Questions to which you will want to know the answer

1. Can we blame Ed Miliband for everything? I mean, Trump, Brexit, all that stuff? (Clue: yes.)

2. Why did mediaeval knights spend so much time fighting snails? 

3. What do people who own slaves think about slavery? ("I came across a slaveholder who was surviving with help from a bonded labourer and loans from the Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning microfinance organisation dedicated to extending loans to the world’s poor.")

4. How does Utah achieve the social mobility of Denmark? (More interesting than it sounds.)

5. Has food taken the place of music?

6. How cool is the great new game, Strange Beasts? 

7. How is the EU like a boyband?

Answers at the links.

Some things to look at and think about

1. More people live in the small red area than in the all blue areas on this map put together (from here):



2. British comedy needs to escape the shackles of Ricky Gervais. This article is well worth a couple of minutes of your time, not least for seeing Nigel Farage turn up in a Harry Enfield sketch.

3. Real life, shot to look like a beautiful 'how to' Youtube video.

Things to read and think about

1. Let's start with politics. David Runciman: "It is often said of democratic politics that the question voters ask of any leader is: ‘Do I like this person?’ But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: ‘Would this person like me?’"  Runciman also tells us this: "All the women in May’s current cabinet, barring the leader of the Lords, Baroness Evans, were helped to enter Parliament by May’s organisation, [Women2Win]." (Runciman's article is a review of a book about Theresa May. Runciman knows David Cameron from school, and makes it somewhat about Cameron too. The contrast is interesting and he writes it very fairly. But I would love to see a similar article written by someone who was at school with May.)

2. For those of you who care about such things, reasons not to worry about all that Brexit stuff that people still keep going on about:

(A) There was no wave of hate accompanying Brexit. You didn't spot it in real life. That's because it didn't happen. In fact "the UK public actually became more positive towards EU immigration between November 2015 and November 2016, the period covering the campaign, vote and supposedly hate-filled aftermath". Note also that "the UK’s positivity towards non-EU immigration is significantly higher than the EU average." People just don't like the EU. If you think that normal British people are unable to distinguish EU citizens from the EU, consider whether you are able to distinguish between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

(B) And there's not going to be a problem with a Brexit deal either. Deals will get done. Maybe this will be one of them.

3. Now let's slow down and chillax more generally.

(A) There are good reasons to slow down. Drugs can make you better at chess and it seem that they do so not (as you would have thought) by speeding you up, but by slowing you down.

(B) Resist the Internet!, says Ross Douthat calmly and sensibly. But he's not alone. You may recall David Gelernter saying it in one of my links not long ago, and here is Scott Adams too: "My observation is that smartphones have made half of all adults mentally ill. I mean that literally, not figuratively. The business model of phones is addiction, not value. And they addict you at the expense of the things humans need in their lives to be happy and healthy."

(C) Are you reading stuff? Stop! "Let’s say you pick up a copy of Jude the Obscure, become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England—to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books." But you should read that link and perhaps worry a little.

(D) You're not surfing the web or reading, so what should you do? Voltaire had it right: we must cultivate our garden. Perhaps because everything is going to be fine, or perhaps because the (or at least a) world is going to end.

Ten links for you

1. The Vatican's Latinist: "I saw him for an hour in Rome in 1985 and that one hour completely changed my life." And many other people's lives too, it seems.

2. The Fox's Prophecy. And pretty prophetic it is too. "Taught wisdom by disaster, // England shall learn to know // That trade is not the only gain // Heaven gives to man below": there's Brexit and Indyref2 in one stanza from 1871.

3. Computer games vs the Game of Life. "In May 2016 he finished his graduate-school training in business law. A few months later, he decided he didn’t want to work in law after all; he wanted to play video games. ... During his studies, he could only spare a couple of hours each day for his habit. Now he can slip into his video-game worlds for five or six hours at a time. A law career would have meant more money. Yet it would also have meant much more time spent at law." Trade-offs, you see.

4. Semper sic tyrannis? "If, however, it turns out that the intelligence agencies have indeed been actively collaborating with the White House in working against opposition politicians, the whole tale assumes a particularly dangerous aspect as there is no real mechanism in place to prevent that from occurring again. The tool that Obama has placed in Trump’s hands might just as easily be used against the Democrats in 2020."

5. "One precious thing about ordinary readers is that sometimes they develop feelings for the characters. This is something critics never discuss. Which is a shame. The Anglo-Saxon critics do good plot summaries but they don’t talk about the characters either. Readers, however, do it uninhibitedly." Houellebecq. In my view, it is nearly always worth reading interviews with boxers or Michel Houellebecq.

6. "I don’t understand why we look down on people who vote against their own interests. ... putting the good of the country ahead of your own pocketbook? I salute you, my noble friend, and wish you had a less idiotic idea of what’s good for the country." That's from this chap, here.

7. A couple of links about the capitalist world we live in: why are the French so miserable? and how to save capitalism,

8. Malcolm Gladwell on leaks. There's quite a few things going on in this piece to do with the changing of the generations, game theory, technology and the law and more besides.

9. What Robert Kelly himself has to say about that BBC interview.

10. Last but not least, a funny and new (well, newly-published) story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Trump and Clinton gender reversal

This is the story. Not quite as medically invasive as it sounds: re-enacting the debates with a male actor playing Clinton and a female actor playing Trump. Everyone expected a female Trump to be unbearable - but it turns out s/he's a really appealing character, whereas a male Clinton is even more unlikeable.

It's an interesting example of upending one's expectations. I would also say it's a pretty good rebuke to the idea that people don't take to strong women in politics. A certain confident, forthright style seems to go down well, as least in debates. As if Margaret Thatcher's performances at the dispatch box did not already prove that.

Three interesting things to read

Here are three interesting pieces that I recommend you read.

First, this crazy story about a 752 pound emerald. The film would be easy to cast: Danny DeVito and Joe Pesci would have big parts, and maybe John Malkovich could be the Mormon.

Second, here is "polymath" David Gelernter. Worth reading all the way through. He says lots of different things and can't be summarised. Here are some examples.

"Take any civilization, ask for its artistic masterpieces; today, they are almost guaranteed to be valuable all over the world. There’s almost nothing less subjective than the sense of beauty." Hmm. I instantly search for counter-examples. But isn't the lack of counter-examples striking?

"I've written & argued in Germany that (for example) computers & social nets ought to be treated like bars or strip joints: not acceptable for children. (At least we ought to consider treating them that way.) I don't like the idea of legal restrictions. But I might urge that we get computers out of schools until our children are able to read & write half decently—at least as decently as they used to during the middle two-thirds of the 20th Century."

"Rear your children to be atheists or agnostics—fine. But turning them loose on the world with no concept of right and wrong is unacceptable. You might well say that Jewish and Christian ethical teaching managed to accomplish remarkably little; but if you believe that, and propose to teach your children even less than the bare bones that proved (you say) so inadequate, then your irresponsibility is obvious. Choose the ethical code you like, but choose something and make sure they know it."

An intelligent provocateur, perhaps?

Third, here is Brendan Simms with something interesting to say about Brexit. Unlike Gelernter, he has a single thesis which is capable of summary. His idea is that England has been responsible to a large part for the creation of modern Europe, and that the UK was created by England as part of that project. Leaving aside the England/UK bit, here's the core of the thesis:

"The continental order is largely a product of British and latterly Anglo-American attempts to create a balance of power that would prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon (first Spain, then France and then Germany), while being at the same time robust enough to ward off external predators (first the Turks, then Russia and then the Soviet Union). The resulting “goldilocks” problem, in which the continentals were either too strong or too weak, has been one of the central axes of European history in the past half-millennium.

After the Second World War, the Americans, some visionary continentals and even some Britons (such as Winston Churchill) realised that the only way to cook porridge at exactly the right temperature was to establish a full democratic political union, with or without the UK. Such a United States of Europe could look after itself without endangering its neighbours and both embed and mobilise Germany for the common good. For various reasons, most of them to do with the incompetence and divisions of the continental Europeans, full union was never achieved; and while it remains the only answer to the European Question, its realisation seems further away today than ever.

The UK played and plays a unique role in the system. It is not in any meaningful sense “equal” to the other states of the “club” that it is leaving. Over the past three centuries – from the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, through the 18th-century European balance of power, the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the Versailles Treaty of 1919, to the 1945 settlement and beyond – Britain has been central to the European order, far more than any other power. This remains true today, because the EU depends entirely on Nato, of which Britain is the dominant European member, for its security.

Though France likes to think of itself as a military superpower and boasts that it will be the only EU state with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council after Brexit, the reality is that it is a far inferior power in the European system. Its sovereignty was restored, perhaps unwisely, by the Anglo-Americans in 1944-45, and is now strongly qualified by how France controls neither its own currency nor its own borders, and while it could theoretically restore its sovereignty, this cannot be done without simultaneously establishing that of Germany, which is the one thing that French participation in the European enterprise was designed to prevent.

The EU may be a club and it can make whatever rules it likes, but it should never forget that the Anglo-Americans own the freehold of the property on which the club is built. Brussels and the continental capitals are at best leaseholders, and in many cases just tenants of this order. Put another way, the UK is not just another European “space” to be ordered, but one of the principal ordering powers of the continent."

It's an interesting sideways take on the world (worth reading in full for thoughts on the UK, the EU, Trump and more) but I wouldn't subscribe to it. Even with American help, the UK can't cook the porridge itself.