The public in the UK is wrong. It's a Christmas movie — but given the way things are going lately, I'm cringing about New Year's instead of anticipating it with glee.
- In a truly shocking development, a denizen of the art world acknowledges that not all is well. He's right that the auction system is "sleight of hand," but he's missing the bigger picture: The sleight of hand is itself just the magician's assistant distracting attention from reimposition of patronage systems on working artists. Not just in fine art, either; both commercial publishing and recorded music (even touring performance music) are almost proud of it, under other names. Even those who seem to be expressing sympathy for the difficulties of being in the arts are subtly reinforcing a return to early-Renaissance patronage. Which enables — encourages — early-Renaissance censorship…
- Speaking of sleight of hand, how about masking hate, bigotry, and lust for power with "faith" (again)? Of course, this isn't exactly new; in the Western world, just look at the Reformation and Counterreformation, and the West isn't even the worst offender (don't look too closely at South/Southwest Asia any time in, say, the last two-plus millenia).
- It's bad enough when a head of state goes after another nation's head of state; that faint echo of "Caaaaaaaastro" you might be hearing in the background is nothing, really, just voices in your head. Leaving aside that these targets of ire are often merely alternatives to something else reprehensible — remember, "our bastard" is still a bastard — it's much worse when the target isn't a foreign head of state, but a foreign jurist who is "attacking" an "ally" alleging violations of international law. Next, I suppose, will be insertion of Western Hemisphere Command personnel into Brasil's Supreme Court building to "supervise" enthusiastic enforcement of preexisting laws against coups by sore losers.
No further comments for a while on certain misuses of US military personnel to preemptively enforce domestic criminal law while the questionably-identified targets remain outside the US. It's not that I'm not outraged by any possible "kill everybody" orders, or war crimes, or failures of my successor commissioned officers to learn anything that's not in the curriculum at institutions that still celebrate other violators of the law of armed conflict and Posse Comitatus Act. It's that the facts as presented are insufficiently verified — which is, itself, a serious problem. And not a problem that I can do anything about.