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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Last Friday night I went to the theatre. The play was about a group of people who played poker with each other for life-damaging stakes, and my feeling about such people is that they deserve every misfortune that they bring upon themselves. So I couldn’t get involved in the play or care about what happened to any of the characters in it. (It didn’t help at all that they were all men.) Poker for serious money has apparently been on the up-and-up in recent years, and especially since the time when this play, Dealer’s Choice by Patrick Marber, was first written and performed just over ten years ago. But for me all that this proves is that there are, now as always, lots of people around with more money than sense. People who merely gamble about which of them ends up taking home all the money leave me cold, and this play left me correspondingly refrigerated.
I mean, if you’re going to gamble, gamble about something. Do something where your knowledge of the world and ability to predict its happenings will benefit others. Why not, for instance, gamble on the stockmarket, or on commodity prices. Contrary to widespread opinion, these are immensely valuable activities (as Johnathan Pearce regularly explains here), which help to create a world of rationally negotiated prices for just about everything, and which enable other people (people like farmers particularly spring to mind) to avoid the very risks that you so like to take.
Or do something more creatively hazardous, which, if you can bring it off, will amount to more than mere money in your wallet, which in any case, if you are the kind of gambler I saw in the theatre last Friday night, you will probably squander within the month with more vacuous betting.
Why not, for instance, open a theatre – a theatre which doesn’t depend for its survival on state hand-outs but entirely on the number of bums on seats you can contrive and the quantity and quality of other goods and services you can ply the bodies attached to the bums with, like food and drink in appealing surroundings?
Which is exactly what my friend and host for last Friday evening, Don Riley, did do. His theatre, which is just up the road from London Bridge tube station, is called the Menier Chocolate Factory for the most obvious of reasons, which is that this is what it used to be.
When it came to the play we saw last Friday, deal me out. But as for the Menier Chocolate Factory generally, count me in. I’ll definitely be going again, and I enthusiastically recommend the place.
The Brave One is a good film, and I would encourage people to go and see it. Even though this means putting money into the pockets of Time Warner, which is hardly my favourite corporation.
– warning: spoilers follow … → Continue reading: The Brave One: a film well worth watching
I’ll be poised to grab a cinema seat for this one when it comes out.
I liked this film, 3:10 to Yuma. The death of the Western is one of those occasional refrains, but this is fine piece of film-making. There were one or two clichés in it (those evil rotten railroad barons) but those clichés had some basis in fact.
The picture of the old West was almost completely bleak, but it made for great drama, and a terrific set of gunfights. For a rather contrarian view of the West, this book is worth a look.
I am not a great opera buff but I am very saddened to read about this news this morning. The man’s voice was simply amazing.
Rest in peace.
The film Death Sentence is worth seeing.
As the saying goes “Warning! spoilers below”… → Continue reading: ‘Death Sentence’ – a film worth seeing
Being the free marketeer that I am, I accept the point that an item is worth what people are prepared to pay for it, not more, not less. But some sort of gremlin in me shouts “that’s bonkers!” when I see what people are prepared to shell out for a so-called work of art. The skull, encrusted in diamonds, sold for £50m by Damian Hirst had that little gremlin shouting again in my head.
To think that some folk working deep under the earth’s crust dug out all those sparklers for this, when there are so many beautiful women out there who should be wearing things like these.
Ok, rant over.
If you are in central London and want to see some wonderful art, I can recommend this. The ticket prices are a bit steep and the collection is not quite as big as some, but definitely worth it. It makes me want to get across the Channel and sip wine in a nice restaurant in Normandy or Brittany.
There is something strange about contemplating a peaceful scene on a Normandy beach, painted in say, 1870, to realise that 74 years later, the place was swarming with Allied troops slugging it out with the German Army, or what was left of it.
It is all too easy to imagine a future in which our grandchildren will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having had a grandparent or great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service, or was a District Officer in Bechuanaland.
–Jeremy Paxman, keeping hope alive for millions of Britons
The Bourne Ultimatum is a crackerjack of a high-adrenalin, fast-paced film. I must admit that I am slightly allergic to Matt Damon but he delivers the goods in this third instalment of the Jason Bourne series. James Bond he ain’t: no tuxedos, no rapier one-line putdowns, no Russian Smersh agents called Tanya and definitely no Aston Martins with ejector seats but for excitement, it ranks highly. I was slightly irritated by the constantly jerky film shifts – the director is obviously trying to show how realistic and gritty the whole thing is, and I am not entirely convinced that the CIA’s technology is as snazzy as in the film. But these are quibbles.
I expected to see a few cliches in this film, and we were not entirely disappointed. Yes, the CIA is portrayed as riddled with mad, bad people, but on the other hand, justice is done, the bad folk get brought to book eventually, and the film does not imply, as far as I can tell, that the threats to the US are somehow made up or are the figments of imagination. If anything, the message is that overzealous security agencies can easily convince themselves that it is okay to violate the boundaries of the law to do what is necessary. No one is above the law.
I also smiled wryly at the way the film showed how many CCTV cameras there are in Britain. The scene at Waterloo Station, for example, was excellently done, and horribly believable.
No, I am not talking about the tiresome Lindsay Lohan and her ilk.
Perusing the morning papers, I could not help but wonder who will come under more fire: Kiera Knightley for glamorizing smoking (and looking absolutely stunning while she does so), or Sienna Miller for wearing what appears to be a keffiyeh as a bikini top?
There is a lovely piece in the Telegraph today about Elvis Presley, who died 30 years ago (Christ I feel old as I type those words). A lot of people get very snooty about the Tennessee lad but I do not. I like most of his early material, am not quite so keen on the Vegas year stuff and have not much interest in reading about his later years. But that he had an amazing voice, charisma and impact on the world of music can only be denied by people who have spent the last few years living on Mars.
For nearly a year, I lived at the flat of the late Chris Tame, whom I very much miss both as a friend and intellectual influence. Chris was a massive Elvis fan. His house in Bloomsbury would be either vibrating to the music of the King or some surf guitar dude like Dick Dale (no deep classical music was allowed). Chris was an atheist and no believer in the afterlife, but I bet that if there is one, he is up there, rockin’ to the music of his hero.
Not everyone shares my generally favourable view, such as Tim Luckhurst in the Guardian. He repeats the old, politically-correct crud that Elvis only was important because he “stole” blues from black people, etc. Oh please.
And if I can make a sort of cultural-political “point” here, let’s not forget that Elvis is probably loathed by the sort of people that any self-respecting advocate of the pursuit of happiness would be glad to be loathed by: religious fundamentalists and nanny staters of various persuasions.
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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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