March Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote for my Substack subscribers about wrongness and responsibility, fatigue and rhetoric, China and misinformation, Sam Bankman-Fried and Shakespeare, the Iraq War and justification, wokeness and problematising, mainstream and underground entertainment and abrasiveness in writing.

I wrote for The Critic about Wakefield and cowardice and the Iraq War. I also made a little satire of British politics podcasts.

For the Washington Examiner, I wrote a tribute to the great singer-songwriter Jason Molina on the tenth anniversary of his death. This one meant a lot to me.

ChatGPTerror. The rapid progress that is being made in the field of artificial intelligence is terrible news — terrible news, that is, for those of us who thought that we could pivot to copywriting when the bottom fell out of our gigs in opinion commentary. As for mankind at large, well — we can see that it has admirable uses. This guy used GPT4 to diagnose a life-threatening illness in his dog. But just as it can make the valuable pursuit of knowledge more effective — say, in healthcare — it can make the damaging pursuit of knowledge more effective too. This guy using it to plan a death camp is kind of a silly example but you can see how useful desperate-to-help AI could be to people planning fraud, surveillance, terrorism et cetera.

Its ability to create realistic media has been supercharged as well. Half of Twitter thought this “photo” of the Pope in a fetching designer jacket was real for a day (in fairness, the Pope really should wear a jacket like that). I wrote a column for Quillette two years ago about deepfakes and got assailed by commenters because deepfakes were hard to create and didn’t look especially realistic. The point, with technology, is to imagine what it could look like with increased technological sophistication. I’m sure the Wright Brothers couldn’t have imagined a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II but here we are.

Happy birthday to THE ZONE. Yes, THE ZONE turns three this month. Thanks so much to everyone who has been following. I know it can be eclectic to the point of self-indulgence but I always hope that it is interesting.

A disastrous catastrophe. Two valuable essays by Ed West do a great job of explaining why it was delusional to think Iraq could be transformed into a liberal democracy. That said — the US and the UK still did a terrible job (dissolving the state, half-arsing their post-war mission, using torture et cetera). The plan was bound to fail, but the “Coalition of the Willing” somehow failed even worse than they could have done.

A fragile state. One thing I regretted about my pieces on Iraq was saying that the nation is in a better state than it was when Saddam was in power and not adding a big, fat for now. Adam Tooze explains how much that qualification matters.

The costs of war. Philippe Lemoine wrote an interesting article for us this month about the costs of war between Russia and Ukraine. I thought that it was a valuable dissent from mainstream opinion, because the deontological case for war — while strong! — has been overvalued at the expense of practical assessment. What is achievable in Ukraine — and for what price?

Castaneda the sorcerer. I love being sent articles about things I knew absolutely nothing about — and that very much applied to Daniel Miller’s fascinating look back at the strange life and career of the spiritual hoaxer Carlos Castaneda.

Actually… When I read that Harry Lambert of The New Statesman, whose writing I enjoy, had written an article about what really happened in Wakefield I was curious. I wrote two articles about the persecution of four schoolboys who had somewhat mishandled a copy of the Quran and had appeared on TV talking about it. What had I, and people who agreed with me, got wrong? Well, not much. Lambert clears up a few factual errors in the reporting, which is useful, but none of them dispel the view that four schoolboys were persecuted for somewhat mishandling a copy of the Quran. It’s tempting to think that when events like this take place the truth must “lie in the middle”. But while there are probably nuances that press coverage has missed, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t lie very far to one side.

Home front. I’ve just had my bathroom renovated. There’s something quite emasculating about renovations. You’re effectively asking people to come into your home and saying, “I can’t make this look nice. Can you make this look nice?” Now, we have professionals for a reason. I haven’t had the time to make coffee today so I definitely don’t have the time to learn how to install a shower. But I always admired my first boss in Poland — who was doing freelance work in the morning, running his business in the afternoon and doing up a flat for his daughter in the evening. I hope in the future I will at least be able to replace a broken socket pipe tile.

On God. Bethel McGrew is writing a series on “rational faith”, which touches on the book I should get back to writing.

Have a great month,

Ben