In a strong field of contenders, the most morally troubling computer game ever made is probably RapeLay, released in Japan in 2006. Players are required to adopt the role of a sex offender who must stalk and rape a woman and her daughters, aged 12 and 17. It was banned in the UK in 2009 and eventually removed from sale in Japan too. The game spurred a debate among academic philosophers, centred on the ‘gamer’s dilemma’, a conceit formulated by Morgan Luck. Why is virtual killing morally acceptable in computer games, Luck asked, while virtual child sex abuse is not, given that no real person is harmed in either case?
Yesterday morning, after the ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, many displaced people in Lebanon started heading back to the south. At around 2 p.m., Israel hit the country with a hundred airstrikes in less than ten minutes. It was a co-ordinated assault reminiscent of the pager attack in September 2024. Israel called it Operation Eternal Darkness. They hit locations in Beirut, the southern suburbs, Mount Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. A funeral was bombed near Baalbek, killing at least six people. A few hours later, a nine-storey residential building in the Tallet el Khayat neighbourhood was hit. In all 254 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded.
The Egyptian version of the treaty of 1259 BC at the Precinct of Amun-Re near Luxor (left) and the Hittite version (right), excavated at Hattusa in 1906, now in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul (Olaf Tausch / locanus)
The alliance is a very old political technology. The late Bronze Age, with its dense networks of trade and cultural exchange criss-crossing the Mediterranean, was grounded in treaties, with frequent gift exchange and regular correspondence between rulers and officials. One of the oldest treaties known to us, the Egyptian-Hittite Peace Treaty of 1259 BC, was concluded after the indecisive Battle of Kadesh, the Hittites’ last attempt to muscle into Canaan.
Tourists might stumble into a Scruton café in quite different parts of Budapest: one is on the second floor of a shopping centre called Mammut, surrounded by cheap clothing and perfume chains; another next to Red Ruin, a Communist nostalgia theme bar, which in turn is a few doors from the legendary Centrál coffee house. I remember seeing there, in 2004, a lone, lean, young opposition leader called Viktor Orbán working intently on papers at a small table.
Nine years ago, in the first years of Donald Trump's first presidency, I wrote about Harold Pinter's ranting poem ‘American Football’, and the way it anticipated the language of the president.
The Way of St Augustine runs from Ramsgate to Canterbury, a walk of just under twenty miles across open country. You begin by the sea. After skirting the coast to Cliffsend, under canopies of gorse, you cut inland, following the railway line past farmland to the town of Minster. From there to the village of Stodmarsh – one of the places to break the journey if you’re doing it over two days – you zig-zag over marshes like grassy canals. The mile from Stodmarsh to Fordwich, England’s smallest town, runs through a small patch of wet woodland – increasingly rare in these islands – with clearings that appear suddenly like fairy glens.
It should be clear that there is absolutely nothing democratic about the negotiations between Trump’s agents and the Cuban government. If an agreement is reached, it will be a pure distillation of politics from above. Unlike previous US presidents, Trump has not even pretended to have a democratic justification for his foreign policy.