Our World

While newsrooms across Europe, including ours, scramble to report on the fallout between right-wing parties and analyze what the shake-ups in political groupings might mean for the next European Parliament, we should not forget that the Right has an historic opportunity to make an impact in the larger battle for Europe. It should not be wasted on internal power-struggles and infighting.

Ordinary Europeans do not care about comings and goings in Brussels-based political groupings. “Will they stay in ECR? Will there be a split in ID? Will there be a new faction?” While we will certainly report on these questions, the truth is that nobody in the real world really votes on the basis of whether their party of choice is in the European Conservatives & Reformists (ECR) or in Identity & Democracy (ID). We must be careful not to get so drawn into parliamentary machinations that we lose sight of the big picture.

No company is quite so inseparable from the World Wide Web as Google, which made searching the internet an eponymous verb. The web made Google rich, too, but this week Google relegated it to a submenu. In a design of its next-generation home page that the company showed at its annual I/O developer conference this week, the demotion is quite clear.

Searching now returns a blancmange of content in special pull-out boxes, apps and features, some of it artificially generated. The days of lists of links are over — if you want to see web pages the tech giant now offers a “new ‘Web’ filter” that will refine your search to only see web pages. This may startle Generation Xers whose first taste of the online world was via a web browser, but the web has become a legacy format like the DVD.

A medium designed for the masses has been colonised by middle-class Tristrams.

Strike a light! New research published this week from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has exposed that in film, TV and radio, just over eight per cent of ‘creatives’ are from working-class backgrounds – the lowest percentage in a decade. This does not surprise me in the slightest, though it is always nice to have some juicy stats to confirm what one already suspected.

Young men and women are increasingly divided.

Sex and politics are clickbait material, so it’s little surprise that The Economist’s early March article “Why Young Men and Women Are Drifting Apart” went viral. In this case, the attention was warranted. The article adds to our understanding of the long-standing gender gap in politics to include the often-puzzling Generation Z, spotlighting trends with implications reaching far beyond any particular election.

What happens when you mix chauvinism with continental camp?

As the protests in Malmo over Israel’s inclusion in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, like the anguished defences of taking part by British and Irish contestants show, the kitschy spectacle is an inherently geopolitical format. In the interests of fairness then, should Palestine, like its neighbour Israel, enter Eurovision?

It is difficult to imagine a coherent argument against it on cultural grounds: after all, one of the arguments Israel’s supporters currently find most objectionable is that Israelis (most of whom are now descended from Middle Eastern Jewish refugees) “really” belong in Europe. In fact, the question is not technically a cultural one: as Palestine is not a member of the European Broadcasting Union, it is not eligible to join. Yet all the other Arab states neighbouring Europe are EBU members, and free to take part if they wish to: Morocco’s 1980 entry was — so far — the only Eurovision entry to be performed in Arabic, while Lebanon only withdrew its planned 2005 entry once the state broadcaster realised it would not be permitted to censor Israel’s performance. But that the question immediately asserts itself as a cultural one — a drawing of borders between our European home, and outsiders — reaches to the very heart of the contest’s meaning.

I know a lot of Daily Sceptic, Spectator and Telegraph readers never go anywhere near the Guardian. I, however, read it: one has to know what the enemy is up to. Today there is a characteristically celebratory piece about the Garrick vote to admit women as members. It is by one Jemima Olchawski. Instead of just enjoying the result she tries to make an argument, and it is a terrible one…

Beanfield internet.

They were just set up in our condo.

They only do condos.

Has anyone used them?

Reviews are good and the price is great relative to Bell & Rogers.

I remember fondly a time when Tim Hortons truly was a “café and bake shop”. I would travel with my grandfather and brother to the nearby, small town location and sit by the window. My order was consistent. My brother and I would split a turkey bacon club. A sweet, tangy honey mustard was spread on the underside of a warm baguette. We’d order the chili as well, which came in a bread bowl at the time. And we’d cut a frosted cinnamon roll down the middle.

Can you really be ‘passionate’ about digital marketing?

I suspect Montaigne was being coy when he complained of the “wild and useless weeds” that would encroach on his mind in idleness. It is to those wild shoots that Montaigne owed his genre-defining essais, and thus his lasting influence. Spontaneous growth testifies to fertile ground, which is certainly better than the alternatives. One alternative is a barren mind. Another, seemingly opposed but often one and the same, is the harried or overwhelmed state of those consumed by careerist ambition — which stands for many or most of us.

Montaigne left such pursuits behind in the 1560s, at age 38, when he retired from public office to embark on a life of contemplation, thanks to which we have his published work. In solitude, he gave himself over to the world and his own mind — his “back shop”. He was there for the weeds.

When I was growing up in the 1950s in Weston-super-Mare, England was largely a middle-class society. The values of the middle class were dictated from above and would work their way down the social ladder. My family may have been on one of that ladder’s lower rungs but we had middle-class values: although my father left school at 16, I never heard him mispronounce a word or make a spelling mistake. People tried to do their job well; they weren’t overly concerned with becoming rich, they just wanted enough money to get by, and live a good life.

The most controversial topics to cover in journalism aren’t what you might first think. Foreign affairs? Religion? Trump, Biden, Clinton?

Nope. Not by a long shot. Sure, people are deeply passionate about these topics. But I’ve learned from my years of newspaper writing that the topics that are most likely to result in your inbox being flooded are voicing an opinion on parking and pets.

That’s because these issues affect people directly in their daily lives, sometimes on an hourly basis. There’s no escaping them.

My heart places me in the “No such thing as a bad dog school” but Pitbulls unfortunately have to be excluded.

Citizens won’t sacrifice themselves

Western politics is defined by a conflict that is always awkward and sometimes cringe. On the one hand, our leaders are full of loud-mouthed passion, warning that the days of peace are over and that we now need to prepare for total, generational war. On the other, it’s beyond obvious that nobody cares. Across Europe and America, politicians now openly exhort their populations to feel righteous patriotism and to answer the call of duty, but all seem to accomplish exactly nothing: our militaries are shrinking due to a lack of recruits, polling shows a massive disinterest in fighting for King and Country, the young in particular remain completely unmoved. Even in embattled Ukraine, young men are choosing to dodge the draft and go clubbing instead.

Welcome fellow members of the internal proletariat! Anyone got a match?

Related … h/t Hermes

This is the most important video on the internet right now.

Best 90 seconds you will spend all day is watching this MSNBC clip.

Seriously.

pic.twitter.com/bbUNNQ7Wec

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 24, 2024

The unmarried thirtysomething is a rising star in the West. Some of them might be in common-law relationships, some may have kids, but many of them won’t have either. The future on the horizon is one of greater solitude, an affliction that will likely cost us political stability and economic success, on top of general well-being.

This is an acute issue in Canada: the most recent set of odds given by Statistics Canada peg a person’s chances of ever marrying at a mere 44 per cent — that’s down from 74 per cent in 1991.

Feminism has left middle-aged women like me single, childless and depressed

I increasingly feel that feminism has failed my generation. It is a peculiarity of the West that it is divided into sets which differ profoundly in their beliefs. This state of affairs began with the Reformation and has grown more pronounced ever since. There were Protestants and Catholics who differed fundamentally not only on faith but on practical matters. It was among Protestant communities that feminism first emerged, and it is in Protestant countries such as America and Britain in which feminist beliefs have been at their most vocal and strident in tone, like a religion with no dilution of agnosticism. Margaret Thatcher, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto, and no Catholic country could have produced her like.

Thucydides famously wrote that wars are produced by fear, honor, and interest.

The great historian Victor Davis Hanson titled his book on World War II The Second World Wars because the conflicts that evolved into that global war began as separate wars: Japan versus China; Italy versus Ethiopia; Japan versus Soviet Russia; Soviet Russia and Germany versus Poland; Soviet Russia versus Finland; England and France versus Germany; Italy versus France; Germany versus Soviet Russia; Japan versus the United States and England; and Germany and Italy versus the United States. Similarly, in 1912 fighting broke out in the Balkans; then Austria-Hungary went to war against Serbia; Germany declared war on Russia; Russia waged war on Austria-Hungary; Germany attacked Belgium and France, and England declared war on Germany. Later, Italy and the United States joined the war. Those conflicts also evolved into a global war waged on five continents, on the high seas, and in the air.

For more than 70 years, a slender volume written by a dockworker who died in 1983 has been handed around by presidents, would-be presidents, journalists, students, and more as a guide—decade after decade—to epochal and baffling events.

Published in 1951 in the shadow of World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements became one of President Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite books. As the former Supreme Allied Commander of European forces during World War II, Eisenhower saw firsthand the rise of mass movements and how they turn destructive. During one of the nation’s first televised presidential press conferences, Ike cited the book, turning it into a bestseller.