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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Seth Barrett Tillman’s Recommended Irish, British, and other European Blogs (and other publications)

Dear New Reform Club Readers,

Here, at New Reform Club, most of our readers are from the United States. We know. Here are the pageview statistics.

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I am not going to recommend American blogs to you. You can find them yourselves, and also choose for yourselves. (And please keep reading New Reform Club!) But I now live in Ireland, and so I may have a good deal more contact than you with good Irish, British, and other European blogs and related materials.

Here I am going to recommend a few such blogs.

First, Kenan Malik’s Pandaemonium. Malik is a thoughtful public intellectual. There remain few such people in the West, and those that exist deserve our support. Here is a taste:

As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes – into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example – and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage.

Untangling the many strands of the multiculturalism debate requires understanding the concept itself. The term ‘multicultural’ has come to define both a society that is particularly diverse, usually as a result of immigration, and the policies necessary to manage such a society. It thus embodies both a description of society and a prescription for dealing with it. Conflating the two – perceived problem with supposed solution – has tightened the knot at the heart of the debate. Unpicking that knot requires a careful evaluation of each.

See https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/the-failure-of-multiculturalism. In regard to taking down the Rhodes statue, he wrote:

But turning a statue of Cecil Rhodes into an invented psychological trauma, or demanding that it be removed as an act of ‘decolonization’, will change neither the way that people look upon the past, nor challenge the injustices of the present.

Once upon a time, student activists used to demand that capitalism must fall, or that apartheid must be crushed, or that colonialism must be swept away. Now, it seems, they just want to take down statues.


The second blog is Paul Staines et al.’s Guido Fawkes. You might want to skip any of the America-related posts. To be perfectly blunt, generally, Brits and Europeans don’t get America, and quite frankly, I have come to believe that, generally, Americans don’t get Europe either. (I will write more on this in the future.) Still, anything on Guido Fawkes on Britain or Europe is fun. Fun: sort of like The American Spectator during the Clinton years. Those were better days, which, I suppose tells you that I am getting old. (See, e.g., http://ssrn.com/abstract=2456569.)

My final blog recommendation (for now) is His Grace’s Archbishop Cranmer. For those not in the loop, Cranmer has been dead for centuries; His Grace is a nom de plume. This blog is downright un-American (but not anti-American). It is unashamedly Tory, and supports the Established Church! “Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!”

The “final non-appealable authority ... on all disputed points of usage” (see http://ssrn.com/abstract=1029001) also has some favourites. One is www.timworstall.com.

One Irish newspaper columnist is particularly good, which usually means that after a few years he will be picked up by a better paying British broadsheet. See Ian O’Doherty at The Irish Independent. The Indo (as it is called) is one of the two newspapers of record here; the other is The Irish Times. (See, e.g., http://ssrn.com/abstract=2129771; http://ssrn.com/abstract=2465554.) The former is read by independent businessmen; the latter is read by the (anything but) caring and professional classes. 

Enjoy,

Seth

PS: Runners up: biasedbbc.org, and www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/StGeorge.html (April 23, 1961), which inspired a BBC racist political fantasy: National Crime Squad Manhunt: I am an Englishman. The youtube segment is only 7 minutes.   

PPS: I will come back with some continental recommendations on another occasion.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SethBTillman ( @SethBTillman )

Here is my prior postSeth Barrett Tillman, Is Senator Ted Cruz a “Natural Born Citizen”? Yes, The New Reform Club (Jan. 18, 2016, 10:53 AM). 

Welcome Instapundit and Chicago Boyz readers. Please have a look around The New Reform Club.


Seth

8 comments:

Erik said...

Take a look at No Pasarán once in a while, Seth
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/

We've been around for almost 12 years,
and do some good work now and then…

Some recent examples:

• What the Hell Are We Doing in Iraq? — 4 Reminders
from 2004 (Rice, Giuliani, Bush, a U.S. Marine)
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2016/01/what-hell-are-we-doing-in-iraq-4.html

• T'is easy to tout the success of gun control laws
in the rest of the Western world when you ignore
certain pertinent facts from Europe
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2015/12/tis-easy-to-tout-success-of-gun-control.html

• Have You Noticed What the Oregon Ranchers Have NOT Done?
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2016/01/have-you-noticed-what-oregon-ranchers.html

• Etc…

Bill Peschel said...

Added Guido and Cranmer to my list; thanks for the reccies.

(And for there being a few of them. I read so much stuff that I'm avoiding listicles that start with "87 Things You Must See RIGHT NOW."

Retired Dude said...

Actually we Americans DO GE T Europe. Or, more correctly, those of us Americans of "European Heritage" had ancestors who GOT Europe. And we have parents or grand-parents or great-grand-parents who GOT Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

I will leave it as an intellectual exercise to you - the blogger - as to why the majority of Americans have to wonder if you folks will ever GET such American ideas as individual responsibility, love of freedom, toleration and distrust of "Government" and self-appointed "Elites".

Seth Barrett Tillman said...

Eric, I promise to take a look -- more than once in a while -- at your http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/. I have read your blog. There is not a lot of info on your blog about you, or where you are now located. I was trying to recommend Irish, British, and Europeans writing in and about Europe. I am an expat, and I was not recommending other expat blogs. That's a whole separate list.

Winston -- I am an American blogger
living and working and raising a family in Ireland.
Try to lighten up.

Seth

Anonymous said...

How about http://davidthompson.typepad.com/ ? The man is English, interesting, and quite hilarious

Anonymous said...

I second the rec of David Thompson's blog. He is fantastic.

Armour said...

Dear Seth, I agree that Ian O'Doherty is great (apart from his rabid atheism, but nobody's perfect). Another blogger who hounds the Irish left is http://markhumphrys.com/ (but again, a rabid atheist!...sense a pattern here?). Here's another one http://irishsavant.blogspot.ie/
In general, Irish media, academia, and politics is dominated by the left. They had a field day with Sarah Palin a few years ago, they are currently chortling at Donald Trump, and they wring their hands about global warming. Slim pickings for any right-thinking people I'm afraid.

Rich Vail said...

Thanks for takin the time to compile this list. I've saved it for future perusal...