June Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote on Substack about Roger Waters and cancellation, sin and bias, excuses for paedophiles, atrocity obscurantism, Anthony Bourdain, Cormac McCarthy, debating and my trip to Rome.

I wrote for The Critic about Tory toothlessness and inescapable inequalities.

I wrote for the Hungarian Conservative about the failure of the Tories and the Spectator World about QAnon and its critics.

Promocja! I always feel a bit bad about doing sales because it seems unfair to people who subscribe at other times. But if Biedronka can do it, so can I. Until July 1st you can get 25% off a monthly or annual subscription to THE ZONE. So, if you were thinking of subscribing — now’s your chance. I really enjoy writing on my Substack and it’s an honour when people enjoy reading it.

The EDIfication of everything. Is English cricket a hive of bigotry? I took aim at the facile egalitarianism of a recent report on “equity in cricket”, and its expectation that men and women’s elite sports should be on equal footing. Niall Gooch, meanwhile, lays into its shoddy methods — such as its assumption that the decline in cricket participation among black Britons must be due to structural prejudice and not an increase in migrants from West Africa rather than the Caribbean. Sadly, EDI will always create the need for more EDI.

Maus trap. The great alternative musician John Maus — his “Hey Moon” is one of my favourite tracks — is being kicked out of festivals for associating with right-wing entertainers. No doubt the organisers think of themselves as very counter-cultural.

Prigozhin’s push. The Ukrainian War grinds bleakly on. Most sensational this month was the abortive coup of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group. It struck me, as his men rolled past miserable Russian troops, and as he grilled a miserable officer who was forced to act is if he was having a conversation and not contemplating his gruesome demise, how humiliating war can be. Excitable trads sometimes like to talk up the bold macho implications of conflict — but war is also shivering in your boots as your opponents swagger past, wondering if they are going to fill your chest with brass and lead. If a war is necessary then that’s a noble risk you take. But if it isn’t…

The aesthetics of profundity. Becca Rothfeld criticises critical pretension. I think the Caroline Calloway book she’s praising sounds about as interesting as a right hook to the dome but I agree with her broader point.

Inclusive fairytales. Ed West deconstructs the Windrush mythos:

Even London schools have been emailing parents to commemorate those ‘answering the call from the British government to work in the NHS, on public transport and in the Post Office’. It is the story of the post-war imperial subjects who answered the appeal of the mother country.

And yet… it’s not quite true.

Honestly amoral. Richard Hanania thinks vegans have good moral arguments but puts selfishness first:

Does doing something you admit is immoral make you a bad person? Maybe by some definitions. But does that make someone who constructs ideological justifications to present their conduct as defensible somehow morally better?

I’m a vegetarian but I’m not a vegan for pretty much the same reasons. In fairness, I don’t think it’s inherently immoral to use animal products. But I doubt the free range chickens whose eggs I eat are quite as free as I’d like to think. Certainly, the male chicks aren’t.

The thing, not the thinking. Freddie deBoer reflects on the dark side of thought:

It appears [Agnes Callard] met her match, though. Her partner says, “I remember watching [Callard’s children] play on the furniture and suddenly realizing: this is the point of furniture.” I find this genuinely tragic: what Callard’s kids found beguiling about playing on the furniture cannot be replicated by thinking about what furniture is for in some mawkish philosophical sense. What they were enjoying was the immediacy of the experience, the tactility of the thing. They were enjoying a thing in the Heidegger sense without thinking like or about Heidegger.

The watermelon. A wonderful slice of life from Bethel McGrew:

Sometimes, I tell them, I write about this kind of thing—and I gesture around the room. “About all the boring people here?” asks Johnny.

Bureaucratic twee. J Sorel is unimpressed by the COVID inquiry:

Fundamentally, these are people who refuse to accept the inevitable side-effects of their own project. Faced with the terrible consequences of the policy of lockdown, they cast about for individuals to blame, for “wreckers”.

The debunker’s delusion. My esteemed colleague Sebastian Milbank criticises the Disinformation Industry:

The same hermeneutics of suspicion and moral contagion that inform the wackiest tin-foil hat wearer are at work in many of those employed by organisations like the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the Anti-Defamation League and numerous fact-checking outlets and liberal media organisations. Use of terms like the New World Order, “cultural Marxism” or “globalism” are all taken to be dog-whistles indicating anti-semitism, white supremacy, support for Russia, or radical libertarianism. Likewise any scepticism towards mainstream reporting is treated as grounds for assuming “denialism” whether towards issues like climate change, evolution, gender ideology or vaccines. 

Messages more than poems. Adam Kirsch reflects on the later work of Auden.

Thank you for reading. Have a lovely month,

Ben