July Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote on THE ZONE about The Sopranos, esotericism, violence in politics, tech nerds for Trump, my experience of education, Oliver Traldi’s Political Beliefs and childless dog gentlemen. I normally aim for an absolute minimum of eight pieces (these round-ups not included) and apologise for failing to meet that. I’ll make it up next month.

I wrote for The Critic about Keir Starmer’s win, the paranoid style in British centrism, Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the Southport killings.

I wrote for The American Conservative about the dawn of Starmerism and The Spectator about the melancholy of the middle of July.

Labour pains. Mainstream British commentators were insistent that the election of Keir Starmer represented the return of normality (whatever that is). Since then, it’s been riots, riots, riots. It’s almost as if Britain has deeper problems than the immature character of its politicians. I wrote about the fetish for “grown-up politics” last year:

The British state is not drifting along in calm waters beneath sunny skies. The nation is beset by housing shortages, inflation and institutional failure. The world, of course, is facing the prospect of a local war escalating with global consequences. The call for “stability” is disingenuous on its face because the UK has been set on large-scale social, cultural and demographic change for decades, and so “stable” politics are “stable” in the sense that a speeding car can maintain a steady course. Yet it is also silly because Britain doesn’t just need sober management. It needs change. It needs reform. That takes more than being “grown-up”. It takes imagination and intrepidity.

Bidend. So, farewell then, Joe Biden. An apparent fait accompli has seen him be replaced with Kamala Harris. The Democrats look stronger now — though of course a lot of that is based on pure hype, and there is a long way to go. Back in February, I wrote that “Democrat officials must be having sleepless nights imagining Biden’s performance in the debate”, and called his administration “farcically opaque and dishonest”. If his decline was so obvious to me — a random British idiot living in Poland — how obvious it must have been to everyone who worked with him. What a grand and elaborate farce. But I think some liberal and left-wing commentators are suffering from an interesting problem. They assume that all right-wing claims are “misinformation”, and the fear of “misinformation” inspires them to misinform themselves.

Danish pastry. Will Solfiac writes in measured praise of the Danish turn on immigration:

So what are the overall lessons here? Denmark is still a liberal democratic Western country experiencing the same pressures as the rest, and it is diversifying. The process is going less quickly than in some other countries but it is still the same trend. Anyone demanding an immigration moratorium and a reversal of increasing diversity is not going to be satisfied with the Danish policy.

Denmark is more successful than peer countries though in three ways. Firstly by slowing down the process and making it more manageable. Secondly by facing up to the fact that not all immigration is the same and trying to prevent its more damaging manifestations. And thirdly by achieving national political consensus and relative policy effectiveness on the issue.

Moving prose. Phil Christman (my spellchecker is grimly intent on calling him “Christmas”) writes on travel:

Here I am, having an epiphany in the middle of my silly quotidian life. I am as absurd as Elizabeth Gilbert, or Alanis Morissette. I am realizing something obvious—that the quality of attention we bring to things is more important than the freshness of the things we bring attention to—and I had to go to so much trouble to do it.

I f*cking hate scientism. Max Lacour reflects on the pandemic and scientific evidence:

Ministers have to be better at reading and interpreting graphs certainly, but they must also learn to see them as partial and leading and in need of systematic balancing against other, competing accounts of what matters. Pursuing the former without the latter risks simply making ministers ever more uncritically receptive of scientists’ narrow worldviews and disciplinary priorities. To continue reaping the benefits of science-based policy, while avoiding its terrible harms, science needs to be seen for what it is — useful and (often) fascinating but reductive and (equally often) value-laden. 

Home front. I’ve signed up to run a half marathon next month. I thought it would provide good motivation for cleaning up my diet and not drinking or smoking. But then I had an epiphany. Would it not be more inspiring to run it without cleaning up my habits as proof of what the mind and body can withstand?

Trad(TM). Mary Harrington explores the ironies of extremely online tradwives:

With production values that good there’s likely a crew on-site to assist with lighting, shooting, editing and publishing [Neeleman’s] all-natural-looking kitchen creations. Neeleman herself has detailed their 30+ employees, and shared footage of the (considerably less artfully styled) space where Ballerina Farm Oompa-Loompas package and dispatch products from the show’s multimillion-dollar spin-off food and lifestyle brand. Their farm-cum-home-cum-studio is clearly a hive of activity and people, all the time. As the interview notes, there are also domestic cleaners, plus a home tutor to educate the older children.

I don’t pretend to be “trad” at all, but I suppose attempts to promote less technological lives will always depend on some amount of hypocrisy. It takes technology to promote yourself. Even Ted Kaczynski used the mail.

Making natalism work. Ed West writes on Paul Moreland’s No One Left:

The only real answer, Morland observes, is that Israelis swim in a pro-natal culture, and one factor is that under-appreciated human dynamic – status. He quotes one commentator as saying ‘Successful people in high tech have made it if they have a lot of children. They have four kids and are proud of the fact that they can afford it. Yachts, private planes and fancy cars are not the symbol here… it’s the number of kids.’ So it might be possible to reverse the baby bust, without eroding women’s hard-earned freedoms, by raising the status and prestige attached to parenting.

That’s a pretty strange way to look at having children. Then again, we’re a pretty strange species.

Redefining friendship. Freya India writes on friendship in an online age:

Here’s what happened: when phone-based social media platforms emerged in the early 2010s they did not just take time away from real-life friendships. They redefined friendship for an entire generation. They gutted it. They removed the requirements of effort, of loyalty, even of meeting up, and replaced them with following each other back, exchanging a #likeforlike, and posing for selfies together. Facebook made becoming friends as easy as clicking a button.

I’ll have you know, Freya, that I’m friends with every one of my Twitter mutuals. Even if I know nothing about them. Even if I keep forgetting their name. Even if I can’t remember why we ever followed one another. That’s real friendship.

Have a lovely month,

Ben