Hot-dogs, bad history, poor science and the curse of the Blob (plus some magic)

Some essays and articles that have piqued my interest - from permanent opposition to Sunak's political suicide via flesh-eating fungi and enchantment.

Permanent Opposition.

I’ve always associated the state of permanent opposition with the far left, with the sort of “never grew up once a student activist” sort of politician but Tom Jones (that’ll be Councillor Jones to you of course) has spotted the tendency in the Conservative Party. Jacob Rees-Mogg, from the pulpit of his show on GB News presented his ‘shadow budget’. As Tom spotted:

“If only you were a member of some kind of institution that could affect this kind of thing, Jacob. Perhaps some kind of organisation that would be in charge of government spending and taxation, and have some control over what the state does. Perhaps elected by a majority of the population in order to reflect the general wishes of the populace. That had perhaps been in charge of those things for over a decade, so it really had time to embed any specific policies it might wish to implement.”

For reasons that are too meta to explain here, Tom calls this ‘hot dog politics’ and we see it all the time. MPs roll up on the telly or in the papers explaining how it is terrible that something or other hasn’t happened and nobody asks them why they’ve not done anything about it until it was a Big Deal with the public?

Lies, damned lies and 21st century academia

Ian Leslie was once, like me, a research director at an advertising agency. Ian was probably better at it than me because he didn’t waste everyone’s time conducting research asking “Is £5 a lot of money?” and “Why does everyone hate Leeds United?”. Anyway Ian has moved on and writes interesting stuff including a commentary about how academic historians are destroying the study of history. This article takes, as its set texts, a couple of academic journal articles that seem to involve only a passing connection with historical evidence and sane historiography. One concerns how many black Londoners were killed in the Black Death of the 14th century (correct answer probably fewer than a dozen) and how this shows we were structurally racist even back then in the middle ages. And the other is an article about how the Cort method for rolling steel was invented by some slaves in Jamaica not by a chap called Cort.

“In recent years there has been a precipitous, worldwide decline in the number of young people choosing to study the humanities, including history. Governments are funnelling resources towards STEM, and universities are responding to signals from the marketplace. But the humanities are also under assault from within; from a cohort of academics who have been raised in the deadening, homogenising discourse of critical theory (or a rather, a degraded version of it) and who are now abandoning the principles which made their discipline authoritative and vital in the first place.

There really isn’t much point in studying literature if you don’t value it as an end in itself rather than just a method of social activism and there is certainly no point in studying history if you don’t believe in the primacy of empirical evidence. If you want to tell the story of the Industrial Revolution as one of exploitation of black technological practices, that’s fine, but it has to be securely rooted in evidence. If it’s just a story, it’s worse than worthless.”

Read the whole thing, it is worth your time.

Flesh-eating fungus (and climate change obviously)

Ian Leslie wrote about how everything seemingly has to be about race but there’s a similar problem with everything being about climate change.

There’s a disease called ‘Valley Fever’ that is caused by what sensationalist copy editors will call a ‘flesh-eating fungus’ and the number of cases in California have been rising.

“Scientists warn that coccidioides, a fungus that causes an ailment known as Valley Fever, is spreading rapidly in the US West as temperatures increase. Per the Washington Post, cases involving this flesh-eating fungus, dubbed "cocci" in scientific circles, have quadrupled in the past 20 years, with California particularly hard hit. The CDC reports about 20,000 annual cases in the US, but the agency estimates the true number may be closer to 500,000 because initial symptoms are similar to those for more common diseases.”

Now cocci literally is, of course, a flesh-eating fungus because it evolved to live off dead animals in desert conditions. And because scientists are obsessed with climate change, one of California’s infectious-disease specialists comes right out and says that "I cannot think of any other infection that is so closely entwined with climate change,". The article goes on to tell us that there’s no proven connection but that doesn’t stop the scare stories about how, if we don’t starve, we will be devoured by flesh-eating mushrooms. Some sanity does come however from an actual mycologist who didn’t get the climate change memo (despite being a UC Berkeley):

"These fungi evolved to eat animals," says mycologist John Taylor. Dead rats are a favorite snack, and while researchers know the fungus grows in dirt and is spread through the air, they're also studying rat holes, where large concentrations of the fungus grow.”

Maybe the problem is that there are more rats not to mention those bubonic plague carrying ground squirrels? Or more people - nearly 200,000 in California - who are homeless?

Enchantment and the idea of spirit

One of the things that keeps me attached to conservatism is the idea of enchantment. It is hard to explain how magic pervades the world to someone who doesn’t see its presence. There is a passage in Paul Gallico’s ‘The Man who was Magic’ that comes closest for me. When the magical man was asked about magic, he didn’t reply with talk of the magic he performed like unscrambling an egg but instead described the world and the universe:

“And when the sun sets...then the night magic spreads out above your head; worlds and universes a-borning and a-dying—stars and planets and galaxies. And the bigger the telescope they can make, and the farther into the beyond they are able to penetrate, the greater grows the mystery.”

Aaron Renn, who is best known as an urbanist writer and consultant, has recently taken to writing about men, largely in the context of evangelical christianity. In Renn’s latest piece he talks about being ‘re-enchanted’:

“I went through a three year period some time ago that was by far the worst of my life. It wasn’t just that it was bad, but that there were so many bizarre things that happened that they could only be collectively viewed as at least semi-miraculous - but for the purposes of harming me. I had never read Max Weber, but after that period was over and I read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and his account of disenchantment I realized something: during that three year period the world had become re-enchanted for me.”

The thread on Renn’s substack is worth a visit especially in how he looks at Orthodox Christianity where the idea of mystery and spirit - enchantment if you wish - is far more prominent than it is in the stripped-back protestantism so common in the USA. As Renn observes:

“Orthodoxy seems to operate with a richer appreciation of mystery and mysticism is another factor drawing young people to it. It speaks to this growing longing for a re-enchanted world.”

I also like Renn’s characterisation of Jordan Peterson’s work as “Jungian claptrap”.

Nanny, Blobs and Political Suicide

Chris Snowdon writes about the latest piece of pseudoscience around food, booze and fags:

“Suffice to say, they will keep flogging the ‘drain on the NHS’ angle for as long as people are dumb enough to believe it. The report goes on to provide some new estimates of how much “health-harming industries” cost society by allowing people to drink, smoke and eat so much that they become unemployable. They don’t look credible but closer analysis is impossible because they don’t show their workings.”

Nick Busvine has views on The Blob:

“But the Blob, I think, are those people who are paid by the taxpayer and who exert significant influence on public policy making, but who remain essentially anonymous and ‘out of reach’: in other words - civil servants, quangocrats, regulators, health service leaders and so on.”

Don’t wholly agree since a lot of the blob are safely camped in NGOs and academia but the analysis is interesting and welcome.

Finally Fergus Mason points out Rishi Sunak’s ‘political suicide’. The body is still twitching but this is worth a read:

“Rishi Sunak either doesn’t want to hold Boris’s winning coalition together, which assuming he actually wants to win the next election makes no sense at all, or he doesn’t understand what it was based on. What Boris understood, but Sunak apparently doesn’t, is that overall - and of course there are many exceptions - the British people tend to lean left on economics and right on culture. We like the NHS and welfare state, but we also like strong border controls and crime-free streets.”

Enjoy.