Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote on Substack about professional wrestling, Nietzsche, inequality and empathy, why I am not a Marxist, the Conservative Party Conference, AI art and the future, The Singing Detective, atrocities and the Internet, why neoconservatism remains a terrible idea (and post-October 7th hawkishness could backfire), writing on a mobile phone, the problem with performative empathy, the limits of centrist authoritarianism, techno-optimism, toy octopuses and anti-semitism.
I wrote for The Critic about shoplifting, decolonisation, Graham Linehan’s new book, the Polish elections, COVID and scapegoating, the police, cancel culture and debates about minorities in British history. I also wrote for our print edition about Rory Stewart.
Finally, I wrote for The Tablet about the Polish elections. Phew. A busy month.
Israel’s 9/11? Philippe Lemoine is always a sober-minded thinker and his sceptical thoughts on Israeli strategy are worth reading:
So even if Israel managed to destroy Hamas and the conflict remained limited to Gaza and the West Bank, which remains to be seen, it would have to devote much more resources to the occupation than before. Moreover, sooner or later (probably sooner rather than later), other groups like Hamas will emerge. The Israeli will again face waves of terrorism against both the IDF in the occupied territories and civilians in Israel.
In the new edition of The Critic, erudite military historian and charming writer Peter Caddick-Adams has similar thoughts. It is eminently understandable for the Israelis to feel that they cannot co-exist with Hamas. But that does not make their goals achievable.
Despair of the centrists. Aris Roussinos reflects on Israel and Palestine in the British imagination:
Centre-right commentators who a few weeks ago howled at the Home Secretary’s remarks on the failures of multiculturalism, expressing their satisfaction at Britain’s successful experiment with demographic change, now express horror at the results. Multiculturalism, they have suddenly realised, does not mean the creation of a rainbow coalition of disparate peoples who have all suddenly adopted the worldview of an ageing Times columnist.
Who could have guessed?
Creatures from beyond the void. Santi Ruiz replies to Mark Andreessen on techno-optimism:
I’m a techno-optimist because I think the only way out is through, and that technology must be made to serve human ends. Without a better philosophy of what a human is for, and a higher view of humans than of the technocapital machine, it’s just a vehicle for Land’s creatures from beyond the void.
Homes for Hamas. Ed West writes about British social housing:
Despite being a known and wanted terrorist, Sawalha was allowed to settle in Britain in the 1990s and obtain British citizenship. He continued to work for Hamas, holding talks about committing terrorist acts and laundering money for the group, according to the US Department of Justice. In 2009 he signed the Istanbul Declaration which praised God for having ‘routed the Zionist Jews’, and called for a ‘Third Jihadist Front’ to be ‘opened in Palestine alongside Iraq and Afghanistan’, according to the paper.
All the while he was benefitting from Britain’s social housing system.
Nuance is unsexy. “The Nuance Pill” argues that the scale of modern sexlessness has been overstated:
Ultimately with issues like this, the more nuanced picture always gets lost in the alarmist noise. There’s a reason why everyone’s seen the 2018 GSS graph but almost none of them have seen the subsequent surveys, let alone another source like the NSFG. This just doesn’t emotionally appeal to people in the same way.
Netflixland. Jacob Phillips walks us around the flattened world of popular culture:
I’ve recently begun noticing the frequency with which contemporary TV dramas are set in imaginary places, particularly on Netflix. These places are hardly Middle Earth, but strangely depleted amalgams of typical features of everyday places — a host of “Anywheresvilles” or “Everywherelands”…
RIP Peanut. A beautifully written piece on gaining and losing a pal:
I found him lying in nearly the same spot of the same ditch where he was thrown just over a year ago. And my first thought was how much richer both of our lives had been on account of each other. My second thought was of the sack of leftover biscuits on the kitchen counter.
The rebirth of belief? I contributed to this podcast series by the Christian writer and radio presenter Justin Brierley.
Celebration Poems. My Mum’s book of poems turns two this week.
Have a lovely month,
Ben