You thought that the 1984 sci-fi horror flick, The Terminator, was about killer robots from the future. Think again. It’s actually about sex. The Terminator might have been intended as low-budget B-movie schlock, but through some top-notch story-telling, it seized the imagination of the public and gave birth to a decades-long franchise. Many of its tropes continue to echo down the years. I'm here to ruin your fun The Terminator was released in 1984.

If the 2019 film Midsommar were a mirror into which we were to gaze, a horrifying visage would stare back; it shows us what we have become. While director Ari Aster may well have first envisioned the film as straight forward slasher schlock, what he ended up with was an important cultural commentary, a societal artefact, that reflects the zeitgeist. He was no doubt helped by superb performances from the main cast, especially from Florence Pugh, as Dani Ardor, who encapsulates the societal sickness in which we wallow.

Thanks to Miri AF for pointing me to the predictive programming in the 2019 series Years and Years. The series forewarned many things, including war in Ukraine, a pandemic (Monkey flu), floods and the rise of a "far right" figure which is a sort of hybrid of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins. But don't worry; everything will be cool and groovy by 2030 when the UN's sustainable development goals are due to be met.

Conservatism is a plaintive whimper, a sigh from those who feel that they have something to lose. It's a lament for a disappearing simulacrum. It is reactive and defensive. It is an inability to grapple with the world as it is and a plea to avoid taking up one's cross, so that one may have a comfortable life. That's why it is a loser's ideology. Conservatism is about nostalgia, the longing for the country of one's childhood.

St. George's day always provides an opportunity for the usual suspects to come out of the woodwork and trash one of the symbols of England. They claim that the patron saint of England was a Turk who didn't kill a dragon and probably didn't exist, only for others to point out that Turkey didn’t exist at the time and that he was a Greek-speaking, Cappadocian. Such attacks feed into the malaise of identity across the British Isle's but in England in particular.

Donald Trump, on the day of his inauguration, in something called the National Cathedral, was told In the name of our god, I ask you to have mercy… from the pulpit, by one Mariann Budde, a woman pretending to be a bishop. "Our god"? Is that an inclusive or exclusive “our”? Is her god the same as Donald Trump's? How many gods does Ms Budde think there are? If we can divine this then we can predict the course of the Trump presidency by its metaphysics , or 'grammar', if you will.

The media industrial complex can't help but tell you what will become of you, if you follow the path laid out for you by the system they promote. This is what the film Ratter (2015) does. It functions as a revelation of the method, as it were, and must have been made in spite of itself. It nods at a slew of feminist tropes of male predatory behaviour. The funding pitch probably went something like this: "this film turns the viewer's gaze onto the male gaze, taking the subject of oppression and objectifying the objectifier.

Is not any public success an artificial contrivance? If an individual, song, book or film is given a high profile, is it not because the gatekeepers of culture have deemed that such individual, song, book or film will push public discourse in a direction which they desire? That certainly seems to be the case with the slapstick farce, No Sex Please – We're British, a film and play that suggest Britons are coy in matters of the flesh.

Can a bunch of old stones make Englishmen of immigrants? David Starkey, a TV historian, seems to think so. Dr David Starkey, as a person from the television, is someone I never took much notice of, in the same way I didn't take much notice of other television people, say, Dale Winton, Graham Norton, Lyce Doucet, Carol Vordeman, Jeremy Paxman or Katie Price. Recently, however, Starkey got himself a YouTube channel, wherein he opines on the problems facing his country.

This is the second post in the Dune critique series. The first one on Dune: Messiah, is here. ::: {.captioned-image-container} {.sizing-normal width=“640” height=“487” sizes=“100vw” srcset=“https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6FRh!,w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e3d031e-b4ad-4bfb-8c61-b89d8ae400cb_640x487.webp 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6FRh!,w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e3d031e-b4ad-4bfb-8c61-b89d8ae400cb_640x487.webp 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6FRh!,w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e3d031e-b4ad-4bfb-8c61-b89d8ae400cb_640x487.webp 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6FRh!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e3d031e-b4ad-4bfb-8c61-b89d8ae400cb_640x487.webp 1456w”} ::: *** WARNING: SPOILERS *** Some people just want to be evil. Because Children of Dune, the third book in Frank Herbert's Dune series, is about such people, it deconstructs the genre of science-fiction and gives the lie to the genre's myriad conceits.