"I Was Outside Smoking, The Fall Winds Just Beginning" Edition

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Obligatory shilling. I reviewed a preposterous book called In Defense of Looting for the Spectator USA.

I also wrote for paid subscribers to this platform about the bad science that underpinned the rush towards the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s. If that interests you, subscribe!

Visiting Wisła. I spent the weekend in the pleasant Polish town Wisła, tucked in the Beskid mountains. We had a lovely time.

We stayed at this nice, friendly hotel. At the back of the hotel is a mountain, and near the top of the mountain is a surprise: a bare bones church. According to one article on the Internet, persecuted Lutherans held secret services in the mountains. Imagine the dedication it would take to reach this place. That's devotion. But I have no doubt that it also makes for an especially inspiring service.

A worrying feature of the Polish mountains is what tragic eyesores some of the newer, larger hotels are - enormous concrete slabs, dumped on the mountainside. Of course, I have no right to say what should and should not be constructed. But if nothing else, attempting to maximise profits on the back of natural beauty and traditional charm undermines what makes them attractive in the first place.

Simple advice. Oliver Bateman writes about trauma and physical and mental strength, saying: I have always wanted my body to be two things: functionally strong and healthy, and completely my own.

Egress and acceleration. The reliably fascinating Geoff Shullenberger reviews Matt Colquhoun's new book about Mark Fisher and left and right-wing futurism, and offers this powerful sentence: The impact of the virus has thrown the sustaining rituals of politics into disarray and accelerated the migration of social life into a privatized virtual realm. Biological and technological trajectories are unfolding in the absence of effective political control.

Consenswho? Edward Feser writes about Paul Feyerabend's critique of scientism. I think the important question it leaves us with is - when is a scientific consensus not a scientific consensus? Few of us would advocate radical scepticism over the idea that the Earth orbits the sun. But desperate attempts to build a false consensus out of differing opinions on the origins, effects, containment and treatment of coronavirus should encourage doubt towards those muddy little words “the science says”.

A response to a response, to a response to a response. This is a bit self-indulgent so I have saved it for last. A writer at New Inquiry comes for yer boy BD and an article I wrote about rioting.

One annoying thing is that they call me, in the space of a couple of hundred words, frightened (twice), terrified (twice), confused and confounded. There are two additional references to my “fear”. I'm all for a bit of rhetorical fun but that kind of pseudo-psychiatric condescension is cheap. Plus, it is not even used for comic effect.

The writer, Alex Benham, says it is “ludicrous” that I think frustration over Jeremy Corbyn's loss and the tedious uncertainty of lockdowns explains rioting in Britain. But I did not call them the only explanations. Indeed, I explicitly referenced the death of George Floyd and perceptions of Anglo-American policing.

Benham thinks that when I refer to frustrations over lockdowns I am referring to the “frustration of one's rights to work and consume as normal”. Work and consume? That might be his dessicated understanding but it isn't mine. It was the inability to meet one's friends and family and have fun that I thought was more significant.

Benham thinks that rioting represents:

…a desire to care for each other that can only be fulfilled by destroying all that makes caring impossible.

This is obviously why rioters in the US have been attacking churches, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bodegas, pharmacies and so on. Because such apparently unassuming establishments make caring impossible. Confused? Well, that's why you aren't a leftist intellectual. I hope you feel ashamed.