The Mandalorian & the Death of Star Wars will premiere today from (probably) 7:30pm UK / 2:30pm Disney LucasFilm's Eastern Time. Link below.

I have finally started editing the book I wrote in the 6 months before I got distracted by YouTube, way back in 2022(?) So far my main question for my past self is why the hell it's 680 pages long. But if I set myself the task of genociding my darlings a chapter at a time, I will be done with the second draft in 47 days. (Technically it's the third draft, but the second one just transferred it from the typewriter it was written on into Word. Google Docs, it turns out, has a character limit.) I'm also running chapters through an AI text-to-speech to see if the jokes still land when they're read by an overly dramatic robot.

The prideful, stupid narcissist is easily corrupted, cucked and radicalised by a cynical old politician playing on his ego— the only character who shows an ounce of intelligence. Like all children, he is told he is special. Like too many children today, he refuses to grow up. He blames systems he does not understand. He is too self-absorbed to contemplate a single way they might be redeemed. He is too fragile to sustain loss or misfortune. He believes he alone has a right to not be failed. He embraces moral relativism because he is selfish. Rather than use his prodigious talents for the good of others, he complains that he is not rewarded simply for being himself. He loves his wife as his possession, and turns on her the moment he thinks she's anything more. He murders children. He embodies what he creates: a lost generation. He overthrows those old systems, and becomes an embittered tool of the new regime he stupidly believed he would rule. He must eventually be redeemed by his son, who remembers the old virtues of charity, friendship, and self-sacrifice, and who fights - guided by his father's teachers - to rebuild what his father destroyed, as it should have been. We need much more of Luke, and much less of Anakin.

The UK currently has a prison capacity crisis. We have so few open prison spaces that the government has been operating an early release scheme. - People in prison for shoplifting have been released early. - People in prison for domestic abuse have been released early. - Two men convicted for manslaughter in the killing of a police officer were going to be released early, until the political backlash forced the Prime Minister to intervene. - The mother of Henry Novak's killer, who hid the murder weapon, is due for early release. But we're spending time and public money drafting badly-worded and unenforceable laws that make it an imprisonable offense to possess pornography in which known actors of legal age look like they might be step-relatives? You don't go to prison for shagging your actual cousin, incidentally. That would be culturally insensitive.

I will not be paying this and the government can go fuck itself.

This Orwell quote, and the other often paraphrased as "all art is political," is one of the most abused sentences in the English language. Orwell means it in the relatively narrow sense that all works of art will contain the political presuppositions of the artist. Art does not have to be actively or consciously political, but its assumptions - say, about what is right and what is wrong - count as political attitudes. This is true of everything from War & Peace to Treasure Island. But most of those who parrot the line today use it to excuse active politicking — the very propaganda Orwell warns against. If all art is political then it is fine that my work is about my politics, and you are a fool if you reject my politics, because all art is political. In The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda, Orwell takes aim at precisely this sort of sloppy, motivated reasoning: "If we look back at the English literature of the last ten years not so much at the literature as at the prevailing literary attitude, the thing that strikes us is that it has almost ceased to be aesthetic. Literature has been swamped by propaganda. I do not mean that all the books written during that period have been bad. But the characteristic writers of the time... have been didactic, political writers, aesthetically conscious, of course, but more interested in subject-matter than in technique. And the most lively criticism has nearly all of it been the work of Marxist writers... who look on every book virtually as a political pamphlet and are far more interested in digging out its political and social implications than in its literary qualities in the narrow sense." Orwell thought the first position - an awareness of art's political assumptions - was good and valuable, because it reminds us that art is of our world, and this understanding helps us spot propaganda when it disguises itself as pure aestheticism. But he deplored the second position - the conscious politicisation of art, and the view that art must be actively political to be good - "...because it caused countless young writers to try to tie their minds to a political discipline which, if they had stuck to it, would have made mental honesty impossible. The only system of thought open to them at that time was official Marxism...". Honesty is impossible in such circumstances, he said, because making art the slave of contemporary politics makes it dependent, in the end, on grubby temporal scheming. The bold Marxist writers who devoted their art to that vision of utopia were totally undone by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Art cannot pretend at utopian principles while it sources its morality from the real business of politics. When political art comes into conflict with the needs of ideology, the art, not the ideology, gets sacrificed. "Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a political creed — or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer."

Hold up, so John Stewart is allowed to waterboard a red prisoner and that's heroism, but when I applaud him for it I get banned for Violent Speech?!

New second channel video! Digger thinks it's much smarter than you. Which is awkward, as it might be the year's most stupid movie. youtu.be/fNidMz1wvQo

Marvel would have required 17 outsourced VFX studios and Godzilla would still be holding his Starbucks Cinnamon Dolce.

I hoped I wouldn't live to see a time in which The Day After Tomorrow could be considered subtle and restrained. The really depressing difference is that I think everyone (even those who agreed with its message) found that movie a little bit embarrassing, whereas Digger is aimed at our new breed of educated retard.

47% of the price of petrol, and 43% of the price of diesel, is attributable to tax. If businesses in this country wanted to lead a quiet revolt against this system, they would start listing the tax% under every price they display.

In the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the creation of Deep Thought - the impossibly powerful sentient computer - outrages the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons. They stage protests and try to shut it down, not because it is wrong, but because it is better at being right than they are. They demand "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty," because, being a union, they have no interest in getting work done. They would happily stop the progress of knowledge if it meant they could continue to collect their cheques. They are ultimately pacified when Deep Thought points out that the 7.5 million years it will take to answer the question of life, the universe and everything gives them plenty of time to make a killing from speculation and book deals.