July Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote on Substack about the death of Twitter, masculinity guru globalism, the ideological abyss of the Conservatives, a breakup and a dying dog, being stranded in Luton, the limits of the red pill and the life and work of Noah Romano.

I wrote for The Critic about cyber-hackers, pseudo-centrism, “national civic service”, why the Falklands should be British and the death of Amber Gibson.

I wrote for the Washington Examiner about why “anti-woke” comedy shouldn’t put politics before being funny. I also wrote for the Spectator about tech bros and martial arts.

RIP Lola. You might have inferred that it’s been a rough month. July started with my dog’s 14th birthday, and a couple of weeks afterwards she had a sudden illness that left her unable to stand, drink or eat. I carried her around her favourite walk before we drove to the vet, and a couple of hours afterwards I carried her into the crematorium. I wrote about my dog a few times here: on her 13th birthday, when she nearly died and as she was dying. I hope I helped to make her happy — but I didn’t do as much for her as she did for me. Thanks, old friend. Rest in peace.

Psychotherapaths. You will not regret reading this eye-opening London Review of Books essay on the psychotherapy cult “the Sullivanians” in its entirety:

Borrowing from the rhetoric of revolutionary politics, they forged a gospel of self-actualisation and social change, eventually systematising Sullivan’s intuitions into a manifesto, The Conditions of Human Growth (1963), in which the analyst’s role was to mobilise the patient’s inner ‘guerrilla fighter’ against the strictures of the nuclear family and the capitalist order.

How easily the flight from “strictures” creates its own. More:

Members’ lives were increasingly regimented. Guidelines stiffened into rules, with punishments for infractions, and patients were encouraged to inform on one another. Any couple suspected of monogamous tendencies would be accused of getting into a ‘Focus’ or forming a ‘Hostile Integration’, for which they could expect to receive a ‘Summary’ – Sullivanian for a public denunciation by one of the therapists – along with a fine, and possibly a slap or punch from Newton. The affirming attitude to sex morphed into an effective ban on saying no, especially if the person asking for it was a therapist.

It’s a review of a book by Alexander Stille, who wrote the exceptional Excellent Cadavers about Cosa Nostra. I can’t wait to read it.

The meaning of Modi. Christopher Caldwell explains the appeal of the BJP — the Hindu nationalists who hold power in India:

A frequent complaint of V.S. Naipaul was that India was the only country that expected its authoritative histories and national myths to be written by foreigners. This fall the first medical school textbook was published in Hindi—the language of a scientifically inclined population of 600 million people. Modi’s home minister, Amit Shah, attended the launch party. The historian Mukul Kesavan, though far from a supporter of Modi, noted nonetheless that the “hyper-educated liberals” of the subcontinent were almost totally ignorant of Hindi fiction, poetry, and journalism. He laments: “When a demagogue like Modi takes a swipe at the likes of [Nobel-winning Harvard economist] Amartya Sen with a motto like ‘hard work is better than Harvard,’ knowing anglophones might snigger but it resonates amongst people who have been at the receiving end of this privileged knowingness forever.”

The problem, for populists, is that resenting “knowingness” can mutate into resentment of knowledge. Still — a very interesting piece.

No more heroes. David Patrikarakos files a sobering report from the front lines of Ukraine:

“They say we are an army of heroes,” he told me. “But we don’t need heroes. We need soldiers who live. Heroism is complete fucking bullshit. You only create heroes when someone somewhere has made a mistake. At the heart of every heroic story is a human life. A mother without a son. A daughter without a father. A country without its citizens. Let’s have no more fucking heroes.”

Dancing on a volcano. Ed West writes a three parter on the social tensions that bubble and seethe in France:

Hussey is of the Left, politically, but his book is free of the sort of preaching and platitudes that dominate progressive analysis of multiculturalism, and which instruct the reader that ‘if only’ prejudice and mistrust could be overcome, all would be well. In this case the situation is what it is, and perhaps there isn’t really a happy way out of this historical tragedy.

‘It may be that what France needs is not hard-headed political solutions or even psychiatry,’ he concludes: ‘but an exorcist’. They’re still dancing on a volcano.

Wrinkles. Helen Andrews reflects on Barbie:

Which brings us to Barbie. Barbie is a symbol of youth, beauty, and possibility. She can be anything, and everyone is drawn to her. But it’s all meaningless because the reason she’s so beautiful and perfect is that nothing has ever happened to Barbie. All the meaning in life comes from the things that give you wrinkles.

It’s a good take — though the problem with the take industry is that watching a film after seeing its reviews means filtering it through a maze of different ideological interpretations.

Mistargeted advice. Mark Solfiac addresses what’s wrong with men feminism:

[Caitlin] Moran is an exemplar of a certain class of female writer who sees herself as highly empathetic, but who generally fails a basic test of empathy: to imagine oneself in the shoes of someone very different. The key here is the difference between affective/emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Writers like Moran may well be very high in affective empathy, i.e. sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering, with an understanding of their emotional state deriving from similar experiences … However, she and other writers like her massively fail at cognitive empathy, the ability to understand another perspective or mental state of which one may have no personal experience or intuitive understanding.

Have a lovely month,

Ben