Attending to the world feels like a constantly more challenging task. What to listen to? What to read? What to watch? Overwhelmed, dazed, collectively and individually we stumble from news story to news story. Stocks go up, bombs go down. Reality feels more abstracted and simulated, except for those constant reminders of the really real. In the last note, PC pointed to the dangers of preferencing simulation to reality: ‘The world is all happening; we’re missing the world happening, but we don’t miss the world, because we’re preoccupied with simulations.’ Indeed.
The present preoccupation is the US - Israeli attack on Iran. The news tell us that, ‘US attack against Iran relied on misdirection and decoys’. The NYT described it as ‘a diversion tactic’. Most certainly. The attack is misdirecting and diverting attention. Much could be said about this, but two kinds of diversion are worth emphasising:
(1) The extreme humanitarian crisis in Gaza is no longer on front pages, but the situation only continues to worsen. To offer a small and incomplete sample of present conditions:
Robert Blecher and Chris Newton, ‘The Gaza Starvation Experiment’, The International Crisis Group, 6 June 2025:
The world, it seems, is witnessing an experiment: an attempt to indefinitely maintain Gaza’s population below the famine threshold while turning food into a weapon of war.
Statement on Gaza by Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, 12 June 2025:
Without immediate and massively scaled-up access to the basic means of survival, we risk a descent into famine, further chaos, and the loss of more lives.
UN OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Update #300, 26 June 2025:
Gaza's water crisis has reached critical levels, with only 40 per cent of drinking water facilities functional and fuel shortages pushing water systems to near collapse. By mid-June, 93 per cent of households faced water insecurity, exacerbating thirst and public health risks.
Families in Gaza are risking their lives to access food, with nearly daily mass casualties reported as people attempt to reach supplies. Most families survive on just one nutritiously poor meal per day, while adults routinely skip meals to prioritize children, the elderly, and the ill amid deepening hunger and desperation.
Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Thameen Al-Kheetan, 24 June 2025:
Desperate, hungry people in Gaza continue to face the inhumane choice of either starving to death or risk being killed while trying to get food.
Since the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” started operating on 27 May, the Israeli military has shelled and shot Palestinians trying to reach the distribution points, leading to many fatalities. Reportedly, over 410 Palestinians have been killed as a result. At least 93 others have also been reportedly killed by the Israeli army while attempting to approach the very few aid convoys of the UN and other humanitarian organisations. At least 3,000 Palestinians have been injured in these incidents.
Palestinians across Gaza are suffering from hunger and the lack of other lifesaving necessities. The Gaza Strip remains on the verge of famine as a result of Israel’s closure and blockade, as well as ongoing unlawful restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian assistance. This adds to Israel’s systematic destruction of local food production and the economy, as well as the repeated forced mass displacements over the past 20 months.
‘Gaza: UN warns of “weaponised hunger” and growing death toll amid food chaos’, 22 June 2025:
Jonathan Whittall, who heads the UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) in Gaza and the West Bank, said: “The attempt to survive is being met with a death sentence.”
He described the situation as “weaponised hunger”, “forced displacement”, and “a death sentence for people just trying to survive”.
“This is carnage,” Mr. Whittall said. “It appears to be the erasure of Palestinian life from Gaza.”
He urged the international community to act: “We need a lasting ceasefire, accountability, and real pressure to stop this. This is the bare minimum.”
Beware of decoys, remember the bare minimum.
(2) There is another diversion at work, less immediate but also consequential. What the US attacks offer is a comforting rerun of post-Cold War international politics. This is a script we all know! The United States using its most high tech and expensive military kit to attack a corrupted regime in the Middle East that has few friends and little capacity to seriously strike back. This returns us to the world of kitsch geopolitics, except instead of the ‘Cold War 2’ script, the US can temporarily relive its unipolar glory days of lording over the world with its military strength and willingness to kill people in far away places. ‘Team America’ following the cue of Tom Cruise, back for one last mission. It is a story that critics like as much as supporters, everyone gets to take their assigned roles and trot out their old positions, rehashed and remixed. Neo-cons, NYT columnists, Beltway critics and critical outsiders, all can rejoice, time for a rerun. Get on X, go for it! Find the data sets! To MS Word! Pump!
All the while, the world moves on. It is changing and happening elsewhere. There is a really profound poverty of analysis and expression that is part of our present predicament. From politics to podcasts, academia to arts, there is a tendency to stick with the banal, the comfortable. This is the world of more, Moore and MOAR!
There is a deep need to struggle towards new frames, different ways of thinking, more open modes of talking and acting in these amorphous, entropic conditions. Staying with distractions and decoys will not help us.
With that in mind, a few recent examples of attempts to go beyond kitsch analysis and think forward:
Adam Tooze, ‘Towards a new order – Who will now work it out?’, Berlin Summit 2025, Forum for a New Economy, June 2025.
Hugh White, ‘On why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that’s probably good’, 80,000 hours podcast, June 2025.
Rod Schoonover, ‘The National Security Risks We’re Not Prepared For: Adapting In an Age of Actorless Threats’, Great Simplification podcast, June 2025.
Listen, look carefully, watch out for decoys. Give attention to those facing forward.