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]
|
A remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas? has just been recorded.
Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.
[…]
Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.
It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.
Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:
Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator – as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors – might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.
As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984–85, up to a billion dollars’ worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray – the epicentre of the famine – was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as ‘wheat militias’.
Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory…
And so on.
And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.
Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the ‘aid’ goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his ‘aid’ may indeed do some serious harm.
There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or ‘Bollywood’ as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.
It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Globalisation in action, perhaps?
I am really looking forward to seeing the new Alien vs. Predator movie, the tagline of which is…
Whoever wins… we lose But I also find it very appropriate to see those sentiments applied here as well regarding the other big fight epic due to be released a few weeks hence. No, I am really not looking forward to that one.
I must say I am quite a sucker for the recent spate of films based on comic strips. I liked the Spiderman films, the Hulk, and even quite enjoyed the Batman films (the one with Michael Keaton, anyway). Well, another one off the conveyor belt is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
It has been panned by the critics, which is usually a promising sign given the nature of most snarky film reviewers these days, and I hugely enjoyed it. It has numerous fine qualities: WW2 fighter planes which can go underwater; futuristic aircraft carriers in the sky with great big Union Jacks on them; spiffy uniforms with Angelina Jolie wearing them; hot female journalists in classic 1930s garb with rakish hats and wavy hair (Gwyneth Paltrow), and big, biiiiiiig metal robots that do not talk but stomp menacingly around New York.
The film has no great ‘message’, I suppose, apart from showing how in the middle of the 20th century mankind, or at least the western bits of it, dreamed of a mechanised, high-tech future. The vision appears a bit comical to us now, but perhaps our age, with our interests in the Web and so on, will appear no less bizarre to generations hence.
But never mind all that highfalutin’ stuff. Go and see the film and have a feast of art deco kitsch with two of the most ravishing actresses now working. What’s not to like?
It has been a while since I have visited the Dave Barry blog. So I had good reason to hope that when I went back there this evening I would find things of splendour and significance. I did. This, I think, was the best thing I found.
Garry I hate to break it to you. But the world is on the brink of disaster. World crime is at an all time high. And the only thing standing between order … and chaos … is us.
And then, the bit that really got my attention:
From the creators of South Park.
Relax. This is a movie. The world is not really on the brink of disaster. It just has to seem that way for entertainment purposes. It opens, somewhere – in London also perhaps? – on October 15th.
“Hey terrorists. Terrorise this.”
Indeed.
I also found this quite encouraging.
Spiders are more scary than terrorists – at least according to a survey of a thousand Britons released Monday.
Household creepy crawlies frighten Britons more than terrorist attacks, or even death, the survey found.
Which makes sense to me, and fits in with my experience. I am, I feel, far more likely to be terrorised by a creepy crawly than by a terrorist. After all, the War Against Terrorism has, in London, so far, touch wood and hope not to die, been going quite well, in the sense that none of London has been blotted out by terrorists recently.
On the other hand, we all know that the War Against Creepy Crawlies can only ever be a holding operation, and is doomed to eventual failure.
The famed Australian cricketer (and much else) Keith Miller has just died aged 84. While idling through some obit-ing about this remarkable man, I came across this amazing throwaway paragraph, seized upon by Tim Blair and included in the original posting, but originally in a comment, here:
After what he went through during the war, cricket always remained just a game to him. He flew Mosquito night fighters. A lifelong love of Beethoven saw him leave his group during a raid over Germany and fly a further 50 miles to Bonn, where he flew low, at some risk, over the city – just to see the place where his hero was born…
I had no idea that Keith Miller cared anything for such things as Beethoven, let alone that he cared that much. (And I am guessing that he did not endanger anyone else’s life besides his own, right? Perry?)
It is truly amazing how much new stuff you learn about people when they die.
I have always liked J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (though I must confess I have only seen the movies and not read the books). She writes about wizards and magic and yet the world she creates is populated by characters who still act like real people.
Moreover she is the anti-thesis of the sugar coated Disney pabulum of recent years. Not only do her characters act like real people, when the story calls for it, they die.
l have long loathed Disney for presenting some of the classic children’s stories of Western literature in such a sanitised and castrated form that Disney’s use of the titles is close to being fraudulent (such as the completely inverted ‘Little Mermaid’). J.K. Rowling is made of far sterner stuff and she realises what the focus-group addled hacks at Disney do not… children are also made of sterner stuff.
Fame at last. Thanks to Peter Briffa for the link.
More from me about the glorious Vicky Pollard…
…here, here and (only yesterday) here.
I had never seen the infamous GULAG system; the Soviet authorities were not keen to document their crimes. But in 1946 they incarcerated an artist, Nikolai Getman, and he survived.
Getman spent eight years in Siberia at the Kolyma labor camps where he witnessed firsthand one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Although he survived the camps, the horrors of the GULAG seared into his memory. Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the GULAG which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.
→ Continue reading: The Gulag
RC Dean correctly identifies the blog-banging of Rather and his forged document as an exercise in distributed intelligence. So, can this model for cooperative intellectual activity be applied to other tasks? Can the combined power of the Internet be brought to bear on other creative tasks, rather than just the destruction of the pretensions of forgers and their mainstream media dupes?
Open Source software famously makes use of distributed intelligence. And I seem to recall hearing on the British BBC1 TV show The Sky at Night that the Internet is also already used to do combined astronomy. Also, I recall reading, but do not recall where or when, about a list of famous maths problems that have baffled the greatest maths minds for centuries, which have now all had cash prizes attached to them.
But in the case of those maths problems it is only the publicising of the problem that uses the Internet. The solutions will pretty much come from individuals. Or is that wrong? Will major proofs of major theorems get themselves constructed line by line, in public, with dozens of different mathematicians chipping in with their own pennyworths, with each step not being enough to justify a journal article, but the combined effect being mathematically stellar?
Could a film script perhaps be concocted in this way? → Continue reading: Some more distributed intelligence
I cannot help but suspect that Babbage and Turing never really envisaged the marvellous uses to which computing devices would be set.
Cats? Fish? Click here.
And no, I did not rearrange anything for the photo.
|
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.
|
