Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I wrote for THE ZONE about sources of national discontent, misinformation and the amoral right, paranoid centrism, weirdness, order and freedom, screwing up a half marathon, being a self-hating opinion columnist and Britain’s depressing government.
I wrote for The Critic in defence of anons, on wrestling podcasts, on two-tier Keir, against exploiting prisoners of war and about the perversity of the Oasis reunion.
Finally, I wrote for American Conservative about the riots.
Party like it’s 1974. Ed West writes about Britain on the brink:
The other similarity with 1974 is a nagging feeling that those in control have run out of ideas, offering only variations of the same theme. When a consensus has been established and the results found wanting, there is a tendency to believe that the best way to fix it is to gather politicians and ideas closest to the ‘centre’. Yet in reality many of these ideas might not be that moderate, and only appear so because of the confrontation provoked by those who want to try something else - and take on the institutions which present an obstacle.
Communities, conflict and coercion. Aris Roussinos considers Britain’s ethnic unrest:
Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.
Bust the Musk? Fred Skulthorp writes about the scapegoating of social media:
As we saw during the pandemic, the idea you can micro-manage and regulate narratives breeds only greater mistrust. Regulating platforms like Twitter, either through banning anonymous accounts or relying on civil servants or NGOS to clumsily adjudicate matters of free speech and identify foreign disinformation will do little to prevent the historic norms that lead to rioting and disorder.
Fifty shades of Gray. Pimlico Journal explore the rise and rise of Sue Gray:
In her new role in Whitehall, she soon toppled the British Prime Minister himself, and then — highly improperly — joined Keir Starmer’s team almost immediately after doing so, adding further sheen to the bizarre bureaucratic-mindedness of the modern Labour Party. In this respect, it perhaps helps that her surname is ‘Gray’.
Femcel fantasies. Nicolas Hausdorf reflects on the war of the sexes:
Arguably, the predicament of both the femcel and the incel is precisely that they cannot accept any real difference of the sexes and that they cannot refrain from making moral judgements about the sexual animalness of humans. At the origin of this predicament, we can imagine an ongoing wounded childish idealisation of the sexual economy, which, when confronted with its reality, becomes fundamentally overwhelmed.
Imperial interventions. Samuel Rubinstein reviews the debate over the British Empire:
One can disagree with Biggar on this or that point – as indeed I do, and as a handful of the contributors to the Anti-Biggar do for good reason – but at least he’s upfront about what he’s up to. He has the ‘anti-colonial’ historians bang to rights on his point that they use morally-laden language without realising it, and then criticise Biggar when he consciously does the same. The historians’ guild assembled to expel this moral theologian from what they felt to be their home turf, but they’re not sending their best.
Dancing with ghosts. KB Goldtooth reviews ABBA: Voyage:
ABBA, in fact, resembled ABBA: Voyage. Just as the former was a covert communion between a lustful pair of Swedish dudes and tens of millions of women — a communion masked by their singing wives — so did ABBA: Voyage use these songs to mask whatever diabolical lust lay behind technology’s ostensibly reflective surface…
Faith and the twisties. Lucy Sixsmith reflects on discernment:
Inordination happens when the good and bad in church, the healthy and unhealthy, the life-giving and horrifying, the strange and unbelievable and implausible and the each-to-their-own and just a bit silly, all mix together, combined with a generous scoopful of inconvenient emotion, and a dash of one’s own incompetence to taste. I’d got pretty good at making teas and coffees, but I couldn’t sort out church on tea alone.
Have a lovely month,
Ben
And now the slow fade, then winter. (Always looking forward to it this late in the summer.) Hope you're well, Ben.
check out this essay by T.L. Davis - I'm posting it in full because remarkably few people follow links: "The 2024 election is the most consequential election in our lifetimes, but it still doesn’t matter. We have already been immersed in the hell that is communist rule. We have a president that does absolutely nothing and Harris will be no different. What we have seen over the past four years is a government run fully by cabinet-level appointees. I have no doubt that Obama was deeply involved in choosing these cabinet posts and is the one who will be answered to on all policy positions from now until he is finally rooted out. If Trump is the one to do that, he’s going to need a lot of help.
This election, if seen for what it is, is an expression of wills. It’s a choice of regular order or communist rule. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen the private armies of the globalists, our police forces and sheriff’s offices, impose rules and dictates sent down from on high. These were not laws and they were not acting lawfully. We have suffered the surveillance, the monitoring of our actions, the visits by the secret police concerning social media posts. We have seen censorship for our views that were ultimately proven true, not the misguided, antigovernment screeds they were proclaimed by a biased and criminally negligent press. We now see people going to prison here and elsewhere for things they’ve said, especially when true. Pavel Durov, CEO of Instagram, has been arrested in France for things other people have said. These are the dark days of communisms showing themselves in real time, across the globe, so there can be no doubt as to the future under Harris/Obama. We know what we will be voting against, that and the intricate and largely computer-driven system of voter fraud. The details of this are utterly shameless. Some states even have recently cleaned voter rolls, required by law and finally enforced, automatically repopulated with those same names. It’s easy, you take a snapshot of the lists in existence, save it, clean the challenged names from the list, wait for the dust to settle and replace the new file with the old one.
To me, I don’t have to wait for this to play out yet again to motivate me. That and the unwillingness of the congress to rectify the fraud and you already live in a corrupted and illegitimate system. Others are going to wait for the election. I don’t know why, but a solidarity of sentiment is important. Everyone has their own line and some people don’t have one at all. The election, as I see it, is merely a reference point for people, a cause or a reaction and they think it’s within their control to decide whether to move or not to move, but they’re wrong. Every decision will be made for them. They have not yet seen the lengths to which the communists will go to vent their hatred on the American people, win or lose.
If Harris wins this election, by fraud, or default (which is a possibility) the game will be on. There is no way, knowing what I know now about how these votes are created and inserted into the system, the infrastructure in place to do that and only that, that they will ever convince me that she won, that a majority of legal voters elected her. I don’t care what they do to manipulate the polls in advance of the second steal. I knew the first one was fraudulent, but I thought there were so many people with skin in the game at the upper levels that they would put things in place to ensure that there was a reckoning to some degree. Watching what has taken place over the past four years, I know there’s no interest in our republic. They want a change, preferably without voters at all. That’s what we’re fighting against.
I may have come to this conclusion a long time ago, but it’s only now that I see a purpose in expressing it. There is no interest in peace with the American people. They want the American people to stand up and fight them. They’re convinced they will win, that the American people have no chance and it will just be a means of further cleansing, a rooting out what’s left of the American spirit so they can get on with their communist system unfettered by public opinion or fear of rebellion. They want to settle it. They’ve imported their foreign fighters into the heartland for that very purpose and they will use them like BLM and Antifa before them. They’re already using the Palestinian protesters in that way. The American people, in terms of historical perspective, are the Native American Indians of today and they plan to deal with us the same way, by starvation, forced dependence and war. If it’s war they want, I have no qualms about giving it to them.
Be not afraid. Your future as an American is the same. You will be imprisoned or killed no matter what you do. One cell will be of stone and mortar, the other will be a monitored existence punished for any unacceptable thought or word. The fight is for the future, not the present. The future might be different for your children or grandchildren, if you fight, but it will be no different for you. Electing Trump sets it off and so you should. It puts the burden on the government then to make the aggressive, offensive moves against the American people. It’s easier to overcome hesitance when the government has made those offensive moves, exposed their heartless judgments, their cruel vindictiveness. Otherwise, it’s all a shouting match about another stolen election and it will take a long time to coalesce around the realities of resisting communism.
The addition of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Trump’s circle of influencers removes the stigma of Trump from a lot of voter’s minds. It gives credence to his vision and ensures that others, especially independents, will move toward Trump, because if he is to win, it will take an extraordinary turnout in his favor. There are all of the illegals and fake voters to overcome. But that’s really just to force the Democrats to drop the pretense of caring about Democracy, though installing Kamala already achieved a lot of that.
In the end, though, no matter which way it goes, it’s probably the last election for many of us. There’s something to be said for the inevitability of the republic’s demise. Republics are successful because they offer freedom to create and produce, but they also offer the freedom, as necessary as it is, of speech. With that, the door opens to communists and their eternal, whining screech for equality of outcomes. Over time, they win and convince enough people who’ve gotten a rotten deal that their promises will bring them a better deal in an egalitarian society. It’s a compelling argument, no matter how many people have to be killed for them to obtain power. As Harris points out herself, the solution always follows the obtaining of power; the solution is never provided to earn or deserve that power." https://tldavis.substack.com/p/the-last-election-before-the-war
Rather reminiscent of this: "prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, and pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. ..." https://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1776-1785/jeffersons-draft-of-the-declaration-of-independence.php
The difference this time - as opposed to other times in our history - is that the ranks in the American military being traditionally filled by white working class people, aren't, any more. Their elders with military experience who have urged them to join in years past, are urging them not to do so, so there is now a huge problem in military recruiting for that class of citizens. The government has lost a lot in terms of perceived legitimacy and credibility, and the people will react to that. And if the government adopts punitive measures against this class - and shows its distrust, hatred, and fear of them - it's a positive feedback loop. We might end up with The Troubles, we might end up with secession, we might end up with open rebellion - or a mix of these, depending on geographical location. It's unlikely to be like the Civil War of the 1860s, more likely the decade before that war in Kansas and Missouri - the years of "Bleeding Kansas" where life continued on peacefully in some areas, others were hit by cross-border raids, and other areas were in total conflict - and no truce or cessation of hostilities was possible, because there was no one to negotiate with, no organization, no front lines... Unless governance and its assumptions change, if they double down on their current policy choices, I think that's what we're headed for.