"Belated and Overcaffeinated" Edition
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I had fun with Dave Rubin’s miserably lazy book Don’t Burn This Country for the Spectator World.
For my paying subscribers, I wrote about modernity and disease and mused on the concept of “the current thing”.
Home front. Sorry for the lateness of my newsletter today. I realised, as I guiltily combed through my browsing history in search of articles I wanted to recommend, how useful this Substack has been in giving a naturally lazy and disorganised man more discipline.
The flag may change. My friend Paul Brian explores how scammers have been getting fat and happy off the Ukraine war:
A scammer who made over $91,000 by pretending to raise money for Ukraine used a crypto wallet that has also been used to raise money for purported Palestinian refugees and Afghan victims of war. The flag may change, but the crypto wallet address stays the same.
Few people are lower than frauds who prey on good-hearted naïveté.
In fact, I think I should establish some kind of organisation to crack down on scammers raising crypto for bullshit projects. You can donate BTC, ETH et cetera here.
The essential passivity. Ed West discusses the decline of metropolitan conservatism:
Worst of all, though, is the essential passivity at the heart of this strange regime, the complete lack of interest in shaping the country, something Tony Blair’s government were quite passionate about doing. All the demographic patterns are moving away from Toryism as their policies help push us towards greater density, higher housing costs, more expensive family formation and an inevitable progressive majority.
Aside from that, Mr West, how do you like the government?
Be good. The always eloquent Bethel McGrew tells a very moving family story:
In the end, she won. She tasted victory on shaky feet, in a hallway full of Christmas decorations. She looked down into the odd little face for the first time, and the last.
Do read the whole thing.
His skin on the table. Nicholas Hausdorf reviews Jacob Phillips’s Obedience Is Freedom (I reviewed it here):
We can take Phillips seriously because he has what Louis Ferdinand Céline once described as an essential quality of the writer. He puts his skin on the table as a moralist and an aesthete in defense of values which otherwise might appear preposterous and remote.
Does your host put his skin on the table? Reader, I put my blood on the table. Granted, it’s from a paper cut.
Have a lovely week,
Ben