About me

I started this blog around 2012. The name ‘The Unrecorded Man’ comes from a generic character in Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ novels. I came to it via a John Derbyshire review of those novels. I thought it sounded better than ‘MyBlog.com’.

I used to be mildly and unthinkingly left-wing after being bamboozled by the BBC and the Guardian. I now dislike everything about progressive liberals, including their obsession with equality as opposed to fairness, their righteous posturing, their vilification of anyone who disagrees with them and their insistence that we feel solidarity with everyone, including those we dislike or are merely indifferent to.

The current narrative among progressive liberals is that everything done by white people is bad and all dark-skinned people are innocent victims. The world is thus divided into two groups of people: those who act (whites) and those who helplessly react (non-whites). We should let these innocents into our countries in large numbers since to fail to do so would be racist and a dereliction of our moral duty. This is our punishment for being explorers, exploiters and the pioneers of the modern world. America, Israel and Britain are the worst oppressors the world has ever seen. Noam Chomsky is the maven of this anti-western silliness.

I would love to turn the clocks back to a time when most normal people had boring middle-class views and progressive leftists were a tiny minority of cranks that people laughed at. Well, we aren’t laughing now. The cranks are in charge and have been increasing in power since the 1960’s.

Immigration is okay but mass immigration is a suicidal idea that has fractured British society. As Enoch Powell said, ‘immigration is all about numbers’ and in my view there has been far too much. Perhaps 60 years ago British people felt they had an identity but I’m damned if I can see one now. Since you can now be British five minutes after arriving at Heathrow Airport our nationality has been emptied of all significance. Now it is just a bureaucratic label referring to a passport holder. For me ‘being British’ suggests a cluster of things including ethnicity, ancestry, culture, religion (or lack of it), language, history, feelings of loyalty and the technical matter of owning a passport. The more of these boxes you tick the more British you are. It’s a matter of degree rather than a binary yes/no.

A recent survey of British Muslims showed that two thirds of them wouldn’t tell the police if they thought a fellow Muslim was involved in Jihadist activities. That tells you everything you need to know about where their loyalties lie and how deluded the repeated claim is that it is only a tiny minority that pose a threat. 50 years ago British people said they didn’t want millions of Third Worlders here but the elite imported them anyway. Now the objection to sending the children of these immigrants back is that they were born here and are thus British. Well, duh, that’s why we didn’t want them in the first place, you morons.

I think all university departments not teaching something sensible like Maths, Science or Engineering could be closed down without any detrimental effects to society. After all, most liberal arts courses are just opportunities for Cultural Marxists to indoctrinate young, impressionable minds with their poisonous beliefs. Apart from this, the novels and poems written during the previous centuries by men and woman who never went to university were of a much higher quality than the stuff turned out by the Art and Lit graduates today. I think these arty subjects should be viewed as hobbies rather than a subject to bankrupt yourself by studying formally. On-the-job training strikes me as a far better way of spending 3 or 4 years than going to university.

I find it hard to tell whether or not I am a racist. For me a racist is someone who dislikes other races simply because they are different, which isn’t the case with me. However, if believing that mass immigration is on the whole bad for the natives of the host nation then I am a racist. And if believing that races vary on average in personality, behaviour and intelligence then, once again, I am a racist. For example, I think scientists have shown fairly conclusively that West Africans run faster, East Africans run further, Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent and east Asians less aggressive than other peoples. On average, of course. The reason I believe this is not because I want it to be true but because the evidence seems to point that way.

I think it was a tragedy, not just for the Jews, but for all of mankind that the Holocaust happened. We need more intelligent people in the world, not fewer. I am pro-Israel because I don’t see why the Jews should be denied a homeland while all other people have one. And no one needs a homeland more than Jews since there isn’t a more despised and persecuted ethnic group on Earth (except perhaps for Gypsies, who probably deserve to be despised.) Israel seems to me an oasis of civilisation in an ocean of Islamic barbarism and backwardness and the accusation that the Jews stole land from poor Palestinians and drove them off is not backed up by the facts. What the Jews did do was flood into Palestine in large numbers near the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century because they were being persecuted in Europe, especially by the Russians and Germans. I don’t see how Jews flooding into Palestine is any different to Muslims flooding into Europe now. The only difference is that these Muslims are less persecuted than persecuting. At least Jews flooding into Palestine built hospitals, schools and generally raised the desirability of that particular bit of real estate. The same can’t be said of the Muslims coming into Europe. Apart from this, the Jews were returning to their ancestral lands after being driven out by Arabs and Romans in the first place. Bradford in England, Malmö in Sweden and Dearborn in Michigan are not the ancestral homes of Muslims. Look, the United Nations annexed a measly 11% of Palestine and gave it to the Jews to rule as their own state. The rest was given to the Muslims who first created Jordan, then Gaza and the West Bank. How the creation of Israel as a homeland for the Jews of Palestine is different from the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Indian Muslims is not clear to me.

My favourite websites are The Spectator, Taki’s Magazine, Vdare and The Unz Review. Recently I have also started reading Quillette, Spiked and Unherd

John Derbyshire is my favourite political and social commentator and I read anything and everything by him bar his Maths books. I also like David Cole, Rod Liddle, Douglas Murray, Ed and Patrick West, Mark Steyn, Jonathan Haidt, Victor Davis Hanson, Gavin McInnes, Jim Goad, Ann Coulter (though I can’t bear her voice), Theodore Dalrymple, Steve Sailer, Pat Buchanan, Lionel Shriver, Toby Young and Walter Williams.

The little I know about economics tells me that Milton Friedman should run every country’s finances and probably their governments too. Though I find economics boring I can listen to Friedman all day. Shame that he’s dead. Luckily two black American economists, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, are still with us and talking sense. My only gripe with them is that neither shows any sign of knowing anything about the role played by biology in how we as individuals, and societies, turn out. As far as I can tell they attribute everything to the environment.

Gavin McInnes is the most consistently funny person I know and his videos are great. Steven Crowder is also good but a little too intense and fast-talking for my taste. Stefan Molyneux is okay and he has some great guests on his show but I always take what he says with a pinch of salt. There’s something about him which makes me unable to trust him.

Elvis Costello is my favourite singer-songwriter though I hate his conventional anti-Thatcher and anti-Israel stance. I haven’t liked any of his music for over a decade so I no longer follow what he is doing. If I were to write a pop song I think it would be in the style of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. There is something about his lyrics which are very familiar to me, as though a talented me had written them. I also like The Stranglers, XTC, Sparks, Ocean Colour Scene, Teenage Fanclub and various other pop groups. I would like to know if there are any good new pop groups out there but can’t be bothered to wade through all the dross to find them. I also feel that at my age I should perhaps be leaving pop music behind. There is something unseemly about old men who keep up to date with the music scene.

Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell (fiction and non-fiction), Kingsley Amis and John Le Carré are my favourite fiction writers. I also like the poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin and T.S. Eliot’s heavy stuff, though not the nonsense about cats.

I watch Youtube videos like those of philosopher Michael Levin here and here and the scientist of race, J.P. Rushton here and here. There are some great videos featuring the very intense Jordan Peterson but he is far too obsessed with symbolism for my taste and he can often be quite vague about things.

Nowadays I find reading short articles and watching videos more enjoyable than ploughing through long-winded books that could have said what they wanted to say in 20 pages rather than 200. For the sake of brevity I try to keep my own blog posts down to a maximum of 500 words but sometimes fail.

Since we can never be 100% sure of anything I put my trust in science, which strikes me as being the best method we have of getting closer to the truth. I am an atheist and think Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens are all good thinkers and writers, though politically Richard Dawkins is too much of a lefty for my taste, Dan Dennett is past his best and I didn’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens, though he was a wonderful speaker and debater. Now I am probably more interested in his brother, Peter, who is wonderful and awful by turns.

I still like many of Sam Harris’s ideas though he no longer convinces me in the way he used to. Instead I have moved more towards the ideas of Jonathan Haidt though even he often strikes me as still being too much of a soppy liberal.

I am no longer able to get as annoyed about Christianity as I used to. Instead Political Correctness and Islam seem much bigger dangers to the things I value. Belief in the divinity of Jesus strikes me as daft but not dangerous, at least the way Christianity is now practised. I like some Christian traditions like Christmas and Easter and the feeling of continuity and community that old churches bring to British towns and villages. I like almost anything that gives a feeling of permanence to this changing world and since you can’t pick and choose your traditions, I am more than happy to go along with those Christian traditions that bind us together. Also, if these atheists are at all representative of mainstream atheists, give me Christians any day.

My favourite kind of film is suspense, especially from the 1960s and 1970s. Also Harrison Ford made several good thrillers during the 1980s. My favourite film is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring Gary Oldman and a beautiful Chinese film called To Live. I will watch any film starring Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Richard Burton or Anthony Hopkins and any comedy with Leonard Rossiter. For some reason there are far fewer actresses whose films I actively seek out, though Maria Schell was wonderful, as was Julie Christie. I like most films directed by David Lean, Sidney Pollack and Stanley Kubrik.

I’m not much interested in art but I quite like some 19th century art, like the American Realists and the British Pre-Raphaelites. I also like illustrators of popular books like N.C. Wyeth and Arthur Rackham.

I work in Japan for 7 months of the year as an English teacher and treat the remaining five months as an extended unpaid holiday in England, where I live off the money I save while working in Japan. Japan has a lot to teach the West about good parenting and how to avoid self-importance. Most young Japanese people strike me as possessing a sense of decency inculcated in them very early on by their parents, teachers and society at large. I find this, as well as their modesty and their lack of ‘cool’, very appealing. If I ever have children I would like to bring them up in the way Japanese children are brought up.

Many western parents treat their children like royalty and even appear a little scared of them. They praise them for the tiniest thing and talk to them in soppy voices that make my skin crawl. I much prefer the way people used to talk to children and probably still do in most non-western countries. The parent as a figure of authority rather than a weakling or tyrant seems to me the best way to produce non-annoying children who grow up to be non-annoying adults.

If I were allowed to choose my time and place to live and die I would choose to be born in a small English market town around, say, 1815 and to die peacefully in my sleep just before WWI. There is something about the modern world that just doesn’t suit me: the crowds of strangers, industrialisation, the huge shiny glass and metal buildings, progressive liberal views, mass immigration, and the welfare programs that unsurprisingly turn potentially decent people into feckless slobs. Even so, I wouldn’t want to be without modern dentistry, anaesthetics or the internet.