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Elon Musk’s free speech delusion
🥊 Beefing brothers | 🍾 Splendid septuagenarian | 🦸♂️ Harry Potter
People
The Gallagher brothers in their pomp. Getty
Back to the 1990s with Liam and Noel
Looking back, the Oasis moment seems “almost fleeting”, says Jo Ellison in the FT – a cultural phenomenon that ignited in the early 1990s and was then “lionised in the brief smug of Cool Britannia” under Tony Blair. Its two Mancunian protagonists, Liam and Noel Gallagher, “defined the decade’s lad”: rabble rousers, rivals and all-round reprobates. Offstage they self-immolated, performing their last gig in 2009 after years of infighting (“and several more of being a sub-par band”). Noel explained the breakup in characteristically frank terms: “I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”
Noel, the band’s songwriter, came away with the lion’s share of the spoils, amassing a fortune in the tens of millions which dwarfed his brother’s smaller pot. But Noel’s divorce last year is said to have cost £20m, and “divorce won’t tolerate retirement”. So now the boys are “dusting off the maracas” for a 17-date UK tour, which is expected to net the brothers £50m each, thanks in part to ticket sales among Gen Z. For these youngsters, Oasis hark back to a mythical time when “you could say what you want without being cancelled, and you could do what you wanted”, free from the “TikTok tyranny”. But, as a male friend who remembers the first Oasis era tells me, it’s also a great day for all those “poor benighted middle-aged dad rockers” who have had to put up with “Swifties and Brats” and other unsettling pop phenomena. “Oasis were crap but they had swagger and they were riotously entertaining and peculiarly British”, and they were optimistic. Young people love the 1990s because it looks like so much fun. “Old people love the 1990s because it WAS so much fun.”
🎸🥊 Siblings have always had a turbulent history in rock ’n’ roll, says Marcus Berkmann in The Spectator. John and Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival didn’t talk for the last 20 years of Tom’s life. Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks weren’t much better. In 1971, at a restaurant in New York, Dave tried to steal one of Ray’s chips. “Ray stabbed his brother in the chest with a fork.” At Dave’s 50th birthday, Ray stamped on his cake.
Property
THE COUNTRY HOUSE Once home to Peaky Blinders producer Frith Tiplady, this nine-bedroom Grade II listed country estate sits at the edge of the East Sussex market town of Hailsham. When it went up for sale in 2020, the eighteenth-century vicarage was in a state of disrepair, but after extensive renovations the house now boasts white marble bathrooms, a sleek modern kitchen, a cosy sitting room with study area, a sunshine-filled conservatory, and elegant walled gardens. Eastbourne, Brighton, and Royal Tunbridge Wells are all within easy driving distance. £1.85m.
Heroes and villains
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Villain
Melania Trump, who trousered $237,500 for speaking at a Palm Beach gathering of the gay rights advocacy group Log Cabin Republicans. One might think that a political spouse would make that kind of appearance gratis, says Air Mail, particularly since getting to the event – at Mar-a-Lago – probably wasn’t too much of a strain. Still, “this compulsion to monetise indiscriminately suggests that maybe she and her husband are soulmates after all”.
Hero
JK Rowling, whose Harry Potter books may guard against the rise of future Nazis. According to a 549-page academic analysis by German PhD researcher Jannina Schäffer, the political and legal systems of the Harry Potter world bear a disturbing resemblance to the Third Reich even before Voldemort and co take over. “And I think the Harry Potter books are a wonderful warning and a way of saying: ‘Dear people, we have to watch out and avoid the mistakes that happened in the Harry Potter books and the Nazi state’.”
Villain
Heinz, which has outraged Italians by releasing a tinned spaghetti carbonara. Chef Aldo Zilli told The Daily Telegraph he was “appalled” at the very idea of pre-preparing the creamy classic. “What is going on with the world? They must be mad putting the beauty and simplicity of a dish like carbonara in a can,” he said. “Heinz pasta hoops in a tin were fun at least. This sounds disgusting.”
Hero
A 75-year-old Nottinghamshire retiree, who saw off a 30-year-old burglar by walloping him over the head with an empty gin bottle. “Magnificent,” says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, and an important lesson. Temperance killjoys are always droning on about how booze is bad for you. But as this septuagenarian hero so majestically demonstrated, “it can potentially save your life”.
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The UK government has promised a decade of national renewal. Its growth strategy has been designed to drive investment to specific parts of the economy such as infrastructure and housebuilding. At the same time, British companies are playing their part in generating growth, and boosting innovation. Rebecca Maclean and Ben Ritchie, co-managers of Dunedin Income Growth Investment Trust discuss further. Capital at risk. Read more here: The UK: rebooted | abrdn
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Elon Musk’s free speech delusion
Hardly a day goes by without Elon Musk “trumpeting his belief in the absolute importance of free speech”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. He insists that “moderation is a propaganda word for censorship” and that the social media site he owns, X, should be a “public square for the world”, where ideas can be exchanged freely and truth will naturally be sorted from falsehood. And to be fair to him, this argument rests firmly in the tradition of classical liberalism. John Stuart Mill believed truth would always emerge from “a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners”. John Milton asked: “Who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
The trouble is, it’s hard to imagine a worse place to exchange ideas than on X. “Sensational tweets travel further and faster than sober ones”, while polarising characters attract more followers than those posting sensible, evidence-based views. Musk’s site is therefore “more likely to weaken democracy than to strengthen it”, whatever the billionaire says. This is in one sense unavoidable: social media platforms are not forums for the exchange of ideas but “business enterprises” for the exchange of ad revenue which depends on clicks and likes. The best case for freedom of speech is that it can be used to hold powerful rulers to account. Today, those powers are the big social media platforms. “Musk might consider himself a latter-day George Washington, but in fact he is much closer to King George III.”
What to watch
Netflix’s new fantasy series Kaos is “anything but chaotic”, says Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. “Hugely intelligent, funny and brutal”, the eight-part show reimagines Greek mythology in a modern world, ruled over by a luxury-tracksuited, debonair Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) and his queen/wife/sister Hera (Janet McTeer). This is a world in which “gods mix with mortals”, rarely to good ends: entry into the Underworld is a pub quiz prize; Achilles Heel cereal is sold in the supermarket; Poseidon sails around on his superyacht. “The story is mad, the energy frenetic and the performances off-the-wall”, says Vicky Jessop in the Evening Standard. “The end result is a glorious burst of firecracker energy.” Eight episodes, 50m each
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Quoted
“He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
Noel Gallagher on his brother Liam