"Googling How to Spell Potpourri" Edition
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I wrote for The Critic about the potential outcomes of Elon Musk buying Twitter.
I wrote on Substack about the oddest night of my life and republished a story from my book.
An ocean of pain. A US egg factory has killed 5.3 million chickens by cooking them alive amid fears of bird flu. The pain of the animals is hard to comprehend. Imagine one bird dying in tremendous agony. Then imagine that happening 5.3 million times.
Perhaps the fear of bird flu was valid. Perhaps there was no quicker way to kill the animals. But the need to do so was created by the astonishing density of modern livestock farming. It is an appalling stain on civilisation.
Suffering as status. Freddie deBoer continues his righteous campaign against the idealisation of mental illness:
Forget the fact that, say, autism and schizophrenia are so different that they have at times been described as opposite conditions. Forget the fact that saying you’re neurodivergent has as much medical meaning as saying you have a disorder of the body. The idea is that there’s a group of people whose brain chemistry differs, in some beautiful way, from some Platonic norm. And it’s an idea that’s taken on great symbolic power in contemporary liberal culture.
I was talking with a teenage acquaintance who said they love the serial Euphoria because it shows what being young is really like. When I asked if that means everybody at their school has mental illnesses and drug addictions they said no. But I detected a hint of wistfulness.
Makers and managers. Ahmed from Post Apathy reflects on the appeal of Elon Musk:
Although Musk is an avatar for agency and ownership, recovering them, in reality, will require a different approach that has not been tried before. It will not find its conduit through markets and corporations or founder-capitalist billionaires. We require new forms of social, economic, and political organisation and niches capable of escaping the attention of the managerial elite until it is too late for them to stop the process.
Edgelord academics. The new issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas is out - featuring a paper questioning whether it is ever okay to use the n-word and a paper arguing that paedophiles are a sexual minority facing discrimination. Maybe so, but does that not prove that discrimination has its uses?
Dying in deprivation. Yuan Yi Zhu reflects on the expanding accessibility of euthanasia in Canada:
There is an endlessly repeated witticism by the poet Anatole France that, ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ What France certainly did not foresee is that an entire country—and an ostentatiously progressive one at that—has decided to take his sarcasm at face value and to its natural conclusion.
Kingers. Alexander Larman pays tribute to Kingsley Amis, who would have turned 100 recently were it not for his unfortunate “dying” incident:
If there was to be some well-intentioned but worthy memorial planned, perhaps with speeches that tortuously tried to excuse or explain away Amis’s more controversial aspects, he would undoubtedly have been deeply bored by such an occasion.
The problem is that deep boredom can make one rather boring. But Amis wrote genuinely sparkling prose. A tedious academic turning “like a squadron of slow old battleships” when someone interrupts him is a simile that always makes me smile.
A poet of contradictions. Sebastian Milbank profiles Rod Dreher:
His religiosity, for all its fascination with Europe and tradition, is very American: apocalyptic and with a passionate, personal relationship with his saviour which he describes as “an active life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ”. There’s more than a touch of revivalist preacher to Rod.
Buncha hayders B. After my recent rant about the expanded universe of Joe Rogan, and the career of Brendan Schaub in particular, I had to check out Schaub’s latest comedy special “Gringo Papi”. It was bad. Not “so bad it was good” bad. It was just depressing. Half of it was about how annoying his Mexican in-laws are, and you could find better Mexican jokes at a MAGA rally. One person in attendance couldn’t stop laughing: Brendan Schaub, at himself. I don’t blame Schaub for any of this. I blame his pals for turning comedy into a podcast-bloated fart-huffing enterprise.
Have a lovely week,
Ben