August Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote on THE ZONE this month about the changing face of hitmen, the sympathetic case for restrictionism, academic ideology, men and anorexia, satire, the Cambridge Five, my dog, the fallout from an academic scandal, a hangover, human variety and my experiences with high-IQ ADHD.

I wrote for The Critic about Monty Python, Jason Arday’s defenders, the British state and crime, Ricky Gervais, agitprop in podcasts, the Arday fallout, political influencers, joyriding and Jolyon Maugham.

Finally, I wrote for The i about Richard Curtis.

Posting will be lighter next month because I’m getting married. It’s very exciting to be able to write that (the marriage part — not the light posting part). Apologies to subscribers, but I hope I will return with new energy and inspiration.

The end of the summer. This is always a poignant time of year for me. Yes, yes, I know that Autumn can be beautiful. (The leaves! The frost!) But I just can’t see the dark and cold as anything except oppressive. This year, though, I’m dwelling on it less because I’m getting married. If we can love and cherish in sickness and in health, after all, we can at least try to be cheerful in darkness and in light.

War worries. Will Russia attack a NATO country? That’s been the talk of European elites this month. On the one hand, it seems improbable. The Russians are still bogged down in Ukraine. They would take severe losses. The geopolitical fallout would be tremendous. What concerns me is that “the costs are high and the benefits are unclear” could also have been said about the invasion of Ukraine. It might well have made no sense, but it still happened. Mark Galeotti, though, writes that “there is no concrete evidence that Putin is preparing for some imminent direct attack on the West”, and while absence of evidence is not proof of anything, it’s still meaningful.

The God debate returns! Bentham’s Bulldog and Scott Alexander are arguing about whether God exists. Noted non-believer Joe Schmid has converted to Catholicism. Yes, the God debate is back, Baby. Let’s party like it’s 2006.

This is excellent news for someone who has written a book about why it matters whether or not there is a God. It’s slightly less good news if that book has been gathering e-dust for years. Consider this a vow to clean it up and put it out there.

Trash v. slop. Becca Rothfeld considers movies that are so bad that they become “perversely captivating”, and muses on the difference between trash and slop:

Henceforth, all badness will be homogenized. There will be no poorly formatted websites. There will be no B-movie monsters wearing terrible prosthetics, no scripts full of non sequiturs, no glitchy graphics. The world will become tragically, unbearably competent, a surface without a seam.

Space and silence. Kit Wilson reflects on the great Leszek Kołakowski:

Here, in a way, is Kołakowski’s whole message encapsulated: Absolute consistency, absolute certainty, absolute reliability are ruses to distract us from the fact that we must, sadly, think for ourselves, reason without safety barriers, and seek without ever hoping to find final answers.

Amor and alienation. Poppy Sowerby writes on millennials as they approach middle age:

When relationships became optional, the offer was supposed to improve. Men and women were meant to have closer and more compassionate lives together, built through conscious and careful choice and not social pressure. In the event, the sexes simply grew apart, pushed into apathy by the very same internet which was meant to connect them, and which briefly brought Jezebel and the rest so much fame.

Clacton, England and the universe. Fred Sculthorp continues his tour of modern England (someone give this man a publishing contract):

Ashleigh’s plight reminded me of the most disturbing conversation of the weekend. I was sitting near the end of the pier with Maggie, a retired paralegal. I was trying to get her to imagine the first humans that crossed here into Britain all those years ago. What would they make of it all now? Maggie wasn’t really interested. She had long since given up England and reality. In her retirement, she had started being visited by arcturians — extra-terrestrial guardian angels of beauty and truth. What she called “the fourth dimensional world” was beyond help. She had reached the end of the pier, and now she wanted to go even further.

Imperialism and irrationality. Will Solfiac takes Jameela Jamil seriously:

I’m not really surprised by her views, and I’m not singling her out as unusually vituperative. In reality she seems to be, as she states in the article, a standard “millennial social justice advocate”, which is why I thought her article was a good example of the common views I am discussing. While these views being held among millennial social justice advocates is one thing, the wider issue is that they are also commonly held among people from India and other parts of the world from which the bulk of our immigration increasingly comes from.

They were asked. Hugh Percy writes on migration and opinion:

The British people were explicitly asked what kinds of immigration they wanted less of and answered clearly. What followed bore remarkably little relationship to those preferences. The information was there; it was simply ignored.

Peaks and valleys. David Butterfield reflects on mountain walking:

Nature, though she has no curriculum to speak of, remains the greatest of teachers. There are three things that I learned from this particular adventure. First, metres really don’t exist in any shorter form than that platinum bar they struck in post-Revolutionary Paris: the distances really do need covering and climbing, whatever you might have planned.

Second, nothing has such restorative power for my soul as remote rural landscapes: they can solve and heal so much, if you just give them the chance. Third, it is a privilege and, retrospectively, a pleasure to have had the opportunity to put myself to the extreme test in such otherworldly beauty: pathei mathos, as Aeschylus rightly had it — true learning comes through true suffering.

Have a lovely month!

Ben