Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote at THE ZONE about sexual predation, my morning routine, the prospect of civil war in Britain, the fifth birthday of THE ZONE, Douglas Murray versus Dave Smith, Kneecap, conspiracy theories, online archetypes and ageing novelists.
I wrote for The Critic about Agnes Callard’s new book, TV dramocracy, inequality, The Holy Grail, Jess Phillips MP, Kemi Badenoch and Adolescence, Keir Starmer, bad journalism and Tom Skinner.
Bad vibes. Alex Kaschuta reflects on the online right:
… the online right is a machine for creating ever-escalating brainworms, personality cults, mental dissociation, haphazard and destructive policies, and in the end eating itself through purity spirals and the eternal struggle to prove you are the most based left standing at the top of the iron hierarchy of nature.
There’s a lot of truth to what Alex writes — and I have laid into the untruthful and opportunistic elements of the online right myself — though it is important to add that “the online right” is a sphere of interest and activity, and not a coherent collective. If you’re a libertarian in Romania, you don’t have to feel like you’re in a co-dependent relationship with a Canadian monarchist and vice versa.
Civil war in Podcastistan. In a similar vein, Konstantin Kisin writes on the problems with the alternative media:
The world of entertainment is not driven by truth-seeking, and the claim that someone’s ideas are false is no longer an effective critique. Podcastistan is a place where people scold the mainstream media for failing to live up to their standards on honesty and accuracy while having none of their own.
Sure. Did anyone think replacing the mainstream media with gym-crazed supplement salesmen and failed stand-up comedians was going to lead to an epistemic golden age? The problem is that people lost their unquestioning faith in the honesty and rigour of mainstream journalists and put their unquestioning faith in the honour and rigour of obscure academics and unhinged tech billionaires. The problem is not just the object of the unquestioning faith. It is the unquestioning faith.
A binary choice. Jacob Phillips writes on Jesus and “cultural Christians”:
You cannot be so disturbed as wrongly to think you are the incarnation of God while at the same time having the sort of insight that grants profound and perennial spiritual wisdom. Messianic delusions discredit everything else a person says.
I’m not sure that this is true — the term “mad genius” exists for a reason — but it is a powerful challenge.
Fundamentally destabilising technology. Jason Hausenloy considers AI:
… the arrival of powerful AI will fracture both domestic and international politics. It is a fundamentally destabilising technology — socially, economically, and geopolitically. Increasingly realistic chatbots will support, and then substitute, human friendships and relationships. Autonomous AI agents will replace cognitive labour, then robots will take care of the rest. And the development of this technology might herald the beginning of a new geopolitical Cold War with China — where a Taiwan invasion becomes ever more enticing, data centres become strategic missile targets, and cyberweapons make it onto the escalation ladder.
Life and love. Nina Power reflects on play:
An excess of seriousness often contributes to the very thing one is concerned about—be it war or more anxiety. The person who cannot play is in a melancholic place: play reminds us that life and love can be understood with a light heart, and that unexpectedly good things happen the moment we loosen our grip.
Maladjusted militants. Luca Watson writes on the decline of jihadis:
For those caught in the wake of these attacks by the socially and psychologically maladjusted, jihadism’s danger remains very real and tragically deadly. But intellectually and culturally, its cachet has collapsed. Jihadis no longer represent a real threat to Western hegemony, but a tragic living consequence of decades of social and immigration policy that has filled the West with directionless men of foreign origin overtaken by resentment towards societies they feel no connection with.
The future of the Left? Henry Reynolds Skelton reviews Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule:
As soon as you filter out the petty anecdotes and media rigmarole nobody actually cares about, you’re left with little more than limp-wristed calls for renationalisation and a flood of cringeworthy football references.
Neighbours and nations. Michael Kranz reports on local identity in Poland:
Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home.
Style and civilisation. Jude Russo ponders literacy:
I have recently noticed in my editing that people have started to write in a strange way: unfinished parallelisms, strange parenthetical irruptions of the authorial voice in the middle of straightforward informative passages, a cavalier approach to verb transitivity, odd repetitions and messy subordinations. I realized that they are writing in the open-ended, elliptical syntax of podcast hosts.
I post this without judgement, because I think in the last year I’ve read more pieces about the decline of literacy than I’ve read books.
Low mimetic nation. James Charlton reflects on TV drama:
Returning Adolescence to the categories of artifice and fiction does not do it a disservice. It frees it from the attempt to box it as mere journalism.
Have a lovely month,
Ben