Greetings all. I’m busying myself with various essays and reviews which will be coming up here over the next few months, so today it’s your turn to take the reins. The Monthly Salon is a space where you set the agenda, and talk about whatever you like. Please don’t be shy - especially if you’ve not commented before. New voices keep things fresh.
If you’d like a prompt or two, here is a varied clutch of articles from around the web that I’ve found interesting recently:
Michael Warren Davies digs into the Prayer of St Ephraim the Syrian, which we Orthodox types pray daily during Lent.
Writing on the publication of Britain’s Cass Report into the pushing of gender ideology onto children by … well, just about everyone in authority, Mary Harringon makes the connection which I have made here in the past between transhumanism and what she calls ‘gender leftism.’
On the same topic, Andrew Sullivan wonders if ‘Big Trans’ will ever be held to account for the madness it has helped spawn.
While we’re talking about the ongoing impacts of the Sexual Revolution, Jonathan Van Maren thinks you can know a society why whom it chooses to honour.
N. S. Lyons writes a really interesting little essay-cum-book review on the vexed question of whether the West is ‘re-paganising.’ I’ll be exploring this here in future. His answer is more thoughtful than most.
Yoshi Matsumoto makes a blisteringly entertaining argument for the existence of organised religion.
Finally, over at Unherd, Freddie Sayers has an important exposé of the global ‘disinformation’ industry and what it is really up to, which turns out - surprise, surprise - to be the censoring of ‘unacceptable’ political views.
Feel free to talk about any of these or none of them. Over to you.
A bit marginal, perhaps, but I've found myself unexpectedly *obsessed* by the journalist James Delingpole's podcast The Delingpod.
It's odd, and it won't be to everyone's taste here. But it's fascinating, and I hope you give him a try. James is a former mainstream journalist, right of centre, who wrote somewhat lightweight pieces for several big papers - so, a named columnist with a lot to lose.
But during the pandemic he smelled a big rat, went massively "off-message", found Jesus, and is now fighting what he sees (as many here do, too) as the coming totalitarian night. His journey has been rapid, radical and very destabilising to his own life - but inspiring, too. Some of his views are frankly odd, but others are growing on me fast, and some of his guests are extraordinary. I've been struck in particular by Simon Elmer, Miri AF, Scrumpmonkey, Brian Gerrish, John Waters, but so many others, too. His sessions with his brother Dick are utterly lovely - daft, divagatory, teasing - and they model (for me) what a brotherly relationship could be.
Who knew... that a right-wing gadfly with (ordinarily) an assured mainstream career could find a depth of integrity and grow up into one of the most courageous, fearless and open-minded voices of our dark times. As if PG Wodehouse woke up one morning to find himself morphed not into a beetle but into George Orwell.
Mary Harrington makes a clever and mostly convincing argument regarding the impossibility of reconciling what she calls bio-liberterianism with socialised health care. In a situation where resources are limited there will not a possibility of unlimited "gender" interventions because resources will be prioritised otherwise if the public have a say. Generally I think this is true, however, there is also the possibility of health care systems getting hijacked, and this has certainly happened. In countries with nationalised health care, such as Sweden (which was at the forefront of "gender" medical intervention for young people for a while) and Britain, there is now luckily a backtracking as the wider public becomes aware of what it is happening. This doesn't seem to be the case with Canada though (I recently read about a court case won by an individual who wanted his "nonbinary bottom surgery" funded by the tax payer; I think it was on Reduxx). Due to the inconsistencies pointed out by Harrington, I think those "bioliberarian" pseudo-leftists naturally tend towards totalitarianism. For decades the strategy of the TRA orgs has been to covertly hijack instutitions and try to prevent the public finding out what's really happening. The same totalitarian responses could be found in the Covid response, especially with the "vaccines", where the NHS top bureaucrats (largely unchallenged) prioritised to transfer massive resources towards a dubious mass injection programme at the expense of other care. And the highly centralised and bureaucratised structure of the NHS, in addition to the fact that the NHS assumes quasi-religious status among large sections of the British Left and beyond, meant that this went largely unchallenged (doctors or nurses who spoke up would most likely lose their jobs). A privatised or semi-privatised health care system - which has other problems - may allow slightly more dissident voices than the NHS, though they have different means of sanctioning medical professionals.