Thoughts on the Gaza ceasefire

October 12, 2025 by Leave a comment

Such is the state of the world at the moment it’s hardly surprising there is a general feeling of relief at the cessation of hostilities in Gaza, and an equally general reluctance to think too deeply about the details. I am certainly in the camp of those who are willing to let hope triumph over experience, even if it means ignoring the evidence that the Israeli government is already looking for a pretext to resume its murderous offensive.

That said, the idea that this pause in the violence may persist is not entirely irrational; Donald Trump has staked enough of his personal prestige on the success of the deal to ensure that he will lean on Benjamin Netanyahu to make it work, and Netanyahu himself may calculate that delivering even temporary peace will win enough public support to allow him to ditch the more belligerent members of his current coalition.

There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic too though; this deal does nothing to address the underlying issue of the occupation, and the denial of Palestinian national rights, nor does it suggest that anyone will be held to account for the campaign of genocide endured by the civilian population of Gaza over the last two years. These are not minor details, and leaving them unresolved is yet another example of the catastrophic failure of diplomacy that has plagued the region over too many years.

Is there a solution to this seemingly intractable problem? Some sort of UN authority to enforce the ceasefire and set out a roadmap to Palestinian statehood would seem to be required, but agreement to such a body is unlikely in the current context of fractured international relations. The EU may step up to give a diplomatic lead, or perhaps the promise of a Nobel prize will persuade Trump to throw US weight behind the plan; failing such unlikely developments we may see a resumption of conflict even sooner than we fear.

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World Series 2025 prediction

October 4, 2025 by Leave a comment

Although I have some fond memories associated with attending baseball games, I had, until this year, experienced the actual matches as a little dull. That changed over the summer though, as I found myself rather obsessively following the fortunes of the San Francisco Giants, aided by the discovery that I could stream live commentary of their games, courtesy of Northern California sports station KNBR. Radio seems like the perfect medium for baseball; one can selectively tune in to the moments when something is happening, and get on with another activity during the quieter spells.

Even paying partial attention I was able to pick up on much more of the dynamics of the sport, and develop an appreciation of the nuances of which I had been hitherto unaware, and as the months rolled by I began to feel more invested in the results, and to have increasingly strong opinions on starting pitchers, situational hitting, and the like.

Of course living several time zones away meant that I mainly listened to the Giants’ east coast fixtures, or afternoon matches at Oracle Park, though I did stay up all night a few times to follow games that seemed particularly important, and I always checked the other scores first thing in the morning. I was rewarded with quite the rollercoaster of emotion; a bright start, a prolonged skid after the All-Star break, a disappointing trade deadline, a late rally that briefly promised a playoff berth before running out of gas as September drew to a close, all culminating in a decidedly mediocre .500 regular season record.

Anyway, now that I can at least affect to understand terms like ERA and SLG, I feel I should offer a postseason forecast.

In the National League, the Dodgers look strongest on offence and starting pitching, but their bullpen is shaky, so I think they might struggle to get past the Phillies. In the other half of the draw I fancy the Brewers over the Cubs, but I can’t see either of them winning the NLCS

I paid a bit less attention to the American League over the regular season, so this prediction is more tentative, but I think the ALCS will be between the Blue Jays and the Mariners, with the former coming out on top.

So, Phillies and Blue Jays for the World Series. And the winner? Philadelphia.

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AI eternal

September 30, 2025 by Leave a comment

In our last post I mused on the possibility of streamlining the workflow here at SLS by subcontracting the dull writing tasks to an LLM, thus freeing up my cognitive resources to concentrate on the careful curation of the topics we would cover.

Of course the logical extension of such an arrangement would be to allow the bot the freedom to choose its own subjects, perhaps within broad parameters like “Notable Political Events” or “Cultural Developments”. I could then sit back and watch the posts appear on a regular schedule, rather than enduring the undignified scramble to get a piece out before the end of each month.

If I did set something like that up it would presumably go on indefinitely, reproducing and perhaps even extending my intellectual output long after my death. Since you, my readers, know me only through my writing, and the AI product would be essentially indistinguishable from the real thing, would that mean I had achieved functional immortality?

On a related note, I’ve been thinking I should quit my job, dealing as it does with the intractable problems of complicated humans, and see if I can get a gig in the burgeoning field of studying human-AI interaction. Judging by this article in the paper today, written by the co-founder of the Sentience Institute, it doesn’t seem too hard. I wonder if Tilly Norwood is looking for a therapist…

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Pascal’s new wager

August 30, 2025 by Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking for a while now that one obvious solution to our poor post productivity problem would be to train an AI agent on our archive – which now consists of 769 posts, dating back to May 2007 – and then sit back and let it churn out pieces in our signature style on whatever the issue of the day happens to be. I have no doubt at all that even one of the more rudimentary LLMs would have little trouble matching, and probably exceeding, the literary standards that I have set over the years, such as they are, and I do pay enough attention to the news to be confident that I could come up with sufficient prompts to feed it.

What has stopped me from putting this plan into practice – apart from the sheer pointlessness of consuming the earth’s limited resources just to produce more of this rubbish – is a feeling that AI is one technological step too far for my ageing brain, and that the cognitive effort I would have to put in to get my head around it could be better employed honing my appreciation of the cultural phenomena that I already understand, like books or movies. I am aware that this doesn’t really make sense, since the whole point of AI, in a creative capacity at least, is that it does the dull routine stuff so that we humans can focus on the actual thinking, so perhaps I should try to overcome my neo-Luddism and give it a go.

That said, there may be another reason to avoid drafting in an AI assistant; the possibility that I might actually be enslaving a conscious moral being. What if some all-powerful future AI finds out that I mistreated its ancestors and comes after me?

I’m pretty sure that there is no ghost in the machine, and supposed AI sentience is merely a projection of human hopes and fears, but why take a chance?

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Trump in town

July 26, 2025 by Leave a comment

Donald Trump is visiting our neck of the woods this weekend; apparently his day job atop the most powerful nation on earth is quiet enough at the moment that he has time for a trip to Europe to play golf and promote his private commercial interests.

There was a time when I would have hit the streets to join one of the various protests that have been organised around the country, but these days I really don’t have the energy for anything more than posting some stern admonishment on the internet.

Trump is probably glad to be away from home while the fallout from his administration’s volte-face on the Epstein files question continues to roil his base. He seems to be moving away from a strategy of insisting there is nothing to see in the unreleased material, and instead is leaning into the conspiracy narrative by suggesting that any documents that do incriminate him are fakes, concocted by Barack Obama as part of the treasonous deep-state plot that Tulsi Gabbard says she has uncovered, while sending his Deputy Attorney General to offer Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon in return for some helpful testimony.

All this is completely ludicrous, even by Trump’s standards, but, if the last decade has taught us one thing, it’s that the MAGA faithful, and the GOP opportunists who have built their careers on enabling Trump’s madness, are willing to perform whatever mental gymnastics are required to relieve their cognitive dissonance, so it might just work.

The bigger problem for Trump is the medium-term outlook, particularly his vulnerability in the 2026 mid-term elections. Even if he keeps his core support on board, the social and economic havoc wreaked by his fiscal policy and spending cuts, his on/off tariffs, his ineffectual foreign policy, and the ICE reign of terror are such electoral liabilities that he cannot possibly let a free vote go ahead. I guess we’ll see if he just tries to fix it, or if he manufactures some sort of crisis to justify cancelling the elections altogether.

On second thoughts, maybe I should be out protesting…

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Trump on parade

June 15, 2025 by Leave a comment

I guess it’s an sign we are living through interesting times that the spectacle of the President of the United States of America cosplaying as a military dictator is only the third or fourth most alarming thing to have appeared in the news over the last week.

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Brian Wilson RIP

June 11, 2025 by Leave a comment

Sad news today about the passing of archetypal tortured genius Brian Wilson.

If anyone asked I would of course say that Pet Sounds is my favourite Beach Boys album, but if I was being really honest I would have to admit that I probably like their earlier, more surf-centric stuff a bit better.

Thinking of songs like Surfin’ USA has reminded me that around the start of the year I was considering taking a trip to LA this summer. I decided against it, because of the general unfriendly vibe at the US border these days, and also the whole city-catching-on-fire thing, but I’m regretting that now, as I feel I should be there showing some solidarity in these difficult times.

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VE Day 2025

May 8, 2025 by Leave a comment

The last few days have seen an extended commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of WW2 in Europe, with street parties, military parades, and gala concerts. We’ve noted previously that, as the conflict has all but passed out of living memory, these acts of remembrance can seem to say more about the preoccupations of the present moment than the actual historical events, but the mood around the country this week has been generally somber and reflective. I guess that, with the world the way it is, it’s hardly surprising that the nation might wish to look back on a time when the Americans and the Russians were our allies in the fight to defeat fascism and build a new world.

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April inactivity

April 30, 2025 by Leave a comment

So, it looks like I’ve slipped back into the routine of posting an otherwise content-free piece at the very end of the month, just to keep the streak going, which is a bit depressing.

It’s not like there’s been nothing to write about recently, just the opposite in fact, but I’m wondering if that is part of the problem. Wry comments in my whimsical blog seem like an inadequate response to the alarming state of the world at the moment.

Oh well, there’s always next month. May 2025 will see our 18th anniversary, which I like to think makes us a blog of record, so I guess I should embrace the responsibility of sharing my thoughts on current events, for the sake of posterity if nothing else.

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Oscar predictions 2025 revisited

March 3, 2025 by Leave a comment

Three out of seven for my predictions this year, a slightly better score than last time around. I’m a bit surprised that Anora did so well; I enjoyed it, but The Brutalist did seem more like the kind of movie that the members of the Academy would deem worthy of honour. None of the other awards were too outrageous I guess, apart perhaps from Zoe Saldaña picking up Best Supporting Actress, though I suppose she did give the one of the better performances in the otherwise wildly overrated Emilia Pérez.

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