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.

See https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/recolonized-by-the-past. 

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 post: Seth 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