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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Alice Bachini is now taking terrorism seriously. (The blogspotting link refuses to work. Scroll to Monday Oct 22: “Taking Terrorism Seriously”, if you aren’t already there.) So I will now pick up the torch of triviality (importance of) and ask: Madonna, crap actress or what? I’m going to argue for the or what position. At some length, I’m afraid, but what the hell? It’s been a rather slow Samizdata day so far.
BBC 1 showed a Madonna movie last Sunday evening. My Radio Times makes no mention of it, but does mention the movie Black Sunday, which they didn’t show. This is the one where Bruce Dern hijacks the Goodyear Blimp in order to zap a Superbowl crowd with knitting needles, and presumably they cancelled it so as not to give those Arab terrorists any clever ideas, or maybe because, what with the bad guys in this movie actually being Arab terrorists, they didn’t want to show a work of fiction that had now become insufficiently fictional. It’s odd that, isn’t it? – although I’m not disagreeing. Odd also that I settle down to blog about triviality (importance of) and profundity has immediately barged its way back in. That’s terrorism for you.
Anyway, Madonna. The movie BBC1 did show was Body of Evidence. The plot concerns a woman who picks on rich old guys with heart conditions and then shags them (very kinkily and dominatingly) to death, after first ensuring that the will gets changed in her favour. → Continue reading: Madonna: too scary to be a star
Britain’s idiot gun laws look like being today’s issue du jour. And at the risk (following on from my enlarging photos fiasco) of making a further fool of myself on a technical issue, it seems (to me) that if you follow a link embedded in a Samizdata comment it works, but the window refuses to get any larger, and the result is tricky to read. That’s what happens with me anyway. No doubt one press of one button will solve the problem, but I have yet to locate the button in question.
So, here, just in case it helps anyone, is the Reason article by Joyce Lee Malcolm linked to by Ralf Goergens in his comment on the sublime David. This Reason piece concludes thus:
The English government has effectively abolished the right of Englishmen, confirmed in their 1689 Bill of Rights, to “have arms for their defence,” insisting upon a monopoly of force it can succeed in imposing only on law-abiding citizens. It has come perilously close to depriving its people of the ability to protect themselves at all, and the result is a more, not less, dangerous society. Despite the English tendency to decry America’s “vigilante values,” English policy makers would do well to consider a return to these crucial common law values, which stood them so well in the past.
And here’s a link to Natalie Solent‘s latest piece on Biased BBC, also regarding guns. Taster paragraph:
Oh, and just skim the whole bunch of stories and look at the headlines: “Terror in US schools and workplaces” – “History of shootings” – “America’s gun culture.” Every mention of the liberty angle has a question mark after it: “Firearms – a civil liberties issue?” – “Right to bear arms?” Don’t hold your breath waiting for headlines like “crime down in gun states”, willya? And don’t wait around for a list of accounts of innocent people saved from murder or rape by guns, although there is a list of accounts of innocent people slain by guns.
Come to think of it, has anyone compiled an internetted list of links to accounts of people saved by gun use, along the lines of that Muslims Condemn Terrorism link page that I flagged up a while ago? If so, another link embedded in another comment please. Do wait around for that, because I bet there is one.
I went on a random blogwalk, as you do at Sunday lunchtime if you live alone and are still wearing your pyjamas, and came across The Spleenville Journal – A Subsidiary of Spleenville World Domination Enterprises. Aaah, world domination …
First reaction: nice looking, witty, a fine answer to what Michael of the 2Bs was saying about envy and aesthetics, see here, I should tell the 2Bs. Anyway I scroll down, and find this. Everyone has already been introduced, and here’s me introducing them to each other all over again. Imagine.
But, it’s all being done so loudly and pretentiously that all you little people out there can’t possibly miss who we all are.
Michael, one of the Two Blowhards, has a great … well he calls it a “rant”, but all I take that to mean is that it took him only ten minutes to write it. Whatever it is, it’s very good and very true, and is about the inadequacy of envy as the explanation of leftism. Michael offers another:
I’m hoping you can explain to me why so many people on the right, libertarian or conservative, discount the question of attractiveness. Are they puzzled by it? Do they think it’s pussy stuff? Are they even aware of it?
As you and I, arty maniacs, both know, beauty and pleasure play big roles in people’s lives. People — and not just artsy-fartsies — make life decisions based on feelings and tastes. Aesthetic preference is a powerful engine that can affect which neighborhood you choose to live in, how you dress and feed yourself, where you shop and travel, and how you make a living.
Too bad the right refuses to wrestle with the question of aesthetic preference. In doing so, they risk alienating everyone who’s attracted to attractiveness. (And who isn’t?) Seductiveness, glamour, sensuality, entertainment, food: are righties really willing to let the left own all these potent issues and qualities?
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I’d humbly suggest that resorting to “envy” as one’s only, or root, explanation for leftie-ism, is itself unattractive. It has its validity, of course. But it’ll never sell.
Michael is kind enough to exclude Natalie Solent and our good selves (“slyness, elegance and perversity”) from these critical generalisations. If they haven’t already the Blowhards should also have a read of the sly, elegant and perverse Alice Bachini.
By the way, thanks again to the 2Bs for making me read Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, which I took with me on my recent holiday that I promised not to keep going on about. It’s over a thousand pages long and weighs about four and a half tons but I didn’t regret taking it with me for a single second. Had I left it behind I would have pined dreadfully. I’ve already done (since we’re on the subject of aesthetics) Athens, Florence, Shakespeare’s London, Vienna (twice – at each end of the nineteenth century), Paris (also end of C19) and post WW1 Berlin. Then it was on to the techies: Manchester (cotton), Glasgow (ships), Berlin again (electronics), and I’m now in Detroit doing Ford and his Model T. Great stuff, and there’s twice as much again more great stuff to come, including Hollywood (Hollywood) and fifties Memphis (rock ‘n’ roll). I will surely be saying more about this fabulous book.
“Arts and Entertainment” doesn’t really do all this justice, but it was the best label I could find. There isn’t a samizdata subject category for “not pussy stuff”.
It’s all been a bit solemn here at Samizdata of late, so here’s an extremely silly final titbit from my Slovak holiday.
One of the oddities of Slovakia for the visiting Anglo is their rule of putting “ova” at the end of every non-Slovak female surname. Julia Robertsova. Meg Ryanova. Gwyneth Paltrowova. Odd, but you soon get used to it. One of these ovas did make me smile, however. The Harry Potter books are big in Slovakia, as everywhere, with all the same symptoms being displayed as in Britain. “When’s the next one out?” say the kids. “Well at least they’re reading something” say the elders. But consider what happens on all the book covers to the name of Harry Potter’s creator J. K. Rowling.
Well, I liked it.
Patrick Crozier is back from his far eastern expedition. His experiences are now showing up on UK Transport – which deals with transport everywhere, and which will one day, I hope, have its name changed to something more everywhere-sounding – and on CrozierVision – which sounds perfect and which now deals with everything else Crozier-related. Apart from UK Transport’s title my only other quibble is that most of the photos are displayed too small to appreciate properly. I enlarged one of them by mistake while putting this together, and there’s nothing wrong with them that displaying them bigger wouldn’t correct at once.
Such trivia aside, it’s fascinating stuff. For instance, from the latest CrozierVision piece:
We are told that Japan has been in recession or thereabouts for a decade. So, while I was there I thought I’d try to spot the evidence. It wasn’t easy. Cars are new, people are well-dressed, there doesn’t seem to be much abandoned property, restaurants seem busy enough, there don’t seem to be any sales.
I did however spot a shantytown. This one was in Tokyo and there was a similar if smaller one in Nagoya. Even in destitution the Japanese beat us. Quite simply they have a better class of dosser. Take a careful look at the photos and you will spot that in addition to the regulation cardboard box these people also have blue tarpaulins. Pretty sensible really. I also saw plenty of coat hangers presumably so that could hang out their shirts ready for that all important interview. Japanese cardboard cities also don’t smell of stale urine. How they do it I don’t know because public toilets in Japan seem pretty thin on the ground.
Patrick will be doing both of the last Friday of the month talks in November, on the 8th at the Evans household in Putney on Congestion Charging (that’s road pricing before the spin fraternity got hold of it), and on the 29th at my place on – what else? – Japan.
Until today, I missed this piece last Friday (Oct 11th) by Tunku Varadarajan for the Wall Street Journal, on the need for a Nobel Non-Science Anti-Prize that could really make sense and do some good. I believe you need to register to make the link work, so here are two of the key paragraphs:
This will not be a joke prize, as the peace prize is; it will be something that Saddam Hussein would get right now, a species of anathema, or international pillory. Apart from being cathartic, a negative award would have a genuine effect on the international order, a real bite in the form of a profound disincentive. Such an award would carry some of the odium of a war-crimes tribunal. No country – or, at least, no civilized country – would allow the winner to visit; and those that do would be tainted. The winner would become a pariah.
Now, that is a deterrent. That kind of award has reason to exist. And it would require some real agonizing over. Imagine the debate: Will it be Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il?
Indeed. Several blog-years ago I did a piece on how stupid the Nobel Peace Prize is, on the grounds mostly that peace takes decades to identify, yet they persistently grant it to people who signed alleged peace treaties last Wednesday. Evil, in contrast, can often be identified right now, just as some forms of scientific progress can be. (The cracking of DNA by Watson and Crick springs to mind. As I understand that triumph, they were getting joyously drunk the evening of the day they cracked it.) Likewise, if almost an enitire nation is being systematically starved (as in North Korea right now) you don’t need thirty years to realise how evil that was. So yes, I’m for it.
Seriously, if the blogosphere got behind this notion we could really make it happen. Let nominations commence.
Boring I know, and boringly topical, but I think I’d go with whoever is most in charge of North Korea these days. But if you can suggest someone nastier and make your mud stick, go ahead and good luck to you. That’s the whole point.
Tim Hall says:
Some of the right-wing blogs I’ve been reading have complained that they’d heard no condemnation of the awful atrocity in Bali from the Islamic community. They should read this.
Yes we should. If we do, we find this:
Whoever has done this has committed a terrible sin and crime. The Quran says “Whoever kills a single human being unjustly is as though he had killed all of humankind” (Surah al-Ma’ida ayah 32). Deliberate murder of another person will put you in Hell forever. Imagine the punishment for those who have killed hundreds or thousands. Whoever has committed this atrocity will have God’s wrath upon him.
I fear the hatred and violence that will continue to flow from this. May Allah SWT help us all.
I also followed one of the links in this piece, to “Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks”, and then the links really start to pile up. I counted no less than 83.
Now I’m no expert on the nuances of Islamic theology, and I cannot possibly tell you how genuine all this condemnation really is. Do they all come from one particular part of the Islamic world, and are we only really looking at old-fashioned intra-Islamic infighting? Search me.
Are they perhaps merely pretending to condemn? Are they merely scared (“I fear the hatred and violence …”) that if the West’s plan A (“War Against Terrorism”) fails, then, united by the failure of plan A to prevent a series of Bali-type horrors around the world, the West might then switch to plan B (“nuke the damn lot of them”)?
Well if they are scared, good. They should be scared. If that message is getting through to the Islamic world, perhaps partly via its English-speaking fringes, good good good. There could hardly be better news for humanity than that.
Maybe this vast pile of links has already been Fisked into nothing in some blog now unknown to me and a commentator will supply the link with a sneerful flourish, and that will appear to be that.
But I say that even pretending is good. Someone obviously thought it worth assembling all these alleged condemnations of terrorism, even if they aren’t, to make it at least look as if terrorism is being condemned by at least some Muslims. Good. Real changes in thought often begin as a mere pretence that such change has already begun. In politics, again and again, you start by changing the window displays, and then your (at first) mere subterfuge works its way backwards into the shop itself. Such subterfuge does at least mean that some Muslims know that they have a problem.
And maybe it’s better than that. Maybe some of this is for real. Maybe those Good Muslims, whom we now curse for their insanely self-destructive silence, really are finding their voices. Maybe they found them months ago, and we’ve been missing it. True, many of the titles of these links do read more like defences of Islam against the charge of terrorism, rather than actual condemnations of terrorism, but like I say, even that is a step in the right direction, and others among them read like much bigger and more genuine steps in the right direction.
I really like comments, both here and elsewhere. I especially like the comments on Little Missy, because unlike the regular stuff on Little Missy I can actually read them because – and this is very odd – they’re in bigger writing. The comments on LM are usually just LM’s friends chitchatting amongst themselves, but since I don’t know what they chatting about I don’t know what they’re chatting about, if you get my drift. There’s no harm in friendly chitchat of course, but often comments jump out at you as deserving more than just to be forever buried away as number 17 of 24, or whatever. Consider this:
The puzzle of why brilliant people (and I’m talking G. B. Shaw and Sartre here, not Starfish) are often so stupid politically has interested me for a while. My theory is that artistic types have long despised the middle class (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are born into the middle class). This disdain for the boring old sods who become bankers and lawyers and businessmen, along with the tendency to romanticize either the aristocracy or the lower classes predates communism, but with the rise of communism, those old feelings of dislike and contempt became politicized.
I think that’s one reason why the left has never come to grips with the horrors of communism or wanted to admit that capitalism, with all its faults, offers more freedom and opportunity to ordinary people than any other system. Admitting that would mean changing one’s attitude toward the dull, plodding middle classes and that’s too strongly ingrained in Western culture for intellectuals to easily give up.
I think that’s good. Also, there is no mention of guns or killing apart from the inevitable reference to communism itself, which for Samizdata just now is a plus, I think. That was comment number 32 (you have to scroll down for it) by “Donna V”, concerning comment number 21 by “Mookie Wilson”, both apropos of a piece in Little Green Footballs about some arts people who have signed an anti-GW2 internet petition.
Or, for those more bloodthirsty readers who want a more immediate body count in the foreground of the picture, I also think that this comment deserves more attention than maybe it has so far got:
We will know that President Bush and co. are serious about the war against the Islamofascists, not when they bomb cities full of women and children, but rather when we start reading on the back pages of the papers about mysterious deaths (falling in front of street cars, say) happening with suspicious frequency to men rumored to be supporters of radical Islam (including spokesman, apologists and financiers along with the gunmen). We should take a leaf from Mossad – that exploding telephone yesterday was genius (not that the CIA has either the intelligence or ops capacity to pull something like that off). This may not be as immediately gratifying as nuking the SOBs, but the time is not ripe for that. Mr. Islamiya would be a good start.
That comment was posted by Doug Levene on October 15, 2002 03:57 AM, and was one of 28 (so far) on this, here at Samizdata. Do fellow Samizdata writers have other comments to offer? – by other people I mean, which they think deserve to be elevated into actual postings? Has His Holiness Instapundit ever linked to or quoted from a mere comment?
I am back from Slovakia now, and had a lovely time thanks. On my final weekend, while football related mayhem reigned in Bratislava, I took a trip northwards to the Czech countryside. I was shown several fine churches, but the most intriguing item of my stay did not involve any sightseeing trips, at any rate not by me. It concerned, rather, one of my host’s first cousins, a man called Karel Krautgartner.
Krautgartner was Czecho-Slovakia’s answer to Benny Goodman, that is to say a hugely accomplished jazzman who could also more than hold his own in the classical repertoire, on clarinet, saxophone and all related instruments. My host played me a videotape of a Czech TV documentary recently shown to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Krautgartner’s death. He looked like a James Bond villain, and played sublimely. He didn’t seem to have been a huge creative musical force. But he was a great band leader and organiser, who inserted successive jazz innovations from America into Czech musical life, and who added middle-European technical polish and discipline to everything he touched.
Krautgartner was only about sixty when he died, of cancer of the colon, in West Germany. He had emigrated there on account of his unwillingness, following the suppression of the Prague Spring of the late nineteen sixties in which he had played a prominent part, to become a Soviet stooge. Concerning Krautgartner’s death my host told me a fascinating and terrible story, which was not mentioned in the documentary, but which my host had learned through being personally acquainted with many of the personalities involved.
Somewhere in the Urals, during the nineteen fifties, a nuclear bomb went off by mistake in a research laboratory, devastating the entire surrounding region, with, as you can imagine, appalling loss of life. → Continue reading: The USSR and all that jazz
Posted from Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Yesterday and the day before, I did a couple of talks in the local high school, with my friend the teacher supplying not so much translation as translatory clarification as and when needed, because my audience had a pretty reasonable understanding�- and this is the whole point of what I’m about to write – of English. I spoke about the British attitude towards the EU, and explained why the Euro-debate has become steadily more fierce.
One of the reasons for�this fierceness is that the Internet has made the idea of participating in the�Anglosphere more appealing, and the idea of a unified Europe corresponding less appealing, to the British. But yesterday morning, before I embarked upon this bit of my talk, I asked how many of my audience had themselves used the Internet during the previous week. Most hands went up. Then I asked: how many of you used only the Slovak language? All hands went down. All of them. Not only that, there was a distinct murmer of disapproval that I should even ask such a question. Only use Slovak internet sites? What a bizarre idea. → Continue reading: On what the EU means to Slovakia
Posted from Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Here at the only Internet cafe in Bratislava that I can find, I am struggling with a crazy Eastern European keyboard and what are for me the difficulties of using�yahoo. It’s an arkward combination, not made�anz easier bz the fact that whenever I tzpe z I get y and whenever I tzpe y I get z. So it comes out as zahoo unless I concentrate verz carefullz.
But enough of trivia. I got to Bratislava last Friday and leave next Monday, and so far it’s been great. I have lucked into a classical music festival, the initials for the Slovak title of which are BHS. So when I went to the concert on Saturday, I thought, oh no, they�ve done a truly tacky sponsorship deal. But all was well.
The concert however was dull, I thought.��The solo pianist, Ivan Moravec, is world-renowned, but frankly he made his two pieces, the Franck Variations for Piano and Orchestra and the Ravel Concerto, sound to me like run-throughs. Maybe it was me. Maybe it is that he looks like a waiter. Whatever, everyone else seemed happy.
But then on Sunday, there was Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the Czech Philharmonic in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. It was sold out of course, but I went along anyway, and a Japanese gent sold me a ticket, for the Slovak equivalent of about £6 sterling ($9 US). Unbelievable. As was the performance. For once all the flim-flam of classical musical ovations – a loud a pretentious ‘bravo’ as soon as the last chord went silent, vast gobs of flowers for the lady solo singers and even for the gentleman conductor, constant returns to the platform for more applause, rhythmic applause – all seemed entirely appropriate. → Continue reading: Eastern European Idylls
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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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