The Autograph Man, by Zadie Smith

The Autograph Man (TAM) is Zadie Smith's second novel. I am going to tell you a little bit about it.

As I recall the reviews, TAM was regarded as the Difficult Second Album that we had to endure before Smith entered her mature period. But what good are reviews? Murder on the Orient Express - 5 stars; War and Peace - also 5 stars: you see the problem. Even those comments along the lines of "007 meets Harry Potter - with a dash of PG Wodehouse!" are more useful: at least that gives you some idea of what to expect from the book. 

For what it is worth, I thought that TAM was pretty good (at least until its later stages). But I can do better than that. Below the break, I set out some comments that I hope will give you a better idea of what the book is like, and then a postscript about London prompted by some comments in the book.

Oh, to see ourselves as others see us seeing ourselves!

This is a little piece by an American singing the praises of a number of British TV police dramas that I haven't seen. The author tells us what is striking about British cop shows compared with American ones. There is the issue of guns, of course, but his first point was this:

"... in the British shows, closed-circuit television surveillance is everywhere ... Crime shows set in Britain may offer the best way—apart from actually moving there—to appreciate how much the nation has become a quasi-benevolent surveillance state. If the police need to determine someone’s whereabouts at a particular hour on a particular night, they will dutifully interview witnesses, check phone records, and otherwise establish alibis much as they would in the United States. But they will also—as any fan of these shows can readily attest—check the CCTV. (According to the BBC, Britain has one CCTV camera for every 11 inhabitants.) That’s true even on Shetland, which follows Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall) as he and his team bring justice to the tiny sub-Arctic islands (population 23,000), more than 100 miles north of the Scottish mainland. Those distant hamlets and lonely roads sit under the watchful eye of CCTV, too. ... The awareness of supervision lends British series a greater sense of control, of order, relative to the urban chaos that prevails on American television. Crime is experienced as a deviation from the norm—something that fell into the cracks between the cameras—rather than the norm itself."

My own experience is that CCTV is pretty useless if you ever need it, but we are talking about fiction. The writers of these police dramas put CCTV into their dramas in the same way that Conan Doyle and Christie put guns into theirs: they are something you would plausibly find hanging around without needing to install clunky plot machinery. Wouldn't you like to see a Chinese police drama, just for these kinds of incidental detail? 

The time portal opens again

For reasons I cannot explain, a page from what a book that says it is an "Introduction to Western Politics in the 21st Century" has come into my possession. It says this:

"... a one-term President who struggled to make the transition from a successful career in business and light entertainment to politics. Although he made immigration reform the central plank of his policy platform, his efforts to enact his legislative agenda in that area were thwarted by an obstructive Congress. Nonetheless, he achieved significant policy success both domestically (by delivering a strong economy, thanks in part to some well-timed tax cuts that he championed) and, most notably, in foreign policy. In the latter field, his valiant attempts to bring peace to the Korean peninsular were the most successful of such initiatives prior to the First War of the Nine-Dash Line, while his achievements in reducing tensions in the Middle East and expanding the number of majority-Muslim countries recognising Israel are the basis upon which the lasting peace settlement reached under the Tucker Administration is founded. However, in the period before the First War of the Nine-Dash Line, foreign policy success was not rewarded at the ballot box in most Western countries and the US was no exception. Instead, his Presidency was mostly ended by a pandemic for which he was not responsible and which, as President of a federal system, he had little power to combat. In an ironic twist, that disease, as we now know ..."  

I am afraid that is all there is. It is in rather large print and, of course, I have had to have it translated.

Some links to chew on

I include some samples partly so that you can see what you are getting, but also because links are rather unreliable at the moment and so you can google the quotations if required.

1. This piece needs to come with trigger warnings for those concerned about grammar and punctuation marks: the author would not get the full SPAG marks in an English school test. It could also do with a fair bit of pruning. Nonetheless, it is really quite interesting and refreshing. Give it a go and see what you think. Sample: "During the last election Matthew Yglesias claimed a Trump victory would lead to roving mobs of trump supporters beating up Jews at random, a major celebrity said Donald Trump winning was like a second 9/11 and got a lot of retweets saying so on twitter. I took a bet with someone very intelligent and reasonable that Donald Trump would not nuke anyone, start a random war, cause international crisis, or crash the economy in his first year or anything of such magnitude. This was a normal thing people claimed Trump would do if he won, in fact many people were certain of it and this was central to their argument for who to vote for in 2016. People seemed very sure Donald Trump would be the worst president in American history and were equally sure there was no way he could win."

2. This is Glenn Greenwald's resignation from the Intercept, which he co-founded. Sample: "The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression. // The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication." And here is the article he was not permitted to publish on the Intercept. Sample question he put to the Biden campaign: "how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective."

3. John Gray on Bruno Maçães. Sample: "This may be why one can detect a sneaking admiration for Xi’s tyranny among Western progressives. Rightly, they perceive that he is promoting an Enlightenment project; although not the liberal project of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, or the communist utopia of Marx, to be sure. Xi’s dictatorship is more like the enlightened despotism of the early Bentham, who aimed to reconstruct society on the model of a Panopticon – an ideal prison designed to enable total surveillance of the inmates. How curious if, as the 21st century staggers on, a hyper- authoritarian China emerges as the only major state still governed by an Enlightenment faith in progress."

"White on white crime"

I once wrote that I regard decent treatment of Jewish people as a good test for the decency of any gentile society. I stand by what I said there - click the link if you're interested.

This test is one of the reasons that the USA can claim to be a decent society. Of course, these things are relative. I am aware of the former caps on Jewish admittance to Ivy League universities and the anti-semitism of, for example, the KKK. There is no doubt much more of which I am unaware. But, equally, we all know much about the appalling treatment of Jewish people in so many other societies. The Magistrate of History will punish the anti-semitic offences of America with gentle admonishment and a slap on the wrist, before turning her attention to numerous European countries with fury and awful punishments.

So it was with some sadness that I read this piece, entitled "Stop Being Shocked", by Bari Weiss. I recommend it to you. Weiss writes about a worsening in the climate for American Jews and, as her title proposes, suggests that now is the time to accept that there is nothing surprising about that development. 

Weiss' piece lists many unfortunate incidents and I was reading through them with a resigned sense of deja vu - until I came across this: "Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”"

"White on white crime"! I had to follow that up. It seems that it is real: indeed, it happened "multiple times", I read at the link that Weiss provides. 

Well, perhaps using the phrase "white on white crime" to refer to the Holocaust is a 'clever' phrase that some undergraduates picked up, used for shock value, and now feel rather embarrassed about. Let's hope so. Let's hope all these straws in the wind are nothing more than straws in the wind.

But one should not be surprised if many people are worried. A society in which educated people speak lightly of the Holocaust is not the kind of society we knew in the West a generation ago. A lot can change in another generation.

In Joseph Roth's book The Radetsky March (recommended), I read that one of the titles of Emperor Franz Joseph was King of Jerusalem, the "highest rank that God had to offer a crowned head". In the book we see the Kaiser taking his duties to his Jewish subjects seriously. And we know (as the author did not - the book was published in 1932) what was to happen to those subjects when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that anything remotely similar will happen in America. It is not simply a case of putting a Sousa march in place of the Strauss one. All I am saying is that the history of the Jewish people includes too many instances of societies becoming unwelcoming to them for anyone to read the evidence Weiss marshalls with equanimity.

An apology

Several links that I have posted recently have not worked. I apologise. I am going back to fix them, so far as I can.

Some interesting links

These are meant to be some examples of the importance of balance.

1. Genuinely interesting piece about the Trump administration behind the scenes.

2. Interestingly well-balanced piece from the BBC about the risks of nuclear power. I have noticed a few examples recently of the BBC making a real effort to look at both sides of an issue. They proved with Brexit that they are capable of this, unlike so much of the rest of the media.

3. Car seats as contraception: a third child means a third child seat, and that means a new car, and that means no third child. An example of the need to balance the different effects that government policies can have.

4. A good letter in the LRB: "A bummer, I know, but we have to entertain the possibility that there is no neat lesson from the pandemic". (Also here.)

5. Does it surprise you to hear that "people are more positively disposed toward women than men — the so-called “women-are-wonderful effect” — and research into people’s attitudes toward things as diverse as criminal sentences, academic hiring, essay grading, and research into sex and gender differences bears this out"? I doubt it. The quotation comes from this piece, reviewing Entitled from a left-of-centre perspective (but very aggressively - must have been written by a man), perhaps injecting some balance into a debate. 

6. Well, this, about the potentially culturally-determined experience of emotions, is interesting. "Barrett’s point is that if you understand that “fear” is a cultural concept, a way of overlaying meaning on to high arousal and high unpleasantness, then it’s possible to experience it differently." This is an idea that I independently developed as a child. If you find yourself in a stressful or worrying situation it is (to some extent) possible to re-interpret it to yourself as an exciting or fun one. Think about what happens to you on a rollercoaster. But perhaps one can take it too far: "Barrett tells the story of a date she reluctantly agreed to go on, which took an unexpected turn as her stomach flipped while she was having coffee with the guy. “OK, I realised, I was wrong,” she writes. “I must be attracted to him.” A few hours later she found herself in bed with ... the flu. What had happened over coffee was that her brain had made a prediction of “infatuation” based on sensory information from her gut combined with her culture’s understanding of that emotion and how it is supposed to unfold."

7. The Spectator in defence of 'wokeness'. And quite right too. Gove, with his Gramsci references, would never make the mistake that Leith ascribes to others. 

8. Women don't like to compete ... against men. But against women? A different story. But still, don't extrapolate to the workplace too quickly: "Gender wage gaps appear even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely. Uber driver’s for example are assigned trips using a gender-blind algorithm and earn according to a known formula based on time and distance of trip. Yet, a small but persistent gender gap of about 7% exists ...", it says here, giving reasons for the gender gap (e.g. men drive faster).

Good news stories

1. This is entitled "When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number" and I recommend it. Tony Abbott has been in the UK news recently as a little distraction from covid, so I should let you know that he makes his way into the story in person.

2. "It took decades, but Chuck Feeney, the former billionaire cofounder of retail giant Duty Free Shoppers has finally given all his money away to charity. He has nothing left now—and he couldn’t be happier." Full story here, but you have the gist of it from that quotation: happy man does good deeds.

3. How Women Won the Gender Self-ID War. "Even though a great many politicians privately came to see the flaws and risks of the self-ID proposal, very few of them engaged with this topic publicly. The real political opposition to self-ID came from 'ordinary' women who saw the proposal as a potential threat to their legal rights and standing. Some of them came to the issue via Mumsnet <waves to FWR board>. Others attended townhall meetings of A Woman’s Place UK, a group set up by women with their roots in the trade union movement. // This grassroots movement deserves a lot of attention and study. It shows how, even when politicians aren’t doing their job properly and listening to all sides, people with determination and organisation can make themselves heard." (Here's a sort of meta-question: how do you think Sir Keir would like you to think he reacted to hearing the news that gender self-ID is not going ahead? My guess is that he would like to think that he brushed it aside impatiently, saying, "OK, that's that - now let's concentrate on important things that affect serious numbers of people, not culture war distractions like that". And that's plausibly true. Which means he is going a decent job.)

4. Not exactly news, but here is a rather joyous performance of 'Sex Bomb' by an enthusiastic Russian military choir. Rather cheering.

And here are a couple which are not told as good news stories, but in many ways are:

5. This is about meritocracy from the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms to modern day America. It is both an entertaining read and, ultimately, a cheering way to think about both the past and the future. Replacing wholesale patronage by competitive exams, competence and professionalism was a good thing, wasn't it? But those who opposed it had good reason too. Our current rules for selecting our rulers are no doubt a similar mixture of good and bad.

6. This, again, is not told as a good news story but as a story about a mother's worry about race sensitivity in America. But it is also the story of Black-Jewish children being brought up in a welcoming environment. There are few times or places in history better for such families.

Why are we arguing?

This piece, by the ever sensible progressive Freddie de Boer, is about what he calls "critique drift", namely the way that perfectly good concepts such as "mansplaining", "trigger warning" and "privilege" get over-used, well outside their correct spheres, until they have lost their original conceptual moorings, while still carrying their original (or even greater) emotional valence, with the result that supporters of the concepts feel they have to endorse every usage, no matter how silly, while generating a backlash to the concepts themselves. 

Does that sound convoluted? Well, here's an example of what he is talking about:

"Trig­ger warn­ings were ini­tial­ly endorsed specif­i­cal­ly for the good of those who suf­fer from post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der, a spe­cif­ic and poten­tial­ly debil­i­tat­ing med­ical issue that afflicts a very small per­cent­age of peo­ple. Trig­gers were not broad cat­e­gories of poten­tial offense that pro­voked vague feel­ings of dis­com­fort, but very spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tions that result­ed in deeply painful expe­ri­ences that stemmed from nar­row­ly-defined trau­mat­ic episodes.

Now, trig­gers are every­where, lurk­ing behind every cor­ner, endorsed by peo­ple in all man­ner of sit­u­a­tions for all man­ner of rea­sons, and sub­ject to appro­pri­a­tion by those who would use them for cyn­i­cal ends — such as the stu­dents at oth­er insti­tu­tions my aca­d­e­m­ic friends tell me about, who use talk of trig­gers as an all-encom­pass­ing excuse to get out of doing work or expe­ri­enc­ing view­points they don’t like. Some of the most priv­i­leged col­lege stu­dents in the world now feel no com­punc­tion against invok­ing trig­gers at any time they find it con­ve­nient. Any­one who ques­tions whether they actu­al­ly deserve to invoke that claim, mean­while, is regard­ed as inher­ent­ly a bad ally and bad per­son. This, in turn, com­pels some peo­ple to think that all talk of trig­gers and trig­ger warn­ings is aca­d­e­m­ic lefty bull­shit that leaves us unable to edu­cate, unable to ever bring stu­dents to encounter any remote­ly chal­leng­ing or con­tro­ver­sial opin­ions, and makes con­ser­v­a­tive back­lash that much more like­ly. This is clas­sic cri­tique drift."

You see the point. 

De Boer adds that anyone who is sympathetic to the concepts but says, as he does, that perhaps this is not a good time to use them will then get attacked by use of the very concept they are trying to defend: "don't you mansplain mansplaining to me!", "your saying that is a very sign of your own privilege!" and so on.

I tried to imagine an equivalent right-wing critique drift and came up with patriotism. "What's that? A German car! Don't you love your country?" Or: "Where are you going on holiday? Italy! You know what side they were on during the War?" And if someone were to reply, "You know what, I'm as patriotic as the next man, but you need to confine this 'patriotism' talk to important stuff - people can drink French wine", they would be met with "Traitor! That kind of thinking is just what is doing down our country!". It would all be very tiresome, and no doubt it would persuade many people that the very idea of patriotism is a big scam designed to shut people up when they deviate from some crazy orthodoxy. I'm glad "patriotism" doesn't work like that at the moment, but I am sure there are times and places where it has done, so let's not think that this is always and everywhere a phenomenon of the Left. 

Anyway, back to de Boer and the current situation. Even dyed-in-the-wool irredeemable right-wingers like me agree that there is a tendency among men sometimes to explain things in patronising ways when they shouldn't (mansplaining), that people who have medical conditions, or are even just a bit sensitive, should not be unnecessarily exposed to things that will make them ill or very upset (trigger warnings) and that some people have an unfairly easier run in life than others by reason of facts about their birth or upbringing that they are not responsible for (privilege). Sensible de Boer and sensible right-wingers could happily sit down and reach common ground on plenty of real-life cases, and perhaps reach reasoned disgreement on many others. (Indeed, when it comes to "privilege", I suspect that right-wingers, who are very alive to issues of class and elite groupings, have much to bring to the party, if that party is conducted in good faith.) With a bit of goodwill and a fair following wind, perhaps we could reduce these heated arguments about race and gender and so on to much calmer discussions about early years education or bullying in schools.

What a wonderful world that would be!, I thought. But then, I realised, that is the wonderful world we used to have. It's very much the world of the 2000s, when nice, decent, well-meaning George W. Bush was succeeded by nice, decent, well-meaning Barack Obama; the decade that ended with the choice in the UK being between Brown-Clegg and Cameron-Clegg. It's like those debates about gay marriage vs civil partnership that no one could get very excited about. Or about how to fund higher education. It was all a little bit boring, certainly nowhere near as exciting as the sorts of things we get to talk about nowadays. It was all a bit Worthwhile Canadian Initiative-y.

Look, here is something written by a current 15-minute wonder, Jessica Krug: "For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies. ... I have ended the life I had no right to live in the first place. // I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one. I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist". I'm with this guy: I feel awfully sorry for anyone in the position of Ms Krug - anyone who feels it might be appropriate to write that sort of thing about themselves. But you have to admit that it is a lot more exciting than discussing the rate at which the deficit should be reduced. What is a "napalm toxic soil of lies"? I have no idea, but it sounds a lot more thrilling than "Compassionate Conservatism".

If we took away all the critique creep, all the energy and vitality that transported recondite academic theories from obscure seminar rooms to front page headlines, then where would be? I know - a better place. But a place that we used to live in, and a sufficiently large number of people did not like it. 

So I find I must agree with what Fukuyama wrote in The End of History and the Last Man all those years ago. You can get to the End of History - i.e. Western civilisation c.2000-2010, say - but you still have humans, and they still want the same things they always wanted. Which includes challenge. It includes high-stakes conflict. It involves right and wrong, something to fight for and something to die for. It does not to include the careful elimination of critique creep.

I remember being struck by this bit of TEOHATLM when I first read it:

And I thought: best not take up climbing then. But that - or something like that - is what people want. All those people who could have re-created the historical struggle on the slopes of Nanga Parbat instead decided to do it in the political discourse of the English-speaking world. I wish they hadn't. But we are where we are and there is no way back.

There is, of course, a way forward. The historical struggle might arise in some new form: the End of History has not reached large swathes of east and south Asia in the way that once it was thought it might, for example. And there are various religious revival movements that provide equivalent enthusiasm to that obtained by the keenest critique-creepers. But unfortunately, sensible and well-meaning as he might be, de Boer is firmly and unfortunately on the wrong side of History with a capital H. 

De Boer concludes by appealing for allies in the task of actually improving the world: "we have been talk­ing about priv­i­lege for 30 years. We’ve been talk­ing about inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty for 25. We’re still here in this unjust world." So let's just get on with it!, he says. Good luck, de Boer. Christians have been talking about loving their neighbours for a lot longer than that, and, well, let's just say it's a work in progress. And I'm afraid that's the way it's going to be until we reach the actual Last Man/Woman/Womxn/Mxn/Other.

We are not arguing because we have made some readily-identifiable mistakes in the application of certain valid critiques: we are arguing because arguing is what we do. If there is no one else to fight, then we'll just have to fight each other.

Hot off the press: sometimes the law is not an ass at all

This is the beginning to the judgment in a genuine case decided today:

"1. Cheryl Pile brings this appeal to establish the liberty of inebriated English subjects to be allowed to lie undisturbed overnight in their own vomit soaked clothing. Of course, such a right, although perhaps of dubious practical utility, will generally extend to all adults of sound mind who are intoxicated at home. Ms Pile, however, was not at home. She was at a police station in Liverpool having been arrested for the offence of being drunk and disorderly. She had emptied the contents of her stomach all over herself and was too insensible with drink to have much idea of either where she was or what she was doing there. Rather than leave the vulnerable claimant to marinade overnight in her own bodily fluids, four female police officers removed her outer clothing and provided her with a clean dry outfit to wear. The claimant was so drunk that she later had no recollection of these events. 

2. It is against this colourful background that she brought a claim against the police in trespass to the person and assault alleging that they should have left her squalidly and unhygienically soaking in vomit. Fortunately, because this appeal will be dismissed, the challenge of assessing damages for this lost opportunity will remain unmet."  

Read more, if you dare, here.

The estate agent's art

People like to laugh at estate agents. But sometimes they have a tricky job to do. For example - 

"It's hard to know where to start with this incredibly alternative home", starts this description, giving us a glimpse into the writer's creative dilemma. But start s/he does, and once started there is no stopping. 

"The bold colours and period features work supremely well with the open plan nature of the ground floor, totally encapsulating an industrial Victorian splendour with a hint of French Chateaux." Not just "partially" encapsulating, please note, but "totally".  

"It's since been heavily featured in some weighty publications with Living Etc coining the phrase "Modern Gothic" when they ran a lengthy cover feature on the house: a description that sums it up perfectly." Do the words "heavily", "weighty" and "lengthy" suggest anything to you? 

Let's go upstairs. "Every room has a theme and an individual style of its own which merits a name for each." I think in the circumstances we can forgive "which merits a name for each". If you had to walk around the stuffed birds, candles and anatomical drawings (see photo 54) you might not be too worried about what it is that is meriting what so long as you got out in one piece. 

"From the 'Boho' to the 'Flooded Chateaux', it feels a bit like walking round a boutique hotel." A bit like. 

All in all, it's quite something for a semi in south London.

Ten+ interesting and somewhat varied links

1. This is an interesting piece about what happened to Corbyn and Corbynism, written from the inside and therefore sympathetically, but sane and sensible. If that is your sort of thing, recommended.

2. Here is Lord Sumption: "“If you are going to inaugurate the greatest invasion of personal liberty in our entire history, even including wartime measures, if you dare to do that, then you have to move straight into justification mode.

“The government has now found itself trapped in a position where, first of all, it has to exaggerate the extent of the problem in order to justify its past actions. "And secondly, by exaggerating the scale of the problem, it is contributing to the difficulty that it now faces in persuading people to go back to school and back to work, because naturally what people ask is, well, what has changed since?”

He added: “The use of fear has, of course, been noticed by many people. And some members of Sage have made public statements since then saying that this was perhaps overdone, but it was a matter of deliberate policy, as it quite clearly was.

“What you have to remember is that when societies lose liberty, it is not because liberty has been crushed under the boot of some tyrant. It’s usually because they’ve been frightened into giving it up voluntarily.”" Well, here is Anders Tegnell in the FT.

3. In a similar vein, the Guardian tells me that "Covid lockdown rules more divisive than Brexit, survey finds". And there's a class angle too. What fun.

4. Taiwan. Oh dear. Is Switzerland like this, secretly?

5. This is a cool science thing - upside-down floating. 

6. BoJo and the rule of law. And here is what he says about it.

7. Are you interested in Nikola? "In Order to Continue the Appearance of Progress, Nikola Posted a YouTube Video of Its Nikola One “In Motion” on the Road. // Text Messages from a Former Employee Reveal the Truck Was Simply Filmed Rolling Down a Big Hill."

8. Your next lockdown project - claiming Bir Tawil.

9. This is where to follow European covid statistics. I don't see anyone congratulating BoJo and criticising Macron given the recent figures, nor should they. This thing is not over yet.

10. This Yglesias-Cowen conversation was nicely done, I thought.

People's Vote - the post-mortem

There is a terribly interesting article on People's Vote in the FT.

It is quite right to say that we got very near to a second referendum happening: the monied and media classes were broadly keen on it, in many cases excessively so and, had they been better led, I suspect they could have achieved it. But the fact that their beliefs were quite different from those of the country as a whole is mentioned only in passing.

"Campbell, Baldwin and Mandelson didn’t want to be explicitly anti-Brexit. Citing their polling, they argued instead that the campaign had to be about resolving the blockage in British politics — thereby appealing to both Leavers and Remainers.  This also chimed with what Downing Street saw. James Johnson, who ran polling for May, recalls: “In every focus group I did, the reaction was always the same: ‘It’s done, we voted, we just need to get on with it’ . . . The only shred of credibility [People’s Vote] ever had was when it was framed as a way to resolve things. ... 

 The marches also didn’t win over floating voters, such as those in the north and Midlands who had backed Brexit in the hope of better public services. Instead, they may have skewed the campaign towards a passionate, pro-immigration minority. Baldwin concedes: “The proportion of soft Leavers supporting a People’s Vote was going down and down.” ”

 And there we see the problem: Remain's most vocal, prominent, enthusiastic and well-off supporters were its own worst adverts. (Much the same was true of Leave, as Cummings realised, which is why Johnson, Gove, Stuart and co were so important.)

 Of course, as Ed West points out, there is nothing terribly unusual about the majority of the country feeling distanced from their own native elites - or indeed favouring foreign ones (e.g., many Remainers). How about this: "But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” Awolowo wrote." (That is from this interesting piece.)

As for the future of People's Vote: "In June, four years after the referendum, People’s Vote — with its large email lists and half a million Facebook followers — renamed itself “Democracy Unleashed”. It has warmed up with attacks on Cummings but is yet to mention the word Brexit. Its eyes are on the general election due in 2024. Its slogans include “Campaigning to put power back in the hands of the people” ...". Is it just me, or is that slogan not the worst ever paraphrase of "Take Back Control"?

Our relationships with inanimate objects

I was prompted to consider what is going on in the 'relationship' between a dog and his/her/its owner. It proved to be surprisingly hard. So I thought I would start with the easier case, namely human relationships with inanimate objects - mere things. But even thinking about this turned out to be both more tricky and more interesting than I had suspected. Some thoughts below.

Unnecessary sneering from the Economist

You may have heard that the UK has introduced its own 'Magnitsky' sanctions, i.e. sanctions targetted at named individuals alleged by the UK government to have been complicit in serious wrongdoing. The UK's list includes 20 Saudi Arabian officials said to be involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, for example. People on the list can have their assets frozen and be barred from entering the country.

I was interested to see how The Economist covered this story. This is what it said:

"Magnitsky legislation is a fulfilment of a manifesto pledge and Mr Raab, who has been calling for such an act since 2012, has achieved a rare political feat: delivering something he genuinely believes in."

Come on. This is cynical, sneery and unworthy of the paper, and I don't need to say why.

But what I thought was particularly strange about the comment was the context. As the article itself says, there is an EU/Brexit angle on this:

"Britain’s sanctions regime has until now worked through the UN or EU. Brexit allows the country to fashion its own rules. Indeed, the first piece of Brexit-related legislation passed by Parliament was the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act ... "

One might have thought that the biggest British political fact of recent years - Brexit - is a good example of the political feat of delivering something that many politicians genuinely believe in. And one might have thought that this story of the Magnitsky sanctions would be an example of why some politicians do believe in Brexit - the power of Britain to fashion its own future, to make its own way in the world, etc etc. But The Economist continues to be incapable of seeing Brexit this way. 

I appreciate that the thinking and writing classes consider Brexit to be a Bad Idea. But I do find it odd that they can bring up the value of sticking to one's beliefs and delivering on them, and do so in a Brexit-related context, and not see the connection.

Sam Kriss continues

Sam Kriss has carried on being Sam Kriss-y, i.e. an astonishing mixture of annoying and insightful and wrong and right. He is well-aware that he is both clever and left-wing. Is he as clever as he thinks? Is he as left-wing as he thinks? I leave that to the reader.

Here he is on Black Lives Matter and similar: "There’s no nice way to say this: a certain subset of (mostly) white people have lost their minds online. ... See, for instance, the form letters: How To Talk To Your Black Friends Right Now. Because I refuse to be told I can’t ever empathise with a black person, I try to imagine what it would be like to receive one of these. Say there’s been a synagogue shooting, or a bunch of swastikas spraypainted in Willesden Jewish Cemetery. Say someone set off a bomb inside Panzer’s in St John’s Wood – and then one of my goy friends sends me something like this:

'Hey Sam – I can never understand how you feel right now, but I’m committed to doing the work both personally and in my community to make this world safer for you and for Jewish people everywhere. From the Babylonian Captivity to the Holocaust to today, my people have done reprehensible things to yours – and while my privilege will never let me share your experience, I want you to know that you’re supported right now. I see you. I hear you. I stand with the Jewish community, because you matter. Please give me your PayPal so I can buy you a bagel or some schamltz herring, or some of those little twisty pastries you people like.'

How would I respond? I think I would never want to see or hear from this person again. If I saw them in the street, I would spit in their face, covid be damned. I would curse their descendants with an ancient cackling Yiddish curse."

And here he is on Bernie Sanders and other failed left-wing causes. You know who the "we" is in what follows: "Give us our due, though: we’re passionate, and committed, and we’re strivers. In a few short weeks, we had the Bernie campaign speaking our language and broadcasting our concerns. We turned ourselves into its faces and figureheads. Just in time to thoroughly alienate everyone who wasn’t already onside.

I don’t think socialism is always, by necessity, a bourgeois idea. On both sides of the Atlantic, left-populism did briefly enjoy a broad base of support. But we need to be smarter: we need to understand that ordinary people simply do not like us, and they’re not wrong to feel that way. We’re basically obnoxious, and to overcome that we need to meet the people where they are." And from that uncontroversial starting point, he spirals off into the void. An acquired taste.

Volunteers

"I got involved with the best of intentions and a desire to play my part in contributing to a democratic debate around Brexit. I ask you, having read this story, would any of you now volunteer to do the same?" So asks Alan Halsall.

The Brexit story gives this a certain piquancy, but Halsall's story goes wider than that. If you have recently volunteered for almost anything then there is a good chance that you will have found yourself faced with a thicket of rules and regulations, guarded by threats of awful consequences. GDPR, for example, or health and safety rules.

If you are involved in recruiting or training people, quite likely having volunteered to do this in addition to your normal job and with the best of intentions, then you will have been subjected to training and warned of the risks of illegal discrimination.

Do you remember all those school governors facing the threat of competition law proceedings? Still happening (discussing discounts! during covid! How very dare you!)

If you have had tangential contact with a school then your criminal records will be checked. Have you carried out a risk assessment for the communal parts of a shared building recently? Organised a village fete?

Here's one example: "... if your group or organisation want to use a community kitchen you will need to know if your particular food operation will need to be registered as a ‘Food Business’ with [X] Council ... For example ... volunteers serving hot soup and sandwiches on a regular basis to homeless and potentially vulnerable people. ... It is recommended that at least one person within a group/organisation will have a ‘Level 2 Food Safety in Catering’ Hygiene Certificate so that they can be available to supervise at events and/or pass on their knowledge to others where appropriate." So you decide, out of the kindess of your heart, to set up a kitchen to help homeless people. One moment you are thinking of feeding some home-cooked food, the same food you would give your own children, to less fortunate members of society - and then all of a sudden you are revising for your advanced food safety certificate.

All of this is probably well-intentioned. Or at least understandable given the outrage that can happen when something goes wrong. But it creates a series of burdens that fall on the public spirited. And it is slowly squashing that spirit. Why do I bother?, asks Mr Halsall - and so many other people across the country, muttering to themselves that no good deed goes unpunished. 

Gove and Gramsci ...

... are the two big Gs of the thinking wing of the modern Conservative Party.

Here is a cracking Ditchley Lecture by Gove, entitled the Privilege of Public Service, but much more interesting than that sounds. I do not agree with all Gove says, but he is reassuringly intelligent and sensitive in his thinking. It is worth a read (particularly if you are in the Civil Service - your career path could well change).

The thinking Right (NB not an oxymoron) has the advantage over the thinking Left not only of being familiar with the intellectual landscape of its opponents - hence Gove's knowledge of Gramsci - but also of being unashamed about appealing to its opponents' holy cows. (And why not? Once an impressive left-wing achievement or person becomes old enough, it/s/he becomes another National Treasure.) So Gove appeals to FDR as a touchstone throughout his speech. Here is using FDR to remind us in London about Leavers:

"Almost every arm of Government, and those with powerful voices within it, seemed estranged from the majority in 2016. That is not to say those people’s views were not honest, principled and public-spirited. It is just to observe that a view, a perspective, a set of beliefs, which the majority, albeit slight, held in this country were rarely heard within Government. FDR asked his Government to remember the Forgotten Man. In the 2016 referendum those who had been too often forgotten asked to be remembered."

Gove is a confident thinker too, which makes his writing more interesting than most politicians. "My first attempt as Education Secretary at a new history curriculum was deeply flawed ... My cancellation of the Brown government Building Schools for the Future programme was a political fiasco ... My proposal to bring back O-Levels strained the bonds of the 2010-2015 coalition and had to be abandoned ...". He adds "buts" to all of these, but even so, it refreshing - and a sign of confidence - to see a politician set out failures as plainly as this.

I would be interested to know how much of what he says would prompt vigorous disagreement from a Starmer-type Labour Party. Possibly very little. Gove (and one detects the work of Cummings too - feel free to play "DARPA" and "Bayesian" bingo) might be writing the future of sensible centrism in this country. I rather hope so.

Someone who did change her mind

Following on from my post about people not wanting to change their minds, here is a great example of someone who did. She is Zion Lights (great name! rather like the best kind of Puritan name from the 1640s), formerly spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion UK and the founder of its climate reporting newspaper The Hourglass, who has quit the organisation to take up a position as a campaigner for nuclear power.

"For many years I was skeptical of nuclear power. Surrounded by anti-nuclear activists, I had allowed fear of radiation, nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction to creep into my subconscious," she says. But then Lights looked into the science and "realised I had been duped into anti-science sentiment all this time."

She adds, poignantly: "To my surprise, when I shared the data with my anti-nuclear friends, they argued against the science. Alas, we parted ways."

Just think how strong her desire for truth is that she left her friends and her job simply to follow what she believes to be true. And not to adopt a fashionable cause that comes with fashionable new friends, but simply to save the world. Zion Lights indeed.

The New York Times and Slate Star Codex

It seems that the NYT has done this, i.e. it has indicated that it will "doxx" (reveal the real name of) Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex fame. So he has deleted his blog. Why? For various reasons, incuding that "some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats ...." He hopes that deleting the blog will kill the story and thus prevent his name becoming more widely known.

Anonymity is a mask for the good and bad alike, and it is difficult to come up with a good rule for when it should be respected and when it should be unmasked. Anonymity is often used to give freedom, and what it gives freedom from may be something we regard as good (the requirements of honesty and good faith) or something bad (improper pressure and threats). It is just too easy to come up examples on both sides of the line.

So I am a utilitarian on the subject of anonymity. It would be a great shame if we were to lose SSC, I think, and therefore my utilitarian calculation is that the NYT should back down.

People don't want to change their minds

You have probably noticed that it's rare that people change their minds. People are wrong about lots of things - you know that and I know that - so we know that the reason they don't change their minds is not because they are right. It's because they're stubborn. Or, really, just because they don't want to, and people tend not to do things if they don't want to if they can help it.

Religion is a good example of how rare it is to change one's mind, so much so that we have special words for the different ways in which people can sometimes do it: conversion, reversion, lapsing, apostasy, losing faith and so on.

Politics nowadays is pretty similar, with quasi-religious levels of commitment demanded of adherents to various causes. We are even developing a vocabulary to show how unusual changing one's mind is: I give you "being red-pilled" (and other colours of pill) as an example. I might have more to say about this in the future. 

So I am interested in people who do change their minds. This is an interesting interview with Marc Andreessen. (If you think an interview with Marc Andreessen, particularly about how he lives his professional life, can be interesting then you will want to read this.) He says this:

"So, generally speaking, most of the people you're around most of the time hate being told that they're wrong, right? They absolutely hate it. It's really an interesting question as to why that's the case. The best explanation I'm able to come up with is: people treat their ideas like they're their children. I have an idea the same way that I have a child and if you call my idea stupid, it's like calling my child stupid. And then the conversation just stops. I've really been trying hard to do is to spend less time actually arguing with anybody. Because people really don't want to change their mind. And so I'm trying to just literally never argue with people.

However, there *is* a group of people who do love to change their mind. And interestingly, it's the people everybody wants to hate. It's hedge fund managers. The really good hedge fund managers seem to all have this characteristic: if you get into this heated argument with them, they'll actually listen to what you're saying. They won’t always change their mind but sometimes they'll go “Oh, that's a really good point”. And then they'll say, “Oh, thank you” which is just really weird for it’s not usually the result of an argument. The reason they're thanking you is because they're gonna go back to the office next morning to reverse the trade."

This is similar to Rory Sutherland's point about business being the only activity where you are paid to change your mind. 

Business in general - and finance in particular - is not getting a good press at the moment. The thinking Right has turned somewhat against free markets because of, well, everything that has happened since 2008, while the thinking Left is pleased not to have to pretend to be ok with the grubby business of making money any more. But it is worth remembering McCloskey's account of the bourgeois virtues that business requires and nurtures: honesty, good faith, keeping one's word, hope, courage, courtesy in dealings with strangers, and so on and so on - doux commerce. To which we should add, courtesy of Andreessen and Sutherland, open-mindedness. 

In the years to come, open-mindedness may come to be regarded more as a vice than a virtue, a sign of weakness of faith rather than of confidence of mind. If you think of any of the fastest-growing political movements we have now, on either the Right or the Left, you will not find the phrase "easy-going, good-humoured tolerance" springing to mind. If we do want to find that kind of attitude in those who disagree with us - and I think we do, given that the alternative is someone changing their mind to reach agreement, and no one likes doing that - then we might have to look to the worlds of business and finance to find it.

Quarantine content

If you are in isolation, here are some things that might you pass the time. I hope to add more links over time.

Virtual tours of museums.

A restful tour of London traffic in 1970.

An invisible glass Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) machine.

H20 - Just Add Water. This is an Australian TV series, available on YouTube, about teenage girls who turn into mermaids. It seems to be thoroughly wholesome (I have so far spotted just one joke about 'your body going through changes', although I have not been 100% engrossed in it) and suitable, I would say, for tweenage girls.

The Kid Should See This. I am sure I have recommended this before, but now is a good time to look at it again. Expertly curated links to things of a generally improving or at least inoffensive nature, but almost interesting and engaging, and not just for children.

Honest Trailers. What the trailer for a film should say, if it were honest. Generally not for children, but often funny.

Kurzgesagt. Educational science videos. Interesting.

Herbert Hoover, amazing guy.

Get a Japanese loo.

How JD Vance joined the resistance (i.e. became a Catholic).

What is Tory Socialism?

Not corrupted by commerce? Are priests more blase about God than amateur religionists?

The Big Bad Sister?

Do you remember Brexit? "Recent political contests across Europe and North America have been propelled by a wave of populist, anti-immigrant resentment, and it was widely expected that these populist victories would further fan the flames of xenophobia. This article reports the results of an experiment around the Brexit referendum, designed to test how populist victories shape anti-immigrant attitudes. The study finds that anti-immigrant attitudes actually softened after the Brexit referendum, among both Leave and Remain supporters, and these effects persisted for several months. How could a right-wing, populist victory soften anti-immigrant attitudes? The authors use causal mediation analysis to understand this ‘populist paradox’." This was "widely accepted" only among the most bubble-inhabiting Remainiac classes. To everyone who voted Leave or thought it reasonable that someone might do so then there is no paradox to explain. But if you really want to read more then here it is.

The China Question.

Why is Germany so good at making cars? "The combination of legal quasi-immunity, specialist technical know-how in several pockets of mechanic and chemical engineering, and wage policies that reduced Germany's real exchange rate inside the eurozone, have been behind what is often described as a second economic miracle." More here.

Ireland and England: a long but sensible piece. A couple of quotations, which don't really tell you what it is about, but which I liked anyway: "London (not Paris or Berlin) is the metropolis of Ireland. And London, metropolis or not, is in England. ... There must be many Irish in Britain who love their lives in Britain; if so, it is a love that dare not speak its name." For those of us who wish England and Ireland just to get on in a sensible way - or even more warmly and closely than that - this is cheering and bittersweet by turns. 

A judgment from the future?

I don't know how to explain this. Perhaps it is proof that the universe is really a simulation and this is one of the little glitches in the matrix that people spot from time to time, a bit like the Mandela Effect. All I can do is tell you what happened to me.

So. I was looking through the BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) website for the most recent cases in England and Wales and I found one dated 2050, namely Taylor v St Mark's Healthcare Trust [2050] EWHC 1893 (KB). It's not on the website any more so I can't give you the link now and you'll just have to take my word for it. I clicked on the link (of course!) and downloaded the case to see what the law will look like in 30 years time. In the event, it was a bit of a disappointment: the case is a pretty anodyne one that simply illustrates that the law will continue to develop in predictable ways. Nonetheless, as it may possibly be of wider interest I've cut and pasted it below and so those who can't wait 30 years for the story can read it now.

There is no such thing as bad publicity

That is an advert in the TLS itself. (Seen here.)

Other links

Here are some links that have nothing to do with decadence.

1. "Withersdale Church is an important and historic church and there is a box pew in the church for use by the owners of Thorpe Hall." That comes from the particulars of a house for sale in Suffolk. I did not know that that sort of thing is still allowed. I suppose I would have thought it quite wrong in the days when churches were full, but now I think it is charming. It says something that it is worth mentioning to potential buyers.

2. Everything you thought you guessed about the BBC is true: "A whiteboard would be marked up with a clumsy grid system. The grid would revolve around a set of key identities such as “woman”, “northern” or “poc” (person of colour). These would then be cross-categorised with political stances such as “Brexiteer”, “Tory” or “progressive”. Our task would then be to ensure that any proposed panel contained a complete balance of all these attributes. ... There is an understandable nervousness about criticising these sorts of editorial practices since it might provide material for the reactionary commentariat who have no desire to see any diverse voices in journalism at all.  ... Off-camera, a highly influential Westminster social circle revolves around trips to various holiday homes in continental Europe, where various MPs and the journalists who are supposed to report on them have long been playing just as hard as they work." Heaven forbid that the BBC provide material for the "reactionary commentariat". And does the BBC think that only "reactionaries" consider it utterly stupid to try to find a brown-skinned northern Remainer to balance a gay southern female Leaver or what have you?

3. Did you know that African Americans are much less likely to support the Democrats when no-one is watching? There are basically loads of shy black Tories in the US. Of course, having a darker skin and being right-wing in this country opens one up to all sorts of attacks from the left.

4. Fascinating article on how odd Germany is (economically).

5. I don't talk much about football. But you will want to see the worst 20 seconds of football ever played. You will also want to see the time when Donald Trump helped Saint and Greavsie to draw the teams for the Rumbelows Cup. That and Home Alone 2 as well: the Presidency will probably not take up much space in his biographies.

6. Babies. "The Left-leaning IPPR think-tank has addressed the “baby gap” — the difference between the number of children wanted by women and those they actually had — which is running at about 100,000 a year [in the UK]. ...  A Guardian survey in 2014 found a third of couples would have more children were they not so expensive; indeed if British women had all the babies they wanted, our birth rate would be above replacement level. In the US, which has seen huge falls in fertility in the past decade, 40% of women do not have all the children they wish." More here. If you have all the children you want in your family then you are a lucky person, and you are quite possibly very rich. This series of tweets, which has enjoyed some prominence, is relevant too: "Some might say: that's absurd, of course a family can't cover an entire health insurance premium, a 3-bed house, and college for two kids on a single worker's salary, that's not how anyone lives. But ... in the past a family COULD do that. Just not anymore." And so is this, from the BBC, about a chap in Seattle who decided to pay everyone $70k: ""Before the $70,000 minimum wage, we were having between zero and two babies born per year amongst the team," he says. "And since the announcement - and it's been only about four-and-a-half years - we've had more than 40 babies."" That is a demonstration of what economists refer to as the theory of revealed preferences.

7. Bad data visualisations with a big Indian (and therefore cricket) focus.

8. This is a rather specialised kind of humour, but I liked it. Abstract: "In recent years, a number of prominent computer scientists, along with academics in fields such as philosophy and physics, have lent credence to the notion that machines may one day become as large as humans. Many have further argued that machines could even come to exceed human size by a significant margin. However, there are at least seven distinct arguments that preclude this outcome. We show that it is not only implausible that machines will ever exceed human size, but in fact impossible". You might have spotted what it is really about.

9. Losing Taiwan means losing Japan.

Decadence?

I am afraid that my linkage of the links below is rather contrived, but each link is itself recommended.

1. Douthat on decadence. And Thiel on Douthat on decadence. And Sixsmith on Douthat on decadence. (One of Sixsmith's better ones, I think: "In our lazier moments we are not opposing decadence but merely providing a soundtrack.")

2. Douthat says "A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that makes the same movies over and over again might be." Well, there are just 10 types of film - judging by their posters.

3. Douthat also tells us that, "Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. ..."." Decadence is consistent with the highest levels of technical achievement - which brings me to Happy Birthday in the Styles of 10 Classical Composers. This really is incredibly good, if you like that sort of thing.

4. Another great Silicon Valley nanny job advert: "strategically think through vacation options based on the developmental levels of the kids and the need for the mom to relax";"Conduct research into domestic and global vacation options based on criteria, populate information into a simple Excel spreadsheet, recommend and book vacations, track vacation expenses in Excel including track vacation home deposits getting returned"; "Family eats organic and is allergic to cow and goat dairy, chicken eggs, green beans and watermelon" (you knew there'd be allergies, but did you guess watermelon?); "'Mom is a CEO and needs to relax on weekends". And here's an interview with the CEO Mom herself. What does Douthat say? Just that "... the promise of Silicon Valley [is] as much an article of faith for those of us watching from the outside as for its insiders; ... the one place where American innovation was clearly still alive."

5. Douthat talks about politics and economics. Starting with economics, here is Ryan Avent: "I have lived most of my adult life—and certainly the years since I began writing for The Economist—within the sphere of wonky technocrats, the quote-unquote reality-based community, people who live and breathe white papers and cost-benefit analyses and who feel certain that we can engineer our way to a better society if only we listen closely to the experts and the data. But in the years since the onset of the financial crisis, and for a number of reasons, a rift has opened within this world. On the one side stand those whose faith in the wonk worldview was not particularly shaken by the events of the past 13 years or so. [...] On the other side of the rift are those who have begun to suspect that some of the assumptions embedded in neoliberal policies were faulty." Frankly, if you haven't at least entertained the idea that the global financial crisis - and the reactions to it by those in power - should alter your worldview then you can't claim to be quote-unquote reality-based at all: "What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what Donald Trump and Nigel Farage said would happen has come to pass", as Lord Melbourne almost said.

6. ... which brings us onto the more purely political. "Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence ...". On this side of the Atlantic, we have Brexit and so I can seamless segue into Tom McTague, who continues his run as one of the consistently best writers on British politics by writing about Brexit here, and Matthew Goodwin, who also continues his good run here, echoing a point I made in the series of posts that I started here: "The story of how Brexit happened is likely to be one of those political stories that "everyone knows", even if what everyone knows might not quite be right." Leavers are, as Goodwin points out, quite nice really. But Remainers will write the history books and teach our children. The 1066 And All Thats of the future will no doubt describe the Leavers as Wrong and Repulsive. (Until the revisionist / Buzzfeed historians of the 2300s tell us that Everything You Thought You Knew About Brexit is Wrong!!!)

7. Douthat's NY Times piece does not mention universities, although I'm sure his book does. Anyway, here is a shocking article on how odd US universities are becoming.

8. And as for relations between the sexes and family life .... "I will try and explain what happens when mating meets politics using a speculative and overgeneralized model. This is a descriptive account of what I think is actually happening, not a moral sermon. There will be charts, and memes, and dating stories." If that's your sort of thing, then you will like this.

9. Next is an aspect of decadence not in Douthat's article: pornography. This is well worth a read: "For anyone born since 1995, it is not necessary to ask how they became aware of sex. It was by watching PornHub on a friend’s smartphone at the age of 13." And so is this (although be aware that (a) it is long - to make the obvious comment, you might want to skip to the good bits, (b) I have no idea if the science is at all accurate and (c) it describes some disgusting things that you might prefer not to know about).

10. Finally, last but by no means least, John Bercow discussed here, as is only right and proper.

Social conservatives and cultural conservatives

This is John Gray on John Gray-ish form (i.e. well worth reading) telling us Why the Left Keeps Losing.

There is a lot of good stuff in the piece, but for this post I just want to talk about this bit:

"A Blue Labour takeover along the lines of that mounted by Blair cannot occur when the mass membership recruited by Corbyn is made up overwhelmingly of progressives. Even if a takeover was feasible it is doubtful whether voters would support a programme of moral conservatism, which Blue Labour also proposes. The resistance to progressivism in social matters is focused chiefly on law and order and immigration. There is no detectable enthusiasm for the restoration of traditional family structures or sexual mores. Working-class voters want security and respect, not a wholly different form of life."

This is completely true. And it is an important point for the future of the Left - and the future of the Right. More below.

Entertaining stuff from David Graeber

This has a good claim to be the best thing the New York Review of Books has ever published on British politics. It is by David Graeber and therefore distinctly, shall we say, odd. I disagree with huge chunks of it. But it is penetrating, thought-provoking and almost persuasive. Take with plenty of salt and an open mind.

Some quotes below.

The names of the composers of excellent TV theme tunes

British TV has been graced with some good and/or memorable theme music. There are some very catchy tunes and some well arranged atmosphere pieces out there.

So I made a quick list of all the theme tunes that first came to mind and decided to carry out some research into their composers.

But I quickly came across a striking fact. They all have names that are ... well... how shall I put this? Let me just say that they conjure up a vision of mid-twentieth century mustachioed executives or car dealers, rather in the manner of the names of the heroes of Sue Hendra's books.

Let's start with sports programmes:

Grandstand: Keith Mansfield.

Wimbledon: Keith Mansfield wrote the opening music but I prefer the closing music, which is by Leslie Statham (aka Arnold Steck), who also wrote the original music for Match of the Day. Yes, Wimbledon can claim a Keith, a Leslie and an Arnold.

One Man and His Dog: Alan Benson.

Ski Sunday: Samuel Soden, aka Sam Fonteyn. Sam is a perfectly normal name, but I couldn't exclude the Ski Sunday theme without it looking like cherry picking. Let's call this an exception.

Match of the Day: Barry Stoller.

Then onto less sporting fare:

Brideshead Revisited: Geoffrey Burgon
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: also Burgon
Chronicles of Narnia: also Burgon. You get to recognise the sound of the brass after a bit. Burgon did many other things too that I do not remember, perhaps because he left out the brass sections from those pieces.

Now, you might perhaps be inclined to intone "Geoffrey Burgon" with terribly round vowels and consider it an appropriate name for a Norman crusader or his modern descendant, a man of substance and good breeding. But I invite you instead to consider good old Geoff Burgon propping up the bar at the 19th hole and asking his old chums Alan, Barry and Keith to name their poison, not forgetting their good lady wives. You will find that it helps my thesis.

Hetty Wainthropp Investigates: Nigel Hess. Hess also did the award-nominated Wycliffe theme, which is a bit busy for my taste.

Last of the Summer Wine: Ronnie Hazlehurst. Hazlehurst also wrote the music for Reggie Perrin and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, neither of which I can hum without looking up but which I daresay are also pretty good.

Jeeves and Wooster: Anne Dudley. A lone female entrant in my list who has (a) worked on lots of films, (b) is married to a man called Roger and (c) has a long working relationship with a man called Trevor (namely Trevor Horn). I do not feel that she invalidates the thesis.

Pride and Prejudice: Carl Davis, an American who moved to the UK. Davis also wrote an on-the-money theme for the 2010 Upstairs Downstairs series that I didn't watch.

Eastenders: another Leslie, namely Leslie Osborne, but in collaboration with Simon May.

64 Zoo Lane: Rowland Lee.

In fairness, I should point out that I also had down In the Night Garden ... , which is by Andrew Davenport, who is clearly both a man of parts and unlikely to star in any Sue Hendra story.

(The Johnny Briggs theme was not originally written for the show and so I feel justified in excluding John Ambrose Greenwood from my list of TV theme composers. Don't ask me too many questions about Arnold Steck.)

I then wondered if my thesis is true of the great US TV theme tunes. The answer is: .... yes!

Dallas: Jerrold Immel - a hit!
Knots Landing: also Jerrold Immel!

McGyver: Randy Edelman. I feel that "Randy Edelman" is the American equivalent of "Barry Stoller" or "Nigel Hess".

The A Team: Mike Post and Pete Carpenter. Oh dear, a bit like Sam Fonteyn - an exception to my theory. But then I looked further, namely on Wikipedia, and saw that Garry Schyman's contribution was uncredited. On the basis of his name alone, I am now entirely convinced that Schyman is the unsung hero of one of the best-remembered of all TV theme tunes.

The Dukes of Hazzard's theme tune was written and performed by Waylon Jennings. Terry Bush wrote the music for The Littlest Hobo.

At this point I have to stop and declare that my thesis is now established beyond doubt. All of those men and no John, no James, no Tim or Steve or Dave or Dan or Matt or Ben or Rob or Alex or Mark or Will or Chris or Ed or ... Nor any Tarquins, Orlandos or Florians. But yet a Barry, a Garry and a Terry, a Geoff, a Jerrold and an Arnold: you have to admit that I am on to something.

There was obviously no bar to being called John and writing good tunes in the 20th century: I give you John "Star Wars Superman Jurassic Park" Williams. But clearly the same unwarranted snobbishness that meant that Hollywood actors used to look down on TV parts means that TV theme tunes were reserved to the Nigels and Keiths of the world, while the William Waltons and John Williamses took the big screen parts. I am sorry to report this, and I can only hope that the recent improvement in the standing of TV shows means that their composers will get the recognition they deserve.

Two Scott Alexander posts

No apologies, but both of these are worth your time, for entirely different reasons.

1. A computer has learned to play chess using text prediction. Just like those AI programs that produce rubbishy poems, this one produces rubbishy strings of "1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 ..." etc.

2. Great questions to ask the US Presidential candidates. It starts:

"Mr. Biden: Your son Hunter Biden was on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, during your vice-presidential term. The Ukrainian government was investigating Burisma for misdeeds, and Hunter was allegedly one of the targets of the investigation. President Trump alleges that you used your clout as VP to shut down the investigation into Hunter, which if true would constitute an impeachable abuse of power.

My question for you is: if your son had been a daughter, would you have named her Gatherer?"