A Pleasurable Headache: 26th July 2020
Not many links this time around as I've been ridiculously under strain in the day job, to the point that burn out approaches.
God bless this pandemic.
The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of 'The Last of Us Part II'
Vice take a look at the sequel on everyone's lips at the moment. For a game that was designed to explicitly reference the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there are some definite problems in how it represents the in-game factions.
George Monbiot on the insidious and pally business of handing out government contracts during a pandemic/crisis. Here he is on an £840'000 contract given to a company called Public First to test the effectiveness of the government's coronavirus messaging:
"But we do know who the contract went to. It’s a company called Public First, owned by a married couple, James Frayne and Rachel Wolf. Since 2000, James Frayne has worked on political campaigns with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. When Michael Gove was education secretary, he brought both Cummings and Frayne into his department. Cummings was Gove’s chief political adviser, while Frayne was his director of communications. At roughly the same time, in 2010, Gove’s Department awarded Rachel Wolf a £500,000 contract to promote his “free schools” obsession. Guess what? That didn’t go to competitive tender, either. Rachel Wolf co-wrote the Conservative party’s election manifesto in 2019."
Fantastic work if you can get it, eh?
Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know
An incredibly detailed (but still fascinating) long read on the intricacies of the Swiss political system. I know. But it's more interesting than it sounds.
‘The Guest’ is a Horror Masterpiece About the Toll of America’s “Forever War”
Meghan O'Keefe at Decider on the subtext of the underrated gem from Adam Wingard.
"Early on in the film, Anna describes David as a “walking, breathing reminder” of her dead brother. He’s more than that, though. He’s a walking, breathing reminder of a war overseas that claims American lives and leaves way too many survivors with PTSD. We never flashback to David or Caleb’s time fighting for the military and that’s important. The horror of The Guest is not what happens during combat overseas, but what gets brought home afterwards. This means grief, anguish, and most of all, an anxiety about the ethics of the conflicts the United States has been embroiled in since 9/11."
France: After Lockdown, the Street
Rachel Donadio at NYRB on France before, during and after the lockdown.
"The pandemic revealed structural flaws in the country’s vaunted health care system. Between 1993 and 2018, France eliminated 100,000 hospital beds, most of them in general medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. Last year, before the pandemic hit, doctors and nurses—and the staffs of 300 of France’s 474 emergency rooms—joined in weeks of general strikes to protest Macron’s cuts to the health care system as well as to their pensions, part of his efforts to trim back the state. (That pension reform and all Macron’s previous reforms were put on hold when the pandemic hit.) But nearly 50 percent of Covid-19 deaths in France—some 15,000—were elderly people in nursing homes. That corresponds to similar trends elsewhere, including the United States, but is nevertheless a stunning loss, especially for a state that prides itself on taking care of its citizens, cradle to grave. "