Sunday West: November 20

He's back

Good morning. Today, I feel Qatari. Today, I feel Arab. Today, I feel African. Today, I feel gay. Today, I feel disabled. Today, I feel a migrant worker. Yes, the World Cup starts today, the most controversial in living memory. Maybe it will all turn out fine, but it feels like a disaster already; which is a shame, as it’s a wonderful thing for football to bring humanity together, and for a MENA country to host it. Morocco seems like it would have been the obvious choice, but I guess they didn’t ‘persuade’ FIFA during their bids.

Since my last newsletter I have written about how Twitter needs broken windows-style policing, perhaps some sort of military strongman to deal with the incivility; the worst of this doesn’t come from no-mark anons either, but often from five or six-figure accounts with blue ticks who use inflammatory and violent language. Although having said that, I see that the Donald has just been reinstated after a popular vote; not sure how I feel about that, to be honest.

I also wrote about how the site has pushed discourse to the Left, in particular because there is now a huge temptation for conservatives to denounce their own in order to seek praise from high-status establishment media colleagues. I wrote a two-part history of Poland, and then a piece on why women were moving to the Left. Finally, I introduced my plan for a post-Tory conservative manifesto. Prepare for government, chaps.

As a further piece of self-promotion, one of my short history books is on sale in the US for 99c. With any luck there will be a UK edition at some point and I will expand it a bit.

****

Elsewhere, Janan Ganesh wrote this brutal piece about Twitter users. I feel ‘rekt’, as the kids say.

The site reeks of low status. And not because it is free. Much of Twitter is conducted in a certain voice, or what might be called a home key. Some would describe it as “twee” or “beta” but it is easier to cite examples than to name it. Here are a few. Quaint bios (“tea enthusiast”). Cultural references to the science-fiction or superhero genres. Self-mockery about bad dates and social awkwardness. Jargon (“performative”, “gaslighting”) that people with a healthy distance from politics don’t use or understand.

****

I haven’t really followed the Sam Bankman-Fried saga and I don’t really understand how it works, except to say that the picture of him with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair is outstanding. I’m no dandy but I think if I was meeting Blair and Clinton I’d put some trousers on.

At The Critic, Wessie du Toit wrote on this subject, and the cult of the disrupter.

We know this because there is such obvious demand in American elite society for individuals who can legitimise tech capitalism, whether through their aura of personal brilliance or by demonstrating its potential for beneficial progress. The reverence for Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are proof of this, but Holmes and Bankman-Fried went a step further by presenting themselves as ambitious prodigies and evangelical do-gooders. Where did they learn this formula for adulation? It’s notable that both are themselves quintessential products of the elite: Holmes’ parents were Washington insiders; Bankman-Fried’s were Stanford law professors. 

Via Jon S.

****

Katherine Dee wrote about how the girlboss cult, of the independent and strong woman, took a hit during lockdown when we all realised how rubbish it was being alone.

It was around this time that I noticed an uptick in feminism-skeptical social media content. There’s always been a market for anti-feminism online for the same reasons that being a “gamer girl” sells: It leverages a niche position that’s in high demand but undersupplied. And yet this felt different. The feminism-critical content I was seeing came from all points on the political spectrum, across every race and economic demographic, and, importantly, from people who didn’t appear to be selling anything. Of course, there were some people angling to become capital-p Personalities, but mostly I saw ordinary women venting their frustrations, many of them spurred by the conditions brought on by the pandemic. 

Perhaps all of these trends are the lies we tell ourselves about our jobs, our relationships, and our feelings of futility to make life more tenable—a form of denial that retrieves a modicum of control. It sounds harsh, but as millennial women begin aging, and they are increasingly doing so alone, the clarion call naturally becomes, “Your life doesn’t end at 30, 35, 40.” I happen to agree that life doesn’t end at 30—I would hope it doesn’t! It doesn’t end in middle age, either. However, “life doesn’t end at 30” shouldn’t be a euphemism for loitering in some kind of extended adolescence, an alternate way of saying, “You are still capable of looking and behaving like a 22-year-old.”

Dee has her finger on some deep social forces, the animal spirits of the dating market. Her substack is here.

****

In the Telegraph, Yuan Zi Zhu writes about euthanasia in Canada, a situation that seems almost unbelievable.

True, there had been warnings that once euthanasia became legal in Canada, its scope would widen rapidly beyond the initial target group of terminally ill people, as had happened in almost every country where it had been legalised. But the Canadian supreme court loftily dismissed these concerns as a “slippery slope” fallacy when it struck down the criminal prohibition on assisting suicide in 2015.

Then a Quebec court ruled that to limit euthanasia access to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” discriminated against those whose illness were not terminal — euthanasia was, after all, a human right according to the courts.

Fast-forward a few years, and the Canadian parliament is now calmly discussing whether disabled children could be euthanised by doctors. In other words, infanticide. Nor will euthanasia be limited to physical illness: from next year, mental illness will become a qualifying condition. Already, depressed teenagers on social media are speaking about applying to die once they turn 18.

The old slippery slope turns out to be slippery again. It keeps on happening!

****

How doomed are the Tory party? Very, writes Ben Ansell.

We see some pretty striking stuff. We saw above how in 2019 graduates were twenty-five percent points less likely to vote for the Conservatives than people with lower-secondary education. We see a similar pattern here. The Conservative lag Labour among every education group (which is kind of amazing) but particularly among people with degrees. Labour have a FORTY-FIVE point lead among postgraduates and thirty points among those with degrees. This is… terrible for the Conservative Party, given that each cohort who enters the job market is around half graduates these days. It’s not like the Conservatives are even doing well with people who stayed at school until eighteen - here they are twenty-five points behind. Changes in education policy mean that it is now increasingly unusual not to have some kind of upper-secondary qualification among younger cohorts.

Ignore some of the weird things about sub-samples where the SNP are getting sixteen percent of the vote of under 50s with no qualifications - that’s a pretty tiny group. The big picture is that the Conservatives are ONLY leading among over fifties without a degree. And one quick glance at the top picture tells you that they are becoming extinct among the under fifties. They crack twenty percent support among only ONE group of under fifties. Those who got their GCSEs and no more. That is a small and declining share of the population, to put it mildly.

****

Stone Age Herbalist writes a short history of the Anglo-Saxons origins debate.

On the 21st of September this year a paper was published in Nature purporting to have solved an ancient conundrum in English history, the origins and arrival of the Anglo-Saxons - the Adventus Saxonum. For most of the public this has never been a real debate - the English were formed through the mixture of pre-Roman Britons and the incoming Anglo-Saxon invaders and settlers. This narrative has been at the heart of Our Island Story for centuries, giving us our national language and character, the formation of the nation being forged through the tug-of-war between Norman and Saxon. But since WW2 there has been a scholarly rejection of this story, one taking on many forms and guises through archaeological and historical trends. This has ranged from arguments that the Anglo-Saxons were actually a very small elite band of warriors, to the wholesale dismissal that anyone arrived at all.

Our understanding of early English history is largely based on Gildas and Bede, which is that the Angles and Saxons came in large numbers, largely displaced the Britons, and that the English and Welsh are therefore a distinct people ancestrally. This theory developed with English Teutomania in the 19th century and a sense of kinship with the Germans; an idea which became somewhat unfashionable in the 20th century, as did the idea of race generally. Instead of genocidal migrations we were supposed to believe that ‘pots are pots, not people’, and that 5th century Britons all start suddenly being buried like Germans because of vibrant new cultural fashions. In retrospect this seems obviously implausible.

Via Razib’s newsletter.

Thanks to all the Americans who have messaged me about meet-ups in 2023. Looking forward to it! Thanks for subscribing, all of you.