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.
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Ken Loach made a good film in 1969. I gather he has made other films since. A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership, for instance, and something about a Glaswegian alcoholic.
My opinion of Loach as a human being was decided when I read this:
In Kes, probably Loach’s best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.
Loach felt that the ordinary moral rules against causing someone (particularly a child) intense suffering through a cruel deception did not apply so long as his deception was carried out in the service of his art. The old Independent article I linked to above goes on:
Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach’s purpose in life – as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises.
His “pokes at authority” seem not to be incompatible with a not-very-surprising yearning to wiggle his way to a bit more power himself, the power, at least, to “do something” about all these people watching what they want instead of what is good for them. And him. And his friends. Here he is in yesterday’s Guardian:
We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.
It is not quite clear from the article whether Loach is proposing that these municipal cinemas programmed by people who care should wholly replace the commercial cinemas and films that nobody cares about, except the millions who pay to watch them. Since he is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which describes itself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist party, it is reasonable to assume that would be his ultimate goal. He continues,
Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence.
Not that having you and your protegés decide what films the taxpayer will have available in the cinema he pays for would make you part of the establishment, or in any way compromise your independence, of course.
I see on Guido Fawkes that arch-Europhile Denis MacShane is to be investigated by the police. He has had the Labour Whip withdrawn.
To give him credit, he did once call Hugo Chavez a “ranting, populist demagogue”. On the other hand he was once Minister of State for Europe.
This article gives a sample of his thought.
Commenters are requested to bear in mind the principle that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yes, even a man who said:
In 2004, a major step forward was taken with the creation of a European arrest warrant
The European Union has paid out vast sums since 2001 to improve Sicily’s infrastructure. What has Sicily to show for it? Nothing. No, less than nothing:
€700 million to improve the water supply? In 2000, the water supply was “stop-and-flow” for 33% of Sicilian households, now 38.7% have water worries. Incentives to entice off-season tourists? Cost €400 million, enough to buy up an airline. And yet the ranks of those thankless tourists haven’t swelled, but petered out: from 1.2% in 2000 to 1.1% in 2007. And as to the €300 million invested in alternative energy projects great and small: it’s true, there isn’t a single hillock without its windmill now, but Sicilian output is stuck at 5% of total consumption, as against an average 9.1% for Southern Italy as a whole.
The quote is from a translation of an article in the Italian daily La Stampa and I found it via Jim Miller On Politics. Jim Miller himself comments:
And we should recognize that the best money of all to waste — from the point of view of a pork-barrel politician — is someone else’s money. There would have been less wasted in Sicily if the money had come from Italy, rather than the whole European Union, and even less wasted if the money had come from the places where it was spent.
The European Union, corrupt as it is, is on average less corrupt than Sicily. Idealistic Sicilians possibly hoped that getting their state largesse via the EU would result in less theft and waste. A vain hope, as Mr Miller or Professor Friedman could have told them.
Today’s Times has the headline:
Allies at odds over death of hostage in bungled rescue
The story is behind a paywall. It does not matter. I am only interested in the headline and whoever wrote it.
Do these people have any idea at all of what life-or-death fighting is actually like? I do not demand that they have actually done any before writing about it; little would ever be reported about war if that were the test. But they could at least have read a few memoirs, or talked to their grandfathers. Reading about the Dieppe Raid might put things in perspective.
Hint: it is not like planning a dinner party. With that sort of thing if you make a careful list of Things To Do and do them all in good time you generally can be reasonably confident that it will work out OK and if it does not work out OK, say the soufflé does not rise or the wine was too sweet, it probably was because someone bungled.
Military small group operations – by which I mean small group killings of people who can also kill you – are not like that. They always hang on a knife edge. The most skilled soldiers in the world frequently die young and frequently fail. A hand is a fraction of a second too slow on the trigger – a human mind is a fraction of a second slower than another, hostile, human mind to make sense of the confusion – and a comrade dies, or a hostage dies, and a lifetime of agonized mental replaying of that moment of failure begins.
Six hours later a headline writer in an office far away expresses his displeasure.
Is this how the EU got a Yes to Lisbon from the Irish? asks Mary Ellen Synon in the Irish Daily Mail, reprinted in the British one.
Ireland and the other eurozone countries might be suffering savage spending cuts, but the EU self-publicity budget thrives: in 2008 the Open Europe think-tank calculated that the EU was spending at least €2 billion a year on ‘information’.
Much of it bent, which is to say, propaganda. The commission actually admits that its information is bent. One of its publications declares: ‘Genuine communication by the European Union cannot be reduced to the mere provision of information’.
Perish the thought! Reducing communication to mere provision of information might mean that journalists got a handful of leaflets rather than a stay at the…
Hotel Manos Stephanie (‘the Louis XV furniture, marble lobby and plentiful antiques set a standard of elegance rarely encountered,’ the hotel brags, and so it should since the rate is listed at €295 a night for a single room).
An ex-Marxist deputy head teacher called Katharine Birbalsingh got a standing ovation at the Conservative conference.
Among the things she said were:
“If you keep telling teachers that they’re racist for trying to discipline black boys and if you keep telling heads that they’re racist for trying to exclude black boys, in the end, the schools stop reprimanding these children.”
… and …
“When I give them past exam papers to do from 1998, they groan and beg for a 2005 or 6 paper, because they know it’ll be easier. The idea of benchmarking children and letting them know how they compare to their peers is considered so poisonous by us teachers that we don’t ever do it.”
The management at her school were not happy and sent her home to await their judgement. It should be noted that she had only worked at this school for a few weeks, so most of the experiences she related referred to her previous schools.
It turns out that the “executive head” (not sure what that means) who sent Ms Birbalsingh home was quite happy with some other forms of political activity. Dr Irene Bishop allowed St Saviour’s and St Olave’s School, of which she is also head or executive head or whatever, to be used as the backdrop for the launch of Labour’s 2001 election campaign. I remember Matthew Parris describing the occasion in the Times as “breathtakingly, toe-curlingly, hog-whimperingly tasteless”.
Ms Birbalsingh is now back at work. But it also turns out that she is also Miss Snuffleupagus of To Miss With Love, a very fine education blog. I cannot link to it because at some time over the last few days it was taken down.
Laban Tall grabbed a bit of it via Google Cache:
The girls push open some doors at the top of the staircase and draw back quickly.
‘Nah… we can’t go down that way.’
I frown. ‘What do you mean, we can’t go down that way?’ They are visibly frightened.
So I push past them, enter onto the staircase landing and find a bunch of boys half way down the stairs, sitting on chairs, gambling with paper money and cards. We are in the middle of lesson time. The girls are uncomfortable. They have clearly been briefed to make sure they avoid such scenes. And these boys are not happy either to be interrupted.
‘Come on girls!’ I shout. ‘Let’s go!’ And I motion for them to follow me down the stairs towards the boys. The girls follow me, reluctantly.
These boys don’t know me of course. I have no clout in this school. So I know I cannot inspire fear. ‘Sorry boys!’ I sing. ‘Coming through!’
The boys look up at me, almost growling. As we approach, one of them puts his foot up on the chair, on top of the money, and blocks our way. I step over his leg. ‘Thank you boys!’ I smile. The girls follow sheepishly. As we continue now on the other side, moving down the stairs, I call back up, grinning. ‘Boys… I’m sure you’re not meant to be doing that right now! Better watch someone doesn’t catch you!’
And off we go. Phew. I can almost hear the girls’ relief.
A half brick. That’s about how musical I am as.
So I’m no judge of an orchestra, but Simon Heffer in the Telegraph seems to think the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra is pretty good. The unusual thing about this orchestra is that it does not receive Arts Council funding.
I have to say that the fact that it gets some of its money from the patronage of the Duchess of Cornwall means that it cannot claim to be entirely independent of the State, since I presume she gets much of her money from the Civil List. But there you go. If one has to have state subsidies for the arts it is much more in the proper style that the dosh should come from the bejewelled hands of the former mistress, now wife, of the Prince of Wales than by filling in a grants form. I rather hope she hands over a velvet bag of gold sovereigns instead of writing a cheque.
I digress right royally. Here is what Simon Heffer writes about the orchestra’s founder, John Boyden:
He has serious convictions about arts funding – in particular, he believes that the market for orchestral music is so distorted by public funding that innovation is almost impossible. Until the Arts Council’s predecessor began funding orchestras just after the war, serious music depended on ticket sales and the patronage of the wealthy. Before the late 1940s, the LSO (a company owned by its players) paid dividends. Now it receives £2,355,836 (in 2010/11) from the Arts Council alone.
Mr Boyden believes that by keeping the price of tickets artificially low, the gap between an orchestra and its audience has become a gulf. He believes that other orchestras use their Arts Council funding to undercut orchestras such as his, taking up residencies in the provinces that are only made possible by the taxpayer’s largesse. The state does not contemplate pulling the plug on these famous institutions and, as a result, everything in the orchestral world is static. Mr Boyden argues, with some justification, that the last piece of new music to seize the public imagination was Britten’s War Requiem 48 years ago – because the music now written for these orchestras is created to satisfy not the musical public, but the taste of a handful of bureaucrats.
Yesterday, ah yesterday. All was happy anticipation then. Yesterday there was this article in the Guardian. It began,
There will be blood – watch exclusive of 10:10 campaign’s ‘No Pressure’ film
Here’s a highly explosive short film, written by Richard Curtis, from our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign
and continued enthusiastically
Well, I’m certain you’ll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It’s also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others.
But it’s pretty edgy, given 10:10’s aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
However today, the article has this added to it.
Sorry.
Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.
As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website.
We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.
At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.
Onwards and upwards,
Eugenie, Franny, Daniel, Lizzie and the whole 10:10 team
Mr James Delingpole may have had something to do with this sad outcome. You can still see the film if you wish. It has been reposted on YouTube by gleeful anti-greenies. Both his article and the Guardian one I linked to earlier have links.
Trainee accountant Paul Chambers has been in court.
He landed a £1,000 fine after the snow closed Robin Hood airport near Doncaster in January as he planned a trip to see “Crazycolours,” a Northern Irish girl he had just met online, and he tweeted to his 690 followers: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
A week later, he was arrested at work by five police officers, questioned for eight hours, had his computers and phones seized and was subsequently charged and convicted of causing a “menace” under the Communications Act 2003.
His defence lawyer asked if John Betjeman’s famous lines about Slough –
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now
– would have caused him to be convicted under the Communications Act 2003, had he the misfortune to live in this blighted age.
Hey, stupid cops and stupid Robin Hood airport security people. Could we not have demonstrations of insane literal-mindedness from people whose poxy airport is named after a bandit ?
From the Telegraph: ‘Koran burning’: men expect to be charged with inciting racial hatred
From the BBC: Men arrested in Gateshead over suspected Koran burning.
From the Guardian… nothing that I can see right now (9.45 am). This absence is being remarked upon in the comments sections of unrelated Guardian stories.
Correction – upon searching I see the Guardian did have a story yesterday. The remarks I mentioned are on the absence of comment or commentable pieces dealing with this story in today’s paper. Quite right too. This is a big story for two reasons. Firstly, who would have thought it? After all that buildup, Pastor Terry Jones, the ticks-every-stereotype gun-toting American pastor, did not burn any Korans. Instead the deed was done in the car park of a Gateshead pub. The second big aspect of this story is explained in this line from the Guardian story I did not see earlier:
Northumbria police said the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the video, but on suspicion of burning the Qur’an.
All usual caveats apply. I consider burning a religion’s holy book to be a nasty deliberate insult. People should still be free to do it. They should also be free to video themselves doing it and distribute the video, whether or not it spreads religious or racial hatred. I am not in favour of the hatred. I am in favour of the freedom. Anyway, I sort-of knew that the video distribution was probably illegal upon grounds of spreading religious hatred. I did not know the burning itself was.
Further update: Confusingly, there is now another Guardian story illustrated by exactly the same picture as the first one but directly contradicting it in what it says about the actual grounds for arrest: Quote:
The six men were arrested on suspicion of stirring racial hatred, police said, which is outlawed under the 1986 public order act. They were not arrested for the actual attack on, and burning of, the Qur’an, but in connection with the posting of the video. Section 21 of the 1986 act reads: “A person who distributes, or shows or plays, a recording of visual images or sounds which are threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or … racial hatred is likely to be stirred up.”
Last update, I promise: Yet another confusing aspect of this story is that according to the second Guardian story, the men have been charged with stirring up racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act, not religious hatred at all.
Will the prosecution be able to make that – the racial angle – stick? Do they even want to? So far as I know, scarcely anyone has actually been prosecuted under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. One might have thought this would be an ideal opportunity for the authorities to try out the Act in the courts, if they were serious. Could it be that the racial hatred charge is intended to fail and is merely a piece of theatre to placate Muslims and protect our troops in Afghanistan?
The author of this article, “An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism”, Micah White, is rightly horrified by the ideas of Pentti Linkola. Note that the url of that link, which seems supportive of Linkola although I do not know if it is his own, describes him as an ecofascist. The page of quotations seems to back up that description fairly well, and it will not come as a surprise to readers of this blog that Mr Linkola advocates that we learn alike from “the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades.”
It is sad, then, that Micah White’s own article, though certainly expressing nicer opinions than Mr Linkola’s, itself advocates the suppression of speech that Mr White does not like. Emphasis added in the following quotes:
The future of environmentalism is in liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume. Rampant, earth-destroying consumption is the norm in the west largely because our imaginations are pillaged by any corporation with an advertising budget. From birth, we are assaulted by thousands of commercial messages each day whose single mantra is “buy”. Silencing this refrain is the revolutionary alternative to ecological fascism. It is a revolution which is already budding and is marked by three synergetic campaigns: the criminalisation of advertising, the revocation of corporate power and the downshifting of the global economy.
and
Democratic, anti-fascist environmentalism means marshalling the strength of humanity to suppress corporations. Only by silencing the consumerist forces will both climate catastrophe and ecological tyranny be averted.
Christopher Booker in the Telegraph has another forced adoption story. Or rather he did on Monday, but now he doesn’t.
…Social workers were about to seize a newly born baby for no more reason than their claim that it might be “at risk of emotional abuse”. Just for once, because no court papers had yet been issued, I would be able to report this case in detail, naming names and explaining why it appeared to be yet another appalling miscarriage of justice.
I spoke at length to the horrified mother, who told me how the local social workers wanted to remove her child which, since it was born prematurely three weeks ago, is still in a hospital intensive care unit. She has already happily brought up three other children, the oldest of whom, a bright 21-year-old who has just got a First at university, is doing all she can to help her mother win the right to keep the new addition to the family.
The next day, however, the court papers arrived, imposing a complete blanket of secrecy.
Do you think in your heart of hearts that there must be something more to it than that? Surely these social workers, while twits, cannot be as malicious as this story seems to imply? Have you ever thought, when reading about such a case, “well it sounds shocking, but one can never tell”?
That is the point. One can never tell. One can never make an assessment of these stories because the ancient protections of open justice have been thrown away.
Since the secret system of the Family Courts has denied the press and public the opportunity to assess the evidence in any other manner, one must make a guess as to the likelihood of social workers really behaving in this appalling way based on other cases where details have leaked out.
Here are two accounts of similar cases, in which professionals – an independent social worker and a GP in one case, a judge in another, who were in a position to tell described the behaviour of social workers as “appalling injustice” and “disgraceful […] about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years.”
Oh, and a sample of the sort of evidence that is held to be damning, as if the Cleveland scandal and the others like it had never happened:
One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have “been forced to have oral sex with her father”.
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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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