We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I am watching the BBC’s Culture Show, and they are telling a sad little story. Apparently, the regional theatre companies of Britain have, during the last five years or so, enjoyed a bonanza of government money. There has apparently been a mini theatrical renaissance in the provinces. Hurrah!
But now, the horrid government is imposing a pay freeze, and this “great achievement” is in jeopardy. For the sake of a few more million quid, this great achievement could all collapse. Woe!
I could have told them. Never, I would have said to them (had they thought of asking me), depend upon government money and the promises of politicians. Never get addicted to the contents of the public purse, for they can be snatched away from you without warning. Renaissances funded only by politicians have a way of dying very prematurely. Getting money from mere customers may be harder in the short run, but once you learn the trick, you have a foundation you can build on more confidently.
Probably all this is just the political machine doing what it does. It spends. It cuts back on its spending. Occam’s Razor says that this is what is happening here. But, although it was not discussed on the show, I wonder if the end of the romance (that is to a Times on Line piece, which may be a problem for some, but it tells this story better than any other I could find) between New Labour and the Luvvies – caused by such things as New Labour going to war in Iraq, and the Luvvies going to war against the war in Iraq – might have something to do with this story of theatrical feast and threatened theatrical famine.
Last night I started to get into the mood for the Capitalist Ball (that being a link to David’s piece about it last year), which will take place in Brussels this evening, by playing waltzes by Johann Strauss II, on my medium- to lo-fi hi-fi machine.
And what lovely music it is! I remember reading that when Herbert von Karajan got hired to conduct the New Year’s Day concert in Vienna, in 1987, he experienced a sense of both musical and personal renewal. This makes perfect sense to me.
With these waltzes, marches and dances, the symphony orchestra had its one great age of pop superstardom. Before then, pop music was played in taverns and in the open air, and classical music was for the aristocracy. As the audience for orchestral music widened, and as the symphony orchestra widened with it, composers like Brahms and Dvorak, in among grander works like piano and cello concertos, and symphonies of course, also wrote dances for the orchestra. But there was about these pieces an air of down-market music being ever-so-slightly elevated by these grandees of the concert hall. The music of the Strauss family was the genuine, popular article, the purest example of orchestral popular dance music ever created.
In Italy, opera was enjoying a similar period of genuine popularity, where high art and popular art were similarly united.
With arrival of the twentieth century, and the age of electronic recording, and then of electronically enhanced instruments, pop music and classical music again went their separate ways. While the classical musicians concentrated on recording what would now be called their back catalogue, the popsters switched back to more raucous sounds, more suited to the limitations of early recording, and then more attuned to their new audiences, no longer beholden to the musical conventions of an earlier epoch. And opera also divided, the torch of popularity being handed on, via operetta, to the stage ‘musical’.
Meanwhile, the once imperial city of Vienna has been dining out on the music of the Strauss family just about ever since, first for real as it were, and then – and now, still – in reaction to the very different and disappointing reality by which it was increasingly engulfed, and to which it made its own baleful contribution, in the form of the influence and perverse inspiration it supplied to the young Adolf Hitler. No wonder the Viennese still prefer the Beautiful Blue Danube version of their past to more recent horrors. (The moment of transition, when what had been a joyous reality was sliding into history, was memorably captured by that other Strauss, Richard, no relation, in the waltzes he wrote for his opera, Der Rosenkavalier.)
But the music of the original Strausses still plays on. As the centuries pass, it seems all too possible that, horrifying though they were, the wars and massacres of the twentieth century may eventually be topped by later and greater horrors as yet unimaginable. The slaughters that now seem to us so uniquely evil may in due course seem only banal, like the murders and feuds of the Italian Renaissance, which we now think of as the mere backdrop to all those wondrous paintings. But those waltzes, dances and marches of the century before the one just concluded – the waltzes especially – will never be bettered.
At the Capitalist Ball, one of the organisers has just told me, there will be a French swing band in action. A different and later style of dance music, but one I am greatly looking forward to hearing.
Every Thursday I do a posting for this blog about intellectual property rights etc., and I am getting paid for this, so this is a commitment that I take seriously. It means that I tend to follow up anything (this link trail started here and went via here) with words like “copyright” or “patent” or “intellectual property” in it with less than my usual level of casualness about internet chitchat.
The Eiffel Tower’s likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. That’s the year that the SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one feel swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted that.
As a result, it’s no longer legal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission…
So far so depressing, and I will probably do my next Thursday’s CNE-IP posting about this, unless something more compelling of an IP-related sort comes my way. Suggestions for that, and for my IP postings generally, are of course very welcome.
The bit that got me wanting to write about this for Samizdata comes immediately next:
…Technically, this applies even to amateurs. When I spoke to the Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu,…
I love that surname.
…via phone last week, he assured me that SNTE wasn’t interested in prohibiting the publication of amateur photography on personal Web sites. “It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn’t used in ways we don’t approve,” said Mr. Dieu.
In a way this is fair enough, if the property rights in question are not in any way controversial or even confusing. I let people into my flat and can still then control their behaviour by not allowing them in any more. But Intellectual Property rights with regard to something like open-air photography of architectural monuments, followed by Internet display, are hardly a model of clarity and certainty. What bothers me about this is the sense I have that the French Official Mind is not making very nice distinctions here between what is simply private property, and that which is public property, but still supposedly in need of protection. The protective methods they are using suggest a definite preference for benign tyranny over clear definitions of what is and what is not allowed. There is an air of “everything is prohibited, so that in practice most of it can still happen, but can then be arbitrarily interrupted whenever we feel like it”, about this.
It is surely not a good sign when things are described as “technically” illegal.
I will certainly regard myself from now on as entirely entitled to photo the Eiffel Tower at night, and to display my pictures of it on the Internet in any way I like that does not insult it or severely misrepresent its shape or nature. Yet I have the feeling that if Mr Dieu took against me for some other reason (perhaps for also photographing something more definitely forbidden than the Eiffel Tower at night), my Eiffel Tower pictures might still be used against me.
I would welcome comments on any of that, and also on the even more potentially fraught matter of the rights and wrongs of taking (interesting word use that) pictures of strangers and putting those up on the www, which is something I have already done quite a lot of, and hope in due course to do a lot more of.
A link to a reasonably simple explication of the legal facts in, on the one hand, Britain, and, on the other hand, on the Continent (my understanding being that the law is very different on either side of the Channel), would be especially welcome. Plus: will this contrast soon be ironed out of existence by the EU? Something tells me that if it is, it will be in the form of tighter prohibitions in Britain rather than any relaxation of the law on the Continent.
Maybe my fellow Samizdatista and more to the point fellow CNE-IPer David Carr has already written about all this, here, or here, and I either missed it or forgot about it.
Off-the-record debate mixed with off-the-cuff publication is a recipe for disaster.
– Rebecca Blood on the decision to introduce a Davos weblog
During the last fortnight or so I have watched with fascination as the Eason Jordan story has unfolded. Here is a recent Instapundit posting about it.
Briefly, at a meeting in Davos on January 27th. Eason Jordan accused the US army of deliberately killing journalists. When challenged he retreated, but what exactly did he say, and how far did he retreat? A video exists, apparently, but has not yet been unveiled. For about a week, the Mainstream Media, hereinafter termed (as my QC Dad liked to put it) the MSM, ignored the story, while bloggers went to town with it.
Last Friday, Eason Jordan resigned from his job, as executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN. He did not accept any blame for his remarks, but said that he wanted to protect CNN from being “unfairly tarnished”.
At first, Eason Jordan and his colleagues probably hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Now that the lynch-bloggers had got their scalp, maybe they would stop their baying and yelling and go back to writing about God, guns, kittens, and suchlike. But the bloggers are not satisfied.
Eason Jordan himself is only the label for this story, he himself being only a part of it. The matter is absolutely not now closed, as the increasingly horrified MSM (mainstream media) are learning, to their severe discomfort. They have much more to learn yet. → Continue reading: Eason Jordan etc.
From the BBC today:
Protesters have marched in London in support of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement on emissions coming into force on Wednesday.
Police said about 500 people had marched to the United States embassy, carrying flags of the 136 countries that have ratified the treaty.
Mark Holland has a laugh at the BBC for taking this unmighty throng so seriously, and has a particular chortle about something called the Campaign Against Climate Change.
And, from the BBC last Thursday:
Several people were hurt in the crush as thousands flocked to the midnight opening of Ikea’s newest store.
The store in Edmonton, north London, stayed open for just 30 minutes because of safety fears and five people had to be taken to hospital for treatment.
The company blamed the chaos, in the early hours of Thursday, on “an unforeseen volume of customers”.
I think this contrast well illustrates the relative pulling power of shopping for bargains compared to political demonstrating, and shows that Western Civilisation will not necessarily be collapsing under the weight of its idiocy any time soon.
The BBC report continues:
Tottenham MP David Lammy said Ikea should have known offering cheap prices in a deprived area would cause a rush.
Indeed. What evil capitalist swine these Ikeans are! – offering furniture to poor people so cheaply that they can actually afford it and turn up in their thousands wanting to buy it.
One of the more depressing discoveries I made from my first year or two of education blogging (Brian’s Education Blog still not working sorry blah blah) was the inexorable spread of cheating in Britain’s schools and colleges. The BBC reported yesterday that a diktat has just been emitted by a committee you will probably not have heard of until now, called JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), saying that this must stop and here is how blah blah:
A rise in the number of students in the UK, including undergraduates from overseas, is likely to mean increased plagiarism, a report has said.
Colleges and universities are being sent guidelines written by experts in the higher education technology organisation, Jisc.
The authors say: “student plagiarism in the UK is common and is probably becoming more so”.
JISC makes much of the presence of foreign students in large numbers, but presumably phrases this more delicately than the BBC’s report does, in its first paragraph above, with verbiage more like the following:
A “holistic” approach is needed which establishes “underlying cultures and beliefs”, “placing academic issues at the centre of the discussions”.
When you are saying that foreigners are cheats, words like “holistic” come in very handy, I should imagine.
However, another reasons why academic cheating is on the up-and-up is diktats from national committees, demanding that British schools (where most British students are still incubated despite all those dodgy foreigners) must do better and better, and get better and better marks, and better and better exam results. This is the process I call sovietisation, and the rot afflicts everyone in the entire education system, up to and including the Secretary of State him (now her) self. Simply, the politicians want the educational numbers to look better than they are, and they cheat.
Time was when the teaching profession was pretty much left to its own devices by London, but those days are long gone. And time was when, if you cheated, you had to make sure your teacher did not catch you at it. Nowadays, your teacher is liable to be the one helping you to cheat, so you can get through your exams, and he can tell London that he is doing a good job. And London will believe it, because London wants to believe it. I think the Soviet vibe here is clear enough. Steel production figures anyone?
Sending out yet another instruction saying that you jolly well must not cheat has a distinctly Gorbachevian air. It amounts to begging that our top-down command-and-control education system must please, please, not behave like what it is. There will be quotas, but no quota fiddling. Dream on.
See in particular, this posting, where I noted how continuous assessment encourages cheating, because it involves asking teachers themselves to tell the higher-ups how well they, the teachers (and the higher-ups), are doing. Exams at least get someone else to say how well things are going, and are more likely to be honest. Although of course the politicians put pressure on those to dumb them down too.
David Gillies responded to that posting of mine, with a comment which I copied over to Samizdata. Gillies noted, you may recall, that there is another reason why foreigners equals cheating. Foreigners equals money, and British colleges do not want to lose it by telling said foreigners that they have done badly in their exams. There is a lot of this about just now, and the less corrupt educational exporters must now be very afraid.
Perhaps there will now be yet another Initiative, demanding that each school and college must set in motion an Anti-Cheating Plan. The more obedient ones will comply, as best they can.
Others will say that they have done this, but their Anti-Cheating Plan will only be observable when the inspectors come calling.
They will, that is to say, cheat.
I am just back from supper with Perry, Adriana and co., and now just about, before sleep overtakes me, have time to report – and to expand upon the fact – that before I left I had another drool over Adriana’s portable computer, with its look-at-it-from-everywhere screen. This time, instructed to feel how light it is, I picked the thing up, and did so with considerable ease.
Earlier in the day, I chanced upon this item of techno-news about something called FOLEDs. FOLEDs are even better than OLEDs. OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes, and FOLEDs are Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In English, what this appears to mean is … well, put it like this. When I bought my digital camera recently there was a film of transparent plastic to protect the camera’s little screen which shows what the picture is going to look like or does look like. What all these acronyms appear to mean is that in a few years time, that thin film of plastic will be the screen.
Over the last couple of decades, mobile computing and communications have changed the way we act – and interact. Notebook PCs, PDAs and cellular phones make it easy to carry information with us whenever and wherever we go. Yet, despite enormous advances in form and functionality, today’s devices can still prove clunky and challenging to carry on planes, trains and automobiles.
However, if researchers have their way, we will soon be able to bend the rules of physics. Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diode (FOLED) technology could pave the way for notebook computers with roll-up screens, toys that show vivid images on their surfaces, even clothing with displays woven into the fabric. “Within the next decade, flexible displays will open up all sorts of possibilities,” states Mark Thompson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. “It will change the way we access information and entertainment.”
Manufactured from transparent plastic films or other ultra-lightweight materials filled with special polymers, these devices could lead to less expensive and far more convenient consumer electronics. Already, researchers have developed prototype roll-up displays, and more basic Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) technology has been built into display screens of a handful of cameras, DVD players and mobile phones. “It is only a matter of time before OLED becomes a predominant display technology,” says Steve Van Slyke, a research fellow at Eastman Kodak Co. and one of the inventors of the technology in the early 1980s.
What makes active-matrix OLED technology so appealing is that it provides a few more vivid image than LCDs and other displays; offers a viewing angle as high as 160 degrees without backlighting; and requires far less power than today’s mainstream display technologies. The latter is particularly appealing for those using battery-powered devices, such as notebook computers. “Any incremental gain in battery life is a significant issue,” Thompson points out.
And so on. I am not sure how long this piece will stay up on the www, so I have quoted it at some length.
When all this comes to pass, Adriana’s portable computer will then seem like my very first portable computer, which was called an Osborne, and was only portable in the sense that your holiday luggage is portable (if it is), or that my mum’s ancient sewing machine is portable.
And how about clothes that change colour and pattern like a movie?
I realise that there will be more to the good life in the future than better gadgets, and that better gadgets might coincide with worse life, but better gadgets are still very, very nice, and I am impressed. Not even the fact that the EU has backed it can suppress my interest in and enthusiasm for this technology.
Relieved as I am temporarily am of my Cultural and Educational obligations, I have resumed contributing to Ubersportingpundit, which is bossed by Scott Wickstein. Yesterday I did a somewhat belated piece about the first weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament, on the Saturday of which Wales beat England 11-9. Wales had not beaten England in Wales in this fixture since nineteen ninety something, and the Welsh were very eager for their side to win, and more to the point, they rightly sensed that this year, they had their best chance for years.
Just how eager they were for a victory I had not realised, until I followed up this link, from a commenter at UbSpPu:
A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles after his team beat England, police confirmed today.
Why did he do that?
It was reported that the man told his friends: “If Wales win I’ll cut my own balls off.”
Perhaps his idea was that when England duly won, again, he would be able to console himself by saying: “Well, if Wales had won I would have had to cut off my balls, so thank goodness they did not win.” If so, the plan went badly wrong.
After the 11-9 victory in the Six Nations clash, the man is reported to have gone outside and severed his testicles before bringing them back into the club to show fellow drinkers.
So much for the Welsh desire to win rugby matches. The story ends with the voice of typical killjoy Welsh puritanism:
A local was reported as saying that the man was on medication and should not have been drinking.
As Dave Barry would say, under a headline about creeping fascism: “What, suddenly you’re not allowed to chop you own balls off?” Amazingly, Samizdata now has a link to this severed testicles report, and, as yet, Dave Barry seems not to.
If England beat France next Sunday, I intend to celebrate by cutting my toe nails.
As an ugly woman, I totally agree with everything that Brian is saying. However, Pynksparx, you are a bitchass and me and my posse are coming to kick your ass. I may be ugly as sin, hairy and around 200lbs, but at least I own my own corporation, have a cushy 6 figure job at another corporation, am rich, and YOU’RE NOT.
– Brian’s Culture Blog (and Brian’s Education Blog come to that) is still non-functioning for new postings, but old postings can still be reached via the archives and can still receive comments. That, from “Tali”, concerning an August 23rd 2003 posting tactfully entitled Why expensive clothes rescue ugly men but not ugly women is the Culture Blog’s most recent comment.
Being a casual and undisciplined surfer of the net means that I often get guided towards stories right in front of me, and very late, by somewhat circuitous routes. For instance, I only got to this as a result of Harry Hutton linking to a James Lileks piece in the Washington Times. But never mind, I got there:
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.
She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.
Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.
This is as classic a case of an ( I presume) unintended consequences as I have ever encountered, and it is an unintended consequence of two opinions both of which I hold myself. First, I do think that prostitution should indeed not be illegal, and second, in the absence of the abolition of state welfare, I do think that persistent welfare claimants should be obliged to lower their sights about what work they are willing to accept. Very unemployed information technology professionals should not lounge around watching day time television for year after year until such time as someone finally offers them a job in the information technology profession.
So, add to all of the above a tiny pepper shake of that Germanic manic logic of the sort that we all know about from our history books, and you get: be a prostitute, or lose your benefits. Amy Alkon, commenting on this post, explained why being a prostitute can be a fine and noble thing and can have very good consequences for society, but she surely did not mean this
That is the trouble with micro-managerially interventionist welfare (or attempted welfare) states. Arguments have a tendency to degenerate into whether any and every imaginable sort of human behaviour or employment or enjoyment should be either (a) illegal or (b) compulsory. (c) Take it or leave it/your choice/we do not care/enjoy it – shun it – it makes no difference to us/you decide . . . has a way of getting squeezed out.
This is an interesting titbit, in today’s Guardian:
Peter Mandelson has attacked the BBC’s coverage of Europe and accused Today presenter John Humphrys of “virulently anti-European views”.
In a letter to BBC chairman Michael Grade, Mr Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, says the corporation has a “specific problem with the anti-European bias of some presenters” and said it was failing in its charter obligation to promote understanding of European affairs.
I seldom listen to the Today show, but it is clear from further remarks of Mandelson’s that the Guardian goes on to quote that what Mandelson means by “anti-European views” is “anti-EU” views, which is a typically sneaky piece of EUrophilia. Has Humphrys been denouncing French cuisine, or Italian opera, or German engineering? Has he been saying that the French are all rude, the Italians rotten at driving, and the Germans all crypto-Nazis under a veneer of politeness. Has he been saying bad things about Estonians? No, of course not.
What Mandelson has accused Humphrys of is making EUroscepticism sound convincing, in the following rather interesting way:
The former trade secretary, who was appointed to the European commission last year, says the BBC gives too much coverage to moderate Eurosceptics and not enough airtime to extreme Eurosceptics such as UKIP.
So Mandelson has now become a UKIP supporter. How is that going to look? No doubt it is all part of some cunning plan designed to split the anti-EU camp and present it as all bonkers, xenophobic, etc., but it sounds to me like a somewhat high risk strategy. What if UKIP gets more airtime, in accordance with Mandelson’s demands, and uses it to be rather persuasive?
I wonder if Mandelson also thinks that this man should have more airtime?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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