Yesterday the latest issue of Private Eye tumbled through the letterbox, and was brought to me (I am laid up following an operation involving cutting into my second toes and inserting pins!) by the wonderful wife. There’s a symmetry here, because the subscription to Private Eye is a gift from my mother-in-law.
There’s two things I read first (after the cover, obvs) – that’s Pseud’s Corner (where particularly ripe and “up itself” writing is mocked) and the letters page. And there I was! I’d forgotten that I sent it in, but it was a not-bad one, pointing out that calling Extinction Rebellion “extreme” is odd, since the real extremists are those who insist on seeking/extracting/burning fossil fuels. They are so wedded to this (for various reasons) that they are frying us all.
Anyway, I put the letter on Twitter where it has done well, and garnered me new followers – I should probably do a Twitter thread to say hello and thanks for following.
Before this I’d had the nice experience of Gail Bradbrook tweeting positively about an old post on this site, from early 2019. It was about infiltration and intimidation in social movements. I never did keep my promise to blog about all the books and things I was reading – a repeated pattern.
Twitter is Janus, obviously – a great source of information and new (mostly thin) relationships, and simultaneously a drain of both attention and time. “Nobody dies wishing they’d sent more Tweets”, to update that quote about television…
Meanwhile, the horrorshow of the climate breakdown, and how it is almost completely ignored continues. The BBC test match special commentators went complete-idiot over the JSO protest, saying the aim was to “wreck the Test”. As if climate change won’t render the whole circus of international travel basically impossible, and make play impossible for months of the year (“heatwave stopped play”). But what else would you expect of them, I guess – there are institutional constraints (blogged here).
The Antarctic and Greenland ice continues to melt.
The graphs have a terrible but compelling beauty about them – the aesthetics of the apocalypse have been noted before, I know (the Nazis had great uniforms, after all). What a species we are, unable to cope with the knowledge of our individual finitude, so then we create gods in our own image and have permission to trash the planet (I simplify, obvs. The Greeks seemed to know what was up – their gods are basically petulant childish assholes, and that’s a good way of explaining why random shit happens. No theodicy problems for them…)
Later on Twitter I found this rather lovely (see above) image, which you only really understand if you know the blue to red stripes thing that annual average temperatures have been rising and rising.
FINALLY for today (short post, work to do), the Wife and I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Beautifully made (even if they occasionally went too hard on the archive/reconstruction stuff to avoid talking-head-itis) and fascinating about just how driven the guy is (and why – dad was a nut). I am old enough to remember Arnold’s rise, and his astonishing run from The Terminator followed by Raw Deal, Commando, Predator, The Running Man, Red Heat, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Total Recall and then Terminator 2 (I think I saw most of these at the cinema, with my mum – I was tall for my age and could get into restricted films).
Right, back to work…
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