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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Not me, that is for sure. Even harder to figure out is the film going public… and after a chat with Hollywood film producer and blogger Brian Linse the other day, I get the impression from him that even Hollywood cannot figure out the film going public.
Take two movies, both based on computer games. Firstly, Tomb Raider, staring Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft.
Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft: striking a Lara-ish stance
The Tomb Raider series of computer games were massive and more or less redefined the genre. I thought they were all quite gripping and am very eager to get my paws on the latest episode of Lara Croft’s adventures, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness.
Angel of Darkness: Lara Croft in all her pixellated glory!
As you might expect, I was rather keen to see Tomb Raider: The Movie, directed by Simon West. It had everything going for it: Angelina Jolie is an interesting looking woman and without doubt a technically skilled actress. Although she is not quite ready to challenge Gwyneth Paltrow for her crown as ‘Best-Yank-Actress-who-can-do-a-perfect-British-accent’, she is pretty damn good nonetheless.
The film clearly had a truly humongous budget, was adequately acted and tolerably directed in parts (with a couple startlingly bad scenes: it takes a certain perverse skill for a director to make a gratuitous shower scene with Angelina Jolie laughable for all the wrong reasons). Unfortunately the story line was weak, convoluted and confusing. Worst of all, the production was dire: it was almost as if it was three separate movies, casually spliced together, differently paced as if styled by three sets of completely unconnected film makers, then finally so badly edited as to make some parts of the story incomprehensible. Although Tomb Raider: The Movie was not utterly without merits, the overall effect was shockingly disappointing. 
And yet, due to the Tomb Raider/Lara Croft brand name and massive marketing, this clunker rode out the appropriately scathing reviews and was by no means a commercial failure in spite of costing a great deal to make. A sequel is in the pipeline.
And then let us look as the second movie, Resident Evil staring Milla Jovovich as Alice.
Milla Jovovich as Alice: about to demonstrate how unhappy she is with her ex-boyfriend
The game that the movie is based on, similarly called Resident Evil is a big name in the Playstation console world, but it does not have anything like the brand recognition of ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Lara Croft’ with the general public.
Killer pixels: Veronica from the Resident Evil – Code V game
The Resident Evil movie, directed by Paul Anderson, clearly has a far smaller budget, it was marketed poorly to put it mildly and with the exception of Milla Jovovich (Fifth Element, Zoolander, Blue Lagoon, Two Moon Junction etc.) had a cast of more or less unknowns. Resident Evil had a simple but nearly flawlessly executed story, was artfully directed, skillfully produced and very atmospheric. It was well cast and Milla was excellent as the killer amnesiac conspirator known simply as ‘Alice’… and unlike the jarring T&A scene in Tomb Raider, the opening shower sequence with dazed Milla worked perfectly, setting the deliciously ill-at-ease tone for the whole movie.
In short, this movie rocks… vastly superior to ‘Tomb Raider: The Movie’ on every level. It has no pretensions to be high art or intellectually challenging, but it does exactly what it sets out to do with considerable flair. 
And yet unlike the dismal Tomb Raider, Resident Evil almost immediately vanished off the screens and onto video/DVD. Fortunately, because it cost so little to make, the picture seems to have still made a profit and thus in this case too, a sequel is in the pipeline called Resident Evil: Nemesis (which will no doubt cause confusion with the impending Star Trek movie called ‘Nemesis’). Movie making is a very strange business.
Go out and buy or rent Resident Evil: The Movie on DVD or Video, it is destined to be a cult classic. Avoid Tomb Raider: The Movie like it was smallpox.
Update: The Resident Evil follow-up movie has been retitled Resident Evil: Apocalypse, presumably to avoid confusion with the recent Start Trek movie flop called ‘Nemesis’
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
– Frederic Bastiat
Thousands of British students have gathered in London today in order to protest against a Government proposal to introduce university top-up fees. Coming from across the UK, they started marching at noon today (I am pleased to report it is pissing down with rain) in protest against a Government plan to require students to pay for at least some of their own university education. The protestors are backed by trade unionist and assorted socialist groups, who are claiming 20,000 students are marching. Police have said there are closer to 10,000 present.
Mandy Telford, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), said: “Education should be based on your ability not your ability to pay. Going down that road is putting a price tag on degrees and that’s not positive for society.”
Society? It is not ‘society’ which takes money from one group of people by force and gives it to another, only the state (or organised crime) can do that to whole sections of the population by force. If students are entitled to take other people’s money in order to educate themselves, and the object of this education being to benefit themselves, why not also for food? For housing? For petrol? For clothing? In fact, why should they need to pay for anything from which they benefit? It seems they do indeed want that invidious form of outright theft called progressive taxation to fund the priorities of others and of course students are just the thin end of the paleo-socialist wedge being offered up here.
Ms Telford [of the National Union of Students] said students were converging on London from across the country. She said: “The march will send a very clear message to ministers. Students are angry and their families are angry.
Well I am bloody angry too! These ‘protestors’ are nothing more than parasites calling for the state to continue to engage in theft on their behalf. What makes their needs and priorities so much more important than mine that they feel they have the right to take my money for their benefit? Well up your, you scruffy leeches… you will get very little from me. Any future business of mine will be off-shore benefiting someone else’s economy, and 10,000 of the reasons are marching through London today.
Islamic preacher Abu Obeida, an Algerian asylum seeker in Britain, has allegedly said that Islamic law requires Muslims everywhere to come to the assistance of Ba’athist Socialist Iraq if it is attacked by the West.
British journalist A.N. Wilson decries British and American threats against the Iraqi regime in his article called War on Iraq is madness, claiming that Anglo-American actions make Abu Obeida’s call to British Muslims to take up arms against British forces seem quite reasonable.
But it is the achievement of Tony Blair’s government that he has managed to make Mr Obeida and his friends sound like the voice of common sense.
Of course one should not think for a moment that A.N. Wilson has qualms about governments using violence, particularly against their own nationals, as he favours the forcibly sterilisation of social undesirables. Thus given his taste for violence backed state enforced eugenics I suppose his de facto support for Ba’athist National Socialism is not so hard to understand, i.e. he favours the type of regime which could actually implement the sort of views he holds.
Saddam may be a brute to his own people, but surely, by the standards of international law, this is less threatening than the Israeli occupation of territory that is simply not theirs. Think of Mrs Thatcher’s reaction when General Galtieri “did an Ariel Sharon” on some barren little rocks in the south Atlantic.
So Saddam Hussain, who used poison gas to exterminate entire towns which opposed him, who invaded Kuwait and before that Iran, is less of a threat that Israel? And Wilson’s history seems to have airbrushed out the fact Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza because its neighbours repeatedly attacked Israel first. I was not aware of any recent British attacks on Argentina prior to General Galtieri’s military occupying the Falklands but perhaps A.N. Wilson is privy to some secret history which I am not aware of.
If I were young enough for military service and was compelled to fight either for Iraq or America, I would fight for Iraq, on the simple grounds that the Iraqis and their surrounding countries should be allowed to work out their own destinies without Western bullying. If I feel that, how much more strongly would it affect a young British Muslim?
And there we have it. Presumably if A.N.Wilson were old enough to have been available for military service in 1939 and was compelled to fight either for Nazi Germany or Britain, he would have fought for Nazi Germany, on the simple grounds that Germany and its surrounding countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherland, Beligium, France and Austria, should have been allowed to work out their own destinies without British, and later American, ‘bullying’.
No doubt… after all, his views of forcibly castrating and spaying the underclass would have been very well received in Berlin in those days.
Sundon Lower School in Bedfordshire has banned video and digital cameras from its nativity play this year, because it is worried that the images may get into the hands of paedophiles.
So let me get this right… The head teacher of a state school has banned parents from recording their children in a play. How can it be okay for a woman in authority to be instilling fear of sexual predators into small children, clearly implying their own parents are collectively under suspicion?
This is the toxic paranoid psychology of the witch hunt. The world is not packed full of paedophiles hunting for pictures of nativity plays but it suits some people to act as it that was the case… powers must be expanded to ‘protect’ children after all and who better than a pettifogging head teacher to do that?
I suspect that this head teacher must be a fifth columnist for the Home Schooling Movement in Britain because no one is really that idiotic and paranoid, right? Right?
This flag was brought to you by The Dissident Frogman
Shop ’til you drop day!
Some who think poverty is a noble, exalted state would have you buy nothing today, calling it ‘Buy nothing day’. But those who reject the Luddite anti-life call of atavistic collectivism know better.
Every November 30th, we all need to remind ourselves that due to the creeping spread of global capitalism, more of humanity has been lifted above a subsistence level of existence than at any other time in the history of our species.
Plumbers, builders, postmen, farm workers, sailors… all owning technological marvels like motorcars, televisions, computers, all having unheard of life expectancies. This occurs not because of central planning, but rather in spite of it… yet somehow Paris gets fed.
So on November 30th go out and turn your mundane daily participation in the capitalist system into a celebration of it! Make it special. Go out and buy the one you love a book they have wanted but is only available in hardback or maybe even a nice sheepskin coat for the winter. You know it makes sense.
From pixalated passions to physical phrolics, the cabalistic Sasha Castel and the vampiric Andrew Dodge – a union made in heaven, hmmm, … or perhaps the other place [A little known village in Dorset].
The blogosphere is agog.
Someone tried to shoot down an airliner full of Jews, not in Israel but in Africa…
Jew on holiday. Legitimate target
anywhere in the world, apparently.
But Jews = Israel and Israel = bad, in fact very bad as it is not just ‘Jewish’ but also ‘White’. Therefore the people who did this must be misguided ‘Islamic activists’. Terrible but ‘understandable’ to idiotarians and other sundry folk who take Noam Chomsky seriously. You know, the sort of people who say “Who are we do judge the value of other cultures?” and “Of course I deplore terrorism, but…”
Kikambala in Kenya is ripped apart by the same people who tried to shoot down the passenger jet and slaughtered Kenyans are photographed in the ruins of the resort which used to bring much needed foreign money into Kenya’s economy…
Vanquished capitalist tools perhaps? CIA agents maybe?
Black people in the Third World lie dead, therefore people who did this must be capitalists, um, imperialists, errr, Americans, no, Mac Donalds, um, er, ah…
I see pictures like those and I am soooooo sick of the people who say “It is all about Israel!” or “It is all about oil!” or “It is all about US policy!“… those dead Kenyans are not in Israel, I rather doubt they owned shares in any oil companies and they did not get to vote for who became the President of the United States.
What “it is all about” is that there are people using violence who advocate coercive pan-Islamic collectivism and who wish to force submission on everyone else. Once this is understood, all that needs to follow is to determine the best way to exterminate them as expeditiously as possible.
This poster can be seen all over London. In it a young man standing at a bus stop chats on his mobile phone, a sight one sees all the time on London’s busy streets.
What the Metropolitan Police are saying is that doing this, talking on a mobile phone in London, in public, is unwise behaviour. Okay, fair enough, London is a big city and all big cities have their fair share of street crime, so what is the problem with this message from the boys in blue?
The problem I have is that this poster is not warning criminals who might attack us and steal our phones of the sure vengeance of the law. Not it is calling on us all to refuse to tolerate thieves in our midst and to resist to the best of our ability. Hell, how about suggesting “if you have a mobile phone in your hand and you either witness a mugging in progress or think you are in danger, dial 999 and the Police, whose paychecks and cars with flashing lights come from your taxes, will come rushing to the rescue”.
No, it does not say that at all. The real message here from our appointed protectors is not “we will protect you from crime” and certainly not “protect yourself from street crime”, but rather HIDE from street crime.
OUT OF SIGHT IS SAFER
The state cannot protect you, it will not permit you to protect yourself effectively, so all it can do is offer advice… and the advice is hide. Do not show anyone you have something worth stealing. I expect we will soon see posters across London saying “it is safer not to wear Armani suits, you might get mugged” and then “don’t wear short skirts, you might get raped” and finally “don’t go out at all, the streets are not safe”.
Perhaps when the state has taxed everything and we no longer have anything left to hide, we will indeed have ‘safer streets’.
The state is not your friend.
In one of the most utterly wrong headed articles I have ever seen in the Daily Telegraph, called Watch out America, the 7st EU weakling may kick sand in your face by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard posting from Brussels (naturally), he would have us believe that, in response to criticisms from the USA that the EU is “a status quo power that resists and resents being hurried into a turbulent new post-Cold War era”:
…Europe is arguably the world’s most dynamic political bloc today. While the US borders have changed little since 1848, the EU is about to swallow eastern Europe up to the edge of Russia and Ukraine.
The EU is about to swallow the poison pill of the basket case post-communist agricultural economies of Eastern Europe, eager to feed at the massively subsidized trough of protectionist Europe and Evans-Pritchard holds this up as evidence of dynamism?
But EU officials are quietly confident that the strategic balance will shift as a decade of debt, over-consumption, and ballooning trade deficits catch up with America.
[…]
“Nobody wants to see America in difficulty, but there’s a high risk that the Clinton boom is going to end badly. Then we’ll find out if Europe’s slow vessel might not prove to be steadier in the long run.” One day soon, America may wake to find itself facing a wealthy superpower of 470 million people.
The European Union… filled with heavily taxed, highly regulated and subsidy ‘protected’ economies… is going to overtake lower taxed, less regulated and slightly less subsidised USA? Oh give me a break. The whole reason that the ruling classes of Eastern Europe want to join the European Union, is that the EU seeks to lock in the position of the all its political classes, to insulate them from the reality of de-politicised markets and the consequences of that anti-market politics brings.
Eastern European businesses, at least some of them, see subsidy and protection from global competition from the USA and Far East beckoning, voters likewise see membership of the EU as meaning the end of restrictions on their ability to travel, work and reside in the more developed West… a ‘brain drain’ heading west of the best and brightest that the middle European former ‘eastern Bloc’ has to offer will soon ensue (good news if you live in the ‘west’), followed closely by an army of welfare parasites looking to help themselves to taxpayer money in Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, The Low Countries and Italy (extremely bad news of you live in the ‘west’).
The very essence of the EU is stasis and yet paradoxically, it is spreading, like some Nordic legend of winter eternal sends its deadening cold fingers into everything. The only people who really benefit are those who are sucking at the teat of the state and even them only until the curves of the EU’s spectacularly aging demographics and that of its increasing tax burden cross, like some cruxiform tombstone.
The First World used to be ‘The West’ and Japan, the Second World used to be the Socialist Eastern Bloc… soon ‘First World’ will come to mean the USA, Switzerland, Japan (maybe), Canada (maybe), Australia and new Zealand and, if it finally breaks clear of the European suicide pact, Britain and possibly even Ireland. ‘Second World’ will just come to mean sclerotic Europe, forever sidelined by more dynamic economies eleswhere and more assertive polities everywhere.
EU as future ‘superpower’? Don’t make me laugh.
variant of “doggerel.” Opinion put forward on a blog that has previously been repeated over and over and over again until it makes people sick.
(Coined by The Pontificator)
Sean Gabb has written a particularly interesting Free Life Commentary called Is There a Right in Ireland? In this he recounts the substance of a radio interview he gave for an Irish radio station.
I explained why foreign aid is a bad idea. It is the negation of charity for a government to take money from people and to give this to other people, no matter how hungry they are. Charity is by definition an act of choice: interpose the tax gatherer between doner and recipient, and there is no charity. Regardless of its moral status, it is also an unwise transfer of funds. As Peter Bauer once said, foreign aid is the process by which money is taken from poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries. Very little of the aid ever reaches the advertised recipients. At best, most of it is stolen by those in charge of distributing it. At worst, it becomes a cushion for corrupt and oppressive ruling classes. They can insulate themselves from the effects of their policies. Directly or indirectly, they can get the money to pay the security services on which their power rests. Much better than aid, I said, was free trade with poor countries. That does raise incomes.
But the part of it that particularly fascinated me is the amazed fury his comments caused to both the radio presenter and a charity worker present. Not just shock at the points he made but at the very notion that someone would make them. It seems such ideas were completely alien, unknown, unheard of apparently. It was as if Sean had suggested the world was spherical to people which accepted as axiomatic that the world was flat. → Continue reading: Evidence is so often trumped by emotional preference
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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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