March Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote on THE ZONE about the anti-Russian case for peace, being a slob, halal slaughter and hypocrisy, the pandemic five years on, Meghan Markle, social media as an emotion parasite, cynicism, Jonathan Bowden and reasons to love Poland.

I wrote for The Critic about Kemi Badenoch, war fever, Europe and the US, smartphones, social conservatism, Boris Johnson, lolcows, Adolescence, Mark Field’s political memoirs, right-wing Corbynites and cults.

Finally, I wrote for Alata about the literature of androcentrism.

A very modern moral panic. There is no denying that social media is full of lies, hatred and perversions — that it feeds off our fears and desires like a vicious parasite and spits them out as algorithmic slop. That said, the campaign to link young men to violence, and that violence to social media, in the wake of the hit serial Adolescence has been so disingenuous and opportunistic that it is impossible not to come to its defence. It would be ignoble not to stand up for an obnoxious man in the bar if he was being bullied. Will Solfiac argues that Adolescence was an absolute clunker and Joe Hackett argues that we are facing a moral panic around social media.

Engineering idiocracy. On the other hand, Richard Hanania argues that Elon Musk and his supporters oppose censorship but encourage intellectual lobotomisation:

He’s a man who has contempt for the entire concept of truth, and doesn’t care if the world knows it, as he poisons the public square. Being caught lying doesn’t embarrass him, since he is not trying to win over anyone who is independent minded and honest.

Alas, I agree. I’ve written about the amoral bullshitters who are prospering on X — and the shameless toleration of falsehoods on the right as long as they are politically convenient. The excuse is always that leftists are dishonest too. But why not be better? What does it say about our beliefs if the truth is not enough?

Overextended, underpowered. Aris Roussinos warns of the scale of the weakness of British defence:

Britain now finds itself in a situation where the resources at hand are vastly below its commitments, because those commitments were made through faulty analysis regarding achievable ends, available resources, and probable outcomes. To have presided over two failures of grand strategy in half a decade might be considered unfortunate. To bolt on a third, at this perilous juncture, could prove fatal.

The Trump doctrine. Steve Sailer attempts to figure out Donald Trump’s bizarre foreign policies:

Nobody in America was sore at Denmark until Trump decided he was. Now, though, many are scrambling to come up with rationalizations for why Denmark deserves to have Greenland stolen from it.

Man and the clan. Chris Bayliss explores the roots of the grooming gang crisis:

I suggest the answer lies in the structure of the societies that the offenders originated from, and which has been transplanted into parts of the Pakistani diaspora in England. Islam has played some part in the shaping of that structure, but my feeling is that the religion’s role in these crimes goes little further than that. The root of the problem is older and deeper.

No place like home. Ellen Pasternack laments London life:

In the recent past, somebody earning £44,000 might have expected to be able to afford to live alone, or at least to be fairly selective about where they chose to live. Instead, what would normally be considered a good salary is enough to struggle to afford a room where you can live like Harry Potter with the Dursleys (“I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I don’t exist”).

Hubbub. Ed West reflects on hubs:

While clubs are voluntary and discriminatory by nature, something that irks modern sensibilities, hubs combine the modern Left’s egalitarianism and its soft authoritarianism …

The CIA Book Club. John Simpson remembers literary propaganda in the Cold War:

It’s only now, all these years later, that I’ve realised I was almost certainly a rather naive mule for a CIA scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. According to Charlie English’s vibrant, beautifully researched and exciting The CIA Book Club, the Polish intellectual and political activist Adam Michnik read The Gulag Archipelago in prison; someone had managed to get a copy to him even there, courtesy of a CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL.

Have a lovely month,

Ben