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2026-01-28

Week 264: An old world dying

The madness on the other side of the Atlantic looms like a spectre over everything, and it’s sometimes difficult to concentrate when a rogue superpower seems intent on wreaking colonial violence both outward and inward. Trump’s threats against Greenland were finally rowed back a bit, but thinkpieces that ask questions like “would invading Greenland mean the end of NATO?” seem to miss the point: if you’re worried about your putative ally invading, you don’t really have an ally. Meanwhile, the stormtroopers of ICE murdered yet another person as they kidnapped and brutalised and carried out the regime’s weird vendettas in Minnesota.

I’m glad I don’t live in America, but I still have to live in America’s world.

On the other hand, we don’t exactly seem to be free of morbid symptoms over here, either, with a Home Secretary dreaming of an AI-powered panopticon:

When I was in [the Ministry of Justice], my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.

Not only do these people think these things, they say them out loud!

The Labour government act as if they don’t realise what everyone else knows, that they will not get a second term, and that they risk building an ever more effective apparatus of repression for a future government that might be a lot more enthusiastic about using it to its fullest. In the US, Democratic administrations funded and supported ICE, and even though it’s now a tool to be used against their own constituency they still struggle to disown it.

Is there some kind of epistemic lacuna in sensibilist politics that, even as they insist on ever more control, renders them unable to imagine bad guys having the exact same tools?

I had to buy a replacement nozzle for the garden hose, because after I hosed the dog shit off my bike in the freezing cold a couple of weeks ago, the water froze in the nozzle and cracked the plastic. Obvious in retrospect, but I didn’t think of it at the time and now I’m £14 poorer, which is yet another annoyance from that event.

I got soaked cycling both ways on Wednesday. I saw a fox on the way home, contradicting my previous assumption that they must not like rain because I only ever see them on clear days. It’s not disproven, but there’s a data point against the hypothesis.

There were two fire alarms at the co-working space; real fire alarms in the sense that everyone had to leave the building, but false alarms in the sense that really matters. It does get harder to take them seriously when you’ve had two disruptive false alarms in the space of three days, though.

We watched 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple at Peckhamplex, home of the £4.99 £5.99 £6.99 cinema ticket. (At least I can just pop downstairs and buy a ticket in person, avoiding an additional 60p for online booking.) Like all good zombie films, hell is actually other people, and the bloodthirsty Jimmy Savile impressionists provided the real horror.

It wasn’t a relaxing watch, but I enjoyed it. The coda looks like the setup for yet another sequel, and if I’m right I also have some ideas about what that might be – or could be, anyway, and it’s related to both the topic being discussed at the end and to what happened to Samson.

While L— was out on Sunday evening I watched an old folk horror film, Witchfinder General (1968). As it’s set in Suffolk, I enjoyed spotting all the places I knew – Lavenham; Kentwell Hall; Orford Castle – and was indignant when they were supposedly in Brandeston but it absolutely wasn’t Brandeston at all. The only really unforgiveable thing about it was the colour of the fake blood. Anyone who has ever donated blood or even cut themselves badly will know it’s not the colour of a Royal Mail postbox, and I’m sure they could have done better.

This week’s links:

• Drone carrying live pig crashes into power lines, cuts Sichuan village electricity for 10 hours.
• EMU2 is a simple text-mode x86 DOS emulator for Linux that supports basic DOS system calls and console I/O.
• A ‘shopping list of autocratic actions’: what would-be autocrats do to recede democracy.
• Shame is a Weapon. “If anti-AI activists want to win, they have to grow fangs.”
• The Trump Administration Is Publishing a Stream of Nazi Propaganda. “The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery.”