Month: May 2024

Political theatre

Earlier this week:

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court has said he is seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Karim Khan said his office had applied to the world court’s pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants for the military and political leaders on both sides for crimes committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.
He named Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, the commander of its military wing, considered to be the masterminds of the 7 October assault, as well as Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the group’s political bureau, who is based in Qatar, as wanted for crimes of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape, sexual assault and torture.
In an extraordinary rebuke of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its conduct in the war in Gaza, Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberately targeting civilians. Monday’s statement notably does not include any Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials, such as its chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, focusing instead on political decision-making.

And now:

The UN’s top court has ordered Israel to halt its assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in a ruling that will ratchet up the pressure on the increasingly isolated country.
The president of the international court of justice, Nawaf Salam, said the humanitarian situation in Rafah had deteriorated further and was now classified as “disastrous”, meaning the ICJ’s previously issued provisional measures were insufficient.
He said the court had voted by a majority of 13 votes to two that “Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in Rafah governorate … immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in the Rafah governorate which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that would bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
The order by the ICJ is not enforceable, and Israeli ministers indicated that they would not comply with it.

In other words, just as pointless as the ICC, which Israel isn’t a member of so the court can’t actually enforce their warrants either. Everyone was getting kind of excited by those warrants when they were announced earlier in the week—whether they were grossly offended and outraged by them, or ecstatic about Something Finally Being Done About Israel—except I wasn’t, cos I already knew the ICC can only go after its own member states. So there was no danger of anything actually happening, and the UN joining in isn’t going to change that. Just vacuous gestures while the death toll keeps going up.

Or maybe not?

Apparently the Tories are so angry at Rishi Sunak for calling this election July instead of October or something that they’re trying to have him fired so that it can be called off. Which should WORK BRILLIANTLY, cos even if it did they would still have to actually hold an election no later than January 2025, which would give any putative next PM (like that Rees-Mogg cunt) a bit over six months to completely turn the Tories around. And I don’t think that’s going to be anywhere near enough for such a thing to happen. I fear they’d just be delaying the inevitable, and I think that’s why Sunak’s calling the election now: he knows they’re going to get smashed and he wants it to be over and done with… or maybe:

Which, if the speculation up top is correct, may not work anyway. And there was this:

To be honest when I first read this I thought the bit about them not having enough time to get jobs in the corporate sector once they get trounced was meant a joke, but I am now realising it wasn’t. Sunak not caring about them? Why, that’s even worse than the rest of them not caring about the people of the country!

Of course, the image of Sunak getting drenched while delivering his speech in the pouring rain outside No. 10 because no one thought to offer him an umbrella is what everyone’s getting worked up about, and with good cause. Whatever Sunak’s weak attempt at justifying it—i.e., that it’s tradition for the PM to deliver this sort of news out front of No. 10—may be worth, I’m fairly sure there’s no tradition saying the PM can’t do it without protection from the weather…

…Especially not when THAT room evidently exists and no one needed to get wet at all.

And much as I do expect the Tories to get completely wiped out, I know we still shouldn’t rule out the alternative. I made that mistake in 2010—I know, because it comes back in Facebook Memories to bite me in the arse every year—when the Liberals adopted Tony Abbott and I thought they’d basically handed Labor the next election on a platter… cos his constituents might’ve been stupid enough to vote for him but the country as a whole would surely be smarter than that. Surely. I was not expecting Labor to shit the bed in the way that it then proceeded to do and actually make Abbott look like a viable alternative. Keir Starmer still has to catastrophically fuck up… which, to be honest, I don’t imagine he will, but even so.

Great, Britain

Britain’s off to the polls, in a sign that Rishi Sunak’s decided “fuck everything”:

Which I suspect is what’ll happen this time too… but Jesus fuck, how uninspiring is Labour right now? As far as I can see, the only thing they’ve really got in their favour is that they’re not the Tories. The latter are manifestly unfit to run a roadside newspaper stand, never mind a country, and I’d be surprised if a single member of the party as it stands is morally fit to be in politics at any level. But is Keir Starmer going to offer anything better? I feel Corbyn would’ve done, but I don’t get a similar feeling from him. Starmer vs Sunak. What a grim choice, almost as bad as Biden vs Trump…

I am the Law?

As I’ve said more than once, I grew up on British comics more than American ones, most notably 2000AD, whose most iconic character, of course, is a certain officer of the law. Obviously, being only about eight years old when I started reading The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, I had no real conception that Dredd and the Judges were essentially operating a fascist, hyper-authoritarian system, not until the strip itself started addressing the whole issue of the absence of democracy in Mega City One… by which time I had aged into double figures and impending teenagehood, and frankly still didn’t understand the political issues or really care about them that much, really.

But Dredd was the hero, wasn’t he? Dredd was the living embodiment of THE LAW in Mega City One (and indeed outside it). The figure we were supposed to look up to. THE LAW was sacred to him, and, let’s face it, he was there to administer it to a bunch of unquestionably Bad People. He was opposed to Bad People. He was the Good Guy.

Wasn’t he?

Dredd co-creator John Wagner said of his creation many years later:

This was back in the days of Dirty Harry, and with [Margaret] Thatcher on the rise there was a right-wing current in British politics which helped inspire Judge Dredd. He seemed to capture the mood of the age – he was a hero and a villain.
That villainous aspect to Dredd’s character – and the Draconian laws of Mega-City One [the post-apocalyptic metropolis Dredd polices] – really caught the readers’ imagination.
Occasionally we’d get letters from children who seemed to be agreeing with his hard-right stance, so we made the strip more political to bring out the fact that we didn’t agree with Dredd. We introduced a democratic movement in Mega-City One as a counterpoint. So in a way the readers helped the character develop.

So, basically, kids not getting the point of the strip was what caused Wagner to be more overt, cos he was a bit alarmed by what he had wrought. But it took me rather longer to appreciate that point myself, and indeed I’d argue that I only finally did so tonight, when someone posted the meme at the top of this post on the PIAT FB group. Cos on more recent reading about 2000AD and its history, I’ve been kind of struck by the often-expressed notion that TGGC was related to the punk movement of the same period, which I could see in a lot of instances, yes, but not with Dredd, who was the flagship character of the comic, he was specifically mentioned in the cover logo for years. He was… not punk particularly.

But yeah, thinking about it now from the perspective offered at the top of the post, the idea that the Judges were just another gang in Mega City One… that makes a certain sense. The gang with the best resources, evidently, and the power to declare themselves THE LAW. The gang that, to some extent, took over the territory of the erstwhile United States from someone even worse than them, the gang that just destroyed democracy rather than most of the rest of the world like Bad Bob Booth… the gang that, per that particular Dredd story, was supposed to restore democracy eventually but just became dictators, the gang keeping on top of and wiping out its competitors for decades… some of whom are still even worse than them. The devil you know, indeed. I don’t know who made that meme, but after 40 years I think I understand Dredd much better now…

Oh not again

ANOTHER fucking Rapture? How did I miss that this one was coming? Still, at least I know to expect the bearded fellow’s assumption of the throne in July; I’m sure that’ll be a BIG and PUBLIC event that will be EVIDENT to EVERYONE, so that it’ll be OBVIOUS when it happens and not an EMBARRASSMENT if it were to, you know, not happen…

Thoughts and prayers

Talking of obnoxious phrases, Steven Moffat recently skewered it in this interview when the interviewer mentions it in the context of his new Who episode, “Boom”:

I always think, how about, “I’m sending thoughts and prayers”… how about cash? You could send cash! Or, help! What the hell is that? I’m against it. It’s like saying, “I’m very, very saddened about these needless deaths.” I’m glad you gave me that useful piece of information! I thought I might have cheered you up.
I think it is vacuity. How can people come out with this crap in the face of genuine tragedy? You come out with thoughts and prayers? Say something useful or do something useful. Be respectful. Don’t reach up for a line off a shelf and throw it in the grieving faces of the massively traumatized.
Yes. My hope was, if we can get “thoughts and prayers” going as a villainous catchphrase, like “Exterminate!”, people might stop saying it.

Which is kind of how he deploys it in the episode, and in a particularly vicious way, too… Indeed, in its way, despite ending happily, “Boom” is one of the harshest episodes of the show (and the “caskets” may be the most quease-making story detail since the “soup” from “Time Heist”):

And that’s not even the nastiest thing the Doctor has to say on that subject. The story itself has the Doctor stuck on a landmine, which is not the first time he’s been in that position:

But this mine is a rather more complicated proposition than that one on Skaro; there’s no easy way for the Doctor to get off it and if he doesn’t it’ll eventually explode anyway and wipe out a substantial chunk of the planet they’re on. Ncuti Gatwa is, accordingly, stuck in one place for almost the entire episode, meaning all he really has to work with is his face and his voice, and godDAMN he puts those things to amazing use. The people whining about the first two episodes being too heavy on the fantasy and absurdism shouldn’t have much to complain about in this one. Though not everyone’s agreeing on its merits, obviously: