Hello,

Obligatory shilling. For my Substack subscribers, I wrote about Howard Stern and boomers, All Saint’s Day in Poland, paedophiles in British culture, being mobbed on Twitter, social change, bad arguments against British policing, effective altruism, Epstein chic, my new pets and the Intellectual Dark Web.

For The Critic I wrote about how the worst British people move to the US, learning from COVID, why young conservatives are angry, the onlineification of everything, the bogus claim that Russia had attacked Poland and the possibility of Poland outpacing Britain.

For Spectator World, I wrote about Twitter verification, the FTX scandal and how much I love Twitter.

I was on a podcast about eating disorders, mental health and writing.

My little book of stories is a year old tomorrow.

The Californian idiotology. A fantastic piece from Rian Whitton on the dream of re-creating Silicon Valley in Britain:

The ideology is built on eschewing competition and imitation and seeking monopoly status through platforms. Copying these novel developments is, by definition, near impossible. I believe the UK can effectively copy the negative aspects of Silicon Valley; the internal conformity, the gradual bureaucratization, the bloated workforces, the mad hype cycle, and diminishing levels of dynamism. But I think if a small country like Britain wanted to be a comparable center of innovation, the markets, technologies, and institutions would have to be novel. Just applying web 2.0 to banking and plastering ‘silicon’ onto every roundabout, alley, and cul-de-sac is an exercise in futility.

West-ern civilisation. Ed West is my favourite commentator on Substack and I’ll keep plugging him until everyone subscribed to me is subscribed to him. This month, he wrote about Britain and decadence:

Perhaps decadence has two stages, the active and passive, the aggressive and depressive. Society is still ‘broken’, as they used to say back in the day, but just more quietly so. It may be a disconcerting time to be old, but in many ways the legacy of the Sixties is that the problems of old age — loneliness, poor health and falling libido — are now shared across the generations.

And about immigration:

In his book Whiteshift, Eric Kaufmann looked at the potential numbers willing to move, citing studies by Gallup World Poll suggesting that 700 million people worldwide would migrate to the West, including 31% of sub-Saharan Africa. But even that might rise if people saw others moving, he suggested.

Not eating shit. Blake Smith writes about being a hater:

Seeing losers and idiots get public praise plunges me, perhaps as a defense against simple jealousy, into a scene where I’m Winston in 1984, where the They are slapping me around until I crack and admit 2 plus 2 equals 5. Insisting that the person being praised is terrible, that his sentences stink, that they offer nothing thoughtful or worthy of thought, feels—and maybe insanely wrongly—like I am maintaining my corner of reality. There is still some shit I will not eat.

The architecture of totalitarianism. Literally. Wessie du Toit writes:

If Stalinism ended up being represented by a combination of overcrowded industrial landscapes and homages to the classical past, this was more stylistic unity than Nazi Germany was able to achieve. Hitler’s regime was pulled in at least three directions, between its admiration for modern technology, its obsession with the culture of an imagined Nordic Volk (which, in a society traumatised by war and economic ruin, functioned partly as a retreat from modernity), and Germany’s own tradition of monumental neoclassicism inherited from the Enlightenment. Consequently there was no National Socialist style, but an assortment of ideological solutions in different contexts.

Even evil has context. Philippe Lemoine addresses the simple-minded argument that NATO had nothing to do with the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

…as I said at the beginning of this article, the way in which NATO expansion played a role in the origins of the war is more complicated than people on both sides commonly assume. In particular, it’s not so much that it was the proximate cause of the war, but rather that it contributed towards creating the conditions that made the war possible.

Windrush and windiness. Lin Manuel reflects on the myths of British multiculturalism:

For the modern Blairite establishment, Windrush represents a definitive break with tradition: the point at which traditional, ethnically homogeneous, monocultural “imperial” Britain ended, and the new multiethnic and multicultural Britain began to take shape, and is almost always deployed in “official” capacities to act as the sine qua non-exemplar of why modern Britain owes its existence to “diversity”.

How Truss was trussed. From our print edition, Jon Moynihan deals with the disingenuous scapegoating of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng:

The brutal demise of the Truss administration following the mini-budget has been widely attributed to the market’s reaction to the expectation of unfunded borrowing occasioned by tax cuts and the fuel price cap. To the contrary: the market’s behaviour was quite clearly a response to the actions — and inactions — of the Bank of England, before, during and after the mini-budget.

A proud editor. If I start recommending articles from The Critic I won’t know where to stop. It’s such a privilege to play even a small role in bringing such commentary to life. Tony Dowson on the New York Times, Fred Skulthorp on “data”, Wessie du Toit on genius, Rebecca Fall on resilience, Nathan Cofnas on his cancellation … I could, as I’m sure you have guessed, go on.

Thanks for reading!

Ben

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The Zone

November Diary