Event Horizon — Sci-Fi Sundaze

In 2040 the research ship Event Horizon disappeared from orbit around Neptune. Now it’s 2047 and she’s back — but where has she been the past seven years?

The event Horizon orbitting Neptune

That’s what the crew of the Lewis and Clark has to figure out. What they didn’t know until they arrived is that Event Horizon was not just a normal ship: it was designed to test a warp drive that could take it to Proxima Centauri in a day. Obviously something went wrong and when they find the Event Horizon it’s a ship without power and without crew. As they board the ship, evidence of something gone horribly wrong is quickly found: mutilated corpses, frozen blood caked on the ship’s walls, etc. Power is restored and the gravity drive that provides the warp is briefly engaged, sucking in one of the crew members who re-emergences comatose. It also triggers a shockwave that cripples the Lewis and Clark and leaves them with twenty hours to fix the ship before they run out of oxygen. All of which is bad enough without the terrible hallucinations each crew member is starting to suffer from or the weird fascination the resident scientist — also the designer of the gravity drive — has with his creation…

The gravity drive consists of three rings covered in spikes and knobs orbiting a metal globe also covered in spikes

Any sane person would’ve been wary of the drive even before the hallucinations started: just look at the fucker. That gothic design just screams evil. Event Horizon is not a subtle film, squarely in that tradition of sci-fi movies warning about things we’re not meant to know. Sam Neill’s scientist character, Dr Weir, is very much in that same tradition of scientific villains driven by hubris, opposing Laurence Fishburne’s captain Miller, the commander of the Event Horizon whose first concern is for his crew’s safety. The situation deteriorates as you would expect from a horror movie following the usual pattern of crew members picked off one by one by either the ship or Dr Weir, until the last few survivors manage to escape — or do they?

I’m not the first one who made the connection between Evetn Horizon‘s gravity drive and Warhammer 40K’s treatment of warp space, far from it, but that was honestly the first thing that came into mind. Just the design of the ship is reminiscent of Warhammer 40K, let alone the idea that warp space drives you mad and is filled with demonic beings. But it’s not the only comparison that comes to mind. Hellraiser, where you can be summoned to hell if you solve a particular puzzle box, is another one, but there are also other connections to be made.

On some level you could see Event Horizon as a movie about alien contact. Something lives in warp space and ‘talked’ to the crew: it’s not its fault that contact drove them mad. Granted, Dr Weir’s actions are purely malevolent, trying to either keep the others onboard or killing them if they try to escape, btu that might just be him, not whatever entity contacted him in the first place. It might just be a Solaris situation, with an intelligence so different from ours communication is impossible, so bizarre that our minds cannot handle it. Forbidden Planet is another such movie this reminded me off, which also had some sort of creature killing off the members of an expedition to an alien planet.

A predictable, but enjoyable horror sci-fi movie.

“Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.”

We’re always told that we should be careful to distinguish between Israel and “the Jews” and rightly so, that any particular Jewish person or group of Jews cannot be held accountable for the actions of Israel just vbecause they are Jewish. That even as genocide is waged in the name of the Jewish State, we should still make that distinction no matter how much Israel and its propagandists want to erase it, to pretend that Israel is the end and be all of Jewish existence, that all Jews worldwide support it, that opposing it is alwayys antisemitic.

This is good and moral and just to strive to. Plenty of Jewish people and organisations have been outraged and protesting the genocide in Gaza, while plenty of non-Jewish Zionists have enthusiastically supported it. Our governments are not delivering arms and support for the genocide because they’re run by a secret Jewish cabal, they do that for their own purposes. Indulging in antisemitic nonsense about “the Jews” is just letting them off the hook, no different from thinking all Muslims are terrorists.

For Palestinians –the actual victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide– though the story is different. They have to live with the reality of what is genuinely a Jewish supremacist state, no different from how Black south Africans had to live with the reality of the Apartheid white supremacist state. The violence against them is Jewish violence and yet they are asked to deny this, as Mohammed El-Kurd talks about in this Mondoweiss article from September 2023:

This was no secret. We lived under the rule of the self-proclaimed “Jewish State.” Israeli politicians have exhausted this line, and their international peers nodded along. The army declared itself a Jewish army and marched under what it has called a Jewish flag. Jerusalem city councilmen boasted “tak[ing] house after house” because “the bible says that this country belongs to the Jewish people,” and Knesset members sang similar tunes. These legislators weren’t fringe or far-right: the Israeli nation-state law explicitly enshrines “Jewish settlement” as a “national value … to encourage and promote.”

Still, though this was no secret, we were instructed to treat it as such, sometimes by our parents, sometimes by well-meaning solidarity activists. We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn’t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all.

For the sake of western optics, Palestinians are supposed to deny the reality of their oppressors. Because of the inherent antisemitist history of Europe and America, abny allusion as to why these oppressors feel entitled to their land is verboten and Mohammed El-Kurd is tired of it:

Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree.” Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. I’m tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the assumption that I’m inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I’m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.

I think he’s right to be tired. It’s impossible to dismantle the Israeli system of Apartheid if we dcontinue to close our eyes to the reality of it, that it is Jewish supremacist, that it justifies its existence through Jewish history. Again, that does not mean that Jews should be blamed for this just because they’re Jewish, but that we should challenge the idea that being Jewish means being in support of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

Power as paperwork

Here is something I’ve seen a million times before in anime and manga: the conscientious ruler buried in the paperwork they have to finish off personally:

A prince at his desk, huge piles of paperwork piled up besides him while his assistant tells him off

This is taken from *deep breath* Gyakkou Shita Akuyaku Reijou wa, Naze ka Maryoku wo Ushinattanode Shinsou no Reijou ni Narimasu, one of those series where the title gives you the story synopsis: “The Villainess Who Traveled Back in Time Inexplicably Lost Her Magic, so She Went Into Seclusion” and was drawn by Sakamoto Bin. It triggered me, because why is the ruler at their desk diligently doing paperwork such a well used image in the first place? Because it makes little sense for a king or emperor to do the work that could’ve been also done by some middle ranking bureaucrat. Yet here we are again, the “good prince” being kept by his duty from visiting the heroine by never ending bureaucracy. Why is this such an enduring image?

It may just be that Japanese business and government alike is incredibly bureaucratic in structure, terribly fond of paperwork for the sake of paperwork. Even though this wouldn’t make sense in a medieval kingdom to have this bureaucracy in the first place, ti may just be a question of the writer (subconsciously) projecting their own society’s peculiarities onto their creation. Or, like so much else in anime & manga, the writer imitating other writers, just like every city in isekai forms a perfectly round circle. Just one more cliche that everybody understands even if its wrong.

(Hi yes, it has been a month and a half since the last post. That’s what you get when you have a new, huge house to explore and decorate. Hopefully somewhat more regular posting will resume from now on.)

Five Habits of Highly Annoying Online Liberals

Dedicated to the memory of Will Stancil.

  1. Obviously the president cannot do X, he doesn’t have the political capital/votes/the Supreme Court. Your average online liberal is very big on making excuses for why it’s just not possible for the Democrats to do anything, but very sure that more, harder voting next time will solve the problem. That this strategy hasn’t worked the last six presidential elections won’t stop them from making more excuses next time.
  2. But the parliamentarian says we cannot do this. The online liberal is very strict on rules when those rules prevent Democrats from achieving anything. Rules need to be obeyed, no matter how nonsensical and attempts to get around them are just wrong. That the president breaks not just rules, but the law on a daily basis by say supporting the genocide in Gaza somehow always escapes their attention. Rules are sacred and it would be wrong to break or ignore them, regardless the outcome. Sportsmanship is everything.
  3. But if we abolish the filibuster, we cannot use it ourselves when Trump gets into power again.. The online liberal is not so keen on trying to fix the whole broken political system, but rather worries endlessly about what the GOP might do if we change anything. The filibuster being the most well known example, but there’s also e.g. the blue slip procedure. If a senator objects to a proposed judicial candidate in their state, they can send a blue slip to the responsible committee and as a courtesy that candidate will be removed. Something the Republicans paid no attention to whatsoever when they lead these committees, but the Democrats keep adhering to.
  4. But the Supreme Court will strike it down anyway so this is pointless. The online liberal loves to capitulate before the fight. In that they resemble their leaders, who are also not keen to start anything that might require more effort than sending out fund raising emails. The filibuster is a good example of this, as this is always brought up as an example of why we can’t have nice things. But did you know that the modern filibuster consists of nothing more than some junior staffer sending an email that their boss would filibuster if a bill is brought to a vote? No effort required at all. Considering the laziness of your average senator, that Democrats do not call this bluff is inexcusable, but understandable considering the laziness of your average senator.
  5. Vote Blue no Matter Who. Or, it doesn’t matter that Biden supports genocide, Trump is worse so it’s imperative that you vote for him regardless of what he does. Don’t put pressure on Democrats to change, you don’t want the Republicans to get in, do you? Also seen in the UK, where the usual bunch of centrist muppets had spent the last half decade describing most Labour voters as antisemitic scum who should disappear, but still expect their votes. The online liberal expects the voters to adjust to their politicians, not the other way around. The online liberal therefore will always scold the voter for expecting their elected leaders to listen to their concerns.

Open Access books at Pluto Press

Pluto Press, one of the older radical anticapitalist publishers in the world, has made a selection of their published work available as Open Access books:

With the aim of accessibility and in the spirit of knowledge-sharing, a selection of our books is available to download through Open Access programmes. Here you can find links to the books on the OAPEN website, and on other platforms, where you can download electronic copies for free.

For anybody interested in leftwing, radical politics, history and theory this is a great resource.