September Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote for my paying subscribers about Hitler revisionism, AI and journalism, the establishment sources of radicalisation, the latest Trump assassination attempt, English identity, Richard Hanania and Richard Spencer, the far right rainbow coalition, Vince McMahon and Russell Brand. Do subscribe if you’re interested in reading this, and much more, both from the archives and in the future.

I wrote for The Critic about Conservative leadership candidates, Peter Oborne, autumn, Britishness, the war on pubs and Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn.

Freebie jeebies. There’s an element of hypocrisy in journalists clucking their tongues about the donations received by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his comrades in their Labour Party. Journalists get loads of free stuff — free meals, free drinks, free tickets et cetera.

I suppose if you want to keep your integrity, you have to ask yourself why you are getting something. American Conservative luminaries Dave Rubin and Tim Pool are alleged to have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Russians, without — again, without — knowing where that money was coming from. If someone wanted to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to write, well, I’d be thrilled, but I would at least be keen to know what was in it for them. People rarely spend money out of the unfiltered kindness of their hearts. They’re paying for something — and what is that something?

Goveing nowhere. Conservative veteran Michael Gove has been named as the new editor of The Spectator. I’m not a fan of Mr Gove’s Blairite Toryism but that’s almost beside the point. At a time where the British right desperately needs to change, its leading weekly organ will be helmed by a man who was at the heart of Conservative leadership for the last fourteen years.

An English illusion. I thought this piece by Wessie du Toit on England’s financial elite was fascinating:

Britain has a genius for luring High Net-Worth Individuals into a kind of fantasy world — a world where the First World War never happened, and the most modern luxuries somehow coexist with an eternal Edwardian splendour. Townhouses in Mayfair and Chelsea maintain their stately exteriors, even as they conceal vast underground swimming pools and garages stuffed with Range Rovers.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a bit of an illusion, of course. The problem is when the illusions of England is all the elites care about.

Everything is fandom. This is a powerful piece by Katherine Dee on the “true crime community” and the more perverse attempts to find meaning on the internet:

Fame gives your life meaning. It’s not about being “great” for greatness’s sake alone. Fame says that your time on this earth was worth something.

You are not just noise, you are a signal.

Of course, we would never be like this in the Ben Sixsmith Community.

Cringe? This essay about awkwardness by the philosopher Alexandra Plakias annoyed me, and it annoyed me more than it should have done because I thought I might enjoy it. Plakias is correct that creating “awkwardness” is not necessarily bad. But she comes close to arguing that it is necessarily good. As she says, awkwardness is “caused by a failure to conform to existing social norms”. So, the value of awkwardness depends on the value of those social norms. Where these social norms are bad, a bit of awkwardness might be valuable. But I happen to like, say, the social norm about not standing very close to someone while you talk to them. We should keep it.

Twilight of the hacks. Here is a great piece by Fred Skulthorp on journalistic self-importance and irrelevance:

And this I suspect is why everyone now hates journalists. The twentieth century mistakenly blessed the industry with ideals of grandeur that set it on a path for self destruction. It industry became a vehicle for narcissists and self promotion. The moment it touched fame or notoriety, the actual work died.

Explaining reality to Ed Miliband. Chris Bayliss laments the lack of establishment realism over energy and the environment:

At the heart of this confusion is the fact that we don’t really understand what we are planning to replace the fossil fuel economy with. Politicians have passed aspirational legislation setting deadlines for existing technology to be phased out, in the hope that the market would figure out the alternatives and the technology in time. These deadlines seemed far enough in the future for the politicians not to worry about implementation, but these are mainly people without any professional experience about the timescales involved in major capital investment planning.

Another island. I enjoyed this interesting and clear-eyed article about life in Taiwan from Pimlico Journal.

The funniness of Trump. Ed West reflects on a comic career:

He’s also had several rows with foreign politicians. He described Gustavo Petro, future president of Columbia, as ‘a major LOSER’ and called Kim Jong-un ‘Little Rocket Man’, and ‘obviously a madman’, and once tweeted that ‘I would NEVER call him 'short and fat’. In a famous foreign policy declaration, the US president tweeted: ‘North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!’

Ironically, Trump’s most famous “funny” moment, when he tweeted “covfefe”, was not funny at all because it was merely random and anyone could have done it.

Have a lovely month,

Ben