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]
|
Last night until late, high up in the Hollywood Hills, a veritable multiplicity of LA Bloggers swarmed into Casa Bad Dude…
Bill Whittle & Rand Simberg… Jets and Rockets
Cathy & Cecile
Matt Welch & Martin Devon
Rand Simberg & Mickey Kaus
Kate Sullivan & Emmanuelle Richard
Martin Devon, Ann Salisbury, Kevin Drum & the pseudonymous Armed Liberal
I finally got to meet Rand Simberg face to face
Sara & Moxie, who contrary to some scurrilous rumours, is most certainly not deformed!
This being Casa Bad Dude, the air was thick with cigar smoke
Update: The morning after the night before…
Brian Linse recovers slowly from last night’s festivities
During my ongoing travels in the USA, I encountered two splendid examples of the idiocy of regulation…
What you see in the above picture, taken a few days ago in Newark, New Jersey, is a steep concrete stairway leading to a carpark next to a roller-skate rink. Now I was rather puzzled to see a bunch of mandated disabled carpark bays next to a roller-skate rink, but the really funny bit was the small curb at the bottom of the stairs with… a wheelchair ramp. Ignoring for a moment the sheer idiocy of the notion someone in a wheelchair would use those stairs at all, somehow I suspect if they had somehow negotiated that imposing set of stairs, they are not going to need a ramp to get over the damn curb at the bottom.
Next for your edification, we have what is in effect a mandated warning posted on a bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, taken yesterday…
Yet for some reason the state wants the same people who drink in bars to vote on who gets to put their finger on The Button.
Why do people tolerate being treated like cretins? America is a very strange place sometimes.
This is an article about a movie that I rather like, but it is also about how not to write a film review.
I am werewolf, hear me roar… No, I am sure I remember that name of that daft Helen Reddy song all wrong, but that does seem to be the message of a review of Underworld in the Sierra Times by the colourfully named RadioFree Rocky D… this movie is just a pinko feminist tract.
To which I say… nonsense.
Underworld, the film in question, is in essence a version of Romeo and Juliette, but set against the backdrop of a war between not Montagues and Capulettes, but a clan of werewolves and a clan of vampires! This has everything for the trash movie aficionado: monsters, perpetual gloomy atmospherics, high tech weapons, chick-in-latex-with-guns (the breathtaking Kate Beckinsale)… need I say more? As an extra added bonus, it even has a decent and fairly complex storyline!
The review on the worthy Sierra Times dislikes this movie because it was being ‘politically correct’:
Women and men are physical equals. Anything a man can do, a woman can also do. Anyone who points out that men are physically stronger than women should be forced to undergo government-sponsored sensitivity training. Worse yet, telling the truth just may be sexual harassment. I know this, because Hollyweird tells me so.
I’m guessing that Beckinsale weighs in at a whopping 115 pounds – including her bootiliscious leather getup and her ho’ boots. I warm up with more weight than that. Be-otch come near me, and I’ll squish her. Good thing for her she carries twin Glocks.
Well for a start Selene, Beckinsale’s character, does not go mano-a-mano with the werewolves when she can avoid it… in fact she runs like hell to put some distance between them so she can shoot the hell out of them with silver bullets. And for another, she is not a 115 pound woman, she is a 115 pound immortal vampire, so why the hell should she be constrained by the limitations of a normal woman? I am sure that mighty jock RadioFree Rocky D could kick Kate Beckinsale’s delectable behind, but I doubt he is bulletproof regardless of how much weight he warms up with, so who cares?
The fact she casually steps off a ledge 20 floors up is a
fair indication the movie does not expect you to see
Selene as a feminist representation of ‘everywoman’
But then the review gets really weird:
More PC oozes out when someone wonders aloud, “Who started this war …?” This is Hollyweird’s way of saying that all wars are stupid and meaningless. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tell any veteran the war he fought in was for nothing, and you’ll get a face full of knuckles – and you’ll deserve it. Hollyweird has its hate-America-first panties in a bunch over the fact that President Dubya was the man at the helm when our troops totally stomped Saddam’s jackbooted civilian-killers into the sand. Where were the liberal’s objections when Weak Willie was Presidunce and sent troops to Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti? Where were the socialist street protests then?
Huh? Now I quite like the Sierra Times and no doubt RadioFree Rocky D and I would probably agree on a great many issues (I was an outspoken supporter of the armed overthrow of Ba’athism in Iraq for example), but this review is what happens when one’s ideology starts to distort everything one sees. That paragraph seems to suggest that to question the legitimacy and sanity of any war makes you some pabulum puking whining pinko. I guess RadioFree Rocky D must have thought any Russian who questioned the wisdom of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was some sort of weak kneed girly-boy.
And from this position he takes the view that questioning the wisdom of a war between vampires and werewolves is somehow criticism of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Funny but I must have missed the ‘No Blood For Oil’ speech coming from one of the vampires (vampires… blood… get it? Oh never mind).
Use GUNS when fighting werewolves!
Anyway, this review tells us a lot about the author who rejoices in the name of ‘RadioFree Rocky D’ but tells us jack shit about the movie called Underworld… which happens to rock big time.
The ayes eyes have it!
Alex Singleton over on the Adam Smith Institute blog does not think much of the cinematic renditions of Lord of the Rings and asks:
Is the Lord of the Rings the most boring series of films ever? I sat through the second in the trilogy, The Two Towers, and just wanted to go to sleep. The pointless dialogue, endless battle scenes and lack of a story made this quite possibly the worst film I have ever watched at the cinema.
Well it takes all tastes but I for one enjoyed both Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers thoroughly and disagree with almost every word of Alex’s critique. The dialogue was true to the story, the battles gripping and best of all for me, the characters were almost exactly what I had in my head for over 30 years since I first read the books. In fact I think the films cut out a lot of the ‘flabby bits’ in Tolkein’s epic (such as editing out the completely superfluous Tom Bomberdil interlude) without doing a great violence to the substance of it.
Although as you may have gathered, I have long been a great fan of Tolkein’s works, the Lord of the Rings has always held deeper meanings for me and the big screen versions have just reinforced my views as to what it all really means.
I eagerly await the third part later this year.
The Free State Project is a group in the USA looking to get at least 20,000 liberty oriented activists to move to a single state in the USA so that they can have more political impact somewhere rather than be lost in the sea of Republican and Democrat statists by being scattered across the country.
And the result of the vote to see which part of the USA they would all move to is… New Hampshire.
Godspeed to you all. I shall be watching this project with great interest.
Islamic culture gets bashed quite enough in the blogosphere without me sticking my oar in, but I wonder what the kumbayah singing disciples of multiculturalism think of this?
A strict Kurdish Muslim who slit his daughter’s throat after she started seeing a Christian boy has been jailed for life. Abdalla Yones, 48, tried to commit suicide after murdering 16-year-old Heshu and pleaded with the Old Bailey to pass a death sentence on him. Heshu was beaten for months before the “honour killing” and had planned to run away from home, begging her father to leave her alone.
The court heard Yones was “disgusted and distressed” by her relationship with an 18-year-old Lebanese student and launched a frenzied attack at their family home in Acton, west London. Heshu was stabbed 11 times and bled to death from her throat being cut.
Sentencing Yones, Judge Neil Denison said: “This is, on any view, a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of western society.”
Or more correctly, a tragic story arising out of an Islamic Kurdish culture with no real notion of objective moral truth beyond what they have been told is written in some book and a Western one which at least imperfectly aspires to find such a thing.
All cultures have problems, flaws and idiocies but that does not therefore mean all cultures are equal. When Islamic culture is not tempered by secular influences, it is particularly prone to produce monstrous crimes like this one. Not that irrational secular creeds cannot produce evils aplenty (such as fascism and other forms of socialism), but at least most strains of Western Christianity and Judaism have had their more demented fundamentalist edges worn off by centuries of secularism.
Brave individuals can use reason to transcend the confines of their culture, but all cultures are not the same and I do so wish some people would stop pretending otherwise.
Art criticism is something about which I only rarely touch on when something particularly interests me. But in today’s Sunday Telegraph (print version only), Ian Hislop has written an interesting piece called Now I’ll be labelled a pervert on how playwright Andrew Lloyd Webber has been scorned and derided by the British ArtCrit set because he has the temerity to not just collect Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but to actually exhibit them to the public.
Having consented to display his collection at the Royal Academy last week, Webber was duly given a good kicking by the critics, who lined up rubbish both the pictures and their owner. The pieces ranged from the hysterical, in the case of Brian Sewell1, to the merely critical, in the case of the critic of this newspaper.
[…]
What appears to really annoy a lot of the critics is the literalism of the paintings: the idea that there is a story or a message, or even something as vulgar as a moral in the artwork, rather than just an impression or a mood or an emotion. Brian Sewell says that Webber has “a literal eye” and that this “has nothing to do with Art”. Nothing at all? This seems rather harsh
1= free registration required
And for me, therein lies the rub. Most art critics hate literal art because literal art can be understood by anyone who takes the time to learn a bit about the context within which the art was created. Now I am not someone who thinks ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron but it is true than much of what passes for art these days is so obscure that it requires an ArtCrit, such as Sewell or Saatchi, to give it some meaning. I guess what I am really saying is that much of what the likes of Tracy Emin does is so devoid of intrinsic meaning that only a professional arbiter of artistic values and taste can tell us poor muggles what the hell it means. No wonder art critics love ‘cutting edge’ modern art!
And now for some art you might be able to figure out for yourself…
Two members of the illustrious Samizdata Editorial Pantheon are going to be in the USA… myself and Adriana, on a mixture of indolent tourism and ardent capitalist business. We will be in Los Angeles from 10th -16th October and then in the New York/New Jersey area between 17th – 21st October before returning to London.
We would love to meet up with US bloggers and so we are organising blogger bashes, one which is already arranged in LA on Saturday 11th October… and one in NYC on Friday 17th October.
Please let us know if you would like to join us so we can get an idea regarding numbers.
That inimitable gentleman Brian Linse, Samizdata.net’s favourite pet pinko, will be hosting the West Coast blogger bash so numbers may be limited.
The splendiferous Jane Galt is heading up the where-and-when of the one in The Big Apple.
After reading Natalie Solent’s article, posted both here and on White Rose called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with a cautionary tale of his own as a case in point.
Check out his close encounter with the reality of CCTV over on White Rose.
CCTV is not your friend.
Which is to say, a politician I respect. Now I do not always see eye to eye with Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican representative for Texas, when it comes to dealing with tyrants and other nastiness outside the USA, but I do respect him nevertheless and given my views on politicians as a breed, that is saying something. When he is correct, oh my, is he correct:
Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce the “Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act.” This legislation prohibits US taxpayer dollars from being used to support or promote any United Nations actions that could infringe on the Second Amendment. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act also expresses the sense of Congress that proposals to tax, or otherwise limit, the right to keep and bear arms are “reprehensible and deserving of condemnation”.
[…]
Secretary Annan is not the only globalist calling for international controls on firearms. For example, some world leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac, have called for a global tax on firearms. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council’s “Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms” calls for a comprehensive program of worldwide gun control and praises the restrictive gun polices of Red China and France!
[…]
Mr. Speaker, global gun control is a recipe for global tyranny and a threat to the safety of all law-abiding persons. I therefore hope all my colleagues will help protect the fundamental human right to keep and bear arms by cosponsoring the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act.
Damn, that is almost enough to turn me into a Republican! Now if that party could just do something about its mercantilist anti-market trade policies, repressive sexual policies in some states and nasty tendency to vastly increase the size and scope of state whilst claiming to be the party of small government…
Last night was a speaker at a blogging seminar in London at the IBM building, organised by Sp!ked called Gone to the blogs: The blogging phenomenon in perspective. The other speakers were Brendan O’Neill, James Crabtree and Bill Thompson.
The introduction to the seminar asked:
Enormous claims are made for weblogs, or ‘blogs’ – online publications in diary format, where individuals publish comment and links to other online content. In media and technology circles, it is often claimed that blogs are revolutionising journalism and enhancing democracy. Meanwhile, others complain that blogs are dangerously unaccountable, and that blogs are clogging up Google’s search engine results with insubstantial material, because an incestuous coterie of bloggers all link to one another.
Are blogs revolutionising journalism, or have people in the traditional media lost faith in their own authority, leading them to talk blogs up? Do blogs enhance democracy, or do they make a virtue of narcissism and navel-gazing? Does a dangerous clique of bloggers wield unaccountable power, or are these bloggers simply exercising their right to free speech on an exciting new platform?
The interesting thing to me was that there was really very little agreement as to what blogging was ‘all about’, either amongst the speakers or from the floor. One recurrent theme was endless blather about blogs being ‘good for democracy’ without really saying why that might be the case.
Paleo-socialist Bill Thompson of the BBC, about whom we have written on Samizdata.net before claimed to now like blogging and regarded the fact virulently anti-socialist folks like Samizdata.net also blog as ‘an acceptable cost’. He also egregiously mis-characterised Brendan O’Neill’s rather temperate remarks on the topic of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger. Whilst a reporter mis-representing a person’s remarks is hardly news, for him to do so when the person in question is sitting a few yards away and is able to point out that is not in fact what they said is… interesting.
Below is the text of my opening remarks:
The intro to this seminar asks on one hand: is blogging revolutionising journalism and enhancing democracy? On the other hand, it is asked, are blogs dangerously unaccountable and are some bloggers wielding unaccountable power?
From the phrasing of the question, we are presumed to feel the first two of these things would be axiomatically ‘good’ if true and the later two axiomatically ‘bad’.
Well, I would answer that blogs are evolution–izing journalism, not revolutionising it: Brendan O’Neill is no less of a journalist for being a blogger and neither is Stephen Pollard, who also blogs. The dead tree publications for which they write are neither harmed nor helped overall… blogs push a great deal of traffic towards their websites, but are in direct competition with the part of a newspaper or broadcaster which editorialises. However blogs do not have reporters in Afghanistan or Liberia: blogs are mostly about punditry rather than reporting. So a journalist’s ability to write an article for a newspaper is much as it was, but his ability to act as a credible independent ‘commentator’ is enhanced by his blog articles, many of which might be overly opinionated for a newspaper editor mindful of his shareholders or ministerial chums…
→ Continue reading: Gone to the blogs
For web design that hurts, you really need to visit…
|
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.
|
