January Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote at THE ZONE about Jason Molina and Norm Macdonald, Trump’s jingosim, polarisation, provocative comedy, Chevy Chase, turning 35, edgelords, why more intelligent people can be wrong, my mum, bullying and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Please do consider signing up — for the price of a little as a cup of cold poison a month — not just for exclusive writing in the future but for access to almost six years of exclusive writing.

I wrote for The Critic about bar fires, Trump and Greenland, diversity contra quality, British comedy, the British police, prohibitionism, Trump and Europe, Trump (my God! No more Trump next month), Andrew Tate and UK drill.

Home front. It was a pleasure to spend a significant amount of January up in the Polish mountains. High on the slopes, it is clear to me that I’m a simple man. All I need is a roaring fire, a pen and paper, massive quantities of Monster Energy, and uninhibited access to Twitter.

The special relationship. It’s been a tough month for Anglo-American relations. President Donald Trump followed up his bullying of Greenland with obnoxious comments underplaying the sacrifice of non-US NATO troops. Is the “special relationship” over?

Well, perhaps in a political sense it has been diminished — and perhaps that is no bad thing. But I want my American readers to know that I still love you and your country. I love your landscapes, and your professional wrestling, and your Simpsons. And I know that you can’t quit us too. If English people as mediocre as Piers Morgan, John Oliver and Price Harry can make it big in the US, we know you love us really.

Cyber master-criminals. China is executing 11 important members of mafia families who have built cyber-crime empires in Myanmar. Across Myanmar and Cambodia are camps where unsuspecting people are trafficked and forced to work in large-scale online scam operations. It’s a massive industry. The revenue in Cambodia apparently accounts for half of the nation’s GDP.

I get wanting to be rich. I do. Offer me a million pounds and I’ll bite your hand, arm and shoulder off. But it’s depressing to think that people wake up in the morning, gaze in the mirror and tell themselves, “Ah, yes, another glorious day of forcing terrified captives to rob unsuspecting grandmothers of their life’s savings.”

Melania, the Movie. I’m so fascinated by the new documentary about Melania Trump. I might even become its second viewer. But it’s disappointing to think about what could have been accomplished if it had been directed by Rodney Ascher or Werner Herzog. As it is, it’s been directed by the dude who made Rush Hour and hasn’t made a film since being accused of sexual assault in 2017.

British journalists and court eunuchs. Chris Bayliss is justly harsh on British journalism:

The role of regular British political reporting from mainstream outlets is easier to understand if you consider them as the modern equivalents of court eunuchs in Imperial China. Their primary interest is to ensure that protocol is followed, and is seen to be followed, correctly.

Also, check out Chris’s piece on the significance of Twitter:

Twitter gives space for stories which would previously never have seen the light of day to circulate and be tested by those who would wish to disprove them. On some occasions, they can begin to take on a life of their own, as public figures weigh in or embarrass themselves as they attempt to address them. This reduces the reputational risk to established outlets in reporting them, as they can merely be seen to cover the emerging controversy, rather than be the ones to break a story themselves.

Fear the Keir. Ed West reflects on Britain and democratic backsliding:

When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one.

Among the disgusted. Fred Sculthorp visits Tunbridge Wells and discovers that Middle England can’t escape British decline:

I find a smart, polite woman in a pink Gore-Tex jacket and black sunglasses out for a walk. Did she ever imagine the country’s present chaos finding its way here? “I think it was inevitable,” she says with rehearsed drollness. “Since Covid, those wilderness years, we all hoped our life would go back to normal but it hasn’t.” I ask her if she still believes in the Tory party, the shires, the old idea of Middle England. “I just like the middle ground,” she says. Does she think it still exists? “Probably not.”

Our inns, our souls. Pimlico Journal writes in defence of the British pub:

This loss of meaningful third spaces in Britain, which for the vast majority of our recent history has been the pub, has had disastrous social consequences. It goes without saying that for older Britons, predominantly but not exclusively men in particular, the pub is a vital lifeline of social interaction and companionship and that the steep rise of prices, the shift to soulless ‘booze barns’ and indeed the closure of many neighbourhood locals greatly exacerbates the problem of old age loneliness. This also applies to many younger Britons who find themselves at the sharp end of the housing crisis that affects most facets of British life.

Supervisory moralism at the cinema. James Martin Charlton considers the work of Paul King:

King’s signature tendency is to use prepubescence as a kind of moral solvent, in which ethical complexity is not confronted but dissolved by routing it through figures who are childlike but not children. The Paddington films don’t wrestle with problems of migration, integration, and borders so much as boil them into gloop, like oranges in marmalade. Wonka does not deal with issues of labour, corporate monopoly, and lacking cultural capital so much as magically turn them into sickly confectionery. I certainly felt distinctly nauseous after devouring three King films.

Why are liberals more smart? Noah Carl suggests a couple of explanations:

Let’s start with the less flattering reason (which is admittedly somewhat speculative). Intelligent people who hold socially liberal views are engaged in a kind of cognitive error, wrongly assuming that what works well for them works well for everyone. They incorrectly extrapolate from their own experience to that of others, and conclude that an absence of normative constraints on behaviour will maximise social welfare.

Scott A on Scott A. I really enjoyed Scott Alexander’s tribute to Scott Adams — especially the sense of a writer grappling with someone who was both very similar and very different:

You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your purpose in life is really just funny writing …

I was surprised to see a lot of people call Alexander’s piece disrespectful. God forbid that when I die, someone writes thousands of words on what they agreed and disagreed with me about. That will be the mark of a life poorly lived.

“Mental illness doesn’t do that”. Freddie de Boer writes about people who are all for mental health awareness until mental illness becomes really strange and scary:

We are asking, perhaps, that you bear [Kanye West’s] illness in mind, that you not be blind to it, that you be willing to weigh it on your own scales of justice. We are asking you to be willing to be uncertain. You see, all of this is incredibly hard, for the ill and for the loved ones and for the bystanders who have to sort out where their responsibilities begin and end. But I can assure you that the glib, self-impressed, preening declaration “mental illness doesn’t do that” has no proximity, morally or medically, to the truth.

The novelist who took on the mafia. Francesca Angelini reviews what sounds like a fascinating biography of Leonardo Sciascia:

He never got over seeing a mafioso visit a shopkeeper known to be behind on his payments. The man tenderly stroked the hair of the shopkeeper’s small daughter and said: “She seems almost alive.” He recognised, Moorehead writes, that “the mafia’s form of justice, with its codes and omerta, was more real to most Sicilians than a toothless government”.

I wrote about Sciascia here.

When the Music Fades. My sister Lucy was interviewed about her new book here.

Have a lovely month!

Ben