Marwood

My economic anxiety!

You can tell London is a global city because you can get in a taxi in Bucharest and say you're from England and the driver will start telling you his opinions on ULEZ

On the one hand, yes. But on the other hand, there was a successful enough biopic of him released a few years ago. Definitely not falling into massive obscurity yet. An interesting question though is whether he's more recognisable now than, say, Johnny Cash and I would say no.

these people do not seem to grasp, like, commodities are a physical thing and not just floating abstractions trapped in spreadsheets or lines in graphs.

Strange. You'd think that the British people would be persuaded by such compelling arguments as 'we don't have a plan for regime change but a friend of a friend does' or 'Keir Starmer smells!'

A far right protestor holds up a sign reading "we are Jeffrey Epstein"

There was a far-right protest against mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York yesterday and well, that's quite the sign

Sure, but my point is in the large scheme of things personal preference won't matter.

The amount of people in a developed country who have their own independent electricity supply is tiny. Meanwhile, in practice, if power is to be rationed, it will be to the benefit of the cities.

it exists where it does for a reason, and is much less likely to be affected by market prices for commodities. So who exactly is the citizen of nowhere and somewhere?

Meanwhile, the hypothetical office worker who lives in an urban area probably has much lower transport costs, perhaps their consumption depends on imports but those can be easily substituted in most cases, unlike that of the primary industry worker. Their job is not exactly tied to a place but

But this is true also for much romanticised 'hard work' jobs - Farmers and Fishermen make their money from exports, often now to countries quite far away. They often also depend on imports of vital materials such as machinery or fertiliser.

This is not wish fulfillment or a prophecy, it's a statement of the obvious. Why? Because the latter group lives a lifestyle which is heavily determined on the affordability of petrochemicals and related exports. If your main form of transport is a car you are in greater trouble than if it isn't

Let's be clear about this, if globalisation does fall apart then the people in Western Europe, at least, who would suffer the least would be the despised urban middle class liberal 'elites', the people who would suffer the most would be the outer suburban/rural 'nationalist' constituency.

an incredibly rare positive headline for sir keir

Baudrillard: totally exonerated, no wrong doing

Yes, but while Trump can try to TACO, Iran most certainly won't so the US (and also all of us) are in all likelihood in too deep now.

we can get our money back, but none of those dead schoolgirls can be clawed back by a supreme court ruling

I’m sorry l, but I had been assured that The Modern State Is But A Committee For Managing The Affairs Of The Entire Bourgeoisie and I am seeing little evidence of this. Is there someone I could speak to?

And just to be clear on this, when I say 'their standard of living', I mean 'yours'.

For decades environmentalists were lectured by right-wingers that they should forget it as people aren't willing to sacrifice their standard of living, now it looks like right-wingers are willing to sacrifice their standard of living and it's for Benjamin Netanyahu of all things.

yes, for better or worse. the point of seeing like a state was that compressing everything into formalized representations of the world tends to generate dystopian outcomes , and i think this really has been borne out by reality when we talk about social media

That's what I get back to - I probably wouldn't be less annoyed if I hadn't been exactly where the film is set *six weeks ago* - but fundamentally this is actually a ridiculous version of Morocco; a country which has high speed rail.

Which is the shame because the soundtrack is great, the photography really does capture the High Atlas and the pre-desert, it is really good at capturing a sort of indulgent naive hippie attitude towards countries like Morocco... but it fundamentally doesn't know what to do with that.

And this is because it is not about Morocco, but about Europeans and the Orient; obviously the whole narrative is inspired by October 7th but when it tries to touch on that directly it has all the delft touch of a brick in the face.

Feeling like a kind of Odyssey, the film takes a very, very dark turn about an hour in - possibly in no film since Psycho or Touch of Zen is there a greater discordance between the first part of the film and the rest of it, but here it is a weakness, it loses the run of itself.

SIRAT (2025): A very well done but very, very silly film that is the recent in that genre of 'pretend smartphones don't exist'. As someone who was actually in Southern Morocco six weeks ago, this grates. I didn't go off the beaten track but I did get reception in the high Atlas.

uh oh

If things continue like this, in a few months time I am going to go round conversations and interject rudely if people complain about the price of petrol with "So, you don't think Israel has the right to defend itself?"

The implicit argument of so much of this stuff is that there is no legitimate role for Muslims in public life.