July Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote at THE ZONE about the USA, annoying words, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, opinion commentators, celebrating death, Joy Division, slurs, London Falling and China and dogs.

Pretty much every week I write twice exclusively for my paid subscribers. If that interests you — as well as hundreds of archived pieces — please consider subscribing.

I wrote for The Critic about Twitter, Count Binface, banned books, social media, Argentina, The Salt Path, Jim Goad, Stella Creasy, divisiveness and a conservative conference.

I wrote for The American Conservative about animal welfare.

Finally, I wrote for The Daily Wire about tech gurus.

Arday bargy. The scandal surrounding allegations of plagiarism and fabrication levelled against Cambridge professor Jason Arday fascinated me less because of the allegations themselves than because of how left-wing academics and politicians fell over themselves to deny them without even the briefest of investigations. There was no attempt to argue that the allegations were wrong because of X, Y and Z (an argument I would have been open to and that I’d still be open to if Professor Arday wants to make it). Right-wing criticism of a black professor, it seemed, was wrong precisely because it was right-wing criticism of a black professor. I mean, take a look at this from Professor Alan Lester:

He referenced his source many times, in text and in references, making his debt to her explicit … If one went systematically hunting any academic in this way one would find similar.

But the accusation, whether it is right or wrong, is that Arday copied extracts without acknowledging it. “If one went systematically hunting any academic in this way one would find similar”? I am not an academic and I’ve never copied someone’s text without being clear that I am quoting them. As an editor, I wouldn’t publish someone who did (unless, of course, it was a dim formatting mistake, but that seems different).

This sort of tribalism ends up looking worse than the initial accusations — the truth of which has yet to be conclusively determined. Kathleen Stock is very good on the embarrassing affair.

Cricketing corruption? I can’t stop reading about the “Clicky Ponting” scandal in British village cricket, in which a team stands accused of devising a scam in which a player would click his fingers to convince an umpire that a batsman had hit the ball before being caught behind. On the one hand, it feels a bit unfair for the players to be the subject of national intrigue as if Saltburn Cricket Club’s second XI is the cricketing equivalent of Man United. On the other hand, what makes this case so fascinating is that such a low-stakes activity is alleged to have been the subject of such a high-stakes plot. It’s like incapacitating your spouse so you can beat them in a game of Scrabble.

A minor god of mischief. Here’s a fun profile of Johnny Knoxville from Jackass. Ignore some of the writer’s more annoying analysis and you have to be fascinated by a man who shot himself in the chest for other people’s amusement:

“Jackass” wouldn’t work without its lovable ensemble cast, but Knoxville is the obvious ringleader. When you watch him crash into a fruit cart or electrocute his friends, it is tempting to think of him as a minor god sent down from Olympus for the amusement of higher entities—an emissary of mischief loosed upon mortals who are powerless to resist or understand him. “Get a load of this,” you imagine Zeus saying as Knoxville Jet Skis through a garden hedge.

After Brent. Fred Sculthorp writes about The Office, Slough and England:

“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

Predators stalk. Alessandra Bocchi considers stalking:

Regardless of who decides to stalk, when you’re on the receiving end, it makes you feel deeply unprotected, and it activates your alertness as if you were alone in a forest in the dark, hearing growling noises. If you think about it, in nature, predators stalk their prey before attacking them, waiting for them to be isolated and off guard to pounce.

Intense agony. Here is a disturbing piece from Bentham’s Bulldog about the capacity for animal suffering — even very, very small animal suffering. I’m sceptical about its more radical implications, but it is a subject that deserves to be considered:

Here, I will argue for what can be called the widespread agony thesis. This thesis simply holds that the capacity to feel intense pain is quite widespread, being present in crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters; insects like ants, flies, and bees; and fish.

Crime and kinship. Chris Bayliss reflects on the cultural roots of the grooming gangs scandal:

The fact is that a tightly-knit extended family structure in which the individual is tied by mutual bonds of absolute obligation to their kin, far above and beyond any loyalty to the state or its laws, is an ideal platform for any kind of illicit activity. Where they evolved naturally, kinship structures provide a reliable basis for cooperation in societies with low levels of trust between non-relatives — but transplanted into high trust societies, they are very powerful means of evasion and protection from the law.

Terror and farce. In the wake of the Berlin Pride terror attack, Jan A. Karon explores the perverse naivete of European institutions:

The suspect being free and being able to kill, after everything else he had been accused of doing, seems simply farcical. Ballout had already tried to join a terrorist army, continued to consume its propaganda even after Lebanese detention, was under electronic and physical monitoring, and was still walking the streets of the German capital on the strength of a counselling program with the hope that juvenile justice might yet reform him.

The rain on spain. Anyone surprised by the chaos in Ceuta should have been following Jack Davey in The Critic:

The measure will grant rights to migrants without papers who have no criminal record and who had been in the country for at least five months before 31 December 2025. Its consequences will be enormous. Official estimates state that over 500,000 people could be included under the amnesty, but the true number will probably be far larger. The best estimates state that Spain has 840,000 irregular migrants. However, a Podemos source told El País that the number of regularised migrants could well exceed one million by the end of the process.

The science of sex. Jerry Coyne reviews a new book by Steve Stewart-Williams on sex differences:

Stewart-Williams notes that such differences could reflect sociocultural pressures like socialisation or bias rather than innate preferences, but we have some data against purely social explanations. Two big meta-analyses, for instance, show little evidence for the differential socialisation of boys and girls—and, anecdotally, we all know of despairing parents who tried to give their children gender-neutral upbringings, only to see them revert to behaviours characteristic of their sex.

Dark Side of the Ring. Wrestling fans — which I assume is all of you — shouldn’t miss this three-part series on Jeff Jarrett and TNA.

Have a lovely month!

Ben