I first started listening to music with intent in 1989. I had recently got a job working in a toy shop that meant I had some disposable income to buy clothes and music with. I was intent on making myself less of a social pariah, an effort in which I mostly failed. However I did have two sets of friends - one at school, one at the church youth group - who were all into music. The church group were either into hair mental (the dudes) or chart pop (the chicks). My school friends were into, well, everything. Phil, in particular, had an obsession with music in all its forms. Every spare surface in his room was crowded out with obscure vinyl, cassettes, and CDs. He may also have introduced me to the UK music press.

Massive, garish papers stuffed full of ads and articles on music - the inkies had been around for decades. I think I bought my first copy of the NME in the summer of 1990. Madchester was at its height. The world in those pages was completely alien to me. It may as well have been reporting from Mars.

Soon I was regularly reading NME and Melody Maker (MM) - either buying copies if I was feeling flush or furtively reading them in WH Smiths until the staff started aggressively rearranging magazines next to me. There were a raft of writers - Steven Wells, David Stubbs, Dele Fadele, Kitty Empire, Simon Price, Caitlin Moran, Everett True.

There was one writer that I became particularly smitten with. Simon Reynolds wrote about rock and dance music in a unique way. There were a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, his writing tries to evoke what the music sounds like and how they made you feel. For example, My Bloody Valentine’s All I Need is a “cloud-covered asteroid” - which it absolutely is. Omni Trio and Foul Play “make the drums sing inside your flesh”. The metaphors and comparisons don’t always work for me. But this grappling with sound in itself and its interplay with your body stood out from other writers content to trade in generalities or a focus on lyrics.

This grounding is then combined with all kinds of arcane philosophy - e.g. Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs as a way of understanding hardcore rave or Klaus Theweleit as a window into heavy metal. It was pretentious in all the best ways.

But this analysis wouldn’t have meant much if the music that he recommended hadn’t been any good and the aesthetic judgments he made had always been radically different to my own. I often agreed with him. I like hardcore (rock and rave) as much as, if not more than, their more intellectual cousins. Britpop was mostly rubbish. Burial was awesome (although I have less interest than he does in Hautology as a project).

He also continued writing a lot and made most of this writing available over the years on his sprawling estate of interconnected Blogger sites. Barely a week goes by without one or two posts somewhere in the Reynolds empire. If I didn’t know better I might expect some kind of dark satanic text mill where third world urchins churn out 300 words on glitchcore. Or these days it would be AI. But the more banal and wholesome truth is that he just really loves writing. I hope the words continue to pour out of him for decades to come.

So lets take stroll down memory lane** and revisit his books.

Blissed Out (1990)

This book was published a few months after I started reading MM. I didn’t actually read the book itself until I found a copy in London bookshop in 1998ish, I have not read it for a long time, and I do not currently have a copy. As I recall, it’s a collection of articles written by SR (and with some contributions by his comrade, David Stubbs). It begins by having a go at the Soul Boys clogging up the charts and then proceeds to investigate the various alternatives (underground and overground) on offer - heavy metal, noise rock, rap, early acid house, Prince, Morrissey, etc. It predates the full bloom of shoegaze, the rise of grunge, and SR’s full on conversion to dance music. Again, memory is a tricky thing so I may have completely fabricated a version of this book.

What brings it back to my memory are the overlaps with his most recent book (certainly its first half). While the perspectives of 1990 SR and 2026 SR are similar, I wonder it what ways they are different. What does 2026 SR think of this first book? What would 1990 SR think of his more mature self and his critical positions? (To be fair, some of his shifts are discussed in the latest book)

Even in 1998, the arguments and the debates that the book were embedded in seemed to be ancient history. As such, I imagine the book itself might be a handy time capsule but I don’t feel compelled to disinter it.

Buy here

The Sex Revolts (1996)

Written with his wife Joy Press. I cannot remember whether I read this in 1996 or 2003. I have equally strong memories of both. Whatever. It is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking investigation into gender in rock. Not just “women playing rock music” but how male musicians and their enablers fans treat masculinity and femininity, men and women, in their art and their lives. Macho men. Soft boys. Madonnas. Whores. People. All that.

Again I do not have a copy of this so I am reconstructing this book from my highly fallible memory. I recall it being a good read. There might have been a touch too much psychoanalytic content in it for my tastes but many of the leitmotifs (oceanic imagery) crop up elsewhere in SR’s work. Again, I would be curious to hear what its authors think of it now, 30 years down the line. I’d also be curious to know what each author brought to the book - and whether they would ever write a book together again.

Details here

Energy Flash (1998)

This I definitely bought when it first came out in 98. There was a compilation CD attached to the book that I played at a house-warming that year. I may have read it repeatedly and I have an ebook version. It is a history of the rise of dance music - primarily in the UK. But it is a unique and highly partisan one.

SR approaches it through the music first. There is a lot of discussion about what specific tracks actually sound like. There is plenty of sociological and historical analysis, interviews with participants and protagonists, even some pharmacology - but this starts with the music. As the book begins in the US in the 80s with Chicago House and Detroit Techno and SR did not have his rave epiphany until 91, the opening is similar to his later historical books but then he becomes a participant. Which is where the partisanship comes in. 90s dance music in the UK was made up multiple scenes. The focus for SR becomes the London-centric, working class worlds of ‘Ardkore and then Jungle (what was later dubbed the Nuum). This is contrasted with the more middle-class worlds of Intelligent Dance Music, Minimal Techno, etc.

Class traitor Simon Reynolds wants to argue for the artistic validity of Ardkore and Jungle. And he’s a bit disappointed when Jungle gentrifies with Goldie’s Timeless and LTJ Bukem.

The book ends in 1997 with rise of both Big Beat and Speed Garage. There were two subsequent editions in 2008 and 2013 with additional material. There have not been any subsequent editions which does imply that this story is now largely played out, at least for SR.

Anyone looking for an “objective” history of dance music will be disappointed - as the reviews on Goodreads will attest. SR is a music journo, not an academic historian. Asking him not to voice his opinions and judgments would be like asking Fatboy Slim to not entertain a crowd. Why would you?

Again, as with Blissed Out, the battles being fought here are long ended and one would assume Squarepusher and Grooverider could shake hands like British and German World War II veterans at a Remembrance Day service - both looking forward to a cup of cocoa and a hot bath.

Details here.

Rip It Up And Start Again (2005)

Another one I read when it came out in hardcopy and have the ebook. Twenty years into his career (but also published 20 year ago), this is the first “historical” work that he has undertaken - in that all the key events happened before he became a journo. So it’s a mix of archival research in the music press and interviews with participants. It came out when postpunk influenced music (The Strokes, Bloc Party) was having a moment so I think it got a lot of attention - and hopefully a lot of people bought copies***.

As I am 10 years younger than SR, I experienced this period as a child and this book came out as streaming services were only just emerging. So I had heard of many of these bands but not all - and I knew very little of the deeper stories and context behind them.

Again this is one person’s view of a music period and it makes no attempt to be neutral about the bands it discusses. Caution: Contain opinions. It is a chunky book that at times overflows with bands and incidents and music. But it is certainly value for money.

Details here.

Bring the Noise (2007) & Totally Wired (2009)

Apparently I bought Bring The Noise in 2012 and I think I read it soon after. It’s a collection of articles written over a 20 year period about rock, dance, and rap music - often with current reflections appended. Many of the articles I had read in their original venues or elements of them had been reused in Energy Flash. There’s a lot of good stuff here and much of it was published in places that are no longer accessible.

Totally Wired contains the interviews that underpinned Rip It Up. I haven’t read it. I’m sure there’s lots of good stuff in there but I read Simon Reynolds for Simon Reynolds. And it struck me that this would mostly be the words of other people.

In hindsight, both of these feel a bit filler-y. If SR himself was reviewing them, he’d say that a best of compilation and a bunch of outtakes were just the artist treading water. And I sympathize with the need for him to make a bit of money while putting together his next book. His books tend to the chunky side so I respect the effort involved. Expecting a Rip It Up every couples of years would be utterly unreasonable.

Retromania (2011)

The next book is different again. Not so much a history (with or without authorial insert) as a set of explorations of pop culture’s obsession with, and reimaging of, its own past. In that sense, it is closer to The Sex Revolts as a thematic investigation although the older book has more of a through-line of argument. Retromania is series of discrete essays inspired by the insane increase in the availability of past music over the 00s. A process driven by technology and commerce. Pop is no longer ephemera, lost to time, but ominously omnipresent. There’s no escape from heaven.

But it’s not just iPods and the internet. Biba and vintage chic, Northern Soul, Rock n Roll, The Stuckists. Many topics crop up in SR’s stories.

At the time, I found the fractured and disconnected nature of the chapters in Retromania frustrating. It felt more like the essay collections than the broader narratives of Energy Flash and Rip It Up. Now, I suspect it may be the book that SR ultimately gets remembered for and, after a quick flick through my ebook, I may well revisit it in more depth soon.

Towards the end of the book, SR says “I still believe the future is out there” Is that still the case?

Details here.

Shock and Awe (2016)

Another history book! “My family went without television until I was around the age of eight, which was 1971, so glam is pretty much the first pop music I can remember clearly.” This is SR going into the music of his childhood. Whereas Rip It Up was a mix of interviews and archival material, Shock and Awe is more purely archival - based on contemporary press commentary and books about, or even by, the participants.

This is a musical period that I have no direct memory of - although many of the bigger musicians covered (David Bowie, Queen, Brian Ferry) lingered as cultural forces into my childhood. So it’s a book that doesn’t have much emotional heft for me but I respect the craft and I enjoyed the read.

Details here.

Futuromania (2024)

Another collection of pre-existing material from a 30 year span, there was enough in Futuromania that I hadn’t read before to make it interesting. The profile of Rob Haigh / Omni Trio and the two sci-fi essays are particularly memorable.

Details here

Still In A Dream (2026)

And now we come to his latest book. A decade after Shock and Awe, SR revisits his origin story. Based on some of the press, I had expected it to be more narrowly focused on shoegaze. But it’s much broader than that. There’s sections on C86 and The Smiths and US noise bands and grunge. Pretty much all of the indie rock musicians that SR encountered and had some aesthetic interest in. There’s also an extended love letter to / euology for the inkies and a whole world of popular music journalism that no longer exists.

Unlike Blissed Out or Energy Flash, this book feels less about winning arguments than making sense of lives and times and sounds. There are still many opinions - including enough criticism of enough indie pop figures to generate a bunch of negative reviews from their enablers fans.

Much like Energy Flash, I have actual memories of many of these bands and events (especially in the second half). I remember buying particular albums and going to specific gigs. So the emotional hooks are there a plenty. But these memories grow fainter and more distant. And that’s no bad thing. I have seen Pixies 4 time - once in 1990 and then 3 times after they reformed, the last in 2022. I don’t want to see them again.

The books ends with SR wondering whether his life as a transmitter of musical excitement has been worthwhile and concluding that it has.

I agree.

Simon, please keep writing while there are still words and music.

Details here.

*Congratulations on your recent wedding. I wish you and your lovely bride all the happiness in the world.

**And then get lost somewhen along Forgetfulness Avenue.

***Now there are historical documentaries about the Strokes and Bloc Party are having revival tours. I feel old.

Guy Ritchie is not a drawcard for me. He’s a compelling visual stylist whose work screams his background in commercials and music videos in every frame. He also evinces a posh boy’s love of East End gangsters so his films end up being commercials for organized crime. So when a new TV show was linked to Ritchie, I knew I had to avoid it like a Kray Twin adversary avoiding The Blind Beggar. What I didn’t know is this show had been created by Ronan Bennett.

Bennett has had quite the life. As a teenager, he faced the courts for violence associated with the IRA and anarchist movements. Then he got a doctorate in History at UCL. Most recently, he created the shows Top Boy and The Day of the Jackal. His shows are about more than people committing cinematically exciting violence. Top Boy explores London in the same way that The Wire explores Baltimore. The Jackal is as much about transnational corporations and the lifestyles of the professionals who service them as it is about a man shooting people with ever more elaborate and unconvincing guns (“Why, yes, this foldaway Brompton bicycle does turn into a sniper rifle”).

On its surface, MobLand is about a crime family and their primary fixer/lieutenant - played by professional hard man Tom Hardy. It should be difficult to relate to a character who spends much of his time blackmailing and killing people. But the show is about something that is supremely relatable to me. The protagonist and his best friend are middle-aged Gen X men trying to balance grueling work commitments with kids on the one hand and increasingly erratic parents on the other. MobLand is all about Sandwiches.

The Boomer couple who head the Harrigan clan used to be at the top of their game. But as the series progresses, it becomes clear that this is no longer the case. Conrad Harrigan is played with an increasingly unhinged menace by Piers Brosnan who seems hell-bent on making you forget he was so boring as James Bond. Meanwhile Helen Mirren plays his wife Lady Macbeth But More Evil Maeve. Their schemes start off violent but comprehensible before escalating to mad then ending full nuttah. Nevertheless they still think they are geniuses, even as their enemies murder their own children with chainsaws, the police arrest them, their closest allies betray them, and their non-dead children curse their names. It’s not us, it’s them. We’re fine.

Letting go is hard to do. Passing on the crown is not the same as losing it.

Meanwhile their biological and adopted offspring move from reasoning with them and repairing their damage to getting the job done without them. Some people have spent so long listening to their own voices that they are unable to listen to those of others.

Most of the Boomers of my acquaintance are not mass murders. Some of them have taken sensible decisions regarding their declining capabilities - e.g. putting their names down for retirement homes; and sorting out powers of attorney and wills and so forth. Others have stubbornly refused to accept the unforgiving trudge of Time, frogmarching us all to the grave like Tom Hardy with an errant henchman.

What this has done is made me determined to not make the same mistakes (although doubtless I will find new and unsettling mistakes to make). I am not Peter Thiel immortal. My body and mind will corrode and decay. I would say that I don’t want to be a burden but I have found the people who say that to be the most burdensome. Rather I want to maintain control of my own destiny. And that will mean giving up certain delusions of competence when the time comes. Hold me to that.

Pierce Brosnan, HR role model

Being aware of Mrs Andrews’ work on generational change and her years in Australia working for the CIS, I braced myself for the worst. Australians will know what I mean when I say that her persona and content is prime Sky After Dark*.

The article is not wholly terrible but it is mostly wrong and the ways it is wrong do actually lead to some important conversations about organizational cultures.

What is Andrews position? In short, men and women are different. Men are more competitive and direct. Women are more conciliatory and indirect. Women are taking over institutions and “feminizing” them and this is bad. This is now a common observation on the Right and such castrated vajazzled feminized institutions are called “The Longhouse”.

I will not argue this based on quantitative data but rather what I have seen with my own lyin’ eyes. Your own personal mileage may vary.

Let me begin by stating my position. I am a man**. I have worked in some very female dominated professions (librarianship, learning & development, marketing). I have also worked in some male dominated professions (sales, IT). I am not exceptionally macho. I am equally awkward with men and women. This is all based on my observations.

So where do I agree with Andrews? Well, I agree that collectively men and women exhibit different behaviours in aggregate. The stereotypes are at least partially true. Men like sports*** and do not like talking about their emotions. Women like shoes*** and do like talking about their emotions.

The question is how true are the stereotypes. To get mathematical**** for a moment, assuming that dudeness and chickness for any characteristic are normally distributed, we might ask:

• How are apart are the means of the two distributions? The three examples show three different pairs of distributions. From right to left in the example below, no degree of overlap (men are women are completely different), low degree of overlap (men and women are mostly different), one with a high degree of overlap (i.e. many men and women often behave the same way). Or to put it another way:

  • Right: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

  • Middle: Men are London, Women are from Paris.

  • Left: Men are from Littlehampton, Women are from Angmerging.

• What are the standard deviations of these distributions? In the example below Y has a greater standard deviation than X. Or to put it another way, are all men the same and all women the same or are they all freaky and different?

Andrews puts in a caveat that: “A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.” but she quickly abandons that to imply that the standard deviations are small, and the means are very far apart. Women are the same as each other and completely different to men.

This has not been my experience and it is getting less my experience as time progresses.

I have worked for a wide variety of women and men who have differed greatly in their competitiveness, empathy, intelligence, bluntness, and deviousness. I have worked with nurturing men and alpha bitches.

What Andrews’ article does not talk about are other factors that influence people's behaviour. Some of these are personal - age, class, ethnicity being obvious ones that come to mind. Our organizations are run by the old and by the middle and upper class. They shape (but ultimately do not control) cultures. And ethnic background has a big impact on behaviour. Comparing an Israeli woman to Japanese man on a scale of bluntness is going to get you very non-Andrewsian results.

Above all, people are shaped by the professional cultures that they find themselves in. Yes, changing the personal backgrounds of those who enter a profession will change it - people don’t leave their baggage in the lockers. But it is more likely that those professions will attract certain types of people and incentivize them to become ever more what those professions value and are valued for. Lawyers are chosen for their ability to argue. Librarians by our desire to organize and serve.

However for all groups and institutions, there is a trade-off. On the one hand, there are certain behaviours (and knowledge and attitudes) that are selected for and reinforced. But if those groups become too homogeneous they risk becoming toxic and brittle.

Male-dominated spaces risk becoming locker rooms. 20 years ago, a bunch of us sat in a meeting with a couple of very senior tech execs. They were laughing about a third exec who ran a group called AIS-D and was flamboyantly gay. “AIDS!” they yelled at each other. “He’s got AIDS!”. It wasn’t so much the juvenileness of the joke that got me. It was the carelessness that someone else might find it offensive. They laughed at their own jokes but never anyone else’s. That kind of behaviour is no longer publicly acceptable (who gives a shit what people say in private) and that is not a bad thing. We need to put the jocks in their place.

Likewise female-dominated spaces risk becoming dens of drama and intrigue where the slightest actions are over-examined for their impact. “Does her coughing when I talk mean she hates me?” “No, she has a cold”. Or insults adopt the passive-aggressive camouflage of feedback. We need to keep the mean girls in their place.

Our organizations have become more diverse and that has made them more resilient and robust (although this may be about to change). The greater the breadth of skills and experiences you have, the greater the chance of you have of handling curve balls when they arrive. Which they always do. However this diversity means that assumptions of behaviour and values no longer hold but must renegotiated. The change brought by this renegotiation of “how we do things around here” is uncomfortable. And it is this discomfort that prompts many of the conservative concerns about “feminization”.

So I say to my conservative brothers and sisters and those that lieth betixt: “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi”. There is no going back to the Locker Room of the past. Well, not until some has washed those jock straps.

Finally, I want to discuss this comment by Andrews: “a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP”. I see a lot of comments about the power of HR on Substack and from the Right that fundamentally misunderstand the role that HR plays in most organizations. Most HR professionals I know do not exercise veto power over their CEO. They will typically advise on employment law matters and act as loyal corporate functionaries. Depending on the organization, that might mean they are enabling employees to do good work or they may be hatchet people. They also make handy scapegoats. Senior executives typically make policy and then get to blame HR if it goes wrong. CEOs are mostly responsible for stuff that happens in organizations - good, bad, and crazy. This is not say that HR professionals have no power or are blameless for mistakes. But such executive disavowals can be very convenient and are convincing to those unversed in organizational politics.

What do you think?

*When the sun goes down, the Murdoch-owned Sky New Australia totally loses its shit and goes full frothing MAGA like some kind of unnatural vampire or werewolf that not even piss-poor ratings can kill.

**Yes I am, yes I am , yes I am.

***I do not particularly like sports or shoes so it is with some alarm that I note that I developed an obsession with sports shoes. On a recent trip to Italy, I was more excited by visiting the Sun68 shop than the Uffizi. Although I don’t think my sneaker obsession qualifies me as non-binary or even bicurious yet.

****If getting mathematical doesn’t lose the ladies then making this comment surely will. I must resist the FEMINIZATION of this Substack AT ALL COSTS. And to the Mathematics PhD who dumped me all those years ago, I am not bitter and this article is why I deserved that PhD more than you with your Vector Spaces and your Lie Algebras. IT WASN’T JUST THE ALGEBRAS THAT WERE A LIE, FIONA!!! *Ahem*

When they hear my English accent, men will often try to find some common ground by asking me what team I support. This is a problem because I do not care about football. My father wasn’t interested in it and he passed his soccer apathy down to me along with his poor eyesight and love of beer.

Brighton & Hove Albion are the closest Premier League team to where I grew up and I have done my level best to ignore them for over 50 years. So it grieves me no end to have to report that, in collaboration with the Samaritans, they have made the best ad about male mental health I have ever seen. A man hiding his feelings from his friend and his friend noticing that something isn’t right and gently calling him on it. Often ads like this come across as patronizing or artificial. Not this one. 100% realness is served.

I’m not crying. I’M NOT CRYING! DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!!!

Ahem

More of this please. This is awesome.

“Ah, one day the CIA said they knew nothing about the attacks. And the next day, they said they knew everything. It was an inside job. It was a false flag operation.”

Everything is a false flag operation.

“A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on another party.”

A few weeks ago, a acquaintance of mine drunkenly yelled at me that he thought that the Oct 7 Hamas attacks were a false flag operation by Mossad and the neo-liberal, Zionist press were covering up the truth**.

Around a dinner table a couple of weeks ago, someone suggested that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a false flag operation by MAGA. And then another person countered that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last year was also a false flag operation. “He just squeezed a blood capsule behind his ear!!!”

I politely disagreed with them. Except for the Oct 7 guy. He was escalating from beer to whiskey and I knew I had to make a tactical withdrawal if I had any chance waking up the next day.

And it’s not as if false flag narratives only exist on the Left. The Right is rife with false flags.

So many false flags being run up the flagpole to see who will salute them.

It’s not that false flags don’t happen. It’s that they are difficult and time-consuming to mount, require significant effort to cover up, and are public relations nightmares if you get caught. The odds are that most of the time, whatever most people say happened is what happened.

So why is the “false flag” narrative so enticing?

Real life is messy. Events frequently fail to follow the narratives that we would like them to. People who we think are evil are not responsible for all the bad things in the world. This is highly inconvenient. False flag narratives allow us to reconcile reality with narrative in a simple way that is impervious to contradiction. All evidence that disproves the false flag is tainted and compromised. Our enemies are not just bad but also highly competent.

And we repeat them to each other in our own cosy epistemic bubbles where we never utter the comfortable words that might pop them.

So for me, false flag theories are a red flag for conversation. Sometimes its not a conspiracy.

*I can’t remember his name so lets just go with Gunter for now.

**He will never read this because he refused to read anything on “NaziStack”.

I have already written about Jimmy Carr. But he wasn’t alone. Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle started on Mock the Week in 2005. Here is a selection of his gags from that time. If you are offended by them, well done. You have played right into his hands.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a young Anthony Jeselnik was plying his trade. Boyle and Carr scrub up fine but Jeselnik was male-model good looking. Here’s an early set. If you are offended… yadda yadda.

I have a with problem Boyle and Jeselnik’s early work. It’s not so much the content. While there are jokes that don’t work for me, Jeselnik in particular pays exquisite attention to the language and the rhythm of delivery he uses for his plot twists.

The problem is the character delivering those lines - what Aristotle might call the ethos and how it interacts with the narrative logic (logos) and emotional charge (pathos) of what they do. They both take on high status roles - dominant, in control, predatory. And they smirk as they say terrible things to audience. For me, the effect is that of school yard bully homing in on a victim, like a shark registering a seal in the water. As an audience member, I feel complicit in their attacks. Laughing at the sidelines. Hoping that by laughing, I will avoid the next attack.

Who says something matters. How they say it matters.

I like their later work much more.

Frankie Boyle got fat and bearded. A slovenly dad, broken down by an absurd world. The attacks come across less as sadism and more as a bitter, rueful response from a man watching everything go to hell.

Meanwhile Jeselnik has pushed his predator persona to absurd, unhinged levels. Reminiscent of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, his scenarios are ludicrous and his apparent calm with them evidence not of superiority but psychopathy. Jeselnik’s on-stage character holds your gaze for just a little too long and goads you not to laugh but to leave a few stops too early to get away from him. The next two bits are some of my favorite comedy of all time.

Even better, Jeselnik has no time for the cancel culture whining of comedians. New (and not always sensible) cultural rules are not an oppression but an intellectual opportunity. You can’t do obvious materials about gender and race and stuff? Boo hoo! Write better material! Do your job.

Meanwhile Jimmy Carr has had multiple cosmetic surgeries over the years so he can always be the comedian he was in 2006.

“I think that, for better or worse, the most compelling answer is that Australia is a staffer state. That is: the top set of decision makers in our society spent their formative years as political staffers, rather than in other roles. The impacts of this are non-trivial and worthy of reflection.”

This is about many things but, in particular, it is about the professionalization of politics and the narrowing of political parties. It is something that I have been concerned about since at least 2010 and it is not good. Let me explain why.

Being a politician in a modern democracy is not like most other jobs. In most jobs, you have a set of skills that enable outcomes that people will pay you for - be it building walls or doing accounts or running a shop. There may be formal training. And if there is not, then there is certainly an expectation that experience in what you are doing is good. That’s the whole point of having a CV. If want to be an airline pilot, you won’t get very far if you have done no training and you have no experience. Or at least I hope you won’t. And modern governments are full of professionals whose job it is to have expertise in how certain things get done - e.g. taxes collected, wars fought, confusing road signs placed.

Politicians are different. In a representative democracy, their role is to represent their constituents. They need to understand their constituents and be capable of representing their wishes through the political process - as confused and contradictory as those wishes might be. They don’t need to be experts in any knowledge domain except the wishes of their constituents.

I would suggest that the legitimacy of representative comes from three mandates.

1. The mandate of the ballot. You win the election according to whatever rules are set - e.g. first past the post, preferential voting, lotto, who has the bushiest eyebrows, etc. This is the most obvious mandate and sometimes people think that it is the only one. But I think two other manadates need to be considered.

2. The mandate of the party. Human beings are social animals and naturally form tribes and coalitions. It’s just what we do. So while older representative bodies (Parliament, Congress) were originally established without political parties, they always tend to form over time. As much as people might despise them, parties are inevitable. Being part of a party provides a representative with legitimacy with the supporters of that party. Now a problem emerges when parties no longer represent meaningful coalitions to the majority of voters. In some countries and times, mass membership of political parties prevents them from drifting too far away from their electorates. But in many countries, political party membership has dwindled, leaving them vulnerable to takeovers by niche interest groups. The mandate of the party is not what it was.

3. The mandate of the self. Fundamentally, voters must trust the politician they vote for. They have to like and respect them. They have to think that the politician likes them. They have to see something of themselves in the politician. And it is here were the professionalization of politics causes harm. Nearly all politicians in the UK and Australia have degrees but less than half of the electorates of these countries do. Politicians in democracies typically have studied Law, Economics, or Politics. Very few have backgrounds in Engineering or Medicine. Even fewer are electricians or plumbers. It wasn’t always this way. The union movement provided a route for ambitious and able working class people to gain political office but now that has largely been replaced by university-educated political staffers. The mirror the representative holds to the electorate is broken.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Wheelwright Lecture on “Should we abolish universities?” (my answer: I don’t think we’ll need to). In conversation with some other attendees, I made exactly the point: Why don’t we have more electricians in parliament? Someone made the counter point that we should want our politicians to be well-educated. To which I would say, there are many ways of gaining education and experience and a degree is only one of them. Just because someone has been to university does not mean that they have learnt anything.

Concerns about diversity among our elected representatives tend to focus on obvious identity markers like gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. However we also need to be aware of background or to put it in a way some of you might prefer, their character and ethos as developed and demonstrated through their life experience.

We need politicians with as diverse characters as the electorates they represent.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t think the dead guy should have been deaded. As annoying as I think he was, if we’re going to start murdering people for being annoying then I am in a lot of trouble.

Controversial opinion: Murdering people is bad.

However I recognize that there are a wide range of views about the dead guy and I have zero interest in policing any of them.

I have been very poor at firing people for their political beliefs. I have fired them because they were bad at their jobs or because they were good at their jobs but the company needed to save money. In return, I have been fired to save my employer money or because my boss and I had blazing rows. But hiring people is hard and managing people is hard and firing people is, also, hard.

In a former role, I managed a woman called Rita. Rita was a South African with a temper. Her defining moment happened at a departmental Christmas BBQ. There we were, eating our grilled meats, sipping our beers, and secret santaing our Secret Santa. We had all bought gifts of under $10 for each other but at the last minute, it was decided that the event should shift to Dirty Santa - where gifts can be “stolen” by later participants. Everyone said that it sounded like fun.

Everyone except Rita. Rita was outraged. Such shenanigans made a mockery of Christmas and gift-giving as far she was concerned. She hurled her gift to the ground and stormed off. Apparently unconcealed rage is the True Spirit of Christmas. There was an awkward pause. And then the festivities continued. While Rita stewed somewhere, like a pudding in custard. I later spoke to her about her behaviour but she was unrepentant. It was everyone else who had been having fun in the wrong way.

So when she told me that Nelson Mandela should have been shot, it didn’t really come as a surprise. As far as Rita was concerned, Mandela was a terrorist who deserved the death penalty. And it was true, before turning to peace, he had been a terrorist.

Controversial opinion: I do not think that Nelson Mandela should have been executed by the South African state.

As much as I vehemently disagreed with Rita, she was quite good at her job. And she had not sought to hurt or abuse another team member. And the paperwork would have been a total ball ache. So I let that one slide. Mostly. I did tell her that my grandfather strongly believed that Gandhi should have been shot by the British Empire. Which she thought was an outrageous thing to believe. But I didn’t want to have an argument when there were so many work-related things for us to argue about instead.

Where do people find the energy?

Dr. Egon Spengler: Print is dead.

Janine Melnitz: Oh, that's very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play racquetball. Do you have any hobbies?

Dr. Egon Spengler: I collect spores, molds, and fungus*

Substackers are أهل الكتاب - “People of the Book”. A significant number of us are wannabe professional writers** (a much smaller subset being actual professional writers). Substack exists in contrast to TikTok, its anti-literate, audio-visual Goateed Spock or perhaps its སྤྲུལ་པ་ double. For regulars here, bibliophilia verges on a full-blown paraphilia, an eroticization of the written word. Or perhaps an illness - a serious case of bookworms, writhing in the brain, to be pulled out of the ear as tickertape.

So there can be no greater heresy than to denigrate The Book. And let me be clear, I do not want to do that. Books are tren for the brain. Only a fool would face the world intellectually natty. I am not that clever so I always go for the performance-enhancing medication of the mind that is the written word.

But I was unusual. From the early 70s to the early 90s, I grew up in a house where the only books were the Bible (for everyone, every day), some books on upholstery (for one parent), and some crime fiction and popular military history (for the other***). We watched TV in the evening****. We did not really discuss books - unless it was the Bible*****.

I was the black sheep of the family. Except instead of sneaking out to smoke cigarettes and drink cider, I went to the library a lot. Initially I read lots of science fiction (like the Thermians did). However unlike the Thermians, I then went on to read all kinds of other books - literary fiction, classics, books of history and science and philosophy. I was a person of the book. I was no fun at parties unless that was a book party which were very much not a thing where I grew up. So I was no fun.

I am a person of the book. I have a Masters in Librarianship FFS.

So I am concerned that literacy levels seem to be dropping. However I have a different view on this to James Marriott and Henry Oliver. They both decry the modern day and hark back to a more intellectual and literary past. I don’t think the past they referred to ever really existed. Sure there were working class libraries in the 19th century. But for most people life is hard and entertainment is a consolation. In previous centuries that boiled down communally performed drama, music, and dancing; and then to privately read books. But from what I can tell, most of these books were roughly equivalent to Marvel movies or Yellowstone. Last year, we cleaned out the house of a 102 year old relative. It was full of books and most of them were adventure stories or romances. There was not a single copy of Phänomenologie des Geistes to be found, even an English translation*******.

So as the title of this post indicates, I think our societies have only be marginally literate at best. They have certainly not been intellectual.

Yes, I think it is true that audio-visual media has pulled people away from the written word. First the valium of radio then the opium of TV and then the fentanyl of YouTube and podcasts and now the nitazenes of TikTok. But we are undergoing a far more transformative bibliographic rupture. Large Language Models now automate the production and consumption of text. Here is a good rendition of a popular joke:

If TikTok provides competing media for communication, LLMs automate (almost) the entire communication process itself. One can communicate without ever needing to think.

If you want a bookshelf (for all your books) then you can either carve one by hand from a tree that grew in your garden or you can buy one from IKEA. A random visiting stranger may not perceive the difference. But you will know. You will have experienced the pleasure of working with the wood. You will know the full story of the table. And should IKEA ever run out of tables or should the table require repair, you will be sorted.

While LinkedIn may be awash with AI slop, I don’t really see the point of that here. I love writing. I select the words. I form them into sentences. I link those sentences together and move them around the page until they make sense. I respect the craft*******. If books are tren for the brain, the AI is a robot doing the weights for you.

I would like to believe that this dedication to hot writing-on-thought action will make me a better person. But the historical record is not that reassuring.

Can anyone invite me to a book party? Oh hang on, I’m already in one…

*Egon might be a scientist but he seems ignorant of chemistry.

**I don’t write to make money. Rather I write to avoid losing money. If I was unable to void my mind somewhere the ideas would build up like undefecated excrement, causing all kinds of problems on so many life levels. Plus whoever reads one of my posts and still wants to communicate has passed my filtration system. It is some unique combination of sewer and bait.

***I’d love to perform some expectation-subverting switcheroo but the gender split was exactly as basic as you would expect.

****Any inadvertently viewed sex scenes would lead to much parental tutting.

*****”If you only read one book this year…” then you are my family and that book is the Bible.

******Perhaps that explains the longevity of the inhabitants. All books by German philosophers should have some kind of health warning attached.

*******I am the Thomas Chippendale of knob gags. So I guess I am also a woodworker of a kind.

Some dickheads Neo-Nazis showed up at those rallies. Their presence led commentators (including prominent ALP politicians) to condemn everyone at those marches. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had an unstable political bomb to defuse - which he did a decent job of. You cannot support Nazis. But you also cannot give them what they want - which is to drive more people to their cause. What did Albanese say?

“The tone of course of much of the rallies was unfortunate, the best way you can put it, but hateful in some of the extreme examples. And the idea that an open neo-Nazi was able to give a speech from the steps of the Victorian Parliament is something that isn't the Australian way”

“There has always been an element of people who would appeal to anti-immigration as a platform, but migration has of course brought a great deal of benefit to our nation.”

“I’d just say to people, and I have no doubt that there would have been good people who went along, heard about a rally, concerned [about social problems] … have a look at who you were with on Sunday.”

In short, he centrist-dadded it and this was the right thing to do. He copped some heat from his own Party but it was a call for cohesion above tribalism.

Meanwhile very online troll Senator Jacinta Price made some comments that Labor promoted Indian immigration because Indians voted for them. Indian immigrants do vote more for Labor but they actually tend to be centre-right in their views. Many of the ones I have met are the classic aspirational types that John Howard was so adept at speaking to. Their preference for Labor is simply an indicator of the current unelectability of the Coalition (which will doubtless be temporary).

She refused to apologize and the Opposition Leader, Sussan Ley, kicked her off the front bench [EDIT: That wasn’t quite why she got kicked off]. As Price is a darling of the hard right, this will cost Ley in the future.

In short, she centrist-mummed it and this was the right thing to do. She copped some heat from her own Party but it was a call for cohesion above tribalism.

Many people find Australian politicians heaps mid. I have been pleasantly surprised over the last couple of weeks. Sometimes mid is what you need.

• In living memory, a university education has gone from being a luxury for a tiny minority to both an entry ticket into middle class life and a badge validating your place in that life. 43% of Australians aged 25-34 have a degree. Education is Australia’s third biggest export after coal and iron ore and its universities employ over a quarter of a million people. Degrees are big business. [Source]

• Who pays for this $40bn industry? Looking at all university income:

  • A third comes from government grants (tax payers).

  • A quarter comes from overseas students.

  • A sixth comes from government-underwritten student debt.

• University graduates tend to vote for left of center parties. While nearly all right wing politicians are university educated, they increasingly see universities are ideological enemies rather than neutral civic institutions. Some of the more florid examples of left-wing ideology in universities has given their opponents easy ammunition.

• For the 20th century, automation technologies were focused on manufacturing while computers enabled white collar work and created new professions (programmers, business analysts, web developers, social media managers, etc). In short, technology favoured people with degrees.

Universities have grown in an environment where technological, economic and social change effectively sold their product for them domestically and where reduced international regulation opened up new markets of those hungry for their product. As much as they are positioned as dens of Marxism, modern universities are quintessentially neoliberal institutions that thrived in a neoliberal world. We left that world some time ago but sometimes reactions are delayed.

So what happened?

• A victim of their own success. Degrees used to be rare. Now they are common (and getting more so). While many degrees have intrinsic value, the blanket status value of a degree has declined over time. While this has led to an education arms race (e.g. people getting a Masters degree to gain an edge with those over a Batchelors), this arms race has proved to be unsustainable.

• Immigration has become a hot button issue in Western societies. A major immigrant channel is education (universities are the original people smugglers). So governments can score easy political wins by reducing student visas, which is a problem if your finances are built on them.

• Meanwhile right-wing governments can bolster their standing with their anti-university constituents by attacking their perceived ideological enemies.

• Technology is now coming for the jobs of white collar, college degree workers. Not only that but LLMs undermine many of the traditional assessment approaches of higher education. In the predator-prey arms race between teachers and cheats, ChatGPT is as disruptive as cheap drones are to the real world battlefield.

So what does this mean?

• Some professions will remain degree-based - e.g. Medicine, Law, probably Engineering. But many professions do not require a degree. They require an initial short-course knowledge base and then periodic upgrades of continuous professional development. The degree will be replaced by the Microcredential swarm.

• Employers will no longer require a degree as a gatekeeping credential for many roles.

• A significant number of universities will either go bust or radically downsize their operations. Savvy employers will be able to pick up smart people cheap.

• Universities will get dragged further into the Culture Wars - esp. in the USA where these Wars are more intense. Ideological entrepreneurs of many stripes may seek to take over institutions on the edge of collapse.

• AI and LLMs will need to be incorporated into pedagogy at break neck speed. Unfakeable demonstrations of ability will be preferred. Handwritten exams will make a come back.

• [EDIT] Skilled manual labour (the trades) will return to middle class respectability given their resistance to easy automation, decent salaries, and affordable training. The VET sector will need to respond in kind. Vocational institutions may rescue academic ones.

Tell me where I am wrong.

Only Fools and Horses was the highest rated comedy in UK TV history and its protagonist - Derek “Del Boy” Edward Trotter - was an archetype of 80s British culture. A Lahndan market trader who dreams of wealth while living with his younger half-brother and an elderly relative in a dilapidated flat in Nelson Mandela House, Peckham. Impossible to trust, Del Boy is equally hard to hate. Effectively orphaned when his mum dies and his father runs away, Del does what he can to provide for his dependents - alongside his equally dodgy mates (road sweeper Trigger*, used car salesman Boycie).

In many senses, he is the personification of Harvard Professor Howard Stevenson’s definition of entrepreneurship. In 1983**, Stevenson formed a definition of the entrepreneur that was separate from previous ones that either saw the entrepreneur as a structural role within the economy or a collection of personal traits (e.g. risk taking). Instead Stevenson defines entrepreneurs by what they do. And what they do is simple: They pursue opportunities whether they currently have the resources do so or not. Stevenson calls these people promoters and explicitly contrasts them with trustees.

“At one extreme is the "promoter" who feels confident of his or her ability to seize an opportunity regardless of the resources under current control. At the opposite extreme is the "trustee" who emphasizes the efficient utilization of existing resources.”

Del has few resources (apart from his wits and a yellow three-wheel van) but his pursuit of opportunity is relentless. Stevenson then goes on to list 6 critical dimensions of business practice that distinguish promoters from trustees:

1. Strategic orientation: Driven by perception of opportunity or resources currently controlled. Entrepreneurs look beyond the horizon of their property in the here and now and into the outside and the future.

2. Commitment to opportunity: Short vs long duration. Entrepreneurs are here for a good time, not a long time because they don’t have the money to pay to hang around.

3. Commitment of resources: Multi-staged with minimal exposure at each stage vs single-staged with complete commitment on decision. High rollers can afford to buy the pot in poker (aka blitzscaling). The entrepreneur makes a series of lower stakes bets. Well, a pig THAT special, you don't eat all at once.

4. Control of resources: Renting vs owning. You don’t want to buy a house if it may fall down tomorrow. Or if you need a boat rather than a house.

5. Management structure: Flat, informal networks vs hierarchy. Hierarchies are great for stable, predictable environments. What kind of entrepreneur exists in a stable environment?

6. Compensation / reward policy: Performance driven vs stability driven. Again, we’re here for a good time not a long time.

How does Del Boy fair against these criteria? He nails 1, 2, 5 & 6. He often falls foul of 3 & 4 - buying large quantities of dodgy VCRs or Romanian wine that he is then unable to shift (have a shufti yourself and see how you rate against Del Boy).

“Compared to returns from exploitation, returns from exploration are systematically less certain, more remote in time, and organizationally more distant from the locus of action and adaption” - Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning, James G March (1991)

Stevenson’s Promoters vs Trustees reminds me of March’s distinction between exploration and exploitation behaviours by organizations. Entrepreneurs are explorers because they have no choice - they have no controlled resources to exploit. However, many organizations struggle to harness entrepreneurs as they are fundamentally disruptive to the stable order. In prison, a trusty is an inmate who is granted a privileged position due to demonstrated good behavior and reliability. Not that our organizations are prisons.

The instability that entrepreneurs create is both necessary and dangerous. Without the pursuit of opportunities nothing changes. But if all you do is pursue your opportunities without regard to everyone and everything around you then you end up a monster. In the haste of your pursuit, you will move fast and break things - and people.

We love Del Boy because he is the underdog - but we wouldn’t want to be ruled by Derrick, God Emperor of Peckham.

*“Why do they call him ‘Trigger’? Does he carry a gun?”

“Nah. It’s cause he looks like a horse.”

**A mere two years after Only Fools and Horses began - maybe Stevenson was inspired after watching a few episodes.

I was chatting to M’Learned Friend Johnnie Moore (no, not that Johnnie Moore, calm down) and he read to me the first few sentences of a book:

“Hello my sibling. Did you know that male echidnas have four penises? If I were as smart as an echidna, I could use that factoid to come up with an evolutionary theory about male dominance and project it onto my own species, then sell a truckload of books. It’s not really a fact though—he only has one grotesque dick with four heads, and his mate probably doesn’t want that horrible thing anywhere near either of her vaginas.”

As soon as he had finished I knew that I had to read this book. It is Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. It does not disappoint. A strong recommend from me. So go off and read it please. It features special guest appearances by Nicholas Gruen (subscriber and occasional commenter here) and Daniel Schmachtenberger (who to my knowledge is not a subscriber but does feature extensively in this post). I am particularly pleased by Schmachtenberger’s appearance because he tells a pointed joke that subverts my expectations of him.

I have no interest in reviewing the book. Lets riff.

There is a phrase that appears in the book. When I run a search on it, I only find it 12 times which is surprisingly few, I thought it was more. “Right relation”. To be in right relation to other people, to you ancestors, to other living beings, to the land itself, to times, and to spaces.

At times, Yunkaporta’s book reminds me of the Théorie de l'Acteur-Réseau of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the rhizomes of Delueze and Guattari, and the wanderings of Michel Serres. Particularly Serres. Yunkaporta spends a lot of his time travelling with us in a canoe. Serres was the son of a barge man* and spent time as a naval officer before becoming whatever he was for most of his career. Technically he was a historian and philosopher of science - but that is like calling Yunkaporta a canoeist. His work is replete with images of water travel: The North-West Passage, the rivers and canals of Detachment, the ship fire that begins The Five Senses. Knowledge is a sea that is a whole ecology, interconnected with the land and the sky through evaporation and rain and rivers. Knowledge is the water that makes up 70% of the earth’s surface and the human body and makes possible the chemical reactions that allow life. Knowledge is protean, turbulent. We have had the (Navier-Stokes) equations to model fluids since the 19th century and yet we still do not know so much about them. $1m for you if you want to have a crack.

What’s it like to be a settler colonialist alien invader? Not as awesome as I had hoped. I don’t have a space ship. The most I can stretch to is a GoGet Kia Picanto every second Thursday. I have yet to destroy anything of note with it as it doesn’t even have a death ray. Some of the other aliens insist on starting our meetings with an Acknowledgement of Planet: “I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, the Ewe Sith Whales of the Strayan Nation (I think I got that right) and pay my respects to Elders past and present.” I’ve never met Strayan although I sometimes see them on public transport with their weird red, white, and blue flags and their ceremonial kriket bats and sacred footee bolls. Sad really. I always hold on to my belongings a little tighter around then as they are all on drugs. I believe we have commissioned some human art work for the boardroom. Keith told me that he thinks a 200-year old child with 4 of their tentacles tied behind their back could do better but he would never say anything in front of HR. We are a progressive house, we haven’t eaten any humans for months. Surely that means something these days?

In most alien invasion stories, we plucky humans beat the invaders with our brains and our guts and our pudgy human fists. Wells has a much bleaker view of human capability. The humans are useless. The aliens are killed: “after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth”. The aliens die because they are not part of terrestrial ecology. The earth kills them as an intrusion, an infection from the outside. When will we have transformed ourselves to the point that the earth no longer recognises us as her own?

“Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts like Begbie. Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that's different; pakis, poofs n what huv ye. Fucking failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wit the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.” - Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, 1993

I was going to post a picture of an echidna penis here but I don’t want to spoil your fun when you can google it for yourselves.

*My dad was a stoker in the navy. He grew up far from the sea, ran away to it, and then spent most of his life near it. That’s where some of his ashes are.

Lots of people have been writing about “the omnicause”. This term refers to the tendency on the left to lump together distinctly different issues into one progressive lump. If you are worried about climate change then you must also be anti-capitalist and for Palestinian and trans rights, etc. The term is more often used by the right to dismiss these issues although I am pretty sure that similar phenomena happen on that side of politics as well. This is in part driven by ideological polarization and the growing sense that a political position needs to be a core part of our identities. If you want to be part of our tribe then you need to sign up to these things.

I personally find this stultifying. I have opinions on Israel/Palestine and trans issues that I think are fairly centrist but I strongly suspect would get me kicked out of certain progressive groups. I am also ambivalent about capitalism. On many issues, I have no opinion at all. If that excludes me from certain groups and communities then they can have sex and travel.

Personally I don’t mind people showing up to unrelated events (say about cycle paths) with Palestinian flags, so long as no one cracks the sh*ts if someone else turns up with an Israeli flag and no one tries to turn the cycle path rally into a pro/anti-Palestine rally.

Although remember, as Alysia Ames says, that the more ideological commitments you require to join your movement, the smaller your movement will be. So you can require people share your stances on capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, etc but don’t complain if no one shows up.

At an intellectual level, you find this position in the claim “to end X, we must also end Y” - where X and Y are capitalism, patriarchy, racism colonialism, homophobia, whatever other bad thing the speaker does not like. Lets call these things The Bad Stuff.

The first problem with these claims is that I am unsure we can “end” any of these things. In the biological realm, we have eliminated smallpox infections but we have not eliminated influenza. This is not because of laziness on the part of medicine but due to the nature of the viruses themselves. Smallpox only infects humans whereas the flu can move between species. The question is whether The Bad Stuff is more like smallpox or the flu. I think it’s more like the flu. Prejudice and power can move and shift and change. That doesn’t mean that we are powerless. Deaths due to influenza have declined due to hard work on the part of human beings. There is no reason why injustice and bigotry should not continue to decline as well. But I think that eradication is unrealistic.

The second problem is that I don’t buy the claims of linkage between these issues. This not to say there isn’t any interaction between capitalism and racism. The Atlantic slave trade was a profit-generating enterprise that was both supported by and generative of racist ideas. But that’s not what is being claimed here. To continue with this example, it seems pretty clear that non-capitalist societies can exhibit systemic racism. The Soviet Union deported multiple ethnic groups as “enemies of the people”. Antisemitism was widespread in the feudal period. Likewise, capitalist societies can demonstrate relatively low levels of racism. The countries that top surveys like the racial equality index tend to be capitalist liberal democracies. You can argue that these surveys are inherently racist, colonial, etc. But it should at least give activists pause for thought.

On some level, these claims are less rigorous intellectual statements than they are pragmatic attempts at building solidarity between different groups (e.g. socialists, feminists, antiracists, etc). The problem is that I don’t think they stand up to scrutiny and they are ultimately unnecessary. If different groups are facing the same opponent then that should be enough for them to make common cause. And the more issues we lump together, the harder it seems to change anything. We end up another version of the metacrisis.

Which would provide lots of great material for my Substack but may not make the world a better place.

James Orr is not a household name - yet. Nevertheless he is the leader of the UK outpost of the National Conservatism movement and an adviser to the Vice-President of the USA. So his opinions matter to people other than his students at Cambridge.

He has particularly strong opinions on mental health - some of which have some validity, others that strike me as wishful thinking and many of which that are actively harmful. I first encountered these on a podcast with Australian Christian College. I noted them but they were only briefly touched on. Then yesterday I came across a much longer discussion called The Myth of Mental Illness: A Conversation With Dr. James Orr on the Psychobabble podcast. This Substack podcast is run by Hannah Spier - a medic turned tradwife whose podcasting output seems to be mostly about the ills of feminism.

Lets see how we go.

“This whole kind of constellation of disciplines, psychology, psychiatry, different schools of psychology, and so on and so forth, show all the signs of a kind of fake avenue of human inquiry that has begun from fundamentally mistaken assumptions and therefore can't get anything right except by accident”

It’s true psychology has some issues. Some people think it isn’t a real science. It has problems with its theories but as argued here: “the problem is not (just) that psychological scientists do not put enough effort into developing theories or do not know how to build theories but that there are great obstacles to building good psychological theories because of the nature of the subject matter.”

There are two responses to these difficulties. One is to try harder - which is obviously what most psychologists are doing. The replication crisis of the early 2010s shook out a lot of dubious research and reinforced a seriousness in the discipline. Canadian psychologist Michael Inzlicht provides an entertaining and informative account of his own journey of intellectual love and loss on ego depletion (seriously, this is a must read). There are so many gaps in our knowledge of the brain, the mind, and human behaviour but this is such an important area of research that I think we have to try.

The other is to abandon it entirely, which seems to the choice that Orr takes. BTW I don’t think we can wait for philosophers to resolve the mind-body problem - in part because I don’t think they will. Philosophers tend to sit and ponder things rather than engaging in empirical inquiry and empirical inquiry is needed. Nor do I think we can rely on religion. The Bible says many things but it doesn’t tell us much about the relationship between the amydala and emotion. We’re going to have to do some hard work.

Moving on specifically to Orr’s claims about mental health.

“Well, they were and they weren't. I mean, you've got to remember that for most of the last few centuries, at least up until the 18th century, certainly, psychological suffering is... Severe psychological suffering would probably be interpreted spiritually as a spiritual kind of illness, whether coming through... human fragility and human sin, or simply the finitude and brokenness of the world, or possibly through non-natural activity, demonic activity, whatever it might be. What they didn't do was assume that a sick mind was the same as a sick body. That to be anxious about something was... a problem of the same kind as a broken arm or a cut on your finger.”

It’s not clear to me that Orr even thinks mental illness is a “thing”. He’s much more comfortable with pre-modern views of the human condition - “sins not syndromes”. Now, cards on the table, I have a mental illness that crops up now and again (it’s probably bipolar 2) and I have a close relative with schizophrenia. These are not Dr Google diagnoses, psychiatric professionals were involved. Now I hope Orr is not being so crude as to say this is divine punishment or demonic activity but it’s hard to be sure.

The practitioners that I have met view mental illness as it is - a complex mix of genetics, physical environment and mental experiences. Treatment is a mix of the physical (medications), some therapy, and behavioural changes (getting up and moving around is good). Simplistic approaches are still out there (e.g. handing out pills willy nilly) but I think we have come a long way in my lifetime. And that’s a good thing. I can’t help but feel that Orr’s perspective takes us back 50 years.

I think part of the issue is that Orr has no personal experience of mental illness. Having experienced clinical depression, it is not simply feeling sad about the world. It is a horrible deadness. It is hard to put into words. And if you haven’t been through it then you should probably be more humble in your judgments of it. Otherwise you come across as not knowing what you are talking about.

“But the point is it is a kind of passive posture. This is another problem about medicalizing and pathologizing ordinary feelings of human disquiet or unease. As soon as you pathologize it, as soon as you have a condition that's in the DSM-5, you are effectively turning yourself into a patient in the sense of you are removing your agency.”

Ah yes, DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. There are many problems with DSM-5. The conditions it lists are less distinct illnesses than symptom clusters. There are very probably multiple different kinds of depression or bipolar but we don’t really know for sure. The diagnostic tools are generally checklists and questionnaires that depend on the subjective judgment of the patient and the clinician. You can take a RAT or PCR test and get an objective assessment of whether you have COVID-19 or not. There is no RAT for depression. DSM-5 is almost certainly wrong about a broad range of things and in 100 years we will hopefully look at it in the same way that we look at humorism (which is not the same as a humorist although bits of it are pretty funny). However right now, DSM-5 is the least worst diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders that we have.

The comment about the risks of medicalizing everyday life is a valid one. Are we overprescribing anti-depressants? Are we overdiagnosing ADHD? I think these are valid questions to ask regardless of the answers that we come to. But I would say these are actively being discussed by researchers, practitioners, and patient groups. And the only way that we are going to come to answers is by some good old empirical inquiry. I do not think the answer is to ban anti-depressants and pretend that ADHD doesn’t exist.

It is often hard for people to get high quality psychiatric care. Yes GPs can dole out pills and there are plenty of people offering “therapies” (which may have no evidentiary basis whatsoever). But competent psychiatrists and psychologists can be unavailable or expensive and it seems that this situation is getting worse. If anything, we are undertreated.

As for being a patient meaning you have removed agency, that might be the case for some people but my experience has been that medics expect some agency from their patients and patients often dish it out. I have had some robust discussions with my psychiatrist about treatment - but I am the kind of pain in the ass who will read 50 bipolar medication RCT papers just to win an argument. The passive patient is (for better or worse) more a relic of the past than a reality of the present.

“these spikes in rates of depression is our deep social economic legal forces that are not that are then as it were turned into psychological ones as if it's the fault of an individual person that they're feeling depressed that they would like to have three children but they've only been able to have one because they wanted”

This section made me laugh because it reminded me a lot of Mark Fisher’s “capitalism causes mental illness” argument. Fisher was a lefty whereas Orr is seriously conservative*. Although for Orr the culprit is less capitalism (although he’s probably with the post-liberals in not liking capitalism as much as some of his fellow-travellers) than people not having all the kids they want. As I stated in relation to Fisher’s work, the economic and social contexts in which people live will have an impact on their mental health. But I don’t believe that mental illnesses magically appeared at the start of the modern period. Depression, mania, addiction, schizophrenic delusions - all these can be found in the historical record (just as infections and cancers can).

So what does Orr think we need to do?

“And recognizing that a problem in your life, maybe from something you've done wrong or something you've admitted to do right, is not in fact something that is a syndrome that you're going to live with for the rest of your life and that you've got to kind of medicate yourself to cope with. But it's something you can be free from. You can confess it either to a priest in a formal context or in the privacy of your own room to God. And you can be promised and assured freedom. You're free from it now. It's gone.”

I’m sorry James, but I don’t think this is going to cut it. I don’t think confessing my sins will cure my condition. BTW I grew up in a Baptist church. There was a lot of spiritual healing that went on (mostly people with back problems that were caused by them having one leg longer than the other - or so the pastors said). One senior guy got cancer. He claimed God had healed him. Then a few months later he died. Of cancer. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

In short, this is terrible advice.

I also think it is unfair to religious functionaries. Expecting a vicar to treat someone in the middle of psychotic episode is completely unreasonable. Many priests and rabbis have minimal training in counseling. As Jeremiah Peck states here: “I did not feel thoroughly equipped to minister to people in the context of the mental, emotional, and relational struggles which they were bringing to me.” So he very sensibly goes off and gets some training. I am often critical of organized religion but it is true that many people are more likely to go to their pastor than a psychiatrist (if only because it is so much cheaper) and pastors like Peck show a great deal of wisdom in seeking to be the best pastor they can. The problem is not, as Dr Spier claims, that “clergy aren’t giving people what they need because they are pandering to the woke ideology”. It’s that many of them don’t know what they are doing.

All of this might just be two random people talking on a podcast. However given Dr Orr’s influence within a conservative movement that has just gained power in the world’s most powerful nation, I am concerned that his advice on mental illness will be taken up by those with the authority to implement it. These ideas provide a handy rationale for cutting research into psychology and the provision of psychiatric services and redirecting the money to religious organizations. Which can only end well.

*The horseshoe theory of mental illness.

How many people live in Israel-Palestine and who are they?

Well, it breaks down like this:

• There are 7 million Jews in Israel-Palestine of which about 500k live in the West Bank.

• There are 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

• There are 2 million Gazan Palestinians.

• There are 3 million West Bank Palestinians

• There are about 500k “others”.

• And about 8.5 million Jews live outside Israel (mostly in the USA).

• And about 7 million Palestinians live outside Israel-Palestine

Sources: Palestine / Israel

So right now, the number of Jews vs Arabs is about equally matched in Israel-Palestine.

But what happens in the future?

• Population growth rates are declining over time for all populations.

• Jewish population growth in the 90s was boosted by immigration (esp. from the former USSR). That has now slowed to a trickle.

• Jewish population growth is 1.8% per year.

• Palestinian citizens of Israel population growth is 2.2%.

• The median age of Israeli Jews is 31.6. For Israeli Arabs it is 21.1

• Palestinian population growth is about 2.2% in Gaza and 1.8% in the West Bank.

• Obviously none of this takes into account large-scale voluntary or involuntary population movements.

Twenty years ago, Netanyahu described Arab population growth as a “demographic bomb”. Currently the Arab population is growing at a faster rate than the Jewish population - but not by a huge amount. These changes will play out over decades (rather than years). If this is a bomb then it has very long fuse.

Religiously moderate Jews in particular are caught between the demographic river and the sea. The Ultra Orthodox (or Haredim) are growing at double the rate of the rest of the Jewish population. They currently make up 14% of the Israeli population but they are having a lot of children. As the men folk tend to devote themselves to religious study, they have far higher rates of poverty and unemployment and far lower rates of military participation than the rest of the Israeli Jewish population. Exactly how sustainable that is remains to be seen.

In my ideal world, every one would stop fighting and get on with living next to each other. However we do not live in my ideal world. What is both noteworthy and depressing is that attitudes on both sides are mirror images of each other: believing that the goal of the other side is to commit genocide against them, that they are the real victims, and that the other side are inhuman monsters. A plurality of Palestinians want a two state solution. A plurality of Israeli Jews support annexation of the West Bank without equal rights for Palestinians.

Perhaps the only bright spot is: “Over 60 percent on both sides prefer a regional peace based on a two-state solution and normalization if the alternative is a regional, multi-front war.”

Some of these people are not famous and so, in an idle moment, I may google them. They might come up on LinkedIn or Facebook or a local baking club newsletter or a bio page of their employer or any number of places. And they generally seem happy. Of course, appearances can be deceiving. But the general message is “move along folks, nothing to see here”.

Last week, a person surfaced in my memory. I wasn’t really sure where from. By way of backstory. At university, I had dabbled in theatre. I wasn’t very good. But I encountered people who were. There was one person that I never actually worked with but I auditioned for on a number of occasions. It got to the point where we would acknowledge each other: “Ah Matt, you’re here again...” I think he was mildly entertained by whatever tomfoolery I did, but never enough to cast me in anything. I still went to see his shows - which were by turns grounded then dreamlike then disturbing. The first one I saw was a production of The Pitchfork Disney where he played Presley. Then there were number of devised shows of his own that I think contained a mix of scripted and workshopped content. I vaguely remember the names - For those in peril on the sea??? River Phoenix dead on the sidewalk??? He was obviously talented and would have some kind of future in the arts-entertainment industrial complex.

Like I say, for some reason his name bubbled up in my mind. So I googled him. There is a wikipedia page devoted to him. Right then, he is wiki-famous. He has been dubbed "British theatre's greatest maverick talent" - a compliment with both a forehand and a backhand. It reminds me of being labelled “the world’s tallest dwarf”. He has led an ensemble named after himself. He has won awards at the Edinburgh Festival and written and directed plays at some of the UK’s best known theatres. So far so good. Perhaps a bit more than: “move along folks, nothing to see here”. Then:

It was revealed that he used his professional status to abuse and disguise his abuse of young men

Oh.

[He] died by suicide June 2021. He had been arrested in May for possession of indecent images of children.

Bloody hell.

The world wide web in 2025 is a weird place. It’s been around for over 30 years. For many of us, significant chunks of our lives are in bits and pieces online. For some us, it’s a steady procession on nothing much. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you get to see someone’s rise and fall.

He started to get favourable reviews in The Guardian around about 2000. He had a prodigious work rate - putting out 2-3 shows a year for over 20 years. He blogged from 2006 to around 2014 (back when blogging was a thing). His plays were published. He wrote a book. By all accounts, his work was daring and lyrical and complex. His blog writing displayed charm and insight and erudition. Whilst he was not a household name, he was a known figure in the world of British theatre - teaching on lots of drama courses. His company even had a critic-in-residence who had her own blog.

And then there’s a pause.

And then there’s news stories about his death. And then, about a year later, it all comes out in a series of posts and articles. About the sexual demands that he made on young performers (esp. men). About the bullying. And about the cache of child porn that his husband discovered. A series of posts and articles from those who were impacted by his behaviour to those who had tried to raise the alarm to those industry stalwarts asking how this could have happened.

Meanwhile his blog has been deleted (although it still lives in The Wayback Machine) and his publications are no longer available to buy direct (although second hand copies seem to be floating round eBay and Amazon).

If I had kept up with his career then this would have played out over 25 years. Instead it’s like binging a Netflix true crime series (in the wrong order). Everything happens all at once. Things written over a decade ago - a description of a piece of theatre involving children, an obsession with nudity, the frequent use of suicide as a plot point - foreshadow things known today. Chekov’s blog post.

It is flippant to say this but the narrative of an abusive man who struggles with his desires and then commits suicide understood in a non-linear way could be one of his own plays. Some people are nothing like the work they produce. Their art is something separate from themselves. Whereas for some artists, their work is a destination to escape to. Their self as becoming is their art. And then some get fatally lost in a region in between - or somewhere else.

This is not entertainment. People have been hurt.

It is sad. It is unnerving. I really, really want there to be “move along folks, nothing to see here” when I google someone.

Some minor spoilers

This movie is two hours of watching men in dresses talk with, to, and at each other. It is is far more gripping than it has any right to be. Much of this simply comes down to the excellent cast (Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, etc) who could make a washing machine manual dramatically intense. The film itself is surprisingly cinematic for its confined location.

Some Defenders of the Catholic Church do not like this movie. Its makers’ sympathies are with those seeking change in the Church rather than conservatives. And its critics are correct that this can lead to some clunky storytelling. However Conclave is not about God. It is about people.

In many respects, the Catholic Church is a multi-national corporation and the shenanigans we witness would not be out of place in boardroom never mind the Vatican. There is wheeling and dealing and confessions and lying. Those participating are not evil. They are simply operating with their own agendas.

Now, the mechanics of the Conclave are collegial rather than corporate. Cardinals vote on which of their number should be Pope until a majority is reached. But everyone has ambitions. Some of those vying for the top job are willing to do anything to get there. Others are a little more squeamish. As one character says, every cardinal has secretly chosen their own papal name. So very human.

In this recognition of the humanity of the Church, Conclave is generous. There are far darker tales of the Church and its priesthood that could be told. When I interact with some Church Defenders, I get the sense that they feel everything could be resolved by restoring the Latin Mass or some other practice. However many who trusted the Church feel betrayed by not just the child abuse, but the widespread covering up. This trust will not be easily won back.

Many of our institutions have trust deficits. In some cases, they have betrayed the trust of their citizens and customers. In others, the root causes are harder to find (but that might just be wishful thinking on my part). Often this mistrust has been actively stoked by those who wish to tear down institutions that stand in their way.

Conclave ends by implying that the future of the Church lies in opening itself to many types of people rather than bunkering down to a constricted and reactionary view of human nature. I would like to believe that this openness and acceptance will create trust but I do also wonder if I am being naive. May be the future is trustless and just the endless bartering for position. While watching the multiple sessions of cardinals voting for the next pontiff, the thought crosses my mind: “What if the voting never ends?”

• What people get wrong about changing human behaviour.

• Why AI and psychology have more in common that you would think.

• The importance of taking an experimental approach.

• What it means when we work with intelligences as well as people.

Let me introduce you to Desmond Child.

American-Hungarian-Cuban Child enters the popular conscious by writing:

Pumping disco rock that is as catchy as the measles in an RFK-run nursery.

But wait. This is just the beginning.

Throughout the 80s, Child writes a series of total bangers for Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Dame Bonnie Tyler - e.g.

Listen to this and feel your ears grow suede tassels and cowboy boots. We’re more than half way there, Jon. We’re standing on the verge of getting it on.

Perhaps Childs’ work reaches its apotheosis in:

The drama here is off the charts. Love has progressed from being a “bad medicine” to actually being a “poison”. Someone get Child a job at the FDA. Nevertheless Alice Cooper “don’t want to break these chains”. Switching metaphors with the subtlety of a rhino crashing the gears of a hummer, I’m not sure that chains are a recognized anti-toxin. But probably more romantic than taking an emetic.

Utterly ridiculous. Utterly listenable.

Child is the Patron Saint of the Power Ballad - a genre as successful and lucrative as it is despised by the cognoscenti. The PB has loud guitars that solo - and is therefore acceptable to dudes. At the same time, it is slower and has lyrics that bend romantic - and is therefore acceptable to the laydeez. Man and woman, dude and chick brought together, lighters waving in perfect harmony.

Obviously the PB is also camp AF. That doesn’t make it unheterosexual. But it may be related to Child’s late 70s confessional "The Truth Comes Out” that is not about him taking an emetic to counteract some poisoning.

I do wonder if the power ballad has suffered as sexual mores have become more relaxed. Men showing their feminine side and women getting their rock on are far less charged matters than they were in the 80s. Although the resurgent conservative gender backlash may revive the power ballad as a cultural form. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we see JD Vance and Patrick Deneen crooning a tortured duet in studded leather.