Cześć,
Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote on THE ZONE about the LinkedInification of love, Paul and Lawrence Auster, my new dog, why I “counter-signal”, murder and music, Jerry Seinfeld’s inexplicable new film, online anons and the attention black economy.
I wrote for The Critic about why Jerry Seinfeld was wrong about comedy, the problem with right-wing pro-natalism, the myths of Tory wets, Louis Theroux, the infected blood scandal, British electoral jargon and Michael Gove.
I wrote for The American Conservative about fourteen failed years of Tory rule.
It’s here, let’s sneer, it’s the election year! Yes, the election was announced for July 4th — certainly the biggest occasion to have ever taken place on that obscure day.
Now, I’m not going to advocate for voting Tory — not just because the Conservatives are absolutely terrible, and not just because I don’t actually live in Britain, but because I don’t believe they have a hope in Hell. Backing the lesser evil out of keen-eyed pragmatism is one thing. Backing the lesser evil out of futile optimism would be intellectually as well as morally degrading.
Still, I think right-wing opponents of the Tories underestimate how bad the ruthless managerialism of Starmer’s Labour could end up being. I took a shot at “Stony Blair”, and his plans for New Labour without the cultural confidence and economic fortunes, back in February, but J. Sorel of The Daily Sceptic explained the problem more elegantly:
What does Starmerism mean? It is a policy of enforcement. It is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo.
My new dog. Say hello to my new buddy Buddy. I got him from a shelter near my town, where the poor chap had been living for a year, and it’s amazing how cheerful and friendly he is after such an ordeal. It’s doubly amazing how cheerful and friendly he’s been throughout a hard month after a botched operation necessitated another operation to fix the damage. A lot of May was spent in a cone, with limited mobility, but now he has recovered and is taking the town’s parks by storm. It’s good to have a dog again.
Political Beliefs. Congratulations to the great and powerful Oliver Traldi on the publication of his new book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. My review should be coming soon.
Trumped up charges? M’colleague Sebastian Milbank argues that Trump’s prosecution might have been petty and spurious. Sorry, Sebastian, but there’s nothing petty about upholding the rule of law. America cannot allow falsified business records to tarnish a glorious history of open and honest preemptive war and institutionalised torture.
A sense of honour. Helen Andrews reviews Glenn Loury’s memoirs:
“To explain how important my sense of honor is to me, would require introducing them to my father, and telling them my entire life story,” Loury writes. That is what he has done in this book. The same self-discipline and self-respect that produced that sock drawer inspired Loury to live up to his obligation as an academic to speak his mind no matter how unpopular it makes him. It is this emphasis on character, not an abstract commitment to free speech, that makes dissent possible.
Actually true. Bethel McGrew embarks on an ambitious project:
This past Easter, I teased a series where I would assemble some of the reasons I think the gospel texts are still, in fact, best explained by the hypothesis that Christianity is actually true.
The great data robbery. Andrew Orlowski discusses the parasitic nature of AI:
A mimicry machine that can produce knock-offs to order may not be what the world most needed in 2024. But thanks to generative AI, we can now request verse in the style of Bob Dylan or Keats, computer code, diversity guides or visual images. With the newest models able to produce video, too, we’ll soon be able to recreate a personalised “Elvis” performing in our living room. The former Google research director and FTC expert advisor, Meredith Whitaker, calls the output “derivative content paste”.
I suppose that makes big fans of generative AI derivative content paste eaters.
The policeman in your pocket. Ed West writes on mobile phones and crime:
At least a couple of studies have looked into the effect of mobile phones on crime. One, from Columbia University, found that ‘the proliferation of mobile phones may explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides between 1990 to 2000, during which time the total annual number of murders dropped from about 25,000 to 15,000.’
The mechanism for this drop was that mobiles reduced the need for drug dealers to use the streets, but a more significant - and obvious - explanation for the link between mobile phones and crime is that they make detection easier.
Given smartphones, CCTV, DNA evidence et cetera, crime should have gone down a lot more. In the 2020s, Poirot would have been out of a job.
Eroticism contra porn. Sarah Fletcher reflects on desire and sex in art:
In movies, as in life, sex should have an alchemical and psychic urgency, as if things as mundane as your morning coffee order or the tragic reality of your roommate all played their unique part in the unfolding desire. We get none of this from pornography, where campy mail men and frustrated step-mums fumble their dialogue before full-frontal penetration takes the main stage.
Against “free speech”. Daniel Evans writes a sharp iconoclastic essay:
Freedom doesn’t happen like you think it does. It isn’t a million people doing all sorts of things at once. It’s the creation of order within which you can operate. Freedom is not a great screeching din of white noise. That’s oppression.
Have a lovely month!
Ben