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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ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:
The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.
In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.
FFS!
James Bowman on the latest work of Quentin Tarantino, a sort of cartoon treatment of WW2:
“It is important for us to remember that those known to history as Nazis were not cartoon characters. Nor were those who fought and finally defeated them. Nor was that defeat accomplished by a gang of bloodthirsty, free-lancing American Jews in search of revenge who manage to commandeer a ludicrously implausible scheme to assassinate the entire German high command, including Hitler and Goebbels, in a small Parisian cinema by setting fire to a pile of nitrate film. I know, I know. Mr. Tarantino’s are not real Nazis, any more than these are real historical events. But that doesn’t seem to me enough of an excuse for them when American schoolchildren — for whose eyes this film is principally intended — may scarcely be supposed to know what was real.”
I think I’ll give the movie a miss, having never cared for any of Tarantino’s output. A friend of mine once told me that he thought T’s films were brilliant, but wicked, morally empty. For balance, here is a slightly more favourable review by Roderick Long.
You simply have to watch this to believe that a bit of sand could be turned into art of such emotional depth.
I am simply left speechless by the performance artistry of this young Ukranian woman.
PS: I owe many thanks to Sharon Shannon for making me aware of this.
Like his blogging Highness, Glenn Reynolds, while I love the visual cleverness of Mad Men, the TV series, and the brilliance with which this show has caught the mood of the time, I find the series rather depressing. I mean, the guys who are portrayed as “having it all” in an age of heavy smoking, drinking in the workplace, womanising and the rest seem to be, a rather depressed bunch. It is a series that certainly plays to the stereotype of business as venal and zero-sum – which is what anti-capitalists like to think it is. But these guys and gals certainly knew how to dress snazzily for work.
But whatever one thinks of the sense of life communicated by the series, Jon Hamm, who plays the main character, Don Draper, is unquestionably a compelling actor who has created one of the most memorable characters in TV drama for a long time (he certainly seems to have quite an effect on this lady). It will be interesting to see what he does next.
A thought occurs to me: Hamm makes a potentially good James Bond and even looks more like the character of Mr Fleming’s books than Daniel Craig, even though the latter actor did a very good turn in Casino Royale.. But the last film, Quantum of Solace, while brilliant in its stunts, was awfully humourless and bereft of character development. And it would not be that big a shift to cast an American in the role: our Jim is an Anglosphere character, anyway.
House of Dumb is as sympathetic as ever to film director Steven Soderbergh.
It seems that the viewers of Soderbergh’s latest biographical work were indeed inspired to follow the example of the subject of the movie:
The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: “Yank it off, boy, what does it matter.” I did so and his possessions were now mine.
A nice piece by Jesse Walker at Reason about the late Michael Jackson. I think Off the Wall was one of the first pop albums I remember listening to, and of course Thriller, with that unbelievable video, was the one that helped propel MTV as a vehicle for music. Those two records remind us not only of what a great performer Jackson was in his heyday, but also of the musical genius of Quincy Jones. Yeah baby!
I also sympathise with Jonah Goldberg, who is a bit caustic about the whole spectacle of mourning. The weirdness and the allegations of criminality that swirled around Jackson in his life are well chronicled, and should not be brushed under the carpet. And remember that people, who are unknown to all but their family, work colleagues and friends, die of heart attacks every day. The truth is, that unless we take a bet on cryonics and join the Singularity, that the Grim Reaper gets us all eventually.
This report says that the debut of the latest Star Trek movie has set box office records. I am not a big ST fan – I prefer series such as Babylon 5, Battlestar G., Firefly and so on, but the trailer for the new film looks pretty good.
Michael Caine, one of the UK’s best-known actors, is thinking of emigrating due to the UK government’s recent decision to impose a new, top-rate income tax of 50 per cent, which once other changes are taken into account, will be nearer 65 per cent. Iain Martin, writing in the Daily Telegraph story that I linked to, points out how Caine is just one of the more recognisable examples of the sort of person looking to hit the exits. It is often useful, if one’s constitution is strong enough, to read the Daily Telegraph comments sections these days, which are sometimes even worse than those of the Guardian. Several people moan about Iain Martin’s article that the 76-year-old actor has made his fortune so he should shut up and be grateful, etc. How lovely. The fact is that Caine, while he may not employ philosophical abstractions to denounce the looting intent of such a tax rise, is at root repelled not by the economic stupidity of such a tax hike, but its essential injustice. What a top-rate tax like this says, in effect, is that no-one should be allowed to rise above a certain level of wealth because it might make others envious. It makes a mockery of all that progressive-leftist talk about removing “glass ceilings” to advancement, etc.
Funnily enough, it was Caine, along with his UK film star buddy and working-class-boy-made-good pal, Sean Connery, who first legged it out of the UK back in the 1970s when the-then governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan introduced tax rates of more than 80 per cent on the “super rich”. He’s done it before, and he is quite prepared to leave again. Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal FC, has warned that many foreign footballers will think twice about playing in the English Premier League. No doubt football fans of a nationalistic bent may applaud this trend if it gives local players more of a chance to play for their clubs, but it arguably will roll back one of the benefits to domestic sport in having talented overseas players strut their stuff here in the UK.
It will be interesting to see whether the acting profession’s traditional love affair with the Left shows the strain. I remember reading that Ray Winstone, another English East End boy to have cracked Hollywood, is running out of patience with the tax situation in the UK. And a few years ago, I watched a chat show when David McCallum, who used to star in the 1960s Man From Uncle TV series, vowed that he would only return to the UK when it spurned socialism. And for whatever reason Peter Sellers or Richard Burton chose to live in the Switzerland, it was not for the cuckoo clocks.
Roderick Long links to some good material about The Watchmen, both of the graphic novel and film made out of it. I saw the film at an IMAX cinema a few weeks ago. Stupendous in some ways; very violent, an interesting morality tale to boot. And not to mention one of the hottest female heroines I have ever seen and er, a blue guy in the buff. (A girl sitting next to me went bright red watching the enhanced Dr Manhattan and she got such a fit of the giggles that it proved dangerously infectious).
Here is a pretty good collection of reviews.
Mr Long also has wise words on the Tea Parties. Talking of which, here are some related thoughts from Maine.
“There’s something deeply amusing about egalitarian snobbery and its assorted conceits. The functions of the welfare state apparently include saving unprofitable drama productions from a disinterested public. Mere commercial forces and popular appetite must not impede work of such tremendous cultural importance that no bugger wants to see it. There’s an inescapable arrogance in the assumption that a given artistic or theatrical effort should somehow circumvent the preferences of its supposed audience and be maintained indefinitely, at public expense, despite audience disinterest or outright disapproval. And when that same disinterested public forks out its cash voluntarily for something it wants to see, this is something to be sneered at and blamed on former Prime Ministers.”
David Thompson.
The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday’s Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil.
But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:
The pirate stations were not killed off by a Tory public-school prime minister (as in the film), but by a grammar school boy and Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and the destruction was not carried out by a Tory toff minister (as in the Curtis version), but by a left-wing toff, Tony Benn (then Labour minister in charge of the airwaves).
Yes, that’s certainly how I remember the story.
. . . the pirate stations were shut not by a stuffy Tory establishment, but by a supposedly modernising Labour government. Fact really is stranger than fiction.
I don’t think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis’s plot are strange. “Modernising Labour governments” think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can – capitalism.
See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too.
I came across this fine tribute website to John D. MacDonald, the writer of many crime/mystery novels, most of which were set in the area around Florida, the Bahamas and Caribbean. If you have not come across his writings, which are a sort of mixture of Lee Child, with a twist of Raymond Chandler, a shot of Ian Fleming, a light coating of Eric Ambler and a tincture of Robert Parker, then you should correct that oversight. One thing I love about these old 1950s and 1960s novels is the artwork on the covers. I love those “pulp” covers with pictures of hot dames, tough private eyes, guns, boats, gambling cards with smudges of coffee or whiskey on them. There is a whole genre of design and artwork that went into making these covers that deserves more credit than it usually gets.
Even today, the MacDonald books, especially his Travis McGee stories, which later got a hilarious echo in the crime capers – also set in southern Florida – of Karl Hiaasen – read as freshly and sharply today as when they were first written. Reading them makes me want to jump on a plane and head on down south for a spot of marlin fishing off the Keys. Bliss.
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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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