In every language, the first word after “Mama!” that every kid learns to say is “Mine!” A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say “Mine!” when you grow up, has – to put it mildly – a fatal design flaw.
– Frank Zappa
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 25th, 2009 |
 21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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I’ve always enjoyed Frank’s philosophy, even more than some of his music.
For the interested, in this interview with Frank, he discusses Ayn Rand, conservatism and how competition gets results.
Clicky.
There is more. I particularly liked this one:
It is a bit of a mixed bag with this guy, but very, very far from stupid.
And:
Not bad at all.
It always amused me that all the hippies adored Frank, but Frank hated them.
There is a line in his song Plastic People, about all the gormless headbands hanging out on Sunset Boulevard
Now go home and check yourself
cos you probably think Im talking about someone else…
He also slammed unions repeatedly in his autobiography. (The quote in the post is in his autobiography, and he is specifically discussing Communism.)
Martin: thanks a lot for the link – highly recommended.
A cutesy quote but unfortunately not quite according to the facts. I won’t go into the boring eye glazing over linguistics professor details but the word after mama and its mmm equivalents worldwide is papa and its pppp similars in other languages.
Irrelevant, Millie. “Mine” is most definitely near the top of the list. The point is a valid one.
(And in my experience, “dada” or something equivalent comes out first.)
Each time I see “Arkham MA” I think of The Color Out of Space(Link).
Laird, I wasn’t arguing the point Zappa was trying to make but merely pointing out the facts of the case. I could see students disputing phonetic sequences with me on the basis of an icon’s mantra. For some reason Zappa has far more intellectual clout than say Ted Nugent who espouses similar views but then Ted is country and western so-o-o.
Ted Nugent is Country and Western???
Are you deaf Millie?
Well you might be after this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYOV8uu17t0
I saw Zappa 4 times, the first with the original Mothers of Invention. Not many Brits can say that.
A brilliant funny creative musician, who is sadly missed, and who was definitely on “Our side”.
I don’t think he does, Millie.
Laird, I wasn’t arguing the point Zappa was trying to make but merely pointing out the facts of the case.
Well, you may not have been arguing the point, but given that you described it out of the gate as “a cutesy quote,” Laird and others can be forgiven for sensing that you were not its ally.
I’ll also take this opportunity to announce — amid everyone’s edge-of-the-seat raptness, I’m sure — that the Opera browser has made it possible for me to finally return to Samizdata, after many years away.
I was among many who cajoled and pleaded with site administrators to ditch the white-on-blue color scheme, which was literally painful to my eyes. (It was also literally repellant, I thought, in that it repelled potential visitors — an odd approach for a site that ostensibly seeks to spread a message.) All to no avail. White-on-blue, despite its well-chronicled accessibility issues and its 1996-esque Geocities-page vibe, wasn’t going anywhere, I was firmly told.
Opera, I have discovered, allows users to permanently tweak the contrast style for specific sites, which means I am now able to view Samizdata in glorious, traditional black-on-white. One of my all-time favorite sites is back in my bookmarks.
Just a little tip for any of you others who are among the 33% of human beings with an astigmatism. Relief at Samizdata can be yours…
Really Tom, everyone knows that there is no browser other than FF.
Nah, I’m boycotting Firefox because of the maddening, ubiquitous memory leaks.
I’ll ask you this, though: Does Firefox have this same weird issue with tabbing through the comment-info fields (“Name,” “Email,” etc.) on this site? It sure does in Opera.
Many? Five or so complaints since November 02, 2001 🙂 Most people like the colour.
And for almost four years, you could have just used this link in the sidebar for a B&W version of Samizdata, but welcome back anyway, hehe
Nope.
When Zappa says this…
“FZ: So anyway, on my way to the little holding tank before the bus comes to take me to the county jail, the vice squad guy comes into the place there with the district attorney, and they’ve still got all my tapes, everything they took out of my studio, and he says, “If you’ll let the sheriff decide which of these tapes are obscene, we’ll give you back everything else.” And I pointed out to him that it was not in my jurisdiction to convert a sheriff into a judge. And they walked out. And that was the last I ever saw or heard of all my property that they took out of the studio. I never got it back. Including master tapes of musical performances and things that weren’t dialogue, they just took the whole thing, and they never gave it back.”
… I know that that’s exactly the attitude I meet with every time I have even the briefest exposure to cops or the city government. What never seems to occur to them is the utter arrogance of presuming to set the terms of my life, not their own or that of their children.
Last wednesday afternoon, I went to the beach – just like I’ve been doing every other week for best part of a year now – only to find a “NO SWIMMING” sign from the city government planted squarely on the end of the path. My local surf dude told me it was there because two students drowned at this beach last week.
(It is an important matter of context here that, in Taiwan, most people cannot swim, despite the fact they live on a friggin island. Throughout the previous year, it has not been unusual for me to find myself the only individual swimming at that beach in a crowd of maybe 1000 people. The only other people in the water would be the surfers.)
So what did I do on seeing the sign? Well I just said “fuck ’em” and went in anyway. I had barely got out to the first breakers when I had the bloody coastguard blaring the siren in his jeep and shouting to me over his megaphone to come back. I stood there, hands on hips, shaking my head and gestured to him to come and get me. He didn’t, and he buggered off back down the beach. I swam out for my usual 500/600 yards before heading back. As I waded out of the water – up comes my friend the coast guard again in his jeep glowering at me. I defiantly stared back at him right the way onto the beach expecting him to get out of his jeep…. but he blinked and just drove on past me without a word.
Now, whilst not fluent, I know enough Mandarin to deal with cops but it may be that he merely presumed illiteracy on my part and thought it not worth the bother – in which case, his job isn’t worth the bother. But I sincerely hope that he knows what that little encounter meant – he blinked, not me and that was because I knew I was right, but he could not find the moral force in him to act on the premises of his job description in the face of my defiance.
Just because two fools who couldn’t swim got caught in the riptide and drowned and all the other teletubby fools are scared, doesn’t mean the goons of the city government have any right to take away from me my pastime of swimming out into the ocean. It was one of the reasons why I chose to live where I do, and I am not going to let them take it away from me on their false collectivist premises.
Memo to Frank- kids also do other things, like believe everything has a personality. The Italian language has the expression ‘Mamma Mia!’- your two words in the very order you said! Does that mean Italian is the truest language
Kids love The Wiggles- should this be a guide to music?
Where will it all end?
Wittgenstein and his followers thought they could get round this “I” and “mine” thinking by what some of the followers (although not Wittgenstein himself) called “mental socialism”.
The denial of the self (even to extent of claiming that “I think that….” and so on were unacceptable) leading to the end of concept of goods belonging to the self (for if the self does not exist…..). Kim Philby (from his time at Cambridge) is claimed to have been particularly interested in this “solution” to a “problem of socialism”.
In philosophy such people as Harold Prichard tried to expose the fallacies involved in the thought of the “great” Wittgenstein. Prichard even took time during his final illness (which killed him) to go to a lecture by the visiting Wittgenstein in Oxford to put a few questions.
Almost needless to say W. did not give proper replies and most of the “civilized” academics present just acted as W’s fan club and sneered (both at the time – and in their later written accounts of the meeting) at Prichard for his weak voice and cough.
Plato would have been proud of them – academics are mostly just the lying, collectivist scum he wanted them to be.
The problem is not that the system does not recognise the concept of ‘mine!’ *Everybody* gets the idea that some stuff belongs to {me}.
No, the problem is that the system does not recognise the concept of ‘his!’. And for completion, ‘hers!’. You see, capitalism and communism both recognise first-party ownership – it just so happens that in communism, the State is the first party. It’s second-party ownership – the ‘guy sitting scross you’ that they don’t get.
Children have to learn this – that yes, some stuff is theirs, but equally true that some stuff is *not* theirs and belongs to other children, and if they want it, they have to come to some kind of mutual agreement with the other guy. We call this ‘trade’ and ‘negotiation’.
It’s really sad that socialists and communists need to learn this fact too.