January Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month (and in the final bit of December — I wrote last month’s round-up early), I wrote on Substack about Conservative grifts, Tarnowskie Góry bars, the anti-war left and the anti-war right, Philip Larkin and my late aunt, liberal triumphalism, online moralism, being friends with people who have different politics, deranged gaming adverts and having a home.

I wrote for The Critic about a year of blackpills, the dark idea of “voluntary resettlement” out of Gaza, Eritrean protestors and multiculturalism, Britain’s Yemen intervention, military recruitment and the Vince McMahon allegations. I also began my new podcast review column — of all things — in our print edition. The first piece is devoted to Goalhanger Podcasts. Subscribe here!

It’s war? A lot of British discourse in the first month of 2024 has surrounded the idea of conscription in the face of potential war with Russia. Guy Dampier wrote for us about why this is pure fantasy politics. I agree.

Certainly, it’s good for European powers to increase their military strength to reduce dependence on the US. (Poland has already been doing this.) One thing that unsettles me, though, is that amid all of the arguments about whether Generation Z are too “woke” to fight, or whether Britain is really “worth fighting for”, people were okay with accepting the assumption that it is highly probable that Europe will go to war with Russia. Recruiting Generation Z? Bizarre. Absurd. Preposterous. Total war with Russia? Yeah, why not.

Now, I don’t want anyone to hold this up in 10 years as an example of blithe complacence. We could go to war with Russia. I live in Poland. I’m never counting out invasion. But when the Russians have taken massive losses trying to secure Donetsk alone it hardly seems inevitable. Besides, a large-scale war between European powers and Russia would be so fantastically destructive — so immensely against the interests of both sides — that for all the value of preparedness we also have to focus on avoidance. I hope I’d die for Poland — because Poland would be in the way long before Britain — but I’d rather not do it unnecessarily — or have millions of people join me in the ground.

Is Britain a free country? Ed West is unconvinced:

I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase in at least 20 years, and perhaps that’s because it’s just not true anymore. If that sounds like the sort of hysteria you’d expect from a conservative commentator who’s been on the sherry, just consider a few recent cases.

That’s living. Freya India writes on modern risk aversion:

Screw that! Take a chance! Trust someone! Fall in love! Feel something! Build something meaningful and scary and try your best not to blow it up.

Happy birthday to me. I turned 33 this month. One thing I like about getting older is the sense of time running out. When I was young, life seemed like a vast expanse of time you could get lost in. The sense of finitude offers a lot of motivation. That said, I’m sure finality itself won’t be much fun.

The multipolarity delusion. Aris Roussinos drives his pen into the point between right-leaning realism and leftist third-worldism:

There is a danger, as theory transmutes into policy, that IR realism becomes a more sophisticated version of the vulgar anti-Western self-hatred of the younger Left. Multipolarity, by itself, is no more likely to bring global harmony than European decolonisation brought what we now call the Global South peace and prosperity.

What an interesting man. Becca Rothfeld introduces us to Guy Davenport:

He was prolific in everything he attempted. He spoke five languages and wrote more than 40 books, and he once casually mentioned that he was in the habit of corresponding with “between a hundred and two hundred people,” among them John Updike. (His correspondence with Hugh Kenner, another of modernism’s torchbearers, was published in 2018 as “Questioning Minds,” two volumes that add up to 2,000 pages.)

My problem with pieces like this is that I think “what an interesting man/woman” and then never read anything they wrote. I mustn’t do that again.

Vince, revisited. In my earlier, longer piece on Vince McMahon, I wrote:

McMahon’s newest scandal — one of countless that have plagued him — is, at least according to our current knowledge, among the less sensational. Thus, it could well bring him down. Legends tend to die young or die pathetically.

Apparently, McMahon entered into an affair with one of his office staff — and then paid her a whopping $3,000,000 for her silence. That her salary doubled for no obvious professional reason is what could bring down McMahon businesswise. That she was apparently passed like “a toy” to McMahon’s longtime employee John Laurinaitus makes it especially grim.

I’m glad I at least said “according to our current knowledge” but I should have guessed from the scale of the payout that it could have been something much worse than a grim office affair. That was short-sighted of me and I regret it.

Still, I don’t regret describing Vince as a fascinating cultural figure. He is. The piece was called “Vince McMahon is America”. It seems that Vince — never the most balanced and moral man — got more wild and debauched with age. We wait to see if the same will happen with the United States.

Atomised. Speaking of sad declines…Laurent Lemasson writes on Michel Houellebecq’s new autobiographical book:

This mediocre piece of writing does have one conspicuous merit. We already knew it was wise to separate the man from the author, but now we have learned that, strangely enough, there are sometimes important things the author knows that the man himself does not.

Let me add one sympathetic note on Houellebecq. When he’s satirised the West as being weak and self-absorbed he’s never claimed to be above it.

Blood on the flowers. Samuel Rubinstein reflects on anti-Empire monomania:

In the second chapter of Empireworld, we pace around Kew Gardens, our narrator lost in thought about the relationship between empire and botany. He is jolted by the “painfully polite”, “twee” atmosphere in the Kew Gardens café: how are we to tally this, he asks, “with the racism of influential botanists”? It is unclear what exactly Sanghera wants: perhaps every family enjoying a day out at Kew should be made to reflect on the supposedly bloody history of their surroundings.

Deepfakery. Fake pornographic images of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter — and what a virus AI images could be. When I wrote a column about deepfakes for Quillette in 2019, I got lectured about how unconvincing the technology was. The problem is that technology tends to become more sophisticated — and more accessible. It might take some lawsuits that could crash economies to avert this phenomenon, or else anyone who happens to attract the attention of embittered perverts is going to end up in porn.

The importance of sleeves. Wessie du Toit reflects on authenticity:

In this way, the culture of authenticity produces a grim irony. Having rejected formal codes as too impersonal, it replaces them with conformity. Lacking a language to formulate, even to ourselves, what it is we want to express, and fearing the Holmesian scrutiny of our audience, we find it safer to choose from the menu of existing options.

The tyranny of twee. Fred Skulthorp tours Twee Britannia:

In a time of discord, what detectable cultural consensus there is has been defined above all by a lack of seriousness, a whimsical retreat into a contrived idea of Britain as a stoical nation of loveable eccentrics. Twee Britannia has seeped itself into the soul of the nation, coming to define one of the last common bonds of public life.

Have a lovely month!

Ben