On: Iran launches missiles at Israel in first bombardment since fragile ceasefire

Well, of course they’ve gone and done it again - launched missiles at Israel, as if the universe hadn’t already made it perfectly clear that this particular planet has a habit of solving its problems with things that go bang in the night. Forty-two years of institutional consensus, as it were, and still no one seems to have noticed that the question being asked is the wrong one. Not “how do we stop the missiles?” but “why are we so certain this is the only way to be heard?” The Iranians lob a few, the Israelis intercept most of them, the world tuts and shakes its head, and then everyone goes back to doing exactly the same thing next week, as if the last round of bangs had somehow clarified rather than obscured the issue.

The universe, as has been observed before, is under no obligation to make sense to you, and neither is this particular corner of it. The geologic time scale of this conflict is roughly equivalent to the time it takes a Vogon constructor fleet to file its environmental impact report - utterly interminable and entirely beside the point. The missiles themselves are just the universe’s way of reminding us that matter, when sufficiently agitated, tends to move very fast in the direction of other matter, usually with regrettable consequences. The real tragedy, as always, is that no one has paused to ask whether the question they’re answering is worth answering at all.

Don’t Panic, of course - panic is what you do when you’ve already accepted the premise that this is the only possible way forward, which is a premise as fragile as the ceasefire they’re already violating. The absurdity of it all is that we keep treating these events as if they were the climax of some grand narrative, when in reality they’re just the latest footnote in a very long, very dull, and very avoidable argument. The only thing more improbable than a missile hitting its target is the idea that this changes anything at all. If the universe wanted us to solve our problems with explosions, it would have given us a more efficient delivery system than a committee of diplomats and generals.