February Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote for my Substack subscribers about conmunities, drill rap, gangs and the media, lolcows, relationship writing, Iraq and Ukraine, The Rest Is Politics, scepticism, Brendan Schaub and Reddit and teenage depression.

I wrote for The Critic about the next Republican nominee, community tensions in the UK, grooming gangs, AI risk, physical media, gender criticism, Britain’s blasphemy laws and the oncoming Conservative defeat.

Blasphemy in Britain. Nothing disgusted me last week like four pupils being hung out to dry by their school for the crime of getting a bit of dirt on a Quran. I wrote about it here. Somehow, teenagers being a bit careless with a book — yes, a holy book, but a book nonetheless — was a matter for a police investigation, but people sending the teenagers death threats was not. It’s outrageous that “community relations” has become synonymous with pacifying the mob.

A plan without a plan. I hope I am far from being a right-winger who is glib about environmental issues, but I thought this piece we published at The Critic this month by James McSweeney on Britain’s “net zero” plans was very disturbing:

There must be a plan, right? You would think turning off 73 per cent of the grid whilst forcing everyone to buy electric boilers and cars isn’t the sort of decision a politician makes on a whim, or for the sake of a press release. 

Having looked into this extensively, I can confirm that there is no plan. 

Better Without AI. I haven’t read all of this online “book” by David Chapman because it is essentially a collection of blogposts and I’m such a disorganised reader that it enables my temptation to skip between its chapters in an ungainly way. Still, it is an interesting argument that the dangers of AI are not just speculative but playing themselves out as we speak — making us a frog being boiled in tech we do not understand. His alternatives, he admits, are “woefully short on details”. But it is compelling stuff.

Tom Howard gives the pro-AI perspective.

Information and communication. Becca Rothfeld asks if chatbots can write novels:

Literature is not (only) a conveyer of information but a locus of communication, and we cannot communicate with an inanimate mechanism, whirring its insensate way through text it does not even comprehend. For this reason, we could only ever really care about words that have been deliberately placed on a page by another person.

How well they can imitate communication, in the future, is another question.

The pen is not that mighty. Oliver Traldi reflects on language policing and magical thinking:

The dispute about language is therefore a dispute about the direction of causation. The new censoriousness is informed by the idea that our problems begin with language, which determines how people feel about things, which in turn determines behavior and outcomes.

Ideology is boring. Ed West tackles moralism in history:

Many historians are privately concerned about the purity spiral, but they either agree with the politics — or at least dislike its opponents more — or feel the force is too strong, or see retirement awaiting. Ideology may end up undermining history as a discipline, but it’s also boring. History should be fun. It’s a black comedy, not a morality tale.

Cell death. Freddie deBoer critiques the Beckettian emptiness of much online “content”:

In one of the videos I linked to, some meaningless letters are scrawled on a toilet handle. Why? Because that confusing behavior compels people to comment, or even better, to share the video with others in an effort to find meaning in that meaninglessness. That’s the whole game.

Dreher and there. I’ve been reading Rod Dreher’s American Conservative blog for at least ten years. It always felt like a last vestige of the blogging era. Now, Dreher is migrating from AmCon to Substack. Good luck, Rod!

What’s the difference between a blog and a Substack? I feel like the former is expected to be more like a journal and the latter is expected to be more like a magazine. There are good and bad aspects to this. It raises the standard of what you can expect from a writer — but it also encourages people to pretend to have more coherent and complete thoughts than they do. I’m sure there is a happy balance to be found in the middle.

Have a great month,

Ben