ORCS ARE CREATURES FROM Tolkien, and specifically Tolkien, who created them as fantastic creatures of dread, and large numbers. Certainly, JRR Tolkien worked in veins of antiquarianism, and everything he wrote was a meta-reference to some Old English or Celtic or Norse forebear, as anyone who's got bored by his books knows, but the forebears of orc-dom in British, Irish, and Northern European myth are not the orcs of modern myth. Traditional goblins are solitary, intelligent, skilful, tricky. Hobgoblins are humorous, though the butt of the joke might be you. Elves will definitely steal your baby, and fairies will definitely trick you. Demons, though certainly folkloric, relate specifically to the rules of Christianity and formal religion. The orcdom of uncountable ugly barbarian numbers, who are enemies and only enemies, and who have been made massively popular in the Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K games franchises, appear to arrive fresh, culturally whole, in the late 20th century. Or did they?
An architectural elevation of Ithaca Gardens, by Harry Seidler. City of Sydney Archives
THE CITY OF SYDNEY Council proposes to nominate for State Heritage Register (SHR) listing a set of modern apartment blocks, including Ithaca Gardens in the Eastern Suburbs. Ithaca is a Harry Seidler apartment block and a landmark; the others are similar. All are covered already either by Heritage Conservation Areas or by some other form of protection. Listing on the State register would be an increase. I simply note that the language being used to oppose its inclusion in the SHR is almost exactly identical to that which might have been used in the 1970s in its favour. In the 1970s the heritage system in NSW was created as a response to excessively arbitrary Government power, threatening localism.
Carroll, the Ithaca Gardens owners’ corporation chair, voiced residents’ “overwhelming opposition” to local or state heritage listing at a council committee meeting last week.
“Ithaca Gardens is not a museum, a place of worship, an office tower or an individual residence – it is home to more than 60 people. Owners … love and respect the building,” he said.
...
He said many of the apartments had been renovated internally to make them “more suitable for 21st-century living” and “to deny such rights to others would seem extremely unfair”.
I agree with the Anglofuturists that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to our current economic failures. I think we need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the variety of capitalism that we have, that has led us to this stagnation. It’s a problem that’s not unique to the UK, but which seems to have affected the UK more seriously than most other developed countries. The slowdown seems to have begun in the 2000s, crystallising in full at the Global Financial Crisis.
I have come to think of this as the hidden, unspoken ideology of our media and political elites. They behave, in word and in deed, as though what is most important is the protection and maintenance of the status hierarchy.
A thing is wrong and objectionable if it is uncouth — crass behavior that undermines faith in social institutions and the social order.
THISUSED TO BE a good blog, a food blog. What happened to that? I got a job, obviously, and the impetus to post food subsided. So here are the nori rolls I like to make on Fridays (in an exercise of quasi-Catholicism) after I go and get some fresh sashimi.
WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.
THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS released its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill and it's not very good, and can't really work. But that's not what interests me about it. That this bit of legislation has been such a prominent part of the government agenda is, I think, a sign of a move away from Labor's role as a State party.
FRAN KELLY IS TO return to the airwaves at Radio National after having, three years ago, retired. She will replace Sarah Macdonald.Edit: she will present a new 6pm program. This is our media labour economy in a nutshell; absolutely dominated by three or four major institutions (the ABC, Nine-Fairfax, and the Murdoch papers) which combine to form what is effectively a cartel for media, and within that, explicitly hostile to young people and new entrants.
These brief allusions suggest that if work (or labour or production) were to lose its pivotal position in the justification and organisation of capitalism, the result would be profoundly disorientating. Firstly, it would risk a legitimation crisis for capitalism, should work appear to become disconnected to reward, property or ‘social mobility’. Whether or not capitalism has delivered these outcomes to workers, its moral crisis potentially stems from a breakdown in the public normative conventions which justify hard work and industry, and thereby allow individuals to achieve moral status, recognition, or security through their labour. Secondly, it would risk a kind of existential crisis for individuals, bringing them face to face with the arbitrariness and potential pointlessness of their lives, once notions of ‘career’, ‘earnings’, and ‘merit’ lose their grip on individual life courses and personal development. Instead, individuals may be forced to confront economic activity as nothing other than a flow of time.
Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.
Tim Judah, Ukraine Divided, New York Review of Books, 5 December 2024
In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it.
