Titania McGrath's "Woke: A Guide to Social Justice" made me weep with laughter

Why should you read it? Titania McGrath explains early on in the book:

"Activists such as myself are spearheading a new culture war, sniffing out prejudice like valiant bloodhounds of righteousness, courageously snapping at the heels of injustice. To give a tangible example of our achievements, consider how the definition of the word 'Nazi' has been successfully broadened to include anyone who voted for Brexit, has ever considered supporting the Conservative Party or who refuses to take the Guardian seriously. Although this is a great victory for the progressive cause, it does mean that there are now more Nazis living in modern Britain than even existed in 1930s Germany. This makes Woke: A Guide to Social Justice not only timely but essential."

She goes on to confront her horrific upbringing...

Tears of Rage - starting with Quentin Letts's splendid evisceration of Theresa May in the Daily Mail

The Mail's political sketch-writer started Wednesday's article this way:

Prime Minister’s Questions left me hoping the Conservatives lose the next election – lose it so badly their buttocks sting – and that Jeremy Corbyn, with whom I disagree on almost everything, becomes Prime Minister.

Having summed up Mrs May's wretched performance as "No fun. No verve. No imagination..." Letts ended his piece with this stirring call to arms:

My review of "Suicide of the West" by Jonah Goldberg for The Salisbury Review

Approximately three hundred years’ ago, Britain gave birth to capitalism, which allowed the people of Europe to achieve “escape velocity from the norm of human existence.” Britain exported capitalism around the globe, which has benefitted billions by producing formerly unimaginable levels of liberty and prosperity. The American conservative writer Jonah Golberg calls this “the Miracle”, because, while it no doubt owed something to British “exceptionalism”, nevertheless “…no one intended it. No single thing made it happen. It was an unplanned and glorious accident.” Sadly, Goldberg warns, the Miracle is now under threat from both Left and Right in those very countries it has made free and wealthy...

Message to the Tories - it's the narrative, stoopid!

Labour have only registered a lead over the Conservatives in one of the last 19 polls. Corbyn's support among young people would appear to be waning - even allowing for the unreliability of the polls, Peak Corbyn might very well now only be visible in the nation's rear-view mirror. So why do I still look at the morning headlines through splayed fingers, gut roiling with dread, wondering which pet left-wing topics will be leading the news agenda today? Apart from the royal wedding, the week before last was all about Tory infighting over a seemingly interminable, bogged-down Brexit, Grenfell Tower victims, Oxbridge racism, a Labour promise to abolish the Lords, and - inevitably - NHS underfunding. I'm seriously starting to wonder whether the government has sent its entire media team (apart from James Cleverly, the MP who battles away valiantly on Twitter) on extended leave...

The Hitchens Brothers, doing the ironing, and the need for consolation

These days, I catch up with political podcasts about once a fortnight, when I do the ironing (yes, I am that much of a New Man) - usually a James Delingpole, an Andrew Klavan, and, if there's time and I'm in the mood for his blistering, rapid-fire sarcasm, a Ben Shapiro. I used to listen to Radio 4 Extra, but I hit a patch where I seemed to get stuck with  The Navy Lark, Steptoe & Son, Arthur Smith or Mel Giedroyc. Anyway, this week I started off my podcast binge with James Delingpole chatting to Mail columnist Peter Hitchens, whose "housemaster in a filthy temper" manner always brings to mind the forbidding British actor, Cedric Hardwicke. Hitchens - in case you're not familiar with him - is an ascetic, fundamentalist conservative (he describes himself as a Burkean, although there was nothing particularly puritanical about Burke), who thinks it would be a jolly good idea...

Sir Roger Scruton on phony, cost-free compassion

And...

Sir Roger Scruton on the cancerous "shadow community of parasites" which pretends to govern us

My brain isn't functioning today - or, at least, it's functioning even more inefficiently than usual. This is the "payback" which often hits CFS/ME folk the day after the day after they've overdone it. Writing about Zulu on Friday took it out of me, because I hate the thought of not doing justice to the films or books I care about - I knew it would, but it's a price well worth paying. My mental haze worsened as I leafed through the Sunday Telegraph this morning in a vain search for anything vaguely resembling heartening news. It seems Mrs. May's government is failing on just about every front - no more money for the military, the new universal credit system about to be watered down/postponed/abandoned/whatever. The only whiff of uplift was the suggestion that the EU's negotiating stance is softening because of the groundswell of support here for a "No Deal" Brexit, which would, of course, leave Britain's fanatically dirigiste neighbours...

Ed West is spot on about not writing stuff that makes you feel good (though he's wrong about Brexit)

Yes, indeed. Ed West has demonstrated his point in recent months...

"I'm not about to defend Stalin, but..."? But me no buts.

I realise that wasting what little energy I possess these days highlighting the utter idiocy...

The brilliance of Peter Biskind's "Seeing Is Believing" and the classic right-wing 1996 Mel Gibson film "Ransom"

One of the most exciting books about cinema I've ever read is Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, left-wing film historian Peter Biskind's 1983 study of the political attitudes underlying 1950s American movies. It's worth reading for the first chapter alone. In it, Biskind dissects Sidney Lumet's claustrophobic 1957 drama, 12 Angry Men, in which a New York jury tries to reach a verdict on a young Hispanic accused of murdering his fodder (sorry - his father). At first, they're all for frying the little bastard, but, gradually, the achingly rational architect Henry Fonda - the representative of the corporate-liberal state - convinces the others that the little bastard is innocent...

Brandolini's Law explains why arguing with lefties is so exhausting - and pointless

The proposition that "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit...

Up is Down, Wrong is Right, Ugliness is Beautiful, Hate is Love, Black is White...and Free Speech is Fascist

Members of the Corbyn-supporting Momentum movement/cult here, and the Antifa (Anti-Fascist) movement/cult in America...

Jeremy Corbyn - finally, a politician able to abolish class distinctions in Britain...

...by making his party equally unpopular amongst all classes!

This YouGov graphic is one of the most heartening...

Martin Durkin and James Delingpole in the most stimulating podcast of the year - red meat for right-wingers

I didn't mean to spend an hour this morning listening to James Delingpole interviewing the maker of the hugely influential online film, The Brexit Movie. But I made the mistake of listening to the first few minutes of the podcast...

An old friend - a Guardian reader - wonders what the point of this blog is, and why I'm so angry and aggressive

I was pleased last week to discover that I'd received an email from a childhood friend I hadn't seen since school. Whenever I hear "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys, this erstwhile chum always pops into my head, along with a vision of the muddy garden of the new house his family had just moved into when the Best of the Beach Boys LP was released (or, at least, when I'd managed to save up enough pocket money to buy it). I used to be rotten at keeping in touch with people, and only began making an effort as I approached my half-century - in one case I wrote to a friend's old school asking for a contact address, only to discover that he was living in the same flat, with the same phone number, as when I'd last seen him 25 years earlier. Anyway, my old schoolfriend's email started off pleasantly enough, with personal stuff - but then moved on to the subject of The Grønmark Blog. Here's what he had to say:

Yes, I know we who constantly complain about the "left-liberal elite" sound bonkers - but we're justified

"YOU'RE NEXT!"

I'm well aware of the danger of designating a disparate group of people as The Enemy, applying a handy, disparaging label to them, and then using it in a lazy, knee-jerk fashion every time something displeasing happens. The ability to instantly identify a standard scapegoat obviates the need for thought or analysis, and allows moaners like me to search out the next issue to blame the left-liberal elite for. Depending on which side of the political fence we're on, we choose different scapegoats, be it The Blacks, The Muslims, The Jews, The Rich, The Bankers, The EU, Little Englanders, Xenophobes, Racists, Social Workers, The Gutter Press, Tory Scum, The BBC, The Establishment, Climate Change Deniers, The Snowflake Generation, Social Justice Warriors, Guardian Readers, Academia, The Unions, The Green Lobby, The Military-Industrial Complex, Hollywood etc. In order to quell this instant pigeonholing tendency...

There are as many high-IQ Conservatives as Lefties - so why are there ten times as many left-wing academics?

Ask most left-liberals why there's such a preponderance of left-wing academics in British universities - almost 100% in some subjects - and they'll smirk and respond that it's because left-wingers are generally more intelligent than right-wingers. That has always been, to quote Dame Edna Everage, "a phallus I'd like to explode" - not because I believe that people who score well on IQ tests should be running everything (see the comments section of this post, in which GCooper suggests the term "Laputan" for what he calls "high-falutin' idiocy"), but because (a) I've met lots of very, very bright left- and right-wingers from most non-criminal walks of life, and, even discounting my own natural prejudice in favour of conservatives and the fact that I've spent most of my life amongst left-wingers, I haven't noticed a particular left-wing imbalance, smarts-wise - to be honest, many clever sods seem to display an imperfect understanding of how logic or the rules of evidence work. But until now, I've never found the right ammunition with which to attack leftists' smug self-regarding assumptions regarding their cognitive superiority. Well, here it is:

Conservatism shouldn't be the new Punk Rock - it should be the new Rock 'n' Roll!

Yes, I know - the YouTube video-blogger and Infowars polemicist Paul Joseph Watson isn't everyone's cup of tea: he's mouthy, loud, belligerent, Northern, snarky, and vain about his looks. He's the sort of arrogant, angry young man you really wouldn't want your daughter bringing home. And yet - and this is important - he's on our side! Well, he is if the phrase "our side" means "anti-socialist". Watson is a right-wing libertarian rather than a traditional conservative. I'm very much not a libertarian - and I suspect you aren't either - but what we on the Right all share (or should) is a detestation of socialism, all the way from its left-of-centre, global-corporatist, fill-yet-boots, soft-fascist Blair/Clinton wing through to the irrational, joyless, nihilistic, hate-filled, hard-fascist, Corbyn/Sanders end of the left-wing spectrum...

When are lefties going to realise that they are now the baddies?

You can see where I'm heading with this, right?...

A happy retirement to the great Thomas Sowell, who's off to spend more time with his cameras

The great man published his final syndicated column today. What spurred him to finally give up sharing his views with the world at the age of 86?:

"During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, there were four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful."

Obviously, I had no idea this was going to happen when I did a post featuring a host of Sowell quotations - "All undergraduates should be force-fed Thomas Sowell quotes until they see sense" -  exactly a week ago.  But...