-camera to questions about his life, which alternate between self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. Much of the campness comes from another third: Dramatizations of important incidents in that colourful story. On the frequent occasions when you doubt the veracity of Lazenby’s account of himself—he doesn’t deny that he has lied widely both in his personal and professional lives—the other third of the content—contemporaneous film footage or accounts of the same events from other participants/media reports—often gives him validation.

Do not be put off, as I almost was, by the first few minutes of Lazenby’s storytelling, in which he is wincingly crude and brags about being an unpleasant child in a way that immediately turned me against the adult senior citizen he aged to become. Because, by the end, his story has said something profound about the choices we all have to make in life, even if you’re not exactly sure what that profound thing is, and you will (probably) have been charmed by some of what he tells you about his experiences between those two ages.

There is an early brush with death. There is a great love affair. There is a pivotal choice. There are improbable scrapes. You will learn things about the man that you didn’t know—I had no idea that he was catapulted to an A-list role without any previous feature film experience—and you will learn things about English-language culture in that odd transition from the 1960s to the 1970s that you either never did know, are so old you’ve forgotten, or were too stoned to notice at the time.

Rebel Ridge

Netflix original movie thriller

Immediately after I finished watching Rebel Ridge, I did a Twitter search for “Black Jack Reacher”, because I knew that this would be a common response to the film, and I would be very surprised indeed if its makers hadn’t at least thought about using this high concept as its pitch, if not its actual shooting template.

If the Reacher phenomenon has somehow passed you by, then we’re talking “tall, quietly spoken, ex-military stranger arrives in small town, stumbles upon dark shenanigans in high places, teams up with a local hottie, and then it all kicks off”.

The Jack Reacher novels make a very big deal of what a very (physically) big man the character is, but the first official Jack Reacher movie cast notoriously short A-lister Tom Cruise as the protagonist—to howls from the fandom. (Though much of the later critical consensus was that he somehow managed to fill out the part.) Rebel Ridge almost made the same “mistake” in casting 5’9’ (1.75m) Star Wars franchise star John Boyega. But Boyega dropped out and the lead role of “Terry Richmond” was taken by relative-unknown Aaron Pierre. Pierre is 6’3” (1.9m) and ripped. His being big, but quiet and somewhat anonymous, was a perfect combination for this role.

So much of the tension of this movie—and it relies on tension for so much of its effect—comes from our experiencing the extremes of provocation Richmond is put through from his point-of-view and so simultaneously willing him both not to lose and to lose his temper so we can see what righteous retribution he’s capable of wreaking. It is a nice touch that both the protagonist and the viewer will slip up if they see too much of a racial motivation in Richmond’s treatment

Pierre is so good in this film, and the film itself is so good, that it could well be both the man’s breakthrough role and the beginning of a(nother) lucrative action franchise. I’m not just saying this because Pierre is, like me, another member of the (highly exclusive) half-Sierra-Leonean Brit club2, but the man has movie-star presence and hypnotic looks. These wouldn’t be enough if it weren’t for a superb script, one that’s both lean and dense. (It’s certainly dense enough to leave some critics confused—as people who so often fail to pay attention at work can be.) And they wouldn’t be enough if Pierre couldn’t act. He can even deliver the occasional overwritten badassery in this in a way that is convincing rather than cringe.

Don Johnson has been doing this sort of thing for decades longer than Aaron Pierre, but he could have phoned in his role in this; he chooses not to, and his performance is another gem.

Throughout Rebel Ridge I was gripped, so much so that I don’t want to say anything about the plot, especially as it relates to the title, because I want you to be as pleasantly surprised as I was. If you watch in on my recommendation and you don’t like it, I’ll give you back the corresponding fraction of your Netflix subscription3.

These terrible events have been made worse because our family has been subjected to what a CID detective in court at the inquest into my father’s death described as “a campaign of constant harassment and abuse” by a stalker.

Because of this campaign, my dad died alone. Because of this campaign, we were forced to cancel his funeral. Because of this campaign, the awful physical and mental suffering my mother has endured was compounded by her experiencing the fear that her own son had died or been imprisoned for the rest of her life, not once but twice.

That campaign included my being attacked by the stalker, but then arrested and locked up after a false assault accusation; my being investigated for the “murder” of my father and of my mother—who is still alive and well cared for; my having utilities cut off to my home because of false accusations of fraud; and our stalker ringing and messaging friends and relatives, colleagues and clients, police, social services, school and health and church authorities to make defamatory accusations or to verbally abuse front-line workers. If you follow me here or elsewhere on social media, some of you might even have seen our stalker’s public abusive messages, usually accusing me of being a killer.

Yesterday, I was informed that the perpetrator is under “mandatory care” in a psychiatric hospital.

I already suspected that something like this might have happened, because there had been a break in call attempts from our stalker’s number appearing on the call-blocking application I use; on one line alone, I typically receive five to twenty per day, every day.

I want to apologise, first of all, to people who subscribed to this substack when I started it, when I had no idea that all this horror was imminent, for my being chronically distracted by all of this (and distracted by all of the other fallout that inevitably accompanies serious family illnesses and deaths).

I would also like to apologise to anyone who has suffered collateral damage from the stalker’s actions against us. If we have not discussed it before, feel free to contact me so that I can apologise to you in person, and so your experience can be included in the ongoing police investigation.

I’d like to thank all the friends and family who have helped us through the past few months.

Despite the heroic efforts of other individuals—part of our stalker’s M.O. has been to bring formal charges of professional misconduct against public servants who, for example, have cleared me of vexatious criminal accusations—we have been let down by multiple institutions. So I have no illusions that our stalker will remain in custody permanently or will stop the campaign; but, for now, we’re all grateful for this peace.

Went The Day Well? is a 1942 not-official-British-propaganda film, based on a story by Graham Greene and directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian whose life is a story in his own right. It’s already a pretty well-known war movie—if not up there with the likes of Sands Of Iwo Jima or Colonel Blimp or Casablanca—but I realised soon after I dipped into it one day last week, that I hadn’t seen it before. In it, an almost-idealised south-of-England village is invaded by Germans and many of the invaders end up dead.

There are no spoilers in that previous sentence. The film’s framing device, narration from an imagined future village-church graveyard, makes all of this clear from the start. But it does not prepare you for everything you witness in the final act. If I tell you that the plot is ripe for a Tarantino retelling, that might hint at some of the flavours of its final course. Even if such a reboot never happens, it deserves, even at this late stage, to become a cult classic, and I’m puzzled that it hasn’t already.

If you’re at all interested in the British, especially the English, you should watch this film. The place and its people have, of course, changed hugely since it was made; but it captures so much of the essence of both how they still are and how they still see themselves that it’s a must-see. This isn’t to say that it’s perfect: Although many of the performances are fine drawings of modest lives lived bravely—moving pictures of courage—some of the acting, especially by the non-trained players deployed at points, is poor. But it is a perfect encapsulation of several particular kinds of Britishness. Indeed, the story wouldn’t work at all if the villagers weren’t undone at the outset by their plausible eagerness to offer temporary welcome1 to strangers, albeit British strangers who present themselves as conspicuously loyal to King and country.

It takes the escalation of the peril the locals find themselves in to drag them from their socially stratified politeness, and from their banter and their irony, into the sort of dark place where they resort to their ruthlessness and stubbornness and seriousness and bloody-mindedness.

“Good moaning”

Again, it’s no great giveaway to say that the Germans who invade the fictional village of Bramley do so by giving every impression that they’re natives. That they do so reminds me of the best running joke in 1980s UK sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo: that the recurring character of Officer Crabtree, a British bobby working with the French Resistance has such a terrible accent when speaking French that all his (English-language) lines are spoken with the most contorted vowels possible.

This gag has multiple layers of irony:

1. ‘Allo ‘Allo parodies the (apt) seriousness of wartime dramas like Secret Army, populated by clever and ruthless German invaders, in part by mocking the ineptitude of its own farcical Nazis, who are—inevitably, but generously—the butt of most of the jokes; some of the biggest laughs, however, are saved for the British characters—and the laughs work because of the richness and ambiguity of English vocabulary, as well as because English, very unlike German, is a most un-phonetic language.

2. The character was partly inspired by former UK Prime Minister Edward Heath, who spoke fluent French, but with a poor accent.

3. In real life, Arthur Bostrom, who plays Officer Crabtree is, in fact, fluent in French.

But, if you’re familiar with how Germans not native to the UK speak English, when you watch Went The Day Well? across the decades that have passed since its release, you can understand how it might have been possible for fake ‘Krauts to get away with it:

1. Even allowing for their being portrayed by trained actors, the upper-class characters in the film speak with close-to-RP accents—they make sounds that today’s correspondingly advantaged inverted snobs dare not.

2. Such accents boast vowels that are closer to those of Germans who’ve learned English as a foreign language (even today) than they are to the vowels spoken by most natives.

3. The accents of all the characters in the village vary widely, both by class and geographical origin2, again in a way that is far more pronounced than today.

So it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that, back in the early-to-middle 20th century, a small group of mildly-accented fluent English-speakers from Germany—or loyal to Germany/German family—could pass for Brits within an isolated village population, especially as self-proclaimed outsiders, who might have been privately educated. (This adds yet another irony to the ’Allo ‘Allo joke: actual Brits shown speaking English in the show speak it in RP.)

The Heart Of The Matter

The heroes of Went The Day Well? are both male and female, but one of the most interesting things about the film is how conventional the depictions of male heroism are next to the well-acted complexities of the sacrifices of the film’s inadvertent warrior women. In such a traditional and “respectable” setting, the female characters not only have to overcome their physical fears, but are forced by extreme circumstance to break through the societal constraints placed on their sex and face horrors that they would not have been expected to (though a farming environment like this one would present its residents with more direct experience than most of the bloodier side of life).

You expect a straightforward plot from a work of this vintage; but it disappoints almost spitefully, as the hopeful plans of our plucky protagonists to summon aid are frustrated. You expect one early death to be the setting of an example both by the German hostage-takers for the captured villagers and for the audience by the filmmakers, merely to remind us of the stakes. It is not. It is the first of so many deaths that, unusually even for now, we cannot trust that anyone we have identified with will live to see the end of the weekend invasion it depicts.

I’m not enough of an expert on cinematography to be sure, but I couldn’t help mentally pigeonholing the lighting and composition of many of the shots as “film noir”. It certainly exploits both darkness itself, and sharp contrasts between darkness and light, as well as combinations of foreground and background to paint the drama of some of the most gruelling set-pieces as starkly as possible.

However gloomy aspects of this adaptation are, the film is a long way from Greene’s original story, in which it’s not the collective efforts of the villagers, and certainly not the martydom of certain of their womenfolk, but the actions of a lone-and-lawless outsider that are most important to defeating the invaders.
Again, this template is somewhat un-Greenesque (and would be perfect for Tarantino); but, despite discarding this more-subversive plot, the transformed work remains shocking.

The film guides always qualify their description of Went The Day Well? as “propaganda”, because its production does not meet that definition; but the film-as-art cannot be classified as pure propaganda also because, if it has a message, it’s not merely one of inevitable victory through heroism; it tells us baldly that no one can be trusted, that averting defeat carries a terrible price in pain and blood, that everyone—man, woman and child—must make sacrifices, and that fortune does not always favour the brave or the virtuous.

How you can watch it

You can watch Went The Day Well? free with a trial subscription to Studio Canal. or you can buy the BFI restoration on Blu-ray disc.

My Instagram timeline is punctuated with ads that would have seemed bizarre to my twentieth-century music-loving saving-up-money-for-weeks-to-buy-physical-media self: Musicians offer to send me CDs of their professionally recorded and produced and packaged songs for free, if I’ll just tell them where I live. Often, their ads either play a clip of their music in the background or open by playing one in the foreground1. Sometimes, the artist making the offer performs one of the tracks in an official music video.

Most of these videos are pretty slick. Most of the tracks aren’t bad. But most of the music is also not so good that I take the trouble even to follow the ad’s link to request a CD. It’s not an original observation—we reached this point years ago—but music is so cheap now that musicians literally cannot give it away.

But I know what I would pay for: I would pay for a service to recommend music to me that I like so much I would hand over my email address to listen to it.

Closing the box

Something not a galaxy far, far away from this has existed for years: Pandora-dot-com. I even used to use this service in the early oughts. Since then, against current fashions, Pandora has pivoted away from its original AI-based model—it hoped to license its proprietary algorithm to music companies—and towards offering a smart streaming service to consumers, and it did so over twenty years ago.

The way it worked when I started using Pandora is pretty much the way it works now, as Wikipedia says:

Listeners can tune into established genre stations, other users' stations or create their own stations based on their musical interests.^[41] The user can use thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to declare whether they like a track or not, which determines whether similar songs should be played in the station.^[42] A second thumbs down to the same artist will ban that artist from the selected station.^[43] A thumbs down immediately skips a song, but the number of times a user can skip tracks is limited unless they are using one of the paid subscription plans, or opts to watch a video ad.^[44][45]

The “artificial intelligence” lay in Pandora’s encapsulation of your musical tastes in a clever enough form—Pandora’s aforementioned proprietary algorithm—to make good recommendations. This algorithm encodes the characteristics of millions of tracks to cluster them so that songs and recordings with similar musical properties are placed closer to each other in computational space. If you like one track in a cluster, there’s a good chance you’ll also like one of its Pandoran neighbours.

Pandora didn’t just recommend established artists, but ambitious up-and-coming ones. Not only would their tracks be added to your stream; but, if you liked them, you’d also get the opportunity to do more than Like them: you could add your Pandora-registered email address to their mailing list. And I often did that. To a point when I’d get several emails a week from wannabe stars, usually telling about their tours of small venues in Minnesota that I was never going to visit in a hundred years.

This isn’t why I stopped using Pandora; I stopped because the full service was no longer available in my territory (the UK) for copyright reasons. But a UK-based/Europe-based service that operated in a similar way—so I had a realistic chance of attending the gigs of bands it recommended to me and rewarding their efforts by handing my cash to them directly—would have won my patronage in an instant, in exactly the way that Spotify’s feeble attempts to recommend music to me failed to. (I do, in fact, pay for YouTube Premium, but not for its bundled YouTube Music service, which does at least have the advantage over Spotify of offering quite a few tracks that record labels have suppressed on other streaming services.)

Why is Spotify so rubbish at recommending artists to me? (I use the word “me” intentionally, because I have at least one good friend who is very happy with this aspect of the service.) This leads to my supplementary question: Why is what I believe to be a poor service good enough for most other people?

I want less of More Of The Same

The best commentators can distinguish how they personally feel about something from how other people feel about and distinguish how other people feel about that thing from the truth about that thing. Everyone jokes about how, immediately after they buy an item from Amazon, The Algorithms fill their browsing experience with ads for exactly the same product. Because it’s obvious that, immediately after buying a particular product, we aren’t interested in buying another one, isn’t it?

But there’s a gap between what it is “obvious” in our opinion and obvious in other people’s opinions and what other people whose living depends on it find to be true. Amazon’s living depends on its making sales. Every time I boggle at the current clown-pants layout of the company’s website, I check myself and silently ask: “But what if this shitshow works? What if Amazon devotes millions of person-hours to measuring exactly what level of user-experience chaos its customers will click through to hand over even more of their money to the Bezoids?”

Because what really is undeniable is that Amazon shifts a lot of product. At the risk of my sounding like an evolutionary biologist telling a just-so story about the past emergence of some contemporary human anatomical feature, maybe Amazon shows people more of the same because people do, in fact, want more of the same. And that applies even to products other than the inherently-repeat-purchase lines that Amazon now aggressively pushes “Subscribe & Save” discounts on.

Indeed, Amazon Prime Video takes More-Of-The-Same marketing to an extreme. As you scroll down its home screen, it offers you an entire row of films you have already watched, and invites you to watch them again; it shows an entire row of movies it recommends precisely because people watch them over and over again—and few people would be able to get through that Often Rewatched row without seeing something that they had rewatched; and it shows you an entire row of films that belong to the same subgenre as films you have watched before.

It’s this last kind of More Of The Same that interests me. Or rather doesn’t interest me. Because, yes, there are certain cinematic genres that I am drawn to, but the problem with popular genre content—sorry cineastes, cinema is a popular medium, not an artform2—isn’t that it’s limited by the expectations of its genre; it’s that people who like that genre are prepared to lower their expectations in exchange for conformity with its tropes, tropes they know appeal to them. “Yes, this film is ruined by Steven Seagal’s appalling acting and unnatural physical movement; but I would like to watch ‘Die Hard on decommissioned battleship’.”

Even though I anything but a pop culture snob, I am pretty sure that this is not true of me (and of at least some other people—I’m not that special). I enjoyed Die Hard hugely the first time I saw it. I have rewatched Die Hard many times since. But I have never watched an entire Steven Seagal film. I have no desire to watch a Steven Seagal film. And my feelings about that wouldn’t change however much a Steven Seagal film resembled Die Hard.

The Problem and The Tragedy

This is the problem. Or at least it’s the problem for a minority of people like me. Almost all non-Pandora-style recommendation algorithms are more or less sophisticated versions of:

“You watched films A, B, and C, which you ticked the Thumbs-Up icon to Like. People who also Liked A, B, and C also Liked films X, Y, and Z. Here are X, Y, and, Z as your recommendations. most of these films also happen to belong to what our clustering recommendation algorithm has labelled ‘Genre Alpha’.”

Yes, it might well be true that A, B, and C have fans in common with X, Y, and Z; and it might well be true that X, Y, and Z are of the same genre as A, B, and C. But it is also often the case that A, B and C are good films/albums/products of Genre Alpha and X, Y, and Z are bad films/albums/products of Genre Alpha. I don’t care if other people agree with me about the, admittedly relevant, question of genre; the problem is that they disagree with me about the, more important, question of quality.

This might be the problem, but, for my twenty-first-century music-loving self, it’s not the tragedy. The tragedy is that there isn’t a strong enough incentive for any large corporation to solve this problem, because lots of people, like my Spotify-loving friend, are (almost by definition) happy with this kind of recommendation3—not least of all because there probably isn’t enough good stuff in any given genre for any algorithm to recommend new good stuff they haven’t already seen aren’t already familiar with.

This latter issue is, I suspect, where movies separate off from music. Because, at least for now, feature films still mostly cost large sums of money to produce. Popular music recordings do not. Pandora can work for music because there are lots of good musicians with limited resources who can still make impressively produced recordings. But why would record companies want to promote them when the record companies’ back catalogues can make them more money with less marketing input?

Twentieth-century record companies were just banks whose employees snorted (even) more blow and hired (even) more prostitutes—and who lent money to degenerates by design, rather than in error. Perhaps a better analogy is venture funds, because they would lose silly money on nineteen losing prospects and still make a profit thanks to one massive hitmaker. But, today, not only is the ratio of ambitious music-makers to successful money-makers higher; the wannabes don’t need record-company-size sums either to produce studio-quality recordings or to release it to everyone on Earth with money to give them, for those consumers to play in high fidelity directly into their ears or their homes.

The economic result of this technological revolution is that the artists hustle online themselves, like the record companies would have done once-upon-a-time on their behalf (and at the expense of the artists’ advances), shaking their metaphorical moneymakers out of the metaphorical brothel windows of the Internet.

But no one pimps like a record label

Here’s a perfect example of the kind of talented unsigned artist trying to give me a CD. I watch this sponsored Instagram clip. It’s downtempo; it’s not performed in English; but it’s gripping and cool. I’m intrigued.

Then, I visit the maker’s website and I fear I’ve been redirected by malware to buy a 1990s collection of “Your Secret To Restful Sleep” self-hypnosis cassette tapes. The faux-marble background! The emojis! The filtered headshots! You tempted me into a dark spy-movie subway station with icy, monochrome central-European art-pop; now you’ve got me down there, you smash me in the face with exclamation marks and retina-scorching cerise pink.

This whole layout is a reminder that singer-songwriters should not be doing their own marketing. This website should be being put together by a posh, starving intern, suffocating under the thumb of a cynical, drug-addled music-industry boss. Singer-songwriters should be writing songs and singing them. But God help them doing that fruitfully in a world where streams are the measure of chart success and AI-generated songs can collect tens of thousands of streams.

Even if you don’t think pop music matters, variations of this problem, which had been around for decades everywhere from academia to public policy to journalism to literature to photography to biotech, are getting worse, as the technologies that amplify it have become more powerful. AI as long-refined as Pandora isn’t quite up to the job of stopping this—and it will anyway, increasingly, be in an arms race with other AIs.

We live in an attention economy. And it feels like attention is drifting further from those with talent and closer to those with a talent for self-promotion and armies of machines to fight their campaigns.

I don’t have a solution. But I do have an intuition: The future of curation is human. When recommendations are mostly the result of blind overlaps between your patterns of consumption and those of complete strangers, when most Web traffic is bots, when a large fraction of online reviews are paid-for, the gold standard, the most precious resource, is the active, disinterested discrimination of a real human being whose judgement you trust. We live in a world where computers now have the power to create, but we will probably all be dead before computers have taste.

CODA: I Am Not A Robot

As a public service, here are some other artists I’ve enjoyed that I “discovered” over the past decade for myself—a couple were already well known to others at the time—purely via the Internet, with no real-world word-of-mouth intercession4.

The Allergies

BOVIY

Alma Cook

Dirty Loops

Dodie

Frost*

Ghost Coach

K/DA

The Main Squeeze

Seaforth

Betty Who

The Newsagents is of one of the most successful podcasts of the past few years in the UK. Here, one of its presenters, Lewis Goodall, joins a lament about the sort of people who go into politics these days; specifically, he addresses his co-presenters’ disappointment at how few scientists choose to become MPs (about 1’30” in).

GOODALL:

“We saw during the pandemic … there are lots of very, very accomplished [scientists]—they’d be terrible in politics, terrible. Because, like [sic], they can’t communicate properly; they have no sense of political vision.”

So Goodall, the sort of man I’d have to invent if he didn’t exist, neatly summarizes an outlook common with members of our media establishment that’s the perfect opposite of mine—and, even more neatly, I hold my opposite view because I spent years doing science, several of them employed by an odd quasi-civil-service research entity. Earlier on in the discussion, Goodall points out that he did History And Politics as an undergrad—as opposed to PPE, an Oxford degree disproportionately common among MPs—and dismissed by his colleague in that clip as “useless”, implying that the Oxford-PPE-to-professional-politics pipeline is part of the problem with UK MP recruitment. It is, but, as a history graduate, you’d think Goodall would know that quite a lot of human beings living in the twentieth century died in the twentieth century because of leaders with “a sense political vision”.

I bang on for Britain about “binnism”: my political-philosophy-that-isn’t: In a mature liberal democracy, the greatest contribution politicians can make to the well-being of their constituents is to empty The People’s bins, and otherwise get out of their way.

“Empty The People’s bins!” is a metaphorical imperative and literal one. Once a state has developed to a certain stage, peak performance isn’t about “political visions”; it’s about Getting Boring, Important, Dirty Shit Done:

• protecting the country from enemies abroad,

• protecting its citizens from enemies at home,

• providing universal health insurance (because markets can’t),

• educating children (synthetic phonics, numeracy, and knowledge-based direct instruction of course),

• building and maintaining infrastructure,

• and, yes, sanitation. Few state interventions have saved more human lives than the safe and timely disposal of rubbish and sewage.

These core activities should be more than enough to keep politicians busy—busy enough to stop them getting in the way of voters, who, funnily enough, are trying to make things better for themselves already, because that’s what people want to do. When working people improve their and their families’ lives, that mostly makes the country better for everyone. When politicians create five-year economic plans and “regional development boards”, they mostly don’t.

Goodall also makes his case by invoking the pandemic: a more recent historical event, one which I’m sure—if I could ever bring myself to listen to his and his colleagues’ show at any length—he and I also saw in different ways. There were many times during the pandemic (and during the Brexit process that immediately preceded it) when I watched UK journalists on television behaving either like shameless partisans or tantrumming children, abandoning their supposed factual approach for telenovela levels of moralising melodrama, moments when broadcasts took on an hallucinatory quality. “Are these supposedly educated and informed adults really spouting these ridiculous and easily debunked lies in front of millions? Do they think they’re in The West Wing or that they’re the hero reporters in a bad science-fiction film?”

If you felt the same way at the time, subsequent events have shown you to be right. Not only have much of the press pack been proved wrong about the science; they personally turned out to be hypocritical about the practicalities.

But at least tackling COVID-19 was of great material importance to the UK’s citizens. Since big issues like this and leaving the EU have faded into the background—as is often the way when the media consensus turns out to be wrong and attention to its record might be embarrassing—we’ve been treated to multiple examples of media-enhanced hysteria about nothing at all.

If you care about politics, stop reading now

If you’re reading this, you’re probably more interested in politics than most people, and you probably think politics is more important than most people do. If so, there’s a good chance you won’t like what I have to say—except the bit at the end.

If you usually come here to get away from argument-from-anecdote, I’m about to disappoint you. What I have to say flows like a stream down a mountain from the daily differences between the real people I interact with at work—skilled manual workers, who have better things to obsesses about than politics—and the imaginary people I interact with online—middle-class, graduate-degree-holding office workers, some of whom obsess about politics for that work. Most of you reading this of you are in the latter category, but you’re part of a smaller population than you think.

In contrast, The Real People remind me every day that, if I were a political commentator—that is, the sort of person The Imaginary People take seriously—I’d consider my very existence absurd. Because, not only would no one (statistically speaking) in the real world care about what I do for a living, but no one should care about what I do for a living. Because what I would be doing for a living—talking about “visions” for example—doesn’t matter. What matters is that The Real People are as free as possible to make their lives better without the interference of people who think they know better than they do what “better” means.

The very opening of my own article, however, undermines my case: The Newsagents is—within its niche of Centrist Dad politics nerdery—extremely popular, and that niche includes at least one podcast popular enough to fill a stadium. But I’d counter that, once a phenomenon reaches this level, it’s not a reflection of real life; it’s become just another fandom: a small fraction of the whole population, a fraction with a large disposable income, is obsessed with it. No one else cares. Politics podcast stadium sell-outs are as weird to most people as Slipknot ones. Indeed, as with perhaps other O2 headliners this year, Nickelback or Celine Dion for example, part of the obsession is driven by fans’—in this case post-Brexit Centrist Dads—feeling that everyone hates them, or at least that all those Real People out there don’t understand. In one sense, they’re right: For the Real People, punters who pay between £40 and £170 to watch live a politics podcast presented by two men who are no longer in front-line politics are in the same Venn circle as Furries. Even people who work in the media are mystified:

No one cares about politics until they have to vote

The frequency with which the subject of UK party politics comes up in my conversations with other Brits, all of them of voting age, on the Anonymous Midlands Industrial Estate where I rent my office1 is low. I would guess less than one-in-fifty, perhaps as low as one-in-a-hundred of these conversations addresses politics. This is the case even though we mostly talk about things not happening on Anonymous Midlands Industrial Estates and even though I am myself interested in politics and happy to discuss it on the slightest pretext.

I’m also happy to concede that most people who qualify to vote in the UK do, in fact, vote at national elections and referendums (but only just).

But I’m also happy to claim that most voters don’t think very much about politics outside the campaigns leading up to those elections.

No one wants to think that what they care about is politics

Voters’ are turned off by politics-the-thing and “politics”-the-label: They don’t want any issue that does attract them to be associated in their own minds with the thing that repels them. To be fair, when you are paying large sums of money in tax every month in the hope that some of it will give your children a better education (which you care about), but you suspect that the politicians responsible for this are sending some of it to an overseas non-governmental organisation that’s been infiltrated by international terrorists as a ransom (which you definitely don’t care about), you might resign yourself to accept that, regardless of your priorities, this is what politicians do, so that must be at least part of what politics is. If you believe that, then you might, reasonably, decide you want nothing to do with it.

In such circumstances, the well-worn and hokey “If you care about your children’s future, then you care about politics; if you care about the state of your neighbourhood, then you care about politics” gambit is more likely to insult them then it is to persuade them. Because they can see that, even if they believed that the stuff that matters to them is the stuff of politics, their politicians don’t.

And that political issue you care about probably isn’t political

I’d go further: People often are correct that what the media and politics-addicts are gossiping about when they gossip about what politicians do isn’t politics. Because even so-called political correspondents are human beings, they are more interested in gossip than they are their actual work. We all are. But, if you work in a place that makes widgets, spreading gossip is obviously not part of your business; if you work in a place that makes words, and hopes to generate outrage (because outrage generates clicks), spreading gossip is less obviously not your job.

There’s a big exception here: It’s often the case that something that is just “gossip”—or something even more inconsequential in the lives of normal people—about politicians does have profound political consequences, and, by that, I mean it either forces the politicians’ colleagues to remove them or sways votes in public elections. So, little as such things might have to do with ideology or even with the bin-emptying end of politics, elections are fought or won on the margins, and moral marginalia—breaking bylaws, dodging taxes, romantic affairs, personal feuds, addictions, debts, and petty criminal offences—can matter.

But, more often than not, this is not the case. The purest form of the non-political being touted as political is when commentators claim that some words said by a politician are poorly chosen, and therefore hurtful to some party, then further claim that the wider public or some other hypothetical constituency disapprove of the hurtywords being hurtful and then—still with no material outcome or even causation having been demonstrated at any point—further claim that the supposed negative reaction to the hurtywords has caused a crisis “close to” the politician who hurted people with the hurtywords.

No one cares that their own politics are a mess

Political visions and ideologies are, at least in theory, meant to hang together. A vision is meant to embody an overarching goal, one your policies are supposed to bring closer; an ideology is meant to inform policies that share a common philosophical inspiration, or it’s at least meant to lead to policies that are consistent within that system of thought. But, when you survey voters and collect a list of their most popular political views, you find that real people cherrypick from all over the political compass. To the irritation of political “scientists”, the centre of UK politics, for example, falls somewhere near: “Hang The Paedos; Fund The NHS”.

All Right-Thinking People are expected to look down on these kinds of chaotic preferences: To them, views like this coalesce into the vulgar “populism” of Brexit and Trump that Right-Thinkers have spent years condemning as a “threat to democracy”. But these views are, by definition, closer to what voters want than anything those doing the condemning have to offer. The real question is: “Who is ‘threatening democracy’? The people freely (and messily) exercising their right to vote or the people claiming that those votes are based on views so incoherent that the electoral outcome should be overridden by Those Who Know Better?”

The charge of incoherence derives, once again, from the anti-scientific belief that views that might turn out to be right in practice should be rejected for being wrong in theory2, that ideas are more important than implementation, a belief that Steve Jobs attacks persuasively here.

Indeed, ideological inconsistencies are a bit like manufacturing trade-offs. You would love your product to be a perfect, seamless monocoque of pure function-as-form, but the real world won’t let it. It’s only once you accept this impossibility that you have any hope of building something that will turn out to be insanely great and insanely popular.

No one cares about politics—until politicians Take The Piss

Even if political correspondents are writing about politics, the politics they are mostly likely to be writing about at any given moment is the politics that’s happening at that moment. This is, to be fair, the definition of “political news”.

But the political issue that sways the median British voter in the polling booth is the political issue that is most important to that median voter at the time when they are voting. This will be biased toward their own personal long-term concerns, and it will also, inevitably, be affected by recency bias, both because voters don’t think much about politics outside election time and because they find it harder to remember the politics that was going on in all those other moments, the moments when only politicians and political commentators were interested in politics.

The issue that prompts politicians to remove another politician before the voters have a chance do it directly is often one that few voters have been paying attention to. For example:

Voters had paid a great deal of attention to the Poll Tax—in a very un-British rioting-in-the-streets, mass-civil-disobedience way. It was literally an Empty The People’s Bins issue, because it literally paid for The People’s bins to be emptied. But it was EU membership, then more widely considered to be a settled issue, and branded by the media an unhealthy obsession of weirdos within the Conservative Party, that triggered Thatcher’s downfall.

Gender self-identification laws affect a tiny number of people in Scotland, but they give us one of the purest examples of how commentators’ and politicians’ focus on ideology, on politics over practicalities, can make them look silly when reality finally slaps them in the face. The consensus was that Scottish voters were more-or-less on board with the way that gender ideology had become embedded in public institutions. Last January, the pundits agreed that Rishi Sunak was foolish to block new self-ID laws:

16th January 2023—James Ball, writer for the New European:

“I absolutely cannot understand why – *purely politically* – Sunak has intervened on the Scottish gender recognition act. Seems destined to cause him running headaches for months now, while before it just didn’t need to be near his radar.”

“It’s every one of Sturgeon’s Christmases at once. Total idiocy.”

15th February 2023—BBC News Website:

Nicola Sturgeon has announced she is resigning as Scotland's first minister after more than eight years in the role.

The Scottish National Party leader said she knew "in my head and in my heart" this was the right time to step down.

Ms Sturgeon said she would remain in office until her successor was elected.

She is the longest-serving first minister and the first woman to hold the position.

Ms Sturgeon insisted her resignation was not in response to the "latest period of pressure", which has included controversies over gender reforms, trans prisoners and the strategy on independence.

The problem here isn’t with James Ball; he’s just a convenient example. The problem here is that many of his peers thought much the same as he did. They were as wrong as it was possible to be. All these professional prognosticators, many of whom had been seduced by Sturgeon’s “visions”, were wronger than the people they were prognosticating at.

And it wasn’t subtle complexities or the conflicts of rights and freedoms between, say, girls and trans women that persuaded the SNP that the game was up; it was its leadership having to defend their calling this rapist a woman and arrange to have “her” put in a prison with other women:

UK General Elections are rarely decided by foreign policy, so, when the Labour Party was under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a man unusually obsessed with international politics, it seemed that his, er, not-mainstream foreign-policy positions wouldn’t be his biggest liability; but, when Jeremy Corbyn was tested over the Skripal poisoning incident, even as commentators assumed his views on this would be of limited interest to voters, he chose to Take The Piss. Normally, foreign policy is about quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing, rather than chemical weapons attacks on sleepy English market towns. Telling voters that maybe they should wait to condemn this kind of domestic horror until they’ve heard the verdict of Vladimir Putin—about whom voters have heard enough for long enough to judge him something of a rum chap—was a clear-cut case of Taking The Piss3.

This is one of the glories of the British: They can be “intensely relaxed4” about policies they disagree with, right up until the point when some real-world test prompts them to think someone is Taking The Piss. No one cares about politics here until they suspect they’re being treated as mugs. Britons are so committed to patriotic whimsy that thousands of them spend hours crocheting fancy hats for Royal Mail postboxes...

…and so contemptuous of racist, authoritarian, nationalist demagoguery that they laugh it out of public life…

This is the right way round. This is one reason why, unlike too many of its European neighbours, the UK never experienced totalitarian government. Spare us politicians with a “vision”, leaders with “passion”. Bring us competent pragmatists who can Empty The People’s Bins. Those who live here are blessed that this attitude persists.

God help any leader—Jezza over Skripal, Nippy over female rapists, Boris over office parties—when voters decide that they have been guilty of Taking The Piss, perhaps the “political” crime that UK voters—once roused from their half-conscious indifference to politics—are keenest to convict politicians and political parties for.

Yes, this very British attitude has given us an unusually rapid rotation of Prime Ministers and First Ministers over the past few years. That clear-cut examples of Taking The Piss by various leaders in the EU during the same period has has led to no significant corresponding change in its leadership is one of the reasons why Britain is no longer a member thereof.

But, here, if a political party isn’t first to punish a leader who Takes The Piss, then people so uninterested in politics that they think political-podcast-stadium-gig attendees are weirdos will use their votes to punish that politician’s whole party. This is democracy in one of the oldest democracies: No one cares until you Take The Piss. And this is A Good Thing.

Coda

As I type this, the SNP continues its implosion. Since we started with him, we should give the last word on their previous ex-leader to News Agent Lewis Goodall:

GOODALL, January 2023:

"One of the few constants in British politics. She resigned at the moment of her choosing doing an unprecedented thing in British politics. Just a bit better at politics than some of these people"

A popular gambit in what currently passes for trans activism is to claim that denying certain activists’ demands cause the deaths of trans people. The stakes are often raised to “the deaths of ‘trans children’”. Sometimes, these threatened deaths are implied to be at the hands of others; but, often, the claim is that denying troubled youngsters—actually denying the activists—said law-change or resource or service will drive them, the youngsters, to suicide.

What This Post Isn’t About

Kids who are different from their peers get bullied. Bullying is an evil in itself. Bullying can drive kids to suicide. Regulating children’s behaviour towards their peers in the places where adults can regulate it, applying fair and consistent discipline, and removing dangerous children from spaces occupied by vulnerable children almost certainly save lives.

We’ve learned about a clear-cut example this year: That the most recent of several school expulsions of one of the murderers of Brianna Ghey had been for poisoning a fellow pupil and that she was not only then moved to Ghey’s school without that school being informed of that fact, but placed in a class full of vulnerable children, were catastrophic failures of safeguarding—without which Ghey would almost certainly be alive today. This substack is not about this real phenomenon.

What This Post Is About

Here’s activist KC Jolyon Maugham [436000 followers] on Twitter, quoting himself comparing the end of puberty blockers being prescribed by the NHS to children to a ban on abortion:

“Solidarity with trans children whose mental health suffers, solidarity with the families of children who take their own lives, solidarity with those who cannot ‘go private’, solidarity with trans adults whose lives are scarred by an absence of medical care, solidarity with all those harmed by putting politics before healthcare.”

As with so much of the lawyer’s output, you have to concentrate to catch all the layers of question-begging. Are all children who believe at some point during their development that they are “trapped in the wrong body” “trans children”? How many of the kids Maugham believes are “trans children” are struggling with their sexual identity (as so many do) or simply attracted to the same sex? How many are only labelled trans by adults? Where is his evidence that the particular form of intervention he prefers is effective enough—and better than the alternatives—to count as “medical” care? Where is his evidence that suicide, a fundamentally irrational act, is, in such troubled individuals, a result of withholding of the treatments he advocates, rather than of more general and profound mental health problems?

[Whenever in this article I cite a tweet as evidence of the prevalence of a particular pernicious claim, I’ll also say how many people follow the person who tweeted it. I not only want to show that I’m not tilting at straw men, but also that the views I’m challenging are widely shared. But I only use Twitter for convenience. UK MPs have leant on the suicide-threat-by-proxy in Parliament. The most prominent “transgender youth” charity, Mermaids, uses it.]

Here’s activist TV personality India Willoughby (verbatim) on the same platform [78000 followers]:

“The exact same puberty blockers - identical dosage - Will STILL be prescribed to cis kids. This ban is discrimination, and I hope parents sue the arse off the NHS at the European Court of Human Rights. This decision is going to cause stress at best - and kill at worst.”

[Being as pointlessly scrupulous as usual, I concede that Willoughby is at least coy about how exactly “trans kids” will be “killed at worst” by this evidence-driven policy.]

The more “scientific” variant of this kind of blackmail claims that Studies Have Shown that making some demanded resource or service or access available to trans individuals reduces the numbers of suicides among that demographic. You don’t have to read me debunk this; you can read the words of someone who’s spent years researching into how best to prevent suicide, Louis Appleby1, the Chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group [34800 followers]:

“We need to see an end to that line about choosing a living daughter or dead son.

“It is not based on evidence.

“May add to distress in young people & mislead worried parents.

“Deeply insensitive to 200 families/yr to whom the suicide of a teenager is more than a slogan.”

“Children with gender distress may face bullying, isolation & family conflict, reasons to be alert to suicide risk.”

“Empathic support is vital but evidence that puberty blockers reduce risk is weak & unreliable.

“Invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken & potentially harmful.”

Even if you accept the claim of cause-and-effect that supposedly underpins it—he doesn’t, NHS England doesn’t, I don’t—it’s…

…A Shameful Tactic…

It exploits tragedies in order that people not immediately involved in them can achieve their political goals. It is especially exploitative if the deceased and/or those closest to them didn’t share the goals of those co-opting them in life.

It pretends that an irrational act can be used to make a rational argument. It’s hard—impossible!—to think of anything a fit and free human could do that would demonstrate more clearly that they’re suffering a mental illness than that human ending their own life. By definition, it’s impossible to draw any rational conclusion from their suicide either about the rightness of their inner motivations or about the wider world.

It puts words in the mouths of people in no position to deny them. Even if the thoughts or feelings of an individual aren’t directly co-opted, again by definition, because they are no longer here to think or feel, even as they did at that moment. We know from so many survivors of suicide attempts that, an instant later, most thought and felt vastly differently from the way they did at the moment they wished to end it all.

If it became a consistently successful tactic, it would link suicide to “positive” outcomes and create a moral hazard. Suicide is a catastrophic waste of, mostly young, lives. Even beyond the immediate victims, it wreaks destruction. Because it is a known social contagion, it can literally destroy other lives—when, for example, young people are inspired to imitate their dead idols, it can destroy unrelated lives thousands of miles away. But, even if you haven’t felt or seen the impact of the suicide of someone close to you, it isn’t hard to imagine how it can rip the heart out of a family and scar everyone left behind for decades.

UPDATE 23Apr24: It’s the depressing inevitability of it… [Read the next section about a migrant suicide for more context.]

It’s also…

…A Revealing Tell

It says a lot about this tactic that it’s popular on Twitter, a forum where the first path taken into any debate is the low road, and where even supposedly “moderate” commentators get so drunk on the instant affirmation of their groupthinking peers that they discard the decency that they like to believe their enemies lack.

When suicide is exploited for some partisan goal, I don’t believe most bystanders fall for the gambit, but I do believe that it tells those bystanders a great deal about the moral judgement—and, sometimes, the moral character—of the people who use it to try to win them over. Which brings me to Owen Jones [1.1 million followers] on Twitter:

“Aaron Bushnell died because he had too much humanity for a world run by people who don’t have any”

US Air force airman Aaron Bushnell died because he ignited the petrol he had poured over himself as he stood outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC.

Of the death of Albanian asylum seeker Leonard Farruku, Sam Freedman [143000 followers] wrote on Twitter:

“Performative cruelty has real and tragic consequences.”

Even before police or—heaven forbid!—court confirmation that the death of an asylum seeker on the Bibby Stockholm accommodation ship was a suicide, Freedman has stepped onto his corpse to use it as a soapbox.

(Note that Freedman’s post is reposted here by former Times leader writer Oliver Kamm [35K followers]. Kamm has form in prematurely exploiting violent death in the hope of scoring petty political points.)

Now that the coroner has pronounced, we know that the cause of Farruku’s death wasn’t people Freedman doesn’t like continuing to have politics Freedman doesn’t like, but Leonard Farraku’s hanging himself by the neck.

Much of Freedman’s opinionating has the same problem as Maugham’s: It’s so dense with unsupported pseudo-liberal cliché that you lose count of the levels of question-begging. Even if we put aside the inherent moral rottenness of the tactic, those using a suicide to project some imagined spite onto the act of providing free food and accommodation to people who, like Farraku, have arrived in this country by illegal means fall into a logical trap—in the same way that those who try to frame the issue of immigration as one of material profit-and-loss do. If you talk up immigrant doctors and nurses and entrepreneurs and cite increased tax income, you sink to the level of opponents who talk up crime committed by migrants and taxes dodged by undocumented workers: “I see your Nigerian doctors and raise you my Albanian drug dealers.”

If you want to claim every suicide of a migrant is an inevitable consequence of government illiberalism, don’t be surprised if your opponents feel more comfortable down there with you in the gutter and claim every assault and murder and rape of a native by a migrant is an inevitable consequence of government liberalism. And don’t call it racism when neutrals accept your implicit invitation to do this kind of grubby arithmetic themselves and come up with negative answers.

What would they do if they really cared?

To people interested in Farruku beyond his demise offering them a convenient shroud to wave, I recommend the parts of this article about the man’s tragic life that aren’t also trying to co-opt his death for the Guardian’s crusade against The Torys.

One revelation in it in particular struck me, as it was also true of a friend of mine, Adam, who killed himself at a miserably young age: Farruku’s mother died when he was a child and that death, unsurprisingly, affected him deeply and for the worse.

The rest of Adam’s family were astonishingly kind to me at the time of his death, and even came to visit me to offer consolation—when the pain of my loss can only have been infinitesimal next to theirs. His sister Tara went on to take that kindness far further, moving to Australia and becoming a firefighter, a Mental Health First-Aider, and an anti-suicide campaigner and researcher. She even wrote a book about her brother and about wider questions of (especially male) suicide. Reading it is a good place to start.

And, of course, a direct and practical thing that anyone who wants to prevent more suicides can do is volunteer for the Samaritans.

In this context, one aspect of Adam’s death has particular poignancy: He wanted to do something to change the world for the better, and had persuaded himself that he could achieve more by studying politics than by, as he then was, studying chemistry. Anyone who knows me can imagine my skepticism; but, having by that time changed my own subject of undergraduate study myself, I did what I could to help him with that. Like Farruku’s, his case was in administrative limbo at the time he died.

Years later, I became friends with a man who, like Adam, had also lost his mother to cancer at a young age and had studied at the same university. In the hope of saving others, my other friend dedicated his life to biochemistry and cancer research, and has worked successfully in drug discovery since. I wish Adam (whose father was himself a physiologist) had been able to follow a similar path.

[Reading this back, I see the ironies compound: Trans activists make political demands for drugs that have profound physiological effects on children with profound emotional problems, and they try to justify their political demands for scientific “solutions” by appeals to bad science about the terrible physical consequences of emotional disorders. But the World is always a worse place when stupid politics is allowed to drive the use of clever chemistry.]

Root Causes

Especially because I was taught to think by doing science, and science is where bad ideas go to burn, whenever I encounter a common broken argument like The Argument From Suicide-Threat-By-Proxy, I ask the meta question: Why, against reality and reason, does it persist?

For once, most of the answer is simple: We live in an ideological era when perceived victimhood confers status and authority and when victims are political currency.

This week, the Labour Party, whose own ongoing problems with racism had only recently been exposed again, was handed a political gift: Baldly racist and sexist remarks made five years ago by the Conservative Party’s biggest donor about Labour MP Diane Abbott were picked up (and enthusiastically run with) by the media.

As a result, Labour politicians and supporters have been able to pretend there’s a moral equivalence between a political party having accepted money from someone and a political party choosing to recommend someone to voters as their representative in Parliament. Before the week was out, some Labour MPs had taken up that spark of good fortune, seen in it another spurious moral equivalence, and used it to try to set fire to their party’s collective trousers.

That is, this would have seemed to be a wise time not to remind voters that Abbott had herself been removed from the Parliamentary Labour Party for a racist letter she wrote to The Observer. (And this wasn’t the first time she had been caught in public racism.)

Instead, former Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and current Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner, among others, called for the Labour whip to be restored to Abbott, her magical status of recent-victimhood having cleansed her of her sins, proving that much of the performative outrage expressed by her comrades this week on her behalf was instrumental, as is much performative concern about suicide.

I’m sure that McDonnell and Rayner are sympathetic to Abbott’s position, but I am also sure they know that having Abbott back on their team in the Commons would restore some of the influence they had when Corbyn was leader. They know that victimhood confers status and victims are currency.

True Blame And Party Games

The proximate cause of all violent deaths is violence. Social media didn’t kill Brianna Ghey; the violence of a violent girl and a violent boy did. When a man chooses suicide, he, more often than a woman, chooses violence. The proximate cause of most deaths of desperate human beings literally dying to get to the UK is people-traffickers taking migrants’ savings to bring them here illegally and then gambling with migrants’ lives. You almost have to admire the audacity of people who see the government responsible for housing illegal migrants as “cruel”, but only condemn the gangsters who traffic them when doing so presents an opportunity to attack that government.

When Sarah Everard was murdered by a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police, her death was so politicised that a (photogenic) woman dragged away by police from a vigil for Everard “became the face of the Sarah Everard vigil”. Bystanders could see the heavy-handedness of the police response for what it was; they could also see what was wrong with Everard being erased from her own death:

When activists and opinionists hijack violent, tragic, premature deaths, especially self-inflicted deaths, for their own political ends, the only people persuaded of the activists’ agenda are the people already on their side, people who also care more about that agenda than they do about the actual victims.

When they skim over the stories of those victims, when they skim over the pain of their bereaved friends and family, when they skim over the immediate circumstances of their deaths, to shout over at the world about their own obsessions, the only people really listening are their own tribespeople, to whom they are always signalling anyway.

Suicide-threats-by-proxy are counterproductive for the activists wielding them, but they are useful to the rest of us, because they help us to recognise their wielders for what they are—and to see their cause for the kind of people it attracts.

I am all but alone in the Philippine jungle, muttering to the rainforest monkeys that the Tories still have a chance of stopping Keir Starmer from becoming the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. After this week’s by-election results, the macaques are cackling even more loudly and mockingly at me. Indeed, even I am mocking the widely shared Conservative cope that, with no significant leaps in the absolute numbers of Labour voters in these two contests, their vast raw swings to the Labour Party aren’t “real”; the results just mean that Labour candidates won because Conservative voters stayed at home.

A Change Is Gonna Come

With so little difference in practice, if not in rhetoric, between the way voters expect the Opposition to operate in power and the way the Conservative government is operating in power, one fact, above all others will determine the outcome of the next UK General Election: Voters want a change. It almost doesn’t matter what kind of change—though voting for the Labour Party is the obvious way to get that change in most constituencies both in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

By the time it takes place, the Conservative Party, in different ways, under different leaders, will have been in power in the UK for 14 years. On the rare occasions in day-to-day conversations when I have heard any adult who is not unhealthily obsessed with politics say anything about the upcoming election, they’ve made a reference, a direct one or an indirect one, to The Need For New Management.

It is impossible to argue with this feeling. Not merely because it isn’t in itself a logical reason to vote for the Opposition, but also because I can’t deny that extended incumbency tends to make governments complacent and democracies stagnant.

Unfortunately, I can’t find the paper that I read some years back about how, in most democracies, this psychological tendency—the need for longer-lived democratically elected governments to be replaced—has a real, quantifiable effect on election outcomes; but this paper does discuss “incumbency fatigue” in US Presidential elections and make reference to other work that addresses such effects.

Bad Week

Even sympathetic media reporters admitted that the days leading up to these by-elections had been bad ones for the Labour leader. After much speculation/leaking, he publicly abandoned the party’s £28bn-per-annum commitment to “green investment”. After days of dithering, he publicly abandoned his initial support for Labour’s candidate in the Rochdale by-election Azhar Ali, following Ali’s having been caught claiming Israel had staged Hamas’s October 7th pogrom of Jews. Ali had also ranted about “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters”.

Then, things got worse: another Labour Parliamentary candidate (and former MP) had been caught referring repeatedly to “fucking Israel” and telling Ali at the same meeting that Britons who signed up for the Israeli Defence Force “should be locked up”.

Unlike in the Ali case, when several members of Labour’s front bench initially made media appearances to claim that it was sufficient that Ali had apologised1, Starmer suspended Jones immediately. There are rumours that other elected Labour representatives were either present when these statements were made or have themselves been recorded saying similar things, and the other journalists are coming for them.

But none of this, widely reported in the media and fresh in the minds of voters, who by turning out at low-turnout votes proved themselves to be more interested than most in politics, seemed to do much damage to Labour’s fortunes—in two constituencies where communal issues are not thought to be significant.

Winning And Losing; Right And Wrong

So, after proving they can do it on a wet Wednesday2 in Wellingborough with their team captain crocked, and after months of twenty-point polling leads over the Conservatives, the consensus is now that Labour is on its way to a comfy Parliamentary majority. All that’s left for (the many) sympathetic political commentators is to bemoan the next Premier’s lack of vision:

Labour Is An Ultra-Low Ambition Zone [New Statesman]

“[T]his Labour frontbench is neither as dazzling nor potentially transformative as that of the first Blair government” [Forbes]

If You Win By Saying Almost Nothing, What Happens When You Take Power? [The Guardian]

I have a long-fermenting substack in my queue that dismisses the importance of political “visions” and other seminar-room abstractions; but, whether or not voters are that fussed about them, there’s a more fundamental issue here that fans of political visions have to face:

Any overarching political framework is nothing without a moral underpinning. The candidacy of any campaigning politician standing up for an idealistic vision won’t be able to bear its weight if his integrity is seen to fall short, a lesson Labour learned the hard way when that moral colossus Boris Johnson crushed Jeremy Corbyn at the last General Election.

The Opening Notes Set The Key

Prigs like me date our split from Labour back to Ed Miliband’s choice of narrow party political advantage over action against Assad’s war crimes, a betrayal of the people of Syria that continues to shame the west to this day, and has led to an ongoing slaughter that now only exists for The Good People to provide a growing archive of images of atrocities that they can re-label as having taken place in Gaza last week3.

Although I had resigned from the party long beforehand, Labour’s election of Jeremy Corbyn as its leader cut the final link this particular prig had with the party I had supported all of my life—even under Michael Foot, a man to Corbyn’s Left, whose political integrity was such that Corbyn remains unfit to tie Foot’s laces. In contrast, I was a Eustonite and Corbyn was former Chair of Stop The War, an (if not the) organisation that, for me, embodied everything wrong with the crank Left: its reflex anti-westernism, its indulgence of—support for!—terrorism, its absence of international workers’ solidarity, its cult-like mentality, its personal nastiness, and—perhaps most of all—its antisemitism.

Corbyn brought “Stop” The War “comrades” with him to his office as Leader Of The Opposition and I burned my bridges.

Starmer, who started his political life on the communist Left, embraced Corbynism. But, then, as so often with Starmer and his principled positions, he told the world that he had turned away from it:

“The problem is, however, that by conceding that the Corbyn years were mired in moral squalor, and a politics he finds anathema, it raises serious questions about the credibility — and perhaps even the character — of Keir Starmer. Whilst the Labour leader puts clear water between him and his predecessor, he is still the person who served under him as Shadow Brexit Secretary for four years. He remained on his frontbench in that period when it was clear to all what Corbyn stood for. When it was discovered that Corbyn supported an antisemitic mural depicting hook-nosed Jewish bankers, Starmer did not resign. When the Panorama documentary on antisemitism within the Labour Party came out, Starmer stayed put. The very fact that the party was even being investigated by the EHRC did not dislodge Starmer from his place.”

Starmer was not alone. Save for a scattering of resignations, whatever their claimed “fighting behind the scenes”, many (most?) of Labour’s MPs were happy to give a standing ovation to Jeremy Corbyn when they thought he was less of an electoral liability than they had feared. It was only when he became a disaster that they became reacquainted with their consciences, and remembered that they had had their doubts about Corbyn all along.

Technical Recession

But, when Keir Starmer took over leadership of the Labour Party from the man that Labour MPs and candidates and Starmer had stood alongside and campaigned for UK citizens to make the nation’s leader—while the party descended into such disrepute that it was investigated for racism by the statutory body set up by a Labour government—that man, Jeremy Corbyn, was still in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

With Corbyn still in place, a fresh start would be impossible; he would be a focus for dissent and a standing indictment. How to remove the ghost at the feast? In a way beloved of lawyers: on a technicality. Do not let how boring4 this story is distract you from how grave its implications are:

Episode I: The Phantom Menace

First, the Labour Party’s disciplinary unit suspended Jeremy Corbyn from the party. Then, he could no longer hold the party whip in Parliament. Because this news was told to the world by Keir Starmer, at a press conference about the ECHR report on Labour antisemitism, immediately after the decision, it was widely seen as Starmer “sacking Corbyn for Labour antisemitism”. This isn’t what happened.

Corbyn was suspended by the disciplinary unit, not Starmer, because he was deemed to have “minimised” the extent of Labour antisemitism when he responded to that report in this way:

“Anyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party is wrong. Of course there is, as there is throughout society, and sometimes it is voiced by people who think of themselves as on the left.

“Jewish members of our party and the wider community were right to expect us to deal with it, and I regret that it took longer to deliver that change than it should.

“One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.”

Read Corbyn’s words, like I did. I found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to concede that a man I hold in comprehensive contempt had made an arguable point—one I disagreed with, but one that I couldn’t in good faith spin as inherently antisemitic, let along a sacking offence.

Episode II: Attack Of The Clones

Then, within weeks of his suspension, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour membership was restored. Unlike the question of Corbyn’s membership, the question of the party whip was in Starmer’s hands. At the time of Corbyn’s reinstatement, no decision had been made about it. But, the next day, Starmer confirmed that the whip would remain withdrawn; Corbyn would not be permitted to be a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

Starmer had hinted that Corbyn might regain the whip if he apologised for his words. Then, he hinted that this would be conditional upon Corbyn rejecting Stop The War’s agenda, (an agenda that, of course, Starmer himself had had little problem with for years). Despite the efforts (and meeting votes) of his local party, Corbyn will likely stand as an independent at the General Election.

So?

What is the point of all my procedural pedantry? I recount the history in detail because, alongside the latest drama in Rochdale, it exposes most aspects of one common narrative as false:

No, Starmer did not “immediately sack Corbyn for allowing (indulging?) antisemitism when Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party”. No, Starmer did not “draw a line under the issue”.

Because Starmer never had to face down Corbyn over Labour antisemitism itself—only temporarily displace him over the meta-issue of perception of the problem—and because Starmer removed the whip from Corbyn for something Corbyn did after handing over to Starmer, Starmer has never had to engage formally and publicly with his own complicity during the time when Corbyn was leader of the party and Starmer “back[ed] him 100%”.

Indeed, Starmer took the extraordinary position that terrible things had happened while his former boss had been in charge, but implied that there were still circumstances under which he would welcome Grandpa Terrible Things back into the family.

This spirit lives on. This week gone, we heard various senior Labour figures tell us what a nice man Azhar Ali was, how sorry he was, and how the problem of this unfortunate leak of an official Labour candidate’s sincerely held views could be dealt with by giving Ali time to “rebuild trust” with (that famously mono-opinioned entity) “the Jewish community”.

This is, at very best, moral idiocy. But, we’re living through one of the very worst times for British Jews, it’s hard to bid it any higher than disgraceful. Since Hamas’s openly antisemitic, openly murderous pogrom, UK Jews have become the No.1 target for racial hatred in the country.

Boggle at the horror of this: Because Jews in another country were victims of a racist slaughter of innocents, Jews in this country have become the biggest per-capita victims of racist attacks.

But, to our media classes, otherwise so quick to righteous outrage at the slightest sin against the gods of multiculturalism, it’s no biggie. Certainly not big enough for even the word “Jew” or “Jewish” to make the (extensive widescreen desktop version of) the front page of the BBC News Website—even as the BBC wrestles with the problem of the views of a contestant on one of its own reality shows.

Observe that, within a certain stratum of society5, unlike anti-black racism, antisemitism isn’t something that’s inherent to an individual—a person either is or isn’t a racist—that antisemitism isn’t systemic in society; but, instead, antisemitism is the kind of stain that can be rinsed off with some “specialist sensitivity training”.

That’s where the Labour Party under Keir Starmer is now: It’s “been on a sensitivity course”. It’s made the right noises to keep (E)HR(C) happy. The underlying problem persists; and everyone from the leader down is prepared to make excuses for it—right up to the point at which the the media can’t be fooled any more6; but, because the voters want a change and Labour aren’t The Tories, no one really cares. Except prigs like me. And the Jews7.

But there aren’t many Jews registered to vote in the UK. Under a Starmer government, full of Ministers and MPs who have made and continue to make the same excuses as Starmer, there’ll be even fewer Jews here. That alone is reason enough why no decent person should vote for him or his party.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: This work is a long way from the novel it’s based on, so I’m going to treat it on its own merits (and demerits).

And, while I’m not a man for “trigger warnings”, there are aspects of Poor Things that might have social consequences if you take your date/your family/your priest to see it: Much graphic body-horror and much graphic sex and much nautical swearing—some of the last depicted on board (simulations of) actual ocean-going vessels—plus every main character is a monster and/or does monstrous things. This is not Friends—The Movie.

Young Frankenstone

Throat-cleared, I’ll cough up my judgement: This is an arty film, but, even if you don’t like art-house, you’ll be entertained in some way. Because, for all its self-conscious grotesquery and semaphore-obvious messaging, it’s fun, and funny. Several one-liners and reaction shots—if not the copious physical comedy—made me snort loudly in the cinema. It’s good to look at, quirky, and well-acted—or, perhaps, “performed”.

I also found entertainment in the story’s central “plot twist”. It was a plot twist to me, but not to my viewing companion. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because the “revelation” is explicit and implied from the outset; though you might be distracted, as I was, by the volume of human viscera the director throws at you during the relevant segment of early exposition.

This neat, late non-surprise was not enough, however, to distract me from the clodstumping pseudofeminism of Poor Things’ final act. No matter how sympathetic you are its politics, you’d have to be deaf and blind to find the way it’s expressed subtle.

No Turn Unstoned

The other obvious unsubtle aspect of this film is its lead’s performance. Please understand: the script, the direction, and her presentation by the filmmakers—of which more later—ruled out understated anguish as an option. And the scenery was so loud that, even if the actors didn’t chew it, they’d be tempted to shout over it. From the moment of her “problematic” R-word introduction, Emma Stone was obliged to go, at the very least, Full Theatre Kid—if not Full Re-…

Tropic Thunder references aside, of course her performance as walking, talking experiment Bella Baxter is going to make Emma Stone an Oscar™ candidate (again). To reiterate, as when she previously won, the way she is made up, dressed, lit, shot, and choreographed are as much part of her character’s introduction and development as her own artistic choices.

Given how in-your-face her slapstick manner and couture shoulders are throughout, it’s a testament to the make-up artists and stylists, as well as to the way Stone exploits her own physiognomy, that the transformation of her face and hair over the course of the film was compelling enough to leave this boringly straight non-aesthete wittering about them both hours later. Stone morphs from Hollywood-ugly freak to Hollywood-gothic starlet.

TOP TIP

Don’t bet on her winning a statue though. Not because she’s not a contender, but because, if you’re a betting wo/man, and you like a flutter on non-sporting outcomes like Academy Awards, I recommend you take your punts on more obscure Oscar™ categories—if you see a film where the work done in that particular department is particularly fine. I still regret not slapping a fortune down on Richard King’s sound editing work in The Dark Knight, the excellence of which I remember commenting on at the time, but, sadly, not acting upon. So consider a better-value punt on Poor Things’ Make-Up And Hairstyling. You Heard It Here First1.

Ruffal-oh

Mark Ruffalo, who can act, spends too much of this film being distracted from his day-job by his having to sustain a Britoish accent. Given that there are so many other stars who could have carried off Duncan Wedderburn’s caddish ‘tache as well as Ruffalo without being harassed by this technical issue—some of them actually British men, men also good at all the other stuff that doesn’t involve sounding British—I wish one of them had been cast instead. It’s not as if the production lacks box-office draws already. This film is not realistic, but his globe-trotting vowels still dragged me back to reality too often.

There could, however, be an unrelated reason why Ruffalo got the gig—one that, when I thought of it, made mischievous sense: He’s well-known for having played the similarly-freakishly-older love interest to another bodyswap female protagonist in early-2000s romcom 13 Going On 30. The character he played then was the moral and temperamental opposite of Poor Things’ openly rakish an dissolute Duncan Wedderburn.

There are moments in the latter when he appears to be enjoying himself as much as he did in the former. One of those moments is not only a hinge around which the plot of Poor Things swings2…

…it appears to be a deliberate, inverted homage to a sequence that’s a hinge around which the plot of 13 Going On 30 swings:

Perhaps the teenagers who grew up crushing on cute, dorky Ruffalo, are now perhaps of an age cynical enough to appreciate cruel, dandy Ruffalo.

Willem’s scheme

Though not the protagonist, the entire story is driven by Willem Dafoe’s Dr Godwin Baxter, referred to often throughout with all the cryptic symbolism of a codpiece by the nickname “God”. Dafoe, in, I think, the single nod to the original source work’s Glasgow setting (or to the rabid nationalist cult that throbs north of England), plays God with a Scottish accent.

He manages this competently too, while being forced to act through a heavy mask of freakshow make-up. His character is not a good man, but we soon realise that he is the son of an even greater monster, and, in a fable full of matter-of-fact abominations, the most matter-of-fact revelations of such are Godwin’s own un-self-pitying recollections of the horrors visited upon him by his own father.

Despite this backstory, it’s a die-throw between Dafoe as Godwin and the two shoehorned-in black characters who enter from the wings later in proceedings, only to exit again shortly afterwards, which member of the cast is given the least scope for three-dimensionality.

The Beauty around the beasts

Watch the trailer (embedded at the foot of this stack) and I won’t have to tell you that, if you book tickets to watch the evil clowns in the foreground, you’re signing up for the spectacle of the anachronistic, gothic, steampunk, Victorian-melodrama big-top soundstages in the background. I don’t like soundstage locations, but Poor Things escapes the constraints that made the 20th-century work of the likes of Tim Burton so annoying to me. This is, I suspect, in part thanks to inspired lighting and the clever use of lenses, film stock, and angle.

Another factor that I suspect helps with this, and also gives the film a period feel, is its unusual, and changing, aspect ratio. Indeed, the film explored so many cinematographic variables for reasons of period and perspective and playfulness that, even when my attention drifted away from the proceedings themselves, there was usually something technical to boggle at or admire. As a one-time keen film photographer myself and a lover of wide-open old lenses, I was captivated by the unmistakable—and now unmistakably retro—bokeh of so many of the many shallow-depth-of-field shots.

Until I read the article I linked to above I wondered how intentional it was that the film jumped between different camera set-ups even within a single scene. Apart from the broad strokes like the migration from black-and-white to colour as Bella left home, there seemed no narrative or emotional justification for this blossom-hopping. The testimony of the makers supports that. So it really should have been annoying, but somehow it wasn’t. Perhaps even the film’s wider incoherence is also part of the reason it’s so engaging.

A Word about All That Sex

I wasn’t going to mention it again, apart from my simple, practical content warning, because it honestly didn’t seem important to me. But someone on Twitter drew my attention to some no-doubt-politically-motivated newspaper criticism of the quantity of sex in Poor Things. Both nominally liberal and conservative commentators in the UK are boringly obsessed with artistic depictions of intercourse and yet, somehow, never complain about any aspect of the same that might inspire real human beings to enjoy real sex more.

For the record, the sex is essential to the story and not shot to titillate, and I should have said something about how refreshing it was that Bella's sexual awakening comes, literally, at her own hands—rather than by her being lifted, Hollywood-trope-style, onto the nearest available piece of furniture by some smouldering hunk.

Even the way she talks about sex is, again refreshingly, matter-of-fact, to the extent of her naively clinical choice of terminology for various acts becoming a running joke.

[SPOILER IN NEXT PARA]

The film's treatment of the subject only becomes tedious at the end, when almost certainly for political reasons, the writer summons up Evil Men plotting to to remove Bella’s clitoris. This, however, is the sort of fictional coverage of sexual matters that newspaper opinionists are much more likely to approve of.

The Bodacity of evil

Poor Things plays Mengele-monstrousness for laughs. I’m a sensitive soul, but the gore and brutality are laid on so thick that I stopped wincing at them about halfway through. I suspect that was the makers’ intention. This is not a film that succeeded in repelling me or a film that inspired in me serious moral reflection; it bursts with horrors, but it’s not Saw-style torture porn, and treats butchery of the living almost as the set-up for gags rather than a scare tactic. Despite its terminal spasms of wokery, you might as well look for a Madonna-and-child in a Keith Haring mural as gaze into Poor Things for a real-world moral.

So I recommend Poor Things not because it says anything (morally) good or important, but because, like its central character, it’s an extraordinary mixed-up creation to gaze upon, it features extraordinary talents, and because, even as it irritates, it will make you smile at terrible things. I don’t like it when I do that, but there’s no denying that, when we smile at terrible things, we understand something about life.

[This post is mostly about the misuse of language, substantially about the abuse of Jews, and, eventually, about the fall of Claudine Gay. Please allow me apologise to Norm for the title and get some relatively uncontroversial scene-setting out of the way before I get spicy.]

Contents

The uncontroversial bit

The voters have spoken, damn them, and they won’t shut up…

…so we’ll have to speak over them…

…or change what they’re saying

Compulsive lying takes a toll…

…but institutional lying takes a team

“Culture wars” are wars of words

Activist lexicography

The Gay affair

Canaries in the coalmine again

The price of freedom

The uncontroversial bit

Because laws are codified in words, by definition, in states ruled by laws, words have consequences. When those laws keep order, the only legitimate domestic conflicts are battles of ideas. Because we also express ideas in words, words are the weapons we use to fight such battles. So reshaping words can become an arms race.

Orwell knew this. If it’s not enough for bad actors to conceal political intent through obscure language, they can go full Ministry Of Truth. But Orwell’s department of propaganda acted for an imaginary totalitarian state, albeit one modelled after real ones.

The UK’s and the US’s 20th-century histories are dominated by their joint wars, hot and cold, against totalitarian states. As well as their commitment to liberal democracy, Britons and Americans share a common language and overlapping cultures. The Very Online refer to this space they share with one another, and with other similar countries, as “the Anglosphere”. Their citizens are supposed to live in places where, and at a time when, their free universities preserve and protect their heritage from ignorance and barbarism. That state-subsidised freedom of thought is supposed to complement their free markets and free presses (and open networks), which, in turn, are supposed to respond to the demands of diverse consumers of concepts and content.

The Anglo ideal is that free citizens are free within their means to choose what they buy; that they’re free without constraint1 to choose how they vote—and to vote secretly, in a space where the message they send to their politicians cannot be judged either by those around them or those with power over them.

But, in both countries, what happens when people exercise those freedoms doesn’t always please those whose duty it is to serve the people.

The voters have spoken, damn them, and they won’t shut up…

In such ostensibly free societies, even established power is open to democratic contest. The pesky voters often refuse to do what their betters believe is best for them. Lately, in both the UK and the US, the voters have been peskier than usual.

One reason that these pesky outcomes have surprised elites is that members of those elites tend not to have too much to do with the bulk of voters—”How could we have lost?! I don’t know anyone who voted Brexit!”.

Another reason they are surprised is that even opinions within their peer groups are not as uniform as they comfort themselves to believe. That is, the people they do know are not always honest about how different their views are from their own. There are no secret police listening, but there are still social and career penalties for thoughtcrimes. The easiest way to avoid paying is not to speak your mind. Revealed preferences are the surprising flipside of preference falsification, the plot twists to establishment narratives.

…so we’ll have to speak over them…

When electorates vote within the rules to deny establishments what they want, members of those establishments are tempted to change those rules.

In the rest of the EU, political elites have had ways of dealing with inconvenient democratic choices: When French and Dutch voters rejected the EU Constitution, they were bypassed; then, pretty much the same changes to the bloc’s governance were repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. When Irish voters rejected that, they were made to vote again.

Such shenanigans are harder in nations with a bloody-minded popular commitment to fair play and a history of mocking and rejecting totalitarian politics.

But those attitudes didn’t stop, for example, one rich woman from going to court to force the UK Parliament to vote to endorse the result of a referendum that it had already promised voters it would honour. The howling irony was that the outcome of this forced vote then embedded Brexit even more firmly in the UK’s future (because Brexiters could point to a Commons majority vote in addition to a referendum majority), forced a “harder” Brexit (because the votes of hard-Brexit MPs now had to be courted by a soft-Brexit PM), and wasted money and time telling us things we already knew.

And those attitudes didn’t stop many MPs from frustrating the implementation of that same vote to the extent that they tried to set up a banana parliament (with a howlingly ironic name), just down the road from the real one, or continuing to block the country’s departure from the EU with such contemptuous enthusiasm that it eventually triggered a landslide vote against their cause in a General Election fought almost solely on the issue of Getting Brexit Done.

Now, political enemies of former US President Donald Trump fear that Americans might elect him again, and some of them are trying to block this foolhardiness on the part of The Little People by judicial means. But even some of his most enthusiastic transatlantic opponents fear this will undermine the credibility of opposition to him and lead to a backlash.

…or change what they’re saying

So—unlike in the EU—in the US and the UK, gaming or changing constitutional rules can be conspicuous, difficult, and counterproductive. But, if you can’t find words to persuade voters to vote the way you want, if you can’t change the rules or exploit obscure laws to thwart disagreeable voters’ will, you can still change the words themselves.

Before constitutional changes and policies and laws become electoral issues, they begin as public debates. In free democracies, even if you make a claim in such a debate from a position of power, your power doesn’t include the power to take people who contest that claim to court and lock them up; it doesn’t include the power to delete their dissent from the press or the library or bookshops or the Internet. If you keep losing an argument for a policy in public, you might never even get a chance to lose a vote on it.

What if your claim is false—and you know it’s false? Your only remaining options are to keep lying or redefine the truth. You can tell voters that a political change that leads to the highest legal immigration levels of all time, of which a higher-proportion of immigrants come from majority-non-white countries, is “racist”. You can claim that a implementing the results of a referendum, two parliamentary votes, and a single-issue General Election is “dictatorial”. And, when everything else fails, you can ascend to Peak Chutzpah, and accuse voters of having fallen for the lies of a foreign power and assert that they were really saying anything with their vote to leave the EU other than that they wanted to leave the EU.

Compulsive lying takes a toll…

If you know any compulsive liars, but you aren’t a compulsive liar yourself, you must have asked that timeless question: “How do they do it?”

Staying honest requires no housekeeping, because reality exists independently of us and takes care of its being consistent with itself all on its own. (Of course, material reality throws up anomalies all the time, but finding ways to reconcile those with our own, tidier, mental models of the world is the business of science and art.)

But big lies and frequent lying take mental energy. The definition of a lie requires that the liar is aware of the truth he misrepresents, of the falsity of claim he has made, and of the inconsistency between them.

If you tell more lies to people who still believe you, eventually you have to at least make them consistent with each other. So the best compulsive liars usually hold an entire imaginary version of reality in their heads, one robust enough to avoid obvious self-contradictions. When you hold a fantasy world like this tightly enough that you believe it, psychologists calls it delusion. Such a mismatch between the world and your perception of the world is a foundational pathology of much mental illness.

If you aren’t clinically deluded, you either have to hold your imaginary world at arm’s length—and work twice as hard as everyone else to keep score on the two realms2—or you can try to recruit everyone else to help you build and sustain a parallel reality from its component lies. This socialised or distributed delusion is the foundation of cults, religions, ideologies, and academic Theory-with-a-capital-’T’ (not the lowercase-’t’ theory of physics, subject to the harshest and most exacting tests that radio telescopes and rocket ships and lasers bounced off the Moon can inflict, but the cargo-cult theory needed to provide pseudoscholarly justification for ideologies that voters won’t freely vote for).

…but institutional lying takes a team

So, when compulsive lying scales up to the level of the institution or the state, it’s even more inevitable and important that we find ourselves asking the same question of organisations as we ask of individuals: “How do they do it?”

In a totalitarian society, keeping grand conspiracy theories, like Marxism, alive is easier. If you are a dictator, you control the flow of information to the masses, you imprison your critics, you rewrite history.

• In a free society, even your goal is merely to sustain less-grand but still-high-status conspiracy theories, like that Donald Trump planned to buy the NHS, you need to be more devious, more subtle.

• If you’re an elected representative, you can’t imprison your critics without risking removal, so you create institutions that are constitutionally not accountable to voters.

• If there are free media, you can’t control the flow of information to the masses, so you complain of a “disinformation” crisis and use it to justify making the media less free. Or you subsidize your own conspiracist media outlets.

• If there is a preserved canon of falsifiable knowledge, you can’t rewrite history, so you change the meanings of the words in which that knowledge is written.

The golden bonus of this last tactic is that you can pretend that arguments about words aren’t serious politics. Every time your enemies point out your attempts to manipulate reality by manipulating meanings, you can accuse them of ignoring the substance of an issue to obsess about symbols; you can accuse them of indulging in “culture wars”.

“Culture wars” are wars of words

But culture wars are politics by other means. If you are losing the fight by the existing rules and you are involved in the business of rule-making, you may try to bend the rules to get your way, and rules are made of words. The bigger the gulf in belief between rule-makers and the ruled on an issue, the more likely a controversy is to revolve around disagreements about the definitions of those words, the more likely it is for contentious policy to be justified by claims that contradict their longstanding and popular meanings:

“Trans women are women.”

“Israel is an ‘apartheid state’, committing ‘genocide’.”

“That isn’t ‘plagiarism’; it’s ‘duplicative language without appropriate attribution’.”

As with so many such strategies on the political battlefield, this one is popular in academia, the theatre of war where so many speeches to the troops open: “Let us begin by defining our terms…”.

Activist lexicography

The purest form of this martial art is waged in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. This is how the default Wikipedia entry for “Cultural Marxism looked in 2014:

This is how it looked in 2021:

If you’re a nerd about such things, this example illustrates well the decline from a global academy that accommodated quite a few Marxists, who were often at least superficially rigorous and would be comfortable with the longstanding textbook definition of the phrase, to a global academy that accommodates many more vulgar-Left activists (including post-modernists), who are anything but and who prioritize activism over its opposite: scholarship. Even if you accept that “cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory, why a supposedly serious reference work would present that definition of the phrase before the far more longstanding and better-supported one is not a question to which the answer is purely logical.

This was Merriam-Webster’s secondary definition of “racism” in 2020:

2a: a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles

This is what it changed to in 2020:

2a: the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

specifically : WHITE SUPREMACY sense 2

You can read about how Merriam-Webster redefined “racism” here. But while that commentary rightly warns of the danger of the new definition embedding unevidenced claims about “systemic racism”, it skips over another danger: This new definition overlaps with the widely held reframing that holds that racism is only racism when prejudice is accompanied by power.

The attraction of this definition for the political partisan is that all one has to do to protect one’s hatred of another tribe of humans from accusations of racism is to demonstrate that one’s enemies are in some way “powerful” or “privileged”—a gambit grimly recognisable to Tutsis, and Igbos, and Jews, but a gambit so long endorsed by the professoriat that you question it in polite company at your peril.

The Gay Affair

Which brings us to Claudine Gay and to the preference falsification we began with.

• “Preference falsification refers to misrepresenting private beliefs and thoughts in public. It is universal and occurs in many contexts.

• “This behavior can be due to people's discomfort holding a minority opinion and the social pressure to conform in a group setting.

• ”Classic experiments by Solomon Asch demonstrate the tendency to yield to the majority, even when the majority is wrong.”

There are few institutions where the sanctioning of wrongthought is more likely to lead to such self-censorship than our universities. Few university leaders pursued wrongthinkers with more zeal than Claudine Gay.

But it wasn’t for contributing to a climate that threatened free inquiry that Gay became prominent globally. This is the air academics breathe now. It was for refusing to say unequivocally that scholars’ calling for the genocide of Jews on campus was against Harvard’s rules:

One of the other elite-university presidents who testified similarly had to resign for doing so at the start of December. But Gay hung on to her position, even when new pressure mounted on her as more and more examples of her copying the content of other researchers’ published work into her own were uncovered.

Even other progressive academics were shocked by the response of many of Gay’s peers to this self-inflicted crisis of credibility. [If you aren’t a subscriber to The Atlantic, I recommend you enjoy this piece as your one free article. I found it all the more devastating because I disagreed with much of it.] This academic in particular was shocked because so much of the response was simply to change the meaning of words that everyone had long agreed the meaning of:

‘The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)

‘[conservative activist Christopher ]Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.’

Canaries in the coalmine again

Gay didn’t mention plagiarism in her resignation letter; she also didn’t mention Jews. A common complaint from Gay’s supporters has been that media attention to her plagiarism is disproportionate. But the reason this lesser issue is being elevated is because of the earlier relegation of the greater moral question of why universities so keen on policing other prejudices are more relaxed about the longest hatred.

At first it seems like another example of a perennial “progressive” reflex that continues to repel me: the elevation of matters of etiquette over matters of morality. In this case, however, it was conservatives who resorted to “bringing down Capone for tax evasion”. They couldn’t get her over the question of racial hatred, so they got on her for copying her homework.

As so often with “culture wars”, our war correspondents only paid serious attention to the conflict long after it had started, when the chronically losing side finally hit back. Open hostility on campus to most other minorities would have triggered swifter and stronger action by university administrators—even unintended-but-perceived hostility would have brought on the same; but, for too many “progressives” there’s something different about Jews.

Antisemitism on university campuses inspired by the recent Hamas/Israel conflict led US lawmakers to call university leaders in for questioning. Their answers were not convincing. Everything that followed followed from that.

It’s sad that the Jews were, once again, written out of their own story—another recent example: no mention of the word here in the National Portrait Gallery’s new page about the Kindertransport3—but at least the reason Gay went was directly relevant to her professional competence. The output of the working scholar is original thought expressed in original words. Despite failing to do her job according to her employer’s own standards, Gay won’t be removed from Harvard’s faculty, be made to admit fault, or suffer a significant reduction in her large salary4. So, while the vast diminution of in her power within the university was well justified, by comparison with the treatment of those deemed to have offended other minorities, Jews on campus haven’t received justice.

The price of freedom

A lesson we can learn from Jews who survived persecution to tell their own stories, from Jews who fled totalitarian states to the UK and US to speak to us through their scholarship and musicianship and friendship, and through so much more—from Jews who survived to recreate their own language—is literally to watch our words, to be vigilant against our own thoughts being turned against us.

When a public debate turns on matters of fact, but one side tries to turn it toward matters of meaning, hear a klaxon. When an authority or a peer tries to shame you for using particular words with particular meanings, fear your own reluctance to offend. When you yourself are tempted to cheat with definitions in the hope of an easier win in argument, resist.

Cinema is a mass medium. It’s entertainment. When makers of movies forget this, what they make is more, not less, likely to fail as Art. And some of the greatest cinema was moneymaking craft that we recognise as Art as an accident.

But I was also reminded by a documentary touching on the reception of mid-period Spielberg that much middlebrow movie-making doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Leave The World Behind is not Spielbergian, but it sets out to grip us and it sets out to Say Something, but what it says is ambiguous and unpretentious—and its execution is sufficiently well done and story big enough in scope to bear the weight of the ideas it sneaks on board.

The direction is stylish and eerie. The setting and suspense tempt the director/cinematographer into Hitchcockian angles. The symbolic imagery is [WARNING: SPOILERS] in-your-face without being irritating and contributes without distracting.

When it comes to movie-making, being merely “mid” can be good—sometimes even great. LTWB is not great, but it’s very good.

The set-up

The film’s title, billing, and opening monologue all tell us up front that the players are going to be cut off from other people. But they are also going to be cut off from mass culture—and it appears to be a deliberate irony that, while the dialogue addresses cyber-war and culture-war themes directly, the one moral that the plot itself hammers home is that it’s (literally) vital to preserve even lightweight, mass-market popular entertainment1. It can’t be an accident that one of the main protagonists is a media studies professor, and that his wife, Amanda, is an advertising executive.

The story’s outermost frames are:

1. Amanda’s wish to get away from people—she hates people.

2. Her younger child Ruth’s quest to watch the final episode of Friends—she loves Friends.

The infrastructure of Netflix’s Leave The World Behind is as exposed as the pipework of the Pompidou, but it’s the extent to which our world’s information infrastructure is exposed to attack that drives the plot.

We know from the outset that things are going to go wrong, but don’t know how wrong and we don’t know when, and LTWB isn’t going to rush into it. The movie is long and slow, and that’s a good thing. Things take time to happen, but what makes the script so good is what doesn’t happen. There are turns that you will see coming, but I there are ones that I guarantee you will not—and they are the one of the best kinds of unpredictable: You see the cues and expect the unfolding of a trope, but the story instead curls a different paw.

Is this plot intended to be allegorical? Is it meant to be anti-racist? Is it meant to warn us about growing political divisions in the contemporary United States? Is it intended to be dystopian? Is it meant to warn us about the weaknesses of our dependence upon vulnerable technology?

Or is the core message a smaller and more parochial one: about the business of moving images?

I can’t support this last suggestion without a big spoiler, so I won’t; but I beg you to stick with this film through to its final scene.

The cast

I have to talk about the cast: because it includes four decades-established US A-listers, in only the second feature by writer-director Sam Esmail (a man who, ten years ago, was editing “making of” shorts for The Fast And The Furious franchise).

Julia Roberts allows herself to be Hollywood ugly, inside and out. Ethan Hawke balances being useless and seedy with being the heart of the story. Mahershala Ali (who replaced the originally attached Denzel Washington2) is the master of pained concern; but, here, he stirs in hints of withheld secrets and hidden threat. Kevin Bacon plays the sort of antagonist that his younger self raged against in his breakthrough role.

The child/teen actors are all excellent and—this isn’t meant as an insult—all distinctive-looking—rather than extruded-plastic, Village-Of-The-Damned TV-junk-food-ad-rejects.

So why did they do it? Cynic as I am, I don’t believe the answer is just money. Yes, two or three of the leads do get to play somewhat against type, which must have appealed. And, for the adults at least, this was clearly not a gruelling shoot. Even some of the supposedly location shots look suspiciously like they took place indoors, in a place with air-conditioning and macrobiotic snacks.

The script

The No.1 reason the big hitters stepped up, I suspect, is that the words are well-written and the characters are well-drawn. Others might contend—indeed some critics have—that the film gets in over its head; but—unless I’m underestimating the subtlety of its maker(s), this is not a work that overreaches its wisdom or preaches one simple overarching moral. It’s true that the dialogue is leaner than real life, in the way that didactic dialogue can be, and that the characters often draw general conclusions from their specific circumstances, (and do so out loud), but none of them is obviously intended to be The Voice Of The Author and they don’t even agree with each other.

The politics

Hard though it is these days to get it into the heads of DEI-obsessed commentators, what people say in a piece of dramatic art and what lessons we are intended to take away from it (if any) are not the same thing.

LTWB is the first fiction to come out of Barack and Michelle Obama’s five-year-old production company, so you would expect there to be a Message (of a US Left-liberal variety) to be embedded in it. But, unlike many overlong contemporary films, LTWB gives much of that time over to its characters for them to develop into, and for its ideas to become three-dimensional as well.

There is time for us to see, for example, that a hint of perceived racism can be more about that perception than actual racism; it even cleverly has anti-black racism only hinted at on the part of a character we know to be an equal-opportunity hater, but anti-white racism spelled out by a non-white character. There is time for us to see that, even within a context of large-scale human cruelty, bad circumstances can sometimes bring out the good in flawed people. There is certainly time for us to be made to appreciate that the odd little obsessions of people we overlook can have worth.

The trailer

I recommend you don’t watch this. You will enjoy the film more without seeing the clickbait (streambait?) set-piece spectacles embedded in it.

No, watch the film instead. At worst, it will annoy you and you can come here to complain in the comments; but, even if that happens, I bet Leave The World Behind won’t leave your brain behind for at least a week.

Theranos was founded by now-convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. In the absence of enthusiasm for her product claims from people who actually understood biotech, it took the willingly loaned non-expert credibility of the likes of Kissinger and, for example, Bill and Hillary Clinton to persuade investors to fund the foundations of her folly.

Even (especially?) his enemies wouldn’t deny that Henry Kissinger was a clever man. In the eyes of willing marks, whatever domain-specific knowledge Kissinger lacked in the areas of microfluidics or medical diagnostics, he made up for in conspicuous erudition, seriousness, and fame.

The Dropout (on Disney+) dramatises the life of Elizabeth Holmes over the years leading up to and during the scandal. As someone with an academic and professional interest in this affair at the time, I followed its twists obsessively as they unfolded in the real world, so I watched the first episode of The Dropout with interest, because I wanted to learn more about what happened before Theranos and Holmes became news that I could read in the UK.

I find criminals dull and biotech interesting; but, because so much of the rise and fall of Theranos flowed from the personality of its founder and from the response of the outside world to that personality, there’s too much to learn from knowing about Holmes as a person to dismiss her. Accordingly, the first episode of The Dropout plays out like a Marvel supervillain origin story.

Two linked scenes in that episode, portraying a meeting between Holmes, then a Stanford undergraduate, and Phyllis Gardner—a real-life doctor, professor, and kosher tech entrepreneur—say a lot, both within the history of Holmes herself and about the internal and external mindsets that made the rise and fall of Theranos inevitable. For example:

1. It’s not a stretch to see the demise of Theranos as a textbook dramatic tragedy: Circumstances (rather than the stars) shaped the protagonist; the protagonist could only act according to her nature; her actions could only lead to disaster.

2. The Theranos affair could not have continued to happen as long as it did without the judgement of those not directly involved in the scandal being clouded by the poison of identity politics.

Anyone “in the business” with a more-than-basic understanding of the relevant science and technology could see that there was only one way Theranos’s dream of diverse, reliable medical diagnoses based on single drops of blood was going to go. Gardner, one of Holmes’s earliest critics certainly could.

In these scenes, Gardner stomps on an earlier, related, technological dream of Holmes’s for her own (Holmes’s) good. It’s the kind of mercy killing often performed by an Oxbridge don on an over-imaginative student: based on first principles and flowing from the decades of research that preceded it; but also brutal and concise, because the don murdering your idea doesn’t want to waste their time and doesn’t want you to waste yours. When bright young dreamers first experience such a stomping-of-their-dreams, the pain can be excruciating. If they subsequently go into research, they might learn that this pain is so much less terrible than that of having such dreams crushed by their own hard-won data, that early stompings, self-inflicted or otherwise, hurt far, far less less than late ones.

Unfortunately, the YouTube clip I’ve embedded above ends before the follow-up scene, outside Dr1 Gardner’s office. In that one, the professor tries to bring home to student Elizabeth Holmes that what might seem to be harshness on Gardner’s part is borne of her own experience of having to back up every scientific claim in her career with solid research work—more work than her peers—and her hope that Holmes grinds as hard to ensure that Holmes’s own science is taken as seriously. Gardner strongly implies that she (Gardner) has had to produce so much supporting data for other scientists to take her seriously because she is a woman in a man’s world.

The irony in Gardner’s warning is obvious to anyone familiar with Holmes’s ascent. While earlier anti-female sexism made Gardner’s past path to legitimate academic and business success rockier, Holmes’s future path to multibillion-dollar crime would correspondingly be smoothed by the fact of Holmes’s sex—to such an extent that the absence of scientific evidence to back up her claims would be widely disregarded and that criticisms of her would be branded “misogynist”, a disastrous endpoint of one kind of “Believing All Women”. It would be difficult to deny that another kind of sexism helped her: many straight men and not-straight women must have been, at the very least, distracted by Holmes’s youth, good looks, and deep voice.

When you are selling empty dreams, appearances matter. Theranos’s products were mirages. It wasn’t merely that they were technology that hadn’t been refined yet; they were, like Holmes’s wheeze in the dramatized clip, imaginary. Even with the vast sums of money at the company’s disposal, “faking it until they made it” was impossible, because there were first-principle reasons why such tech was impossible without inconceivable leaps in available technology. Without concrete evidence of such breakthroughs, Theranos could only establish itself with the donated heft of high-status/low-knowledge supporters (like Kissinger and his friends).

Biomedical science and Internet old-timers have seen this kind of thing before.

More than a decade before the Theranos scandal, the anti-MMR vaccine scandal started. At its inception, the theory that MMR vaccination caused autism via some kind of disruption of the human gut was a high-status one. It started with a research doctor publishing in a peer-reviewed journal famous even outside medicine (if one not held in high esteem by practising biomedical research scientists). Once it had percolated down from the ivory tower to the lay public, the parents most likely to withdraw their children from vaccination programmes were among the most educated and affluent.

Those actually working in science (like me) who scoffed at the flimsy case for this “new immune syndrome” were accused of being unqualified, envious, closed-minded, in the pay of Big Pharma, or worse. Even Private Eye, the comedy court circular of the skeptical elite, the satirical outsider organ of media insiders fell for the snakeoil.

But, years later, after grim resurgences in the infectious diseases the MMR vaccine protects against, this kind of anti-vax hysteria had become low-status, and its original fomenter had been struck off the UK medical register.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic launched a new flotilla of charlatans. This time, the politics motivating the quackery was much simpler and more obvious. But there were multiple medical debates—even though a debater’s position on those issues could usually be inferred from their politics. There were fights over:

• the efficacy and safety of COVID vaccines,

• the efficacy and costs/benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), and

• whether or not there was something especially novel and terrible about this particular coronavirus, over and above its higher fatality rate,

• and, of course, the origins of the virus.

In these cases and others, cranks abounded on the extremes, sometimes the extremists even linked metaphorical arms while performing their respective voodoo dances.

On these questions, most people “in the business” familiar with the longstanding evidence base in the control of respiratory infections and with no pre-existing political axe to grind took up what became known by more polite online commentators as “COVID Centrist” positions. Such moderate positions were not so popular with start-up culture “tech bros”.

There were different kinds of COVID Centrist, with different views along each debating spectrum, but they all had some things in common with Our Phyllis above (and one I am guessing she shared):

1. They considered good experimental and epidemiological evidence to be paramount. They elevated it above status, credentials, emotions, vibes, and politics.

2. They took first-principle scientific arguments more seriously than worst-case, science-fiction-movie speculation, and they took tried-and-true treatments more seriously than novel ones.

3. They recognised that all interventions carry trade-offs.

4. They knew that pandemics are marathons, not sprints.

It’s in the spirit of the last of these that I tell you that there are going to be more posts from me about this—and warn you that I am just getting warmed up.

It was solely to watch Prey that I took advantage of a two-month Disney Plus subscription offer. I’ve not had much time to watch TV recently, but I would have stuck with Disney+ if I’d thought it worth the full £8-a-month sub. On balance, for me, it wasn’t. But, yes, Prey justified the admission fee on its own.

You can read a review of it here, plus reviews of a couple of other relatively recent action releases on Disney. Handy if you’re too busy to bother committing to our era’s obligatory two-hour running lengths without a recommendation.

Prey

Imagine you outsourced the plotting of the next episode in the Predator franchise to the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” department of an elite US university. You’d get something like the storyline of Prey. If you enjoy films as entertainment, and especially if you enjoy action films, this sounds like a bad joke; but Prey’s script and direction were handled by people who seem to admire and understand the genre. As a result, it’s possible to ignore the implied politics and ride it like a rollercoaster, rather than roll your eyes at a disguised graduate seminar in post-colonialism—which it also is. Perhaps this is the new (winning) rule for HR-compliant corporate entertainment: “Go Woke; But Remember The Blokes.”

Why is this slogan apt? The protagonists of Prey are 18th-century Native Americans living on the Great Plains, so it ticks the Indigenous Peoples box; and, since it features French-Canadian fur trappers as secondary antagonists, it also ticks the Anti-Colonialism and Pro-Sustainability/Anti-Animal-Exploitation boxes. The principal is a young Comanche woman, who is—not entirely unfairly at first—not taken seriously as a hunter by her male peers, filling the Pro-Feminism box. And the film was greenlit by a female executive under a billing of going “against gender norms”, so anyone who hasn’t completed their woke bingo card by this point hasn’t been paying attention.

But blokes who love SF/action films have at least a couple of rules of their own: For example, the rule-of-thumb with Star Trek films is that the even-numbered ones are better.

The rule-of-thumb with Predator films is that the ones set in the wild are better.

And Prey is set on the Great Plains in the 18th century. There’s plenty of wilderness to go round for everyone.

The film not only respects a central aspect of what makes the best Predator-derived works gripping—the only hope humans ever have of defeating the technologically superior trophy-hunters-from-space is for Homo sapiens to fall back to the killer cunning that left him last Homo standing on his own planet; it also works because it’s tightly scripted, well directed, and performed with talent and commitment by a young cast.

The usual gratifying tropes of the franchise are present too: This “retro Predator” still has some nifty hunting tech gadgets, cleaves to the species’ code of honour, and, once started, is determined to finish the hunt1.

Given the bowl of offal that Disney reduced the Star Wars franchise to after it bought that one, it’s especially satisfying that the end of Prey makes sense in itself, draws together the threads of this “episode” of the Predator myth, and integrates with existing canon/lore—rather than spitting on everything that’s preceded it in order to make everything that follows easier to write and make those mountains of new merch in the warehouse easier to shift.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 3

If I’m tackling the Mickey empire, I’m pretty much obliged to review something from the Marvel comics-derived superhero franchise that Disney also acquired recently (in the process unifying, multiple, previously disparate, IP empires into one multimedia blob, including two separate branches of Marvel at the cinema itself).

The current media consensus seems to be that, since the end of the vast Avengers arc with Avengers: Endgame (especially the departure of Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark), Marvel has lost its point, lost consumers, or lost direction—or all three. Since many cinema critics hate comic book adaptions in general, hate the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular, and are tired of big-budget, CGI-heavy sequels, this consensus has gone unresisted.

Rotten Tomatoes shows that critics are still saying nice things about individual new items of Marvel content. A quick google of recent commentary about the MCU also shows that critics are also expressing their view that various Marvel sub-franchises have outstayed their welcome. Sadly, much as I hate to be the nobody who jumps on the somebodies’ bandwagon, I am (mostly) not going to be joining the Maquis on this front.

Don’t get me wrong. No one involved in GotG Vol III has been anything less than highly competent. It’s not the fault of the makers of this film that it didn’t matter to me very much what happened to characters I had already invested time and interest in. The film even answers questions that many of those viewing previous Marvel movies will have genuinely wanted answering. But it’s inevitable that a kind of fatigue sets in with all but the most committed fanboys and fangirls when a series of well-told stories have reached what seemed to be a natural conclusion, but the people telling them don’t stop.

So, if you like this sort of thing, I can guarantee that you will like this particular thing. You will not be disappointed. You might well be moved by the backstory of Rocket the enhanced raccoon. You might feel a glow at the buddy-buddy interactions between The Gang. You might well smile affectionately as beloved characters grow into new in-universe roles over the course of the episode.

But you will not experience nirvana. You will not see the face of God. If you are a sucker for cute anthropomorphic animals, you might cry a bit—especially if you are particularly emotionally attached to trash pandas. But you will cry because the makers of the film very much wanted you to and have manipulated you cynically into doing so. And, of course, you’ll laugh, because these films can always pay enough good writers (and actors) to put in at least a few good jokes.

If you still have a gen for the MCU, then I recommend this. If you don’t, then you already know exactly how little you think you’ll care and can plan accordingly.

Free Guy

Ryan Reynolds is near the top of the list of good-looking goofs you hire if you want to make a good-looking goof-fest, even a good-looking goof-fest that’s nominally about AI. Thanks to his Deadpool reboots, he is definitely top of the good-looking goofs you hire as your protagonist if you need someone to break the Fourth Wall and mock his own heroics.

The twist in this case is that Reynolds plays a video game character, Guy, who doesn’t even know there’s a fourth wall to break. We enter his imaginary world and see it as he does: rendered in the full detail of our own. That is, even though players of “Free City”, the game-within-a-movie, only ever perceive the online world they rampage through, Grand-Theft-Auto-style at limited resolution, we see it from Guy’s perspective, with no visible pixel grain.

This is important to at least one of the subtexts of Free Guy, one that must have been obvious to the people making it, who, after all, work in Hollywood: It’s the question of what happens when the players realise that all the world is a stage and that they are merely players, or, rather, in this case, that they are merely NPCs (Non-Player Characters).

Especially given the contemporary derogatory slang meaning of the abbreviation “NPC”, there are plenty of obvious jokes to be made about an NPC who works in a bank. Free Guy gets these out of the way early on.

The eponymous Free Guy’s black sidekick scores bonus irony points by a) being called “Buddy” and b) inverting the usual buddy-movie trope2 to play the straight guy to the main guy.

The dynamic of the in-game protagonists established, the movie pulls out to show us the “real” world surrounding them, outside the servers hosting Free City. Within the game, this starts with Reynolds’ character being seduced by the song of real-world-dweller Millie Rusk’s pointlessly hot3 online avatar “MolotovGirl”.

Talking of “pointless”, we should, I suppose, be pleased that Rusk’s real-world friend Walter "Keys" McKey is played by a man, because his is the sort of role movies used to dump on women—often, puzzlingly, without objections from large numbers of women: Keys acts as Rusk’s initially somewhat clueless man-on-the-inside of the generically evil corporation responsible for Free City, mopes after real-life Rusk, and is our proxy on the receiving end of chunks of exposition. But Stranger Things’ Joe Keery is a trouper and does well with what he’s given.

One thing that might seem trivial, but which completely shifted the way I perceived the story from the way its authors intended: At the start, more than one character refers to Keys as Rusk’s “ex-partner”. If you’re a Brit hearing this American English, there’s a good chance you’ll spend the rest of the movie taking that to mean that the two of them are former lovers. Don’t make the mistake I did. They aren’t.

If I say much more about the story, I’ll be giving away too much away. Because, the film’s credit, while there are outcomes that follow from them that you would predict correctly from my description of its premisses, there are also things you wouldn’t4 and they are just about enough of these to keep you watching through the stretches of proceedings when the flippancy of the dialogue and the intentionally cartoonish-realistic action effects and stunts aren’t enough to hold your attention. The surprises, and the suprisingly big laughs, only really kick in in final act, when some elements from earlier on pay off nicely and some other elements seem to arrive from another dimension, but are so funny that you don’t care.

I wouldn’t pay a fiver to rent Free Guy, but I would recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it to check it out if it’s available to them as part of an existing subscription of theirs.

Disney Plus is no longer a subscription service of mine but I had some fun watching some of the content it had to offer while I could. You might enjoy it too. But don’t go there looking for Art.

The Right Side Of History

A favourite trope of historical dramas is the “That Aged Poorly” dinner party scene: Around a rich-food-laden table, aristocrats/tycoons/intellectuals smugly discuss a then-topical matter and spout views that we viewers now know, with the benefit of our many years of hindsight, are Recklessly Complacent or Deeply Problematic—or both.

In between mouthfuls of food, a confident, redfaced, upper-class Englishman in a dinner jacket will pronounce: “That Hitler’s a bally angry-sounding chappie, but he’s not done England any wrong, and I can’t help thinking he might be on to something when it comes to the Jews!”

When the great numbers of “progressives” who believe that progress always means “the continuing benevolent movement of social mores in the direction of my own prejudices” encounter resistance to what they believe to be positive societal change, they imagine that their opponents will, one day, be portrayed like this—in some future, more enlightened, time; a time when everyone will understand that they, the “progressives”, were self-evidently morally superior and those who opposed them were wicked, or, at best, fools.

A crucial element in these vignettes is that the ruddy wrongthinkers on screen are portrayed in a context of ease and comfort—not only material comfort, but the comfort that comes from believing their conclusions are unlikely to be challenged by their fellows, the comfort that comes from being surrounded by those one trusts and trusts to assent.

Which reminds me of something more mundane…

What would you say is your worst fault?

I used to work at a Medical Research Council unit. Before I was made a member of an interview panel there, the unit’s director explained to me the institute’s One Clever Trick for screening candidates:

If your CV made the cut and you were called in for in-person assessment, your day would go as follows:

1. In-depth, but friendly, interview with the recruiting scientist

2. Tough grilling by a panel including scientists outside your field

3. Very casual, relaxed meeting with supposedly "minor" admin staff member

What candidates didn't know was that, even if they had bossed the rest of the process, the third stage could turn out to be the killer. Because the "minor administrator" was, in fact, a young-looking-but-senior staff member, who not only did her best to take the interviewee’s side and make them feel they were in the company of a comrade, not an enemy, but also made a careful note of:

1. What candidates said to her when their guard was down

2. How candidates treated a member of staff they might be tempted to consider their "inferior"

My goodness, how frontrunners fell at that last hurdle. From admitting: "I don't really want the job, but my girlfriend has just got a post at the university (Cambridge)" to exhibiting the general rudeness and contempt of a pompous ass who's been on their best behaviour in a professional pressure cooker for hours.

Torture is for losers

Right at the start, I want to make it absolutely clear that, pace the BBC’s simplistic headline, by citing this second example, I am not saying people I disagree with are Nazis; I’m saying that everyone—from fascist to communist to anywhere in between—is susceptible to the same psychological weakness: namely that, when surrounded by people who agree with you, you can forget that you and they are surrounded by people who don’t; you can forget that the real truth is Out There, existing concretely and independently of you and your mates, and continues to be indifferent to whether you believe it or not.

Whatever else you think about torture, if those you are torturing are committed to their cause, it’s not an efficient way of getting reliable information out of them. It’s so much easier to get the truth out of people who have to have their guard down. You can, of course, lower some people’s guards by depriving them of sleep or drugging them or offering them reprieve from suffering that you or your colleagues have subjected them to—or you can simply put them at their ease. There’s no need for people to go on the defensive if they believe they’re not being attacked.

This approach has history:

Thousands of German POWs held captive in England during World War II were bugged by "secret listeners" who were themselves German refugees, working for the British. Historian Helen Fry and one of the last surviving listeners explain how the prisoners were lulled into divulging secrets of the Nazi war machine.

One group of German generals captured during World War II thought they had hit the jackpot.

Held in a stately home, they were allowed to keep personal servants, drink wine and eat good food.

As a result they boasted of how stupid the British were, and one even wrote to his family to wish that they could join him at his prison, as he rated it so highly.

But what the prisoners did not know was that British intelligence had bugged every part of their accommodation, from lampshades and plant pots right down to the billiards table around which they relaxed on lazy days.

…

Historian Helen Fry, who has written a book called The M Room: Secret Listeners who bugged the Nazis., says the information gleaned by the eavesdropping of the German generals was vitally important to the war effort - so much so that it was given an unlimited budget by the government.

Fields of scarecrows

Back in the oughts, when those of us of a Eustonite tendency were trying to warn their comrades and the wider world of the dangers of the crank Left, the crank Left that eventually took over the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, we faced two common responses:

1. “These racist, conspiracy-peddlers are straw men, figments of your imagination conjured up to justify your own warmongering political agendas.”

2. “Even if these phantoms do exist, they have no power. Tony Blair is in his Right-wing pomp within the Labour Party. The sold-out, market-loving Centre-Left dominate global politics. Why should we care about your campfire ghost stories about the likes of the organising committee of ‘Stop’ The War1? You’re paranoid obsessives.”

Of course, now, like hindsight-armed viewers of historical-drama dinner parties, we have lived through an era in which these crank-Left “straw men” not only showed themselves publicly as flesh-and-blood, but invaded the Labour Party and wore it as their cleanskin.

Many of these debates of the 2000s took place on blogs, because, back in the oughts, social media was in its infancy, and mostly fully of teens and children. But, today, real-time politics happens on Twitter. Anyone warning of sickness on the Left can answer accusations that the are conjuring up straw men to make their case by citing sheaves of sick tweets written by Lefties. And, shockingly, the kind of crankery worth warning about isn’t confined to user Ivan3498505, grinding away in a Siberian botfarm, but is routinely emitted by supposedly moderate westerners in proper, responsible jobs in academia and public-sector institutions, or even in the media.

They emit this stuff because there are so many ready to receive it. They speak their minds online because they feel at ease there. They damn themselves because they feel no fear of condemnation. And there is no need for hidden microphones, because their words are broadcast live to the entire planet, or for spies to make transcripts, because they type up their own words for us in black-and-white.

The timeline takes to the streets

So we come to today, 11th November 2023: Armistice Day, originally a celebration of the agreement of the end of hostilities in the Great War in 1918; since folded into Commonwealth nations’ Remembrance Day: a memorial to all members of their armed forces who lost their lives in the line of duty.

A debate has been raging in the UK about whether or not to ban “pro-Palestinian” marches planned to take place today—after such demonstrations have recurred every weekend since 7th October 2023, when the terror organisation Hamas, operating out of Gaza, invaded Israel and attacked Israelis, killing 1200 of them, mostly civilians. The full horror of those attacks is hard to grasp, a fact not lost on those who, for their own political reasons, now spread conspiracy theories about them, claiming that the attacks never happened/were staged/were expected by Israel all along/were, in fact, perpetrated by the Israelis themselves.

Every too-online observer with a political bone in their body has an opinion on this. My opinion doesn’t matter either, but, since you care enough about it to have read this far, here it is:

The marches are overwhelmingly indifferent to the war crimes that started this new round of conflict and they are uninterested in calling for the return of the hundreds of Israeli hostages still in Hamas’s hands. The overwhelming wish of the marchers, expressed loudly and repeatedly, is for the end of the state of Israel. The organisers of and participants in the marches include supporters of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist group.

BUT I don’t want to see the marches banned.

I do HOWEVER want those marchers openly inciting violence or committing other criminal offences to be arrested. I have no interest in identity-based “anti-hate” laws and have zero faith that they will ever be applied consistently by those paid to enforce them. But, as long as the police fail to remove those participants breaking longstanding non-identity-based laws—for fear of “inflaming community tensions” (or on other fuzzy politically motivated grounds)—then expressions of hatred made on these demos will intensify alongside the incitement. This is exactly what we have seen happen over the past few weeks. Today will not be their peak.

The one good outcome of this is that the marchers are now comfortable enough that they can show their true selves in public even more frequently than they did at the start. No one can pretend any longer that these are “peace marches”. Apart from their routine, ongoing bellicose chants…

They dress as Hamas terrorists:

They call for the expulsion of Jews:

They imply that non-whites who disagree with them are traitors to their skin colour with the racist slur “coconuts” (brown on the outside, white on the inside).

They intimidate Jews by hanging around outside synagogues waving flags and smoke grenades.

They do all of this because they feel safe to do it. They do it because they are surrounded by peers who not only won’t challenge their behaviour, but who agree with them. They do all this because our media refuse to report their behaviour accurately to outsiders who would be less sympathetic to it. They do all this because they believe there will be no legal consequences.

As I write, Channel 4 News is reporting that the pro-Palestinian marches “passed off peacefully”2, but the tiny counter-protest near the Cenotaph by the “far right” did not, because of “scuffles”. Simultaneously, the Metropolitan Police have issued an S35 Dispersal Order for Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, in part, it seems, because pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been launching fireworks at police.

We have put them at their ease. They have shown us who they are.

2

UPDATE: In a glorious self-own, Channel 4 News has already had to delete this tweet: