Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote for my paying Substack subscribers about World War 2 in discourse, why progressives love performance poetry, the Ukrainian town of Lyman and the joys of Google Maps, my dog’s operation, thumos and modern war, Greg “Opie” Hughes and how careers decline, prospects for postliberalism, how good people can have bad opinions and alcoholism. If the incredibly coherent themes that emerge from this appeal to you, please consider subscribing.

For The Critic, I wrote about hysteria in opinion commentary, James Felton and cockwomble, the cult of the writer, Liz Truss as a scapegoat and the fetish for “grown-up” politics. I also wrote a piece for this month’s print edition, about the onlineification of everything. You can subscribe here.

Autumn leaves. I feel like Waugh-reading, often-frowning, thirty-something conservative lads are just the kind of people who would make a point of claiming autumn is their favourite season. Well, it isn’t mine. I like the light and warmth and dislike their disappearance. Still, there is beauty in a “golden autumn”. Leaves are arguably at their most beautiful just before their death — flush with chemicals.

I have read — and I am very far from being a biologist, so take this with a pinch of salt — that leaves change colour to protect the tree, either from sunlight or from insects (or both — who knows). In death, in other words, they support the life of the whole. There is something beautiful in that as well.

The gory Tory story. A friend of mine who worked in politics once told me that when politicians get a job you can see them walking in with their heads held high. Soon, you see them walking out again with their backs bent low. Seeing Conservative politicians pretend to be excited about the guy who lost to the woman who replaced the guy who won an election reminded me of this. You don’t redeem the situation by feigning happiness. You make yourself complicit.

Conservatives aren’t even avoiding the voters having a say but avoiding their own members. It’s extraordinary. I’m a right-winger, and I think Labour will do worse, so I’m not about to demand an election, but this is like watching a stand-up comedian bomb onstage under the delusion that if they hang about long enough they can think of that one joke that will convert the crowd.

Geeks, Google Maps and guns. Here is a typically interesting article by Wessie du Toit about war nerds and information architecture:

In a world increasingly destabilised by conflict, amateur battlefield sleuths have become a valuable information source. Their cataloguing of equipment, losses and troop movements is monitored by professional analysts and journalists, not to mention organisations documenting war crimes. At the same time, they provide a channel for a new form of propaganda, as the combatants seek to spread evidence of their battlefield achievements. And so a growing public audience, drawn by some ambiguous combination of information hunger and morbid curiosity, finds its social media feeds dotted with daily scenes of war.

Don’t know what you want but I won’t let you get it. Ed West writes with his usual wit about generational conflict in Britain:

One of the most eye-opening revelations about London life is that many of the people now preventing Soho bars from opening late are ex-punks who, true to form, don’t care what other people want. The whole ethos behind youth culture of the late 70s was to stick two fingers up to the rest of society; why change the habit of a lifetime?

Ed also comes through with a searing analysis of the grooming gang scandal in Telford:

To many men involved, women from outside the community were not considered worthy of respect, especially when they were seen as immoral. In both Telford and Rotherham, girls were routinely called ‘white slags’ and ‘white whores’.

Ice cold war. Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski reports on American attempts to retard Chinese technological development:

Government agencies were to focus on previously unrestricted technologies: these include supercomputers and AI and all the tools and elements it takes to develop them. Now the Biden Administration has introduced export controls on the latest cutting-edge chips, on the software necessary to design them and on manufacturing equipment necessary to produce them. Restrictions also apply to U.S. personnel associated with China’s advanced semiconductor sector.

But don’t worry. I’m sure we don’t have to be concerned about the prospects of a technological arms race between the Americans and the Chinese when both sides are led by such balanced and reasonable people.

Traditions of knowledge. Will “Evolving Moloch” Buckner argues that modern hereditarians have an impoverished understanding of ethnography. Too often, references to “different kinds of intelligence” are used to equate the societal value of keen logical-mathematical intelligence with the value of “being good with cats” or “writing half-decent opinion commentary” or whatever but Buckner makes a good argument for historical context:

…despite this extensive popular discussion of what should be a fairly obvious and well-established point—that Kalahari hunter-gatherers are uh pretty good hunters, with effective and intelligent strategies for obtaining their prey—there are some popular hereditarian psychologists who have claimed that African hunter-gatherers are actually too dumb to hunt, and don’t hunt at all or don’t need to hunt to survive.

Further Up. Inspired by my guide to THE ZONE (which I also wrote for my subscribers this month) the always thoughtful and engaging Bethel McGrew wrote one for her fine Substack.

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful month!

Ben

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The Zone

October Diary