Off to see Project Hail Mary in Leicester Square. Time to find out what these astrophages are made of.
Watched Top Secret! 🎥 a couple of nights ago. A 1984 film by the makers of Airplane, I have to wonder why on Earth I haven’t seen it till now. It’s pretty funny. A rock star visits a weird East Germany, which is just as oppressed as the real one, but the authorities are still the Nazis. Wehrmacht and SS uniforms abound.
Our hero gets caught up in a plot to rescue an imprisoned scientist — the resistance are all french, of course — and falls for the scientist’s daughter.
It’s about as silly as it sounds. An early part for Val Kilmer, and he does a pretty decent job as the singer, which can’t have hurt when he was cast as Jim Morrison in The Doors.
How can it be that I only realised today, with the clocks going forward for summer, that we don’t have a six-month summer/standard time split. We have seven months of British Summer Time.
All the more evidence that BST should be the standard, if not the permanent state.
What Exactly are we For and Against?
We went to the march against the far right I wrote about yesterday. We decided not to walk, but to find a spot and watch it. I’ve often thought, at marches, you miss a lot by being in it. You just see and hear the small subset of people and groups you end up walking with. So it was interesting to get an overview of sorts.
No sooner had it started than we saw people caring not just the inevitable Palestine flags, but that of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Which is just fucking disgraceful on a supposedly anti-nazi march.
They were not the last. We saw dozens of instances of that hateful flag of one of the most oppressive regimes on Earth.
It got worse, though: we saw one, and only one, person also carrying a picture of Khamenei. I was too shocked to even think of taking a photo.
It wasn’t all deluded or confused fools and useful idiots, though. Teachers, nurses, midwives, old-school communists, feminists and general true anti-fascist activists: much of it was quite heartening.
I don’t know what this flag means, but I kind of liked it. I hope it’s not something terrible:
But this is the kind of anti-nazi imagery I grew up with:
Against the Far Right but not Against Antisemitism?
There’s a big march planned in London tomorrow, called Together Against the Far Right. It’s organised by the ‘Together Alliance’, which seems to be a big conglomeration of trades unions and other groups. All well and good.
The odd thing about it is, at a time when antisemitic attacks are at a high, there are no Jewish groups involved. Or nearly none. Indeed, this article from The Times (archive link) is headlined ‘Celebrities back anti far-right march “freezing out Jewish groups”’:
Jewish leaders said they believed they had been frozen out by the organisers despite the event’s far-right focus, while groups they perceive as being linked to “extremist rhetoric and outright antisemitism” were listed as supporters.
I don’t know what the organisers are playing at,1 but I don’t see how you can stand against Nazis if you’re not standing with Jewish people.
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I sort of do know, or strongly suspect, and it’s both sickening and stupid. ↩︎
I’m currently reading The Twenty Days of Turin A Novel by Giorgio de Maria. đź“š
It’s a very odd work, which in part slightly prefigures (because it’s set in the 1970s) some of the negative effects of social networks. But it’s about a lot more than that.
Why Can't We Find Out What the Green Party is Proposing?
I’ve been hearing about the Green Party’s conference motion against ‘Zionism’, and how it seemingly is deeply antisemitic, and will effectively have them supporting Hamas. I didn’t want to write about it without reading the actual motion. But that appears not to be possible unless you’re a party member. It’s behind a login requirement. I can’t find anywhere that actually quotes the motion.
The Guardian and the BBC don’t seem to have reported on it at all. The Daily Mail has something behind a paywall, but its headline claims the motion ‘would make it party policy to back Hamas terror attacks’. The Canary’s article on it1 speaks warmly about it, saying it ‘could be a game changer for UK politics.’
Well, yes, and not in a good sense.
It’s one thing to be against some actions of the current Israeli government. Quite another to support — even tacitly — an organisation dedicated to the eradication of the entire nation and people of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah are Nazis, and all people of the left should oppose them and their aims just as much as we opposed the National Front and the British National Party.
But without being able to read the motion, it’s hard to know how extreme it is. You might argue it’s a private matter for the party, unless and until it becomes their policy. Up to a point, that seems fair. But I think political parties have a duty of transparency. They want people to join them and vote for them. Therefore they should let the public know the kind of things they’re talking about.
And the mainstream press should be reporting on it.
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And hey, who knew The Canary still existed? ↩︎
Putting this interview with Andy Weir here for future reference. We’re going to see Project Hail Mary next week, and it claims the book and film are ‘built on solid science’.
But it’s described as:
a story about humanity’s last-ditch attempt to save Earth from “astrophage,” a fictional, star-eating algae that has infected our sun.
I also watched the trailer last night, and it seemed incoherent (though trailers often do).
But algae? Biology in a star, in plasma at impossible temperatures? I can feel my inner physicist cringing already, so I hope they manage to make it make sense somehow.
The music app on iOS: what does this icon on the top right do? Or what is it supposed to do, because nothing audible or visible happens when I tap it?
