Hello! I’ve had a tough week, but hopefully I’ll get the energy back soon to embark on the most valuable article yet that I have in mind. In the meantime, I’m going to be sprucing up the Weekly Defrost with a bit of edutainment! This week I’ve gotten really into Tradle. Perhaps it was Tradle that got me through.
This is a game in that Wordle format - a daily puzzle where you have to guess one thing, you get six guesses and clues as to how close you are each time. In Tradle’s case, you’re presented with a country’s export %s and total dollar value, and you have to figure out which country has this combination of exports to other countries.
Obviously, you can just play Tradle yourself every day, but what I’m going to provide here is a simplified version. At the top of each Weekly Defrost, I’ll post a random country’s exports; at the end, I’ll tell you what country it is with a little factfile. It’s that simple! No chance to learn clues from missed guesses - you’ll just have to get as close as you can within the sanctity of your own mind. Without further ado:
Nigel Farage is in after all! He appeared to be supposedly focused on the US election and really trying to avoid having to actually do parliamentary politics, but no, he's leading Reform UK into the election and running in the town of Clacton. It sounds like he has a good shot, which will be fascinating if he wins on the eighth attempt and has to actually navigate Westminster.
I of course oppose Farage - key to my political identity is support for immigration and horror at Brexit, and he is of course the arch-Leaver - but he's already done a lot of the damage in dragging the Tories right. The question is whether he instead only accentuates Tory unelectability for years to come. Not only do they split the right-wing vote, particularly in the "red wall" critical to Boris Johnson's landslide, but they'll put pressure on Tory leadership campaigns to see who will step up that can win back Reform UK votes - taking the party further right at a time where they're probably already too far right for the average swing voter. Rishi making a key message of his campaign national service, then missing the D-Day celebrations, can only be said to be on brand for how his campaign is going; surely this most offends the kind of voters likeliest to consider defecting to Reform. I am seriously wondering if a storyline will develop about whether his own seat is at risk.
I think a campaign premised on “you all know that Labour have already won, so you might as well send a message to the Tories” is a very smart one, so long as they don’t get too clever with it and focus on expressing a protest vote over Machiavellian calculations. I’m not usually inclined to call an election result early, I waited a long time on ours because even though Labour were so doomed it would only have taken a few % flipping to shift the result, but the margins are huge in the UK and practically every factor is already decided. Farage and Reform UK are the moving ball to keep your eye on - just the way they like it.
I ran my thoughts on the first UK leaders’ debate between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak on the Twitter! Check that out for all the debates I cover. Headline thoughts: Keir Starmer looked like a mediocrity not just as a debater but as a potential Prime Minister. Communication isn’t everything but I haven’t heard anything to suggest he’s an absolute policy maestro behind the scenes. I’m getting really worried now about whether his government will get much good done or go down a similar road to NZ’s Sixth Labour et al (get lots of votes, do nothing).
Sunak’s attacks weren’t effective except for the fact that he got away with nonstop insisting Starmer would raise taxes by £2000. He doesn’t look credible and he isn’t attractive to Reform voters. The moderator was pretty good but some of the questions were mid. Absolute highlight was the interviewer afterwards where Richard Tice, the leader of Reform UK before Farage took over, telling the interviewer that there's no point in fighting climate change because it's foolish to think we can stop the power of volcanoes. I didn’t see the multiparty debate because it started at 6:30 am and my sleep’s been bad this week.
To my surprise, Indian PM Narendra Modi really misjudged his landing: having hyped up a huge win, they’re instead in need of their coalition partners. I don’t know enough to judge whether they’ll curb the BJP’s worst impulses or encourage them, but either way it’s egg on his face. He’s a curious individual to evaluate in that IMO he has the blood of many people on his hands domestically, but unusually for a geopolitically powerful ethnonationalist, has so far taken on something of a sleeping giant role internationally. Fingers crossed the giant stays asleep - I don’t want another Indo-Pakistani War in my lifetime. Speaking of which, Sleepy Modi is 73 and will be as old as Biden and Trump were in 2020 by the next election. Just pointing that out.
Like South Africa, the election’s important not because the ruling government has been outright cast out - indeed, he’s only the second Indian Prime Minister to make it to a third term, after Nehru - but because there’s been a surprising swing putting the Opposition a lot closer to removing them at the next election. I would have to guess that frustration amongst farmers and poor voters with a lack of support, and concern amongst both those sympathetic to the BJP and those who could be mobilised against them of giving the government constitution-rewriting powers, particularly given the history of the Emergency, were the two driving factors. Those are only guesses; besides, India’s so incomprehensibly enormous it’s difficult to formulate an overall narrative when entirely different stories can have been playing out in very different regions towards the same result. I don’t, for instance, know why Uttar Pradesh went from being their base to their bane.
I can, however, strongly recommend India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, by Ramachandra Guha. The book’s thesis statement is that being a geographically gargantuan state with an incredible number of ethnic groups and clear religious divides, formed by merging a massive colonial regime along with many puppet monarchies, would seem to be a strong predictor against the success of democracy and stability, and so India’s eminent success despite much violence along the way is well worth study.
This is particularly salient at a time when the INC are out of power to reflect on how leaders like Nehru did many great things for the country. (I think there’s a weird cultural thing in the West where Gandhi is super well known and Nehru just isn’t, whereas to do comparisons George Washington is a known name, Nelson Mandela is, Fidel Castro, etc etc.) To draw a comparison, the ANC are still in power and South Africa is a united, stable democracy also with its own violence (e.g remarkably high rates of killings of ANC politicians), but they must also begin to consider what their own post-Congress future looks like.
I picked this up the other month in preparation for the election and found it eminently readable - it’s a big tome, but, relative to how much there is to cover, the book is remarkably good at not getting too bogged down in the details without feeling like a paper-thin perspective. Even though, I mean, I suppose it literally is a…anyway, go check out your own nearest library and see if they’ve got a copy! India is, surprise surprise, really really interesting!
I don’t know enough about Mexico to say anything except congratulations and best of luck to the new president and that I’ll be hoping for the safety of all people and politicians. The wave of political violence there is really concerning and, while I wouldn’t advise pushing on in the face of such a real threat, it’s certainly extremely brave from all those who chose to. I hope all Mexicans can take pride in the candidates for President that they ended up with even if theirs didn’t win.
The announcement of the first review by the Ministry of Regulation (into Early Childhood Education) continues to have a comical quality to it. David whining about all these silly little regulations might appeal to the business owners and workers who can't stand this sort of nonsense, but...it goes both ways. I don't understand why he's getting so invested in these, either, and as usual I suspect it's his glove and fist strategy at work: draw attention to headline-generating issues, while doing substantive regulatory work below the hood. I just need to see the work actually do something good for the country, because I don’t think he can whip up voters to the polls simply by saying “children are free to frolic under the apple trees once more”.
AI has been a big topic of discussion in general this past year or so and so I’d just like to say my piece. I’m not fond of AI-generated art and content, it strikes a wrong chord with me, and I'm highly concerned about the potential impact on people like me whose best skills are in fields like writing. However, I think the most ferocious pushback from people in art spheres have been extremely unpersuasive. To me, it basically all boils down to two points.
Point number one is "I don't see the appeal of something generated, I only care about art with an artist behind it". Okay. This is not how most people approach art. Most people like art on its own merits, not metatextual details looked up on Wikipedia later. This is why, for instance, bashing on modern art gets so much traction so easily: because the large majority of people are not engaging with, to go with the easy stereotype, a lot of red paint and a bit of yellow and blue as something interesting.
To take one example of art, just look at the box office domination of "turn your brain off" action movies for decades. Most of these aren't trying to say something deep and nor are the vast majority of viewers reading into them or implanting meaning into them. They’re just good at spectacle - and often the humans involved make bad decisions or do poorly at pretty basic things other works clearly outcompete them on!
It's disingenuous for people like me who have spent years and years moaning and griping about influential creators not stepping up and using their resources creatively to turn around and say AI art will be the death of creativity. Creativity runs deep but its consumer uptake is not suuuper high. AI will probably just exacerbate that ability for uncreative churn to dominate markets and squeeze out very creative and impressive efforts that are sometimes rewarded by viewers but often not.
The second argument is that “AI does this thing badly”, because of course AI has all sorts of odd hallucinations and disturbing, uncanny details. Sure, but…this would assume AI will remain static. Nothing to me explains why AI won’t continue to get better and better at creating art as issues are ironed out and users come to better understand it. This, of course, is the best argument for AI art: that people without many resources but with vivid imaginations, passionate dreams and strong talents can gain access to art creation too, alongside those who currently can, which, surprise, surprise, tends towards being youth from upper middle class families et cetera et cetera.
I have no interest in using AI right now, but that might change if, for instance, it gave me the opportunity to visually create a scene I never could otherwise - or even just as a supplementary tool, like visualising a scene I'm writing to be better able to picture it. I think the kneejerk instinct to reject AI art because it's currently predominantly creepy slop being used to manipulate old people on Facebook is not going anywhere.
I suppose we're finally starting to see some belated progress on protecting people from the worst of AI creation, from misinformation to deepfakes, but when it comes to AI art’s evolution, “we should ban it to protect artist jobs” is probably going to be approximately as successful as “we should restrict imports to protect worker jobs” played out in the Midwest. There just aren't enough voters to interest politicians in such Luddite protectionism.
Creatives, for a long time, stood practically exclusively to benefit from technology in creativity - one obvious example is we don't have to write on paper anymore and being able to type, email and print is enormously advantageous. However, a double-edged sword has been gradually driving into us: notably, the ubiquity of the internet is obsoleting copyright protections for artists everywhere, whose work is now being exploited without compensation to make AI better. If AI gets good enough to really compete, then that wound will open up violently.
As I often express in relation to urban progressives, like fighting the last war on social issues - this is cherry picking, but some people genuinely believed over the past year that gay marriage was under threat - I’d much rather feel like urban progressives have a plan for how to blunt the edge and wield the weapon rather than just saying “getting stabbed sucks, we should ban swords”. We aren’t going back to the Stone Age.
[spoilers for Star Wars movies at the end of this segment]
Speaking of innovations in art, I have to shout out Star Wars: Visions this week! As with Smiling Friends, I had no concept of what this show was beyond being animated; I had assumed some sort of equivalent to Marvel’s What If, just as the old Star Wars canon had room for Infinities, a series of comics exploring What Ifs in the timeline. I’m torn on if I want Star Wars: What If; on the one hand, it could be excellent; on the other, Marvel’s killed my hope that Disney execs genuinely understand how fans fixate on and discuss hypotheticals, given they picked some of the most random and bizarre changes to make you could think of. You could almost say that there is an existing human lack of creativity dominating the market . . .
Anyway, Visions has nothing to do with that, but is just as inexplicable a concept. Seven Japanese animation studios were contracted to produce nine "short films" (they're just anthology mini-episodes) in various anime art styles; you can feel a bit of thematic overlap, but for the most part the only commonality is that they're set in the Star Wars universe. Apparently, the second season I haven’t gotten to has expanded to studios around the world.
I wasn’t enjoying the episodes at first, but I really appreciate the concept regardless. As somebody regularly irritated by a lack of creativity of studios with enormous resources, I’d much rather that instead of churning out a tired retread of the same ole that audiences often seem quite fatigued with right now, they divvy up those resources and chuck them at a bunch of contracted studios. This logic operates the same way that, for instance, governments understand it’s often better to let a bunch of different contractors trial different approaches to see which is best (e.g charter schools) than one size fits all everything and potentially choose poorly, fresh out of ideas.
Anime isn’t really my thing. I know that’s an awfully broad thing to say, given that lumps together an entire country’s animated product, which can have all kinds of variations in plot, themes, styles etc. within that, but you know there are general tendencies the same way you can point to general tendencies in, for instance, American animation. Fortunately, however, the series went on a great run in the middle.
I'd particularly highlight The Ninth Jedi (initially planned as two episodes and it shows) and T0-B1 as excellent. Very rarely for one-offs, I genuinely would’ve enjoyed getting to see either of these stories continue in the future, as I actually cared about and felt invested in their protagonists, something that’s always a real challenge to pull off in well under 30 minutes!
I don’t think Visions would be particularly enjoyable for somebody not interested in Star Wars, but if you do like anything in the universe, I’d definitely recommend at least checking out one of the episodes I’ve shouted out and going from there. Also if you really need to know some top Star Wars: What If pitches, here they are copy pasted from the Star Wars group chat [Star Wars spoilers now].
What if Luke fell to the dark side on Bespin?
What if Anakin refused to join Sidious as his apprentice, but Sidious survived and sent out Order 66 anyway, leaving Anakin on the run?
What if Leia’s message made it directly to Obi-Wan on Tatooine, without R2-D2 ever meeting Luke?
What if Darth Maul killed Obi-Wan instead of Qui-Gon on Naboo before being cut in half?
What if Anakin died on Mustafar?
What if the Ewoks just ate the Rebels on Endor, giving IG-88A a clean run to galactic revolution? [if you are a Star Wars fan and have no idea what this means, Wookiepedia is about to blow your mind]
What if Sifo-Dyas survived on Obah Diah and went back to inform the Jedi Council he had made an army for them?
After Sidious emerges from his bunker into 500 Republica as the Battle of Coruscant kicks off, what if Dooku just has Grievous blow up the building?
Have fun with thinking about these! Or get a life. Your choice.
Also for good measure in the spirit of me running a one woman magazine here’s a lifehack: chocolate Krispies (that I only got for baking a slice) are mediocre on their own, but if you like dipping biscuits in tea or other hot drinks, I beg you to get some chocolate Krispies and try dipping them. Just a couple of seconds and they come out absolutely beautiful. Well worth a go!
The answer to the export puzzle was Djibouti! Terribly hard question to start on, I know, but the random country generator gave me Azerbaijan first and I thought that that was a little too easy. If you’re unfamiliar with the country, this little borderline-city-state is tucked along Africa’s east coast, in a critical position at the mouth of the Red Sea south of Yemen. Accordingly, international narratives about Djibouti are dominated by the jockeying for influence there amongst Western powers for port access and other basing rights. Djibouti is over 50% Somali and around 25% Afar, both Cushitic peoples from around the Horn of Africa, with the last 25% mostly being Arabs; almost everybody is a Muslim. With the anarchic Somalia to its east, the totalitarian Eritrea to its northwest, and huge Ethiopia with its history of ethnic division, wars, and even starvation to its southwest, the former French colony is a bastion of peace, stability, and harmony by comparison!
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