May Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote for my Substack subscribers about the Bam Margera theory of Western civilisation, the death of Jordan Neely, giving up Monster (mostly), the prospects for Poland’s future, drill rap and vicariotica, living on the peripheries, my dog and the meaning of life and the myth of Britain as an immigrant nation.

I wrote for The Critic about the “global majority” meme, the new swing voters (and opinion commentators’ attempts to invent demographics), the National Conservatism conference, why Matt Hancock should piss off and the death of Martin Amis.

We do podcasts at The Critic too. Since my last round-up I’ve spoken to the great Ed West and the great Tom Jones — both about British, and Conservative, decline.

Martin Amis, RIP. A lot of the obituaries for Martin Amis — perhaps my own included — have involved 25-40-year-old men talking about how he inspired them to battle clichés, while scattering their own clichés like farmers sowing seeds. The problem is we learned to dislike the clichés of the 1990s but are far less sensitive to the clichés of our times. John Self’s tribute is the best I’ve seen. Terry Eagleton’s is a bit unfair but quite funny.

Nat Commentary. The National Conservativism conference has generated a lot of discussion. In fact — is “generating discussion” the highest aim of conferences? Could one perhaps invent a non-existent conference and get a bunch of opinion commentators to discuss it? That would save a lot of money. Anyways, J Sorel makes good points about the lack of concrete reforms being discussed. Titus Techera welcomes the critique but longs for more alternative. Will Lloyd thinks it was very dark but also energetic. Henry George says it exposed deep conflicts (though I think the conflicts are somewhat artificial). David Aaronovitch appears to still be working on his immense exposé.

How Brexit backfired. Ed West ruminates:

You would have to be a fool to bet against an institution which has lasted so long but, having been around a lot of Conservative voters recently, I can say that the mood is very unhappy. One of the running jokes at NatCon was that the protesters outside, with their placards denouncing the Conservatives, loathed the party nothing like as much as the people inside did.

Finally, some good news? Scientists claim that the shingles vaccine could prevent dementia. This would be cool, if true, because dementia is horrible but also because of the sheer fortuitousness.

Sorry, Salinger. I didn’t really get into The Catcher in the Rye when I was young, and later I absorbed the idle meme that Holden Caulfield was just a pretentious grump. My error. Lee Siegel hymns the virtues of the book:

Rather, the book very purposefully, and with great artistic complexity, ­portrays the tangled effects of trauma—in this case, Holden’s response to his younger brother ­Allie’s death from leukemia at the age of ­eleven. There is not a syllable in the book that is not ­haunted by this tragedy in Holden’s life.

Hypergeeky about hypergamy. Scott Alexander breaks down male and female relations:

…men and women display an equal and stunning degree of class homogamy. Men may use their class-based market value to purchase a little more education in a mate, and women to purchase a little more income, but both genders consider class first and foremost.

I think the first things I considered were her eyes. What a romantic I must be. (Yes, I appreciate that these aren’t meant to be conscious and calculated thought processes.)

Bottomless Pits of Dysfunction Watch. Charlie Peters discusses making his documentary about grooming gangs. Guy Dampier responds to people who think that the issue was exaggerated or misrepresented.

Inconvenienced. Social decline and economic stagnancy have been obscured by little luxuries. Wessie du Toit observes that even they are slipping out of reach:

Budget services have been dragged down by labour shortages, inflation, and a loss of investor patience. Short-haul air tickets are around twenty to thirty percent more expensive than last year, and with new environmental regulations looming in Europe, it’s safe to say they will never be as cheap as they were. Uber’s fares keep rising, even as wait times have grown. Netflix is cracking down on account sharing and has introduced ads.

Gender neutrally juvenile. I rarely agree with Becca Rothfeld but I always enjoy her writing. Here she is on masculinity gurus:

If I believed in “manliness,” I would say that it is not very manly to seek out a father figure to hand you a script for adulthood, but I don’t, so instead I’ll say that the longing for a lifelong coach is gender-neutrally juvenile.

Against books. As someone finishing a book I’m intensely biased against this piece by Richard Hanania. Still, he makes some reasonable points:

My experience in political science is that what will often happen is that an academic will get a paper published in a major journal. Then it becomes easy to sell a book to a publisher in which you just present the results of that paper and add a bunch of useless words.

We’ve all seen books which could be articles (which could be tweets). If you read books to be informed then you could find yourself wasting a lot of time. If you enjoy language and the process of reading, on the other hand, then you’re on safer grounds. Hanania also writes:

One might read old books for historical interest (Category 2), but the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical.

This might often be true of the empirical sciences. But if you perceive human nature as largely unchanging, someone born 459 years ago could have deeper insights than someone from today. They are working, after all, from the same material. In philosophy, meanwhile, verification is difficult enough that one could reasonably argue that a man from hundreds of years ago was more right than people of our times. That’s one of few things Marxists and Burkeans could agree on.

Okay, I think that’s enough. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’re interested in my stuff. This month I have a whole bunch of stuff I’m planning to write about, from the art world enabling paedophiles, to German reparations, to the immense arationality of belief. And if that doesn’t sound appealing then what the hell does?

Have a lovely month,

Ben