"Laying the Smackdown on All Their Candy Asses" Edition

Andrew Sullivan? More like Andrew Sucks-to-be-you-man.

Matt Taibbi? Matt Cries-like-a-baby.

Jonah Goldberg's The Dispatch? Loner Oldberg's The Piss Batch.

Persuasion? What are you trying to persuade me to do? Go to sleep?

Jesse Singal? It's not surprising Jesse's single! All of the women he meets thinks he is obsessed with trains issues.

David French? Somehow the French are embarrassed to be associated with him and not the other way around.

Brad Polumbo? Sad, dumbo.

Alright, that's the competition systematically demolished. Let's prepare ourselves to enter,,,The Zone.

Obligatory shilling. I wrote for the American Conservative about the insufferable “all men need therapy” meme.

I wrote a parody of “rich people struggle too” articles for the Spectator USA.

Lastly, I wrote about the ongoing migration crisis in the Mediterranean for paid subscribers to this platform. If that - or Polish culture, or British literature, or American media - interests you, subscribe!

Home front. Do you like the picture? Most of my photographs are at best pretty but I thought this was a good one. A friend observed that it was reminiscent of the paintings of the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński.

No escape. I'm seeing a lot of optimism about the prospects for authorial independence that Substack and similar platforms provide, and I wanted, naturally, to rain on everyone's parade. “The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling,” wrote David Brooks in the column I mocked last week. So far. It is only a matter of time before the people behind Substack begin removing people. “Now I have escaped cancel culture,” is the constant refrain of people who leap from one platform to another without realising that they are still dependent on the grace of Big Tech. I'm not saying it is a bad idea to use this service, I am just saying people on the right side of the spectrum should not get too comfortable.

Other diseases. The New York Times reports on how more than a million people could die of tuberculosis if it goes undiagnosed and untreated due to responses to coronavirus. The Guardian was reporting on this in May.

It is very strange that these reports are not accompanied by commentary on how to stop this happening. It almost appears to have been accepted as a fact of life - a necessary evil as nations cope with what is I think is a considerably less dangerous disease.

I supported most of the initial lockdowns. I thought the precautionary principle made it a necessary response to an outbreak that could soar out of control. If the lockdowns are allowing other diseases to soar out of control, however, one must at least ask oneself: what are we doing?

Managers not elites. Never having been to an elite institution of higher learning as a student or an academic I should be careful before assuming other people's descriptions of them are on the money. I suspect that 95% of the women have dyed their hair blue and 95% of the men have been expelled for sexual misconduct but, really, who knows.

All jokes aside, I thought this account of attending Harvard by Saffron Huang in Palladium rang true, if only because it explains the manner of much of our political and media elites. “An ambitious graduate is conditioned to become more narrow-minded, risk averse, and manipulated by the prestige ladder of the institutional status quo.”

Meanwhile, Helen Andrews reviews a book about college admissions fraud. “Singer’s clients weren’t trying to recreate the pre-meritocratic world where upper-class children could coast their way through the Ivy League. The workaholic meritocracy is their world.”

Beyond artifice. Joseph Keegin writes for Athwart about the philosopher Henry Bugbee. As someone who has always assumed that men fish to escape their wives, I enjoyed the observation on how Bugbee's fishing was in tune with his meditative philosophy. ““He fished with the same eloquence he lived,” his obituary records. “No fly-line could be cast with greater grace; no one could acquire a more studied knowledge of the streams and lakes and the fish that finned there; no one could have a more reflective understanding and appreciation of the fullness of the moment when a fish breaks water.””

Apologies for the irreverence with which I began this newsletter. Of course, there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with trains.

Have a lovely week,

Ben