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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I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I’m glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)
To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:
It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.
Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.
As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we’re as bad … But, if we don’t, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.
In the pre-Christmas rush I have missed an email from someone at Ofwatch, who describe themselves as promoting the interests of adult subscription service viewers in the UK.
The BBFC (the British Board of Film Classification) are conducting a survey asking people if they agree with the way sex and violence are currently classified at all levels including R18. The last time they did this they were forced to relax the censorship of 18 classification film a little as most people were in favour of more choice for adults.
The survey opens up in a popup window the first time you visit www.bbfc.org.uk (and only the first time unless you clear your cookies). It is a simple multiple-choice form that doesn’t take long to fill in and can be completed online or even better, printed and posted (printed responses may carry more weight).
If you can spare a few minutes it is well worth completing it. I can guarantee that the likes of Mediawatch will be asking all their moaners to fill it in, so we desperately need a few open minded people to help balance things out and prevent the corrosive influence of the rightwing fundamentalist Christian groups who are opposed to just about everything and anything with an 18 certificate (or even a 15 certificate in many cases).
Apologies and hope that those interested in such matters still have a chance to participate in the survey.
Norman Lebrecht is a name familiar to all classical CD geeks, of whom I am definitely one. He has written vast books full of rage. The air is thick with the sound of nails being hammered on the head, and of thumbs being crushed with that same hammer. Excellent explanations charge headlong into ridiculous explanations for the same phenomenon, the phenomenon to be explained usually being the “death of classical music”, which is the phrase Lebrecht sometimes gives to the current travails of the classical music performing and recording enterprise. He sometimes gets that distinction right, and then in the next sentence quite forgets about it. He knows something important is happening to something important, and he hits nail after nail into the wood pile, hoping eventually to nail it all down. (He reminds me of how I write about Modern Art.) → Continue reading: Norman Lebrecht and the death of classical music
Maybe mankind, even in these dumbed-down days, can take only so much dreck. That, in my ‘umble opinion, is one lesson we can reasonably draw from figures showing a fall in the sales of Hollywood-made movies in north America. Yes, Lord of the Rings 3, Finding Nemo and some others have proven a big hit, but all too often the formula of big action movie has proven a dud.
Of course, certain factors are involved here. Remaking comic strips into films is bound, after the early flurry of excitement, to leave audiences cold. DVD sales and rentals may also be playing a part, though heaven knows it is difficult to work out if there is a direct cause and effect.
I would be willing to bet, though, that one factor which Hollywood film executives are missing is the changing demographic profile of our culture. All too many films are still pitched at teens and twentysomethings, but surely as populations age, as they are in parts of the West, film producers need to take account of a more mature audience.
The Peter Weir historical drama movie, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and based on two seafaring novels by the late Patrick O’Brien, was my favourite of the year, and much better than I had come to expect of literary screen adaptations. It has not shot the lights out at the box office, but deserved to do so.
Or maybe films made in Asia and elsewhere are going to pick up the slack from Hollywood over the long term. We live in interesting times.
Italy is of course renowned for its great public architecture, its dazzling roster of artists and sculptors, its fantastic food and wine, elegantly-dressed citizens and of course some of the most crooked politicians on the planet. Well, last week, during a trip to Malta when I had a chance to surf over some television channels, I realised that there is an even greater glory of Italian culture – its tv shows.
OK, I am being only half-serious, but Italian television is so funny, so crass, so brassy, and so choc-full of dazzingly gorgeous women and cheesy male presenters that I grin whenever I think about it. You cannot fail to feel good and be amused by it.
One of the things I dislike about much British television is just how depressing it is. Our terrible soap operas, with their tragic sense of life and victim culture, are the worst, but much else is also awful. Not so with Italian television.
Of course it is brazenly vulgar and silly. The moral scolds of the far left and far right would loathe it. But such folk, who share more in common than they would like to admit, miss the point that a certain amount of vulgarity is a sign of health, a suggestion of a level of dynamism in a culture. And judging by Italian tv, Italy is in rude good health.
And of course much of it is owned by the arch-villain of the Guardianista classes and my favourite Italian politician, Silvio Berlusconi. Belissimo!!!!
(Mind you, this guy takes a different view)
I staggered blearily back to an Internet connection this morning and looked for the Samizdata Lord of the Rings review so I could add my comment of a single word, ‘Triumph’, before staggering even more blearily through to the New Year.
But though I looked high and low in the Gladden Fields of Micklethwaitian cultural commentary, this review appeared to have rolled down the Anduin bit pipe and down into the sea of review history long ago. Or had it even appeared at all? A bit more searching and still nothing appeared. So it seemed the task had fallen to a simple Oxfordshire resident, rather than one more worthy.
I must apologise in advance if this review starts falling apart in its latter stages. I watched most of the last twenty minutes through a tearful blur of homoerotic emotion just glad the lights were down so nobody could see the big blubbing bloke in the corner. → Continue reading: One film to rule them all
I’ve just got off the phone with my mother, who included in among all the family chat some grumbles about this year’s Christmas stamps. She prefers more obviously Christmassy imagery, and she said the people at her local Post Office didn’t much care for them either. What are they? – she said. I’d heard distant grumblings about these stamps, and had seen the one with the ice twiddling around a tree because presumably that was the one which people were particularly grumbling about. Controversial blah blah. But I hadn’t seen all of them, or given any of them any thought until my mother mentioned them.
I should guess that there is a sort of ideological agenda here, in the form of a non-agenda. They avoid anything very Christian. Like most readers of this blog I should guess, I utterly despise the notion that Christian Christmas stuff should be set aside in order not to upset Muslim stroke atheists. (a) No sane Muslim stroke atheist could possibly be upset. (b) If insane Muslim stroke atheists are upset, to hell with them.
Nevertheless, and perhaps because I am myself a devout atheist, I actually quite like these particular stamps, although I do agree that the ice twiddle one is rather silly. I especially like the ice star. But I’m guessing others might prefer something more along these lines.
On the face of it, this posting by Alan Little is about music:
A performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica”, by Wilhelm Fürtwangler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944. There are hundreds of recordings of the Eroica, dozens of which are probably excellent; but this is supposed to be one of the handful of truly great ones according to well-informed opinion on rec.music.classical.recordings. …
Later in this posting, Little was kind enough to link back to a piece I did on my Culture Blog about how Hitler’s love of classical music did dreadful harm to classical music, and when Little emailed me about his Fürtwangler piece, he probably had in mind that it would get a mere reciprocal mention on my blog. But actually, Little’s posting is more in the direction of the Samizdata agenda.
…I’m feeling distinctly queasy, though, about listening to and possibly enjoying a work of art produced under the Third Reich.
See what I mean? Little continues:
Why? I have no qualms about listening to Soviet music, Shostakovich for example. Yet Stalin was just as much of a monster as Hitler and the Soviet Union in the 1930s was at least as much as a horror as the Third Reich. So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does? Do I think the Soviet Union was in some ways a lesser evil than Nazi Germany? There’s not much to choose in terms of crude bodycount. But I still think it’s a good thing that the most important war memorial I’ve ever seen is two Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburg Gate and not two panzers in Red Square; the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would have had an even worse time in the last fifty years if it had been the other way round. I think there also is a sense in which Hitler was something the German people did – they elected him and were enthusiastic about him for quite a while – whereas Stalin was something that happened to the Russians – the Bolsheviks came to power in a wartime military coup that their brilliant propaganda machine subsequently dressed up as a popular revolution.
This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results – which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.
Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation – so to speak, to go bad.
That also seems to be roughly how Alan Little sees it.
By the way, Little liked that Fürtwangler Eroica. A lot. “The best performance I’ve ever heard, I think.”
More great news, this time on the Ozzy Osbourne front. He’s not going to die:
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne is breathing unaided for the first time since his quad bike accident a week ago.
The former Black Sabbath singer has been taken off a ventilator and has been able to speak to his family.
And with his old verbal fluency unimpaired, I trust.
Not long ago I caught Ozzy and daughter Kelly doing their Christmas single Changes on Top of the Pops, which is now number one in the hit parade apparently. And then immediately after that Ozzy had to be rushed to hospital following his prang, and Kelly rushes there to see him. You can’t buy publicity like that, because you can’t fake it.
This tune, for me, personifies the way that pop music these days, at least the sort of pop music you see on British telly, has become more and more something that your granny can recognise and sing along with. Not like it was in my day. In my day we used to drive elder brothers and sisters crazy, never mind our parents and grandparents. But now the man who used to bite the heads off bats is in that same celebrity category that used to be occupied by the Queen Mother and now also accommodates England’s rugby darling Jonny Wilkinson. (Although, it seems that many elder brother types are angry about Changes. This angry bloke reminds me of how my contemporaries at Essex University in the early seventies reacted to Donny Osmond.)
With his latest effort Ozzy has apparently set a new pop record, of the Guinness-Book-of variety:
The singer has set a new record for the longest time taken to reach number one during a career, reaching the top of the charts 33 years after his first hit with Black Sabbath, Paranoid, got to number four in August 1970.
Ah, Paranoid. Those were the days, eh? Who would have thought that Ozzy Osbourne of all people would live long enough to break a record like that?
About a month ago, Norwegian blogger Bjorn Staerk composed a sumptuous satire of the marxoid mentality in a parodistic review of the Lord of the Rings:
Working hard to foil the plans of these good, decent white folks are the “evil” Saruman, and the even more “evil” Sauron, rulers of two countries called Isengard and Mordor. Both are portrayed as near-demonic in their hatred of our white heroes. Sauron is no more than a big, red eye, hovering in the air, clearly implying that he’s some kind of “Devil”. Both have massive armies at their disposal, consisting entirely of filthy, ugly monsters that happen to be black, every single one of them.
I wonder how many people read that, chuckled and thought to themselves that, in reality, no respectable left-wing commentator or pundit could ever possibly plumb the depths of such absurdity?
If you were one of those people, you were wrong, because Bjorn Staerk’s creation was both witty and remarkably prescient.
British socialist and Independent columnist, Johann Hari has not only risen to the bait, he has grabbed hold of it and ripped it to shreds in a feeding frenzy. Perhaps Mr Hari also read the Bjorn Staerk piece, got entirely the wrong end of the stick and decided to follow its lead. More likely, though, that he thought this up all by himself.
In an editorial he has called ‘Oppose Tolkein!’ (which itself sounds as if it has been lifted straight out of the Student Trotskyite Handbook), Mr Hari warns the world that the Tolkein classic is, in fact, a thinly-veiled Nazi screed:
The most obvious is racism. The purely evil Orcs are, in Tolkien’s words, “squat, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant-eyes”. The enemy is the Dark Lord and he lives in the Black Land. The heroic hobbits and elves are, by contrast, uber-Aryan and ethnically pure. Ideals of “blood” and its purity are always sloshing around his narrative. For example, the Men of Gondor – “the high men” – are descendants of the Numenorians, the greatest of all warriors. Over the centuries, they have become “degraded” because of breeding with inferior races. When their bloodline is pure, as in Aragorn’s descendants, the strength of the original Lords of the West is retained.
Read Bjorn Staerk and then read Johann Hari. Can you tell the difference? No, neither can I. Mr Hari has provided definitive proof for what we have all long suspected: that no satire on the thought processes of the modern left can be regarded as exaggeration.
As well as writing for the Indie, Johann is also a regular contributor to Harry Hatchett’s blog where he and his fellow travellers are forever accusing free market campaigners of holding views which are ‘out of touch’ and ‘unpopular’. Deliciously ironic then that Johann should elect to publish his laughable denunciation not 24 hours before the British public votes ‘Lord of the Rings’ as their ‘favourite ever book’.
I am also given to believe that he is considered in many circles to be something of a rising star of the British left. Judging from this kind of form, I can only concur.
I often make predictions, and with a kiss of Mafia-like death, virtually all of them fail to come true. I have a gift.
However, it gives me great pleasure to announce that at least one of them has come true. Lord of the Rings has been voted, against all the muttered displeasures of the socialist London-based diners of the BBC cognoscenti, and the great and the good, as the United Kingdom’s favourite ever book.
Which reminds me of the following quote:
Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-Earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all spurious BBC competitions to fill up the airwaves with cheap programming, so the money saved can be used to prop up the useless lives of BBC socialist parasites, are an evil.
If this book can win, against all the railings of the government worshippers who rule this country, then I have hope. One day we will destroy their ring of power and free ourselves from their tyranny. In the meantime, let’s just hope Mr Jackson gets the film rights for ‘The Hobbit’, to give us something to watch next Christmas.
Running short of last minute Christmas ideas? Want to understand what it’s like to be a ruthless statist? Look no further than Medieval: Total War. I was at a loose end last week, alone with a laptop, a CD drive, a hotel bedroom, fifteen quid burning a hole in my pocket, and a nearby South London branch of WH Smiths. There are many terrible things such a situation can tempt a man into, so I leapt into one of them regardless. Finding a bargain-basement copy of Medieval: Total War, for £14:99, I loaded up the sucker and got going. I started as the English, on the easy level, from 1087 onwards, my mission to conquer the whole of Europe by 1487. Three hundred and fifty years later, virtually the whole of Europe is now dominated by England, I’ve destroyed the French and the Germans, almost as good as beating Australia at Rugby, and I’m about to conquer Constantinople. Unfortunately, I remained unable to do any of this without keeping the provincial tax levels at ‘Normal’, i.e. 50%, rather than ‘Very Low’. Though as an Austrian, I did resist going for ‘Very High’ taxes, at 70%, to pay for my insatiable desire for more troops, better weapons, Royal Knights, and Welsh Longbow men.
If you do get the game, try to get up to the Halberdier and Swiss Pike men level of building technology. Both soldier types are lethal, especially at cutting up enemy cavalry.
In a two-way split game, you first of all play a game of strategy, sort of like a complex form of chess, on an Olde Worlde map of Europe, with the construction of buildings, fleets, the training of soldiers, assassins, princesses, and various alliances. You have to build up certain levels of technology, based on your provincial castles building program, before you can train up certain types of more professional soldiers. You then press an ‘end of year’ button, a bell tolls, and you move into the second stage of the game where your campaigning soldiers go into full 3-D battles, with opposing armies, with the same battle engine currently being used in the Time Commanders television series.
What I really liked about the game was its insistence that you look after trade, and keeping your provincial populations happy. Yes, only in order to keep your tax levels up, and to avoid expensive rebellions from the serfs, but Professor Hoppe’s analysis that monarchy is better than democracy, though still much worse than proper liberty, becomes more persuasive by the day.
Is the game addictive? I’ll say. I’ve had to ask my wife to hide the disks when I got home. But have no fear. I have a sneaking feeling I’m getting Railroad Tycoon for Christmas, so I can pretend to be Dagny Taggart. I wonder if it has a John Galt extension pack? Should a man my age be doing such things? I have absolutely no idea. But it certainly beats watching television, especially the vacuous rubbish on the BBC. I wish I could give up the BBC completely. Has anyone in the UK tried it? I’d miss Top Gear, of course, but virtually all of the rest of it you can keep. Except for John Humphries on the radio, this morning, when he literally laughed in Chancellor Gordon Brown’s face, as El Gordo tried to persuade the Welsh Rottweiler that his new open-ended National Insurance tax is in some way different from income tax. It was almost worth the licence fee. Almost, of course, but not quite.
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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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