"Matter of Fact, Go Ahead and Link That, Couple More Shots Where Your Freak At" Edition

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote an appetising piece for the Spectator World about men who want to be castrated.

I wrote a short story for the promising new magazine Return about sex, violence and virtual life.

I asked, for my paying subscribers, whether Will Smith’s slap was premeditated and whether everything is a work.

The mountebank moment. Dorian Lynskey considers fraudsters:

…the scam, the fraud, the grift, the hoax, the long con, has become a cultural obsession. In the space of three months, Netflix alone has given us The Tinder Swindler, Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Bad Vegan, and Trust No One.

Of course, these stories are inherently entertaining but I think there is also some extent to which we like to exceptionalise and exoticise risk to distance it from ourselves. See also, serial killers.

Goblin mode. The always enlightening In the Sight of the Unwise profiles a listless, ageing British state that is quite literally running out of energy:

Pressure from NIMBYs has led to central and local government almost entirely giving up on solar and onshore wind, while eco-activists have proved effective lobbyists against new nuclear and gas exploration. Besieged on all sides by hostile pressure groups lacking any kind of long-term vision, and too intellectually weak to generate a coherent long-term energy policy itself, the result is regulatory chaos that is neither eco-friendly nor able to put any downward pressure on prices…

Other than that, though, Mrs Lincoln…

The intellectual test. Graeme Wood profiles an eccentric ISIS propagandist who claims to have abandoned Islam:

He said his conversion was “not making my time any easier in here.” And if he wanted to feign rehabilitation, he would have done so years ago, at sentencing, and not in this roundabout and arcane way involving Syriac texts and Hellenistic historiography. I asked him why the Alexander stuff had convinced him that ISIS was wrong, whereas the group’s practices of mass murder and sex slavery had never tipped him off. He said the latter were consistent with the religion, while the Alexander plagiarism failed intellectual tests on their own terms.

One suspects that this deradicalisation strategy will not scale up. But it is still interesting!

A satirist’s senescence. Andrew Sullivan recounts an unpleasant experience with Jon Stewart:

On the race question, Stewart has decided to go way past even Robin DiAngelo, in his passionate anti-whiteness. His opening monologue was intoned at times in a somber tone, as if he were delivering hard truths that only bigots could disagree with.

As I wrote on Twitter, Stewart is a man with one skill: calling George Bush stupid. He was good at calling George Bush stupid. But expecting him to do anything more complex is like expecting someone who can play “Wonderwall” to conduct an orchestra.

Men, memes and machines. Jacob Siegel profiles Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin:

Depending on what circles you run in, it can seem like everyone now has an opinion about Curtis Yarvin—and that includes me. We were introduced in 2017 when I received a short, unsolicited email from him calling me a “fake writer” working in a “fake century.” 

No one who speaks German could be evil. Peter Tonguette tries to explain why William F. Buckley defended a murderer:

Maybe it was a matter of hubris, including hubris about the superiority of those who claimed, as Smith did from his cell, to believe in conservatism. “We were taken in, I suspect, in part by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer,” says Donald G. M. Coxe, an attorney who wrote about Smith for the magazine. 

Learning from this, I must reluctantly accept that a reader of THE ZONE could be a savage killer. But at least they would be a savage killer with excellent taste.

THE ZONE turns two next week! I thought I would celebrate with a little AMA. Feel free to email questions or ask me in the comments (or don’t and I’ll pretend I never asked).

Have a lovely week,

Ben