-
Paul Young chocolates, which are a bit of a Christmas tradition for us, ceased trading in August. A bit of a sad discovery but I guess people buying chocolate once a year doesn’t really pay the energy bills.
-
Ukraine commentary from November
Two interesting points from newsletters on Ukraine last week.
The first is regarding security guarantees in Europe from Phillips O’Brien’s The Two Futures
What this war has shown is that there are two realities for a European state: being a full NATO member covered by article 5—and everything else.
Russia’s aggression has consolidated NATO but leaves those outside the alliance exposed and with no real choice but to seek inclusion at some point in the future. The article also comments how Russia goes out of its way to avoid provoking an alliance reaction that will crush its remaining conventional force.
The other was about the strange double-standards on Russia’s ineffective offensives from Lawrence Freeman in Why “not losing” is not tantamount to winning.
Whatever limited progress has been made has come at an enormous cost. Zaluzhny claimed on 10 November that Russia had suffered some 10,000 casualties since 10 October, and had lost over 100 tanks, 250 other armored vehicles, about 50 artillery systems and seven Su-25 aircraft.
Even allowing for some exaggeration these are staggering losses, which if experienced by Ukraine would have led to gloomy questions about their ability to stay in the fight, and the wastefulness of their tactics. Somehow it is now assumed that in an unaccountable system, with soldiers taken from minorities and the poor, these casualties barely register in Russian society and cause no political backlash.
I’ve been wondering why when Ukraine suffers losses “realists” start talking about some fantasy of a land deal that will be acceptable to Russia but when Russia loses material that makes it difficult to continue to project any power globally there are not demands for Russia to start to specify attainable war aims.
There is something unpleasant in the idea that all these lives lost in fruitless offensives are meaningless and of no consequence to their own people. The article talks about the signs of change in the Russian attitude to the war and I can’t believe that a country can continue to lose at this rate and it has no impact.
Clearly democracies with citizen soldiers need to think about casualties differently to systems that are inherently coercing compliance. Ukraine needs to think about how to conserve itself as a nation. However it has been a long time since we’ve seen an imperial power manage to maintain control of an unwilling population. For the defenders not losing looks a lot more like victory than the occupiers.
-
Two elevated racecourses in #ForzaHorizon this week, both pretty good fun
-
Siobhan and Tom’s marriage in #Succession is one of the most complex, sad and unedifying depictions of a marriage I’ve seen on #Television for a long while. It also felt more real and rich that the idealised relationships fulfilling the needs to a story arc. It isn’t just complicated, sometimes it is horrible too.
-
I’m really enjoying the neon stylings of Horizon Midnights. The aerodrome in particular is insane.
-
The Peripheral
The themes of crisis and collapse along with a clever take on time travel makes it feel very different from conventional sci-fi.
It also features one of the most believable sibling relationships I’ve seen on screen in a while where love and loyalty is mixed with resentment and misunderstanding in appropriate measures. It is refreshing to see a family relationship where both parties make mistakes and unreasonable demands of each other and with the same frequency as positive support; where pettiness mixes with high stakes. At one point Flynn demands her brother leave her room with all the force of countless teenage rows.
After the excellent initial episodes which are more like two feature films than regular television the pacing gets a little uneven with a hillbilly crime element that isn’t as good as Justified or even Sons of Anarchy. The flashbacks into the life of Wolfgang while helping to emphasise how dreadful the collapse was doesn’t really move the story on or help with the flow of the main plotline (and the major feature of Gibson’s fiction I would say is narrative drive).
There was a lot to love about the dark adapted future it portrays. One moment that I felt was really well-observed is when the augmented reality is switched off to reveal how depopulated and damaged London is. Wolfgang/Wilfred explains with a frankness that the illusion of a busier city is for the mental health of the living inhabitants. Later he discusses with his adoptive sister the effect of the implants he wears that supress memories of his real family who, she suggests, were killed in a brutal massacre that he doesn’t actually wish to remember. This are damaged post-humans, almost propped up and made minimally functional by their enhancements rather than cybergods.
Chloe Grace Moretz does the bulk of the heavy lifting on the performance front but Gary Carr and Alexandra Billings also turn in some good work. I also enjoyed JJ Field’s turn as Lev but there was an element of panto to his malevolence so it might not be to everyone’s tastes.
One of the biggest things that makes me want to see a greenlight for more seasons is the cliffhanger of the final episode where as a viewer I wanted confirmation that the sacrifice of the protagonist had been redeemed. It feels like the story is really just getting started.
subscribe via RSS