Iran War Notes

Netanyahu, the leader of Israel, sounds reasonable in his speech and his answers to the press questions, he has a nice voice, and is always composed. This is 19/03/2026 during the war on Iran by the US and Israel. The war was started by these powers without warning during negotiations with Iran. The justification has varied for the US and Trump, flipping between the apparent nuclear threat, to the killing of protesters by the Iranian authorities, to regime change.  Now, as Netanyahu speaks, he refers to Iran’s conventional weapons that it has developed, describing them as a way for Iran to develop and protect nuclear weapons. So now, also, Iran may not even develop conventional weapons, as far as these powers are concerned. In effect this means that Iran may not have a state, be a state, an authority with power.

The argument that these allied powers were encouraging an uprising by the Iranian people rings hollow, now, because the bombing, such as of needed infrastructure and the oil storage facilities around Tehran, which affects Iranians badly, does not engender sympathy even from the rebels.

On a news programme, Trump expressed surprise that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz as part of its retaliation. The strait is a narrow point in the vital global trade route for shipping, especially of fossil fuels. This in itself is surprising, both that he did not expect it, and that he would admit to not expecting it. But Trump is hard to pin down, he sows confusion and appears to operate on whims. The attack on the giant gas field shared between Iran and Quatar. Was this known by Trump or not? Who knows. Trump seems to deny knowing it, perhaps because it would not be liked too much by Quatar, a supposed ally.

It seems incredible that the leaders of Iran especially, after all this time, do not seem to realize that the US and Israel work together, they are a ‘double act’ so to speak. Or maybe they just go along with the illusion. Israel manages to assassinate Iran’s leaders almost at will, but still Iran seems to be capable of defending itself with its missiles and drones.

The question is, does Israel and the US really want to degrade Iran to the extent that it represents no threat? Do they not need a good excuse for war every now and then? And what do they really expect from regime change if it were to happen? Not a progressive revolution of course, they do not want a competing progressive democracy or socialism in this fossil fuel rich location, they would prefer the return of the Shah type of aristocracy, it is easier for them to make deals with and exploit.

None of the ‘analysts’ of this war drawn on by the western media bring into the account of this conflict the role of class. The US military bases strewn throughout the region exist because the regional royalty, their ruling classes want them, because they help them control their own working classes. Iran is the different one, the exception, it had a revolution but went one step forwards and two steps backwards, it ejected western interests and deposed the Shah but installed the clerics and absolute religious authority. But it does not have the US bases and is unfriendly to US regional influence, and Israel. It is therefore not entirely untrue that Iran does not represent a threat to the world if it develops nuclear weapons.

But it is also true that we are always threatened by the nuclear weapons in the hands of people like Trump and Netanyahu, and Hitlerism grew out of a democracy, so what is different about Iran? Iran must not have nuclear weapons according to the western powers for a hidden reason, because it is near all the oil and the main trade route for it. For this reason, the Middle East in general must be kept virtually medieval, and it must be reduced into this condition periodically by the imperial powers. It must be made and kept barbaric. This is simple capitalist imperialist competition at work.

What, in any case, is the specific difference with Iran having nuclear weapons to other countries that have them? Aside from the argument that they are crazy, Netanyahu claimed in his speech that if they had nuclear weapons, they would blackmail the world. Is this true? Apart from trying to know what is in the psychology of the future Iranian regime if it had nuclear weapons, what would be their actual, material, advantage? After all, they would only be in the same position as every other nuclear power. If they were to use the bomb, there would be mutually assured destruction, and no winners. Clearly the only real difference would be that other nuclear powers would not be able to sway them with threats so easily, the nuclear powers would lose influence in this region, which in the end is to lose profits.

Regarding the accusation of craziness, Iran has Islam as a state religion, unlike for instance Judaism in the state of Israel. The west implies that this state religion is especially unhinged. History does not prove this, yet every religion has its extreme evangelists who can become state terrorists. At this moment it is the democratic west led by Trump and Netanyahu that is being terrorist, but on a grand crusading imperialist scale that makes the label seem weak and inappropriate. Religion is dangerous because it is faith, and faith knows no bounds.

Coming back to earth, by missing out class in their analysis, the leaders of the west also miss out the thorny issue of their own workers not being able to afford to buy fuel for their cars to get to work and the cost of living is rising again. These are ostensibly at least democracies, which have public opinion, which in the US is opposed to this war. In the Middle East what the working classes think and feel is a mystery to them, at least as far as they let us see. Iran attacks the neighbouring Middle Eastern countries that host US military bases from which they are being attacked, as they obviously would. These attacks must affect the class relations in these countries, causing some wobbles. Thus, it is not only Iran that could develop regime change given this war and its unsettling conditions.

Generally western leaders, in an amazing show of brazen hypocrisy, denounce Iran for attacking these countries (i.e. defending itself) and remain quiet about the unlawful surprise attack by Israel and the US on Iran, which started this war. Brazen hypocrisy is clearly the name of the game these days, it is presumably a rather strange way to try to hang onto a vestige of moral high ground, but they cannot refer to international law anymore, which died with Gaza. This might be seen as the law of the jungle, but in the jungle it is simpler, there is less connivance, subterfuge, espionage, backstabbing, etc., all the hallmarks of human economic contradictions and struggle.

And all this fighting is over fossil fuels, all this extra pollution, at a time when we least need it, when the planet is warming alarmingly due to the burning of these fuels. Truly the global bourgeois classes seem to want to cement their reputation as totally unfit to rule.

 

The western Bourgeois classes flummoxed by Trump’s Imperialism

 So Trump, the US president, jealous at Putin’s imperialism, starts his own adventure in his own ‘back yard’ (as the press call it) in South America, as US armed forces kidnap president Maduro of socialist Venezuela, strangely meeting little resistance, according to reports. After this, we again find the US president threatening to take over Greenland, possibly even forcibly. This now has a new significance for other western leaders. They were generally quiet or supportive on Trump’s illegal action in Venezuela, but the Greenland threat got them worked up a bit more. Greenland, belonging to Denmark, a Nato member. Nato, a military alliance, has a pledge to defend any member against external threats, but now the threat is the biggest member of Nato, its de facto ruler. What would they say now?

Well, at least a few half-hearted comments about Greenland meant they did not have to remark all that much about Venezuela. But now of course Putin in Ukraine is not so morally different to Trump in South America. Clearly the liberal western press was having an awkward moment finding its ethical high ground. Still, the bottom line, the standard frame, was to support the US, the leader of the Free World. They look for excuses for the leader of the Free World to be so obviously outright authoritarian and imperialist.

Putin in fact has more and better excuses for imperialism in Ukraine, given what happened in WWII and the millions of Russians who were killed by the German Nazis, the invasions of Russia usually being via Ukraine with assistance from some Ukrainians. So, we see that what interests the bourgeois classes and its western media is not really some special democratically based morality, but the interests of its bourgeois class owned corporations who are helped to global success by the force of the US military. In a sense what this means is a return to the capitalist normality of imperial competition, which was only interrupted a little bit by the post world war consensus that such wars should never happen again.

And so, what does this mean? It means we are heading towards another world war; this is always where imperialism ends up, as we should know by now. However, knowing this and doing something real about it are two different things. Our politicians act as if they are living on a different astral plane, their morality and arguments are from an earlier time, outdated as soon as they utter their well-worn phrases, and otherwise quite bizarre, they do not face up to what is happening. But they cannot, not because they do not have this knowledge, but because they are embedded in a system where they depend on the corporations and the military who are pushers of imperialist conquest. They are not in fact our elected representatives, even though of course they act out this role, they are really members of the media state apparatus of the bourgeois class, their job is to perform for this class, to play the role of democratic freedom, a kind of covering up of imperialism with a sugar coating.

 

Ukraine Russia War – Fascist Corruption

Recently some of the Ukrainian president’s closest friends, confidantes, and advisers, as well as people in his political party, have been strongly suspected of corruption by the internal agency, called Nabu, that not so long ago Zelenskyy tried to prevent from doing its job through legislation in Ukraine’s parliament, only to be made to reverse this by massive protests. The corruption involves alleged kickbacks from contracts for the big Ukrainian energy company, Energoatom. One of the suspects fled the country, allegedly to Israel, just hours before his home was raided in the investigation, apparently being tipped off. This was Timur Mindich, the old friend of Zelenskyy and former business partner in his media production company, Kvartal 95, which helped Zelensky get elected and gain power, as well as providing a team of close advisers afterwards, all helped by money and political encouragement from the west.  Another close friend, adviser, and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, who was inseparable from Zelenskyy until now and was the key figure in the so-called peace negotiations with foreign governments, was Andriy Yermak. Yermak also worked for Zelenskyy’s media production company, as a lawyer at first, from 2011. Other figures involved are Ukraine’s ex deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernishov, who was also under suspicion in another case of corruption, the justice minister Herman Halushchenko, and the energy minister Svetlana Hrynchuk, plus a good number of other less well-known individuals. All of these were members of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People political party. Yes, the name seems somewhat ironic to say the least.

The western media state apparatus does not dwell much on these matters, although they report it, the person who appears to be the focal point of the corruption, president Zelenskyy himself, completely evades their suspicion, even their speculation, when you might have expected otherwise. So much money and praise has been heaped upon this fascist leader, now no longer elected in Ukraine but essential to the western media, that they cannot easily retrace their steps. It was similar with Aung San Suu Kyi, you may recall. But that moment when the Canadian parliament, with Zelenskyy in attendance, gave an actual old Nazi two standing ovations, was obviously highly emblematic.  

The bourgeois state media spin on this is that it demonstrates that Ukraine is a society with a democracy on the right path to solving its enormous corruption problem, as if this were just a fly in the ointment, it is after all the only way to paint it positively for them. It is a standard response that excuses everything. If they lose a conflict, they will also say it was due to the mass peace campaigns, which "show how vibrant our democracy is." 

We will not dwell on how western workers might feel about their money and weapons being gifted to a foreign fascist leadership while they are deprived in the cost of living crisis, but ask how must the poor Ukrainian workers feel being sent to the front and risking their lives, and often dying, for these people. They are suffering in the energy blackouts caused by Russian bombing, but having their money and energy siphoned off to fill the pockets of their own corrupt leaders, in the midst of this war, rather than support the effort, must be extremely galling. This again is not mentioned, even speculated on, by the western media state apparatuses, who dutifully follow their bourgeois class’s imperialist aims.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/4/17/why-is-a-heroine-of-ukraines-revolution-charged-with-murder

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/what-will-the-sacking-of-zelenskyys-no-2-change-for-ukraine

"Several months later, NABU published tapes exposing large-scale corruption within the president’s inner circle. Although, initially, the chief of staff was not directly implicated in the scandal, reports were soon leaked that the “Ali Baba” mentioned in the tapes was none other than Yermak. The recordings also suggested that it was Yermak who may have ordered the security services to launch the attack on the anti-corruption agencies back in the summer, though no formal charges have been brought against him.

Even after not only the opposition, but also some of the president’s allies began demanding Yermak’s resignation, Zelensky fought to the bitter end for his chief of staff. "

https://left.eu/ukraine-government-turning-blind-eye-to-fascism-in-its-ranks/

"As Mr Korotkykh's case demonstrates, the ultra-nationalists have proven to be effective and dedicated fighters in the brutal war in the east against Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces, whose numbers also include a large contingent from Russia's far right.

As a result, they have achieved a level of acceptance, even though most Ukrainians are unfamiliar with their actual beliefs.

The volunteer Azov Battalion is a case in point."  *

* The idea expressed in this article by the BBC writer that Ukrainians are somehow more unaware of what Nazis are is somewhat ridiculous, given the history of their country, and its invasion by Nazi Germany. They would have at least as good an understanding as UK citizens, except it would be likely influenced by the years of imperialist imposition by the late Russian Soviet Union and later Russia.

The Brechtian element of radical Pop

There is an unheralded modernist Brechtian aspect to some pop music. By Brechtian I mean a technique used by Bertolt Brecht, the famous playwright, in his theatre. This technique was sometimes called the 'alienation effect'. It was a way to distance the audience from too close an identification with the characters being played in the performance, so that they were not, in a sense, hypnotised by the narrative but relatively distanced. This technique is not to be confused with alienation in the more usual usage, such as by Marx or Durkheim, where it describes a negative state of mind or feelings. In fact, Brecht"s effect could be regarded as a kind of antidote to alienation in the ttraditional sense.

When I was young I found myself liking certain types of popular music across the genres that they belonged to, and this made some things a little awkward, given it involved transgressing specific fashions that went with the genres and different peer groups. There was a time when I liked Ska and some reggae of the Trojan records type, but also Jimi Hendrix and Cream. The fashions that went with these two kinds of music were completely different, the former being generally skinhead and the latter hippie. I had this way of being more of a skinhead at my school, a secondary modern mixed comprehensive, but out of school I could be more of a hippie (this sounds difficult especially with the hair but we had feathered haircuts that could be long). But the two fashions were more than just that, of course they were ways of acting and living. The media was critical of both but the more working class skinhead fashion and the music was often framed in the media of the time as racist, even though it was obvious we liked black music. In my school there was a black skinhead girl, she was tough.  Most of the free images of skinheads are of more recent origin, I don't remember seeing any swastikas on skinheads in the 1970s, later this was a punk thing and I suppose there was some crossover in styles then. Ironically the most white music was 'cock rock' with their anthems.

The attitude of the skinheads was, at least superficially, completely opposite to the hippies, skinheads embraced violence or at least did not shy away from it, and were cynical about liberal attitudes. The hippies were into peace and love and flower power, although of course they protested. My skinhead style was not the full on crew cut hair, red braces, whiteT-shirt, Levi 501s and boots, but the variant that was more common at school, Levi Sta-Prest trousers, loafers or brogues, Ben Sherman shirts, maybe a tank top jumper. It may seem, because of the media, that skinheads were right-wing in politics, but I was not aware of this personally, some were right wing, others were not, like myself, I was a socialist, my Dad was a shop steward, but skinheads were more from the working class, while hippies seemed to be more bourgeois.

So what about the music? You can see that the difference in these so called sub-cultures made it difficult to like music across this divide, but I did, because I found something similar in certain artists. For instance, I liked the sound of early Bob Dylan records, and I liked the sound of some of Ken Boothe, and Prince Buster. To just jump around a bit (probably in time as well as across these boundaries), Jimi Hendrix sometimes reminded me of Ska. The feature that made the similarities was, I would now say, the Brechtian effect, the rather raw, obviously also electronically mediated, 'mistake' filled, sound that 'revealed the transaction' between the techniques producing the sound and the listener. The Beach Boys had partially developed this sound, and so had others, the Shangri-Las, the Phil Spector wall of sound, it goes back to Leadbelly (Huddie Leadbetter) maybe. Ok, it is not just a sound, it is the arrangement, so partly also a studio product. Some of it merges into blues with Janis Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company. 

Clearly, wI am not talking about such pop music being radical in what it says in its lyrics, its stories, the 1960s 'protest songs' for instance, but more its form, and this form was not specific to a particular genre. 

When I finally became an art student it was easier to negotiate these differences. Art students have their own weirdness and did not fit into anything very obviously, but it still bothered me, or to be more accurate saddened me, that my new peer group was generally more hippie and more embracing of that cultural position, because they were more bourgeois. In the meantime I was becoming more bourgeois, leaving behind my now proscribed skinhead past, and in a sense also my family. This made me want to understand what was going on with these categories into which I did not easily fit. It seemed to me that something was being censored by the media frame, not to put it too finely, and we were being channeled away from this Brechtian formal aspect of radicalism that crossed over these dividing lines.         

Reflections on the Killing of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, the far-right youth influencer and supporter of Donald Trump, was shot and killed at a college campus in Utah. Such an escalation was foolish and is to be regretted. The suspect, Tyler Robinson, a young man, has been held for trial. This has been in the news now for a few days.

Of course, the killing has provoked a lot of reaction in the US and beyond, and has had some heavy repercussions. – One is, just recently Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show was suspended. In his comedic monologue criticising the Trump administration he mentions vice-president JD Vance as exploiting the assassination to attack political opponents of Trump. In this response to the killing, JD Vance said that the majority of violent acts such as this were by ‘lunatics’ on the left. This is not the case, in fact most political violence in the US has been by the right-wing, and it has been the right-wing that, through provocations and trolling, has primarily used hate speech to inflame the political climate, Vance was, even at this time, inappropriate by his own measure, just adding to this.

The shooter, Tyler Robinson, if the reports about him are accurate, appears to come from a Republican family, but his own politics are according to the reports more leftward, while also influenced by internet subcultures, and gender politics.  However, the case has not yet gone to trial, and we do not yet know the real motives, yet Vance and Trump have already blamed the ‘far left’ for this violence, jumping to their desired conclusion.

One of the outcomes of Trump’s democratic election has been the obvious triumph of the press and media over traditional politics in which its role has been kept in the background. Although Trump’s regime has regularly attacked the press and blamed the media for its coverage, it is clearly straining to appear to be an alternative rebellious force  while holding the executive power, and has meanwhile consolidated its power over these corporations and debunked the standard traditional ‘balance’ between left and right sides. It has also by doing this deflected attention from Trump’s own roots in the media, as well as his friendly relations with Epstein.

Hitherto the appearance of a balance, and the supposed checks on unbridled power that it defends against, has served the bourgeois class well as an image of fairness, but Trump now openly eschews this. The question is, where will this lead for the US? We can see the aim is to keep Trump in power as a dictator, but why would the bourgeois class of the US want such a dictatorship at this stage, and why would it be so willing to ditch this well-honed mechanism of managing its class power now?

The answers lie in the continuation of imperialist projects that never actually entirely left the room. Post WWII, we have lived through a time when the liberals of the bourgeois cultural elite, and its media, put a lot of faith in what they termed the rules based order and the universal values typified by the spirit of the UN at its pinnacle, despite the obvious flies in the ointment at the time. The continuing aims of the imperialist capitalists were put in the background and tended to be ignored while reconstruction after the war went ahead. But this could not last forever. What we see now is imperialism refreshed.

But it is imperialism dressed up in new clothes. In the old days, imperialist conquest and colonization for expansion and profit was mediated by the divine right of kings and queens, with missionaries projecting Christianity onto savages ‘for their own good’, for the salvation of their souls. This was the ultimate justification for the massacres, enslavement, and ethnic cleansing that it carried out, while undoubtedly bringing scientific advances to the world. But today this ideology and aesthetic can no longer hold water, it looks like what it is, a bunch of anti-scientific prejudices and bigotry. So, what can take the place of these old excuses for extreme violence in the modern world, when imperialist capitalist expansion is again rampant and obvious?

Curiously, we only need to look at a product of modern science, the internet, and social media, to see it. The troll is there to inflame debate towards the fascist perspective on everything. If Trump or JD Vance lie and go against reason and science, they are trolling, if they complain against things that they are simultaneously guilty of doing themselves, they are trolling. When they talk against the state apparatus while acting as the state apparatus they are trolling. When they rail against censorship but simultaneously blatantly censor their rivals, they are trolling, when they gush with sentiment over the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, but are cold and callous about the killings of Democrats, they are trolling.

And this strategy is the same as Israel’s, the proxy of the US, when it tells Gaza Palestinians whom it is bombing where to move to and then also bombs these ‘safe areas’. This is also trolling, on a different level, indeed, but it is the same kind of thing. And what is it for? It is for the capitalist imperialist expansion of white western power into the Middle East where the oil and the trade routes are. It is to use Israel and Jews as its advanced guard, its missionary force, for this project. Does it care in any real sense about Charlie Kirk or the Jews of Israel? Is any of this for moral reasons? No. The US leadership is complicit in the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. It is trolling everyone when it claims to be interested in peace, it even bombs an ally while it holds peace talks that it takes part in. Again, this is trolling.

And it is clear that as a strategy, trolling is what the US ruling class has opted for in the modern age, it is its media position. Yes, this is added to by certain evangelical Christian religious motives, and spiced up with a simple lust for violence, tainted by a strong desire for vengeance and retribution for perceived injustices. But it is trolling, writ large.

And yet trolling is inherently weak. It cannot really match the old ideologies and aesthetic practices. It cannot be consistent. It cannot be sustained, it is anti-science but must use science, it is anti-rational but cannot ignore, at least for long, the economy. It is doomed to failure, to implode. So, in this sense it, MAGA etc, is a kind of death cult that wants to take everyone with it, down. If President Donald Trump cannot succeed in his project, and he cannot, he cannot be seen to fail, so he must become a martyr, he must become a kind of deity that avoids all culpability. He is trapped in this loop. As many commentators have said already, the US is heading towards a very dangerous place, but we are all in this place.

On the Kimmel furore (we quote here from the Guardian online): 

"...The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has said that the ABC network “caved” to pressure from the US government.

The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to “do this the easy way or the hard way,” tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it.”

In a statement, the advocacy group went on to say that the US “cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”

From:

<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/18/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-comments-show-cancelled-suspended-monologue-trump-us-politics-live> 

- Note how this is a peculiar statement because in it it is seen as the responsibility of 'institutions' to grow a backbone themselves, when obviously the institutions have an existing backbone (in other words it is institutional) which is currently being used  to quell dissent and censor, so, according to this institution (the Foundation for individual Rights and Expression) the institution that censors has the merely moral responsibility to stop itself from doing what it is doing, and it is, kind of, a bit sad that this is not happening. 

Peter Mandelson finally sacked over Epstein

Peter Mandelson, the long time seemingly irrepressible political figure implicated in some aspect of British government, has been sacked today, which would be the third time in his political career, by the British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, after further revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the very rich convicted paedophile sex offender who died in prison while awaiting trial. 

Apparently, according to Starmer, Mandelson was subject to a full vetting process before his appintment as British ambassador to the US. So they either knew all this and did not care, liked it, just hoped it would not come up, or they are just incompetent. Incompetence is the usual escape clause.

Mandelson wrote to his 'pal' who was facing prosecution, in June 2008, for soliciting a child for prostitution:

“I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain. You have to be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can.”

One of the most striking and disturbing aspects of this is the statement that it 'just could not happen in Britain', as if he would have been able to protect him, or that Britain was more amenable to these things.

Only recently, this September, the deputy PM, minister, and leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner had to resign due to impropriety over not paying the correct tax on a property. The government has been reportedly preparing for tax increases on property.

Charlie Kirk, 31, MAGA ally of President Trump and youth agitator shot dead

Charlie Kirk, 31, the US right-wing influencer and strong MAGA ally and supporter of President Donald Trump shot dead on a Utah University campus during a debate, 10 September 2025, when he was answering questions on gun control. 

Cross party commenters condemned the shooting as does Trump, but Trump sites only previous attacks on right-wing Republican supporters and fails to mention Democrat victims.

Today the hunt for the perpetrator is still ongoing. Many students dived then scattered as the shot rang out, which hit him in the neck. Kirk was on his America Comeback Tour, as part of the student group Turning Point USA.

Kirk had openly stated bigoted views and used homophobic and Islamophobic slurs, he recently tweeted “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

Affective Practices and Politics, a schematic Marxist analysis

Gary Tedman

What my research work is mostly about, as in my book Aesthetics & Alienation, is the way aesthetics fits into politics.

A short, materialist, definition of aesthetics is the opposite of anaesthetics.

So, what is the opposite of anaesthetics? Anaesthetics are normally understood to be drugs that dull our senses, which make us less aware of our surroundings. They are of course important in medicine, but if we treat the term more broadly, we can see that it could mean anything that reduces your general awareness of reality. So, when it comes to aesthetics, by contrast it is anything that increases your awareness of things, which heightens your sensory capacities.

However, aesthetics has a long history of being a fairly minor ‘tributary’, of philosophy, where it includes or blends into such things as the philosophy of art; it also surfaces in art theory and criticism, and it even appears as a more everyday term for getting your nails done in a shop. We can ignore these aspects for the moment.

I cannot repeat here what I have already gone over in my book. I merely want to point out what I think is an important aesthetic factor in current politics.

The bourgeois class has always been aware of the usage of aesthetics, mainly because for this class it firstly became important for selling things and for marketing and branding in capitalism. Over the many years of their class rule they have built up this knowledge, partly by default, because it is instrumentally useful, but also in the knowledge that it is something that is influential and beneficial in their class struggle against the working class, in other words, it helps them to succeed in their exploitation of the working class.

How does it do this? In my book I explain the role of aesthetics and the ‘aesthetic level of practice’, as well as ‘aesthetic state apparatuses’ in the process of sublimating the alienation from labour of the working class (alienation as per Marx ,1844, and it makes some references to the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s work). This is not easy to grasp in simple terms, and it requires some foreknowledge of Marx’s work, but there are other less significant but more everyday examples of how aesthetics is a part of politics, but which are ‘hidden’ by the ruling class, or they are rendered morally taboo to draw attention to.

My current work, a new book, is about the bourgeois media and the role it plays in the aesthetic class struggle, and I want to put forward a few ideas drawn from this here. I will state them without much evidence and rather baldly.

The media uses aesthetics, perhaps this is obvious: for instance, politicians are groomed by the media, and with their expertise the media presents them in the way they want, while taking into account the needs of their class’s class struggle. Of course, the aesthetic struggle extends way beyond this aspect, into all forms of entertainment and escapism too, but we will concentrate on just this.

We are supposed, obviously, to understand the media as ‘free’, but we reject this.

For us, the media is a state apparatus.

Now, considering ‘the media’ as a unitary thing, as in ‘media state apparatus’, even though this is what the term ‘the media’ (in English English) already implies, might seem a stretch, I know. A lot of the media is obviously privately owned. However, this ownership does not change things drastically, these corporations are either owned by the bourgeois class, or directed by the bourgeois class through their state (it is therefore much like bourgeois education being private and ‘non state’, but also being the most state state education). If there are small independent creative, media start-ups which do well and become popular (it happens!), these will soon be gobbled up by the bigger media state apparatuses and in any case are always governed by state laws.

Thus, we do not accept that there is any really ‘free’ media. It is always, or almost always, in the control of the bourgeois state.

A lot of people already feel this is true, but now we come to the most interesting aspect of the media considered as a state apparatus. The elected government and parliament is also a part of the overall media state apparatus.

It is not something separate, independent from the media. It is also not ‘free’ and ‘of the people’. - Because this apparatus only deals with appearing to govern in an emotional, affective, or aesthetic sense.

To understand this fully we need to delve into bourgeois democracy and how it functions, which has to be left out of this account for the most part, unfortunately.

We can just note that democracy was not elected, it had to be won in the class struggle by the bourgeois class against the old aristocracy, with its divine right to rule. In the history of its origin and development class struggle has continued. Voting democracy tries to hold this struggle within certain boundaries suitable to the bourgeois ruling class. It has to appear to be rule by consensus. Democracy is the political superstructure that it normally prefers because of its appearance of consensus, ‘everyone has a say’.

Being a system fundamentally based on popularity, however, means that it is not politically scientific, and the vote is always directed by which class holds the media state apparatus, which decides what is popular - it is always push rather than pull, just as class struggle came before democracy. We only know what happens in our democracy via the media state apparatus. The election itself is already a performance played in the media, governed by the media state apparatus. There is no such thing as ‘spontaneously popular’, or at least it is extremely rare.

Voting democracy must always elect a parliament that must have a certain structure, which remains rigid and which is repeatable, and its performance is played out, and can only be played out, as a media performance in the media state apparatus. The structure is always a false dialectic: a to-ing and fro-ing between two sides which constantly balance and repair what the other does wrong. It is the ‘nice cop versus nasty cop’ routine writ large, with the voter as the interrogated subject.

‘The media’ schools the elected politicians in how to appear in the media. Essentially this shows the power relation, these elected politicians are the employees of this state apparatus.

If parliament is a media state apparatus, then what apparatus really does the work of governing the country, we might well ask.

We already know that the real mechanism of governing exists and operates in the background, in the UK it is Whitehall, and permanent under secretaries of state which run the different departments, who are appointed, not voted for. This is also where the echelons of government blend quietly with the military and military intelligence, who of course are also not voted for.

In other words when you vote you are voting for a performance, perhaps, at best, a better performance, but this is all you can vote for.

President Trump of the US is perhaps one of the first big bourgeois politicians to be so obviously from the media state apparatus, so obviously a performer, although there have been others. As we know he always rails against the media and pretends to be against it (he would!), despite him being its most obvious product, a sort of pinnacle of the breed.

One thing that led to the writing of this short piece was noticing that certain affective practices, which can be defined as emotional ways of being, your aesthetic, are set in stone by the bourgeois media state apparatus as preordained slots into which the various figures in politics must fit.

For instance, the typical left-wing politician is almost always shown as a ‘firebrand’, a bit shouty, always admonishing people and vigorously trying to persuade us of his (usually his) moral truth, in other words he is a puritan and a humanist, always. This happens across national boundaries, for instance in France Jean Luc Melenchon performs as this figure. In the past in the UK both Neil Kinnock and the union boss Arthur Scargill performed in this vein. These figures always have a religious-like fervour which is reactionary, despite what they may say which may be rational.

Does this performative aspect mean these figures always act insincerely? It does not necessarily follow. But they will be rewarded for how well they adhere to their roles in the false dialectical contest, and insofar as they ‘like’ these rewards and do as they are directed, it seems likely that they would be swayed, and so they become bourgeois agents, specifically of the bourgeois media state apparatus.

 

 

What Happened to Muesli?

 I don’t normally eat muesli for every breakfast, but I like a change, and I thought I would get some. 

There are things that are so emblematic of the capitalist system that we live in that it is even quite comforting, in a way. 

For a Saturday, the shop seemed strangely empty, maybe it was the inflation. Anyway, every brand of muesli (or ‘muesli), of about six or seven, including even Jordans, had chocolate chips in them, and all of them were some abomination called (here in France) ‘croustillant’, which apparently means they wrap blobs of oat flakes in caramelized sugar, so they end up like little flapjacks I guess. I quite like flapjacks, but If I want one, I will get one, or make one, given I have never seen one for sale in France.

- Now, I do not like sugary things, and do not eat chocolate all that much and do not want it in my breakfast cereal, but there seemed to be no choice. I went for the only one that had no chocolate in it, it was a ‘bio’ product and looked sober. I did not read the packet that closely and was, the next morning, disappointed to find it was also ‘croustillant’. It also had very few nuts or seeds in it than these gummed up oats and was much too sweet for me. The nuts that were in it were like concrete. If I had gone to the smaller ‘bio’ supermarket I think I could have got some actual ordinary muesli out of the VRAC (the hopper things), but that was out of the way and a bit of a pain, and the staff were often snobby, and your bank balance much worse off afterwards if you ever wandered off-piste.

So, yes, it is sort of comforting, I’m in this familiar setting, just that, I suppose, inflation has just affected things in a slightly more extreme capitalist way, - even humble muesli. I cannot be bothered to work out why. Someone please tell me. Perhaps they can save on the dried fruit and nuts and seeds and just use cheap oats, maybe they get the sugar cheap, and the chocolate, and maybe because the sugariness is kind of addictive they can sell more of it, obviously they are all copying each other in the competition, which is supposed to produce democratic variety but does not. It is probably a form of shrinkflation but instead of shrinking the size they shrink the quality. It can’t be great for your teeth, for kids especially, and isn’t it fattening? One reason I started eating muesli was for its extolled health benefits, a source of fibre, and I like nuts and seeds, and you used to be able to get no added sugar. The original brand was Alpen, which was very good, but I can’t find this in France. Jordans used to be a second choice. But all this health emphasis is evidently out the window now.

If I complained I know what they will say, “it’s the market, people want it”.

The Plant Based Alternative and Modern Puritanism

Almost all food for humans is ulmtimately based in plants, even if we eat meat. For instance, the meat we eat is usually produced by a creature that eats plants, like the cow eats grass. We cannot avoid the fact that as part of the food chain we as living things die and get eaten, somewhere along the line. Evolution even relies on this. It is a circulating spiral.

One of the big problems with, say, the vegan alternative to meat eating is the illusion that you are virtuous and avoid harming animals. The growing of vegetable crops in the current way is a massive cause of loss of biodiversity, so kills creatures. Modern farming, not just for meat products like cattle, but also for crops, change the landscape on an enormous scale and make it an inhospitable environment for countless animals and insects, and this includes of course the use of pesticides.

And no, we cannot suddenly change all this to nice organic smallholdings that do no harm, or masses of people will starve. Modern farming might be bad in the way it has ended up, but it has been able to feed billions of people, and this must be acknowledged.

Still, one of the ways our bourgeois class tries to market new versions of its commodities to us is by extolling how it is more virtuous, so that the customer can get a warm glow of satisfaction that not only is she or he a part of the wealthy who can afford such things, but also at the forefront of ethicality, a ‘good person’. So, you are also buying this image.

With electric cars, for instance, this has recently turned sour: not only because of the antics of Elon Musk in support of fascistic Trump, but we have found (from scientific research by the University of Aukland, Australia) that the production of electric cars has made more harmful emissions in those countries that have championed electric car technology the most. This is partly because of the manufacturing process of these vehicles, which leads to more emissions, but also the lifetimes of the vehicles, which rarely get to ‘pay back’ what they owe in these emissions. And, of course, unless they fully run on renewables, they also use fossil fuel generated electricity.

The marketing, in the media, of vegetarianism and veganism often seems like a version of political correctness, something mainly for liberals. This is not the fault of vegans or vegetarians of course. It is a problem with the market, mass production, and capitalism. Do we really still need to say it? That the way that farming is performed as a massive agribusiness, for profit, whether for meat or crops, is the problem, and you cannot change this by simply altering your diet as an individual.

But even if you suppose that this puritanism might make some difference, on the other hand it stands as a kind of moral signpost that the problem is people, individuals and their choices, their behaviour, what they want to purchase as consumers, and it ignores and let's off the hook the industry. It is a way of accepting the blame and the guilt not just for yourself, the person who takes this position, but for every ordinary person, it says you are guilty, not capitalism. 

But we are not guilty. We simply need to eat, sleep, and get to work so we can be exploited by this same market. We are like the animals and vegetables being farmed.

Genocide is the New Misdemeanour

Well, maybe it is more than that, genocide is now the new black, and in fact it is mostly forbidden by our ruling classes to actively oppose it, or you will be jailed, or bombed. They have bent the stick in the other direction. Our dear bourgeoisie can now be called the class of Palestine Inaction, and they are very relaxed about war crimes. Not in relation to ‘Putin’ though. As far as ‘Putin’ is concerned he is evil beyond words, it is always ‘Putin’s War’ in Ukraine, but not ‘Netanyahu’s War’ in Palestine.

This, rather obvious flaw in their new logic does not raise much of an eyebrow for them though, - by ‘them’ I mean in their media. Their media carries on, business as usual. Oh, how they criticize those times when they were silent about the holocaust, about the genocide of Jews in Germany. Now, they are silent again, in another direction, making the same ‘mistake’.

But they cannot these days just be silent, can they? There is too much technology to make us aware of what is going on in every part of the world if you want to know. So, instead we get a strange stubborn forcing of the argument, something like, you must behave this way whatever the rationality of it, whatever the morality, because this is what we think, this is how we feel. They want their profits, this is what matters to them. It has all become exposed to the light of day.

They obviously do not give a fig anymore about international law, the rules-based order, universal values, humanitarian morality, - or perhaps we should say they no longer care about appearing to give a fig about these things. They will keep on prosecuting ordinary people for, say, shoplifting, though, very severely. But logically the whole edifice of law has collapsed, it cannot continue as if things have not changed, at least without fascism becoming prominent. And this is why we see the rise in nationalism and fascism, egged on by the media which is obsessed with it.

Now our leaders are almost all war criminals, in one way or another complicit in what is happening in Gaza, including people, children, being starved to death, it is such a new reality that many of us are just gobsmacked unable to do or say anything about it.

We are well beyond the stage when this slaughter has anything to do with Hamas and terrorism.

But the US are only using Israel as their policeman and agent provocateur in the Middle East, and for expansion into this vital global oil and sea trading territory.

What does this mean? It means at some point in the future, medium to long term, the Israeli ruling class will come into conflict with their current US overlords and seek true independence. At the moment, Israel is like another state of the US, where things military can be experimented upon. It is a frontier, a wild west. This is something that not every Israeli will want for their children. So, support the protests of Israelis against the Israeli state apparatus.

Meanwhile the Palestinian people, if they continue to be led by a resistance made up of mainly religious fervour, engaging in adventurist terrorism and doing exactly what their opponents want, are doomed to a slow and torturous death, fated by western imperialism, and its media.

Problems with the Kardashev Scale

You may have heard of the levels of technological civilization that might exist in the universe, called the Kardashev scale, named after the Soviet astronomer who thought it up, Nicolai Kardashev, in 1964. The scale depends mostly upon the size of the energy usage by the civilization in question. The scale normally goes from one to seven, but people have extended it - for instance Carl Sagan added detailing within the levels (it occurred to me on writing this that if this interest you, you might also like Olaf Stapledon’s science fiction book “Last and First Men” written in 1930, which in many ways predates Kardashev’s ideas).

The human species is not yet on the first rung of this ladder. An advanced cosmic civilization on the seventh rung would be able to control the entire universe or multiverse and harness its total energy. The first level is capable of using the power only of the planet that the civilization is born on. So, a type two civilization is capable of using the total energy of its planet and its local star. Etc.

 Our human definition of civilization is very likely to be biased towards what we currently think of as our civilized status, but setting this aside, in the original scale by Kardashev, as stated, it relies upon energy use as a way to decide its position on the scoreboard. One of the reasons why this might be flawed is that advances in science can find ways of making energy go further or have more dramatic effects with a smaller amount, or at least we might infer that advancement ought to mean this. But nevertheless, the scale as such assumes that the goal of advancement will always be greater power and greater power use. It is obsessed with power.

This assumption derives from the notion of technological advancement considered in isolation from other kinds of advancement, such as social and political. Peculiarly, but not surprisingly, the scale seems to fix the advancement at a technological level embedded in twentieth century Earth based Eurocentric capitalism, which fought imperialist wars over energy resources (and we are still doing this).

But clearly, we must not only consider technological advancement but also biological and evolutionary, as well as advancement in art and, design, and philosophy, and social and political advancement. Not all of these correspond to each other harmoniously or develop in time at the same rate. Kardashev, a pretty good astronomer, was not such a good philosopher. Imagine therefore if we kept to his scale the sheer amount of rubbish, pollution, and kitsch that the advanced technological civilizations would produce, say about Type 3. The cosmic scale equivalent of kitten videos but with the ability and power to have them transmitted everywhere all at once. Sagan once said that a lot also depended on the civilization’s storage and use of information. Our internet carries multiple terabytes of information for instance. Unfortunately, however, a great deal of it is lies, trolling, and fascist. A concept of quality has gone missing.

There are infinite resources available in the universe, so no need to fight over any of it. And even if civilizations were super abundant, the universe is so colossal that we might never be able to communicate even with just one, in any case. And the physical constraints on the speed of travel (light speed) would probably lead to advanced civilisations giving it up as unnecessary and concentrating instead on other areas of life, in other words they have eschewed the imperialist social misadventures of their distant past which led them to always want to physically expand. It is not impossible that an advanced civilization might even consider using such power a sign of gross immaturity, philosophically speaking, and they would snobbishly avoid such doltish aliens; as for us, we would not even be worth a glance.

Or what would a Type 7 civilization artist want to do with the universe? Maybe we are in fact living in one of their works of art, and Dark Matter is a kind of clue of this, a bit of Cow Gum used to fill in the gaps to make it all look good.

Fireball Earth, Our Extinction, and the Fermi Paradox

 Our Earth does not have an equilibrium that it tries to keep to. It does not balance itself to help us living things survive. That living things on this planet have evolved has led to some effects that cause the planet to be more habitable for a certain kind of life, but there is and has been no plan for this. The Earth does not care, or not care, about life or our human species. We tend to think of the story of our planet in humanized terms, as if it had feelings and a goal that should be nice for us. It does not. But the human species perhaps can. As we are creatures which are self-aware, and we have scientific knowledge, maybe we have the possibility of consciously intervening in our planet’s trajectory. It remains to be seen; at the present we are not capable of this, it is only potential.

Scientific findings based on data have demonstrated that the planet on which we live has had periods in its history when there have been mass extinction events in which a majority of life goes extinct, and that these periods correspond strongly to times when there have been rapid changes in climate, such as dramatic warming. Sometimes these have been in response to ice ages, as a kind of ‘over-correction’ when carbon in the atmosphere has risen due to the effects of continuing massive volcanism and when the ice and snow covering cannot absorb all the emissions, leading eventually to extreme heating.

The Earth still has periods of ice-ages, it oscillates between average temperature extremes, and we are currently in an interglacial period, in fact more near to the end of it than the beginning. Climate scientists say the evidence shows that fast human caused climate heating due to our burning of fossil fuels will prevent the next ice age from happening.

Yay! You might think. It will be nice to avoid all that cold. But every such dramatic change in temperature, and this human caused change is the fastest ever, has led to really big extinctions amongst Earth’s creatures.

Why? Because evolutionary alterations to adapt to such changes occur much slower than this rate of change. Living things cannot speed up evolution. What the science has noticed is that animals have instead had to, if they did not simply die out (which they did), migrate to colder regions of the globe if they could. Sea creatures migrated for instance, whilst some land creatures might have found it more difficult due to being cut-off by seas or the landscape. One of the science articles points to surface sea water temperature during a hot period of 40C, which meant that land temperatures must have been even hotter. Sustained general average temperatures of this size lead to the mass deaths of plants and animals.

The human species will be unable to change course from their current trajectory of burning fossil fuels and large-scale agriculture for crops and livestock, which causes the increasing emissions of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn creates the heating effect. Political forces will be unable to tackle this problem in a scientific manner, as we have already clearly seen, because science is not the primary goal of our capitalist politics. To put it schematically, this is because the most powerful and profitable globally spanning industries: energy, security, and drugs, influence our politicians and shape their policies.

Just as importantly, these industries also decide the discourse that the rest of us perceive through the media. It therefore becomes unpopular to talk about climate warming, and again as we have seen increasingly climate science is being depicted in the press as crackpot. Add to this the fact that these industries provide a multitude of jobs for people who obviously do not want to lose their livelihoods, then we have a political environment which is totally opposed to doing anything substantial about climate heating, and will fight it even in the sneaky and subtle ways that our media industry knows how. It is the same with the offshoots of the petrochemical industry, such as plastics and plastic pollution. This industry is profitable and is hardly likely to give this up voluntarily, so there have been no agreements over preventing plastic pollution (as recently seen).

The interests that exist in these industries therefore are inevitably against the dismantling of their dominance, something which would be necessary to prevent further climate heating. But even if they wanted to do this, as a few people in the industries clearly do, they would find it very difficult to change course because they are massive juggernauts, and it would be too socially disruptive to capitalism. At the same time, it is also unlikely that the democratic consensus could agree on a globally unified approach to this enormous problem, given that all the different nation states compete economically, and it would need some short and probably medium term severe economic pain and disruption to even begin to ameliorate in a real way the effects of the pollution.

So, what is likely to happen in the future? Continuing the current course, we are likely, sooner than later, to experience more instances of deadly heatwaves, especially in areas that are already warm, such as nearer to the equator. Wildfires are likely to become a constant feature of summers in these regions, but also in regions more northern that still experience much less regular rainfall or only get the rainfall in overly large downpours onto dry and hard ground and so produce floods.

Quite soon, apart from the effect this will have on agriculture, these areas will become non-survivable in the warmer seasons. And mass animal and human migration from these regions will be likely. But this will be resisted by the cooler northern countries by default, as is already happening. It is similar with the rise in sea levels and the necessary abandonment of coastal cities, which will also lead to mass migration which will be resisted.

In short, in human terms, the social disruption and the massive numbers of refugees in combination usually lead to wars and wars always lead to even greater and faster emissions. We could call this and other factors of a similar nature the social feedback loops that add to the climate disaster. Given that this will happen quite quickly it will lead to great stress on the human population, and this will reach a tipping point beyond which it will not be survivable.

The ever-increasing temperatures may even lead to a Fireball Earth phenomenon, where the confluence of the normal volcanism and geologic tectonic activity from beneath the ground combines with the atmospheric heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels to squeeze the habitable space in the middle. We have all heard of Snowball Earth, where in the past our planet has been completely covered in glaciers, this will be the reverse phenomenon. But it may be harder for the Earth to recover from this hellish state and get back to its current fairly pleasant condition for our species. Venus, one of our neighbouring planets, is like this, essentially a fireball. Evidence suggests it once had oceans, long ago.

The Fermi Paradox is the idea that intelligent life should be prevalent and even abundant in the universe but strangely does not appear to be present to our astronomers. It is likely one of the reasons that we have not discovered intelligent alien species out in space is because this global catastrophe is the kind of thing that usually happens to the top predator in an ecosystem. Its own success becomes its failure because it cannot prevent itself from using up all the resources that it needs to continue to thrive and so destroys itself.

We like to think we are conscious and in charge of our destiny, but it is probable that we are not, and that this idea is mostly a self-delusion.

I have only been a little hyperbolic here, unfortunately. See:

 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/31/cop30-climate-us-officials

Adolescence – Review, Netflix TV series

This series is a hit and has had some rave reviews, so to mention its good aspects is almost superfluous, but I will a bit: it presents a very current, relevant storyline, approaches a difficult subject head-on, a child murderer, the incel, the manosphere, misogyny, chauvinism; it uses some interesting realist filming techniques, and has some good and even great acting. OK, on to the bad stuff:

Like with so much British media of this kind, our offering hits you with a moral sledgehammer that too self-consciously sees itself as ‘finger on the pulse’, but you can’t help feeling it is already dated. It fails pretty miserably at capturing the working class and working class emotions, except in a very caricatured way, instead for the difficult moments it resorts too obviously to petit bourgeois kinds of behaviour for its characters, for instance the main subject, the boy murderer, seems too middle class, something like a cuckoo child in his family, he is quite erudite, unlike his father, a plumber, a small small businessman with tattoos and a van. At the same time, every other child in the series that gets any significant screen time seems to be stamped from the same mould, with the same blank expression, unsmiling, humourless, - practically inhuman. Except by some miracle, the son of the cop. He is dealt with far too obviously in such a way that flags to us that we are supposed to see this man, his father, as even more of a hero than he already is, for he is such a good Dad too. Earlier he had been so nice and honourable to the suspected murderer (with a kitchen knife) on his arrest that it was like an advert for the police.

Then the school scenes. What a strange place, on the one hand full of liberal caring teachers and staff, with a few token nasty ones added , and the children are all uncaring, and show totally no sadness about the death of one of their own, in fact they were mostly excited about it. This seemed the most unrealistic passage in the series. It must be difficult to capture this kind of school, for sure, probably because it would have working class kids in it, and this series seems unable to address them, it is for it foreign territory, so we just get a harsh caricature, like a Hogarth painting where everyone is emotionally kitsch.

The part that was probably the most successful after the first episode was the psychologist who visited the boy murderer in an institution. The interview had a Tarantino-esque quality to it. It was gripping, edge of your seat stuff. But the last and final episode I found difficult to follow either because the sound quality was poor and did not pick up the conversations very well but also maybe because the Liverpudlian accents, with all that emotion and stress, were quite strong, especially for the two women, it made me ask myself were they using this accent to signify crudeness?  Neatly for us, we knew the father was going to display his anger problems, which he did on tap. I could not recall what a ‘Nonce’ was initially, I had to look it up. It seemed as I was watching a slightly offset thing to spray on the father’s van, I was not sure why. Perhaps it was that the sexual side of all this had not been, until this word appeared, raised to any great level, except in the indirect sense of sexism. But this sexism was quite sexless, until finally at the end what you are led to suppose is the possibility that the father, when he was refused his oats by the mother, got into a big, barely suppressed, strop and everything condensed his anger from there. Surely this was not blaming the wife, the woman?

One of the most glaring omissions, which we must assume was fully intended, was the complete absence of any perspective from the parents of the girl who was murdered, or indeed of the girl herself up to the fateful moment. You briefly saw her pushing the boy in a black and white CCTV video, and then him attacking her. Her schoolfriend had a memorable small part, but in which she just seemed angry rather than sad. Maybe this was the problem, the emotions on display throughout were telegraphed and without subtlety, they were either blank and bland or heart wrenchingly crazed. Only the main cop, a man, his son, and the father of the boy murderer were given a wider range of emotional responses. I suppose this was intended to be kind to them and sort of absolve them, because they were trying hard to make sense of things in a difficult modern world, full of weird emojis, of all things. But that they were all male sits a bit strange in a series that has been received as bravely tackling misogyny.

For this series, the misogynism seemed to be mainly understood as being perpetrated by social media as the bad guy, or bad gal to be more exact. The female stabbing victim had been bullying the boy (OK, not impossible, but come on…) as an incel, we are informed. Surely this was not suggesting she, sort of, deserved it, or that she was a part of the explanation for what happened? Was the series doing its own sly version of victim blaming, having a go back at the MeToo argument in the guise of criticism?

But the tension the father caused and which was revealed to us in the final episode clearly went against this interpretation in the end, his pent up anger was a violence that did not need to go much further to have its horrific effects on his family, which had obviously grown accustomed to it and developed coping techniques. But this just left us in an eclectic mess of moral possibilities, reflecting, I suppose, a too enthusiastic desire to be on point.

There are some glaring things that have been left out: there was no transgender concerns on display in this series, peculiar because one of the most high-profile murders by young people recently was of a transgender person. So, it seems as though the whole issue has been forced into a mould that excludes this. The critical language that followed in response to the series used the modern buzzwords like toxic masculinity and incel but avoided toxic gendering, which was at least suggested as a factor in the programme. The problem of capitalism and democracy was also avoided, - if on the broad scale capitalism can be expansionist and imperialist, why should the individual be any different?

Today news is not so financially free as it once was, even if it is more widespread and potentially available, if young people today mainly get their news from online sources, on their smartphones, the majority will go to free versions, not the so-called reliable stuff behind the paywalls.  But here in the wild west lie all the exploitative sensationalist dangers, and the extreme right-wing version of reality. The free market, unhindered, leads to fascism. We got a bleak taste of this from the depiction of the school, with the kids staring at their phone screens as they walked home, but these were mainly, if I recall correctly, female students, as if they were the ones mainly affected.