Challenging the herd with bold thinking in philosophy, politics and culture. Subscribe to UnHerd here: unherd.com/join
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"Superman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Wolf Blitzer would share a common landlord."
@ryan_zickgraf on the merger of Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros.
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AI: a very human tragedy, by Terry Eagleton
There’s a long history of myths and fables which concern servants or apprentices rebelling against their masters, taking advantage of their absence in order to sport, riot and smash the dinner plates.
The Shakespearian Fool wants to do this but can’t, so he contents himself with creating verbal havoc instead, running linguistic rings around the monarch and his courtiers. Ariel in The Tempest is always just about to get out of hand but just reined in by his irascible master.
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UnHerd retweeted
Working for @unherd is always an education in seeing the other guy's perspective. Love this weekend's interview with DSA guru Bhaskar Sunkara by @NikosMohammadi.
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Modern conservatives belong to a political class that is increasingly deaf to classical music.
How do we fix this? @holysmoke 👇 buff.ly/LonXMp9
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Will the Gulf war claim another victim?, by Malise Ruthven
The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner.
Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.”
The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.
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Can Zohran Mamdani save high culture?
His ‘Opera for All’ initiative is a promising step, writes @holysmoke 👇 buff.ly/LonXMp9
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‘We are accustomed, in the West, to associate anti-colonial rhetoric with the Palestinian cause.’
Yet Benjamin Netanyahu leans into it just as heavily, writes @si_rubinstein 👇 buff.ly/ivGBrlX
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What the West forgets about China, by David Lloyd Dusenbury (@DusenburyDavid)
In September 2015, Xi Jinping made his first state visit to Washington, DC. During a six-day American itinerary, he made the usual rounds: the summits, the forums, the dinners. Yet during his first speech in the country, Xi also mentioned that he had read some of Walt Whitman’s poetry.
This should not surprise us, since Whitman has had a rather strong reception in China. In the Twenties, the avant-gardists of China’s New Culture Movement held him up as an icon, and by knowing some of Whitman’s verse, Xi showed that he’s familiar with a figure who inspired modern China’s literati.
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Benjamin Netanyahu this week attacked Britain’s colonial history.
The Israeli political Right has a deeply anti-imperialist strain, writes @si_rubinstein 👇 buff.ly/ivGBrlX
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How to solve the debt crisis, by Jagjit Chadha (@jagjit_chadha)
With the establishment of the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Treasury seems to have become little more than the Government's policy cheerleader — vacating its former role as a ‘critical friend’ seeking to correct policy errors and nurture growth.
Not unrelated, Whitehall’s relaxed attitude to raising debt means the Treasury has an incentive to see inflation as the way out of our fiscal mess.
Yet if that reduces the value of Britain’s elephantine debt, it soon sparks other challenges, not least in the weekly supermarket bills of millions of ordinary people.
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Should the Tories lean into the ‘nasty party’ label of old?
@DrDavidJeffery on Badenoch’s proposed benefits crackdown 👇 buff.ly/7W1gDYE
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Low-trust society breeds weak kids, by Marilyn Simon
“Say something fucking wrong!” I want to shout at them. “Say it just to say it, to show that the public world doesn’t hold jurisdiction over your home, your family, and your private world.”
The home should remain a place for private life. It cannot be private unless one resists the intrusion of The Ministry of Nice. The home should be a safe place for dangerous ideas. If one wants a child capable of navigating the pathways of the world, of slipping past the notice of busybodies who are ready to report any whiff of risky thinking, they need a place where social conventions can be discarded, or ridiculed, or accepted.
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Kemi Badenoch’s proposal to stop welfare claimants from using benefits to buy alcohol could be smart politics.
@DrDavidJeffery 👇 buff.ly/7W1gDYE
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Xi will win the AI war, by William Matthews
Just as self-actualisation-through-technology, Nietzschean or utopian, has its conceptual roots in the West’s intellectual heritage, so also does the alternative vision of AI — an all-of-society enhancement that is context-specific, regulatorily-iterative, embodied, and safely controlled — have its roots in China’s.
It is the kind of approach one might expect from a civilisation whose philosophy has emphasised a continuous relationship between the mental and the physical, the mutual influence of society and the wider cosmos, and the complexity of the web of factors that influence individual behaviour.
Such principles lie behind ideas ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to Confucian moral self-cultivation, emphasising propensity and interconnectedness over determinism and separation.
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"It’s hard to imagine the DSA embracing Bhaskar Sunkara’s socially moderate, pro-American model of democratic socialism.
Then again, a year ago, it would have been hard to imagine Zohran Mamdani urging the Left to stop coddling disorder."
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Funding contraceptives and abortions in deprived countries won’t help the British economy.
Read @AdamPollock on the problem with Foreign Office funding 👇
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The Government has announced £254 million in funding for a programme which provides abortions in deprived countries.
Is the Foreign Office using its budget wisely? @AdamPollock 👇
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Andy Burnham should embrace his inner Trotsky, by Jonny Ball (@DespoticInroad)
‘You may not be interested in war,’ Leon Trotsky is supposed to have said, ‘but war is interested in you.’ On the eve of his first Labour conference as leader, Andy Burnham is learning this maxim’s grim truth. Facing a deteriorating set of public finances, which threaten to leave his radical domestic agenda stillborn, this is in no small part due to conflict in the Middle East.
Just as LBJ’s Great Society was knocked off course by the tactical genius of Ho Chi Minh, 'Manchesterism’ might be tempered by the Houthis, to say nothing of multilateralism’s fading potency in our increasingly unstable world.
There’s every chance, here, that Burnham was familiar with Trotsky’s quip long before he entered No. 10. Like many Labour statesmen — Tony Blair and Keir Starmer among them — he enjoyed a youthful flirtation with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas. That’s three out of the last four Labour PMs confessing to intellectual dalliances with the founder of the Red Army.
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The centre-left’s slow suicide, by Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis)
‘Only dangerous fanatics refuse to compromise,’ my mother used to tell me. And so, several decades later, I entered government ready to compromise; a small price to pay, I thought, for delivering a modicum of relief to the suffering majority who had voted us in. Yet the hardest, and the most pertinent, question kept torturing me: how does one compromise without ending up compromised? Which single compromise would catapult me into the land of the co-opted? For months, I struggled to find the answer, until one revealed itself unexpectedly.
It is an enigma that begets a paradox. On the one hand, trying to pinpoint the pivotal compromise is as futile as trying to seek the single hair that, once lost, admits one into the brotherhood of the bald. On the other hand, just as one glance at me confirms I lack enough hair to count as bald, one glance at Andy Burnham and the vast majority of Europe's centre-left leaders confirms they are compromised. It is a question that remains pertinent.
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UnHerd retweeted
"Prohibition actually led to a decrease in crime, a decrease in domestic violence, a decrease in certain fights and other sorts of public disturbances," though "it's too late now" to bring it back.
@sunraysunray says in my @unherd profile of him.
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UnHerd retweeted
“As a society, [we] should have a normative vision of a good life, but also leave room for minority preferences.”
@sunraysunray to me on weed, booze, porn, gambling, patriotism, and his socialist vision for America.
This weekend in @unherd.
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