I Looked at the News and Thought: F&#k It

On taking a break, watching a preventable crisis unfold and wondering when exactly global leadership became this incredibly stupid.

Morning, all,

So. The hawk-eyed among you may have noticed I didn’t write anything over the past week. Which is unusual for me, I know - I’m normally quite reliable about turning up to shout into the internet on schedule.

I’d love to tell you this was some carefully curated act of self-care. A mindful pause. A strategic retreat to recharge the batteries.

But honestly? I just looked at the state of things and thought, with considerable feeling: “Nope. Fuck it. I can’t.”

And then… I didn’t.

I’ve been doing this - casually writing about politics, trying to make sense of it, trying to make it legible - for years now. And I have a process. Something happens, I read around it, I contextualise it, I write something that hopefully turns sheer unbridled chaos into something resembling coherent analysis. Maybe even something useful from time to time.

But last week, when Trump casually floated the idea of wiping out an entire civilisation, that process just... stopped working.

The headline that made me tap out for a week - and honestly, I feel like I’m not alone.

What do you even do with that? How do you contextualise it? What’s the sensible take on “maybe we’ll end Persian civilisation and see how it goes”?

I’ve written about Trump’s absurdities before. Threatening to invade Greenland. Threatening to annex Canada. Implementing tariffs on an Island exclusively inhabited by penguins. The whole rotating cast of batshit ideas that normally I could at least find an angle on, could contextualise, could turn into something resembling analysis. But I just sat there staring at my screen, and this time… nothing came out. Because this wasn’t another ridiculous Trump moment to be filed away and dissected. This was different.

I think what finally broke my brain wasn’t just the statement itself - though Christ, that’s bad enough - it was the gap between the seriousness of what’s actually happening and the sheer, utterly idiotic absurdity of how we ended up getting here.

The United States and Israel did not stumble into this conflict. They didn’t get dragged in reluctantly - they kicked the door in with both feet and went, to put it lightly, full balls to the walls.

Coordinated strikes on Iranian targets. Leadership assassinations. Infrastructure hits. Not covert operations with plausible deniability. Not grey-zone ambiguity. Just very clear messages delivered with very large hammers.

And then - and this is the bit that makes me want to put my fucking head through a wall - when Iran responded exactly as any state would respond when you bomb it, the entire Western narrative pivoted to framing Iran as the aggressor.

Iranian escalation. Iranian provocation. Iranian destabilisation.

As if cause and effect have just... stopped applying because it’s geopolitically inconvenient.

Now, to be absolutely clear: I am not defending Iran. Iran’s government is a genuinely contemptible authoritarian regime - one that crushes dissent with brutality, tortures political prisoners, executes people for their beliefs, and systematically represses its own population with casual cruelty. It has a long, documented track record of proxy violence, regional destabilisation, and exporting its particular brand of theocratic oppression. The regime is, by any reasonable measure, a force for genuine harm in the world. Nobody sane is confusing them for the good guys here.

However.

There is something profoundly, insultingly dishonest about bombing a country, openly calling for regime change, conducting what amounts to acts of war, and then acting shocked - fucking shocked! - when that country hits back.

You don’t get to be both the aggressor and the victim. That’s not how this works.

And yet here we are.

A “ceasefire” that collapsed before the ink was dry. Peace talks that fell apart in the early hours of this morning. Shipping lanes getting squeezed through the Strait of Hormuz - which, just as a reminder, handles about 21% of global petroleum traffic. Oil markets twitching like they’ve developed a nervous disorder. Israel settling into what looks suspiciously like a long-term military occupation posture. The US trying to position itself as both active participant and neutral referee, which is a neat trick if you can pull it off.

All of it conducted with the arrogant, reckless confidence of two countries that have decided the normal rules of consequence simply don’t apply to them. As if power absolves you of the need for strategy, as if entitlement is a substitute for wisdom.

As if there’s a plan. As if this is all part of some grand strategic arc that will, at some point, resolve itself into stability and order.

In reality, the whole situation looks far more like a series of escalating decisions made in the moment, each one justified just enough to get through the news cycle, each one pushing the situation slightly further out of control.

And sitting slap bang in the centre of it all is a man who, at best, treats global conflict like a personal branding exercise. At worst... well, at worst we get statements about ending civilisations.

There’s a kind of fear that’s permeating the world that comes from incompetence, pettiness and vanity paired with power.

Malice, you can plan for. Malice is at least predictable. You can model it, respond to it, build containment strategies around it.

But this isn’t that.

This is volatility, impulse and decision-making driven by ego and news cycles and whatever the last person in the room said.

It’s the geopolitical equivalent of handing a toddler a loaded weapon and hoping they don’t figure out how it works - except the weapon is nuclear and the toddler has a social media account.

And the rest of us are just... watching - desperately trying to work out what any of this actually means in practical terms.

Because it always comes back to that, doesn’t it? The practical consequences.

Oil prices go up. Shipping gets disrupted. Supply chains wobble. Inflation ticks upward. Someone in the UK wonders why their weekly shop has gone up again and gets told it’s “global pressures,” as if that’s some kind of weather system rather than the direct, traceable result of human decisions made in rooms by people with names.

And all of us find ourselves sitting here thinking: this is so avoidable - not easy to avoid, nor simple. I’m not pretending there are easy answers here. But avoidable.

That’s what pushed me over the edge, I think. Not the scale of it. Not even the danger of it. The stupidity of it.

The sense that I’m watching a series of choices being made that actively make things worse, and those choices are being sold as inevitable. As if we have no agency and this is just how things have to be and we shouldn’t worry our little heads about it.

And look, I know what you’re thinking - what about UK politics? What about Nigel Farage’s latest desperate plea for attention, or Shabana Mahmoud’s most recent plan to make migrants second-class citizens, or Kemi Badenoch’s constant, weirdly pugilistic flip-flopping on literally everything? Normally, I’d have something to say about all of that. Normally, I’d be writing about it.

But this week? I couldn’t even be bothered. I looked at the domestic political panto and just... couldn’t summon the energy to care.

Not because it doesn’t matter - it does, it matters quite a lot actually - but because I was too busy staring at the possibility of civilisational collapse to get worked up about the usual nonsense. Sometimes you hit a burnout threshold where even the things you normally give a shit about just feel like background noise. This was one of those weeks. I needed to let it all pass without commentary.

I will care about it again next week, but I have to admit, it was nice to not care for just a few days.

And after years of writing about politics, trying to analyse it, trying to make it make sense, I just hit a point where my brain went: I don’t want to explain this today. So I didn’t.

I went outside. I did my actual job, which - and I cannot stress this enough - I absolutely love. I spoke to real humans about real things. I ran a D&D session where the most pressing concern was whether a corrupted bear was about to flatten the party.

(Reader, the bear made more sense than global politics.)

The new job, by the way, is brilliant. Properly brilliant. For the first time in a long time, I’m working at a level where the impact isn’t just local - not just one service, one team, one patch - but something that could actually shift things more broadly. The kind of work where you can see the line between what you’re doing and actual, measurable change.

And the people are just... actually good. Genuinely competent, thoughtful, decent. My boss is a brilliant guy who I get along with. You forget how much that matters until you have it again. How much easier it is to do hard work when you’re surrounded by people who actually give a shit.

Remote working is still a bit of a head shift, I’ll admit. I have to physically force myself to leave the house every day or I will simply merge with my desk and become part of the furniture. But hey, we adapt. That’s the South African way.

And then there’s the D&D.

I have, somehow, become a dungeon master. I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. One minute I was a player, the next I’m orchestrating elaborate fictional disasters for a group of increasingly chaotic adventurers.

Turns out, orchestrating fictional chaos is significantly less stressful than trying to interpret the real thing.

At least in D&D, when things spiral out of control, everyone acknowledges it’s because someone rolled badly. There’s an honesty to it. A transparency. When the barbarian charges headfirst into a trap, we all know why it happened. We can see the dice. We can trace the decision.

I find that deeply comforting right about now.

So that’s where I’ve been. A bit tired. A bit overwhelmed. Staring at the news like it’s personally wronged me. But not gone.

I’ll be back this week, because I do still care about this stuff. Probably too much, if I’m being honest. I can’t seem to help it. I just needed a moment to step back, look at everything, and say, with full sincerity: what the actual fuck is going on.

Anyway - I am now at the point of becoming properly rambly, and I know you have things to get on with.

I hope you’ve all managed to find a bit of space to breathe. Or at least to step away from the madness for a few minutes here and there.

Take care of yourselves, and try not to let the bastards ruin your Sunday.

Best,
Bear