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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What is your favourite passage from a novel?
I think mine is that superbly-written scene in Moonraker when Ian Fleming describes how Bond deals out a sequence of cards that in Bridge is known as a Yarborough and as a result, takes the villain Drax to the cleaners. I never thought that a writer could make the game of Bridge sound exciting, but Fleming achieved it.
For second place in this quiz, I think I have to go for the scene in Scoop when William Boot, the hapless correspondent, files his first despatch for the Daily Beast. I still grin whenever I think about it.
I am sure many of you have heard Carla Howell’s song “How Could I Live Without Filing Taxes”. Well, now she has a music video!
Like a lot of people, I am a big fan of the cartoon show South Park, in which a group of characters send up the hypocrisies and stupidity of the world around them. The makers of the show seem to have a fairly strong libertarian streak although they themselves seem desperate – perhaps wisely – to avoid any explicit label. There is a good interview with them here. And the other day, on a pure whim, I bought this entertaining book, “South Park and Philosophy,” a collection of essays mostly by Richard Hanley, who is a professor of philosophy in Delaware. Most of his essays are pretty smart and funny and I can recommend the book, although religiously inclined people would be appalled, I think, by Hanley’s assumption that religious people are, by definition, crazy.
Hanley understands the bit about how South Park is often seen by its fans, and possibly even by its enemies, as pretty liberal in the old-fashioned, non-US usage of that word. He is quite nice to libertarians, actually, and even gives an accurate summary of the views of Robert Nozick, which is refreshing. No straw men here. However, Hanley goes on to attack libertarianism on the grounds that, such liberties as are defended are in fact a sort of nuisance. “Too much” choice is confusing and takes up a lot of time, time better spent having fun. Hanley, with the unusual and refreshing candour that is the mark of the book, argues that libertarianism is unappealing to people because many people want to remain like children and have the parents do the annoying and time-consuming decisions for them. Excerpt:
“A sure way to make your small child miserable is to put them in charge of the mintiae of life. Make them decide not just what to have for breakfast, or what to wear, but also what brand of toothpaste or underwear to buy, what to cook for dinner, and so on. Make them pay the bills for their stuff. They do not want to do all that crap. They just want to be kids, for Christ’s sake. And part of being a kid is having someone else sweat the small stuff for you. Then you can go play, or play with yourself, or what it is that you want to do.”
And in this respect, I want to be treated like a kid. I want universal health care, so I don’t have to worry about falling ill, and being shit out of luck or coverage. I want gun control, so that I don’t have to worry about protecting myself from a fucking nut job like Jimbo or Ned (whoever they are, Ed) when they want to shoot up the joint. I want social security,so that I don’t have to know all the ins and outs of the fucking stock market….I want consumer protection, so I don’t have to investigate every fucking product like I want to buy, the “sea monkeys” Cartman buys in “Simpsons Already Did It”. I want state utilities, so I don’t have to be constantly figuring out the best deal”…..
He concludes, “What I am proposing is not so very radical.”
No, it is not. What this academic with a foul mouth – presumably trying to show how hip and totally kewl he is – is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood. They want the state to take care of the supposedly terrifying idea that we should make provision for our own old age rather than vote for high taxes and steal the money from other people and future, as yet unborn, generations. He finds it a shock that consumers’ best defence is to read the label rather than have state officials regulate consumer products on our behalf (and how well has that worked?). He positively wets his pants in terror about investing in a fund on the stock market, despite the fact that millions of people, who are not even university professors with fancy letters after their names, find this to be a perfectly normal activity. In Victorian Britain, remember, millions of factory workers saved their precious spare money in mutual aid groups called Friendly Societies and even set them up themselves. Amazing. And his comment about guns wins the prize for most cretinous comment of the lot, since he presumably has not been reading up about the appalling spate of shootings of young British kids in London and elsewhere in a country that has tried the sort of gun control he favours.
Many years ago, I recall that the late Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician and confidente of Margaret Thatcher, likened the position of a person under socialism to that of an infant receiving pocket money from his mother. The state would take care of all the pesky stuff like pensions, education, health, housing, transport – pretty much anything serious – and leave a bit of spare cash so that the benighted citizen could gamble around, bet on the horses, take the odd holiday, but otherwise have the freedom of a child in a kindergarten. Joseph put the finger on the long-term cost of this paternalism: by infantilising people, it makes them vulnerable to problems in the long run. It means that people start to forget what it was ever like to have such choices and decisions in the first place.
There is another issue. When people moan that we are overwhelmed by “too many” choices – a question-begging notion if there ever was one – they assume that their own fear of choice must be shared by everyone else. I suppose there are some people who would rather not bother about providing for retirement, or worry about consumer safety. Well, in an open society with a division of labour, people with a dislike of risk can work in corporations for a fixed salary and have a lot of benefits given as part of the package. Other people, meanwhile, prefer to work as entrepreneurs with an uneven income and take more decisions for themselves. There are consumer magazines that check products out on our behalf as a commercial service, and in shopaholic nations like Britain, shopping itself seems to have become a sort of business in its own right. There are endless programmes and magazine articles about it. If a lot of people find certain choices difficult or frightening, then that is a business opportunity for someone else. And so on.
What Hanley wants, and what all such devotees of paternalism want, is for a lot of the messiness and complexity of modern life to be taken away by Big Government. Well, we have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction. The fraying state of civil society, with problems of rising crime, the “victim” culture, is much of the consequence. Professor Hanley does not want to grow up, and neither do many other people. At least he has had the honesty to admit that Big Government is the dream of toddlers.
Lastly, when thinking about paternalism, remember PJ O’Rourke’s wise words: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and a Porsche 911 to a 15-year-old.
I thought I’d just put this photo up from the Libertas film blog, simply because, well, I can, dammit.
If you enjoyed the You-Tube video which Thaddeus pointed out, you can find the main track and much more at the band’s web site: Stuck Mojo Media.
As I spent a good chunk of my life on the bottom end of the music business I know what life there is like. Let us just say I never gave up my day job.The cost of instruments, equipment, recording, new strings for each major gig and not to mention the bar tab… make a musicians life a tough one. Even if you do have the day job to live on, you spend your life in deep levels of sleep deprivation. The only thing which keeps you going is the buzz you get from the audience. Please show these guys your gratitude by buying their music or putting something in their tip jar.
Do your part to make sure they can keep doing what they are doing!
Movies have consequences:
“Iranian commentators are mainly angry, defending Iran’s action,” the e-mail said. “The reason for that is a) UK does not have a good/positive history in Iran b) Persians have been treated badly by Westerners e.g. in the movie 300 or referring to Persian Gulf as simply Gulf or Arabian Gulf, so now having the poor young sailors captivated by Iran, many Iranians feel proud!!!!!!”
Now what are the chances of Ahmedinejad changing his name to Xerxes?
Whatever you may be doing this weekend, whether it’s playing a few rounds of golf or taking a trip to the seaside or pruning your rose bushes, let us help you to set the mood and deepen your sense of tranquility and peace with this admirably tolerant, progressive and diversity celebrating video.
Relax and enjoy!
I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers’ reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.
Clive has a picture taken from I’m All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove – the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick – as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United’s Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.
In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing – “Set the People Free” – while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).
And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show’s brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I’m All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas (“what a fwightful shower!”), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.
The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the ‘enlightened classes’ at the time, which was that Britain was not ‘modern’ or ‘efficient’ enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain’s industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain’s economic stagnation. The ‘fix’ was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions’ privileges, starting with the closed shop.
I have heard it said that Sellers’ portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers’ genius to send up the intrusive state of today.
If it were not for the fact that I saw ‘300’ on its UK opening night (i.e. last night), then this hilariously PC review would have me thrusting my hand into my pocket to whip out the price of a ticket:
It’s an ugly business: brutal, racist, homophobic – dare I say fascist? Harmless escapism indeed.
Damn those warmongering Neo-Spartans!
I am sending an email to the producers with my suggested title for a sequel – “300 II: the Persians are back and this time they’re Islamic!!” The cultural cringe alone will be worth the budget.
Behold the depths of your innermost soul
A Minotaur walking in endless despair
Mythical like a dream
Invisible like a soft breath of wind
– Bel Canto, Time without end.
I suppose I just cannot bring myself to give a damn about what is happening in the news today.
Considering the fashionable wail that Britons are a dumbed-down lot, there is a lot of interest in the fiction of Jane Austen at the moment. BBC and other channels are vying, so it appears, to see which one can carry the most screenings of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility or Emma. More productions are expected. Last night, yours truly and Mrs Pearce went along to see ‘Becoming Jane’, a film which tries to capture the moment in Austen’s life when she fell for a dashing if roguish young London lawyer, tried to elope with him, but failed to carry off her plans when she realised that a whole brood of relations depended on her young beau’s uncertain income for support. The lawyer’s rich uncle, played with menacing brio by Ian Richardson, blocks the marriage (Richardson is brilliant in the film). Austen ended her days unmarried, channelling her experiences of forbidden love into fiction. Her life sounds quite sad in certain ways although we have some of the finest fiction in the English language as a result.
Some people wax lyrical or get very cross about Jane Austen. I take a fairly sympathetic line. Toby Young, writing in this week’s Sunday Telegraph magazine (no web link), argues that she is one of the greatest English novelists, a stylist and master of irony, able to catch the foibles and weaknesses of people and also able to spot the virtues and goodness in the most unlikely people. On the other hand, Frances Wilson, writing in the same magazine, says Austen was a money-grabbing snob, a reactionary (horrors!) whose characters all too often forsook the path of true love and chose money and position instead. That verdict seems unfair. Take Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett initially recoils from Mr Darcy (this is an age when a man is Mr X rather than Dave or Steve) precisely because she fears he will be a snob and a materialists because of his substantial fortune and large country estate. Wilson, who I suspects projects her own liberal sentiments onto a much more conservative age, cannot imagine why Bennett does not go for the more supposedly hunky Mr Wickham instead. But it is Austen’s brilliance as a writer to draw out how an initial lack of attraction can, after a time, turn into something very different.
Irony, and the ability to see through the surface of things, is what makes Austen’s fiction so compelling. It is not ‘realistic’ in the dreary, PC sense that she packs it with large lectures about the Napoleonic War, or the Industrial Revolution, or the tumults in Ireland and the New World. She chose a very particular time and place – rural, Southern England – and the preoccupations of minor landed gentry. It does not try to make grand socio-economic ‘points’, although clearly, in its reticent way, it is a very conservative form of fiction, like the crime fiction of PD James. We do not, to take a different author, damn Joseph Conrad for being ‘limited’ because his works are often set at sea.
To go back to my first point, it is remarkable that, at least among what is left of the novel-reading classes, Austen remains so popular, and not just with women, although she is seen perhaps unfairly as a writer on women for women. There is a timeless quality about her stories and her themes. In 200 years’ time, I am not sure if anyone will be reading Norman Mailer. They might though, still be reading the woman who wrote this:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
I am not the shockable type but this preamble to an article singing the praises of the tv hit, 24, had a pretty bracing effect on yours truly:
Fox’s hit drama normalizes torture, magnifies terror, and leaves conservatives asking why George W. Bush can’t be more like 24’s hero.
To use the word “normalise” next to the word “torture” is extraordinary. Maybe 24 does raise the issue of using torture as a desperate but necessary act, but I hardly imagine that the viewer is left thinking that there is anything “normal” about it, like brewing a cup of tea in the morning for breakfast or taking out the garbage. From what I recall, torture is seen as shocking, and rightfully so. Think also of the scene in Dirty Harry when Clint shoots and then beats up the psycho. You “know”, unlike in real life, that the baddie is a baddie and hence do not feel bad when he gets the Eastwood treatment. Real life is different, which is why we have pesky laws like no jail without trial, etc.
For what it is worth I enjoy 24. I have no idea what the programme-makers would think of their programme being thus described by the American Conservative.
For a brilliant demolition of those who use the “ticking bomb” scenario in movies and books to rationalise torture, this by Jim Henley is a must-read.
(Update: I should in fairness point out that the American Conservative article makes it pretty clear that it loathes the show, although the way in which the introductory paragraph is written sucks the reader into thinking that conservatives support the practice. I guess I fired off my angry post a bit too quick. That said, it does appear that some of the “appeal” of the show is in how it unashamedly portrays the use of torture. Remind me not to ever watch this show again).
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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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